La Trahison des Clercs, ed. #115

There are a number of reasons that my interest in following the present art world has flagged to almost complete indifference these past several years. I've grown to see little point in complaining, and increasingly think less and less abut it all. But R.M. Vaughan's critique of the recent Berlin Biennale, posted this past June at Art F City, echoes some of thoughts about it very well. The opening paragraphs provide you with a preview of the tenor of the entire thing:

"Since the last Berlin Biennale, Europe has undergone a currency and debt crisis, watched far right political entities grow from obscure clusters of nutjobs into massive populist movements, dealt, badly, with the millions of people fleeing conflicts in the Middle East and North Africa, and been subjected to terrifying and brutal acts of terrorism by all manner of extremists.

In all of these crises, Berlin, the capital of the EU’s richest and most politically powerful country has played a central and keynote-determining role.

I can thus think of no better way, given the circumstances, to reinforce the popular perception that contemporary art has nothing to say about the world that surrounds it than by hiring the NYC-based fashion bloggers DIS to curate the ninth edition of the Berlin Biennale. I have rarely seen such a profound case of not giving the people what they want, of so many heads so far up so many assholes.

Just walk away, Berlin. Go have a strong drink. Read a good mystery novel. Take too much MDMA and pee your slacks. Sit in an empty room and cry. Do anything but waste 26 Euros on the Berlin Biennale.

I am not arguing that every work of art must pay keen attention to (nor certainly attempt to resolve) world problems. But I cannot see the value of artworks that exist in and speak solely to a snarky, self-affirming vacuum either, as do almost all of the works I saw at the BB. There is so much avoidance of current problems on offer here that one could reasonably see the entire project as an act of retreat, even denial. It’s as if the world is too much for DIS and their assembled artists, so they’ve all gone back to the rec room to play video games."

Admittedly, Vaughan wasn't alone in this assessment, as negative reviews of the Biennale stacked up across the internet. But then there's Vaughan's review of a large exhibition of paintings by American artist Amy Feldman which appeared this past week. I recommend reading the whole thing, but the crunch comes in the final stretch:

"I showed a friend a selection of Feldman’s works, a friend who happens to be an accomplished novelist who grew up in poverty in the UK. His response was that all I was doing by showing him these lazy paintings was affirming his long-held suspicion that the art market really existed to give frivolous rich people a way to show off how much play money they have. Feldman’s paintings are that and that only – light amusement for jaded buyers.

The works have no redeeming qualities other than as oversized examples of how shitty and decadent times have become. Feldman’s paintings are the wall-based equivalent of hiring peasants to play at being peasants in your estate gardens, the extra chandeliers in the posh hotel lobby, the last dollops of gold and poured blue glass on King Tut’s 25 pound funeral mask, the extra season of Girls; flitting, careless excess and high-brow gluttony rendered into being with a gutting, lurid insincerity"

Easily the most acidic art reviews I've encountered since the bygone days when Gary Indiana used to occasionally contribute to The Village Voice.

Strungout on Jargon (Slight Return)

TEMPLATE 6: The Disneyland/ Dystopian Paradise/Planned Utopia Artist Statement $21.99:

Step 1: talk about how your interest in planned communities came from interrogating the assumptions of the following:

• the American dream
• the failed narrative of progress
• conflicts that inhere in postmodern urbanism
• experimental geography

Step 2: talk about ambiguous futures, suspended temporality and the destabilization of the reality principle
Step 3: rail against a too-perfect repressed 'paradise' that is really a simulacra of XYZ
Step 4: bring in Buckminster Fuller, Brazilia and Celebration (planned community in Florida)

TEMPLATE 7: The Deconstructed Architecture/Unmonumental Sculpture Artist Statement

Step 1: talk about how your work began with a preoccupation with 'haunted spaces,' 'aporia' and 'liminality'
Step 2: talk about how your installations render visible what the built environment has naturalized or obscured
Step 3: tell an anecdote about how your 3 month artist residency in a Third World country (i.e. South/Central America, Eastern Europe, Africa, etc.) awakened an awareness about how ethnography is embedded in place in a way that the homogenized metropli of the First World never allowed you to perceive that allows you to simultaneously:
A.) off-handedly brag about how you were at a residency
B.) show that despite your impenetrable wall of accolades, you are still a sentient aware person capable of being effected and transformed by lived experience (they LOVE that!)

From "Top Ten Words I Am Sick of Seeing on Artists Statements" by Andrea Liu [ # ]

image: Thomas Struth

Arts & Leisure

"The Artistic Temperament"

Verdict of the Peter Doig case that I posted about earlier. As well as a befuddlingly hilarious recap of the closing argumennts.

An American Folktale (Rough Draft)

Originally posted at And What Will Be Left of Them?,  
November 2011, as a teaser/preface to this second part.

Originally he hailed from the "Cradle of Liberty," that echo of the cradle rocked out of, Boston. Historic and colonial, an Atlantic capitol of Old World once-wasness. A lovely "walking city," everyone said.

But a fucking nightmare to drive in.

Home to the reputed Worst Drivers in the Nation. Unsurprising, seeing how successful navigation requires the quickest and most aggressive reflexes -- the sort that never fail to confound and frighten non-natives. It's what's required if you' aim to get anywhere. Of bettering the illogic of the city's narrow streets, those streets that weren't designed with the idea of this sort of traffic in mind, ages removed from any modern idea of enabling vehicular progress.

And you know how progress means a lot of things. For over a century it'd meant heading west, to the land's nether shore. West over terrain once crossed by horse and by wagon, then by telegraph and railway. Much of it, thank god, now much more easily and more often flown over. All part of expansion, of a fated and manifest destiny. So westward he went. To where everything, as they said, was presently at. The whereall to which everything led, the telos of all pioneering and frontiering. To the ascendant domain of the Now, the cultural seat of powers-having-shifted, of late modernity itself. Last stop, final destination. Built for cars, for maximum traffic, to fully accommodate its flow and—the theory had it -- avoid the snarls and tangles and perpetual arterial clusterfuckage. Its skies and sun having waited all those ages to be finally tinged pink by a brume of ozone.

He found plenty of things to do in L.A., though. Like playing in traffic. Lying down on a bustling blacktop amid flares (but only to get arrested once the cops arrived). Or staging lurid roadside distractions for random passersby. Getting shot, or tortured, or dangled from on high. Or having himself nailed to one of the road-clogging four-wheeled beasts, with the beast screaming beneath him as he lay belly up in the morning sun. All of this a means, perhaps, of becoming one with the city, of becoming part of its circulatory system.

And then one night arriving at an elevated and narrow stretch of coastal highway, and there placing a monument. Twin cruxes, soaked in the very stuff that made all these things possible. Planting them in the paths of the road's to and fro. Igniting them and then vacating into the night, leaving behind a pair of blazing glyphs -- flaming totems, emblems for the name and number of the century in which all of this came to be. A pair of sentinels, their limbs splayed to alert, or forewarn, or to deliver some form of reckoning. Left there for the latenight traveler who, finding his route obstructed, could only stand in the torchlit road and wonder what on earth it could possibly mean.

Bête comme un peinture

Earlier I wrote about the Painting 2.0 exhibition at the Museum Brandhorst in Hamburg. It occurred to me after the fact that this is third of several exhibitions this past year that were threaded on a similar thematic thread. Add to the previous the American exhibitions The Forever Now: Contemporary Painting in an Atemporal World, mounted by the Museum of Modern Art last winter; and the roughly concurrent Variations: Conversations in and Around Abstract Painting, hosted by the LACMA. The latter received almost no attention, while the former prompted a great many reviews, almost all of them harshly negative. The Brooklyn Rail recently featured a lengthy comparison of the two shows, aiming to to account the disparate strengths and weaknesses of each show, as well as what sort of thesis they might present about the plight of contemporary painting:

"Is the supposed crisis in painting a product of the medium’s own neurosis? Perhaps it isn't that painting is dead but that, like many of us, it suffers from anxiety about death? Maybe painting is depressed, a sentiment I dare say many critics would validate; or narcissistic (undeniably), or irrationally obsessed with the threat of other mediums. Obsession of some sort seems the most likely diagnosis, with the result being compulsive inward-looking as well as an unhealthy fixation on what painting or sculpture or video might be doing."

Not bad for a start. But unfortunately after that point the article begins chasing its own tail, the author defaulting to half-century-long about formalism vs anti-formalism polemics, via the dusty grad-school required-reading of Clement Greenberg's "Towards a Newer Laocoön" and Rosalind Krauss's "Sculpture in the Expanded Field." Which only raises the questions: If painting is reputedly dead or in crisis, why is it still a matter of discussion a half-century after being declared so? Why haven't the parameters of the discourse shifted, or the critical vocabulary significantly revised, in the interim decades since?

Of the many reviews of MoMA's The Forever Now exhibition, perhaps the most interesting I’ve come across is the one penned by (surprisingly enough) the artist David Salle, which appeared in the pages of ARTnews. As one would expect, Salle has skin in the game, and critiques the show in largely pictoral terms. Salle waves off all the agonistic concerns about the fate of painting in the digital ago, concluding:

"...The [exhibition’s] good news, is that painting didn't die. The argument that tried to make painting obsolete was always a category mistake; that historically determinist line has itself expired, and painting is doing just fine. Painting may no longer be dominant, but that has had, if anything, a salutary effect: not everyone can paint, or needs to. While art audiences have gone their distracted way, painting, like a truffle growing under cover of leaves, has developed flavors both rich and deep, though perhaps not for everyone. Not having to spend so much energy defending one's decision to paint has given painters the freedom to think about what painting can be. For those who make paintings, or who find in them a compass point, this is a time of enormous vitality."

This, after having established in early in the review:

"[Curator Laura Hoptman] wants to make a point about painting in the Internet age, but the conceit is a red herring — the Web's frenetic sprawl is opposite to the type of focus required to make a painting, or, for that matter, to look at one."

Also of interest was Salle's takedown of the work of recent art-market sensation Oscar Murillo. In which Salle focuses on Murillo's work in strictly pictorial and presentational terms, tactfully sidestepping the sorts of spleen-venting scattershot screeds Murillo has received (however deservedly) from other critics.

Which brings us to another, closely related, topic. All of the above having transpired in the context of a parallel discussion about the ascent of "Zombie Formalism" -- the glut of painting-qua-painting as produced by a number of contemporary and emerging artists, artists who've been hot on the art market in recent years (and a number of whom are included in the aforementioned exhibitions).*  While I don't wholly disagree that there's been a lot of slight, anemic, vaguely homogenized style of painting in recent years. But personally, I'm not sure my the category of painting has borne the brunt of the criticism. As the art market bubble has expanded in recent years, I'm inclined to argue that all that money pouring into the market in search of "mobile assets" to chase has had a diminishing effect across the disciplinary spectrum; resulting in a deluge monotonously generic work in all of the more dominant categories, as well -- from video, to installation and multimedia works, you name it.

_ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _

*  For the unfamiliar, examples here and here. As well as the ur-text that got the whole ball rolling.

The Errant Eye

fig. 1

It's not all that difficult to tell a fake Jackson Pollock painting from a real one. Despite what some may think, and despite all the scoffing my-kid-could-paint-that cliches, it's not all that terribly difficult to discern that something is amiss.

The first indicator is the scale. Smaller works from Pollock’s "drip"/"allover" phase are in the minority, with the rest of them being quite large.

The main thing is composition, of being very familiar -- after long, extended periods of looking at the Pollock's work -- with the artist’s visual vocabulary. This might take a while, but after a time that vocabulary becomes intuitive. One general aspect is the work's compositional rhythm, its push-and-pull -- the way the composition breathes or coalesces through an amalgam of webs, skeins, clusters, puddlings and crusts. Also considering how the artist would crop the canvas after-the-fact, which was often dictated by by where the density of the composition begins to thin or become too diffuse, with only a moderate ratio of bleeding over the edges, the allover "apocalyptic wallpaper" effect being economically hemmed in by the boundaries. And then there's Pollock’s sense of distributing the paint about the canvas, in terms of chromatic harmonies and contrasts. Bold, bright elements are most often not allowed to dominate, with the artist "knocking them back" via breaking up one layer with the next. (This was perhaps done with the intent of nullifying elements that might be construed as "figurative," which the critic Clement Greenberg told him was regressive, conservative).

fig. 2, 3

Third would be the condition of the thing. This would involve a close-up inspection while bearing a number of considerations in mind, many of them having to do with the painter's methods and materials. Such as: In order to execute his famous "drip"-era painting, Pollock set up studio in a barn, with the canvases spread out on the floor. It was far from a pristine environment, and a fair amount of detritus -- dirt, cigarette butts, bootprints, etc. -- sometimes got caught up in the action. There's also the matter of looking at how the thing has aged -- basic entropic considerations. Such as the discoloration of the canvas/support. Or, given that Pollock often made these works by using commercial-grade lacquer paint, which have a tendency to quickly degrade over time -- cracking, crazing, or wrinkle at various points [fig. 2 - 3]. Such is the stuff that has kept a number of museum conservators busy in recent decades.

At the very least, the art directors of Ex Machina [fig. 1] might've contacted the prop department of the makers of the 2000 biopic Pollock. Actor and director Ed Harris had reputedly spent months studying Pollock's methods and laboring to recreate them for the sake of his performance in the film [fig. 4 - 5]. Perhaps there were one or two of the mock Pollocks still in someone’s possession?**

fig. 4, 5

Or maybe they have consulted with the British conceptualists Art & Language, getting some technical pointers from them about they went about making their Portrait of V.I. Lenin in the Style of Jackson Pollock series back in 1979-80 [fig. 6 - 7].

Kitsch, Dirt, Mud, and Chaos

Hans-Peter Zimmer, collage, date unknown

At the end of the prior post I had mentioned the Gruppe SPUR. I hadn't had reason to think of them in many years. In fact, I once had a copy of a German-language book on the group; a book that was long ago lost, destroyed, or came to some other such fate. At any rate, being reminded of them, I decided to seek out images of their early, SI-era work online. No quick task, as the group was -- I gather -- never widely known outside of Germany.

Comprised of painters Heimrad Prem, Helmut Sturm, Hanz-Peter Zimmer, and sculptor Lothar Fischer, the group came together in 1957 in the city of Munich. Their work during those years in many ways mirrors of number of postwar "art informel" avant-gardist tendencies of the era -- like a mishmash of COBRA-style taschism and art brut primitivism.

Heimrad Prem - Untitled, 1962

Lothar Fischer, title and date unknown

Helmut Sturm  "Paar", 1962

Hans-Peter Zimmer - Untitled, 1961

Lothar Fischer "Flucht aus dem Morgenland", 1959

Ceci n'est pas une pipe, pt. 118

From a recent discussion between Susanne von Falkenhausen and David Joselit, concerning the latter's curatorial hand in the Painting 2.0: Expression in the Information Age exhibition, via the German edition of Frieze mag:

SvF: So medium specificity – that’s the old spectre. And what does medium specificity, what does Clement Greenberg, have to do with Guy Debord? You would like to get painting out of the register of Greenberg and put it into a register of Debord?

DJ: I suppose it’s very hard to characterize a complex project in a slogan. But from my point of view, what painting really can do is represent, even theorize, the circulation of pictures – and by ‘pictures’ I mean commoditized images as they arise in mass media of all types ranging, in our period, from television to the internet. We know that appropriation was aimed at indexing the ‘life of pictures’. But it did so in a very severe way, which in fact made the displacement from one context to another – art to advertising, for instance – clean and unambiguous. Whereas in painting, what you see from Robert Rauschenberg to the present is that commoditized images are put into circulation in time and space, and move at different rates. Many of the questions animating conceptual art with regard to changing values of visual knowledge have been explored in painting, but I don’t think this has been sufficiently recognized. While it is a simplification that has many problems, for the sake of argument I think your characterization is largely correct: we are trying to take painting from Greenberg to Debord.

SvF: But Debord...

DJ: He would have hated the project.

SvF: Yes, I think so. He would have sent in some black paper or something like that.

DJ: Right, or a film. ...Obviously Debord did not and would not approve of painting.

Unless the painting in question were one by Asger Jorn (who's included in the exhibition). In which case, Debord was all to ready to accept it as a gift, which -- lore has it it -- he would turn around and sell, using the money from the transaction to fund the publishing of the next edition of the SI journal.

Driving to the End of the World

Canon Fodder: Institutionalized, II

From a recent interview with Hal Foster at Mute, prompted by the publication of his latest book, Bad News Days...

JDM: It’s interesting that you dedicate this book to those art spaces and journals. At one point in the book you say that, ‘we might reassure ourselves’, when faced with some of the art you are discussing, by relating it to some historical precursors. I wonder though how much the modernist canon that you rely on is relevant to the kind of artists who operate through those same grassroots venues and journals. It seems to me that that particular art history and canon is no longer the context within which a lot of younger artists see their work operating, or not in any kind of privileged way.

HF: I don’t discuss the split between contemporary practice and postwar practice very much in this book. Certainly modernist art is quite distant, but then again I think when ambitious artists develop they do have connections to the past that they might not recognise and that it may be incumbent upon others to extract. So, for example, I was surprised when I wrote about the abject that there would be connections to Bataille, and that when I wrote about the mimetic that there would be a different Dada that would emerge. I don’t think that that is an imposition on my part. I think ambitious practice always reconfigures history. So I do understand that there is this disconnect but new lines also open up. Certainly we’ve lived through a long epoch of art in the context of cultural studies and artists are a lot more involved in the social and the political in a synchronic way and so artists think about work as just so many projects. That tends to devalue the diachronic and the history of medium. But the serious ones, I think, come around to that question too. To sustain a practice you have to develop a language and that language demands an engagement with the past.

And later in the same discussion...

JDM: Swinging back to questions of education, now that the academic institution is no longer a place to find shelter, would you agree that contemporary art has become a holding category for culture generally and, if you do agree, what do you think the positives and negatives of that situation might be?

HF: Well I think that’s right. One thing that struck me with the emergence of relational art was how compensatory it seemed, you know, like: ‘Oh, social relations elsewhere are diminished, if not destroyed, perhaps we can use art as a site for interaction.’ I feel like there’s real pathos there, but also real force, I don’t just mean to decry it. It’s a sad reflection on other spaces and other institutions if that is the case. This is the condition of neoliberalism that most people, even its champions, will admit; it wants to deregulate everything. The ravaged institutions that remain have an enormous amount of work to do. In the United States that’s usually primary schools, where all sorts of social problems are dumped and libraries that become homeless shelters. As the government withdraws from more and more spaces the ones that remain are really burdened. What troubles me in terms of the institutions of art is that the opposite is happening. Rather than act as the last strongholds or even leak-holds of the social, they seem to want to mimic the rest of the market place and become simply another branch of the culture industry. That’s one line of polemic in the book. What art institutions do at their best is provide a site where different temporalities and different ideas of what it means to be a subject in this society can be constellated in works of art, but rather than do that they seem to want to become relevant to the culture that so privileges presence, you know, the live. It’s the entertainment version of self-actualisation, of human capital, of how to be fully you at all times.

That last bit about the overburdening of various cultural institutions makes me think of my ambivalence about certain trends among metropolitan art museums that I noticed emerging back in the mid-to-late 1990s; all of which had sociological correlates. Firstly, the increasing numbers of “populist”-minded blockbuster exhibitions, the sort that were obviously intended to bait tourists and suburbanites; but which would also become more and more frequent as “re-urbanizing” demographic shifts and gentrification gained momentum. Secondly, there was the proliferation of “relational” art projects hosted by art institutions, which ran parallel to increasing discussion about the “disappearance of public spaces”, compounded by the closures and marginalization of smaller cultural venues and sites due to (once again) increasing gentrification. And then there was the expansion of museum educational departments via outreach programs; attempting to ameliorate -- in their meager ways -- the effects of inner-city educational inequities (i.e., a public education system that was becoming increasingly handicapped by successive cycles of ideologically-driven budget cuts and public demonization). On these last two counts, I’m tempted to think of Claire Bishop’s description of relational art projects as attempts to create temporary “functional ‘microtopias’” that offered “provisional solutions in the here and now” -- albeit in the shadow of far greater, far more extensively destructive socio-economic forces.

Don't Talk to Sociologists

Mayo Thompson interviewed for BOMB magazine, speaking about divergent modes of creativity and the "waxen herring" of a 50-years-old conjectural musical project...

KC: Would you say you see Red Crayola as a product?

MT: Mike Kelley once told me that he was no democrat, but that we were going to have to have universal democracy before anything interesting could happen again. He was thinking about product, good product. Though he did not think art is redemptive, Mike was a utopian. He believed in progress. I don’t. And I don’t think anything is necessarily interesting. Something’s being interesting only serves those in whose interest it functions. Punk qua form wasn’t about making interesting music, rather about music as self-realization. Even poor punk was interesting, though, particularly if it sold. That’s what made the Crayola viable. Sales made it interesting in a broader sense. When we started we knew we couldn’t play up to the standards operative in those days but didn’t let that stop us. We made a virtue of what we could do that conventional musicians couldn’t do, and exploited that, with the idea of making them eat it thrown in. We were playing a theoretical endgame. We let the world know we couldn’t be bothered. You might say that was and to an extent remains The Red Crayola product. Our music expressed our aggressiveness, our attitude. When I heard The Beatles, Dylan, I thought, 'Fuck, cool. If that makes it, I can sing too.' The Sex Pistols had the same effect, giving people a sense that they might empower themselves. People discouraged me when I sang as a child, said, 'You can’t carry a tune in a bucket.' People still say that. Well, fuck it. I haven’t been trying to carry a tune. I’ve been essaying, expressing my interests in abstract terms, devil take the hindmost.

KC: So you do not consider the records that you have made to be works of some kind?

MT: If you mean artworks as such, no. I think of them as candidates for asymmetrical functional relations, open to interpretation.

KC: Having said that, would you refer to the band as a condition of a sort?

MT: Condition? You mean like, pneumonia? No.

To my lights, it just represents instrumental potential inasmuch as its value is tied to its use. Music has been instrumental to my being able to put ideas in play, having more fun than you’re supposed to, that sort of thing. I’m no purist, and don’t believe authenticity or sincerity save anything, not necessarily. The game is to make things that have to be dealt with on the terms they instantiate. My stuff doesn’t carry or necessarily suggest imperatives for others. It’s not well-formed in the scientific sense. In personal terms, it entails a measure of shame, because it would be nice if everybody were as fortunate as I in doing what they like.

Full interview here.

Margin Call

Come what may:

"[The Luxembourg] report notes that following the 2008-09 financial crisis, few market sectors rebounded as robustly as art – particularly contemporary art, which has doubled in value since the beginning of the financial recovery. 

"But since art has no fundamental value, it is difficult for economists to apply economic principles to it. It is harder still to trade in art as an asset class, as the market has clearly attempted to do. [...] 

Levin said the bubble was inflating in part due to the prevalence of high-end money laundering being done through art, and how the two have come to affect one another. Buy art in one country and pop it in the private jet, the theory goes, and by morning you’ve moved $100m between tax jurisdictions.

"'In certain countries, art is very effective way for collectors to transfer wealth,' Levin said. 'It’s highly mobile and there’s a tendency for it trade up to whatever the strongest currency may be.'"

In other news:  I guess for years now NYCers have been saying that the city's been taken over by rich wankers. I guess this confirms it as fact.

image: Damien Hirst; "What Comes Up, Must Come Down", 1994

Before, During or After the Fireworks

Peter Schjeldahl, recently interviewed at the Brooklyn Rail...

"Aren’t feelings the only things in the universe that we can really know? They’re the actual us. Thoughts are just lawyers for our feelings. Memory is a pile of stories determined by feelings and constantly revised to fit new feelings. I guess the emphasis in my writing has to do with my never having been educated in art. I saw and loved art before I knew anything about it. I lucked out of the problem of learning about art before you see it — because you will always be dealing with that information at the expense of what moves you first-hand. I discovered very quickly in the ’60s that I was the world’s leading expert in my experience. And then I got praised for making the most of that. I think Jasper Johns said one of my favorite lines, which I remember vaguely but goes something like 'Style is only common sense. You figure out what people like about you, and you exaggerate it.'"

I'm assuming that by being "I was the world’s leading expert in my experience," Schjeldahl means something along the lines of: A first-hand authority on my own experiences. To the degree that: subjectivity vs. experience + subsequent knowledge and exposure = an expanded frame of reference in which to ground one's expertise/worldly compass.

Anyway: Noted, the way in which the matter of "feelings" -- and how "feelings aren't facts" -- turns up later in the interview in a wholly different context; but then dovetails into a bit about the place and presence of an artwork re intention and effect, and the matter of artistic failure(s), that last aspect being returned to later still:

"Looking at art is like, 'Here are the answers. What were the questions?' I think of it like espionage, 'walking the cat back' — why did that happen, and that? — and eventually you come to a point of irreducible mystery. With ninety percent of work the inquiry breaks down very quickly. You reach an explanation that is comprehensive and boring. Bad art, as any good artist will tell you, is the most instructive, because it’s naked in its decisions. Even adorably so. When something falls apart you can see what it’s made of. Whereas with a great artist, say Manet or Shakespeare, you’re left gawking like an idiot."

Public Service Announcement (or: Kunst = Kapital, Slight Return No. 489)

Ad Reinhardt, Rough Sketch for a Leaflet in the “Event” or “Happening” of a Fine-Artists Strike, c. 1961

[ via ]

Institutionalized (Slight Return)

After letting the grumbling subside, curator & MoMA director Glenn Lowry and his associates belatedly fire back at the unanimous disapproval heaped upon them over the Museum's Björk retrospective. Huh, okay. For some reason, I always get suspicious whenever someone plays the populist/anti-eltism card. But maybe that's just me.

Relatedly, the last issue of New York magazine features two pieces concerning the unveiling of the new Whitney space; with Jerry Saltz critiquing it from the interior at length, while architecture critic Justin Davidson assessing Renzo Piano's overall design for the building as a whole. While Davidson doesn't dislike the building as a whole, he labels it "deliberately clunky" and at times offers some less-than-glowing things descriptions:

"Once it ages a bit, it will start evoking our Apple moment, when high-tech containers, from phones to cruise ships, had to have shiny metal casings and dark, satiny screens. There's nothing seamless about this awkward kit of protruding parts and tilting surfaces, though: The thing might have have arrived in an Ikea flat pack and then been prodigiously misassembled."

“Were I to judge the new Whitney exterior,” writes Saltz, “I’d say it looks like a hospital or a pharmaceutical company.” That aside, Saltz is far more enthusiastic -- if not effusive -- about the interior exhibition potential. And his piece is among the longest and more erudite that he’s written (to my knowledge) in a good while. Those who remember his tenure at the Village Voice about 10-15 years ago (and his brief stint with Modern Painters magazine) can probably remember how often he played the role of the art world scold -- venting about the bloated indulgences, excesses, and follies of various cultural institutions; calling for so-ands-so's departure; decrying on the absence of female artist in exhibitions and permanent collections, & etc.. Since he’s been with NYmag, not so much. But, in course of delineating the status and history of NYC’s four major art museums, Saltz slips back into that mode from time to time:

“The list of fun-house attractions is long. At MoMA, we’ve had overhyped, badly done shows of Björk and Tim Burton, the Rain Room selfie trap, and the daylong spectacle of Tilda Swinton sleeping in a glass case. This summer in London you can ride Carsten Höller’s building-high slides at the Hayward Gallery — there, the fun house is literal. Elsewhere, it is a little more ‘adult’: In 2011, L.A.’s MoCA staged Marina Abramovic’s Survival MoCA Dinner, a piece of megakitsch that included naked women with skeletons atop them on dinner tables where attendees ate. In 2012, the Los Angeles County Museum of Art paid $70,000 for a 21-foot-tall, 340-ton boulder by artist Michael Heizer and installed it over a cement trench in front of the museum, paying $10 million for what is essentially a photo op. Last year, the Museum of Contemporary Art in Chicago mounted a tepid David Bowie show, which nevertheless broke records for attendance and sales of catalogues, ‘limited-edition prints,’ and T-shirts. Among the many unfocused recent spectacles at the Guggenheim were Cai Guo-Qiang’s nine cars suspended in the rotunda with lights shooting out of them. The irony of these massively expensive endeavors is that the works and shows are supposedly ‘radical’ and ‘interdisciplinary,’ but the experiences they generate are closer, really, to a visit to Graceland — ‘Shut up, take a selfie, keep moving.’”

At the New Yorker, Peter Schjeldahl is equally heartened by museum's new exhibition, and similarly blase about the Piano's design. I reckon the next time we can expect this kind of consensus is when the new Whitney Biennial rolls around, at which point everyone will go back to the rancorous poohing-poohing that unfailingly accompanies the event.

This Exhibition Is Closed To The Public

On the circulation and consumption of certain goods at a particular moment in time (i.e., ours):

"To brutally summarize a lot of scholarly texts: contemporary art is made possible by neoliberal capital plus the internet, biennials, art fairs, parallel pop-up histories, growing income inequality. Let’s add asymmetric warfare — as one of the reasons for the vast redistribution of wealth — real estate speculation, tax evasion, money laundering, and deregulated financial markets to this list. [...]

"It is defined by a proliferation of locations, and a lack of accountability. It works by way of major real estate operations transforming cities worldwide as they reorganize urban space. It is even a space of civil wars that trigger art market booms a decade or so later through the redistribution of wealth by warfare. It takes place on servers and by means of fiber optic infrastructure, and whenever public debt miraculously transforms into private wealth. ...Or when this or that regime decides it needs the PR equivalent of a nip and tuck procedure. [...]

"Seen like this, duty-free art is essentially what traditional autonomous art might have been, had it not been elitist and oblivious to its own conditions of production. But duty-free art is more than a reissue of the old idea of autonomous art. It also transforms the meaning of the battered term 'artistic autonomy.' Autonomous art under current temporal and spatial circumstances needs to take these very spatial and temporal conditions into consideration. Art’s conditions of possibility are no longer just the elitist 'ivory tower,' but also the dictator’s contemporary art foundation, the oligarch’s or weapons manufacturer’s tax-evasion scheme, the hedge fund’s trophy, the art student’s debt bondage, leaked troves of data, aggregate spam, and the product of huge amounts of unpaid 'voluntary' labor — all of which results in art’s accumulation in freeport storage spaces and its physical destruction in zones of war or accelerated privatization. Autonomous art within this context could try to understand political autonomy as an experiment in building alternatives to a nation-state model that continues to proclaim national culture while simultaneously practicing 'constructive instability' by including gated communities for high-net-worth individuals, much like microversions of failed states."

The latest edition of the e-flux journal is largely devoted to the topic of the Anthropocene. Of the few exemptions to this them is the essay "Duty-Free Art" by artist Hito Steyerl, adapted from a lecture/presentation she gave last year, devoted to — among other things — the recent boom in "secret museums" in the form of squirreled-away freeport art troves around the globe.

Exit Through the Gift Shop, Pt. 38

So, this past Tuesday eve, MoMA opened its doors to offer the art press an advance preview of its new exhibition devoted to the career of Björk. And in the days since, negative reviews have been piling up. Far from being a backlash against the subject of the show, all disapproval and animus has been leveled at at the Museum and -- more specifically -- at curator Klaus Biesenbach.

Ben Davis at ArtNet News declares it a "fiasco" and causticly likens it to “a fashion show and a theme-park ride,” “a forced march through a props closet,” resulting in “[a] special purgatory between for half-baked celeb worship and muddled exhibition design.” This he attribtes to the notion that:

“...The regnant post-studio, post-pop, performance-obsessed sensibility has created an art climate where it is not only acceptable but inevitable to honor celebrity itself as a kind of talent.”

At ARTnews, contributor Michael H. Miller likewise deems it a curatorial fail, feels embarrassed on Björk’s behalf. Miller can forgive much about the show (even the Volkswagen product-placement tech tie-in), but ultimately condemns the exhibition as a case of misguided institutional “starfucking.”

But the most withering assessment so far comes from Roberta Smith at the NY Times. A few highights from the opening paragraphs:

“Given the number of Björk fans it will probably attract, the show’s future as a logistical nightmare seems clear. ...But the show reeks of ambivalence, as if MoMA, despite its frantic drive to cover the entire waterfront of cutting-edge art and visual culture, couldn’t quite commit. The museum has certainly given more space to less. Marina Abramovic, whose cheesy retrospective, ‘The Artist Is Present,’ took over half of the Modern’s sixth-floor galleries in 2010 (another Biesenbach project), is not as genuine, innovative or visually inclined an artist as Björk.

“... [The] exhibition stands as a glaring symbol of the museum’s urge to be all things to all people, its disdain for its core audience, its frequent curatorial slackness and its indifference to the handling of crowds and the needs of its visitors. To force this show, even in its current underdone state, into the atrium’s juggernaut of art, people and poor design is little short of hostile.”

Of which one takeaway might be that Smith holds Björk in higher regard than Marina Abramovic. Another being what serves as a unifying complaint about the exhibition: That it's a poorly-executed result of a museum trend of the past two decades -- one in which turnstile-conscious panderings to pop-culture appeal degenerate into a cynically complacent, slipshod production.*  Whlie several critics have compared the thing to an evening at the Hard Rock Cafe, a trio of staffers at Hyperallergic conclude:

"Maybe, to play devil’s advocate for a moment, that’s why we were all so intensely disappointed by the exhibition: we were expecting an exhibition. Had we shown up to preview 'The Tunnel of Björk' — and had said tunnel flowed a little more smoothly — we would have liked it?"

"But if we wanted 'The Tunnel of Björk,' wouldn’t we have gone to alterna–Walt Disney World?"

"That’s exactly where we went."

As far as how all this might wash at “street level,” perhaps the best feedback comes from the comments section of a post at Stereogum:

“Is there any reason for a bunch of Bjork’s photos, songs, and videos to be shown in an art museum? Similarly, was there any reason for Jay-Z and Marina Abramovic to participate in the Dance That Caused 1000 Cringes? Is there any reason why we need to listen to Kanye West ramble on about his nonexistent fashion career?

I’m not saying musicians can’t do other stuff, but nowadays it seems like everyone in the public sphere needs to diversify their portfolio even if they have nothing of value to contribute outside their primary discipline.”

Relatedly, Spencer Kornhaber at The Atlantic writes about how Kanye has at least some idea about how the differences of how mass-produced culture and high-art culture works; whereas RZA and some of his Wu colleagues (in reference to this recent possible “conceptual” non-enterprise) don’t.


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* Or, as Jerry Saltz wrote: "I greeted its June announcement with dismay, writing,...'MoMA [is] destroying its credibility ... in its self-suicidal slide into a box-office-driven carnival ... Tilda Swinton sleeping in a glass vitrine, Queen Marina staring at smitten viewers in the atrium, the trashy Tim Burton show, last season's gee-whiz Rain Room, and of course the wrecking ball Diller Scofidio + Renfro is about to swing.' What made me know back then that the Björk show would likely be another embarrassing pop-programming nadir in a string of embarrassing pop-programming nadirs was the way MoMA — more than any major museum in the world — has gravitated to spectacle almost for its own sake." Mind you, this was penned the critic who fawned over being invited take part in that Jay-Z video; but he Saltz returns to scold modus in towards the end of the piece as he veers into a museum/cultural politics screed.

The Imaginary Museum

This article could've been a submission to the next edition of The Journal of 'Ugh', but instead it arrives by way of The Atlantic:

"But for art to have as much of an impact upon mass culture—and appeal to consumers—as those luxury brands have achieved, it will have to break out of its crystal bubble. It will have to follow the path that the food industry has for the last two decades or more, which has been the path of taking once abstruse and artisanal products and making them common fare. [...]

"'Anyone who is a serious member of the creative class,' Art Basel director Marc Spiegler told Reuters last week,' is going to come into our fair. We’re getting a lot of requests from CEOs and CMOs who’ve never come to the fair.' In other words, there is a legitimate turn taking place as the idea of an immensely lucrative contemporary art market ceases to seem like a sign some market bubble is about to pop. With each passing year, contemporary art becomes a more plausible tentpole for the global creative economy."

Of course, the whole piece serves as yet another megaphone of the marketplace triumphalism, a 'rah-rah' celebrating the wind down of this year's installment of Art Basel Miami.

There are so many problems with the thread of the author's argument that I almost get a headache trying to think of where to begin. But ultimately, the argument hinges on a number of socio-economic hypotheticals that fly in the face of the current state of things. For instance: As if an art fair is an ideal or even conducive setting for viewing art. As if every art fair is an equivalent to a Documenta, Venice Biennale, or a visit to the Gugg. And as if lots of collectors are like Charles Saatchi who -- be it for the sake of raising one’s profile or out of a genuine sense of cultural largesse -- share their collections with the public.

About that last item: Nevermind that the elevated prices brought about by the high-rolling market of recent years has priced out most museum and cultural institutions, the price of the average desirable acquisition far exceeding whatever funds they might have at their disposal. Instead much of the work ends up in private collections, often bought as a speculative investment, then shunted away into safekeeping and well out of public circulation then maybe sometime later put back on the auction block. (Unless, of course, they decide to donate -- once again, whether for the sake of public prestige, a sense of civic generosity, or as a tax write-off -- parts of their collection to art museums. If there’s been a surge in these donations in recent years, one which parallels the frenzy of the market, nobody’s mentioned it. Maybe the Pew Foundation’s already chasing those numbers.)*

In a way, one could argue that the article’s thesis tracks like a misunderstanding or distortion of the Beuysian equation of “Kunst Gleich Kapital,” extended to “Art + Money = Democratization.” Except, judging from the context, that the author’s idea of what constitutes “democratic” rests on the assumption that there’s a sort of trickle-down economics will come into play as a result of the perpetually-booming art market. Which I guess makes it the Chicago School of Economics version of Andre Malraux's "“Le Musée imaginaire." Praises be, edification from on high!

Say it with me: Ughh.

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BTW: The image a the top is tom Eric Fischl's recent series of painting derived from photo studies taken at various art fairs. About which, note this article posted at -- oh, irony! -- the site for Christie's auction house. Final paragraph:

"Fischl does not paint the generous, open, multi-cultural city of Miami, infused with energy and Art Deco beauty, and lit by neon. This series is about the art world which, in his opinion, represents another country altogether."

Meaning that, in a way, it's a revisitation of his "Cargo Cults" series of beach paintings from mid-late 1980s.

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* This scenario is, of course, peculiar to the U.S.: where -- unlike other places -- cultural institutions and museums received little or nothing in the way of government subsidies, and therefore have to depend heavily on donations.

Whose Boots Are These, I Think I Know

Y'know, there’s nothing more I’d like to see than a final takedown of Michael Fried’s “Art and Objecthood,” if only for the sake of sparing future art and art history students from ever having that tiresome, long-winded, and utterly pointless text foisted on them by their professors. A dismantling that'd put the thing out to pasture once and for all. Whatever the case, this definitely isn't it.

Re, Heidegger’s musing on Van Gogh's "A Pair of Shoes," see the ripostes by Meyer Schapiro and Jacques Derrida. As far as the bit about “Guernica” and the problems with political art goes, see Ad Reinhardt taking the piss out of Leon Golub in a discussion on the agency of protest art reprinted in Artwords: Discources of the 60s and 70s.