[#hashtag] Class Dismissed. Everyone gets an A for Effort. Well, Almost Everyone.

William Powhida makes transgressive, self-reflective, art;

and his subjects are often people—or prevailing notions of—Power. Hence, I shouldn’t have been surprised last night when he suddenly called me out as conducting the most in-your-face, authoritarian, put-people-on-the-spot-to-give-a-right-answer #hashtagclass session that he’s seen yet. [Sorry, I have to paraphrase on the above; I was writing on my computer (artist's statements, remember?!) while he was talking, and couldn't focus and listen at the same time.] Funny. I was So Trying Not To Be an Authority Figure that I came off exactly like one. But that’s cool. Bill practices what he preaches in his work; and, well, so do I.
Watch this humorous video of “Powhida” from C-Monster. Then read this article from the New York Times: that’s right, Tufts University is now accepting YouTube videos in application for college. Indeed, Powhida makes his artist’s statement many times over.

The old adage, “by my students, I am taught,” never felt so real. Time for me to teach video editing; word editing is so Old School. That said, I tried to prevail. I wrote a live statement for Jen Dalton (the other organizer of #hashtagclasss) and took way too long to do it. But I didn’t do too bad a job, considering I was working while the aforementioned artist’s statement/pedagogy/meta-discussion was taking place. (The one I couldn’t really hear.) Dalton’s past work was new to me. We looked at it in some Online images, and I asked her a few questions. ONe thing I learned (in addition to the fact that she’s an incredibly private person, and in addition to the fact that the overall arc of her artistic work is pretty darned interesting), is that, since she was a kid, she’s been obsessed with “bean counting,” and, more recently, with how statistics, raw data, survey results, and the like get depicted in visual terms (pie charts, bar graphs, diagrams). I couldn’t help thinking of that Tufts video paradigm shift once again—and wonder if she hasn’t anticipated something that’s now in the air. The NYTimes reports that one video has gotten the most views. What’s it of? A young lady, named Amelia Downs, who does interpretive dances of math concepts. Jen, take a look:

I’ll leave you the applicant’s written statement, which accompanies the video. My professional opinion on edits?: I wouldn’t change a thing.

Hello Tufts Admission person!

This movie shows me performing my math dances! The dances shown are:

Volume of a solid of revolution (y-axis)
Line graph
Scatter plot
Box and whisker plot
Pie graph
Bar Graph
Sin and Cos graph
Cot graph (THIS IS SUPPOSED TO BE CSC)

I hope you enjoyed them!

Thanks to my best friend, Tim, who filmed it!

Next up, Jen and Bill, if we ever do this again (and I wouldn’t mind; I would be so much better at it a second time): I pull out the appropriate tags/metadata from every artist’s statement I write. it’s yet another skill artists are gonna need. #thetruth.

(Powhida closeup image from his [2006?] show at Schroeder Romero Gallery courtesy of Barry Hoggard’s photostream on Flickr; Powhida video first ripped from C-Monster.)