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.

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.

The 'Eighties Revival, Pt. 56

Owen Hatherley, screeding about postmodern architecture (and its supposed "revival") at Dezeen:

"Defenders of Pomo who combine their liking for it with left-of-centre politics can point to the way that early Pomo was linked to local campaigns and ideas of "community architecture", against the collusion of big business and the state in places like Greenwich Village and Covent Garden. The architectural results of those events are pretty minor, but in the West Berlin IBA of 1987, Postmodernist ideas about streets, complexity, juxtaposition, decoration and context did result in some of the most interesting social housing schemes in a city already full of them. 

"But there is a reason why Postmodernism and the Thatcher-Reagan revolution became so closely linked. Charles Jencks's inaugural manifesto-compendium on Postmodernism included within it a staged knife attack in Robin Hood Gardens, one of the social housing schemes written off therein as a social failure largely because of its design. A great way of intensifying the rationale behind a design choice was the old Ruskinian appeal to morality. Modernism meant bad concrete estates full of bad walkways and bad open spaces and a bad lack of ornament and tradition, which produced bad people committing bad crimes. If you think that's a reductio ad absurdum, read practically any book on architecture and planning published between 1975 and 1995. The results, for those in those apparently "bad" buildings, would be drastic. The new "common sense" was that their housing was so awful that it probably needed to be demolished – eventually, as you can see in, say, London's Cressingham Gardens, no matter how much residents insisted they liked their Modernist houses. 

"It's not Postmodernist architects' fault that in most of the west, social housing stopped getting built at around the time their ideas came into fashion. However, the fate of Modernist social housing is partly their fault, in that they willingly gave the aesthetic alibi for a political campaign."

Two East German Defectors Walk Into an Art Gallery...

* * * *

Interview between John Anthony Thwaites and Gerhard Richter, written by Sigmar Polke, October 1964

JAT:  Mr. Richter, you are the most talented of the German Pop painters; you went through all the hardships and the hostility that the movement encountered in its early days; and you now occupy a leading position in the movement. Perhaps you can tell us something about your work and your artistic development.

GR:  I have a lot of work, and I am well developed artistically, and also mentally and physically. I pull the expander front and back. And if you saw my new pictures, Mr. Thwaites, you would collapse!

JAT:  Why?

GR:  Because they’re so good! You’ve never seen such good pictures in your life. No one has ever seen such good pictures, and I can’t show them to anyone, because everyone would collapse. So in the first place I hung cloths over all the pictures, and then in due course I overpainted them all white.

JAT:  And now?

GR:  Now I don’t paint at all any more, because I don’t want to have the whole human race on my conscience.

JAT:  How many victims have your works accounted for?

GR:  I don’t know, exactly. The exact statistics do exist, of course – they run into the tens of thousands – but I can’t concern myself with trivia. It was more interesting earlier on, when the big death camps in Eastern Europe were using my pictures. The inmates used to drop dead at first sight. Those were still the simple pictures, too. Anyone who survived the first show was killed off by a slightly better picture.

JAT:  And your drawings?

GR:  I haven’t done a lot. Buchenwald and Dachau had two each, and Bergen-Belsen had one. Those were mostly used for torture purposes.

JAT:  The Russians are said to have five of your paintings and drawings. Is that so?

GR:  I don’t know how many.

JAT:  Stalin mounted his reign of terror with two pictures. After killing millions of Russians, it’s said that he caught an accidental glimpse of one of your pictures, just for a fraction of a second, and immediately dropped down dead. Is that so?

GR:  I don’t know. One of my best paintings is in the Soviet Union.

JAT:  So what happens next?

GR:  I don’t paint any more. I can’t, because I don’t want to spread terror, alarm and anxiety everywhere, and depopulate the earth. But now it’s come to the point where I only have to think my paintings out and tell someone about them, and the person rushes off in a state of panic, has a nervous breakdown, and becomes infertile. That is the worst effect. Though I can’t say so for sure, as yet, because – depending on who tells the story – I have already caused dumbness, hair loss (mainly in women) and paralysis of limbs.

JAT:  Is it true that you supply paintings to the U.S. Army?

GR:  I can’t tell you anything about that.

JAT:  Have you no scruples, or anything?

GR:  I am an artist.

JAT:  Do you believe in God?

GR:  Yes, I believe in myself. I am the greatest, I am the greatest of all!

JAT:  Thank you, Mr. Richter.

GR:  Not at all, Mr. Thwaites.

* * * *
Now being reminded (via stumbling-upon) of the bit above, which I'd completely forgotten about, having first encountered it in a book I owned some years ago.

I know that the concept of the “fatal/killing joke” (as in, “die laughing”) had been around long before the Monty Python skit based on the same premise, had been around for a long time – but deadly paintings? Gallows humor in a Cold War context of postwar Germany, as well as a cynical dismissal of the heroic notion of “art as a weapon.” Also, it hints at the pair’s own anxieties about pursuing the quaint and retrograde practice of making paintings at the dawn of the consumer age – the suspected pointlessness of creating singular, hand-crafted images amidst the deluge of mass-circulated imagery pouring forth by way of magazines, advertisements, movies and TV, etc.. “Cynical” in that one, perhaps, could only continue to paint or make art by shrugging off the suspicion that doing so meant pursuing an increasingly marginalized, devalued, insignificant endeavor.*

The cynicism and dark humor of the “interview” are most likely attributable to Polke. Jokes about the feebleness of art in the postmodern age were a constant trope in his work throughout the years. For instance, a painting produced by Polke some five years after the text above, in which the artists has a laugh at the “transcendental” conceits of the pure-abstraction school of painting...

...In which the purity of the composition is sullied (if not nullified) by the intrusion of text, text which roughly translates as, “Higher powers command: paint the upper right corner black!” (And in that font, no less.) And then there's this one from 1976, with its obvious reference to the Nazi-via-malappropraited-Nietzschean übermenschen theme, transplanted into a postwar setting...

...About which I always wondered if Polke didn't derive the idea from the title of Norman Mailer's famous essay about JFK's nomination at the 1960 Democratic National Convention.

Such was the character of Sigmar Polke’s anti-mannerisms – corrosive irony combined with a pomo pastiche sensibility that appeared to disregard all notions of “high” and “low,” thus allowing a maximal accommodation for the most garish of decorative kitsch. Add to this his seemingly arbitrary or slipshod methods in the craftsmanship department, his incessant flirtation with visual murkiness, if not outright “ugliness.” Problematic and abrasive enough for some audiences, one supposes, were it not all capped off with – of course – the artist’s recurrent visual allusions to the repressed demons of Germany’s recent past. “For him,” critic Peter Schjeldahl once wrote of Polke, “Aesthetic decorum appears to be roughly as important in the present state of civilization as table manners during an air raid.” Unsurprisingly, hazy accusations of borderline “nihilism” have occasionally been made by some critics.**

At any rate, Sigmar Polke will most likely be the subject of some long-overdue inkage on these shores on account of the MoMA retrospective that's presently kicking off. High time, too. Polke received only a bit of letting attention in the U.S. previously – mostly back in the days of so-called “German Invasion” early phase of the 1980s NYC art boom. I believe at the time his work was touted as an acknowledged precursor to that of art-boom passing fancy David Salle. But ultimately Polke’s work proved a little “too German” – that is, too esoteric and impenetrable – for American eyes; because the attention fell away, soon enough. The spotlight would mostly go to Anselm Kiefer for the remainder of the decade, before critical consensus began to finally settle on Richter as the most important European artist of his generation.***

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*  Wasn’t there something along these lines serving as a theme in Wim Wenders’s 1991 film Until the End of the World – a character at some pointing morosely muttering about contemporary life being overrun by a “disease of images”? Difficult for me to recall the context, as it’s been about two decades since I saw the film.

**  In this respect, it could be argued that between Richter and Polke, the latter proved to be far more of an influence on younger artists in West Germany – particularly the “bad boy” Cologne coterie of Kippenberger, Oehlen, Büttner, etc.

***  In retrospect, it would seem that the American artworld craze for postwar German art mostly served to buttress the legitimacy of emerging NYC art trends. By which I mean: Polke as an establishing precedent for Salle; Georg Baselitz and A. R. Penck cast in the supporting roles for the neo-expressionism of Schnabel, Rothenberg, et al., and so on. Like some stealthily-chauvinistic booster campaign that whispers, "We've got credit in the Old World!."

When We Were Real

Eh. Maybe I was wrong. Or only slightly off. Perhaps it is a subtrend, after all -- the matter of curatorial re-enactment. I say this after reading about an exhibition which recently wound down at the Kunsthalle Düsseldorf, a 50-year anniversary commemorative "Reproduction" of the 1963 art event Leben mit Pop – eine Demonstration für den kapitalistischen Realismus, as originally organized and staged by four young and as-yet-known artists: Sigmar Polke, Gerhard Richter, Konrad Lueg, and Manfred Kuttner.

But in some respects, the Kunsthalle affair wasn’t a literalist attempt at restaging the original event. For one, the reproduction was hosted by an actual museum, whereas the original was staged in a department store. Also, it doesn't strictly focus on the original event so much, but rather on those first few years that Polke, Richter & co. were associated with each other as they developed – each in his own way – the "Capitalist Realism" aesthetic that they'd chosen as their shared artistic banner. And while the artists themselves took active part in the staging of the 1963 event (a la a Fluxus-style “Happening”), I doubt anyone approached the surviving instigators about "getting the band back together," so the Kunsthalle instead mounted a number of large photographs from the occasion that graced the walls throughout. In fact, as a review in the art publication Spike has it, the curators decided to go all-in with the "reproduction" thematic trope:

"Most significantly, the works by Richter, Polke and Lueg – Polke’s Socks (1963), Richter’s Neuschwanstein Castle (1963), for example – were presented only as full-scale, photographic reproductions, mounted unassumingly on corrugated cardboard. This decision to include only reproduced works (excepting the real letters and photographs that were presented in the archival vitrines) somewhat collapsed the formal divisions between work and reception, and more significantly, demonstrated an attempt to strip these canonical paintings of aura."

As far as contemporary art is concerned, we’re still very much living under the influence of Pop; in much the same way that we’re still awash in the thrall of the material culture that inspired the movement’s first generation of artists. So much so, that Pop holds an almost monolithic presence in the cultural imagination. But between the Kunsthalle’s revisitation of Leben mit Pop and the Tate’s tribute to the 1958 This Is Tomorrow exhibition a few years ago, we’re presented with a somewhat ironic conundrum – as each of the original versions of these two exhibitions embodied two different, international responses to postwar material culture. The Independent Group’s This is Tomorrow exhibition was largely celebratory in tone. The Group’s engagement with the emergent culture of the day, via their activities at the London ICA and the resulting exhibition, were a largely noncritical – and at times enthusiastic – exploration of the transformative dynamics of “mass culture” (as well as a generational rebuke against the parochialisms of Herbert Read and his fellow directors at the Institute).*

But the four artists responsible for Leben mit Pop had a different relationship with postwar American popular culture; one which was much more ambivalent. Each wveas young enough to ha come of age in the years following World War II, in a mainland Europe shaped by the Marshall Plan – the U.S. recovery project that aimed to rebuild war-torn Europe and counter Soviet ideological influence by way of promoting its own model of postwar prosperity and democracy abroad. As Europe struggled to extract itself from the rubble and get their own industrial economies in full operation, these years saw a deluge of American products and media, all of it modeled after a middle-class lifestyle as broadcast and imported wholesale from another shore. A love/hate relationship ensued among some Europeans, one characterized by a circumspect regard toward a blinkered culture of consumerism that sometimes rubbed against the grain of traditional native values. Some would eventually begin to refer it as the “coca-colonization” of Europe.

Add to all this that Polke and Richter had both been defectors from regions of East Germany. Having been exposed to postwar European life on both sides of the Wall, the recognized that the true marketplace wasn’t so much about objects and mod cons, but ultimately one of ideas. With the shape of contemporary culture coalescing around the channels through which these ideas were communicated – through the airwaves, films, magazines, showrooms and Expo halls of late Modern society.


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*   Or, as IG co-founder Reyner Banham called it, "the marble shadow of Sir Herbert Read’s Abstract-Left-Freudian aesthetics." It might also be noted that the Group’s focus wasn’t limited to pop culture in the common sense, but extended to science and technology, as well. For this reason, the sometimes utopian optimism that characterized the IG’s discussions and activities have provoked occasional comparisons with the aesthetics of Italian Futurism earlier in the 20th century.

Whenever I hear the word 'Culture,' I first check the Terms of Service agreement...

Despite the fact that the topic of Disney is in no way part of any recent research I'm doing, it seems to keep turning up randomly without my looking for it. So, one last item in this thematic thread, one that I came across the other day...

That being the recent UK premier of Philip Glass's latest opera, The Perfect American, which takes the legacy of Walt Disney as its subject matter. Glass composed the music and helped develop the premise. The libretto was supplied by Rudy Wurlitzer, based on the 2001 novel of the same name by Peter Stephan Jungk.

Reviews of the opera have been mixed, Citizen Kane comparisons have been a staple throughout, and there's been no shortage of discussion about the production's unflattering portrayal of the figure of Walt Disney. Glass himself has admitted that it was a project born of deep ambivalence, the decision to do it originating when he was given a copy of Jungk's book some 5 years ago by then-director of the New York City Opera Gerard Mortier, who requested that the composer develop it into a stage production. "Of course it's not a hatchet job," he recently stated by way of anticipating criticism, "Why would I spend so much time making fun of someone I don't like?...Disney was a man of his time, both in his shortcomings and what was powerful about him."

By the varying descriptions, the show sports a couple of intriguing scenes. One involving a crew of technicians wrangling to properly wire the animatronic Abraham Lincloln for the Disneyland park, with the robot coming to life to draw Disney into a debate about race relations and social equality in America. Another involves Andy Warhol appearing as Disney lay in his deathbed, the former paying tribute by telling Disney that he’d been a role model for the pop artist, proclaiming that he was "born the same year as Mickey Mouse” and that he also “has a huge army of helpers."

This last bit naturally has me thinking back to the remarks of Pierre Huyghe, which I cited in my prior post on this topic; Huyghe’s observation that “ [Warhol’s] Factory was a place where Warhol could embody the capitalist system,” in relation to how artists like Huyghe and Mathias Poledna have adopted the medium of film production in recent years. Film being a collaborative art form, and its methods – of course – mirror those of industrialized manufacturing; with its departmentalized, assembly-line systems of production. And it’s a model that’s lingered on well after the decline of the manufacturing sector and its diminuation by an emergent post-Fordist economy. In the context of The Perfect American, Glass chalks the Disney-Warhol analogy up to the persistence of the Atelier System in the artworld, the hierarchical system by which an established artist pursuing large or ambitious projects does so by overseeing a crew of assistants and apprentices in a workshop setting. Warhol probably had other sources of inspiration than Disney when setting up his Factory, but it could be argued that Koons adopted it from Warhol, with Hirst taking it from Koons. Historically, it’s not that uncommon of a practice, and it’s been around for centuries.

But enough about Disney, already. My interest in all of this has to do with broader issues concerning art's engagement with pop culture, and the critical strategies it devises or employs in doing so. Older, supposedly critically interventionist tactics look toothless and inadequate in hindsight. Say, for example, postmodernism's prior 1980s fixation for appropriation from the pop-culture (and art historical) canons. All those supposed deconstructive siphonings from the domains of advertising and entertainment amounting to little more than shadowing the visual rhetoric of the dominant culture, while at the same time perhaps capitulating to the the alleged "end of art" verdict (i.e., art's previous societal role having been subsumed by the hegemony of "mass culture" throughout the course of the 20th century). Likewise with other varied strains of "neo-pop" or "pop conceptualist" practices that soon followed in the 1990s, where all pretenses at semiotic inversion were jettisoned for a type of jaded resignation (if not outright Baudrillardian "nihilism," by some critics' reckoning).

Quoting or borrowing from the public domain purported to serve some subversive critical purpose at the time, but in the end -- no matter how playfully done -- it seems a bit feeble in many respects. As dead-end tactics go, one might be tempted to recall the words of Martin Heidegger, who, in Being and Time (and admittedly speaking of something else entirely) wrote: "Appropriation [merely] appropriates. Saying this, we say the Same in terms of the Same about the Same. To all appearances, all this says nothing."

Plus, it was so much an easier thing to do once-upon-a, back when it was less difficult to pinch and abscond with and détourn without having to lawyer-up first. Y'know, before that the borders of that "common culture" were so thoroughly and rigidly policed. Before the corporate entities that distributed and administered such stuff began claiming ever-increasing restrictive rights to exclusive ownership, rendering all free and "creative" engagement therewith likely to a cease-and-desist notice, liability to prosecution, and the threat of litigation.

* * * *

In some areas, however, pop culture isn't what it used to be; at least not in terms of it having any claim to be a "common culture" that serves as a mutually, broadly shared cache of reference points. It often seems like a quaintly anachronistic idea in the era of media atomization -- of profilerating channels, echo-chambers, sub-niches and sub-subgenres, and increasing degree of nanocasting that break down to the point of individually-tailored/-filtered content.

Film (in the form of mega-budget blockbusters, anyway) might be the only remaining form of media that still -- as Huyghe described it -- provides any remaining remnant of providing a "public space; any social or civic or communal grounds for discussion. The same can't be said of any form of pop music anymore, certainly. And if you read the recent interview with filmmaker Adam Curtis in FACT mag, you run smack into a "twas it ever thus" assessment along those same lines. In speaking of his recent live-event collab with Massive Attack, Everything is Going According to Plan, recently staged at the Manchester International Festival. In the interview, Curtis raises the topic of regurgitative retrophilic tendencies in recent music; of pop music's incessant mining of the styles and gestures -- so radical, allegedly, in their original in situ context -- of prior zeitgeists:

"Pop music might not be the radical thing we think it is. It might be very good and very exciting and I can dance to it and mope to it, but actually it just keeps on reworking the past. ...If you continually go back into the past then by definition you can never ever imagine a world that has not existed before. I think true radicalism...comes from the idea of saying this is a world that has never existed before, come with me to it.

...[But] music may actually be dying at the very moment it is everywhere. There comes a moment in any culture where something becomes so ubiquitous and part of everything that it loses its identity. It will remain here to be useful but it won’t take us anywhere or tell us any stories. It won’t die in the sense of not being here but in the sense of not having a meaning beyond itself. It will just be entertainment. What will happen is that something else we haven’t imagined yet will come in from the margins that tell us a story that unites us."

If that weren't bleak and dystopic enough, Curtis sets it up by flatly stating earlier in the interview:

"My argument is that we live in a non-progressive world where increasingly we have a culture of management, not just in politics, but everywhere. Modern culture is very much part of this progress. What it’s saying is: 'stay in the past and listen to the music of the past'."

Or as Simon recently put it, was the idea of pop music ever being anything akin to a socially transformative phenomenon little more than a myth rooted in Boomer "generational over-estimation"?

Full interview with Adam Curtis here.

Vexing Symmetries, Part One

I: The Artist in Her Studio

This first photo of the artist in her studio is the most widely known and circulated. That, mostly owing to the fact that it was used as the cover image on an album by a notable indie-rock outfit not too many years ago, an album that subsequently wound up on a number of music critics' year-end lists. Perhaps a few people who bought the album already knew the image, knew what – or who – it depicted, were familiar with its original context. That context being that it’s a picture of the American artist Lee Bontecou working in her studio loft in lower Manhattan, as taken by photographer Ugo Mulas in 1963. The artist's back is to the camera, and she stands in almost total silhouette. One can discern the welder’s mask tipped back on her head, and – in the arm that hangs slack by her side – a blowtorch, both of which obviously were instrumental in making the large, strange, surreally totemic constructions we see propped up along the walls of her workspace.

The image has an almost iconic quality about it; which is appropriate, since it captured a leading American artist at the height of her career. Which is also ironic, seeing how – not too many years later – the same artist would slip from the public eye, and eventually, mostly (for a couple of decades, at least) from public memory, as well.



^ ^ ^ ^ ^ ^ ^

II: A Disappearance

What had happened to Lee Bontecou? That was the question for many years (nay, decades) among some of the art-minded folk who knew or remembered anything about her work. If you lived someplace that a museum that housed one of her works, she was never far from memory – mainly because the work, once seen, had a tendency to permanently lodge itself in a person's memory. Occasionally some art magazine or publication might reproduce a photo of one of her pieces, usually giving it and the artist a passing acknowledgement in the course of some broader context. And all the works attributed to Bontecou dated from a specific period – a narrow window that fell in the first half of the 1960s. Beyond that, the trail seemed to go dead. Such remarkably unique and uncanny work, the opinion had it, whatever because of the artist?

The rumor had it that she'd walked away from the art world for some reason or another – had deliberately "dropped out," or merely drifted off. Not much of anyone seemed to know the story as to why. This was the case throughout much of the 1980s and 1990s. This finally changed in the years leading up to the approach of the new millennium, mainly sparked – with a great deal of help from feminist art-history scholars – by a renewed interest in Bontecou's work.

But in that intervening stretch of some two decades or more, Bontecou remained a mystery. For instance: In the mid 1990s, in the course of my graduate studies, I took a course under the art critic Jerry Saltz, one part of which involved a trip to New York and extensive walking tour of the various gallery districts and museums as they were trotting out their wares for the autumn opening season. At one point we wound up at the Leo Castelli gallery. Along one wall of the place, there was a large photomontage of vintage black-and-white images, displaying what was effectively Leo Castelli's "greatest hits" – a panorama of many of the important, zeitgeist-defining artists that Castelli had represented over the years. The thing prompted a quick round of Name That Artist as we surveyed the wall-length spread.

"It's like a Who's Who of all the heavy hitters of an era," Jerry said, pointing at portraits that splayed the length of the wall. "There's Johns. And Rauschenberg. Frank Stella. And there's Warhol, of course. And I'm not sure who this guy is...," pointing toward one figure.
"James Rosenquist," I offered.
Several more names are ticked off the list. "And who's this?" Out of the array of nearly twenty artists, he was pointing to a image that was peripherally tucked in among the lot, showing a sole female member in the display.
"Lee Bontecou," one of the other students answered.
"As in: Whatever happened to?" Jerry said, his eyebrows raising excitedly. "One of the most inexplicable vanishing acts of the modern American art scene."

As it turned out, she wasn’t that far away. Up until five years prior to discussion, she'd been teaching at nearby Brooklyn College; as she had been for the previous two decades.



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III. What Time is Now? (Some Notes on a Particular Context)

At this point, it's probably worth noting the importance of Leo Castelli in this story; if not in the broader story of American art at the time in question. If only because he was the leading art-gallerist of the late 1950s and early 1960s. In those years, the roster of artists he corralled and represented could be described – without fear of hyperbole or contradiction – as an "era-defining" all-star lineup, the extent of which was unparalleled.

Early on, he'd taken in Rauschenberg, Johns, and Cy Twombly. From the array of young artists working in the emergent category of Pop art, he'd landed Lichtenstein, Oldenburg, Rosenquist, and eventually the late-comer Warhol. Into the 1960s, Castelli's cortege would expand to include the pioneering minimalists Frank Stella, Donald Judd, Robert Morris, Dan Flavin and Richard Serra; as well as several prominent "post-minimalist" artists such as Eva Hesse, Keith Sonnier, and Bruce Nauman. Such is the stuff from which museum permanent collections would be made.

It was also the sort of collection that represented a particular moment in art history, especially due to its eclecticism – several developments, all of them more of less concurrent, none of them particularly acquiring (or, at the very least, competing for) aesthetic dominance. Over the preceding decades, painting – particularly that of the abstraction variety, what held some debt to Cubism – had been considered the most important artistic endeavor of the age. But with the "triumph of American art" as epitomized by the efforts of Pollack, DeKooning, and their Abstract Expressionist peers, that sequence had effectively reached the end of its arc – had been taken as far it could go, was increasingly perceived as "exhausted."

Not that painting was abandoned overnight; far from it. The supremacy of painting persisted in a strain of Greenbergian formalism, playing out into the 1960s in the domain "color field" painting and "post-painterly" abstraction. But fewer and fewer artists felt that there was much (if anything) at stake in area of activity – in what was shaping up to be an aesthetic endgame, dwindling under the orthodoxy of endlessly self-refining criteria. And whereas the issue of "what to paint" became something of a conundrum among those artists who chose to stick with the medium, for as many artists of the postwar years it was a matter of whether to bother with the categorical imperatives of painting (or sculpture, or any specific traditional medium for that matter) at all.¹  At which point things scattered off in a number of directions – into a number of mutant, "impure" directions, with no single -ism having the final word (save for a nascent wave of aesthetic pluralism). "Movements no longer work," the minimalist sculptor and arch-theorist Donald Judd wrote in his "Primary Objects" essay of 1965. "Linear history has unraveled somewhat."

Such was the state of things when Leo Castelli opened his New York gallery in 1957. He'd started off collecting and exhibiting the work of Modernist masters and artists of the New York School – Kandinsky, Gorky, Pollock, DeKooning and the like. To a large degree, he still subscribed to the Modernist paradigm, believed in the positivist teleology of artistic evolution à la MOMA director (and Castelli mentor) Alfred H. Barr's famous flow chart (c. 1935) of 20th-century art movements – an intricate diagram of influences and causal linkages. But three decades later, speaking of the post-modern art scene of the late 1980s, he would confess:

"I never thought it would come to this. I've always believed in development, one movement following another, the Cubists on the heels of the Fauves, Minimalism after Pop, and so forth. But everything today is very much in flux. There's so much happening now that it's difficult to sort it all out."

One could argue that this perception of evolutionary succession was never so secure or tidily sequential in the first place; more a product of prioritized perception, categorization, and a willful "aspect blindness."²  More interesting (and ironic) here is Castelli, in looking back what all had transpired in the art world since the advent of his career, wasn’t able to fully comprehend how much he had actively abetted its unraveling and fragmentation.

But part of Leo Castelli's eminent career meant drastically furthering the careers of the artists he exhibited. He assertively and savvily promoted their work, brokered the sale of same to important collectors and institutions, and even paid them a generous stipend. And one of those artists was Lee Bontecou, whom Castelli approached (thanks to the urging of his fellow gallerist Ivan Karp) in 1960, giving her a solo exhibition in November of that same year. It was only her second such show, but it was the one that landed her squarely and prominently in the public spotlight.

^ ^ ^ ^ ^ ^ ^

IV. When was Then? (Some Sidenotes on that Same Context)

An inventory of what all what going on during that brief transitional span of time that happened include the year of 1960 would be too much to catalog here. Some highlights might include: The waning of lyrical abstraction in the U.S. and elsewhere; taschisme and art informel their related and competing postwar European manifestations subsiding with other things shouldering into the breach. A number of artiste provocateurs who had been active in France and thereabouts coming together under the short-lived umbrella of Nouveau réalisme. The first stirrings of Viennese Actionism. The work of Lucio Fontana, Alberto Burri and other emerging out of the rubble of postwar Italy. And the emergence of Neo-Concretism in Brazil. Plus numerous other things, most of which couldn't be attributed (even though manifestos were still quite fashionable) to any -ism or over-arching aesthetic. And then of course there was that quickly coalescing international network of artists operating under the banner of Fluxus; whose chosen moniker and loose, often chaotic operations best epitomized the artistic character of the times.

Someone might have even declared painting "dead" thenabouts, but maybe not. If not, then the verdict would be delivered eventually, and then they'd do so repeatedly in the years that followed. Whatever the case, it may have already been neither here nor there in 1960, something a bit superfluous and not worth worrying about. Not even worth getting all reactively anti- about; since anything can become a point of departure – the bedrock for mutation, syncretic hybridities or whathaveyou. Cultural activity (if not culture in general) sometimes operates that way When certain areas of feverish concentration and activity lapse, possibilities in other areas become fertile ground for exploration. When one of those same demoted zones of activity become a critical "ghetto," then all stakes are off the table; all supposed "rules" and strictures are rendered arbitrary, and everything previously considered a given becomes moot. For some, this can be a distressing situation, at least if an artist is the sort that needs the guidance of signposts for required for "correct" navigation. For others, it presents a liberatory situation. The way forward, as it were, doesn't necessarily mean taking steps down the previously proscribed path.³


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1.  In some instances, this sense of a break (or at least and attitudinal disconnection)had as much to do with an artistic ethos as it did aesthetics. For one, there was the nature of high-Modernist formalism, which had grown increasingly hermetic as the years wore on. But there was also the romantic subjectivism and creative agon that peaked with Abstract Expressionism. The latter in particular failed to appeal to many younger American artists, who in some cases considered such stuff quaintly ill-suited to their own time, if not something of an existential indulgence or luxury.

2.  Case in point: The movements Castelli offhandedly cited in his remark have – in terms of shared practices or theory – have very little in common (if not altogether opposing aims). The only rationale for pairing them as examples in this instance is by dent of one having historically followed the other.

3.  Or so it looks in hindsight. Who knows – a lot of the participants probably had all sorts of heated arguments about it all, about what mattered and why, where it all could (or should) lead. You often sense it in what was written by some of the more notable art critics of the time – the awkward reliance on established notions, the ill-fitting comparisons made and metaphors deployed, the lapses in judgement and failures to recognize what would later seem obvious, the sometimes fidgety grasping (especially among the younger, next-gen critics) toward defining whatever criteria lurked at the heart of it all, to devise the taxonomy or nomenclature of what was emerging or might follow in its wake. Makes for interesting – if not consistently clumsy reading – most times.

The most telling example of this, see Lucy Lippard's first collection of republished criticism, Changing: Essays in Art Criticism. The footnotes on a number of essays being apologias and after-the-fact clarifications or revisions for what she'd been trying to describe and define initially. Remarkable seeing how (a) the collection saw print in 1971, scarcely five years after much its contents were first published, and (b) Lippard was perhaps the sharpest and insightful critics on the scene at the time.

{ End of Part One }

After the End of Art (Re: Commitment)

An excerpt:

"It was shortly after the emergence of the institutional critiques articulated by artists such Michael Asher and Marcel Broodthaers, Daniel Buren and Hans Haacke - and nearly contemporaneous with the burgeoning critiques of ideological hegemonies in the artistic practices of Louise Lawler, Martha Rosler, Jenny Holzer, Allan Sekula, and Dara Birnbaum — that we also encountered Andy Warhol's entry 'Art Business vs. Business Art' in his Philosophy of Andy Warhol (From A to B and Back Again), in 1975. Armed with an Enlightenment belief in the unstoppable progress of institutional critique and artistic critiques of the discourse of power, I, for one, considered Warhol's notion of Business Art to be a brilliantly conceived parody of the side effects of an ever-expanding art world - a travesty in the manner of Jonathan Swift's 'Modest Proposal.' Little did I imagine that, a quarter century later, it would have become impossible for Warhol's prognostic vision to be mistaken for travesty anymore. Rather, we had to recognize - with belated hindsight - that Warhol had in fact prophesied what we finally came to experience: the total permeation of the cultural sphere by the economic operations of finance capital and its attendant ethos and social structures. Only a Cassandra whose ethics and aesthetics were as exceptionally evacuated as Warhol's (other artists at the time still associated their practices with moral, critical, and political aspirations) could have enunciated this vision. A comparable diagnosis of the explicitly and inevitably affirmative character of modern culture had been formulated by Herbert Marcuse in the early '60s. Marcuse's tendency to accept if not to exaggerate the inextricably affirmative dimensions of cultural production and to recode them as potentially transgressive operations had appeared to us as a symptom of the philosopher's increasing Americanization. In other words, it was not until the early '80s, or even later, that it dawned on some of us that the cultural apparatus had in fact already undergone precisely those transformations whose full spectrum only Warhol had predicted, and that his prognostics were about to attain the status of all-encompassing and seemingly insurmountable new realities.

"What were the symptoms of these new conditions of the 'common culture' that had emerged perhaps most vehemently in the United States but also abroad during the so-called Reagan-Thatcher era? And what structural transformations had taken hold in the sphere of artistic production and reception, which we had until that moment naively associated with those other institutions of the public sphere where the production of knowledge and the memory of experience had been socially sustained and collected: the library, the university, and the museum? A number of multifaceted transformations, at first developing slowly yet steadily, soon picked up a precipitous pace and expanded globally. I will enumerate some of these perceived changes, in the manner of a paranoiac whose list of enemies and threats has only increased continuously ever since the initial diagnosis of the condition."

From Benjamin H. D. Buchloh's essay "Farewell to an Identity," published in the December 2012 edition of Artforum. Which, oddly, it appears someone reproduced and made available in this form here. I suspect that for much of the mag's readership, the piece amounted to little more than tl;dr trahison-des-clercs gasbaggery. I, however, found that it very succinctly encapsulated a number of major misgivings I've had about the artworld for about the past 10 to 15 years.

The Changing Sameness

Just above, a photograph. A photograph that I took the liberty of flipping into black & white. I'm not giving credit to the photographer, which might (or might not) be deemed problematic seeing how the photographer slapped a copyright on the image. Which I can't help but find odd, since the image is a recreation of something someone else did fairly recently, which was itself a twist on something someone else did a good many years before that, which itself was slightly modeled after something that someone else had done far earlier.

The rabbit hole, such as it is, ends there. Perhaps if you were to turn this series of repetitions and permutations into an equation, the equation might run as such: A something being repeated -- the first time as history; the second time as semi-ironic hommage; the third time as highly-ironic parody; the fourth time as utterly fucking pointless, ranking well below a fart in the wind tunnel in terms of cultural significance.

At which point I feel tempted to double back and revisit Lester Bangs's "Who Stole Punk?" spiel for the first time in many years. But instead I was recently thumbing through a copy of Paul Morley's Words and Music for the first time in a long while, a number of things jump out at me, but most particularly this bit, which echoes a common geezerly complaint of recent years...

"The Strokes were great are re-creating moments but not as great at creating moments. They were conservative (they conserved); they weren't radicals (they didn't remake the world). Their music was a tribute to a radical spirit, while missing a radical spirit. Ultimately what was lacking was the sense of newness, the sense of coming-out-of-nowhereness, that gives essentially simple, honest bursts of communication a power beyond the immediate. If Television had not made 'Little Johnny Jewel' in 1975, and we had first heard it in 2000, it would still have been as uncanny a piece of music...but it would have had twenty-five years of other things that have happened to contend with...

If 1949 Charlie Parker had in fact first popped up in 1964, well, it would have been quite arresting but, really, pretty pointless. This is the problem I began to see at my age as rock music began to photocopy itself: what was lacking for me was the suddenness that must be attached to the sound, the suddenness of its appearance and its newness. The suddenness of sound when it sounds like new sound connected to but adrift from other sounds."

At any rate: Some blog-realm cross-chatter blahblah-ing, a few clearing-the-attic thoughts on some things I'd flagged for comment some weeks ago.

One being: Phil's recent yarn on the subject of older music outselling new, but more specifically talking about of eternal returns and revivalism in pop music. I'm intrigued -- unsurprisingly, I suppose -- by his introducing the idea of entropy into the discussion, particularly linking it to bygone notions of progress and dynamic evolution in music. (Yes, we know...postmodernism told us such stuff was a very dubious and distinctly modernist idea, right? Yet we still sort of believe in it, expect it, perhaps even desire it. That suddenness, that newness, that jolt of uncanniness, that creation of a moment.) Simon offers a brief aside musing that sometimes things progress by way of crabwalking -- laterally, sideways, not necessarily in any strictly linear, teleological way. Which may or may not overlap with Phil's later thoughts about change versus "progress" in broader socio-historic terms.

This condition, of course, partly provided the premise for Simon's recent book Retromania. But I say partly because Simon's discussion of the "atemporality" of certain stripes of contemporary pop music ultimately encompassed more; is is many ways bound up with the idea of hyperstasis, having as much to do with the influence of digital culture and the internet -- with its alinear and across-the-board, equal-access-to-everything-at-once character -- rather than the matter of mere sonic stylistic apery and recycling.

Of course, part of Phil's initial post addresses the music's diminished cultural status -- about it no longer being a "driver of youth culture." Which points to how pop music now (and long has been) just one commodity among many; in most cases signifying little more than any other lifestyle accessory, something that long ago spent its own artistic and "cultural capital" through sheer market-glutting, quantity-over-quality overkill.Much of which rings familiar, echoing certain critique about information culture; about how the democratized deluge of facts and opinions ends up being a scenario of one piece of information -- regardless or truth- or use-value -- canceling another out, on and on ad infinitum, resulting in an reciprocal and comprehensive nullification of content or meaning, leaving little but a diffusive pink noise across the spectrum.

And I suppose there's any number of angles one could take to analyze or explain this entropic state of affairs. For instance, extrapolating on stats: the increase of venues of distribution in relation to surplus cultural production and income, the proliferation of channels in an pluralistic media landscape and the increasing splintering and atomization of niche audiences viz market demographics, "narrowcasting," and etcetera, etcetera. Other possible models? Two come to mind, two that have less to do with pop music but (much like that image above) with music's connection with the the larger realm of cultural activity and "creativity"...

First: That of the interpenetration and eminence of design into every realm of cultural and material culture over the past few decades, if not the way it's become the essence of culture (as we now know it) itself. Or as Hal Foster has described: the all-eclipsing "value added" (ugh) manifestations of the "political economy of design," which and the way it bypasses the condition of reification in the ways that it articulates and embodies "subject-less" desire -- reducing its own essence and efforts to an endless perpetuation of cultural production "that is all image and no interiority -- an apotheosis of the subject that is also it potential disappearance."*

The second being a concurrent trend that arose and gather momentum over the same stretch of time -- that of the culture of curation and its accompanying archival impulse, the many ways in which the aesthetic of mixing and re-presentation loomed to the fore. This has not only run parallel to the first aspect but is closely connected as well, due to its obsession with an aesthetics of display and exhibition. And it's the aspect that's mostly responsible for the ouroboric process by which culture operates at present -- consuming and re-presenting itself, without having to signify much of anything outside its own culture-ishness.

The above two points being perhaps a little too tied to discussions of visual culture, as far as the whole matter of critical discourse is concerned. Still, I see them as being part of a similar critical enterprise, one that coincides with the sort of things that both Simon and Phil are addressing; although by different route. And the above probably amounting to little more than me daubing on a wall, a meager attempt at hammer out some thoughts that deserve far more time & space to address.**

At any rate, there are some other things Phil mentioned in his posts, concerning the notion and the nature of progress in all of this. Which is a slippery topic, and one that brings some other ideas to mind; but which will have to wait for another time, a possible part two. (But perhaps done a some point when I'm not so tired, and hopefully more lucid.)

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*  "When Surface Became Depth" was how Michael Bracewell summed up the decade of the 'Nineties. In hindsight, the '90s would seem -- as Warhol would have put it -- "very full," all-too willing and capable of delivering (as far as music was concerned, at least) its share of ecstatic or transcendent moments, compared to much of what has followed in its wake. Yet somehow Bracewell's dismissal has a ring of truth to it, if only because anyone who was paying attention could perhaps notice an underlying emptying-out going on beneath it all...a silence gathering beneath the masking din.

**  Have been busy with other things lately, many of which has been siphoning of time and mental and temporal "bandwidth." Case in point, I think I started this post many weeks ago, and...well, here we are.

Just what is it that makes today's cities so disjointed, so anomic?

Venturi Visits Las Vegas, 1976

The Future of Architecture,  1979

Traffiknattet, 1979 (rvd. 1993)

First the building then the site, 1982

The Best of Architecture, 1984

Collage City, 1980

Architectural Outlook, 1987

Architectural collages by Nils-Ole Lund.

[ Via Socks Studio, via Archive of Affinities ]

The 'Anti-' Aesthetic

Was there any nihilistic impetus behind this?

CHUCK CLOSE:  Ad Reinhardt was to me the most important figure. He had more influence on me than anybody. He made the choice not to do something a positive decision. He would make these lists about what you can't do and that seems very nihilistic and negative. On the other hand, that became a set of limitations that opened things up. You ended up freed to be intuitive by a rigorous system. It's not the straight-line type of development, though. The problem with art history is its 'Old Testament' version of things -- so-and-so begat so-and-so, and so forth. It's as if you got on the train and got off on the other end. ...


CHRISTOPHER WOOL:  [...] In a way, Reinhardt was a lot like Warhol. You never quite knew when he was being ironic. I think it's different from this reductive aestheticism. I define myself in my work by reducing the things I don't want -- it seems impossible to know when to say 'yes,' but I know what I can say 'no' to.

...You take color out, you take gesture out -- and then later you can put them back in. But it's easier to define things by what they're not than by what they are, which is what Reinhardt was doing, and what Warhol did so incredibly well on so many levels -- and then of course pretended that he wasn't. [...]

CC:  One of the most liberating things is how often painting is declared dead. It's a very bizarre thing to be doing at this point in history. I've been around long enough for painting to be declared dead and resurrected five or six times. Whenever painting is declared dead is a great time to make paintings.

CW:  I wish someone would declare it dead this week. [Laughs] It always seems to have the most possibilities when people are saying that. ...Accepting the limitations sets up the boundaries -- some simple, basic ways in which you know it's painting and not something else. It makes it easier.

But you never questioned the premise of becoming a painter?

CW:  No. The parameters of painting are not any more limiting than other art activities -- they are actually much more to the point. All that crap about painting being 'complicit' or whatever is ridiculous, because all the other media that are supposedly non-complicit ultimately embody the same problematics. You accept the limitations as givens and then go on. [...]

CC:  It is very different for younger artists now, because they are choosing painting as an option over all the other forms, like installation. When I was a student being an artist meant being a painter.

CW:  That's not completely true, because many artists of your generation were the first to do nonpainting, nonsculptural things. I certainly grew up aware of that generation. At any time we could have easily chosen another course.

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Excerpts from a 1996 discussion between Chuck Close, Philip Taaffe, Sue Williams, and Christopher Wool, as moderated by Allan Schwartzman. [ Source ]

The Location of Culture: Scattered and Increasingly Digressive Notes About 'Collage Culture', Pt. II

Asco - Día de los Muertos Takeover, East L.A. 1974

In his essay "The Death of Subculture," Aaron Rose relates a comment made to him by Glenn O'Brien, who had remarked, "Subculture is no substitute for culture." Naturally, because the former always evolves and formulates values and identity by way of its inverse relationship to the dominance of the latter. This putting me in mind of Koolhaas's topography of the Generic City:

"Identity centralizes; it insists on an essence, a point. ...As the sphere of influence expands, the area characterized by the center becomes larger and larger, hopelessly diluting both the strength and the authority of the core; inevitably the distance between center and circumference increases to the breaking point. In this perspective, the recent, belated discovery of the periphery as a zone of potential value – a kind of pre-historical condition that might finally be worthy of architectural attention – is only a disguised insistence on the priority of and dependency on the center: without center, no periphery: the interest of the first presumably compensates for the emptiness of the latter. ...The last vibes emanating from the exhausted center preclude the reading of the periphery as a critical mass. Not only is the center by definition too small to perform its assigned obligations, it is also no longer the real center but an overblown mirage on its way to implosion; yet its illusory presence denies the rest of the city its legitimacy."

* * * *

Two quite common, if not slightly clichéd, readings of the work of Alberto Burri...

The first is the materialist angle, concentrating on Burri's use of materials evocative of the landscape of a war-torn Europe -- the "sackcloth and ashes" of his earlier work being reflective of a society digging itself out from the rubble and the burden of a troubled modern history, with the later works using industrial-grade plastics and the like paralleling Italy's recovery thanks to the largesse of the Marshall Plan (if not of the short-lived economic miracolo italiano of the late 1950s and early '60s).

The other being the one that stresses the visceral associations bound up with many of Burri's works. An account anchored in the biographic, that cites his former service as a medic in the Italian military during WWII; and how that experience proved too much for him, causing him to turn his back on a medical career, only to take up painting shortly after war's end. The tears and cuts and stitching and scorchings that appear throughout his works calling to mind fleshly wounds, lacerations, bandagings, suturing and cauterizations.

Both readings being highly metaphorical, each being rooted in a different site of trauma -- the first socio-historic in character, the latter psychological.


* * * *

Alberto Burri's work gained almost immediate attention in the late 1940s; especially in New York, where a young Robert Rauschenberg quickly fell under its influence. By 1952, Rauschenberg traveled to Italy with Cy Twombly, the former with the intent of seeking out Burri in Rome. That artists like Rauschenberg and Twombly would come into the mature phase of their careers by way of European influence proves intriguing, partly because it flies in the face of certain critical accounts of art history in the second half of the twentieth century -- the common version that has it that American art during those years having been a scenario of self-invention and willful pioneering, taking no cues from a European scene whose Modernist momentum had faltered due to the disruption of WWII, and whose postwar artistic developments constituted lateral or idiosyncratic zags that failed to resonate in a broader international context.

By some accounts, the European postwar art informel movement was interpreted as a response to the historical plight of Europe in the middle of the twentieth century -- an expression of cultural and existential malaise, arising out of smoldering doubts about the metaphysical health of Western civilization that had resulted in two world wars, the rise of fascism, and the Holocaust.¹, ²  The disparity between historical circumstances makes for an ironic contrast -- Burri and his contemporaries laboring in postwar Europe, engaging modern material culture in a tentative and ambivalent manner; Rauschenberg (and his contemporaries working in the more overtly "Pop" vein) working in a postwar American climate of emerging affluence and triumphant complacency.