The Franklin Institute also has an informative video on YouTube:

Art and the Limits of Neuroscience
By ALVA NOë
Why does art move us? Why does it matter? The answers are not likely to be found by studying the brain.

	The Beginning of Infinity: Explanations that Transform the World by David Deutsch Reviewed by Richard Kade
	Divining a Digital Future: Mess and Mythology in Ubiquitous Computing by Paul Dourish and Genevieve Bell Reviewed by John Vines
	Helmholtz: From Enlightenment to Neuroscience by Michel Meulders; edited and translated by Laurence Garey Reviewed by Amy Ione
	Switching Codes: Thinking Through Digital Technology in the Humanities and the Arts by T. Bartscherer & R. Coover, Editors Reviewed by Rob Harle
	Through The Looking Glass by Francisco López Reviewed by Eugene Thacker

Also:

L|R|Q – Leonardo Reviews Quarterly
The fourth issue of Leonardo Reviews Quarterly is available to download as a PDF.

Please click here to start the download.

Ione, A. (2100) “Multiple Discovery. ” In: Runco MA, and Pritzker SR (eds) Encyclopedia of Creativity, Second Edition, vol 2, pp. 153-160 San Diego: Academic Press.

Please email me for a pdf of the article.

EBOS 2011 is presented by ProArts Gallery in Oakland, CA.  This review was prepared for Leonardo Reviews .

After reviewing the 7^th Creativity and Cognition Conference [1], held in Berkeley in 2009, two thoughts kept reverberating in my mind as time passed.  First, I thought about the many reviews I have written about art and events in the Bay Area and wondered why I have never looked at the vibrant art produced here.  I also thought quite a bit about Cathy Treadaway’s paper, mentioned in that review, in which she outlined her approach to integrating newer technologies into her handcrafted art. To put these thoughts to rest, I decided to review the annual East Bay Pro Arts Exhibition (EBOS) in the Bay Area this year.  This 2-weekend event highlights the work of over 400 artists located in the San Francisco Bay Area, many of whom open their studios to the public.  While perhaps not as well known outside of the Bay Area as other locally-based projects such as Burning Man, which has achieved global recognition, EBOS does offer a noteworthy mix of innovative art, groundbreaking museum and gallery exhibitions, live concerts, and great food.

The focal point of the show is the ProArts gallery in downtown Oakland, where each artist can include a small example of his or her work.  The resulting collage is remarkably strong and immediately highlights the talent in the community.  Perhaps the most creative contribution was one that showed the degree to which art, science, and technology is now a normal part of any exhibition space.  In this case, Raines Cohen mounted a large postcard for the exhibition inside a locked box.  Just before the opening reception, he unlocked the box and placed an iPad inside that was running a video presentation of his work and photographs throughout the opening reception.  At this point it became clear that the postcard was a clever placeholder, and the purpose of the locked box was to use it for the video invitation that he ran during the opening, which was intended to entice people to visit his space. [I assume that the postcard was returned to the locked box after the opening reception.]

The purpose of the ProArts gallery space is to help art enthusiasts devise their visitation plan.  I must admit that although I mapped out a plan from the gallery presentation, once I got going, I found it hard to stay on track.  I was lured into spaces by posters on the street and comments from artists I met as I visited with them in their studios and other visitors I encountered along the way. I am not sure if I recommend this approach because I missed studios of interest based on their gallery pieces.  Still, I was glad I took advantage of those who tried to draw an audience to their space because I found some gems this way.

The first day of the four-day event I traveled around with a colleague.  We picked as one of our first stops a building where several prominent Bay Area artists (Richard Diebenkorn, Elmer Bischoff, William Theophilus Brown, and Paul Wonner) had had their studios there in the 1950s.  Together with David Park, who had a studio in downtown Berkeley, Bischoff and Diebenkorn founded the Bay Area Figurative style. Moreover, it was in this space, in the mid-1950s, that Diebenkorn created his famous ”Berkeley Series” of abstract landscapes in this space.

As it turned out, one of the particularly robust studios I visited, Marty McCutcheon’s, is now located in this building.  McCutcheon’s space was set up to be a gallery exhibition of his work and was one of the high points of the day.  The studio consisted of a large sculpture/installation around the walls that was uniformly whitewashed (though with bits of unpainted colors showing through).  The all-white installation was put together with found and discarded objects (a chair, a television, old paint brushes, etc.) constructed in a flattened format resembling a synthetic cubist painting.  While my companion saw shades of Diebenkorn in the asymmetrical geometry (suggesting some resonance with where the studio space was located), I thought more about Louise Nevelson’s unique assemblages made from cast-off wood and other materials that she, too, transformed into works of art. Like Nevelson’s work, I think the monochromatic color added a mysterious quality that made the work alluring.  The installation also incorporated a video projection that complemented the assemblage and truly elevated the presentation because in the video McCutcheon showed his hands drawing and working.  These clips, which were pieced together, were even more fascinating once I realized that I could see him create some of the whited out pages of text that were a part of the assemblage.  This juxtaposition brought the work of William Kentridge to mind, whose creative practice includes drawing a bit, shooting the drawing, and then drawing and shooting some more.

At first I was surprised that McCucheon’s space was set up to highlight his work and that the “working studio” aspect of his area was so invisible.  But, as it turned out, many of the folks I visited did not highlight their working space. This was a bit disappointing.  For example, there were many locations where artists grouped together to increase foot traffic, one of the largest being at a former Barnes and Noble space that was transformed into an art fair, with 43 artists displaying their work.  This was a mixed bag.  In some ways the setup made the “studio” aspect of Open Studio seemed quite remote.  Yet, I did find both intriguing work and many artists who integrated art, science, and technology themes into their projects.

Maryly Snow, for example, brought to mind that while digital art is still a relatively recent phenomenon, artists have used art, science and technology for a long time in various forms (e.g., printmaking and photography).  She was quite representative of the way artists now mix and match, often using printmaking as a technique to create works that offer a commentary on scientific and mathematical ideas.  Briefly, she works with “appropriated” images, finding ways to reassemble them and make them her own.  She had several bubble chamber images on display.  Her web page says these are from the Lawrence Berkeley Labs.  She also showed her Art for Physicists portfolio and photocollages, which are quite unlike those of David Hockney.  Whereas he keeps the multiple pieces in the presentation, Snow assembles the collage with tape and then rephotographs it so that it becomes “whole” again.

Of the places I visited, I thought Benny Alba’s studio/gallery was perhaps the best mix in terms of combining a number of artists with a “studio” feel.  Benny greets visitors as they walk in, making you feel like a guest in her home.  The studio itself, with 11 artists inside, felt quite cohesive and had the kind of community feel that was missing at the Barnes and Noble site.   The work of Vicky Mei Chen, a printmaker, stood out.  She produced small, hand-made artist books (in slipcases) exploring the relationship between urban landscape and the entities that occupy the space. Another artist of note here was Jennifer Downey, a painter whose work centers on nature and how humans interact with nature.

Although I found that traveling to so many studios has its ups and downs, the ups are more prevalent than the downs.  There are also both rewards and challenges.  Visiting one multiple space environment, with a maze-like interior, was annoying because it was surprisingly difficult to find the artists that I wanted to see.  Thinking about it later, this layout probably offered the artists who worked there more privacy.  Cluttered locations showed “the artist” more but, in some case, this meant there was not enough room for visitors (because the space was so taken up by the art). It is harder to visit artists who work in spaces that are not shared with others.  [Of those I visited I particularly liked Barbara Maricle’s, who displayed some mixed media prints that included old architectural blueprints and other materials.]

One of the fun things about this type of event is that going here and there exposes things that are ordinarily invisible.  Ironically, one building with an open studio introduced me to an exciting work that was just “sitting there” in the lobby.  Called “The Tule Wave,” the piece is a large-scale kinetic sculpture by Berkeley-born Reuben Margolin. It consists of a small electric motor located overhead that rotates a pulley, which in turn imparts movement to 241 Dacron strings. The strings then pass through brass grommets in a tension grid and descend to support 1140 sections of Tule Reed and more than 3000 brass beads.  I urge readers to visit “http://www.reubenmargolin.com/waves/Tule/” for an image of the piece and more information about how it was made. Installed at the David Brower Center in Berkeley in 2010, it is in a location I walk by daily. Yet, I had never been inside and had no idea that this extraordinary artwork was housed there.  With so much attention given to museums, exhibitions and art-designated spaces, I wonder how many similar gems we miss as we live our lives.  In this case, I find it hard to describe the dynamic and overall presence of this hanging work.

While I found the organization of the ProArts event extraordinary overall, there were a few things that were less successful in my view. The website itself is a valuable tool in planning one’s itinerary, so I can understand why many of the artists decided to display multiple images, but several of these links were broken. I also would have liked an option to save my itinerary in the online gallery.

Still, all in all, East Bay Pro Arts Open Studio confirmed my sense that art, science, and technology is quite evident across the board these days. This event, which mixes well-established masters with younger artists, highlighted many aspects of creativity and also allowed many artists to show what goes on inside their working space. It was particularly in the studios of the artists who are using what are often considered more traditional tools that I realized (from conversations and their libraries) that creative people have a knack for integrating the old and the new.

[1] Leonardo Reviews: posted December 2009 http://www.leonardo.info/reviews/dec2009/everydaycreativity.ione.php

Source: East Bay Open Studios Preview Exhibition and East Bay Open Studios 2011
Reviewed by Amy Ione

Arnheim for Film and Media Studies
by Scott Higgins, Editor
Reviewed by Ian Verstegen

ArtScience: A Journey Through Creativity – permanent exhibition and Travelling the Silk Road exhibition
Reviewed by Stella Veciana

Design Thinking: Understanding How Designers Think and Work
by Nigel Cross
Reviewed by Dene Grigar

East Bay Open Studios Preview Exhibition and East Bay Open Studios 2011
Reviewed by Amy Ione

Fastwürms Donky@Ninja@Witch: A Living Retrospective
by Philip Monk
Reviewed by Rob Harle

The Horizon: A History of Our Infinite Longing
by Didier Maleuvre
Reviewed by Jan Baetens

The Secret War Between Downloading and Uploading: Tales of the Computer as Culture Machine
by Peter Lunenfeld
Reviewed by Jan Baetens

Think Art – Act Science (Pensar art – Actuar ciència): Swiss artists-in-labs
by Irène Hediger, Curator

and

Visceral: The Living Art Experiment
by Orton Catts and Ionat Zurr, Curators
both reviewed by Harriet Hawkins, Deborah Dixon and Elizabeth Straughan

New materials received – July 2011 Compiled by Martyn Woodward

In Praise of Copying by Marcus Boon Reviewed by Amy Ione Anyone who followed Barack Obama’s popularity leading up to the 2008 presidential election in the United States no doubt recalls the iconic Hope image that seemed to become the unofficial poster of the campaign because many felt it defined Obama’s message so well. The poster itself was so powerful in a symbolic sense that the Smithsonian Museum acquired it when he took office, despite the museum’s usual policy of collecting official portraits of presidents as they are leaving office. As it turned out, the artist, Shepard Fairey, had used an Associated Press (AP) photograph to achieve the likeness. As a result, a question arose: Did Fairey’s use of a photograph, taken in April 2006 by Manny Garcia, require permission or was it covered by fair use? The ensuing legal case, which was settled out of court, has stimulated enormous amounts of discussion because of the many examples of artists who have copied photographs to create their work. [For example, Gerhard Richter has conceived numerous series based on photographs].

More amusing are the Jeff Koons’ cases. Koons recently sent a ‘cease-and-desist’ letter to an artist he claimed was copying his balloon dog sculptures. Like Fairey, Koons settled this case out of court.  The Koons case received quite a bit of coverage because this artist has been sued several times for copyright infringement. The best-known case is perhaps Rogers v. Koons in 1992, in which the court agreed with Art Rogers, a photographer, who claimed that Koons had used Rogers’ material to model three sculptures he sold for $367,000.

These vignettes are among the many that touch upon the variety of questions concerning the nature of copies and originals.  While the computer, the Internet, and our global society has perhaps heightened awareness of what we gain and lose with copies, as Marcus Boon shows in his book, In Praise of Copying, the subject of copying is neither new nor simple.  Walking us through an immense volume of information, Boon argues that copying is an essential part of being human and demonstrates the complexity of the subject.

The strength of Boon’s book is his ability to write easy to read text and to simultaneously provide an erudite discussion.  In part this is accomplished by putting many of the nuances into the footnotes.  This is an effective approach given the breadth of the presentation.  Equally compelling is the volume’s originality, particularly in light of a thesis that validates copying.  I wondered if he would argue, like a Nietzsche quote he includes, that life itself is an appropriation and thus his work is more a compilation of material than an original perspective.  In any case, in my view, the presentation is novel due to Boon’s use of Buddhism as a touchstone to the broad sweep of Western ideas.

The author explains that his impetus to write the book grew out of the observation that copying is pervasive in contemporary culture, yet at the same time subject to laws, restrictions, and attitudes that suggest “copying” is wrong.  Proposing that we need to rethink how we see the tension between copies and originals, Boon suggests that Mahayana Buddhism, in its various historical forms, offers entry into the subject because it provides a way to rethink common duality of terms that have historically supported Western views.  While Buddhism may offer an alternative to dualistic types of ideas such as subject/object, I didn’t find the dualistic thesis convincing in terms of copies. Even before reading the volume, I found that the tensions between originals and copies did not strike me as a dichotomy.

One interesting aspect of the Buddhist perspective is that it allowed for a comprehensive overview and did not compel a “new” ethics, so to speak.  Rather the effort highlights the role of copies in our culture, largely through a weaving of critical theory, philosophical history, and cultural examples. Platonic mimesis is meshed with memes.  The history of copyright laws and patent laws is introduced in terms that look at both modern law and philosophical perspectives we can trace back to Plato and Aristotle.

Boon has an interest in what words mean and how they affect the discussion.  “Copia,” for example (as in “cornucopia”), is the subject of one chapter. Boon claims the nuances of the word, which originally referred to the abundance, multiplicity, and variation of copies that were not mere imitations, was lost due to a variety of reasons.  These include the development of the disdain people had for copying as imitation and how the printing press, copyright, and other societal values favored individual ownership. On the other hand, before the printing press “publishing” meant making an original available for scribes and students to copy. Through doing so they would glean a deep sense of the material and, in some cases, make it material to others as well.  Indeed, a book that remained uncopied was unlikely to survive.

Although there is much discussion on film, art, and literature, it still seemed to me that the book was weighted too heavily toward philosophical ideas and cultural products (e.g., counterfeit Louis Vuitton bags and bootleg Harry Potter products).  Academia is woven into the discussion, as is plagiarism, but in a generalized fashion.  He does mention that copying is a subject he teaches to students at York University. Many of the examples seem targeted to that cohort (e.g., comparing iTunes with tape mixing and Internet downloads).  There are also many examples related to education in the university.  These range from the fact that student readers are subject to copyright laws (that increase their cost) to the use of services such as Turnitin.com at universities to spot plagiarism.

Given how copious my copy (!) of the volume is, it surprises me that some of my favorite examples of the tension between copies and originals were not mentioned.  While art is not neglected, for example, he mentions the important role Andy Warhol played in making artistic copying a part of contemporary aesthetics.  I would have liked a chapter on art that discussed both the historical discussion and the trope of copies AS art, epitomized in the multiples of Andy Warhol and the mass production techniques. Warhol and other artists are discussed (e.g., Mike Kelley, Duchamp, Cindy Sherman, Sherrie Levine, etc.), but their work is blended in more than looked at in terms of the language of art.  Boon does note that Warhol turned the ethos of preciosity on its head to embrace the multiplicity of copies as an aesthetic in its own right and the use of appropriation as an artistic strategy.  What I felt was missing was a section that zoned into the tension between the original and copy in art in a larger sense, in terms of artists, collectors, forgeries, education, etc.

Historically, for example, there were many arguments about what constitutes “great” art.  On the whole, artists were trained by copying the work of others.  Yet, particularly with the Renaissance, the goal for the artist was to achieve recognition as an innovator, a genius who made original work.  This not only created a conflict in the studio/atelier, it also created an academic tension since good “technique” and the qualities that made works exceptional were not seen as the same thing. Moreover, with the invention of photography in the nineteenth century we find many fine artists using the ease of the photographic copy to “sketch,” which facilitated in the production of their work.  Nonetheless, as recent research has shown, they often hid their photographs because of the stigma attached to working from copies.  His contemporary examples, like Andy Warhol, seemed to buttress the cultural orientation rather than to look at art per se.

Finally, I also would have liked some integration of how the ideas about originals and copies interface with multiple discoveries.  For example, Darwinism is discussed in several places, but the attribution of evolutionary theory is not. It is well known that Herbert Spencer (1820–1903) was thinking about ideas similar to Charles Darwin’s before Darwin’s publication of The Origin of Species in 1859 (1809-1882); yet, Spencer was accused of copying the idea. Similarly, there has been much research on the seventeenth-century calculus controversy between Isaac Newton and Gottfried Leibniz. At the time it was said that Leibniz copied Newton’s work, although later research suggests the two approaches were independently developed.

Despite these minor limitations, In Praise of Copying is a splendid book. It will appeal to anyone who wonders about the nuances of how we think about copies and where copies “fit” in our world today.  The discussion ranges from what is a copy and copying as deception to montage and the mass production of copies.  The text moves quickly, and it is only upon closing the book that one realizes how much territory the author covered.

Published: http://www.leonardo.info/reviews/apr2011/ione_boon.php