Noé Gaytán

Crit Notes

In this piece I explore the meaning of art criticism and how people
(artist or otherwise) look at art. I appropriate a chapter out of the book
7 Days in the Art World by Sarah Thornton. The chapter, The Crit, is about
the author sitting in on Michael Asher’s critique class at CalArts. What I
did was make photocopies of the pages and gave them to 3 people: an art
student, a psychology student, and a philosophy student. I asked them to
take notes and highlight what they think is important (critiquing a
chapter on critique). I then took another copy of the chapter and
superimposed all 3 together. I was interested in seeing on how things
overlap (both conceptually and physically), what each student decided to
focus on, and what kind of connections were made. The piece is very much
about being a student. The process and materials make reference to being a
student. This is how we learn. The teacher decides on a reading, the TA
photocopies it, the students read it and highlight things. The form is
equally as important as the content. In many ways it functions as a
painting (flat surface on a wall) and focuses heavily on color. There were
only 3 colors of highlighter used, but with the overlapping they were
mixed to create new colors, which I see as another reference to art
school. It is also be meant to be viewed from afar as a sort of colorful
abstraction. This is a site-specific work. It is made by a student, meant
to be seen by students, created for a student show, at a gallery in a
university. The viewer then completes the piece by looking at it and
providing their own critique (a critique of a critique of a critique). The
fact that Chris Burden, our golden alumni, is the artist that Thornton
decided to use for the image of the chapter (with the Shoot piece being
another work of a student) is the cherry on top.