On the Exhaustion of Something of Other

Christian Viveros-Fauné, writing at artnet News, on "Containers and Their Drivers," the Mark Leckey mid-career retrospective presently on view at MoMA PS1:

"Fiorucci [Made Me Hardcore] achieved cult status at almost viral speed, thanks in large part to its timely anticipation of the YouTube generation’s breezy manipulations of digital sources. This accident of history lent the North England-born artist the veneer of being the Cezanne of the interwebs—in today’s artspeak, post-internet art’s analog pioneer. A gifted but ultimately trivial sculptor, filmmaker, poster-maker, installation-designer, lecturer, musician and general jack-of-all-0-and-1-art-trades, Leckey seems to have never recovered from the pigeonholing. [...]

"Traipsing through Leckey’s multiple rooms at MoMA PS1, consequently, comes across as a spiritually exhausting, Reagan-era throwback experience. As captured in his first US survey...Lecky’s life’s work takes physical shape as a concatenated set of new media reworkings of Jean Baudrillard’s 1980s-style vaporings. The majority of Leckey’s current installations, in fact, deal with some unacknowledged version of hyper-reality. Were Leckey American, no doubt this exhibition would have featured the DeLorean from Back to the Future. [...]

"'I see myself in a tradition of Pop culture,' Leckey told artnet News contributor J.J. Charlesworth in 2014. 'I'm a Pop artist – I believe in the idea that you’re essentially a receiver, that you open yourself up to, and you allow whatever is current to come through you and absorb it into your body and somehow process that, and that’s how the work gets made.'

"The work's chief revelation is as simple as it is uncritical: in our era of data glut, everything is everything is everything. Leckey’s replicas (or are they simulacra?) accrue on repeating shelves and pedestals, one after the other, in ongoing, insistent, recurrent, nearly endless succession."

The gist of Viveros-Fauné's critique is hardly a new one. If anything, it very much echoes that of Julian Stallabrass's YBA bollocking of some years hence, High Art Lite. That being, that "pop conceptualism" rapidly degenerated into a a default modus in which postmod irony, long having lapsed into a state of rhetorical depletion, becomes a form of passively (if not somewhat masochistically celebratory) fatalism. We are all merely receptors, culture is effectively like a pinterest page,  and "thinking isn't cool -- shit and stuff is cool."

The prevalence of 1980s tropes, themes and cultural references in Leckey's work is apropos in a way. For those old enough to remember the art of the '80s, this sort of installation art bound to seem so tiresomely familiar, because it's little more that the eternal return of Haim Steinbach -- endlessly reused and recycled and diluted into a thinner gruel with each iteration, a cultural product that exceeded its shelf life with the close of the prior century, a salon art that now signals aesthetic inertia and little else. Except, I suppose, some would argue that in his day there was something about Steinbach's work that seemed simultaneously both humorous and ever-so-slightly horrific. Whereas much of the stuff of this latest generation too often comes across as thoroughly anesthetized.

Not Great Men (Modern Primitives vs. Killer Clowns Edition)

No sooner do I mention Thomas Houseago than NYT artcritic Ken Johnson publishes a review on an exhibition by/of same. The result is an all-too-common sight of watching American art-crit collapsing under the weight of all the extraneous baggage it’s saddled itself with these past 3 decades. Johnson’s "masculinity" framing narrative falling flat on its face, mainly because it comes across as a sneeringly disingenuous evocation of a '90s-style identity politics angle; which seems sneakily (and sarcastically) self-serving in this instance, what, given the public flogging that same critic recently received over some remarks he made about some other recent exhibitions. About the only thing he raises that might have much to do with anything significant is when he bemoans the retromantic nature of Houseago’s work and methods. But even that runs into trouble:

"Mr. Houseago’s eccentric enthusiasms are muffled by his reverence for traditions old and Modernist and by his Postmodernist play with generic formal and stylistic conventions. His art is too much about art and not enough about his inner life. It’s too impersonal."

But in a way, it’s kind of interesting to read, if only to watch the forces at play. A lot of points made, some of them arbitrary or poorly qualified, others contradictory, so in the end everything just sort of cancels each other out, leaving the reader with almost nothing to take away from having read it.

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Was curious to read the article in the latest New Yorker about the relationship between Alabama “outsider” artist Thornton Dial and his collector, patron and advocate Bill Arnett. Found it disappointing, can’t recommend it. Bears the common hallmarks of a lot of recent journalism (the type that’s become increasingly common in the NYer itself the past few years): Lopsided in its focus, raising questions that go insufficiently answered, with the writer (or editor) unable to figure out which story they’d like to tell, and in the end hedging it bets by defaulting to a baseline cynicism. The thing's also in need of some decent photos of Dial's work.

If there’s a story or central theme here, its about the disconnect between criterial narratives. Arnett’s passion and advocacy for “folk” art (particularly Dial’s), and the ceaseless frustrations he’s run into trying to get institutions take what he considers due attention. Of course, most of the institutions in question subscribe to a different, competing account of historical evolution – a telos in which artists like Dial don’t figure. (After all, why are they labeled “outsider” artists in the first place?)

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None Dare Call It Boho

I suppose there's a lot one could say about this by way of addressing its errors and inaccuracies and the cards it stacks for the sake of making what amounts to a dubious argument. Little need, though; because one commenter (Christine) has already done a lot of the heavy lifting. Noted that the screed comes via a publication whose subscription rate priced me out of its neighborhood nearly a full decade ago.

That's No Moon...

Fortunately, Owen Hatherley's a prolific blogger and writes for numerous online publications. I've long been curious about his two books on architecture, but they're not the sort of thing that circulates very widely here, on account of the fact that they're very British/Euro in focus -- be it his revisionist take on Brutalism, or his attack on generic contemporary urban architecture. The latter being his book A Guide to the New Ruins of Great Britain. Thing is, the critical thrust of the latter isn't an exclusively U.K. phenom, since the sort of architecture he critiques has (it seems) become something of a new International Style. The glimmering yet soullessly homogenized buildings that seem to be going up in (if not glutting) every middling/large city -- not just here in the U.S. or in Britain, but many other places as well.

I gathered this scenario was much more common that I reckoned a while back when I was checking the traffic to a particular recent post of mine. The post had generated an unusual (for this humble blog) amount of hits and linkage. One link went to a blog written by someone hailing from a town in Portugal, where the author could relate to the very thing I was talking about.

I lived in Chicago for the better part of 16 years. In that span of time, I watched the city "turn around" in some respects; with certain parts of the city being developed to the point of being unrecognizable from how I'd know them during the 1990s. This became especially true as the housing bubble began to emerge back around the beginning on the Noughties. River North, Printers Row, Fulton Market, Greektown, and many other neighborhoods sweeping with generic boutique-y rows of shops, filling up with blocks and high-rises of bland and blocky "luxury" condominiums. In some cases, I suddenly found it difficult to navigate or orient myself in places I'd previously known quite well, because all the landmarks had been erased or were obscured by high rises.

In some instances, these new (over)built environs felt downright oppressive. A not-uncommon plan for some blocks of condos -- wedged into this or that span of street -- was to a multi-level parking deck for the residents, with the Lego luxury abodes stacked atop. Thing is, city ordinances reputedlym dictated that these parking levels had to be walled in, could not be open. So as you walked along a row of one of these things, you'd face a solid concrete wall extending up about 2-3 stories running down the length of the street. A dingy chasm, effectively -- dwarfing, alienating, drab. (I believe once upon a time, the popular word for this sort of effect was "dehumanizing.")

Which brings us to the song above, up there in the Youtube clip. Wifey and I caught the Country Teasers back in 2006 when they hit the U.S for their The Empire Strikes Back tour. They trotted out this tune ("Mos E17ley"), and it immediately became something of a recurring trope in our lives. Inevitably we'd find ourselves driving or walking through a neighborhood like those described above, and one of us would mutter, "This place...is like the fuckin' Death Star."

You Can't Blame This on 'Formalism'

"As bad as art can get"? Dunno, I can always think of worse things. At the very least, it's a reminder of some of the reason I was recently ready to bid farewell to Chicago.

"Public art is all about creating a dialogue. When you can get people talking, in particular if they're not saying the same thing to one another and they have differing views, that's an exciting thing. That's something that people who are interested in placing public art are happy to see happen."

But really, the sculpture above isn't that different from a number of works by Jeff Koons, is it? The difference having to do with a post-modern irony and self-awareness in relation to the matter of "kitsch" and its place in the broader culture.

About 15 years ago I had a class under the critic Jerry Saltz. At one point, in a group discussion we briefly kicked around the topic of why does so much public art suck? We couldn't reach any sort of solid consensus on the matter. But by Jerry's estimation, about 90% of public art was guilty of sucking. Personally, I felt that that was too generous a number, and that the ratio falls more in the area of 95 or so. And so long as cities and organizations continue to shell out funds for projects like this, the remaining bracket incrementally shrinks with each passing year.

And it's all a little too common -- bad decisions, errors in judgement, etc. Take, for instance, Chicago's public sculpture commemorating the Haymarket Affair. After decades of protests from the law enforcement community, the city finally commissioned and installed one roughly a decade ago. And this is what they got for their money:

This Moment in Labor History has been brought to you by Playmobil®!

...Versus Getting Away from It (Some Afterthoughts on the Prior Post)

And there are a lot reasons why cinematic treatments of art are often so terrible. One is that seems that the people who write these films don't understand their subject matter, or grossly misjudge how to get it across on film. Usually you get some naively starry-eyed romanticization of it all, or some pathetically misfired attempt at satirizing the artworld and how it supposedly operates. (Or in some instances, a deeply confused combination of the two.) The video above somewhat follows in this latter mould, but unlike most art-related films I can think of, it's actually somewhat enjoyable to watch.


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The parodic gist of the Modeselektor video brings to mind the recent craze for art fairs, since that's obviously what helped inspire the thing. I went to a few art fairs back in the mid-to-late 1990s, and soon decided that I'd be better off avoiding them as much as possible in the future. Little did I know at the time that they were about to become the "wave of the future." And in recent years, a lot of critics and artists and various artworld people have decried the rise of the art fair. Reputedly a lot of gallerists hate them too, but feel that they're a "necessary evil" in keeping their businesses operating and economically afloat.