PDQ EDITOR CECIL TOUCHON INTERVIEWS
GARY BASTOKY 

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CT] I was impressed with your commentary about web sanitation. Being in the interesting position of an artist and gallery owner, you get to see and participate in a culling process not unlike the one that you comment on. As artists we must cull through a lot of visual data in order to focus in on what we believe to be important enough to paint or sculpt or write about or whatever. As a gallery dealer you have to make chioces about whose work you are going to show and who not and among those that you do show, what of their work gets exhibited and when. With all of this experience, what, in your opinion, needs to be taken into account by these reviewers who are deciding what gets noticed and what remains just a 'www.unknown.com'?

GB] I think that we are talking Apples and Oranges here. When I pick work to exhibit, I always go with my intuition. I don't rate the work as good or bad. I don't give one body of work three stars and another, just one or none. I show work that seems to me to fill a need. I believe that art comes from a "tuning-in," so to speak, with the chaos that exists at all times, all around us, that can never truly become part of the human consciousness. It is too overwhelming. Artists have a job and a responsibility and that is, to give us glimpses of this chaotic time and space, through a medium that makes sense to us, consciously and logically, while our subconscious and intuitive levels are also gaining access to new information. The long term benefits to the human race, and possibly the planet in general, is the evolution of consciousness, through individuals and later through what we might call the collective consciousness.

When we talk about the media, and the internet has very recently joined newspapers, radio, and television, as a mass media vehicle, we are generally talking about low level information, such as news, advertising, etc. This level of information doesn't do much for the awakening of the human spirit. In fact, I think it closes more doors than it opens. I'm not saying that this is bad, because it's just different and there's a place for both of these types of information, as well as many others. I like to be entertained and that satisfies one level of information need for me.

To have the neccesities of life, like eating, having a safe place to retreat to, etc., most of us have to work at something. Many people that are trying to have a life that is not too far removed from their work, elect to run small businesses. Many of these same people believe that greed and business are not necessarily synonymous, but they are competing in a market where "more money" is the goal, not the reward for hard work and quality. Small business proprietors, including myself, have been priced out of the major advertising markets, and we do the best we can with the limited ad budgets we do have. My own budget, or lack of, means that I am proprietor, director, sales person, ad designer, toilet bowl scrubber, web-site developer, designer, writer, coder, etc. I can't afford to hire high priced illustrators, run my own servers, etc. My ads and my web-site reflect only what I am able to do with the time and money available. Can the results of this kind of time/money budgets really be rated in comparison to General Motors or my former employer, Microsoft?

Most major cities have seen this phenomenon: artists moving to a part of town that is still affordable, for studio space. Over time, after a few risk takers open small cafes and shops, mostly catering to artists and other lower income types, the area becomes trendy and expensive. The price of real estate goes up and the artists and other small businesses have to move on. The Internet was, until perhaps a year ago, similar to the pre-trendy-artists'-lofts-phase. Once the press got ahold of the next big thing, and hyped the hell out of it, it became trendy. Maybe the "artists" didn't have to move out, but the people that moved in, with a lot of muscle (read "money") didn't care about the art. They did care about the real estate and a big return on their investment.

To continue the anology: the money moves in, and what was hip is now a threat. The politicians are called in, the police decide that there are certain "types" that are undesireable, and pretty soon it's real "safe" and nice and clean and boring.

Essentially, the search engines that have rating systems have become the police that are trying to keep things nice and safe for big money. Occasionally they'll rate an art site or something similar, but that's just to show how hip they think they are. Not unlike Wired magazine thinking that deconstruction was hip (get over it!).

I don't rate artists. Critics do that. Critics are the search engines of the art world. They can either give you enough information to make it interesting enough for you to go look at it and decide for yourself, or they can say, "it's great," or "it sucks." In the latter case, the general population suffers because, as people are generally either lazy or busy, they want to relay on someone else to decide for them. That's one single person, who the "Weekly World News" would call an expert, making a qualitative judgement that can make or break an artist's career. I know of at least one art critic who has received many writing awards, but only writes about things that she doesn't like, and uses a lot of art history and correlations that say, "remember that I'm an art critic and know a lot of stuff that you don't know, which allows me to make judgements and be rude." The awards keep her employed and full of herself. I'm not sure what we're getting out of it.

I choose to show artists whose work I feel, for whatever reason, might add something to the future of humanity, the collective consciousness, or whatever we care to call it. I work from my intuituion and there is a feeling of consistency among the work I show. Work that I reject, has nothing to do with whether or not it is good. I'm only an expert at knowing what works for me. I can only hope that there are others who appreciate the work that I choose to show and want it for their own. I try to refer the artists that I cannot show, to another gallery, or I may comment on my perception of the work, but only if asked.

Judgements have to be made all the time. I buy clothes that I like. But I may see clothes that I wouldn't wear, on someone else, and I'll think, "it looks nice on them. It wouldn't work for me." A good friend, who shares much of the same sensibilities as I do, loved the Robert Altman film, "Short Cuts." I hated it with a passion, but I never thought of it as a bad film. I didn't like Robert Altman's Cynical View of the World. I learned nothing from it, except that if you have money and a name, you can tell a lot of people, just about anything. Even things that are probably too personal to be made public. Sometimes people replace judgement with money. It's not a pretty sight (or site).

The Net is a horse of a different color. Let's hope that it retains some of it's original color.

CT] So what your saying is that the search engines say, Yahoo!, Lycos, Hotbot, they need the big money folks to feel comfortable being on the web so the web has to have a good, wholesome, normal, corporate sort of presence and so the reviewers are going - due to this need for the proper image and the support that comes with it- to overlook sites that give the impression to the average joe that the internet is strange and potentially dangerous? How could they do it so that artists in general would feel that something equitable is being done... Not rate things? Not point to specific sites? Ask artists to offer recomendations? For instance, in the Net Magazine or Internet Underground there are site reviews. I have to admit that many times I regard their choices as lame or regard the reviewers comments as uninformed or misinformed but I am glad to be turned on to new sites that I have not discovered yet. Maybe that should be one of my questions to people I interview; 'What are your favorite sites?' or ask for a copy of artists bookmarks. In other words, Maybe we artists ought to take things into our own hands and offer links to lots of art sites.

GB] I should qualify that my beef is not with search engines in general. I designed software documentation for 10 yrs and I was adamant that we have complete indexes in all our books. TOCs are great for getting an overview, nothing beats an index for finding specific information. I see Yahoo!, HotBot and some of the others as indexers, with varing degrees of success.

I think that if someone is going to offer what is essentially an index of a huge, huge amount of information, categorizing that information in various ways so that an actual human can find them, should be the core focus. Sure they can comment, or have lists of new entries, etc., but it's the rating systems that I'm offended by.

Lycos, Excite, Magellan, and others that will only list sites that meet certain quality criteria, (and we don't even know what that criteria is) are what I'm concerned about. Many of the search engines will list you, as long as you take the time to fill out their information form. This is tedious, but fair. I pay for a basic listing, in the "Art Gallery" section of the Seattle and East Side yellow page books. I think it's too expensive, but not beyond my reach. I'd prefer to pay a small monthly fee to be listed in just one really good (well thought out, easy to use) search engine, rather than hope that maybe one or two of the many requests I submitted, may actually make it into a listing.

I can't imagine, with all the sites that are constantly coming and going, being able to find anything without a good indexing tool. There are many good examples of indexing tools that allow (or help!) one find a virtual needle in a haystack. Unfortunately, most clients want lots of buttons and "cool" graphics and the designers need the work, so that's what we get. Most could care less about navigation or access to information, which, I guess is a pretty good reflection on the general population.

There are already some art sites, like Art Planet (http://www.artplanet.com/) that list artists, galleries, etc. How many people know about these? In my commentary, I wasn't specifically referring to artists being left out. That's not my main concern. There is lots of information out there that could be made more accessible. I'm talking about any small business or individual with something to offer. I think it's very ironic that we have to look in print media to find something interesting on the Net. The more web sites there are, the more magazines there are.

Did you know that in order to get a magazine onto a newsstand, you must be "picked up" by a distributor, and you pay the distributor to put them out there? On top of that, the magazine makes NO money from the sale of newsstand media. Subscriptions are what keeps a mag going. The Web seems to me to be another another way to distribute information. I can't see ever giving up print media. I love it. But the web is like a giant newsstand that's spread out all over the globe, and anyone can offer anything to just about anybody. Finding it is the hard part and I think that there are those organizations out there that are trying to become the Web-Distributors, which would bring us right back to square one. A corporate organization, by its very nature is conservative and as I mentioned in my commentary, they would like things to be safe and simple, meaning that they would like to control it.

If you look at my site, you'll see right away that it isn't HotWired, nor is it Sony Music Online. It's a lot like my physical space: clean white walls, minimal decoration and excellent artwork. If someone is looking for artwork, that's what they'll find. If they're looking for splash screens and unreadable typography, they can find it without too much trouble, somewhere else. I can't see it ever getting reviewed in those print mags, or getting 4 stars from some rating system. It doesn't load calliope music while the paintings either spin around or show up somewhere inside of a walk-through cute tunnel-like arrangement that looks like the inside of a large intestine. I appreciate all the technology and illustration skills that went into those types of art sites, but I don't think it shows much respect for the artist or the artwork.

All I'm asking is that this media be allowed to flourish, but I think it's going the way of TV. I don't watch TV anymore, unless it's a movie or something specific. I have anxiety attacks when I watch sit-coms. I wonder who is writing this stuff, how it is getting funded and why people are laughing. It's not Lucy. It's mostly mean spirited stuff like Letterman making fun of people. It's not Groucho, coming from the hip and being human. Essentially it is sanitized. The web is well on it's way to becoming a mirror image of this phenomenon. Perhaps it's getting time to move on. Where? I don't know, but hopefully I'll get there a little ahead of the media again. Let's hope I'm wrong and Duracell will decide that they are not getting enough for their advertising dollar, take their bunny and go bang on the drum somewhere else.

CT] You made a comment earlier:

"I believe that art comes from a "tuning-in," so to speak, with the chaos that exists at all times, all around us, that can never truly become part of the human consciousness. It is too overwhelming. Artists have a job and a responsibility and that is, to give us glimpses of this chaotic time and space, through a medium that makes sense to us, consciously and logically, while our subconscious and intuitive levels are also gaining access to new informtion."

We live in, what is perhaps, an unprecedented period of spiritual freedom and experimentation in which, in the arts especially, we have at our disposal the knowledge of the many cultures of the world; of their art, of their literature, of their beliefs and of at least a outline of their history and the ability to view them from afar or, if we choose, immerse ourselves in them first hand through travel. Such an exposure of knowledge as is now commonplace however, not only brings the potentiality of a widening spiritual freedom but also a widening of personal responsibility. When we realize that we are free to believe what ever we wish and that we are not subject under pain of death or imprisonment to believe any particular thing, we run the risk of entering a state of personal crisis and confusion that are part and parcel of our present times. The weight of responsibility that rests on our shoulders as artists to integrate within ourselves this vast body of world knowledge with an adequate degree of balance and integrity, is a task that no single individual is capable of and points up the old axiom; "The more you know the more you realize that you don’t know". Is this undigested, perhaps undigestable amount of knowledge what you mean by chaos? What kind of stratagies would you suggest to artists to deal with all of this chaos and transmute it into consciousness?

GB) Woody Allen said something like, "Time exists so that everything doesn't happen all at once."

Time is a human concept that we need to have, in our day to day life, in order to make sense of the physical world. I believe, and if I'm not mistaken, "relativity theory" clarifies this, that time is relative. Everything that exists, has existed or ever will exist is available to the human sub- or pre-consciousness. Time is not linear, but exists in a chaotic state (for humans).

The difference between the average person or the average artist, for that matter, and what we call genius, is the ability to tune into this chaos and interpret in a way that we can understand.

I think of an artists' responsibility as the ability to respond to that chaos. The metaphor I use to explain this is probably not too far from the truth. Everything that has been invented or any idea that has been discovered or theorized has got to come from the human experience. This is the only true understanding we have.

The computer and the human brain is the obvious analogy. Cars have 4 wheels because we are quadrupeds; otherwise it may have had 3 or 5 wheels, had we had a different number of limbs. Perhaps spiders would have invented cars with 8 wheels? We were able to invent such things as TV and radio, because of our understanding of wave forms, but how did we really come to understand this or even have it to enter our consciousness? We understand it because we are, ourselves a sort of receiving unit. Each of us has our own frequency and some of us are more able to focus and tune into this frequency than others. What we are picking up is not radio waves or infra-red or anything that we can read on a scientific instrument (thus far). We are picking up information from out of the chaos and we are filtering it down so that it can be communicated to others.

This tuning in may come as the result of meditation or prayer or work. Some people, perhaps Einstein or Matisse, had by chance, a genetic makeup that allowed them to be in tune most of the time, naturally and through their work. Whatever the method, we are essentially like oscillating crystals and what we are picking up from the "ether" is information that is needed by the human species, in order for it to advance over time, to another level of awareness.

That, to me, is the whole purpose of art: the escalation of human awareness. Look at Biblical imagery. Is the image of Christ on the cross, an image of a crude antenna picking up on the frequency of the Creator? (sort of pushing it there, but it was the first thing that came to mind...) What about the image of Moses and the burning bush? Is Moses tuned to the chaos that can only be described as a burning bush and the voice of God? Was he "given" the ten commandments or did he somehow "know" without actually intellectually knowing, what was needed by the collective consciousness in order to move it up to another level of awareness?

This tuning in is not a conscious activity like, "oh, I guess I'll tune into The Chaos Channel today and see what's up." In fact it is done by not doing. The channels are opened by the relaxing of the ego or conscious mind. Again, this can be done through a practice of mediation, of prayer or perhaps by chemicals (naturally occurring in the brain, and perhaps through external chemicals such as peyote or LSD), and through the process of work.

So basically I am saying that there are no strategies except for us to take responsibility for ourselves and to practice our craft and learn to respond to our work as an ongoing communication. I see the process of creating as sort of the "call and response" method used in Jazz and Gospel music. We begin the call by placing paint (or whatever) on a surface and we respond to that call as it speaks back to us and takes on a life of it's own, which we must nurture and then wean. If we are too involved in our own egos and we perhaps fear the letting go of it, we are expressing our personal histories only. We are not expressing that which is beyond us. We are not paying attention and we are not tuning in.

I think the image people will have of the type of work I describe, will be that it is some sort of new age cosmic mandelas or some such trivia. A painting of a building or garbage in an alley or almost anything can convey the message. It isn't the subject matter as much as it is the feelings that are transmitted to another.

That's where the viewer has to begin to take responsibility. If they are going to get the most out of this attempt to communicate, they must pay attention also and "listen" to what their bodies and their senses are saying. That's a whole other ball game. No need to go into it here.

more to follow

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