The titles of Damien Hirst’s spot paintings give them a slightly menacing, as well as a dangerously attractive, air: Cocaine Hydrochloride, Morphine Sulphate, Bovine Albumin, Butulinium Toxin A. Their relentless, insistent brightness feels almost bad for you. No wonder one group of paintings is called Controlled Substances. Yet they have no discernable secrets, and that’s part of the deal. Nothing more is revealed, however long you look. They’re as unsatisfying as cigarettes, calming but addictive. Avoid prolonged exposure.
Opening today at all 11 Gagosian galleries around the world, including two in London, Hirst’s spot paintings are taking over the planet. Hirst has produced almost 1,500, and currently has a team of assistants working on one with a million spots that will take over nine years to complete. You gasp at the labour, if little else.
So here come the spots: a quarter century of two, three, four and five-inch circles, with some as big as 40in across, and others just a couple of millimetres. Never mind the shifts from imperial measurements to metric: they’re all just spots. Clean and flatly painted circles of household gloss on white or off-white backgrounds, they cover canvases large and small in unremitting grids. No two spots touch, and no colour is repeated on the same canvas, although some are close as dammit to being the same hue.
There are tiny one-spot paintings, paintings with spots at their corners, ones covered with rank after rank of hundreds, if not thousands, of little circles. There are big spots that go BAM! and others that recede, their pallid colours melting into the background. There are fields of tiny spots that give the overall impression of a greyish muted field, and great blasting walls that go on and on, blinking away as you move about them. Because the colours never touch, there’s no real conversation or friction between them. Everything is insistently frontal. I long for a black spot, a wobble, a smear.
Some paintings might look perky, others dour, but somehow it doesn’t matter, except to those who want a particularly early painting, an over-the-sofa one, one that goes with the curtains, or one with no purple in it (it’s my unlucky colour). It may turn out that, taken all together (and one journalist, I hear, is intent on making the rounds of every Gagosian gallery to see all the paintings), the work of one or another of Hirst’s assistants may have produced the best spot paintings. But is there a best or worst? How can we tell? Each has the same pictorial and optical efficiency, the same immediacy, even though they are so laborious and painstaking to produce.
In London, There are 60 paintings at Britannia Street and 48 in Davies Street. The latter has paintings small enough to carry under your arm or hide in a pocket, if they weren’t screwed to the wall. Hirst’s earliest spot paintings, I gather, are at the Madison Avenue gallery in New York. His first one was all hand-painted blobs, jostling, dripping and crowding an 8ft-by-12ft panel, painted while he was at Goldsmiths college, London, in the 1980s. It had a crowded, rhythmic yet open look you could get lost in, a bit like the early 1960s work of British painter Bernard Cohen, himself no stranger to the blob and spot.
But Hirst’s spots soon acquired a clean and emphatic air. These were take-it-or-leave-it paintings, without problems or doubts, painted directly on the wall. He was doing lots of other things at the time, including painting on discarded cardboard boxes and producing his first medicine cabinets. The variety and inventiveness was evidence of an enquiring and lively mind. Lots of artists could make a whole career from such an apparently limited repertoire of forms and effects. But Hirst, of course, keeps several artistic modes running at once. This spring, a retrospective opens at Tate Modern, while Hirst intends to open his own museum in London’s Vauxhall some time soon.
No matter how many spot paintings there are – tondos, triangles, squares, rhomboids and rectangles with corners cut off – there will always be more words spilled over them. The works look as if they were generated by machine, their cold random repetitions generating endless sameness. It is only the very small works, some with just half a dot on a tiddly canvas, that have a more sprightly, human feel.
All are structured on the grid. The grid, wrote the US critic Rosalind Krauss, is what art looks like when it turns its back on nature. The pleasures of Hirst’s pharmaceutical paintings, as the spots are generically titled, are as artificial as chemicals and drugs. Showing them all over the world at the same time becomes part of their content and meaning: they’re infiltrating everywhere, their field expanding to cover the world.
For a while, coloured spots signalled a fresh, sophisticated, zesty new Britain. Whether Hirst had much to do with this is uncertain. No one owns the spot, although designer appropriations always remind you of Hirst, or of the Japanese artist Yayoi Kusama, who has been covering her work, and her body, in polka dots for 60 years. (Kusama is at Tate Modern next month.) US artist Ellsworth Kelly was also arranging grids of colours in the 1950s, while Germany’s Gerhard Richter has been painting colour charts and squares for decades. Hirst just ran with an unoriginal idea in an original way. Which, pretty much, is what art always does.
© 2012 Guardian News and Media Limited
Mary Heilmann, Rosebud, 1983
I love lines, dots, drippy brushstrokes, polygons, blends, morphs and swirls. I love sticks with stripes on them. Looking at abstract art is for me like doing non-verbal philosophy, symbolic logic or non-number mathematics. It is like music, because it has a narrative without a story, without people: a drama without words.
My studio work is, for the most part, just me sitting, thinking and looking at what I have on the wall. Squares, dots, squiggles made of clay. There are shaped planes of wood or stretched canvas arranged not parallel to the ceiling and floor. I look and think, and I do a kind of obsessive measuring, cutting, dividing, adding, subtracting, sometimes with numbers; division and multiplication that I do in my head. No calculator. No pencil and paper. I imagine the images of other artists. These days I tap into Google to find something on the internet. My current obsession is Malevich, which is why many of my shaped canvases are slanting up and down the wall. I look at the everyday objects around me and mentally take them apart, cut them up and put them together in new ways. All of this is done in my imagination, until I finally get busy and actually make something.
I am happy to see Peter Young’s work being shown in the Tate St Ives ‘The Indiscipline of Painting’ exhibition. He is one of my early heroes: dots, lines, yes! That he was a part of the Los Angeles avant-garde as a child in the 1950s makes a lot of sense. His father, who studied with Albert Einstein, moved from Pennsylvania to Pacific Palisades with the family to work for the Rand Corporation.
There was a wonderful and significant group of post-war artists living in Los Angeles: designers, architects, film-makers, and composers that included Charles and Ray Eames, the architect Rudolph Schindler, artists John McLaughlin, Helen Lundeberg and Frederick Hammersley, as well as Arnold Schoenberg and the young John Cage. Young’s family was a part of this milieu. I lived there in the 1940s and 1950s, when that sophisticated high-culture was seeping into the southern California mainstream – so it was an influence on me, even as a child.
I love Andy Warhol’s Eggs (1982). This kind of generic abstraction is also of interest to me. I think that it often comes out of a discourse with the social community of art as much as out of aesthetic rumination. Warhol was primarily a figurative artist, and it makes sense. The abstract paintings, such as Eggs, as well as his “oxidation paintings”, are the result of his, (probably) non-verbal, engagement with social and critical aesthetic discourse. I have loved Warhol because I have always liked popular culture as much as high art, and was happy when I found that they were part of the same world. I saw his Campbell’s Soup Cans (1962) when Irving Blum showed them in Los Angeles at his Ferus Gallery in 1962. And I saw The Velvet Underground at the Fillmore in San Francisco in 1966.
David Reed is another favourite artist of mine. Again, it is about reference. For example: David often has the brushstroke as his subject. Using it as an image of a beautiful thing, that makes one begin to ruminate linguistically, to have a nonverbal mental conversation about everything, about painting and art, unless, of course, there is someone else around to talk to.
A great survey of painting such as ‘The Indiscipline of Painting’ is for me a huge conversation, and this is the way I love to engage with art. I like to talk about it with other people, but I am also very happy to sit and look all around at painting after painting and allow them to speak to me, as I silently but verbally or non-verbally talk with them, say things to them and to myself. I can do this for a long time. And when I have a show of my work I hope that the people there will do the same thing. That is why I’ve started to make the chairs. I want people to sit down, hang out and look at the work for a long time, and talk to themselves and other people about it.
The human body, by far the most classic theme in art history, strikes a chord with us because it defines our humanity, our physical and emotional being-in-the-world, our being alive. It’s the Pièta’s dangling limbs, the lines of Picasso’s nudes or Michelangelo’s touching hands that convey the feeling captured in the work. Hence, the ‘revival’ of the human form in contemporary art can be called an overstatement, as it is only one new phase of a tradition that’s been going strong throughout centuries. The depiction of the (human) body, gives us a lense into the time in which the artwork was made, and the way people looked at the world and themselves at that moment. Also today, it’s interesting to see how artists work with the body in new ways, and are at the same time part of the continuum, referring to shapes that came before. I would like to shed light on two artists from the lower countries, one from Belgium and one from the Netherlands, to illustrate how today, the human form takes centre stage in different ways.
What Dutch fashion designer Iris Van Herpen does, goes beyond designing clothes: through the use of 3D printing techniques, in which tiny particles of any material can be printed into a 3D form, she creates new forms that are even for her at first ‘unthinkable’: her crossing of oldschool craftmanship and hi-tech techniques result in new extraordinary shapes, with the body (human or not) as a central given. She explains “I have a vivid imagination and can think up many new ideas, but I need the restriction of the human body as an instrument to work with, that’s why I chose fashion.” Van Herpen’s show ‘The New Craftmanship’ at the Centraal Museum in Utrecht last summer, was not just impressive because of the 3D-printed garments on show, her multiple collaborations with internationally renowned artists, or her use of sculptural materials and intricate craftmanship; I was mostly touched by an installation of two interlocking human bodies hovering above the ground, dressed in a tight bodysuit of laced up leather, that appeared to have been caught in an intimate dance, arrested in the material. Being a dancer herself, Van Herpen has a lot of affinity with the dance world, so the collaboration with choreographer Nanine Linning happened fluidly. Mostly, Van Herpen likes to take inspiration from many fields outside of fashion: medicine, biology, architecture and old crafts are often at the basis of the idea for a collection: “I don’t go hunt for far-fetched inspirations, I am inspired by very small, daily things. For ‘Radiation Invasion’, for example, I thought of all the rays and radiations that invisibly surround us every day: the waves of the microwave, our cell phones, wi-fi...I then tried to make a form for it, enclosing the body.”
Van Herpen first creates silhouettes directly on the dummy, sculpting paper into her dreamt-up shape, which she then transfers into a 3D drawing that’s sent off to the company that makes her 3D prints. With the most cutting edge technologies, even the fragilest skelet design becomes a solid structure. Her production methods are high-tech mixed with ancient and time-consuming crafts, which collide into majestic, biomorphic silhouettes with a futuristic feel.
Her ability to convey meaning, emotion and human existence through clothes make her a rare talent, at the tender age of 27, changing the game of fashion design: in a world of fast fashion and an elitist and protective haute couture world, she’s been invited as a guest member of the French Couture Council and continues to show her collections at Paris Couture fashion week, the summum of the fashion world. Her personal motto ‘Normal rules don’t apply’ is a telling phrase applicable to both her work and her personality: blurring the lines between science, biology, fashion, dance and architecture in her creations, and at 27 she’s already working on a major retrospective exhibition at the Groninger Museum next year.
Berlinde De Bruyckere, the Belgian artist working with watercolours, installations and sculpture, sculpts wax bodies (human and other) that narrate stories of love, life and death, even if they are head- or limbless. Her work is often associated with pain, both physical and existential, but to see only the pain is to do injustice to the tenderness of her work.Many of her figures are surrounded, or placed on, pillows, wooden supports (Pièta), covered in blankets (V. Eeman) or display cases, all showing gestures of protection and care. The bodies she creates look fragile and uneven, with crevices and cracks revealing the abyss beyond the skin. The absence of heads, the part of the body used for speech, understanding and emotions, which makes us human, (eg in the Schmerzenmann figures), does not fully dehumanize the bodies but makes them impersonal, expressive only in their being, not in individual expression. Asked about the reason for the absence, she says ‘my images have to function based on their general existence and quality, not based on the recognisable form of a head’.Hence, there’s no specific reason for a head, nor is there for the absence. She lets the figures do the talking. Berlinde De Bruyckere takes her inspiration from figures, human and non-human, which she finds interesting. Her sculptures are often molded directly on those figures, making her work process very unique.
The model, once put into position, is covered in silicones, onto which a plaster is cast. Once the mould has been removed, thick layers of wax are painted into it. When assembling the different parts, the wax is manipulated into the desired form.When doing so, several joints appear. It is only during this creation process that decisions are made about whether or not to cover these, or to exploit their strength.Unaware of the exact end result of the shape, she creates and decides instinctively how to manipulate the wax into it’s final shape. Without pre-set notions, she sculpts, paints and moulds her way meticulously through the work. Meanwhile in her head, she sees all the stories of the world passing by, boiling down into one still shape. As spectators we are confronted with veins and crevices that are left bare, unsolved endings of a story, directly coming from the body. De Bruyckere’s sculptures are headless yet self-explanatory, oozing with raw emotion enough to fill one with horror, compassion or wonder.
The works of these two women, although wildly different, are both results of their imagination and of the work process itself. Both artists state that they have no idea what the work will finally look like when they start, even when it is based on a pre-envisioned body. This leaves a lot of room for reworking and re-sculpting the final shape for as long as it takes. Both artists also incorporate elements of their national artistic traditions: Van Herpen works with gold leather (Capriole, FW 2011) that was also produced in Holland’s Golden 17th Century and De Bruyckere’s work shows affinity to the Flemish late renaissance masterworks. Their merging of traditional techniques with contemporary processes result in individual translations of the human form.
The two seem unstoppable: Berlinde De Bruyckere says were it not for her husband and kids, she would work without end. Iris Van Herpen, too, needs the restriction of fashion and the human body to frame her ideas and the possibilities crossing her high-wired brain. Their hard work does not go unnoticed, as the future looks bright for both: after being on show this year in the ‘New Sculpture’ exhibition The shape of things to come in the Saatchi Gallery London, Berlinde De Bruyckere is also touring the show ‘Mysterium Leib’ (her work in confrontation with that of Lucas Cranach and Pier Paolo Pasolini) to different locations, and working on new shows.
Iris Van Herpen, after a succesful collaboration with Björk for the album cover of her youngest release ‘Crystalline’, continues to work with A-list artists, commercializes her couture shoes with Rem Koolhaas’ shoe brand United Nude, and works on her retrospective solo exhibition for 2012, next to her ‘dayjob’ creating couture collections.
In their own specific ways, these artists incorporate living bodies into the central axis of their work, integrating past and future stories that shape our collective view of the world and ourselves in it. They show us how we define humanity and being alive at this moment in time, connecting us to those that came before and those who will come after.
Photo Credits for the works by Berlinde De Bruyckere:
Feminine Habitat, 2008, Photo: Mirjam Devriendt /
Piëta, 2008, Photo: Mirjam Devriendt
Being an art buyer these days is comprehensively and indisputably vulgar. It is the sport of the Eurotrashy, Hedge-fundy, Hamptonites; of trendy oligarchs and oiligarchs; and of art dealers with masturbatory levels of self-regard. They were found nestling together in their super yachts in Venice for this year’s spectacular art biennale. Venice is now firmly on the calendar of this new art world, alongside St Barts at Christmas and St Tropez in August, in a giddy round of glamour-filled socialising, from one swanky party to another.
Artistic credentials are au courant in the important business of being seen as cultured, elegant and, of course, stupendously rich.
Do any of these people actually enjoy looking at art? Or do they simply enjoy having easily recognised, big-brand name pictures, bought ostentatiously in auction rooms at eye-catching prices, to decorate their several homes, floating and otherwise, in an instant demonstration of drop-dead coolth and wealth. Their pleasure is to be found in having their lovely friends measuring the weight of their baubles, and being awestruck.
It is no surprise, then, that the success of the uber art dealers is based upon the mystical power that art now holds over the super-rich. The new collectors, some of whom have become billionaires many times over through their business nous, are reduced to jibbering gratitude by their art dealer or art adviser, who can help them appear refined, tasteful and hip, surrounded by their achingly cool masterpieces.
Not so long ago, I believed that anything that helped broaden interest in current art was to be welcomed; that only an elitist snob would want art to be confined to a worthy group of aficionados. But even a self-serving narcissistic showoff like me finds this new art world too toe-curling for comfort. In the fervour of peacock excess, it’s not even considered necessary to waste one’s time looking at the works on display. At the world’s mega-art blowouts, it’s only the pictures that end up as wallflowers.
I don’t know very many people in the art world, only socialise with the few I like, and have little time to gnaw my nails with anxiety about any criticism I hear about.
If I stop being on good behaviour for a moment, my dark little secret is that I don’t actually believe many people in the art world have much feeling for art and simply cannot tell a good artist from a weak one, until the artist has enjoyed the validation of others – a received pronunciation. For professional curators, selecting specific paintings for an exhibition is a daunting prospect, far too revealing a demonstration of their lack of what we in the trade call "an eye". They prefer to exhibit videos, and those incomprehensible post-conceptual installations and photo-text panels, for the approval of their equally insecure and myopic peers. This "conceptualised" work has been regurgitated remorselessly since the 1960s, over and over and over again.
Few people in contemporary art demonstrate much curiosity. The majority spend their days blathering on, rather than trying to work out why one artist is more interesting than another, or why one picture works and another doesn’t.
Art critics mainly see the shows they are assigned to cover by their editors, and have limited interest in looking at much else. Art dealers very rarely see the exhibitions at other dealers’ galleries. I’ve heard that almost all the people crowding around the big art openings barely look at the work on display and are just there to hobnob. Nothing wrong with that, except that none of them ever come back to look at the art – but they will tell everyone, and actually believe, that they have seen the exhibition.
Please don’t read my pompous views above as referring to the great majority of gallery shows, where dealers display art they hope someone will want to buy for their home, and new collectors are born every week. This aspect of the art world fills me with pleasure, whether I love all the art or not.
I am regularly asked if I would buy art if there was no money in it for me. There is no money in it for me. Any profit I make selling art goes back into buying more art. Nice for me, because I can go on finding lots of new work to show off. Nice for those in the art world who view this approach as testimony to my venality, shallowness, malevolence.
Everybody wins.
And it’s understandable that every time you make an artist happy by selecting their work, you create 100 people that you’ve offended – the artists you didn’t select.
I take comfort that our shows have received disobliging reviews since our opening exhibition of Warhol, Judd, Twombly and Marden in 1985. I still hold that it would be a black day when everybody likes a show we produce. It would be a pedestrian affair, art establishment compliant, and I would finally know the game was up.
An Essay by Charles Saatchi
Originally Published by The Guardian News and Media Limited
To Jeffrey Deitch:
After observing a rehearsal, I am writing to protest the “entertainment” about to be provided by Marina Abramović at the upcoming donor gala at the Museum of Contemporary Art where a number of young people’s live heads will be rotating as decorative centerpieces at diners’ tables and others—all women—will be required to lie perfectly still in the nude for over three hours under fake skeletons, also as centerpieces surrounded by diners.
On the face of it the above description might strike one as reminiscent of Salo, Pasolini’s controversial film of 1975 that dealt with sadism and sexual abuse of a group of adolescents at the hands of a bunch of postwar fascists. Though it is hard to watch, Pasolini’s film has a socially credible justification tied to the cause of anti-fascism. Abramović and MoCA have no such credibility—and I am speaking of this event itself, not of Abramović’s work in general—only a questionable personal rationale about the beauty of eye contact and the transcendence of artists’ suffering.
At the rehearsal the fifty heads—all young, beautiful, and mostly white—turning and bobbing out of holes as their bodies crouched beneath the otherwise empty tables, appeared touching and somewhat comic, but when I tried to envision 800 inebriated diners surrounding them, I had another impression. I myself have never been averse to occasional epatering of the bourgeoisie. However, I can’t help feeling that subjecting her performers to possible public humiliation and bodily injury from the three-hour endurance test at the hands of a bunch of frolicking donors is yet another example of the Museum’s callousness and greed and Ms Abramović’s obliviousness to differences in context and some of the implications of transposing her own powerful performances to the bodies of others. An exhibition is one thing—again, this is not a critique of Abramovic’s work in general—but titillation for wealthy donor/diners as a means of raising money is another.
Ms Abramović is so wedded to her original vision that she—and by extension, the Museum director and curators—doesn’t see the egregious associations for the performers, who, though willing, will be exploited nonetheless. Their cheerful voluntarism says something about the pervasive desperation and cynicism of the art world such that young people must become abject table ornaments and clichéd living symbols of mortality in order to assume a novitiate role in the temple of art.
This grotesque spectacle promises to be truly embarrassing. I and the undersigned wish to express our dismay that an institution that we have supported can stoop to such degrading methods of fund raising. Can other institutions be far behind? Must we re-name MoCA “MOUFR” or the Museum of Unsavory Fund Raising?
Sincerely,
Yvonne Rainer, Douglas Crimp, Tom Knechtel, Monica Majoli, Liz Kotz, Michael Duncan, Matias Viegener, Judie Bamber, Kimberli Meyer, Kathrin Burmester, Nizan Shaked, Alexandro Segade, David Burns, A.L. Steiner, Simon Leung, Moyra Davey, Taisha Paggett, Susan Silton, Silvia Kolbowski, Susan Mogul, Julian Hoeber, Catherine Lord, Zoe Beloff, Lincoln Tobier, Millie Wilson, Mary Kelly, Charles Gaines, Amy Sadao, Gregg Bordowitz, Andrea Geyer, Lucas Michael, Liz Deschenes, Ulrike Muller, Nancy Popp, Su Freidrich, Dean Daderko, Litia Perta, Ginger Brooks Takahashi, Stefan Kalmar, bell hooks, Julie Ault, Zoe Leonard, Molly Corey, Sharon Horvath, Rachel Harrison, John Zurier, Day Gleeson, Thomas Miccelli, John Yau, Ernest Larsen
Art has emerged as a major vehicle for expressing the Occupy Wall Street movement.In addition to news this week that street art from Occupy Wall Street and Occupy D.C. was being collected by the Smithsonian National Museum of American History, the movement’s Arts and Culture Committee showcased spoken word performances and poetry readings in Manhattan’s Zuccotti Park.
Elsewhere in the city, a group known as Occupy Museums demonstrated at New York’s Museum of Modern Art, the Frick Collection and the New Museum protesting the corporatization of art, and the "No Comment" pop-up exhibition similarly represented itself as art inspired by the movement. Then there’s the sudden popularity of anti-establishment Guy Fawkes masks, distant kin to the masked protests of the Guerrilla Girls, a collective of anonymous artists who wear Gorilla masks to protest sexism.
But perhaps most provocatively, Shepard Fairey -- the artist who famously created the Obama "Hope" poster -- contributed "You Are Invited to the to the Occupation Party," featuring a portrait of a woman evocative of the black power movement, and placing Occupy Wall Street within a deeper history of civil rights protest.
Occupy art might just be the movement’s most politically potent tool in its dramatic reframing of the racial dynamics of a populist uprising frequently characterized as largely white and "hippie."
Fairey’s "You Are Invited" is an especially compelling example. It offers an image of a young black woman with turtleneck sweater and iconic Afro, a la Angela Davis -- the "uniform" of the Black Panther Party of the 1960s and ’70s. The poster’s retro look recalls a militant past, almost startling in our new millennial moment, and surely is meant as a challenge to the idea that as a society we are anywhere near "post-race" enlightenment.
For evidence of this, we need look no further than the grossly disproportionate use of force by Oakland city police in clearing peaceful Occupy protesters recently. Comedian and social critic Jon Stewart said on his late-night show that the only threat that could possibly warrant such a police response was Godzilla. His comment, though humorous, was seriously spot-on, for the "beast" perceived as a threat in that city has long been its black and brown citizens. It is no accident that the Black Panther Party was founded in Oakland, where for decades inequities in health, education, income and incarceration have affected the communities of color there.
Indeed, some have called for more black people’s involvement in the movement, but Fairey’s "You Are Invited" goes beyond an appeal for and to black people. Imagine its even more revolutionary effect as a poster carried by people of all backgrounds and social position, symbolically calling for a pan-ethnic alliance.
Of course some may complain that this repurposing of black power imagery associates the Occupy movement with a dated and narrow cultural nationalism with no place in our post-civil rights era. The poster’s invitation to an "occupation party" -- suggesting both a political party as well as a hip, happening event -- may not mobilize a younger generation unfamiliar with appeals to rise up or sit in. Others may criticize the poster as implying a purely token inclusiveness that masks the real tensions between the occupiers’ often competing and sometimes confused agenda.
These are justifiable concerns. But "You Are Invited" is powerful precisely because it invites identification with this long history of marginalized people striving for social and economic equity, however imperfect and unfinished those efforts.
More subtly but as importantly, the poster is a mini-tutorial, offering some much needed direction and instruction to a new movement missing some important elements for success. Occupiers are invited to take a page from the past, for instance, and go revolutionary with some style. The Panthers dressed for success and worked their cool look to great political effect. Even more essentially, they also had a plan. The Panthers’ Ten-Point Program, which called for "Land, Bread, Housing, Education, Clothing, Justice and Peace" and included a successful Free Breakfast for Children program, sought very practical forms of redress (some realistically possible, some less so) to the social and economic injustices they experienced.
"You Are Invited," with what we might call its black art of occupation, is a reminder of the historical relationship between art and politics. Plato was anxious about the power of art to rouse emotions and challenge authority, and to be sure, art can be reduced to mere propaganda and demagoguery. But we should not forget that Aristotle, Plato’s own student, disagreed with him, insisting that the arts had a profound social function.
In 1926, the renowned black intellectual, W.E.B. Du Bois, argued passionately that art should be used for social justice, that beauty can and must be marshaled for a larger good: "I am one who tells the truth and exposes evil and seeks with beauty and for beauty to set the world right." Similarly, the "No Comment" organizers claim that, "The purpose of the exhibition is to provide a platform for an open dialogue about serious sociological issues."
Let the Occupy movement’s camps and protests and marches continue generating such art -- art that inspires interracial unity where it may not yet exist, art that reminds us of the voices unheard, art that galvanizes practical social change when nothing seems to give, art that, in Du Bois’ words, tries to make the world both beautiful and right.
Edith Wharton first saw Leonardo da Vinci’s Last Supper during a trip to Milan when she was 17. It was to be almost four decades before she finally gave vent to the passion it had aroused. During that long interval, she said, she had "wanted to bash that picture’s face". It wasn’t the most edifying contribution to art history and she was careful not to broadcast it. Rather, she confessed her loathing privately in a letter to the art historian Bernard Berenson, who, as "the most authorised fist in the world", had just done her pugilistic business for her.
Berenson had published The Study and Criticism of Italian Art (Third Series, 1916) in which he revealed that, as a boy, he had "felt a repulsion" for The Last Supper. "The faces were uncanny, their expressions forced, their agitation alarmed me," he recalled feverishly. "They were the faces of people whose existence made the world less pleasant and certainly less safe." This description of the most famous narrative painting in the world as resembling a Neapolitan marketplace drew great opprobrium. One American newspaper compared it to an act of war, claiming Berenson had "torpedoed" Leonardo’s reputation (this at a time when German U-boats were sinking allied ships). Another review argued that he had shown "such want of sympathy with Leonardo’s work as is generally considered to place a critic’s estimate out of court".
The Last Supper is inscribed with a double sacredness: the sacredness of Christ’s passion, the entire story of which it summarises; and the sacredness of Leonardo da Vinci’s legend as "the one artist of whom it may be said with perfect literalness: nothing that he touched but turned into a thing of eternal beauty". This was Berenson in 1896, before he came to repudiate his own judgment as symptomatic of a slavish habit of overpraising Leonardo.
Goethe once said that one must not censure a Leonardo except on one’s knees. Berenson’s refusal to genuflect insulted a tradition of veneration whose origins date back to Giorgio Vasari’s "Life" of Leonardo, published in 1550. "Many men and women are born with remarkable talents," Vasari wrote. "But occasionally, in a way that transcends nature, a single person is marvellously endowed by heaven with beauty, grace and talent in such abundance that he leaves other men far behind, all his actions seem inspired and indeed everything he does clearly comes from God rather than from human skill. Everyone acknowledged that this was true of Leonardo da Vinci …who cultivated his genius so brilliantly that all problems he studied he solved with ease."
Vasari’s Lives of the Most Eminent Painters, Sculptors and Architects is the Ur-text, the coping stone of art history, and his legend of Leonardo as the Ur-artist – superhuman, favoured by God, unravelling the mysteries of creation – persisted unchallenged for centuries. Scrutinised for accuracy, very little of his account survives as reliable fact, as first demonstrated in Carlo Amoretti’s 1804 biography of Leonardo. Since then, such evidence as exists – legal, contextual, pictorial and, of course, Leonardo’s own copious writings – has been rigorously marshalled and analysed, giving the corrective to some of the more fantastic accretions that grew up around his name and the works attributed to him. (When Charles Lamb wrote from Blenheim that only two of the nine pictures there by Leonardo pleased him, none of them was actually by Leonardo at all. There are only an estimated 16 extant panel paintings, of which half have been corralled from across continents for the National Gallery’s forthcoming exhibition, Leonardo da Vinci, Painter at the Court of Milan).
But no fact-finding enterprise can ever provide an empirical basis for the "true" or "real" Leonardo. Even as we consciously expose the fictive exaggerations of Vasari, we continue subconsciously to incorporate the myths and enlarge them. Leonardo’s prodigious experimental and investigative output, as witnessed by his notebooks, his non-acquiescence ("he won’t take yes for an answer," as Kenneth Clark put it), contributed to the belief that he is an indispensable instrument of man’s search for meaning. Just as he chased down the "proofs" for his theories on the laws of nature, energy, motivation and emotion ("moti"), so, with a kind of mimetic restlessness, we rifle his work for the key to decode our intellectual and existential DNA. In his Introduction to the Method of Leonardo da Vinci (1895), the poet Paul Valéry confessed that "knowing very little" about him, he had "invented a Leonardo of my own". Leonardo thus becomes "Leonardo", an allegory, a fulcrum for human consciousness.
Valéry’s essay (written in prose as dense as a traffic bollard) was less a manual for interpreting Leonardo’s method than a pretext for the creation of a "universal man" for the modern age, a man capable of harnessing vast synthetic conceptions to the mastery of himself. Dismissing Leonardo’s "personality" as irrelevant, an "encrustation", Valéry co-opted him as the impersonal genius, a kind of hyper-conscious filter for the verification of knowledge, knowledge that could then be pressed into service as action and power.
This idea of the exceptional man who not only discovers but improves upon the world had considerable traction at a time when the renaissance was being reframed as an ideological, and not solely an aesthetic, movement. "La découverte du monde, la découverte de l’homme". This was how the historian Jules Michelet, writing in 1855, defined it – as a liberating, indeed a liberation movement whose historical function was the delivery of Europe from the political, religious and intellectual servitude of the middle ages. In that movement, for which Leonardo (alongside Filippo Brunelleschi) was the vox clamantis, man had "plumbed the deep foundations of his nature" and "begun to take his stand on Justice and on Reason". The Last Supper, with its protean, Faustian figures, was no longer a theological or liturgical phenomenon, a religious feast, but a council of political action (an interpretation that played out well in contemporary Russia, where Christ was reconfigured as a revolutionary and a democrat, a symbol of social and political opposition to Tsarist rule).
Michelet was deeply entangled in the culture wars of his time. Republican and staunchly anti-clerical, he conducted a bruising polemic against the Catholic church in France. His lectures on the renaissance, a high-octane mix of rhetoric and call-to-arms, so angered the government that his lecture hall was closed down in 1848 for three months. Michelet needed a secular, humanist figure to stand for political and intellectual emancipation, and this is what he delivered. His Leonardo tells us less about the nature of man than about the nature of European man in the turbulent mid-19th century. This is Leonardo as usable past, as a viable element in the creation of an historical meaning that expresses and confirms the values of a particular group.
Indeed, "Leonardo" has become an adjective to describe what survival in history is. And as records of survival go, his is pretty much unbeatable. He even survives Sigmund Freud, whose psychoanalytic study of 1910 depended heavily on invented episodes, supplied by a Russian novel, from Leonardo’s childhood. From this flimsy premise, the Viennese mind-doctor proposed that Leonardo had a frustrated erotic relationship with his mother that developed into a repressed or idealised homosexuality that in turn was sublimated into artistic creation and scientific investigation, much of which was uncompleted due to the absence of his father.
A century on, Freud’s grammar of the subconscious has become so familiar as to be easily dismissed as cliché. But clichés only become clichés because they are good enough in the original. His monograph on Leonardo was the first psychosexual history to be published, and the vehicle for the first full emergence of the concept of narcissism, which Freud didn’t fully elaborate until a paper in 1914. It introduced a new model for the development of the human personality: Leonardo was the first Freudian archetype.
Freud’s intervention was significant in another way. He was very attracted to the romance of modern archaeology, collecting artefacts and archaeological field reports, carefully posing an array of Egyptian figurines on his desk. The job of psychoanalyst, he claimed, was similar to that of the archaeologist: both must "uncover layer after layer of the patient’s psyche, before coming to the deepest, most valuable treasures". Goethe had claimed that the key to Leonardo’s genius lay in his ability to penetrate beyond superficial appearances to what lay beneath: "He began to be aware, that behind the outside of objects … there still lay concealed many a secret, the knowledge of which it would be worth his utmost efforts to attain."
Freud’s evocation of the concealed space – the tomb as well as the womb – and the suggestion that its long-buried arcana could be accessed through methodical deduction, like the Rosetta stone (whose decoder Jean-François Champollion Freud greatly admired), unleashed a mania for finding hidden clues in Leonardo’s work. A disciple of Freud claimed in 1913 to have discovered a vulture – a maternal symbol in ancient Egypt – in the drapery of Saint Anne’s clothing in the London cartoon of The Virgin and Child with Saint Anne. In the 1940s, a foetus was "identified" in the rock just below the virgin’s right foot. When Dan Brown unleashed The Da Vinci Code in 2003 (which, incidentally, marked the renaming of Leonardo as a place rather than a person), he was simply bringing this obsession with esoterica into the mainstream.
Is it possible that Leonardo himself connived, in his lifetime, in his own legend? We know that within a single generation after his death he was construed as a magus or sage, "the Druid Hermes, his beard so long", as one admirer wrote. That beard, essential accessory for a prophet, appears in every likeness of Leonardo, even in the drawing in Turin that is widely thought to be a self-portrait. Did the living figure assimilate himself to the type?
It’s a tantalising possibility, but of a kind unpopular with many contemporary critics. Perhaps reflecting a broader mood of austerity, such speculative exuberance has been curtailed in favour of what Martin Kemp calls the "sober counterweight to the accumulation of legend". Charles Hope suggests that Leonardo has been credited "with an originality which is largely unjustified", time and again circling mathematical and philosophical questions that had been studied before but which he was ignorant of replicating because he hadn’t taken "adequate account of observations and arguments available in standard Classical sources". We should not, argue these critics, look to everything Leonardo produced as taking us over the threshold into some final mystery.
If we want to know why Mona Lisa smiles, we should remind ourselves that this is a portrait of the wife of Francesco del Giocondo ("jocund" in Italian). The documentation tells us so. Even Vasari got this right. The facts have been known for a long time, but somehow we strain for other, less prosaic answers. When Marcel Duchamp mischievously suggested in his 1919 readymade that Mona Lisa smiles because "she’s got a hot ass", he was parodying the obsession with Leonardo’s enigma and poking fun at the mystifications, the purple prose, the sheer dreariness of "aesthetics".
Duchamp’s readymade was a postcard of the Louvre portrait (to which he added a goatee and his infamous inscription) and it spoke to the familiarity of Leonardo’s work through reproduction. Along with the Mona Lisa, the most widely distributed image was that of The Last Supper, at first through engravings and later photographs. Familiarity breeds contempt, and there is a long history of inversion for comic and satirical purposes. Hogarth repeatedly used its compositional structure to mocking effect, notably in The Cockpit, where Christ has become a gambler. Later, filmmakers such as Buñuel and Pasolini played havoc with its sacred associations by relocating it to secular and seedy settings. In Buñuel’s Viridiana, a film condemned by the Vatican, violently drunk beggars re-enact the tableau over a table of stolen food while a nun is molested. This is the reverse compliment paid to icons: they are defaced for their virtue.
We mustn’t lick all the paint off our gods, as Virginia Woolf once warned, and indeed The Last Supper, as if by miracle, has survived all attempts to loosen the hold it has on us. Ironically, it suffered first at the hands of Leonardo himself, who experimented with the technique of fresco to disastrous effect. By applying oils to the surface he trapped moisture in the wall: he literally left the paint unable to breathe. Twenty years after completing the mural he returned to the refectory of Santa Maria delle Grazie to retouch it, but the man who had dreamed of turning back rivers could do nothing to reverse his own technical failure. Vasari, in the 1568 edition of The Lives described it as "so badly effected that nothing is visible but a mass of blots".
In 1652 it was further damaged when an existing door beneath it was widened and heightened. Bashed out with hammers and pickaxes, the mural’s crust was loosened in many places. In 1770 it was scraped with iron instruments by a restorer behaving like a sawbone surgeon ("a true bungler", said Goethe). Napoleon’s troops used the refectory as a dormitory and amused themselves by throwing stones and horse dung at it before Napoleon intervened with an edict to have the room bricked up and sealed. And in August 1943 an allied a bomb tore off the roof, leaving The Last Supper exposed to the elements under a tarpaulin for three years, "the saddest painting in the world" (Aldous Huxley).
The Last Supper still exists, in great part, due to the romance with its crumbling patina, the drama of its self-effacement. It is this, as much as the theatricality, the élan vital of its composition, that secures it a place outside of, as well as within, the Christian story it narrates. Like the man who created it, we can never know it fully. Both are metaphors for the way we construct meaning – they hold on to their secrets, but they also reveal that the history of what we know is only ever the history of what we desire to know.
If anyone figures out the answer, please let me know! In what may be the largest misstep of the Occupy Wall Street campaign, protestors are now “occupying” New York City museums. Starting today with a teach-in at Zuccotti Park at 3PM, protestors will next “occupy” the 4 train to occupy MoMA, the M3 Bus to occupy the Frick, and finally the 6 train to occupy the New Museum at around 7PM. The movement is organized by Claire Oliver-represented artist Noah Fischer, and publicized on Paddy Johnson’s Tumblr. According to their manifesto, Occupy Museums is dissatisfied with the general cultural elitism of the art world and pandering to rich trustees that museums often must go through in order to be given donations to make ends meet.
They write: The game is up: we see through the pyramid schemes of the temples of cultural elitism controlled by the 1%. No longer will we, the artists of the 99%, allow ourselves to be tricked into accepting a corrupt hierarchical system based on false scarcity and propaganda concerning absurd elevation of one individual genius over another human being for the monetary gain of the elitest of elite. For the past decade and more, artists and art lovers have been the victims of the intense commercialization and co-optation or art. We recognize that art is for everyone*, across all classes and cultures and communities.
While rightfully expressing frustration with societal norms has been the forté of Occupy Wall Street since its inception, it seems obvious that “Occupy Museums” is wide off the mark in occupying museums rather than the galleries and art fairs propagated by multi-millionaires. Talk abo ut a case of historical amnesia! Do we not remember that 2009 saw the closing of various museums around the country, including the Rose Art Museum, which Johnson herself covered with much diligence and candor? Why would you occupy a non-profit institution over a for-profit one in the same sector? And further, museums are exceedingly bureaucratic and held responsible for using tax payer dollars, albeit often the tax money they receive barely keeps the lights on. The museum world is one that I actually have a little bit of faith in–unless you’re a director of a handful of institutions across the US, employees of museums are generally underpaid cultural workers that in my opinion, should be supported in weaving art into our cultural fabric.
To be fair, frustrations with the art world and its elitism is a justified qualm. Art students around the country are paying over a $100,000 for an education they most likely will never use in an art world context. But are museums to blame for this? Should they be occupied because their curators and directors are arbiters of taste, or should someone else be held responsible for this financial injustice? (Mayhaps, bankers whose actions have dramatically increased the class divide of the last ten years?) And what distinguishes museums in our current moment from those in times past, which were always Enlightenment-era projects designed to usher transcendental experiences in for the already-learned and elite?
Rather than targeting museums, it seems more pertinent to take action through creation of art reacting to its market catering to rich and elite–or maybe even occupying super rich galleries and art fairs. How about the notably evil David Zwirner <http://tinyurl.com/6fxhskp> , anyone? And further, Noah Fischer, why create art that is tailor-made to exist in a Chelsea gallery and sold to rich people? Is YOUR art for everyone? I think not. Rather than villainizing poor museums and distracting minds from the real problem, which is Wall Street, why not create projects in the name of art that instill new ways of viewing the economy–such as e-flux’s Time/Bank project–that may have some real impact in the culture at large? Or could it be possible that, even though the motivations and frustrations of OWS protestors are generally productive, this specific project is born out of misdirected bitterness toward an institution that has yet to accept you in the way that you want?
*Coincidentally, “Art for Everyone” is the same motto used by Jen Bekman of 20×200, who not only frequently sponsors Art Fag City but also was lauded by Johnson for raising almost a million dollars of venture capital for that business. So I’m a little confused, are exceedingly large amounts of money in the hands of people that control the art world bad or good? I guess it depends on the day.
Disclaimer: I “interned” at AFC in 2009.
By Karen Archey from Art 2.0
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In the winter of 1997, when Chelsea was still a young art district, an exhibition called "When Zeitgeist Becomes Form: German Fashion Photography, 1945-1995" arrived at the neighboring Pat Hearn and Morris-Healy galleries. It had a number of striking images, but what I remember best is the sheepish expression on Hearn’s face after I commented on what a departure the show was from her usual, stringently conceptual exhibitions. "It’s paying the bills," she said, with an apologetic shrug. "And it came from a foundation."
Things have changed enormously since then. Hearn, as fashion-conscious a woman as one could be, died in 2000, and the Morris-Healy Gallery is long gone. Today, galleries rent their spaces out for fashion shows without apology. Fashion photographers like Juergen Teller and Terry Richardson exhibit their commercial pictures with more personal work in blue-chip galleries, as Richard Avedon did before them, and artists like Philip-Lorca DiCorcia and Jack Pierson frequently do fashion spreads. And artists -- even those with the integrity of a Cindy Sherman -- appear as models in photographs advertising the clothes of high-end designers like Marc Jacobs and Comme des Garcons.
Naturally, artists appreciate good design, and art and fashion share a notable history. Did Salvador Dali not collaborate with Elsa Schiapparelli as far back as 1937? Did Yves Saint Laurent not crib from Mondrian? Last year, for a show at MoMA PS1, Rob Pruitt made a video with Marc Jacobs that perfectly melded performance, installation and fashion, and succeeded both as entertainment and commentary. And the Alexander McQueen retrospective at the Metropolitan Museum earlier this year was not just one of its most popular ever but also one of its finest.
I am among those who think of some designers as artists deserving of the name -- the late McQueen is one of them. And fashion has generated some of the most radical photographs in the history of the medium -- something that the International Center of Photography lately has celebrated.
But generally speaking, the more fashionable art becomes, the less challenging it gets. Its increasing coziness with the fashion world is only breeding new ways of branding, selling and presenting art, not making it.
Now, to coincide with the Fashion Week in New York, Kate Mulleavy and Laura Mulleavy, the California-based sisters who design kicky clothes under the name Rodarte, have produced an artwork in the form of a handsome book: Rodarte, Catherine Opie, Alec Soth. Though their book appears to be a collaboration, the two designers are credited as the authors. Designed by Li, Inc., it has white-on-white covers on which the book’s embossed white title and credits are barely legible. Like any self-respecting livre d’art, it comes in a limited edition of 2,000 and looks exactly like an artist’s book is supposed to look, which is a disappointment from a design team that goes to some lengths to reinvent fashion.
Inside are photographs by Catherine Opie and Alec Soth, two photographers with well-established fine art credentials, and a text insert by John Kelsey, a critic who is also one of the partners in the Reena Spaulings Gallery.
Opie is a documentary photographer best known for her portraits of a sexual underground that favors bondage, piercing, tattooing and other means of scarring the flesh. She also makes stunning landscape and architectural photographs, and is a formalist of the first rank.
Soth is another anthropologically attuned documentarian, whose photographs tend to speak of place in terms of class. His palette is not as rich as Opie’s when she works in color, though he can wrest a good deal of psychological detail from the appearance of a landscape or a figure native to it.
For the book, a monograph on the "world of Rodarte," as a press release puts it, Opie made portraits of some of her best models -- Jenny Shimizu, Idexa and Frankie Rayder, among others -- wearing knitted and macramaed Rodarte designs of leather, chiffon, wool and lace strips that bind, wrap, fall off or disappear on the body. All look difficult to put on without assistance and are definitely aimed at the connoisseur, not the shopaholic. Opie’s images are no less captivating than the portraits she makes when not on commission, but they lose a little something from their printing on matte paper rather than her customary super-glossy stock.
Soth’s pictures include pallid Polaroids and larger photographs of people and objects -- a torn rubber tire, a curving staircase, a depressing wooden cot with a cross on the pillow -- in unidentified California locations said to have inspired the Mulleavy’s designs, places like Berkeley, Death Valley, Big Sur and Santa Cruz. They are pictures of an attitude or a lifestyle; fashion doesn’t figure in them but they add a welcome measure of fresh air to this otherwise self-congratulatory tome.
Kelsey’s text is more of a let-down. Though he writes art criticism in a fairly straightforward way, here he strains for poetry so strenuously that it ends up reading as gibberish. Using the book’s design as a starting point, he overworks the idea of map in Braille that he equates to the supposedly uncharted territory that Rodarte navigates in fashion. "Rarely," he writes, "does fashion dream of. . . inventing bodies that go out into the desert of images to transform their blindness into fresh gestures."
In keeping with the rest of the book’s pretense to artiness, and his own fragile desert-blindness metaphor, parts of his text have been obliterated by censoring white-out. Some artists have used this canceling technique to pull new meaning from the printed word. In this case, it serves only as an interruption of a rambling narrative that probably could have used more of it.
In the end, Rodarte, Catherine Opie, Alec Soth is a hip picture book disguised as yet another branding opportunity begging art-world cachet.
If an artist were truly worthy of an entire museum dedicated to his work, it’d have to be one who could say with a straight face, “Let no man undervalue the implications of this work or its power for life; -- or for death, if it is misused.” Even better: “Until those symbols of obeisance to -- or illustration of -- vested social structures, from antiquity through Cubism and Surrealism to my then immediate contemporaries, were impaled and their sycophancy exposed on the blade of my identity.” And it would also help if his widow could assert in retrospect that by 1935 the artist “had arrived at a complete mastery of the recording of visual phenomena.”
Sure enough, the American abstract painter Clyfford Still -- who made those immodest statements and whose second wife, Patricia, uttered similar words on his behalf -- decreed that after his death the astonishing 94 percent of his oeuvre still in his hands (about 825 paintings and some 1,600 works on paper) would be bequeathed to an eponymous museum in the lucky metropolis -- the city would own the art -- which agreed to build it. Denver did the deal in 2005, and on Nov. 18, 2011, the $30 million, Brad-Cloepfil-designed Clyfford Still Museum opens in the heart of the Rockies.
From a hard-hat peek I got just last week, I’d say the building stands a chance at being the best piece of architecture among Denver’s three new museums -- Daniel Liebeskind’s overambitious Denver Art Museum, David Adjaye’s hyper-artworldish black-and-white Museum of Contemporary Art, and the Still. It’s more certain, however, to be grandiloquently appropriate for its content.
Like El Greco and Giacometti, Clyfford Still (1904-1980) is one of those artists who are liked by a lot of people for the same kind of reasons teenage girls like television programs about vampires: a spooky, romantic intimation of tolerably distanced tragedy. The late art historian Robert Rosenblum leapfrogged the histrionics and placed Still -- along with Mark Rothko and Barnett Newman -- among painters who dealt in the “abstract sublime,” i.e., Abstract Expressionism light on expressionist paint-flinging and heavy on the abstract, in order to get directly at whatever primal power runs the universe. Imagine the visual roar of Frederic Church’s Niagara Falls, only in non-figurative painting.
Time magazine called Still “the aloof abstractionist,” but aloofness with Still was more like a mania for solitude, both physical and psychological. He spent part of his early life doing farm work on the unforgiving plains of western Canada and, right from childhood, never wanted to be anything else than an artist. Eventually, perhaps the only artist. Looking back on his influential years teaching and painting in San Francisco, Still said, “My interest in the city, its artists, and history was zero.” In New York, Still opined that Jackson Pollock, Willem de Kooning and Franz Kline were “merely dealing with paint”; just about the time his reputation was peaking there, in 1961, he removed himself and his studio to rural Maryland.
Of course, Still dealt with paint, too. From his early work -- in which a chiseled, huge-handed, claymation-like “upright man” walks through gloomy, crop-failure landscapes, only to gradually fold in on himself and have the surrounding space, in turn, in on him -- to his archetypally gigantic, torn-wallpaper-like abstractions, nothing is more apparent than Still’s concern with paint itself. In 1938 (the same year he began to number his paintings instead of titling them), Still started using a palette knife as a tool co-equal with the brush. Over the years, he ground his own paint and flooded it with linseed oil to obtain wide variations in matte and gloss. In the late 1940s, Still introduced into his paintings areas of raw, unprimed canvas, which he sometimes dirtied up beforehand. And Still’s color -- he loathed the chromatic perfuminess of French painting -- is decidedly Germanic and harsh, reminding one much more of Grünewald and Beckmann than Matisse or Chagall.
But Still’s trademark is his graphic, the way he deals with shape. One of abstract painting’s perennial problems -- from Manierre Dawson and Kandinsky in the 1910s, through the Abstract Expressionists in the 1940s, to such contemporary painters as Ross Bleckner, Terry Winters and Amy Sillman -- is how to end a shape. Chopping off the end of a rectangle or completing a curve can seem abrupt, corny, even comical; a real fine artist should be able -- no? -- to have it both ways: to end the shape and not end it at the same time.
The most practical device to obtain this effect (which is somehow easier to employ on the sides of shapes rather than their tops and bottoms) is to fuzz the edges with varying degrees of brushiness and liquidity of paint. (Rothko and Helen Frankenthaler are the king and queen here.) Sooner or later though, the brushily fuzzed shape has to turn into something else, i.e., a neighboring shape. The next-most useful device is the one that Still used -- yeah, celebrated: irregular tapering. As the shape cascades down the canvas or erupts upward upon it, its edges slowly draw together with the inevitability of a railroad track diminishing in the distance. But Still -- in a much more masterly way than the tens of thousands of other painters who employ the same trick -- bumps the edges a little this way, then that, as they draw closer. At the peripheries and tail, the character of the shape’s edges coincide with the last dry gasp of a brushstroke or the final small swipe of a palette-knife blade.
The effect, in the most renowned Stills, is one of monumentality, profundity and tragedy. Gordon Smith, onetime director of the Albright-Knox Gallery in Buffalo (which has one of the largest museum collections of Stills), called Clyfford Still’s painting “a living mountain.” A cavern turned inside out might also describe his style: profile stalagmites gradually working their ways down, and counterpoint stalactites inching their ways up, over the eons. The feeling a great Clyfford Still elicits in its very form is the same one that Caspar David Friedrich merely illustrates -- a longing for the ineffable. The difference between them, however, is the flat modernist snap of Still’s paintings, the constant reminder that one is, after all, looking at what Maurice Denis famously described as “essentially a flat surface covered with colors assembled in a certain order.”
A hell of a lot of color, in fact, assembled on a hell of a lot of flat surface. One is never unaware that a work of art by Clyfford Still isn’t, absolutely nakedly, paint-on-canvas. And Still’s claim to have achieved his monumental sublime without the springboard of Cubism is plausible. At least there’s a lot less Cubism detectable in Still’s run-up to full abstraction than there is in the work of de Kooning, Pollock or Kline.
Clyfford Still taught a lot, from the 1930s on, in various corners of the country. Whereas the work of de Kooning (easily the most emulated of all the Abstract Expressionists) infected generation after generation of painters with an action-painting attitude -- ripping back into skeins of fleshy paint, semi-uncaring about buried charcoal revisions, slightly muted and somewhat chalky colors tearing or bubbling raucously into one another -- Still’s influence was sharp and direct. That deliberate-yet-spontaneous pat-pat of the palette knife was difficult for students he converted, e.g., Edward Dugmore, to ever jettison. And Still’s aura of certainty -- he wore suits and spats to his classes at the California School of Fine Arts, and he had his students arrange their painting tools in precisely the same configurations -- was a philosophical steroid for younger artists otherwise adrift in the existential tides of modernism.
Ah, but what about the “replicas”? As practically everyone knows by now, Clyfford Still often painted multiple versions -- albeit usually just two -- of the same painting. This fact often consternates modern art aficionados who hear it for the first time, because Still was, more or less, an Abstract Expressionist. That school of painting relies, as does jazz, on improvisation, which is theoretically not duplicable. But every style of painting, even Abstract Expressionism, has its repeatable schtick, and Still made no bones about the relative repeatability of his brand of abstraction.
Typically, though, Still wanted to have it both ways with his replicas. He said that 1950-A No. 2, for instance, “was painted within a month of the first version for my personal record. Making addition versions is an act I consider necessary when I believe the importance of the idea or breakthrough merits survival on more than one stretch of canvas.” On the other hand, Still said that 1957-D No 2, a painting he allowed to be exhibited in a museum in Basel, Switzerland (Still was very picky about where and how he showed), was “a valid and total individual expression” compared to its replica-predecessor, 1957-D No. 1, housed in the Albright-Knox.
Indeed, Still’s practice of replicating his paintings caused his famous ongoing feud with Barnett Newman (artists often feud not with their esthetic opposites, but with those closest to them in philosophy, stance and image) to boil over in the magazine ARTnews in 1965. He’d sent 1950-A No. 2 to the new Los Angeles County Museum of Art for its inaugural exhibition, “The New York School.” Newman said in an interview that Still’s painting had actually never been shown in New York and, therefore, didn’t belong in the exhibition. Patricia Still, the artist’s undaunted spokesperson, answered in a letter to the editor that No. 2 was fully the equal of No. 1, which couldn’t be shown because it had been “injured in successive travels.” Newman retorted that Still’s painting remained a “ringer” in the show. Mrs. Still answered that, then Annalee Newman (Barnett’s wife) answered that, and on went the dispute, via surrogates, for a pointless while.
The replica issue is still thorny enough, though, that the Clyfford Still Museum’s director, Dean Sobel, says the institution will probably mount an exhibition of such paired paintings sometime in the future, so that the mere-copy vs. individual-expression issue can be brought into the light. But the first show -- up for a long spell with no closing date announced as yet -- features 60 paintings and 50 works on paper running the gamut of Still’s career, with an emphasis on seldom- or never-seen work from the late 1920s and 1930s. (The CSM’s debut exhibition is being curated by Sobel and art historian David Anfam.) “This will actually be the first comprehensive Clyfford Still exhibition ever,” says Sobel. “So much of his work was retained by him and was heretofore unavailable.”* “When Still was alive,” Sobel continues, “he had a heavy hand in curating his museum exhibitions, so they reflected his personal preferences.” Unlike the monographic museums concerning the artists Andy Warhol and Georgia O’Keefe, Sobel says, the only art that will ever grace the CSM’s walls and floors (Still did make a little sculpture, a few examples of which survive) will be by the namesake artist.
Still once said that “this instrument, the limited means of paint on canvas, had a more important role than to glorify popes or kings or decorate the walls of rich men.” Not that Still never sold a painting to a rich man (he lived fairly well from the proceeds of his art), but overall, he trod his own curmudgeonly high road. And, to mix metaphors, he apparently played his cards right. Nineteen out of every 20 paintings Still ever painted will now begin to decorate the walls of his very own museum. That’s a pretty formidable blade for anyone’s identity to have.
* Four paintings by Still, ranging from a 1940 easel-sized canvas to an almost eight-foot by seven-feet 1976 painting, are scheduled to be sold for the city of Denver by Sotheby’s, with the proceeds going to beef up the CSM’s meager operating endowment. The absolute no-sale provision of both Still’s and his widow’s wills is being gotten around by the technicality that the works will be sold before they’ve actually entered into the museum collection. Such is why lawyers are paid the big bucks
PETER PLAGENS is a painter and an art critic.
©2011 Artnet Worldwide Corporation
Joseph Beuys, "Cosmos and Damian," 1974
In the year 1974, the United States of America was in crisis. We had lost an ill-conceived and disastrously mismanaged war in Vietnam, and were about to withdraw in defeat. Following the Yom Kippur war, the Arab oil-producing states initiated an embargo on oil shipments to the U.S., Western Europe, and Japan, in retaliation for their support of Israel, and this triggered an energy crisis in most of the industrialized world. Economic growth in the U.S. slowed to near zero.3 In August of 1974, Richard Nixon would become the first U.S. president to resign in disgrace, and his successor Gerald Ford promptly pardoned Nixon of all crimes committed while in office.
This is the time Joseph Beuys chose to make his first visit to the United States. Since 1970, he had been increasingly extending his theories of sculpture into the social realm, calling this new work “Social Sculpture.” Rather than mounting a conventional exhibition in the U.S., Beuys decided instead to arrange a series of lectures and discussions—in New York, Chicago, and Minneapolis—under the collective title “Energy Plan for the Western Man.” He arrived in New York from Düsseldorf on January 9, 1974. When he flew back into New York from Minneapolis on January 19, he performed a therapeutic operation on a striking new feature of the New York City skyline.
The World Trade Center had been completed only months before Beuys’s arrival in New York. It was the world’s largest commercial complex, including seven buildings and a shopping concourse, built at a cost of $750 million. Designed by Minoru Yamasaki and Emery Roth, it was capped off with two 110-story skyscrapers, the Twin Towers, which dwarfed every other building in New York (including the Empire State Building) and rose up out of Lower Manhattan like severed limbs. The towers immediately stood for (symbolized) globalized capital and American dominance in the world market; they were the symbolic pillars of the New World Order.
Beuys was fascinated by the Twin Towers. He must have seen them to great effect when he flew into John F. Kennedy Airport on January 19. In the terms of his theory of sculpture, the Twin Towers were classic crystalline forms: rigid, dry, and cold, like the basalt columns of 7000 Oaks. He immediately did several things in order to warm them up. He chose a 3-D postcard image of the towers that softened their sharp angles and tinted them yellow, making them look like two sticks of butter, a substance that responds to heat very differently than does crystal. The yellow also made the towers appear to be coated in sulphur, which in alchemy is the hot, dry, active seed of metals, the male principle, and is a Beuys staple, often used in his objects and actions. As Annie Suquet put it:
By drawing or marking a space with fat, Beuys subtracted it from the deadly “appropriating mastery” of the right angle: fat, as unstable matter, can shift from the liquid (warm) to the solid (cold) state and compensates, through its very reversibility, the motionless rigidity of architectures. To prepare the space of action with fat meant warming it up, inscribing it with the possibility of movement—of life.4
And then Beuys inscribed on the two towers the names “Cosmos” and “Damian” in blood red ink. Why?
Choosing these twin Arab saints, martyred by beheading, to adorn the World Trade Center Twin Towers, 27 years before these towers, in collapse, became the symbols of Christian/Muslim strife was prescient, certainly. At the time, Beuys must also have enjoyed the significance of tagging the Twin Towers—the new image of global Capital—with the names of the patron saints of physicians, who were known as the Anargyroi (“moneyless” or “the unmercenaries”) because they refused to accept money in exchange for their services. Was this action by Beuys a goof, a lark? Or was there something more going on? Klaus Staeck, who collaborated with Beuys on the Cosmos & Damian postcard (and some 300 other postcards, as well as many other multiples, from 1968 to Beuys’s death in 1986) has written that Beuys “discovered the cosmos in details and was at the same time a master of staging on a large scale. He could devote as much time to the form and contents of a postcard as to the installation of a large environment.”5 So what was Beuys trying to do with the Twin Towers image?
Cosmas6 & Damian were twin brothers, born in Arabia, and brought up as Christian by their mother. They studied medicine and became great itinerant healers, treating both humans and animals. Since they accepted no payment for their work, the Anargyroi’s charity helped to spread the faith. Under the Diocletian persecution, the twins were arrested and tortured, but refused to give up their beliefs. When the authorities tried to burn them at the stake, the flames turned away from Cosmas & Damian and leapt onto their tormentors. When they were stoned, the stones turned back upon the throwers and injured many. When they were crucified and shot with arrows, the same thing happened. They were finally beheaded, probably in 287 A.D., and their remains were buried in the Syrian city of Cyrrhus, where the Emperor Justinian I (527–565) restored the city in their honor. In gratitude for their healing of him from a dangerous illness, Justinian rebuilt and decorated their church at Constantinople, and it became a place of pilgrimage. Pope Felix IV (526–530) brought their relics to Rome and built a church for them in the Via dei Faro Imperiali, where magnificent mosaics from the sixth century detailing the lives of the twin saints continue to inspire.
From the fourth century on, the cult of Cosmas & Damian spread widely, both East and West. In the East, they appeared on countless icons, and some of these images themselves had the power to heal. Their skulls traveled from Rome to Bremen in the tenth century, from there to Bamberg, and finally, in 1581, to the Convent of the St. Claire Nuns in Madrid, where they remain. The cult has been especially resilient and long-lasting in Germany, where Beuys would have known about the saints from childhood.
The Tower. Rider Waite Smith tarot deck. <http://tinyurl.com/3b6dzp7>
Since Cosmas & Damian (or Cosimo and Damiano) were also the patron saints of the Medici family (hence, all those Cosimos), their images can be found throughout Italian Renaissance art. Their statues, designed by Michelangelo, flank that of the Madonna in the Medici Chapel in Florence, and one of the earliest decorations by Donatello depicts the saints in half relief, set above the doors of Brunelleschi’s Sacristy in the Church of San Lorenzo. Fra Angelico made a series of paintings recording the incidents of the saints’ lives for the church and monastery of San Marco in Florence, including the two predella panels now in the San Marco Museum and seven other panels now in Washington, Dublin, Munich, and Paris. Cosmas & Damian were often introduced, in various guises (usually dressed in the scarlet and ermine of physicians), into paintings by Fra Lippo Lippi and Botticelli, and they appear in Rogier van der Weyden’s “Medici Madonna,” painted in Rome and believed to be the first sacra conversazione in the history of Flemish painting. Both Titian and Tintoretto put them in pictures celebrating the recovery of Venice from the great plague of 1512.
A favorite subject for painters was Cosmas & Damian’s performance of the first surgical transplant, when they removed the diseased leg of a Italian man afflicted with cancer, and replaced it with the leg of a recently deceased Moor, thus accomplishing, as well, the first interracial and cross-cultural healing, putting a black man’s leg onto a white body, a Muslim leg onto a Christian body.
Beuys made another multiple in 1975, combining a color print depicting Cosmas & Damian transplanting the leg, with a sprig of Bleeding Heart (Dicentra spectabilis). This is the Asian species of Bleeding Heart, often cultivated in gardens in the Eastern part of the U.S. A similar plant, Dicentra cucullaria (called Dutchman’s Breeches)is native in the Eastern U.S., and is known to New Yorkers as the springtime flowers whitening the shady ledges of Central Park. The Iroquois used an ointment made from Dicentra cucullaria to make athletes’ legs more limber, and a leaf potion made from the plant has long been used in folk medicine for skin ailments, paralysis, and tremors. Beuys might also have been playing on the meaning of the plant’s Latin binomial, in relation to Cosmas & Damian: dicentra, “two-pronged,” plus spectabilis, “visible” or “worthy.”
Cosmas & Damian are later manifestations of the ancient Indo-European myth of divine twins, and especially the tradition of twins as magical healers. There are numerous Vedic hymns extolling their virtues. One relates the story of how the mare Vispata lost a foot in battle, and the Asvins (the name of the divine twins in the Rig Veda) appeared and replaced the stricken limb with an iron foot.7 The Rig Veda also says that the Asvins possessed two wooden poles that they rubbed together to make fire. Aniconic wooden pillars are among the most common symbols of the Dioscuri.
Additional evidence of the worship of wooden pillars has been found in Lower Saxony, where archaeologists have found the remains of thatched-roof structures dating from the eighth century A.D. which were so constructed that there were two wooden pillars beneath the gables. The only evident function of these poles is reinforcement of the ridge ends of the roof, and it is generally considered that their primary function was a religious one. When economic factors forced changes in the structure of these houses, these pillars disappeared; however, their religious function survived in items such as horses’ heads and swans adorning the gables of Saxon structures. Since these items are typical Dioscuric symbols, it seems highly probable that the pillars were originally idols honoring the Divine Twins.8
The church introduced Cosmas & Damian (and other pairs of saints, including Sebastian and Rochus, Johannes and Philippus, Protasius and Gervasius, etc.) into Northern Europe in the hope that they would displace surviving Dioscuric cults, since these saintly twins had already absorbed the Mediterranean Divine Twins traditions. But the truth is that powers such as this do not just disappear, but are reabsorbed and continually rejuvenated in different forms, as Beuys well knew.
Show Your Wound, Dicentra Spectabilis
Beuys’s aesthetic is embedded in the ideas of alignment, perpetuation, and addition. Rather than advocating invention, he believed it was the artist’s task to discover connections and expand upon them.—Pamela Kort9
When one speaks about the sociableness of man, one has to know that suffering and showing compassion are the actual prerequisites for becoming a social being.—Joseph Beuys10
Alberto Giacometti, "La Jambe," 1947. <http://tinyurl.com/3uqyrry>
Fra Angelico, “San Marco Altarpiece: Cosmas and Damian are to be Burnt Alive,” 1439 – 1442. National Gallery of Ireland, Dublin, Ireland. Tempera on panel, 46 × 36 cm. <http://tinyurl.com/3h96oox>
To Beuys, the Twin Towers of the World Trade Center were already a “death zone” in 1974: rigid, cold, dedicated to the accumulation of money and world domination under Capital.11 Was his inscription preemptive and tactical, to put the twin healers in place to heal the wounds to come, or apotropaic, as an attempt to ward them off? All of Beuys’s work can be seen on one level as therapeutic, an attempt to heal the wounds of the social body—both the external wounds inflicted on others and the internal wounds of complicity and denial. As the patron saints of the Medici, Cosmas & Damian were certainly called upon to heal all manner of spiritual maladies arising from the pursuit and exercise of power. Might they be enlisted again in the New World?
And it is difficult not to see the visual cues of Beuys’s second trip to the U.S., for “I Like America and America Likes Me,” as prophetic as well. We see Beuys on the airplane from Düsseldorf to New York, hooded like the detainees at Abu Ghraib and Guantanamo, on an “extraordinary rendition” flight. Klaus Staeck has reported that “After arriving at the John F. Kennedy airport in New York [Beuys] also had to endure the longest questioning. What was his profession? Sculptor. What kind of sculptor? Social Sculptor. What did that mean? What did he want in the U.S.A.? Give lectures. What kind of lectures? Where? What about? Did he intend to be active in politics? And so on.”12 Beuys was then wrapped up and transported in an emergency vehicle to his meeting with the despised other, the coyote, behind bars, like another detainee and suspected terrorist.
But rather than try to blow up the Twin Towers, as Al Qaeda did in 1993, or knock them down, as they did in 2001, Beuys made an attempt to heal the wound these towers stood for through symbolic action—image magic—homeopathically renaming the towers as great healers, famed for their cooperation and cross-cultural surgery. As he had said earlier, “When you cut your finger, bandage the knife.”
What if Bush & Blair (those other twins) had received Beuys’s message and taken it to heart, realizing that the Twin Towers were a wound from the beginning, that needed to be healed, not given “an eye for an eye,” and that their loss was an extraordinary opportunity to reach out to the world and bring it together, rather than to use our loss as a pretext for a previously (badly) planned military adventure in Iraq, and the dismantling of 60 years of human rights protections and international law, in the name of an incoherent “War on Terror”?
The writer Michael Brenson, who has called Beuys “the most prophetic voice” in the tradition of healing art,13 recently reminded me of Giacometti’s “The Leg,” from 1958, as a sculpture of relevance to the Twin Towers. This one amputated leg, improbably resolute in its verticality, while remaining as vulnerable as a twig, manages to be, as Jean Genet wrote, “at once anxious, tremulous, and serene.”14 Giacometti saw the mosaics of Saints Cosmas & Damian in the basilica in Rome in 1920, at age 19, and they immediately entered his pantheon of works—Tintoretto in Venice, Giotto in Padua, Cimabue in Assisi, an Egyptian portrait bust in Florence—that break down the barrier between art and life. It was right after this that Giacometti had his death epiphany, watching Pieter van Meurs die, in Madonna di Campiglio, and realizing once and for all how close death is to life. And I think of his 1958 leg, now, in relation to what’s happened after 9/11—of all the wounded soldiers coming home from Iraq and Afghanistan, and all the severed limbs of innocents, blown up by improvised explosive devices in the streets of Baghdad, every day, endlessly. Who will heal these wounds? This endless wound?
The oldest depiction of Cosmas & Damian we have is in a mosaic frieze in the Hagios Georgios, in Thessalonica, from the beginning of the fifth century. The two saints, in long white robes, stand in perfect symmetry, facing us, with their arms raised in blessing and supplication. They stand in front of a sumptuous palace, with twin towers rising behind them. The mosaic has been badly damaged, and a jagged wound cuts through the center of the composition, separating the twin saints and obscuring much of the frieze. One inscription is still legible. It reads “Damian, physician, month of September.”
1. John Berger, “Steps Towards a Small Theory of the Visible,” in The Shape of a Pocket (New York: Pantheon Books, 2001), pp. 21-22.
2. Joseph Beuys, in Jörg Schellmann and Bernd Klüser, “Questions to Joseph Beuys,” Part I, December 1970, in Joseph Beuys: Multiples, edited by Jörg Schellmann (Munich and New York: Edition Schellmann, 1997), p. 9.
3. At the same time, Chase Manhattan Bank reported that the net profits of 30 of the world’s largest oil companies increased by an average of 93 percent during the first half of 1974.
4. Annie Suquet, “Archaic Thought and Ritual in the Work of Joseph Beuys,” Res, 28, Autumn 1995. Published by the Getty Center for the History of Art and the Humanities in Santa Monica, California, and the Peabody Museum of Archaeology and Ethnology, Harvard University, p. 151.
5. Klaus Staeck, “Democracy Is Fun,” In Memoriam Joseph Beuys: Obituaries, Essays, Speeches, translated by Timothy Nevill(Bonn: Inter Nationes, 1986), p. 14.
6. Beuys’s spelling of “Cosmos” on the card is not out of order, since some say the name Cosmas comes from the Greek cosmos, in the sense of “order” or “form” (world). Others say the name Kosmas is Aramaic.
7. Donald Ward, The Divine Twins: An Indo-European Myth in Germanic Tradition (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1968), p. 18.
8. Ibid., p. 44-45.
9. Pamela Kort, “Beuys: The Profile of a Successor,” in Joseph Beuys: Mapping the Legacy, edited by Gene Ray (New York: D.A.P. and the John and Mable Ringling Museum of Art, 2001), p. 23.
10. Joseph Beuys, in conversation with Axel Hinrich Murken, March 1, 1973. In Axel Hinrich Murken, Joseph Beuys und die Medizen (Münster: F. Coppenrath Verlag, 1979), p. 149.
11. In the Tarot, the Tower represents man’s creations built on the foundations of false science, and it portends conflict, unforeseen catastrophe, and the fall of selfish ambition. P. D. Ouspensky begins his entry on the Tower with these words: “I saw a lofty tower extending from earth to heaven; its golden crowned summit reached beyond the clouds. All round it black night reigned and thunder rumbled. Suddenly the heavens opened, a thunder-clap shook the whole earth, and lightning struck the summit of the tower and felled the golden crown. A tongue of fire shot from heaven and the whole tower became filled with fire and smoke. Then I beheld the builders of the tower fall headlong to the ground.” P. D. Ouspensky, The Symbolism of the Tarot, translated by A. L. Pogossky(New York: Dover Publications, 1976), p. 48.
12. Klaus Staeck, Beuys in America, edited and photographed by Klaus Staeck and Gerhard Steidl (Heidelberg and Göttingen: Edition Staeck, and Steidl, 1997), p. 7.
13. Michael Brenson, “Healing in Time,” in Culture in Action (Seattle: Bay Press, 1995), p. 30.
14. Jean Genet, “The Studio of Alberto Giacometti,” in The Selected Writings of Jean Genet, edited by Edmund White (Hopewell, New Jersey: The Ecco Press, 1993), p. 318.
Print
A generation ago, she was an obscure footnote to the Surrealist movement. Today, she has become almost a cult figure. For the second time in 15 years, a Paris museum devotes a major exhibition to the eccentric photographer Claude Cahun.
She was born in 1894 as Lucy Schwob. Her assumed first name, which can be male or female, reveals her obsession with role playing. Openly lesbian, she liked to dress as a man, cut her hair short or even shave her head. She was lucky enough to find, at age 15, a soul mate who became her lifelong companion -- Suzanne Malherbe, who called herself Marcel Moore. So intimate was their collaboration that it’s often unclear whether a particular photo was shot by Cahun or, following her instructions, by her friend. By a curious twist of fate, the two became sisters when Cahun’s father later married Malherbe’s mother.
Until 1938, when they moved to Jersey, the largest of the Channel Islands, they lived in Montparnasse, the preferred quarter of the Paris intelligentsia, only a few blocks from another lesbian couple, Gertrude Stein and Alice B. Toklas. Most of the pictures on view at the Jeu de Paume are self- portraits (the previous show was at the Musee d’Art Moderne). Cahun never tired of disguising herself and adopting unconventional poses. She appears as a butterfly, a cross-legged Buddha or with dumbbells and the warning: "I am in training, don’t kiss me."
In 1932, she met Andre Breton, the guru of the Surrealists, and joined the movement. From that period date a number of photomontages, mixing heterogeneous objects such as twigs, bones, insects, feathers, gloves and shoes. In 1936, she explained her "theater of objects" in an essay titled "Prenez Garde aux Objets Domestiques" (Beware of Household Goods). It would be wrong to regard Cahun as a forerunner of the feminists who condemn household appliances (and the publicity for them) as instruments of female enslavement. She was too playful and ironic for any kind of dogmatism. One of her favorite items was a wooden mannequin appearing in various poses, probably inspired by the German artist Hans Bellmer, who frequently visited Paris. Bellmer’s fetish was a life-size doll of his own making that he photographed in twisted postures, suggesting scenes of rape and perverse sex. The occupation of Jersey by the Wehrmacht, in 1940, jolted Cahun from her Surrealist daydreams and brought her back to the real world. Unconcerned by her partly Jewish origins, which already put her life at risk, she joined the Resistance. In 1944, after she was interrogated by the Gestapo and her house was vandalized, Cahun tried to kill herself. Sentenced to death, she was saved by the end of the war. The Surrealist movement, on the other hand, didn’t survive World War II. Most of its leading lights had fled occupied France, and the movement never regained its prewar significance.
Cahun died in 1954, almost forgotten, so much so that the catalog of a 1985 exhibition at the Corcoran Gallery of Art in Washington, D.C., assumed that she had perished in a concentration camp. Malherbe died in 1972. They are buried together on Jersey.
On the eve of the AbEx master’s retrospective, his biographer (and our former critic) Mark Stevens chats with Jerry Saltz.
Jerry Saltz: Mark, the Willem de Kooning biography you and your wife, Annalyn Swan, wrote gave me the most vivid picture of the mid-century New York art world I’ve ever had. One thing that really struck me was the severe poverty these guys experienced--how it seemed to define their whole lives. De Kooning didn’t have a phone until the sixties; he had no bank account. Most of them achieved success later than almost any artistic generation ever. What did this poverty cost them?
Mark Stevens: Depends on the artist. Gorky found the poverty and lack of recognition soul-crushing. De Kooning suffered too, but he also knew how to be poor. He’d grown up rough, scraping by. He was resourceful. He used to say, "I’m not poor. I’m broke." I hate it when people make a romance of the garret, but the struggle probably made that generation--or at least the best artists of that generation--unusually serious and committed to their work. They had bet their lives.
J.S.: True. Though it really made some of them unbearable windbags. When I think about Barnett Newman blathering on about "the sublime" ...
M.S.: When no one’s listening, you fall in love with your own voice.
J.S.: When I came of age, de Kooning was always attacked as a sexist pig who slept with everybody and painted women to look like crazed gargoyles. Yet your book talks about how his wife, Elaine, slept around, and he caught her twice in bed with other men--once with his own art dealer, another time with his staunchest defender, Thomas Hess. For me, the paintings aren’t sexist; they’re sexy--luscious, fleshy, wild life.
M.S.: Who would you have him paint, Margaret Mead?
J.S.: Well, John Currin has painted Bea Arthur and Nadine Gordimer?...
M.S.: Calling de Kooning misogynist is simpleminded. It’s for the finger waggers. It caricatures a complicated sensibility. Sure, anger is there, but so is love, desperation, tenderness, joy, and hilarity. Sometimes crazily all at once. Sometimes in varying proportions. "Beauty makes me feel petulant," he once said. "I prefer the grotesque. It’s more joyous."
J.S.: Well, he also said, "I’m cunt-crazy!" to some cretin who pointed at a red gash in a crotch and asked him, "What’s that?"
M.S.: The hilarity--the scary hilarity--of some of his women paintings is underrated. In the fifties you saw women walking down the street in lipstick and heels wearing--around their necks!--dead foxes with scrunched-up heads and little paws. And by the way, the several very important women in de Kooning’s life with whom he had long-term relationships--and most of them were very bright--did not regret the time spent.
J.S.: Art critics can be such idiots. They loved de Kooning in the forties. Then he changed direction in 1950 and started painting women, and Clement Greenberg turned on him. They all claimed that de Kooning was violating the rules of artistic progress. Such crap!
M.S.: Greenberg was a great critic, but not one to let a painting get in the way of his ideas. He loved to play the part of the hanging judge, regretfully executing artists who fell afoul of serious taste.
J.S.: For me, de Kooning proves that the idea of the ever-forward march of modernism is a crock--that all art is contemporary art.
M.S.: Well, after 1950 de Kooning wasn’t interested in making a good painting, as that is conventionally understood. He said as much. He was interested in exploring, in seeing how far he could go with the paint, in finding new resolutions. He could have taken a nap, rested on his talent, seduced the critics, but he chose instead to make confrontational paintings that are like nothing else.
J.S.: I actually cried when I read the passage you and Annalyn wrote about the moment in 1953 when the young Robert Rauschenberg came to de Kooning’s studio and asked him for one of his drawings so he could erase it. One of the most pathos-filled moments in American art, to me, is when de Kooning says, "I know what you’re doing," and adds, "I want to give you one that I’ll miss." De Kooning works his whole life for a scrap of recognition; he gets it, and after 36 months he already knows his time is ending.
M.S.: That was tough, but he was tough. By the sixties, he was the artist you rejected in order to give your own art a generational edge. He became the necessary foil. He wasn’t happy about this, but he never tried to change with the times.
J.S.: Not only was everyone claiming that de Kooning was dead, they said painting was dead too! It’s like everyone wants to be an undertaker!
M.S.: In the seventies, he painted pictures entirely out of place in an intellectual and minimalist era-gorgeous, juicy things that seem to squirrel inside physical sensation. Robert Rauschenberg, by the way, never stopped admiring de Kooning. Same for Jasper Johns.
J.S.: Neither would exist as an artist without him. Of course, probably no twentieth-century American artist is as responsible for more terrible imitations. His work gave permission, but it’s this black hole that still gobbles up artists.
M.S.: There are exceptions, such as Joan Mitchell. But yes, that personal, romantic brushstroke seemed to encourage all kinds of narcissistic bombast from artists too eager to express themselves.
J.S.: As for the eighties, de Kooning may have been suffering from dementia, but I’d claim the very last thing to go in him is what was deepest: his incomparable sense of structure, composition, space, and surface. You coined the term "de Koonings with an asterisk" for these last works. What do you mean?
M.S.: Is a person with dementia still himself? What does it mean if an assistant lays out paints and leads him to the easel?
J.S.: Well, if you have an extra wrinkle in your brain, like de Kooning probably did, you may still be your painter-self.
M.S.: I think this issue is overblown. Until 1985, anyway, he was still pretty much in command. He wasn’t suffering from late-stage dementia. There’s something very moving about the way in the early eighties he begins to pare down, to shed the weight of all the other art he’s seen and made, like an enlightened old man giving away his possessions.
J.S.: I hope the survey shows how radical and challenging he is; how he never stopped pushing himself; how hard he fought his own demons to get to where he got; how willing he was to go back to hell to strike out in other directions. This show can tell us that while painting might not be in the center of our cultural discussion, it (or anything else) can only be pronounced "dead" when all the things it was invented to answer have been answered.
M.S.: De Kooning said flesh was the reason oil paint was invented-and who thinks we’ve answered all the questions of the flesh? Besides, he didn’t want painting to answer anything once and for all. That would amount to a death in the family. You had to keep moving. Be a slipping glimpser.
New York Magazine
Copyright (c) 2011, New York Media LLC.
Everything is changed at Dulwich Picture Gallery by the fact of Cy Twombly’s death. He died in Rome, aged 83, on 5 July, just a week after the current show at Dulwich opened (it closes on 25 September). Twombly and Poussin: Arcadian Painters is the exhibition’s title; it brings together a range of works roughly deriving from the artists’ shared feeling for poetry and mythology, Italian landscape, the life of the senses, the cult of Pan; and inevitably the mind now turns to the enigmatic tag so important to Poussin, ’Et in Arcadia ego’, meaning (art historians cut their teeth on this) that death is always present in the land of milk and honey, or maybe, imagined as spoken inconsolably by a body inside the tomb, ’I too - not death in the abstract but this warm hand - once touched spring water and the yielding earth.’ The urgent, despondent first version of this theme by Poussin is hung in the show’s room one, lent from Chatsworth. It sulks under discoloured varnish, but its theatrics - the naive scholarliness of the shepherd tracing the inscription - are irresistible. Death is displaced in the painting to a figure in the foreground whom at first we barely notice: a typical Poussin figure, half-asleep on the ground, white-haired and a little overweight: as if death, if we’re lucky, will be a long weary half-consciousness of water still flowing (the figure is a river god holding a jar whose contents spill through his fingers) and a shelf of grass.
Death is everywhere at Dulwich. The gallery is showing a short film by Tacita Dean of Twombly a year or so ago, puffy and slow and sly, fumbling round his studio in Virginia. The film moves (rather in the same way as Dean’s tremendous portrait of old Michael Hamburger fondling his apples) from a world of light and vitality, glimpsed through the studio blinds, towards a final montage of grey trees against a storm-warning sky. Halfway through the exhibition one turns off into Soane’s strange shrunken mausoleum for the gallery’s founders, and in the half-light among the sarcophagi is a Twombly sculpture: a black rose resting on a marble pebble resting on a box covered in faded velvet. The label on the box reads: THAT WHICH I SHOULD HAVE DONE, I DID NOT DO. Nicholas Cullinan, whose great idea this exhibition was, makes the connection to Poussin’s contrary (though not, as I hear it, self-vaunting) ’Je n’ai rien négligé.’ But the rose on the unlovely pebble also reminds me of Poussin’s habit of bringing back bits of wood, stones, moss, lumps of earth from his rambles by the Tiber; and the story of him reaching down among the ruins for a handful of marble and porphyry chips and saying to a tourist: ’Here’s ancient Rome.’ Both artists are humorists as well as death-haunted. (Richard Wollheim once said to me, apropos The Triumph of Pan, which is in the exhibition, that he did not feel Poussin ever managed the difficult business of laughter in paint. Maybe not: but he was good at showing human beings trying to be funny. He was interested in the proximity of a laugh to a rictus.) ’Witty and funereal’ was how Frank O’Hara described Twombly’s sculptures early on.
Poussin’s ’The Arcadian Shepherds’ (c.1628-29) <http://tinyurl.com/3ffw4ox>
Across from the main exhibition is a room given over for the next two months to the Duke of Rutland’s five paintings, done by Poussin for Cassiano dal Pozzo, of Ordination, Confirmation, Marriage, Extreme Unction and the Eucharist. Extreme Unction is a heart-wringing picture, and in the circumstances one gravitates towards it. Never has the green of the dying man’s bedclothes - like shot silk, like a snake’s skin, like a putrefying body - seemed so horrible and beautiful. But one looks at the painting with Twombly’s and Poussin’s conception of death and life in mind, so just as important as the horror is the power of life continuing. People have always been attracted, almost guiltily, to the show-stopping grace and carelessness of the serving woman over to the right in Extreme Unction, cribbed from a sarcophagus, waltzing through a doorway on her way to the kitchen. ’Et in morte ego,’ she might be saying. I have a job to do. And out past an opening behind the dying man’s head is a grey and silver abstract arcade - death as emptiness, measured recession from the world, light-filled eternity. Twombly (Cullinan is excellent on this in the catalogue) has a collage where he pastes a reproduction of one of Poussin’s drawings for Extreme Unction next to a flurry of dirty oil and chalk.[*] But the Poussin is cropped: the corpse and the moment of salvation are nowhere to be seen, and what registers is a grim processional of figures wringing their hands. One sees why Twombly has written over it the word ’Bacchanalia’. Poussin’s Triumph of Pan, reversing the thought (perhaps this is what Wollheim meant), is transparently a Triumph of Death. But this is the reason - this is what the whole concatenation of works and circumstances at Dulwich brings home - for the peculiar human thing called comedy.
I have to confess that Twombly’s comedy has most often in the past left me cold. (It seems awkward to say this, but the high pathos and irreverence of his life’s work seems to leave no room for obituary flannel.) I know the paintings by him at Dulwich that strike me as successes, and they are rather few. Primavera is one, especially extracted from its slightly overbearing series. Its combination of savage stroke-play and fruit-juice colour hits home. The Second Part of the Return from Parnassus is another. Aesthetic intensity in Twombly, to state the obvious, is bound up with haphazardness - the search for a moment at which the mind’s faltering, inattentiveness and whimsicality happen on a new order of things. One that escapes, so the painter hopes, from the normal post-Miró play of deskilling and encounters the silliness of the world. Of the world, not of painting. This seems to me Twombly’s vision of Arcadia: a condition very close to acedia, granted, but where the scruffiness and inconsequentiality of the mark-making seems to hum with the laziness of art, as opposed to the aleatory or the uncentred or the il n’y a pas de hors-texte - or any such big idea. Modesty like this is difficult: too much of the time in Twombly the big ideas - as stale as they are impeccable - seem to me in charge.
Twombly’s ’The Second Part of the Return from Parnassus’ <http://tinyurl.com/3neux2l>
My test of true, generative haphazardness, here as elsewhere, is whether the picture’s handwriting does anything to the normal art-ness of picture space: to the kind of entry into an alternative world the picture offers, and the intimation of that world’s shape, proximity and being-apart-from-us. Normal modern-art-space is unbounded and ungrounded, and once upon a time those qualities may have had some life - some danger - in them. Not any more: the shallows have become a paddling pool. It is as if viewers now go to visual art for reassurance about the endlessness (the harmlessness) of the ’virtual’, as once they went to it for a model of totality. The best I can do here is invite the visitor to Dulwich to look at Herodiad (1960) and compare it to Return from Parnassus (1961). I see winsome infinity in the former: perfectly genial, yet for me having nothing to do with the hard deathliness of its Mallarmé source. In Parnassus, by contrast, a true closeness and matter-of-factness of everything, nudging and spoiling the picture plane, do register, I feel, as the proximity - the embarrassment - of bodies. This is one of the few Twomblies where, for me, the sticky-sweet eroticism, all little cocks and bums and glops of semen, ends up driving the language towards a new apprehension of the scene. (Return from Parnassus, by the way, stems from a 17th-century mock-classical poem - Twombly was a great reader - about lads reeling home from a night on the town.)
Haphazardness in Twombly goes along with writing. He has had many literary admirers. His script can be magical: brilliant loopiness modulating into Alzheimerish scrawl. Writing was his way of getting poetry into pictures, which he very much wanted to do - especially poetry filled with elegiac regret. There is a stunning set of quotations from George Seferis (probably a bit garbled) running down the right-hand side of Estate in the show’s last room, copied from Three Secret Poems: ’Our snow white youth/that is infinite, and yet so brief’. And up above, repeated: ’say goodbye Catullus to the shores of Asia Minor.’ I think (it’s hard to be sure) that two lines lower down read ’forever exhausted/forever loving’, though the final word is almost indecipherable, as if overtaken by the exhaustion. All this is a clue to the meaning - the intentionality - of Twombly’s writing, which is always pretending, often irresistibly, to be palsied or childish. The loving and the barely readable seem to go together for him, as well as the loving and the terminally tired. Right at the bottom in Estate the writing gets larger and larger, more and more five-year-old; the final ’forever’ is enormous, plangent, long drawn out, like a parody of Mahler’s ’Ewig’ at the end of Das Lied von der Erde. A loving parody, of course.
I greatly admire Twombly’s Arcadian mood: by which I mean his wish to expose himself to the world as it happens, as it impinges on the passive senses. This is modernity’s only utopia. But it is horribly hard to get to - to get back to. All that careful cultivation of negative capability - all Rimbaud’s ’systematic derangement of the senses’, or Twombly’s systematic dispersal - can so easily turn out to be cultivation, only more so. Poussin, next to Twombly, seems an utter naif. Every painting of his, however learned and overplotted, has a moment in which the world intercepts him and sets him painting for dear life. The sole of the river god’s foot in Arcadia; the crumbling riverbank in The Nurture of Jupiter, and the drowned-white reflection of a cherub’s knee; the astonishing crevices and imperfections in The Triumph of David’s paving (floors in Poussin!); the mud on A Roman Road Š But the episodes are ubiquitous. Put a foot in a pair of sandals, just once in the too Parnassian crowd on Apollo and the Muses on Parnassus, and Poussin cannot help himself getting sidetracked by the pressure of a set of toes. The sidetrack is the road. I know that Twombly would have given his eye teeth to have the world crop up in his painting as it does all the time in Poussin. But no artist was more aware of - more honest about - his belatedness. Tacita Dean has this right. Say goodbye, Catullus.
Often classified as a second-generation Abstract Expressionist, Joan Mitchell owed as much to the School of Paris as she did to the New York School. A card-carrying member of the Eighth Street Club and a regular fixture at the Cedar Tavern, she considered her friend and lover Willem de Kooning her father and her Freudian analyst Edrita Fried her mother. But her abstract paintings are indebted more to the early abstractions of Kandinsky-perhaps even to the pastorals of Giorgione and Claude, and the atmospheric tumults of Turner, and the shimmering edges of Titian and Bonnard, and the engulfing light of Sainte-Chapelle-than to her friend Jackson Pollock, to whom she is often compared, and from whose work Mitchell said she experienced "enormous generosity and lyricism of feeling."
The New York School artists-breaking rules, breaking ground, and breaking ties with Europe-opened Mitchell’s eyes and gave her the language, the confidence, and the freedom to develop her voice; but it was the Europeans who taught her just how rich and poetic painting could be. When Mitchell swooned about art, she spoke not of Pollock, de Kooning, and Franz Kline, but of Cézanne, Matisse, and van Gogh. They represented the highest standard of painting, to which she emphatically aspired.
Mitchell, who was born in 1925 in Chicago and died in 1992 in Paris, was an expressionist and a romantic. But she considered herself to be an intuitive, rather than an "action" painter. She had an astonishing memory-a picture book storehouse of clear multi-sensory images collected from her childhood onward that, Mitchell said, "[frightfully] roosted inside me." She drew upon her recalled sensations and memories of places and people and transformed them to produce abstract paintings that are often landscape-informed. "I carry my landscapes around with me," Mitchell once told an interviewer. Her inspirations ranged from the Chicago sky over Lake Michigan viewed from her childhood balcony, to the expanse of the Brooklyn Bridge, to her feelings about Parisian light, to the sight of a linden tree, to a Billie Holiday tune. She kindled to the poems of her close friend Frank O’Hara.
Of all of the painters of the New York School, Mitchell is the most poetically rigorous. Like the sculptor David Smith, she is a metaphoric artist. What Mitchell wanted from her painting, she told the critic Irving Sandler, was "the feeling in a line of poetry which makes it different from a line of prose." "Music, poems, landscape, and dogs make me want to paint," she confided to a friend, "and painting is what allows me to survive." Mitchell, who loved to quote Eliot, Rilke, and Verlaine, was not using the term "poetry" loosely. She grew up in an extremely literary environment. Her mother, the poet, critic, and novelist Marion Strobel, had been an early force behind Poetry magazine. Thornton Wilder read Mitchell bedtime stories; and other guests at her childhood home included Eliot, Pound, Carl Sandburg, and William Carlos Williams. Later Mitchell, who was as involved with the New York School poets as she was with its artists, would illustrate-visually transcribe and interpret-the poems of James Schuyler, among others; and she would inspire her husband Barney Rosset to take over as publisher of Grove Press. A published young poet herself, she had wanted to pursue both painting and writing, but her father forced her, at the age of twelve, to choose one or the other.
You can sense in Mitchell’s comment about poetry a need to set herself apart from the New York School herd. Representational art (traditionally a form of poetry, not prose) has often been misunderstood to be merely mimetic, not metaphoric-to be concerned primarily with getting a "likeness." And abstraction is often mistakenly thought to be merely an act of paring down, simplifying, or emptying out-"abstracting" from-representational art’s recognizable features. A number of Abstract Expressionists, taking their cues from Surrealism, practiced abstraction as a process of reduction, distortion, and riffing off of "reality." Often, as in the work of Arshile Gorky, they put "abstract" forms in representational or three-dimensional stage-like spaces. Mitchell understood that abstraction in its purest form, separate from representational art, had its own spatial constructs and its own language.
Mitchell wanted her art to be expansive, not reductive. She wanted her paintings to stand alone as pure abstractions and to be as specific and redolent as the best poetry. She saw the trap in Abstract Expressionist gestural painting that could devolve from "action" painting into mere acting out. Although her paintings are abstract, their forms and their titles easily welcome associations with the natural world-even specific places, people, poems, plants, seasons, weather, times of day. But they do not require those references to be effective. Where Pollock’s titles only sometimes suggest the world outside of the canvas (the Gothic reach in "Cathedral," for example), Mitchell’s paintings-exacting yet elusive, never one thing-immerse us in the layered experience of particular qualities of place, whether actual or emotional. Releasing us into the realm of metaphor, her pictures, like poetry, bridge the painted and lived worlds.
Expressive and precise, Mitchell’s paintings can be as bruised and pounding as a hard rain; prickly and densely tangled; ecstatic, infernal, airy, and fragrant. She breaks the world down into elements and stirs them into a flurry of brushwork, which she keeps, miraculously, weighty yet aloft. Sometimes she throws us into a furnace or roots us in the soil; at other times she brings us fleeting memories or sensations in the palm of her hand. Physically frontal and calligraphic, her abstractions rekindle our experiences of nature without ever feeling illustrative or derivative. Still, their specificity can be startling. When Jaqui, the daughter of Mitchell’s psychoanalyst, first saw Mitchell’s twenty-six-foot-wide abstraction "Edrita Fried" (titled after Jaqui’s mother), she literally jumped, "because," she said, "it was as if my mother were standing thereŠ [the painting] was really my mother!"
Among the liberties Mitchell inherited from the Abstract Expressionists was an expansive and decidedly American approach to paint handling and scale-the painting as big, full-frontal assault. Art critic Harold Rosenberg called the New York School tactics "heroic"-an arena in which to act. But in Mitchell’s great symphonic works, especially the diptychs, triptychs, and quadriptychs that spread twenty feet wide or more, we experience not a sense of theatricality or of manifest destiny but, rather, of intimacy, specificity-expressed color by color, mark by mark. Her paintings are dynamic, immersive. But in Mitchell’s best pictures, as in those of van Gogh-in which the whole composition aligns as a force to be reckoned with-each brushstroke has an individuality and a delicacy of attack; each mark, although it contributes to the overall interwoven web, purposefully builds toward a larger metaphor. Most consistently among all of the Abstract Expressionists, Mitchell is closest to achieving that sense of organic vitality, of life-force-that sense of an organism made up of bone, muscle, tendon, fluid, spirit-evident in works of Asian calligraphic verse, in which, to paraphrase Confucius: if the calligrapher does not fully comprehend, internalize, and express the true substance of his poetry, his ignorance will leak through every brushstroke.
No matter how large Mitchell’s best paintings get, their immersion is as much about depth-as it is breadth-of feeling. Mitchell, elevating haiku to operatic proportions, took Pollock’s all-over swashbuckling bravura-with its explosive, hard-boiled, lyric intensity-and internalized and distilled it into something close, secretive, clear.
Typically, a great Mitchell painting or pastel will be evocative of a full range of nature and of nature’s dynamics: bouquets of flowers writ large; brambles and thickets; cloud and ocean; fire and ice; striving, falling, ascension. Amid her paintings’ often bruised and gritty haze and congestion, sharp color notes and blinding white cut through silvery smoke and darkness with the precision of a flashing blade. We may not always know exactly what Mitchell meant to convey-exactly where she hoped to take us within each picture-but bolstered by her titles, such as "Trees," "Sunflower," "Hemlock," "Chicago," "Evenings on Seventy-third Street," "Harm’s Way," "No Birds," "Faded Air I," and "Ici"-we always feel exactly and deeply what she succeeded in conveying.
Mitchell, unlike many of her cohorts, did not regard Abstract Expressionism as a break with European painting traditions. A break would imply that the New York School was a bridge to Rauschenberg, Pop Art, and Conceptualism, all of which she detested. Mitchell regarded Pop as "all money and no cathedral"; she accused a friend who owned two cats and a David Salle painting of animal abuse. And when, in 1988, her retrospective arrived at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art and had to be truncated due to lack of space, Mitchell gave the museum hell for having simultaneously granted an exhibition to Conceptual art-stars Doug and Mike Starn, whom she scorned as trendy and shallow. Mitchell understood that the New York School could be a fresh and decidedly American way back to European modernism and beyond. Although there were many reasons for her abandoning her home in America for one in France, which she did in her thirties, one of the strongest had to be her artistic connection to European painting-her artistic roots in French soil.
Patricia Albers’s book finally retires the legend of Mitchell as just another in a long line of gestural abstractionists, and as second-tier. Albers has conducted diligent research into nearly all areas of Mitchell’s life. She is especially good on Mitchell’s father, mother, childhood, and early adulthood; as well as on her connections with and use of poetry and remembered landscape as subject matter for her paintings. Albers’s mention of the connection between Kandinsky’s painting "Black Lines" (1913) and Mitchell is apt; and her discussion of Mitchell’s affinity with the Romantic poets-especially Wordsworth and his view of lyric poetry ("the spontaneous overflow of powerful feelings") in relationship to Mitchell’s approach to abstraction-is engaging and insightful.
Albers does certain things justice in Lady Painter, among them Mitchell’s girlhood in her affluent and cultured family. She conveys Mitchell’s strained relationship with her physically abusive and emotionally absent father, a Sunday painter from whom she got "Spartan courage," and who helped her to develop the fierce competitiveness that allowed her to become a champion at diving, tennis, figure skating, swimming, running, and horseback riding; and her mother, who instilled in her a love of literature. Albers gives us a strong sense of Mitchell’s early education at the progressive Francis W. Parker School, and of her relationships with her teachers. And she portrays Mitchell’s budding cruelty and loneliness, as well as her experience of synesthesia, with concision. Albers is also good on portraying Mitchell’s ambivalence about her wealth, snobbishness, station, and privilege, as well as her education. (Mitchell spent two years at Smith.) Romanticizing poverty by wearing tattered clothes, Mitchell would have her chauffeur drop her off blocks away from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago, so that fellow students would think she was a starving artist.
Unfortunately, Albers’s thoroughness tends to give equal weight to every guest she brings to the table. Her biography, the first on Mitchell, is fleshed out with anecdote after anecdote about her subject’s personality and personal history-her alcoholism, her emotional outbursts, her quarrels, her sexual relationships-which are interesting only up to a point, and quickly become tiresome. Mitchell’s personality was so strong, and her drinking so prodigious, her sex life so rampant, her belligerent and volatile personality so well known (John Ashbery observed that she turned simple conversations into something like "embracing a rosebush"), that Albers’s endless stories about her behavior begin to take on a life of their own.
We learn from Lady Painter that Mitchell, always on the offensive, was nicknamed "Bullethead" as a child; that she cursed like a sailor one minute and quoted Eliot the next; that she often sported black eyes and bruises from lovers’ quarrels; and that she brought her guests to tears or drove them, shamed and humiliated, running out the door-that is, when she wasn’t trying to bed them, male and (occasionally) female; married or not. "Joan would prove, by turns," Albers writes, "tough and judgmental, flirty and girlish, or bald and provocative Š If she was bored, she’d make trouble, sometimes with casual cruelty: ’So how’s your fucking mother and her fucking cancer?’ she inquired of one young man who had just flown to Paris to be with his dying parent." And Mitchell could be physically, as well as verbally, abusive. Once, while chatting in her studio with a Beaux-Arts professor, Mitchell resorted, Albers writes, to "beating him, hard, with her cane." As "he fled Š a low, demonic cackle rolled out of the depths of the atelier."
What starts out in Lady Painter as a seriousness biography about the development of a gifted artist eventually takes on the quality of a titillating tell-all. (Mitchell "wore holey underwear" and "peed in her cold-water sink and offered the same to visitors who asked for the john".) And Lady Painter often wanders off into banal introductory profiles of its colorful characters and synopses of artists and art movements that feel lifted directly from encyclopedias. Consider this canned description: "An internationally known and admired Italian Swiss artist who had worked in a Surrealist style during the 1920s and 1930s, Giacometti created emaciated walking figures that evoked existentialist solitude and portraits that recorded his struggles with the mysteries of appearance."
At nearly every turn, Albers highlights Mitchell the out-of-control wildfire at the expense of Mitchell the painter. Albers seems to have been seduced more by Mitchell’s personality than by her art, and while reading her book certain questions emerge. What, exactly, is the purpose of an artist’s biography, if not first and foremost to illuminate the art? When does a biography stop being personal and pertinent and become simply an invasion of privacy? And when does a biography, in the service of being provocative, leave its subject behind? Despite Picasso’s complicated personal relationships, I have yet to come across anything in John Richardson’s ongoing multi-volume A Life of Picasso that, through its explication of Picasso’s personality, did not further my understanding of Picasso the artist. In Lady Painter, by contrast, Mitchell the artist and Mitchell the person feel like separate, at-odd themes that never quite gel. Lady Painter does not rise to a larger argument or idea. Albers lacks something essential in her connection to Mitchell’s painting, if not in her actual understanding of the nature of abstraction itself. In the end, Albers’s biography leaves it to the reader to discover the magnificence and mystery of Mitchell’s art.
Lady Painter-the title refers to Mitchell’s oft-used sarcastic comment about her own work, "not bad for a lady painter"-is in some ways a case study of, and a psychological justification for, Mitchell’s behavior. According to Albers, Mitchell felt abandoned by her father, who made it clear to his daughter that he wanted a "John," not a "Joan." And when Mitchell moved to New York, she had to compete against the promiscuous, hard-drinking, sexist, macho boys’ club of the New York School, evident in examples such as Pollock’s standard greeting: "Wanna fuck?", Clement Greenberg’s remark to a New York gallery dealer that he shouldn’t represent any women because they would just get pregnant, and another dealer’s response to Mitchell’s overture for a show: "Gee, Joan, if you were only French and male and dead."
According to Albers, Mitchell wanted to erase the distinctions once and for all between male and female artists. In art, gender does not exist. Certainly Mitchell, along with a handful of other mid-century female artists, cracked what we now call the glass ceiling. But Albers’s hindsight argument and psychological explanations for Mitchell’s alcoholism and abusive personality can be taken only so far. Even if Albers’s armchair diagnosis is correct, none of her insights alter our experience of Mitchell’s paintings, which-as with those of van Gogh-feel completely sane and under control. Indeed, it is Mitchell’s sanity-evident in her studio practice-that is most apparent from her work.
Art and artists are usually handled poorly by Albers. "For Joan," Albers writes, "those very streets, the flux of gritty, steaming-manhole-cover, glaring-morning-light, dirty-brick, din-of-construction Manhattan, were inseparable from de Kooning, the man and the painter." Mitchell and her longtime lover, the painter Michael Goldberg, did not make art, but rather "together the two lived and breathed the urgent and dangerous adventure of painting." And art history references, both too specific and too vague, are forced into places they don’t belong. At one point we encounter Mitchell’s "fetchingly Braque-like stove;" and at another time her terrace is "Mondrian stark in winter." In an attempt to let us know just how difficult it is to make a good abstract painting, Albers delivers this insight: "Color Š is an exacting discipline: one cannot simply slap down one color after another and expect a painting to work." Lady Painter is peppered with self-consciously florid, adjective-laden descriptions of Mitchell’s paintings, including this typically vague portrayal: "’Ladybug’ not only vents the scintillating excitement of painting but also impeccably carries out [Mitchell’s] ideas about conjoining accuracy and intensity: rigorously built, it achieves the ineffable." Sometimes Albers portrays the act of painting as inseparable from those of fighting or sex. "Everything about [one series] of luscious chromatic canvases speaks of [Mitchell’s] all-consuming lover’s quarrel with oils."
Perhaps the book is at its best when Mitchell speaks for herself. "There is nothing like loneliness when a head doctor has made you less detached," Mitchell said. "You know what has hit you." While drawing along the Seine, she observed that "the barges squat with wonderful fat asses and [have] names like Charmine and Adolphine;" and she spoke of Paris-"less ghastly than the false glitter of East Hampton"-as effusing the "ghostly decadence of mistresses and lovers and sadness." Comparing cities, Mitchell said that New York was male and Paris was female; and that Paris’s bridges resembled dachshunds, while New York’s bridges looked like Great Danes. At mid-century, Mitchell described has-been Paris as "a small town-half the Cedar running on half its fuel." "Not much art here," she told Harold Rosenberg, "except the kind sauces are poured over."
Near the end of Lady Painter, Albers writes about a four-day visit from cultural critic Deborah Solomon in the summer of 1991 at Mitchell’s home in Vétheuil, a tiny, quiet village on the Seine about thirty-five miles northwest of Paris. In 1968, Mitchell settled permanently there on a two-acre property with a stone house on a hill, a view of the Seine, gardens, and a small house once owned by Monet. Solomon had come to write a New York Times Magazine profile on Mitchell, who, suffering from cancer, depression, insomnia, arthritis, and a second hip replacement surgery, was at the height of her career and nearing the end of her life.
In her essay, "In Monet’s Light," Solomon writes that immediately upon her arrival, she complimented a painting hanging in Mitchell’s hallway, "only to hear her blurt derisively: ’You’re trying to show me you can feel?’" And at one point during Solomon’s visit, "Mitchell," Albers writes, "feeling that Solomon didn’t ’get it,’ worked herself into a terrible state." According to Solomon, Mitchell snapped: "I’m still an Abstract Expressionist. And I still feel. I have feelings about water and sky. I like a view. I don’t like to look at a wall. My painting has nothing to do with what’s in and what’s not. I do it. I’m not hurting anyone. I’m not selling Palmolive soap. I’m not asking you to look at my art, and I’m not asking you to buy it. So leave me alone. Let me die in peace. I’m not a story."
She was right. In the end, Mitchell’s "story" is much less compelling than the work she gave us. Taking Mitchell at her word, we should allow the personality to "die in peace," and focus our attentions on the remarkable paintings.
Lance Esplund is an art critic and columnist for The Wall Street Journal.
Originally Published by The New Republic
In the Sainsbury wing of the National Gallery in London, the founding masterpieces of modern art are arrayed in all their splendour. The modern idea of art - our belief that artworks deserve to be taken seriously not as mere decorations or religious icons but unique displays of imagination and intellect - began in Italy in the Renaissance. The city that was most self-conscious about this new idea of art in the 15th century was Florence, and here in the Sainsbury wing you can see some of the glories of that place and time: the Pollaiuolo brothers’ Saint Sebastian, <http://tinyurl.com/3hesz7m> Fra Filippo Lippi’s Annunciation <http://tinyurl.com/3syb7ed> , Sandro Botticelli’s Venus and Mars <http://tinyurl.com/64c3vc2>.
These artists had something important in common, beyond the fact that they all worked in 15th-century Florence. All of them had close ties with one family: the Medici. The Annunciation panel by Lippi actually comes from the Medici palace, and Antonio del Pollaiuolo painted decorations for this domestic temple of the arts. Botticelli was a Medici protege, who portrays himself among the men of this famous lineage in his Adoration of the Magi in the Uffizi <http://tinyurl.com/4yxqwjr>.
The Medici are among the most renowned art patrons in history, and with good reason. But here’s a fascinating thing: they are also among the architects of the modern economy. They were the greatest bankers of their age, and the Medici bank pioneered crucial aspects of modern finance. They were "foreign exchange dealers" who enacted a "transfiguration of finance", points out the financial historian Niall Ferguson. When we look at Botticelli’s Venus, we are looking at money.
An exhibition at the Strozzi palace in Florence this autumn (24 September, to be precise), called Money and Beauty, will explore this very contemporary aspect of the Medici. This timely show proposes, according to the press release, to "show how the modern banking system developed in parallel with the most important artistic flowering in the history of the western world". It sounds riveting. But there is one aspect of the relationship between art and money in Medici Florence that is deeply enigmatic.
In the Sainsbury wing, you can easily see the fruits of Medici largesse. But what you cannot see, what in fact you rarely find in Florentine Renaissance art, is a brass-tacks portrayal of merchant life.
The Medici chose to have themselves portrayed not working at the bank, but in the robes of the Magi. They commissioned paintings not of the marketplace, but of mythology. There is a glaring contrast between the art of Renaissance Florence, with its passionate recreations of classical myth and history, and the raw realism of northern European portraits of businessmen. Hans Holbein’s portrait of a merchant surrounded by the instruments of his trade <http://tinyurl.com/3jcnp6l> has no equivalent in the art associated with the Medici family. Why is that?
An answer may lie in the history of the family itself. The Medici bank was brought to the forefront of the European economy by Giovanni di Bicci de’ Medici, who died in 1429. His son Cosimo was the richest man in Europe. Yet Cosimo did not earn his honorary title "Father of his country" through financial brilliance. He was given it because he used the wealth of the family business to reshape Florentine politics. That obsession with politics grew until the most powerful and charismatic Medici of all, Lorenzo the Magnificent, let the bank decay while he concentrated on running the Florentine state.
It’s a strange irony that Renaissance Florence was built by capitalist innovation, but went out of its way to make money invisible in its art. Politics, not money, dominated this city’s culture. The ultimate beneficiary of Medici patronage was Michelangelo, who shared both the Medici instinct for making money and the Medici determination to ignore it. His Moses<http://tinyurl.com/3pr2wso> really has loftier things than money in mind.
The absence of financial imagery in Florentine Renaissance art may even explain why the city went into cultural decline after 1529. The later Medicis completed the change from merchants to aristocrats and even royals. As they made themselves Dukes of Tuscany and intermarried with European royal families, the art and architecture of Florence gradually lost its edge. The moral might be that if money makes art, snobbish disdain for money can kill it.
Originally Published by The Guardian
It’s the Renaissance, stupid.
The economy is not what ails us today. No, what ails Americans is what Leonardo da Vinci, Michelangelo and their artistic spawn have wrought in the culture, starting 500 years ago. The Renaissance has dragged us all down.
Tea party queen and Republican presidential candidate Michele Bachmann <http://tinyurl.com/3ss9gk5> is convinced that America is sinking into tyranny. Why? In a remarkable profile of the candidate appearing in the Aug. 15 issue of the New Yorker magazine, the artistic flowering of the Italian Renaissance takes a beating for having done away with the god-fearing Dark Ages.
Bachmann "belongs to a generation of Christian conservatives whose views have been shaped by institutions, tracts, and leaders not commonly known to secular Americans, or even to most Christians," writes Ryan Lizza, who spent four days on the campaign trail talking with the candidate and her husband. He chronicles Bachmann’s enthusiasm for the extreme evangelical teachings of the late Presbyterian Pastor Francis Schaeffer, commonly regarded as having sparked the 1970s rise of the Christian Right. Schaeffer loved visiting Florence, Italy, where his idea of Renaissance ruin is on full display.
Bachmann also adores Schaeffer follower Nancy Pearcey, a prominent creationist whose recent book is "Saving Leonardo: A Call to Resist the Secular Assault on Mind, Morals, and Meaning." That’s Leonardo as in "da Vinci," whose famous drawing of "Vitruvian Man" shows a human being inscribed within a perfect circle and a perfect square. The artist made the ungodly error of putting humanity at the center of time and space.
Not that Pearcey wants you to be mad at Leo, though -- a political error in the culture wars that she has said conservative Christians have repeatedly made over the last 30-plus years. Like Schaeffer, Pearcey instead counsels hearty admiration for creative skill, coupled with deep compassion for misguided artistic conceptions.
Hate the art, in other words, not the artist.
This art-historical drivel first saw print in Pearcey’s 2004 book, "Total Truth: Liberating Christianity From Its Cultural Captivity." The title is plucked from Schaeffer, who, Lizza writes in the New Yorker, "instructed his followers [that] the Bible was not just a book but ’the total truth.’" The cover of Pearcey’s kooky cultural treatise features a gay reproduction of Vincent van Gogh’s 1888 painting, "Sower With Setting Sun." Van Gogh, himself a failed preacher, turned to art as an ecstatic secular expression of spiritual joy.
Pearcey’s book lauds Schaeffer’s empathy for artists who are "caught in the trap of false and harmful worldviews" -- specifically, those that have trickled down from wicked Renaissance humanism. "As the medieval period merged into the Renaissance (beginning roughly in the 1300s)," she wrote, "a drumbeat began to sound for the complete emancipation of reason from revelation -- a crescendo that burst into full force in the Enlightenment (beginning in the 1700s)."
Darn that Enlightenment! Next thing you know it will be birthing truly dangerous ideas, like secular democracy.
Bachmann and her husband, Marcus, first got on board Schaeffer’s crazy train in 1977, when they watched -- and were wowed by -- the evangelist’s 10-part film series, "How Should We Then Live?" (Apparently conversational English is also Satan’s work.) Schaeffer’s son Frank, who produced the film series before later repudiating his father’s evangelical labors in his own 2007 book, "Crazy for God," described the recurring cinematic set-up: "Dad would stand in front of great artworks, from Michelangelo’s ’David’ to Marcel Duchamp’s ’[Nude] Descending a Staircase,’ and proclaim our answers to modern culture."
Protestant Schaeffer laid considerable blame for humanist developments at the feet of Michelangelo, the Renaissance sculptor (and -- ahem -- devout Catholic). His close-up camera hid David’s nudity, lest it offend tender, Bachmannesque sensibilities. The future King David’s mortal victory over Goliath’s paganism was a worthwhile subject, since it prefigured Christian triumph. But the elder Schaeffer couldn’t imagine that Christ’s dual nature -- as both deity and human being -- could be embodied by fusing the exquisite sculpture’s unearthly perfection with forthright nakedness.
"The first five installments of the [film] series are something of an art-history and philosophy course," Lizza writes. "The iconic image from the early episodes is Schaeffer standing on a raised platform next to Michelangelo’s ’David’" -- the raised platform allowing for the nudity to be cut out of the frame, when it’s not bathed in dark shadow -- "and explaining why, for all its beauty, Renaissance art represented a dangerous turn away from a God-centered world and toward a blasphemous, human-centered world."
Of course, American culture has had trouble with art (not to mention nudity) ever since the Pilgrims bumped into Plymouth Rock in 1620. The Pilgrims arrived carrying "the Word," while all those graven images essential to the visual arts were seductive examples of the devil’s work.
How should we then live? Francis Schaeffer died in 1984 -- a year that is surely coincidental. But Bachmann, an ideologue of the Christian-conservative movement, can’t get enough of the art-junk he peddled. Lizza quotes her as having called Pearcey’s earlier book "wonderful," while she and Marcus find the late filmmaker to be "a tremendous philosopher."
I’m guessing that Michelangelo and Leonardo would disagree. (Incidentally, the Bachmanns’ Christian counseling center in Minnesota would surely recommend sexual-orientation conversion therapy for both artists.) As the saying goes: Hate the philosophy, but not the philosopher. Video "How Should We Then Live 3-3" <http://tinyurl.com/3jffun4>
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Greek businessman Dakis Joannou was posing for a portrait by artist George Condo when he noticed a tuft of hair sprouting from the side of his head on the canvas. He interrupted the painter.
"I’m not worried about the teeth sticking out of my cheek, but I am worried about the hair sticking out of my face," Mr. Joannou told him.
With a few brush strokes, the artist, who is known for painting surreal faces with screwball features, limited the hair to traditional spots just over the ears of the 71-year-old collector. The work by Mr. Condo, whose canvases typically command $450,000, now hangs in a privileged spot by a fireplace in the living room of Mr. Joannou’s Athens home. It’s one of three portraits Mr. Condo painted of the collector, who appears alternately with lime-green ears, a bulbous blue clown nose and an endless chin. Mr. Joannou owns them all.
The portrait has long been a symbol of the relationship between an artist and a patron. Throughout most of art history, commissioned portraits ennobled their subjects--showing them surrounded by symbols of wealth and virtue, perched regally on a steed or even transported into a New Testament scene. The artist, who depended on the patron for money and support, was typically happy to oblige any demands.
Today, portraits may be deliberately ugly, filled with palpable angst or defiantly abstract. The works are more about scouring the psychological depths or playing with the concept of portraiture than about illustrating a patron’s smooth likeness.
These portraits reflect a shift in the power dynamic between collectors and artists. Contemporary art stars are wealthy and famous in their own right. Many of them view commissions as favors, not a necessary part of business. And collectors are willing to play by portraitists’ rules for a canvas they think will reveal something profound about them--or demonstrate their special relationship with a sought-after artist.
Private art adviser Kim Heirston says collectors who saw Julian Schnabel’s signature images of distorted faces made from broken dishes at his current exhibition in Venice immediately wanted to see themselves in fragments, too. "I had about four clients I walked through that show say, ’Do you think Julian would do a portrait of me?’" she says.
Fashion model Christina Kruse recently asked New York-based Israeli artist Nir Hod to paint her 5-year-old son, August. Mr. Hod, whose works typically sell for $30,000, rendered the blond child with a sneer, cocked eyebrows and a lit cigarette. Ms. Kruse loves the work. "He did manage to get August spot on," she says, adding that her son sometimes sits with the bearing of a 50-year-old man. August is less fond of the painting, which hangs in his bedroom at his father’s house in New York, but his mother says that’s because the boy prefers bright colors.
Patrons aren’t always pleased with an artist’s singular vision. "You have to understand that at least 50% of the people who have portraits done of themselves don’t like the portrait," says Peter M. Brant, the newsprint mogul and art collector who has bought or commissioned several portraits of himself and his family.
The resale market for commissions, which often cost more than an artist’s other works, can be limited in the short term. Buyers may not be interested in owning a piece so plainly tied to another collector. With time, however, a portrait can gain significantly in value if demand for the artist grows. "The people who realize that tremendous gain are the grandchildren or great grandchildren," Mr. Brant says.
The market for works by Cuban-born American artist Felix Gonzalez-Torres has thrived in the years since his 1996 death. Last year, Mr. Gonzalez-Torres’s 1992 piece "Untitled" (Portrait of Marcel Brient) sold for $4.6 million, a record for the artist at auction. The conceptual representation of French collector Marcel Brient is a pile of candy in blue wrapping printed with the word "Passion."
Mr. Brant and his family have had mixed experiences with portraiture. Artist Maurizio Cattelan visited Mr. Brant’s house several years ago and proposed making a bust of Mr. Brant’s wife, fashion model Stephanie Seymour. The result: a work depicting her nude torso thrusting forward like a figurehead on a ship. Mr. Brant, who recalls paying $600,000 for the 2003 piece, says his wife was less than thrilled with the image. "It’s like any woman that’s 50, or a woman that’s 70, doesn’t like a portrait of herself because she remembers herself when she was in her 30s," he says. Mr. Brant says he liked it: "As a work of art, it was an ’A.’ " The bust, which Mr. Cattelan says was inspired by the idea of a wall-mounted trophy, was part of a limited edition. One sold at auction last year for $2.4 million.
When Mr. Brant’s mother, Lily Brant, posed for a portrait by Mr. Schnabel, she put on jewelry, got her hair done and trekked out to Long Island to sit for the piece, which was commissioned for about $150,000, Mr. Brant recalls. Mrs. Brant disliked the end result, saying the 1998 painting made her look too stern.
Mr. Schnabel was initially hesitant to tinker with the work. "I didn’t want to change it because it was perfect," the artist says. He soon reconsidered: "It’s somebody’s mother. I said, ’Oh, I can fix that.’" A couple of days later, he added a large block of white paint that obscured the top half of Mrs. Brant’s face, a flourish he has used in similar ways in other works. Though Mr. Brant calls the painting "masterful," his mother covered it with a sheet and left it in her garage in Greenwich, Conn. The piece, which Mr. Schnabel is displaying in his Venice show, is now starting to grow on her. When the work returns from Venice, Mr. Brant says his 91-year-old mother will hang it in her house.
Mr. Brant got a surprise when he commissioned the Swiss contemporary artist Urs Fischer for a show at The Brant Foundation Art Study Center in Greenwich. Mr. Fischer created two candle replicas of Mr. Brant with wicks atop the heads. The wax sculptures, for which Mr. Brant recalls paying about $400,000 each, burned during the show last year, brains first. "I think it’s an incredible work," Mr. Brant says, adding that a candle-maker in Switzerland has since remade the works for him for several thousand dollars each.
When a buyer is unhappy with a commission, the relationship between collector and artist can become complicated. Contemporary art collector Michael Hort so dislikes a portrait of himself and his wife Susan--he thinks it makes her face look stiff--that he’s banished it to a bathroom in their home in Monmouth Beach, N.J. He has tried to temper his disappointment around the artist, whom he declines to name. "One of the problems is for the artist, it’s part of their life, their soul," he says. "I don’t like to criticize something like that."
Artists who accept commissions often set ground rules so that their creative freedom--and relationships with collectors--won’t be compromised. Painter Alex Katz, known for large-scale faces in cropped close-ups, will paint a commission for about $700,000, twice his regular price, and only for buyers who already own two of his big paintings. "I do it almost as a favor," he says.
Jacob Collins, who paints contemplative classical images, insists that a sitter pose for 60 hours over several visits, and he won’t agree to work off a photograph. The artist charges roughly $75,000 to $100,000 for a commissioned work, more than twice the price of a non-commission.
Chuck Close, whose massive photo-based portraits sell for millions, says he is constantly approached by collectors who want him to paint them, but he always turns them down. If he agreed to one commission, he’d have to agree to dozens, he says, adding that friend and former super agent Michael Ovitz asks for a portrait every year to no avail. "I keep teasing him, ’Well, maybe next year,’ " Mr. Close says. Mr. Ovitz says his quest started on his 40th birthday, when as a joke Mr. Close sent a photo of himself at his easel with a picture of Mr. Ovitz on the canvas. "I’ve always wanted one," the 64-year-old collector says.
For many collectors, one of the perks of sitting for a portrait is a feeling of connection with a favorite artist. Filmmaker Angela Ismailos bid at a 2008 benefit gala for a chance to pose for David Salle, who painted her with her head lying decapitated by her side and a flower on her neck. The 38-year-old collector, who spent more than $150,000 for the work, says she doesn’t try to control her image in portraits. She considers the piece as a kind of collaboration. "I wouldn’t use the word ’commission’ anymore," she says. "I love them to do what they feel like doing." She says several artists have painted her because they consider her a friend; some sold her the works, others gave her the portraits as gifts.
New York collector Dianne Wallace appears as a human locked inside a house cat in a work by the German painter Martin Eder. "In the cat’s face, you can more or less make me out," Ms. Wallace says. She believes such portraits help knit her into an artist’s oeuvre: "I feel as if I’m playing a part in art history." Ms. Wallace, who also appears in a painting by John Currin with a lobster and dead fish near her face, as well as a broken-plate portrait by Mr. Schnabel, declined to say whether the works were commissions or gifts.
Demand for portraits is high, says Will Cotton, whose works often feature women in candy-coated headgear and range from $65,000 to $250,000. He says he now receives six to eight portrait requests a year, compared to none five years ago. Amy Phelan, a 40-year-old collector, tucked herself into a dress like a silver cupcake foil to pose for him in New York last year. Delighted with the result, she has placed the work in her husband’s office at their home in Aspen, Colo.
Some artists are pushing portraiture in new directions. Spanish artist Inigo Manglano-Ovalle has created colorful works based on a sitter’s DNA chart. Fred Tomaselli’s "chemical celestial portraits" are based on the subject’s astrological sign and lifetime drug history.
In 2009, Mr. Tomaselli donated a commission for a benefit auction, where it sold for $17,000. It went to Gerrit Lansing, a Greenwich, Conn., collector who was battling liver cancer. The resulting work is dotted with names of medications from Mr. Lansing’s treatment regimen, such as Interferon and Codeine. Mr. Lansing died before the work was completed; the picture was given to Mr. Lansing’s widow, Sydie, who prizes it. "It will be with me forever," she says.
Mr. Joannou enjoys living with his twisted George Condo pieces, whose prices he refuses to disclose. People always recognize him when they see the portraits, which feature him next to Mr. Cattelan, the artist. He says he prefers them to a traditional, stately depiction. "I wouldn’t have a portrait like that," he says. "I’m not the king of England."
Sooner or later, everyone who writes about John Marin gets around to mentioning the 1948 Look magazine poll of 68 critics, curators and museum directors who, when asked to name America’s greatest living painters, put him at the top of the list. Five years later, the headline of Mr. Marin’s New York Times obituary described him as "Artist Considered by Many as ’America’s No. 1 Master.’ " No less a highbrow than the art critic Clement Greenberg concurred, predicting that Mr. Marin and Jackson Pollock would "compete for recognition as the greatest American painter of the 20th century."
So why does Mr. Marin so often get the "John Who?" treatment? For it’s better than even money that unless you happen to be a connoisseur of American modernism or an art-history major, his name is unknown to you. It’s been 21 years since a major U.S. museum last put together a full-scale retrospective of his work. New York’s Museum of Modern Art owns 25 Marins--but not a single one of them is currently on view.
To be sure, Mr. Marin has his share of passionate admirers, and important Marin exhibitions have just been simultaneously mounted by two medium-size U.S. museums, Maine’s Portland Museum of Art (through Oct. 10) and Atlanta’s High Museum of Art (through Sept. 11). The catalogs of both shows are highly impressive pieces of work, and between them they make a powerful case for taking a second look at Mr. Marin--but their authors are quick to admit that such a look is now necessary, since Mr. Marin has in recent years fallen into something not far removed from obscurity. Indeed, the foreword to Portland’s "John Marin: Modernism at Midcentury" catalog goes so far as to describe him as "the missing man among the pantheon of great American modernists."
As I strolled through the Portland show the other day, I found myself wondering yet again how so explosively vital a painter could have dropped off the scope. A bold colorist who viewed the American landscape through the kaleidoscopic prism of cubism, Mr. Marin conveyed with identical precision and sympathy the nervous angularity of lower Manhattan ("City Movement," 1940) and the ceaseless turmoil of the waves that break on the coast of Maine ("Outer Sand Island, Maine," 1936). Like all prolific artists, he was uneven in inspiration, but having seen dozens of his watercolors--he painted some 2,500 of them--I’m struck by how many are not just effective but indelibly memorable.
Why, then, is Mr. Marin so underappreciated by the art-world elite? The standard explanation is that even though he marched to the edge of abstraction, it seems never to have occurred to him to turn his back on the visible world. "The sea that I paint may not be the sea," he wrote, "but it is a sea--not an abstraction." After the rise of Abstract Expressionism in the 1940s, his deep-rooted belief in representation came to be seen as old-fashioned, even quaint.
But there may be a deeper reason. Americans have long had an equivocal relationship with their own art. At the turn of the 20th century, when Mr. Marin was learning his craft, it was taken for granted that the only way for American artists to do worthy work was to imitate European art. By the time of his death in 1953, homegrown modernism was coming into its own, but postwar connoisseurs were increasingly suspicious of distinctively American artists who failed to partake of the "international style" of art, be it in architecture, abstract painting, classical music or anything else. To this day there is a noticeable reluctance on the part of native-born art lovers to admit that a quintessentially American composer like Aaron Copland might actually be great, or that a stage actor need not have an English accent to perform the plays of Shakespeare or Stoppard. Could it be that the reputation of Mr. Marin, whose subject matter is as American as his briskly improvisational brushwork, suffers from our nagging sense of cultural inferiority?
Whatever the reason, Mr. Marin’s stock appears at long last to be on the rise. In October the Metropolitan Museum will be showing a good-size chunk of its Marin holdings as part of "Stieglitz and His Artists: Matisse to O’Keeffe," an exhibition of works from Alfred Stieglitz’s personal art collection that were given to the Met in 1949. Alas, the press release for that show makes only passing mention of Mr. Marin, but at least it will be possible once again for New Yorkers to see enough of his paintings to know how very, very good he was.
I suspect that Mr. Marin would have appreciated the compliment of being exhibited in bulk at the Met six decades after his death. In 1936 he endearingly admitted to a friend that after a visit to that museum’s 15th-century Flemish galleries, he asked himself, "Marin, you are a mighty fine fellow, but do you know your job as well as those old boys did, and will your stuff last as long?" He did--and it will.
--Mr. Teachout, the Journal’s drama critic, writes "Sightings" every other Friday. He is the author of "Pops: A Life of Louis Armstrong." Write to him at tteachout@wsj.com.
The love affair between the intellectuals and the trashmeisters, now more than a hundred years old, has just overtaken the man who is by some measures the most popular painter in America. Thomas Kinkade: The Artist in the Mall is an essay collection that exudes a creepy fascination. While a number of the contributors manage to provide level-headed assessments of Kinkade’s place in the American imagination, I am not remotely convinced that such attention should be lavished on Kinkade’s sugar-drenched Middle America, with its frosted gingerbread domiciles, dew-kissed old-fashioned small-town Main Streets, and farmlands so fertile they look as if they’re on steroids. Alexis L. Boylan, who edited the book, would no doubt protest that the size of Kinkade’s reputation justifies the attention on sociological or cultural grounds, pure and simple. I know that many intellectuals believe we overlook middlebrow tastes at our own risk. But there is a large dose of reverse snobbery threaded through this collection. More than a generation after Pop Art became holy writ, it is rather tiresome to be announcing yet again that we live in a democracy where one person’s treasure is another person’s trailer trash, and that their masterworks are not necessarily inferior to the Picasso’s and Matisse’s in our museums. Many of the contributors to Boylan’s anthology want to devour every last bite of their middlebrow cake, but only after each tasty morsel has been skewered on a highbrow fork. The problem is not that they respect Kincade anthropologically, it is that they respect him as an artist.
Kinkade is a California boy, born in Sacramento in 1958 and educated at the University of California at Berkeley. He refers to himself as "Thomas Kinkade, Painter of Light" (the term is trademarked). Through sales in Kinkade Signature Galleries in malls and by mail order, he has (or at least claims to have) turned himself into America’s most collected living artist, with work of one sort or another in one out of every twenty homes. Although reproductions of Kinkade’s Prince of Peace, a portrait of Jesus, are said to be a big seller, most of his works are landscapes and cityscapes. His subjects are isolated cottages, romantic lighthouses, snowcapped mountains, cozy small town residential neighborhoods, bustling city streets, and inviting foreign vacation spots. The paintings are overheated and underpowered, the color simultaneously shrill and soggy. Everything-houses, trees, clouds-looks as if it’s made of cotton candy.
Grappling with a man whose politics are right-wing and who is unabashedly Born Again is not necessarily easy going for the liberal-spirited or politically correct academics who have contributed to this volume. Some may pride themselves on having taken on a tough subject, but with Mormon chic ruling on Broadway I suppose Born Again chic is just around the corner. Kinkade, although a churchgoer and father of four, also has his wild-man side, which may have a sort of voyeuristic appeal for well-behaved professors. He has been accused of driving business associates into bankruptcy, and reports of his bad behavior have included "public drunkenness, strip club and bar hopping, public urination"-on a statue of Winnie the Pooh at Disneyland, no less-"lewd conduct, and at least one case of probable sexual harassment." The man is catnip for the psychopathologists.
And since Kinkade’s images are mostly disseminated not as original oil paintings but in an endless series of editions and product spinoffs such as faux-Victorian tea cups, those who are still mulling over Walter Benjamin’s "The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction" will have more food-or junk food-for thought. I recall the critic Sidney Tillim arguing some years ago that mechanical reproductions have their own kind of aura, their particular variety of impersonality that conveys some sort of folk or pop truth. I guess such an argument can be made for Kinkade’s slick litho repros, although in order to swallow the argument one would have to feel more affection for Wal-Mart America than I can work up.
The entire subject of Thomas Kinkade is a nervous breakdown waiting to happen. I am not always sure whether the authors gathered together in Boylan’s collection are being grimly sincere or shamelessly ironic. I wonder if they themselves are in some doubt about this. As for the intellectual inflation that curdles so many of their arguments, it comes in forms both defensive and offensive, sometimes simultaneously. A number of contributors cannot resist the temptation to take Clement Greenberg’s old essay "Avant-Garde and Kitsch" for another spin. I find this absurd. What on earth does a piece of writing that was meant to explain the miracle of Picasso, Braque, and Mondrian have to tell us about the work of a man who, though undoubtedly full of himself and his achievement, is mostly out to make a buck? Monica Kjellman-Chapin, in her essay "Manufacturing ’Masterpieces’ for the Market: Thomas Kinkade and the Rhetoric of High Art," alludes to Malraux as well as Greenberg and Benjamin, and gets herself into quite a bind, wondering whether Kinkade is "not particularly postmodern" or "not exactly postmodern." With Kjellman-Chapin, terms such as "high," "elite," "low," and "kitsch" are robbed of any relation to artistic or social reality, as they are marshaled to turn Kinkade into a figure of artistic and social consequence. "His easy assimilation of ’high’ art’s values and markers," she writes, "serves simultaneously to obviate any distinction and to concretize the division between elite and ersatz, while appearing to confirm his own pictorial efforts as legitimate Art-with-a-capital-A."
Kinkade’s pictures and Kjellman-Chapin’s text are a match made in bullshit heaven. "Kinkade," she continues, descending ever deeper into the theoretical muck, "depends on a calcified, formulaic, static, even stale division between ’high art’ and low forms of culture, since even as he enters the fray at the latter level, he relies on the value embedded in and conveyed by a strict and stringently preserved notion of the former to imbue his own productions with value/prestige/aura/authenticity. In other words Kinkade needs kitsch in order to partake of and try to participate in its elevated Other." This sort of self-aggrandizing pseudo intellectual discourse puts me in mind of Edmund Wilson’s unforgettable attack on pedantry in the English departments, "The Fruits of the MLA," in which he bemoaned-way back in 1968-"the indiscriminate greed for this literary garbage on the part of the universities." The only thing that really distinguishes the new greed for garbage from the old is that garbage has itself become so chic. In the Kinkade anthology one finds garbage embraced with both guilelessness and aggressive high-camp cheers.
Karal Ann Marling, a professor at the University of Minnesota and a proud collector of all things Kinkade, strikes me as almost guileless, though I wouldn’t put it past her to be giving me a campy wink, too. In any event, she opens her essay by explaining with apparent delight that "the detachable flap on the remittance envelopes of no fewer than three of my credit card bills this month" offer the opportunity to buy one of Kinkade’s lighthouse lithographs for $9.95. You cannot argue with her when she declares that "it is one thing to buy a Picasso at auction in New York with all the attendant hoopla, and quite another to wallow in ’collectibles,’ including checks, pictures sold through credit-card companies, resin figurines based on old Norman Rockwell magazine covers, and the kinds of dust-catchers collected by little old ladies who also collect cats." What seems to have eluded Marling is the fact that for most of us a Picasso is not something to buy at an auction but something to look at in a museum or in a reproduction. And here is a big part of the problem. For many of the authors involved in this book, dollar value appears to be almost the only salient value. By this logic, a Kinkade reproduction that is specially hand colored and therefore costs more than a Picasso poster deserves the same kind of attention, if not more.
But in an art world where auction prices are more closely followed than critical opinions, why should this not be the case? At a time when Lisa Yuskavage, an artist no more or less schlocky than Thomas Kinkade, is exhibiting at the blue chip David Zwirner Gallery, which also represents the estate of an old fashioned austere modernist such as Donald Judd, the wonder may be that anybody feels any need at all to justify their interest in Kinkade’s crap. And yet I detect a note of something like belligerence in even the most unabashed of the cheerleaders in this collection, the artist and art critic Jeffrey Vallance, who exhibits his own work in cutting edge galleries in Los Angeles and New York. He opens his essay by proudly announcing that "I am writing this from my handsome Kinkade La-Z-Boy recliner"-and it is as if he were saying, "Take that, you snotty readers."
Vallance has the distinction of having organized what he calls "the first-ever contemporary art world exhibition of the works of Thomas Kinkade," which some might take as an elitist declaration that the exhibitions of Kinkade’s work in America’s malls do not count. But no matter. Vallance’s essay, with pithily labeled subsections, is like a ride in a clown car. His first meeting with Kinkade was in the Kinkade Chapel that was set up in the exhibition at California State University in Fullerton to showcase the artist’s religious works. Here is Vallance. "The only way I can describe the scene is that it reminded me of the legendary account of Richard Nixon and Henry Kissinger kneeling together in the Oval Office. Š A Nixonian glow emanated from Thom’s countenance as he divulged his divinely inspired design for the Kinkade empire."
One of the choicest sections in Vallance’s essay is devoted to Kinkade’s much discussed guerilla act at Disneyland, where he urinated on a statue of Winnie the Pooh. Vallance believes that the Los Angeles Times was unfair to Kinkade in a 2006 expose, where if I understand Vallance correctly he feels Kinkade was treated as a garden variety psycho. For Vallance-writing in a section called "The Urination Ritual"-"Pooh-pissing [is] the next step in the grand legacy of piss art"-a kind of "performance art." Vallance links Kinkade’s "work" with Marcel Duchamp’s decision to exhibit a urinal as a sculpture, with Jackson Pollock urinating in Peggy Guggenheim’s fireplace, as well as with work by Warhol and contemporary artists Paul McCarthy, Mike Bidlo, and David Hammons. It is left to another contributor, Micki McElya, to bring Andres Serrano’s Piss Christ into the discussion, explaining that "aesthetically, Kinkade shares with Serrano a reliance on the manipulation of light effects and the use of light as symbolic of God’s presence and the individual’s potential for salvation."
Aren’t the aesthetics of garbage just another form of garbage? In any event, it is a relief to turn to a couple of contributors who have not tied themselves in knots trying to figure out how we feel about Kinkade’s pictures. (Speaking for myself, I feel nothing.) David Morgan, in his essay on "Thomas Kinkade and the History of Protestant Visual Culture in America," suggests that there are mid-nineteenth century Currier and Ives prints that are every bit as programatically moralistic-and banal-as Thomas Kinkade’s prints, and for me that somehow cleared the air. In "Repetition, Exclusion, and the Urbanism of Nostalgia: The Architecture of Thomas Kinkade," Christopher E. M. Pearson shows how Kinkade’s presumptive Americana is in fact grounded in a fantasy about English cottage architecture, and again I enjoyed the level-headed deflation.
I think Pearson is also probably correct when he argues that "while catering to an urge to flee the real or inferred threats of an urban environment, Kinkade’s secluded dwellings in fact represent in idealized form the actual circumstances of many suburbanites, who in an apparent effort to find community and communion with nature choose to live in clearly demarcated single-family houses situated many miles from work or traditional civic centers." Near Vallejo, California, there is now an upscale housing development known as Hiddenbrooke, with houses roughly styled on Kinkade’s cottages, their basic suburban forms dressed with bits of stone and gable. "The four different house models are named after Kinkade’s daughters," Pearson explains: "the Winsor, the Merritt, the Everett, and the Chandler." There are also "’period’ lampposts, a fountain, and a small gazebo, as well as rustic street names like Stepping Stone Court and Rose Arbor Way, which reference titles of Kinkade’s paintings." The homes, priced at around $400,000 when they were launched in 2002, sold very well.
Pearson’s essay on Kinkade’s fictional architecture and its nonfiction spinoffs strikes me as the soundest work in Boylan’s collection. There is a certain elegance about the way that Pearson traces the schlock-fantasy iconography of Thomas Kinkade’s paintings into the real life unreality of Hiddenbrooke. And after the tutti-frutti coloring of Kinkade’s own hideosities, I found something pleasingly deflating about Pearson’s plainspoken photographs of Hiddenbrooke, with its neatly clipped lawns and spic-and-span sidewalks and general air of sunshine banality.
For true believers in Pop Americana, of course, this will be one more chapter in an updated version of Robert Venturi’s and Denise Scott Brown’s Learning from Las Vegas. Can the intellectuals who have apotheosized the strip malls be wrong? Can the millions who have purchased a Thomas Kinkade of one sort or another be deluded? I see no reason why this cannot be the case. The point of democracy is not that the majority is correct, although that is a thought that never seems to be very far from the thinking of many of the contributors to Boylan’s book. My own feeling, after contemplating the Kinkade industry, is that, so far as the Painter of Light is concerned, we are all a bunch of Winnie the Poohs and he has urinated on us all.
Thomas Kinkade: The Artist in the Mall, Edited by Alexis L. Boylan, Duke University Press, 320 pp., $25.95
Originally Published by The New Republic
Jack Goldstein, A Suite of Nine 7-Inch Records with Sound Effects, 1976
The first time I saw Jack, he was standing on a ladder putting some white paint on a wall at Artists Space. He had recently arrived in NY from LA, where he’d already been working as an artist and teaching for a number of years. I was 19 years old, still in art college, and working part time at Artists Space. I had come to New York to study dance and performance art.
I was attending two or three performances a week and trying to locate what it was about performance that I was drawn to. With the exception of Richard Foreman’s plays, I hadn’t found much. A lot of performance art at that time was decidedly untheatrical. I was always excited watching the beginning of a ballet - the curtain going up, the lights, the music starting - but once it began, I got really bored.
That night, there was a Jack Smith performance at Artists Space and Jack and I were both there. The performance was slow to get started. A seemingly intoxicated Jack Smith, after arriving an hour late, unpacked an ironing board, a roll of film and a bunch of slide mounts, and announced that he just had to mount all the slides and then the performance would begin. While we were waiting, Jack and I talked about some of the performances I’d been seeing and about art. Jack was impatient and critical of Jack Smith and his ambling, messy, persona-intensive art. He dismissed the work of Joseph Beuys in the same breath.
Jack invited me to see some films he’d recently completed. We walked the few blocks to his place where he threaded film into a turquoise-coloured 16mm projector. Most artists’ films at that time were Super-8mm or video, so the use of 16mm in itself seemed like a novel choice. The film crackled, the numbered leader flickered by and the screen filled with brilliant colour. The Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer lion, caged within the logo’s familiar armature, turned his head, roared, blinked, turned his head and roared, and blinked again. As the short sequence repeated, the once familiar logo became stranger and stranger. You began to notice nuances in the facial expression of the lion. A moment of what seems like doubt or hesitation crosses the lion’s face, but is it before or after he roars? And what does that mean if it is before or after? Then, the sound seemed to detach from the image. The majestic lion roars, an icon heralding a fine cultural product which I’d seen countless times before was now made irretreivably suspect. I thought I knew exactly what it meant, but because of its brevity had always come in under the radar, continually unexamined. What was accepted as conventional suddenly seemed utterly bizarre - what is that lion doing inside of that oddly constructed space and what does it mean? To look at it over and over was like a portal into another dimension of time/space. I felt like Alice Through the Looking Glass, in a world that was very familiar but somehow turned inside out. I was completely blown away. 1
Jack Goldstein, still from A Ballet Shoe, 1975. 16mm film, 19 sec.
The next film began: a close-up of ballet dancer’s foot standing on point. It is static for some time, then two hands enter from the sides of the frame, untie the ribbon on the slipper, the ribbons fall and the foot collapses down. The collapse of an iconic image again. The next one: a sharp stainless-steel knife horizontally bisects the frame. It is glimmering and shiny. Jack joked about it being his version of Roman Polanski’s film Knife in the Water. A colour appears reflected in the metal handle of the knife. Moving horizontally, the colour gradually pours into the blade of the knife, and then quickly disappears. Another colour appears and then penetrates the entire knife, then another and another. 2
The films were the length of television commercials. And they were spectacular. The production values were very high, in marked contrast to many artists’ films, videos and performances of the period, which tended toward poor quality as if to challenge one’s patience and endurance. It was almost as if there was a kind of aversion to acknowledging or referencing the level of perceptual sophistication we had all come to expect from watching television commercials and feature films. Jack’s work opened a door into what had seemed like a solid wall. And it had the potential of being deeply subversive. It could go into the belly of the beast (advertising) and use its vocabulary, strategies and seductions to examine the gaps between memory, perception, intention and expectation.
After the films, Jack got out a small black box containing a set of 45rpm records. Each 45, pressed in a different colour of plastic, had a professionally printed label. First he put on A Barking Dog. I believe the record was red. You hear a dog barking. It’s quite a distance away, perhaps a few doors down or in a neighbour’s yard. It’s a lonesome sound. It conjures an image. It is a sound that exists in everyone’s memory. The distance has meaning, is almost palpable. Jack always used to say ’distance equals control’, which I understood to mean that as an artist it was a matter of finding the right distance from which to examine things. That distance had something to do with the proximity of beauty and terror - of the sublime.
Next he put on Three Felled Trees, a green record. You hear some chopping, then a tree falling. Then some more chopping, then another tree falls. Chop, chop. Chop, chop, then the record ends. In order to hear the final tree fall, you have to turn the record over. The interrelatedness of expectation, imaginative space and physical space was extraordinary, a kind of spectacle unfolding within my own mind.
And then there was A Lost Ocean Liner: the mournful sound of an ocean liner going round and round and round, calling out from the black grooves of the record. The word ’lost’ in the title connotes an undetermined path; yet as I watch the record turning, the ocean liner seems not so much lost as caught in a predetermined circular pattern. I think I know where it is; it just doesn’t know where it is.
That night changed my life. There was sense of immense possibility. Art could be powerful, beautiful and important. I was inspired to begin making art. In the twenty some years since that night, I have been inspired by many works of art, but nothing comes close to the experience of that night. 3
Much to my surprise and elation, he gave me a box of the 45 records. I was so delirious and carried away with ideas that I left them in the taxi. I spent hours on the phone with the taxi commission and at the police precinct on 5th Street filing a report for missing property. The police officer looked at me quizzically: a box of coloured records? Of what? Dogs barking? I’ve often wondered about where those records wound up, what they might have meant to the person who found them. Like the lost ocean liner, the lost box of records is out there somewhere in the world, sending a message into deep space.
Originally published by EAST OF BORNEO
Photograph by Diane Arbus, 1970
Diane Arbus killed herself, aged 48, on 26 July 1971. On the 40th anniversary of her death, it’s worth reconsidering her artistic legacy. Her work remains problematic for many viewers because she transgressed the traditional boundaries of portraiture, making pictures of circus and sideshow "freaks", many of whom she formed lasting friendships with.
If Arbus undoubtedly felt at home among the outsiders she photographed, she also experienced a frisson of guilty pleasure when photographing them. "There’s some thrill in going to a sideshow," she once confessed of her nocturnal visits to the circus tents of Coney Island, where performers were still earning a living in the 1960s. "I felt a mixture of shame and awe."
Her works make us question not just her motives for looking at what the critic Susan Sontag - with typical hauteur - called "people who are pathetic, pitiable, as well as repulsive", but also our own. In perhaps the most angry essay in her book On Photography, Sontag insists that Arbus’s gaze is "based on distance, on privilege, on a feeling that what the viewer is asked to look at is really other".
The "other" is not what it used to be. We live in a time when it is ubiquitous, whether in voyeuristic TV shows about "embarrassing bodies" or documentaries about sexual exhibitionists or conjoined twins. Nevertheless, Arbus’s black-and-white portraits - particularly of those with mental disabilities or physical abnormalities - retain their power to unsettle and disturb. Here, whatever her intention, the cruel often seems to outweigh the tender. What’s more, her portraits always send us back to Arbus: to her need to not just photograph but befriend her subjects; her seemingly insatiable fascination with the unusual; her often fragile state of mind. (She killed herself for reasons that remain mysterious.)
Later this year a new biography, entitled Diane Arbus: An Emergency in Slow Motion, will be published. The author is William Todd Schultz, a professor of psychology at Pacific University, who specialises in what he calls "psychobiography". Once again, as with Patricia Bosworth’s celebrated book about the photographer, it is the life - and mind - of the artist that is being probed in an attempt to shed some light on the photographs. For his research, Schultz spoke at length to Arbus’s therapist. This, I would hazard, did not go down well with the famously controlling Arbus estate who, as Schultz put it recently, "seem to have this idea, which I disagree with, that any attempt to interpret the art diminishes the art".
Yet with Arbus, as with Nan Goldin, the life and the art are inextricably intertwined. Of late though, Arbus’s identification with her subjects has been interpreted not, as Sontag insists, as a kind of prurient voyeurism, but as a way of understanding the world and shedding new light on its fringes. "To cast Arbus in the role of a tragic figure who identified with ’freaks’ is to trivialise her accomplishment," Sandra S Philips, curator of photography at the Museum of Modern Art in San Francisco, told the Smithsonian magazine in 2004. "She was a great humanist photographer who was at the forefront of a new kind of photographic art."
I would agree with the latter half of that sentence while disagreeing with the former. Arbus, as the great American critic and curator John Szarkowski recognised when he first showed her work in his New Documents group exhibition at Moma in New York in 1967, was certainly a trailblazer of a new photographic aesthetic, by turns raw and unflinching, disturbing and illuminating. But a humanist? Only if your view of humanity is essentially pessimistic and tinged with neurotic narcissism.
Arbus may have felt an enormous empathy with the people she photographed, but she was not one of them, however much she identified with their outsider status. She had her own troubles, but they were of a different order. The work she left behind remains powerful not just because of its dark formal beauty or its stark vision, but because it asks questions of the viewer about the limits of looking, about the vicariousness and predatory nature of photography, and about our complicity in all of this.
When we look at an Arbus photograph, we cannot help feeling that we are intruders or voyeurs, even though her subjects are tied to a time and place that has all but vanished. A sense of complicity - hers and ours - lies at the very heart of her power. Her images hold us in their sway even when our better instincts tell us to look away. Perhaps her greatest gift is that she understood that conflict instinctively, and did more than anyone to exploit it artistically.
They don’t figure in the lists of top collectors, yet they spend millions every year at auction and at dealers. They get first dibs on the most sought-after works of art at the top fairs, yet outside the art world their names are unknown - and they like to keep it that way. They work in a profession that hardly existed 10 years ago, which is expanding rapidly, and for which there are no recognised qualifications. Yet their taste can mould what collectors buy and have a far-reaching influence on setting trends for other collectors - as well as having a major impact on the market itself.
Welcome to the world of art advisers, a term that covers everyone from twenty something former gallery interns with chutzpah to, for instance, the New York-based Thea Westreich, whose A-list client roster includes Chicago’s Pritzker family, venture capitalist Richard Kramlich and the San Francisco power couple Norah and Norman Stone.
Anyone can become an art adviser. Patricia Marshall, who previously worked for the French luxury goods mogul Bernard Arnault and now includes the Mexican collector Eugenio López and fashion group Zadig and Voltaire among her clients, admits that when she started in 2003 she had "no qualifications whatsoever". And while there is a professional association in the US, a number of the most respected advisers don’t even belong to it. Top advisers are very happy to remain under the radar, and protect their big-name clients at the same time.
As an occupation, art advising mainly started after the mid-twentieth century and has really exploded in the past 10 years. Before that, collectors generally relied on art dealers, or were guided by their local museum directors and curators. In the 19th and early twentieth centuries the driving force behind many great collections - often now in museums - were legendary merchants such as Duveen (Morgan, Frick and Mellon), Agnews (Kenwood House) or Vollard (Schukin and Morozov). But "advising is not as new as one might think", Westreich points out, noting that Velásquez counselled King Philip IV of Spain on his acquisitions in the 17th century.
"Today the playing field is far bigger, and there is no longer a single way of building up a collection," she says. The vastly expanded art market is not now just concentrated in western Europe and the US; China, India, the Middle East and Latin America all offer a lot of new art and artists. The events are worldwide as well: from art fairs such as Hong Kong and Dubai to biennales, triennials and other happenings, from Yokohama to São Paulo. And the choice is rich, from the proliferation of art galleries to the sophisticated operations of the auction houses. Buyers - who are often busy making money - simply don’t have the time to stay informed about everything that is happening. Advisers’ mobility is important, says Noah Horowitz, author of The Art of the Deal: Contemporary Art in a Global Financial Market. "Their numbers have increased in lockstep with those of independent curators," he says, adding that "advisers also provide valuable financial services, on tax for instance".
"Our typical clients are time-poor but very wealthy and savvy," says Spencer Ewen of the London advisers Seymours. "They like the fact that we are independent from both dealers and the auction rooms."
Today most of the very wealthy wouldn’t dream of buying art without an adviser. Dasha Zhukova, partner of Roman Abramovich and founder of the Moscow Garage Centre for Contemporary Art, hired the former Gagosian director Mollie Dent-Brocklehurst (she has now moved to run Pace’s new London operation). Hedge fund honcho Steve Cohen works with the New York-based Sandy Heller, who also advises Abramovich. The Dallas philanthropist and collector Howard Rachofsky has been a long-term client of the influential Allan Schwartzman, who also advises Brazilian mining billionaire Bernardo Paz.
Art adviser Mollie Dent-Brocklehurst (right) with collector Dasha Zhukova in action at Frieze art fair <http://tinyurl.com/3qoezr5>
"In the world of wealth people are totally conditioned to have advisers in all aspects of their lives - from their stylists for their wardrobe to their art," Westreich says. "They like to feel confident that someone is looking after their specific needs."
Indeed, it is becoming rarer for dealers to see clients directly, according to London’s veteran modern art dealer Thomas Gibson, who has decided to relaunch himself as an art adviser. "In the gallery today I often see advisers - sometimes more than one - rather than the principals," he says.
For novice collectors, advisers are there to guide - and often educate - their clients. "If you see a Robert Ryman [whose canvases can be apparently plain white] for the first time at an art fair, you may absolutely not understand his significance nor his prices," Schwartzman explains. But advisers are divided on the extent to which they should influence their clients. Some can change a collector’s direction - Schwartzman says that when he first started working with Paz, he was collecting Brazilian modernists. Now he commissions works of art from leading international as well as Latin American artists for Inhotim, Paz’s sculpture-cum-museum park in the Brazilian countryside. And his choices have certainly affected what other collectors in his country are buying.
Other advisers say that their role is to help clients find the best work at the best price, even if it is not to their own taste. "You tell the truth, give them the reasons you don’t like it, but at the end of the day it’s their money," says Gibson.
In today’s highly competitive world one of the key roles of advisers is to give access - both to the art world in general, and to artists and works of art in particular. Dealers often will not sell to someone they don’t know, because they want to "place" works in a good collection or museum, and fear speculators, who might "flip" works quickly into auction. "If you don’t have an adviser, you can’t get the works," says Marshall.
"The advisers we know and work with are very important to us, we trust them and we trust the collections they are building," Martine d’Anglejan-Chatillon of the London dealer Thomas Dane explains.
Trust is important, because for every good adviser, say dealers, there are plenty of bad ones. "Lots of them come on ’fishing expeditions’," says Gibson. "They ask for a transparency of a work of art, and a price, and then try to find a client for it." In the art market, hawking around a work of art can "burn" it by overexposing it.
Another criticism levelled at advisers is that their growing influence has led to homogenisation, particularly in the private art museums that are proliferating today. In the past, collectors could be highly individualistic, with the Barnes in Pennsylvania or Sir John Soane’s museum in London, for instance, reflecting the quirky, but very personal, taste of their founders. Now, with advisers "ticking all the boxes" to ensure that all the major names are represented, their collections have lost that singularity. "We live in a global era," says Horowitz. "The art world is no different from other sectors, and just as in a financial portfolio you will have blue-chip shares, so in a collection today many believe there are must-hold artists."
"There are indeed people who say that they must have ’one of those, and one of those’ - that’s defeating for anyone with a brain," says Westreich, "but it can also be the start of a conversation. We can offer alternatives to this approach, and if you really want a collection of distinction, the adviser can take you there," she concludes.
Copyright The Financial Times Limited 2011
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People in trouble laughing pushed to the ground. Soldiers leaning, pointing, reaching. Woman sweeping. Balloons escaping. Coffin descending. Boys standing. Grieving. Chair balancing. Children smoking. Embracing. Creatures barking. Cars burning. Helicopters hovering. Faces. Human figures. Shapes. Birds. Structures left standing and falling...
The Belfast Exposed Archive occupies a small room on the first floor at 23 Donegal Street and contains over 14,000 black-and-white contact sheets, documenting the Troubles in Northern Ireland. These are photographs taken by professional photo-journalists and ‘civilian’ photographers, chronicling protests, funerals and acts of terrorism as well as the more ordinary stuff of life: drinking tea; kissing girls; watching trains.
Belfast Exposed was founded in 1983 as a response to concern over the careful control of images depicting British military activity during the Troubles. Whenever an image in this archive was chosen, approved or selected, a blue, red or yellow dot was placed on the surface of the contact sheet as a marker. The position of the dots provided us with a code; a set of instructions for how to frame the photographs in this book. Each of the circular photographs shown on the previous pages reveals the area beneath these circular stickers; the part of each image that has been obscured from view the moment it was selected. Each of these fragments – composed by the random gesture of the archivist - offers up a self-contained universe all of its own; a small moment of desire or frustration or thwarted communication that is re-animated here after many years in darkness.
The marks on the surface of the contact strips – across the image itself – allude to the presence of many visitors. These include successive archivists, who have ordered, catalogued and re-catalogued this jumble of images. For many years the archive was also made available to members of the public, and sometimes they would deface their own image with a marker pen, ink or scissors. So, in addition to the marks made by generations of archivists, photo editors, legal aides and activists, the traces of these very personal obliterations are also visible. They are the gestures of those who wished to remain anonymous.
We would like to acknowledge and thank the original photographers Mervyn Smith, Sean Mc Kernan, Gerry Casey, Seamus Loughran and all other contributing photographers to Belfast Exposed’s archive.
An Essay by Cat Weaver, May 5, 2011
If the Carious v Prince case existed during Jean-Baptiste-Simeon Chardin’s timeŠ <http://tinyurl.com/67wzhvb>
The recent Cariou v Prince District Court decision has brought to the fore, once and for all, the elephant in the art world and courtroom, Fair Use, which had, until now, managed to avoid close scrutiny in the popular press.
Why? Because perhaps until now, copyright seemed like a silly game played and lost at little expense to the greater good of the art world.
But Cariou v Prince, with it’s harsh consequences to Richard Prince and his Canal Zone works has made us very aware that a whole body of work can be wiped out by a court’s decision that a claim to fair use is invalid, begging the question, can a judge make these decisions about art?
Notwithstanding that this was a summary judgment and is in the process of being appealed, there are some who worry that if Richard Prince loses the appeal, appropriation art in general will suffer a chilling effect that will lead artists in doubt to abandon projects - in effect, stifling creative speech.
Also, there has been much hand-wringing amongst appropriation aficionados that had similar decisions been made in past seminal works of art - currently studied, worshipped, sought after and canonized - would have been erased: just think what works hereafter will be squelched in the name of copyright!
IN DEFENSE OF COPYRIGHT
The first copyright act in the world, Statute of Anne, 1710, British Library <http://tinyurl.com/6cnd6ge>
First, let’s get something straight. Copyright law does not exist only to protect the pecuniary interests of the holder. At first British common law, the Statue of Anne was intended to encourage creativity by discouraging the piracy and inaccurate copying of books and their content. Not only did the statute give monetary and distributive rights to authors but it ensured that the fruits of their labor would not be compromised in reputation or in content: i.e., authors could feel free to produce works without fear that either their profits, or the quality of their craft, would be usurped.
The United States Copyright Act is modeled upon British law. The copyright holder is said to hold a "limited monopoly" on her works: a monopoly that is limited in terms of time, and, by court acknowledged exceptions of "fair use" "such as criticism, comment, news reporting, teaching (including multiple copies for classroom use), scholarship, or research."
When we consider the freedoms afforded by a secure knowledge that what we put out into the world is, at least temporarily, in most important respects, under our control, we see why copyright is actually an asset to artistic endeavor.
Another frequent objection to copyright law is that it conflicts with our right to freedom of speech. In the United States, it is acknowledged that there is a tension between Congress’ right, as stated in Article 1, Section 8 of the Constitution, known as the copyright clause "to secure to authors exclusive rights for a limited time," and the First Amendment, which guarantees freedom of speech.
The doctrine of fair use mitigates that tension, by allowing exceptions to the limited monopoly held by a copyright owner. Further, the concept of "transformative use" is useful in giving artists the opportunity clarify their claim of fair use against infringement proceedings against them.
A good court decision will keep these tensions in mind, attempting always to maximize potential creativity.
Top part of Article 1 of the US Constitution, section 8 reads, "The Congress shall have Power To Š promote the Progress of Science and useful Arts, by securing for limited Times to Authors and Inventors the exclusive Right to their respective Writings and Discoveries" <http://tinyurl.com/636kjzz>
THE SUBJECTIVE NATURE OF FAIR USE EVALUATIONS
The determining factors to be weighed and evaluated in determining fair use are:
(1) the purpose and character of the use, including whether such use is of a commercial nature or is for nonprofit educational purposes;
(2) the nature of the copyrighted work; and
(3) the amount and substantiality of the portion used in relation to the copyrighted work as a whole; and the effect of the use upon the potential market for or value of the copyrighted work.
One of the most common objections I’ve heard to the Batts decision in Cariou v Prince is that it will have a "chilling effect" on artists who make appropriation art. And, indeed, the Batts decision has had that effect. Finding in favor of Patrick Cariou, Judge Deborah A. Batts ordered that Richard Prince and Gagosian gallery:
" Š are hereby enjoined and restrained permanently from infringing the copyright in the Photographs, or any other of Plaintiff’s works Š and from participating or assisting in or authorizing such conduct in any way."
That "in any way" is a crucial phrase. It entails, according to the court that all "infringing copies," including those used to produce Canal Zone - and, most crucially, all unsold paintings and books, be impounded and turned over to Cariou for "destruction, or other disposition."
As if that were not "chilling" enough the court also ordered that Gagosian, has to "notify in writing any current or future owners of the Paintings Š that the Paintings infringe the copyright in the Photographs, that the Paintings were not lawfully made under the Copyright Act of 1976, and that the Paintings cannot lawfully be displayed under 17 U.S.C. § 109(c)."
Placing the thermostat well below freezing is the fact that this not necessarily the full heft of the judgement against Prince. Damages and "reasonable attorneys’ fees" will be rewarded at a further meeting tomorrow, May 6.
Quite understandably denizens of the white cube blinked in disbelief when the news of Justice Batts’ decision hit them: exactly who was Deborah A. Batts to reek such havoc? Who was Dan Brooks to contend that Richard Prince’s work was not "transformative"?
Left, a photo of a Rastafarian from Patrick Cariou’s "Yes, Rasta" series and, right, a painting from Prince’s "Canal Zone" series <http://tinyurl.com/3dzgtpz>
CARIOU’S LAWYER SPEAKS
Two weeks ago, Hyperallergic attended a lecture at the Volunteer Lawyers for the Arts (VLA), where Dan Brooks, lawyer for Patrick Cariou spoke about the case and took questions from a lively audience.
Asked directly about the feared "chilling effect" Brooks agreed with Sergio Sarmiento, who on top of authoring the extensive Clancco Art and Law blog, is also assistant director of VLA. Sarmiento suggested that appropriation art can only be made better in a world where, as he put it, "You have to have a critical - a rigorous reason," to use another artist’s work. If appropriation art cannot stand up to the Judge Batts’ of this world, Sergio tells us, "Maybe this art movement no longer has viability as a creative approach."
It is interesting, and quite amusing to note that art pontiffs are being asked to re-evaluate just what it is they are so afraid of losing? Are we really going to sweat the loss of derivative artworks which refuse to address their own borrowed content in terms of meaning or purpose?
I can hear the objections already, breaking out the great book of art canons, Joe Artspeak insists that it goes deeper than that. The validity of Warhol and Rosenquist and even Picasso can be called into question if collage is shamed in the courts. What would have happened if Judge Batts had been calling the shots "back then?"
Art histrionics, aside, folks: she wasn’t. And these decisions are made on a case by case basis in order to benefit from precedent, and also to add new points of view and new testimony. Law is alive that way.
Dan Brooks, who has had an earful of objections, says, "Who’s a judge to say, ’Well, that’s not transformative’?" And he answers by explaining that the defendant, the artist himself, has the opportunity of an ’Affirmative Defense’ when addressing the use and purpose of a borrowed image. "The artist himself has to show that his work is transformative. Who else is going to testify about that?"
Art experts will insist that this is not enough: as one audience member suggested, "Prince, by his own traditional practice [the artist has made a name out of being inscrutable] could not comment on what he’s doing -but critics have."
Perhaps it is time for the courts to invite expert testimony to "the purpose and character of the use" of appropriated images. Such a suggestion could add a very entertaining element to court proceedings where every sort of egghead will be called upon to bore the plaintiff’s legal team into submission. And surely allowing that lawyers and judges are not necessarily art experts, it would help to enlighten their decisions. Such testimony would also go a long way toward assuaging the fears of the art elite that delicate aesthetic nuances are not being addressed.
The second most frequently repeated objection to the Batts decision is actually about all copyright infringement cases in the arts, and not just this particular case. It can be summed up by Patrick Cariou’s comments in ArtInfo:
In my opinion copyright law is badly done, because there is one word in that law that makes everyone really confused, and that word is ’transformative.’ It took me over a year to understand what that meant, it was explained to me and I didn’t get it, and I don’t think I’m but I didn’t get it. It has to be transformed for a purpose, that’s what it is, and that’s what the judge is saying.
That’s a pretty clear understanding of a rather vague, and variably applied concept. Fair use has always been problematic, and the addition of the doctrine of transformative use has not cleared things up. It may, in fact, have made it yet murkier. It is one thing for a judge to apply the four cases which can weigh for or against fair use, but quite another to determine if a work is "transformative," a designation which, if granted, weighs very heavily in favor of a fair use claim.
The problem with transformative use is that it is vague.
Originally the concept was only hinted at in the 1841 case, Folsom v. Marsh, wherein Justice Story ruled that
Š if [someone] thus cites the most important parts of the work, with a view, not to criticize, but to supersede the use of the original work, and substitute the review for it, such a use will be deemed in law a piracy.
After that ruling, the degree to which a new work’s intention or purpose was to "supersede the use of the original work" became a gauge in determining fair use. But the term "transformative use" was never stated outright until the Supreme court case, Campbell v. Acuff-Rose Music, which focused:
Š on whether the new work merely supersedes the objects of the original creation, or whether and to what extent it is controversially "transformative," altering the original with new expression, meaning, or message. The more transformative the new work, the less will be the significance of other factors, like commercialism, that may weigh against a finding of fair use.
Since Campbell v Acuff-Rose, most courts place heavy emphasis on transformative use and it has become crucial to a good fair use defense. But it’s interpretation in recent years has proved problematic.
Jeff Koons, for instance, has lost three copyright infringement cases, he has won one.
The images in question in Rogers v Koons, left, Art Rogers’s "Puppies" (1980), and, right, Jeff Koons, "String of Puppies" (1988) <http://tinyurl.com/3f8qwrb>
In Rogers v Koons, String of Puppies was not considered to be transformative because Koons stated outright that he had his assistants copy the photograph exactly: the court ruled that in order to be transformative, a work has to be at least in part about the conjured work, or else there was no reason to refer to that particular piece.
The images in question in Blanch v Koons. Left, the Andrea Blanch photo that appeared in the August 2000 issue of Allure, right, Jeff Koons, "Niagara" (2000) <http://tinyurl.com/3zsys84>
But in Blanch v Koons, Jeff Koons testified that he scanned photographer Andrea Blanch’s photo "Silk Sandals by Gucci" removed the background, added color, and rotated the image which he then incorporated into his collage work, "Niagara." He won his claim to fair use of Blanch’s image.
What made the difference?
Well, for one thing, in the Blanch v Koons case, Jeff Koons did not make his own deposition statement. As Dan Brooks takes some pleasure in pointing out, Koon’s lawyer wrote up a statement for Koons and had him sign it. The statement, Dan says, "deftly navigated around the problems with Rodgers and other previous cases. Koons’s statement said he was addressing: ’the typicality of the ad’ and attempted to comment on ’slick fashion photography.’
In other words, Koons’ statement addressed a transformative intent: to speak to the influences that this genre of photography has on us. Oddly Koons did not address the specific photograph that he used, and a district court and a circuit court both decided in his favor anyway.
I suspect that Prince’s legal team saw the Koons decision as a breakthrough that would allow his claims to fair use to rest on process and not message at all. They apparently felt confident that a new precedent had been set, one which took process into account. That Prince’s detailed testimony speaking to his creative activities was dismissed because he did not speak to the meaning of Cariou’s works came to many in the art world as a surprise. Sure, Prince made no claim to parody, or to reference, but he did describe the full extent of his own artistic tinkering, why was this not good enough for Judge Batts?
The answer seems obvious to me:
1) Blanche v Koons is a flawed decision and Batts was being more true to precedent.
2) Blanche v Koons may have accepted that Koons addressed the fashion photography genre, but Prince, stupidly, testified to addressing only his own storyboarding purposes, and refusing to comment on Cariou’s work, or on the genre.
Wondering about the upcoming appeal, we asked Dan Brooks about the nature of a summary judgement, which can be made only when there is no disputation of the facts involved.
Brooks informed us that most copyright infringement cases defer to a "tradition of settling" (another reason why the art world has been blinkered by this case). "Most of these artists are represented by Gagosian," he quipped, implying that they can afford to settle. "But when they do not settle, both sides tend to move for a summary judgement."
But if the facts are not in dispute, what can possibly be pursued in an appeal to a summary judgement?
"The appeal can only argue that the judge got the law wrong," replied the very literal-minded Brooks.
Meantime, Prince’s newly appointed some heavy new attorneys. The swank team of Boies, Schiller & Flexner LLP. Labeled "a litigation powerhouse" by the Wall Street Journal, the firm has already filed an appeal. A court date has not been set.
Resources:
An interactive timeline of US Copyright Law <http://tinyurl.com/3ok8qoh>
Hyperallergic
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One of Germany’s most well-known and influential artists, Anselm Kiefer, was invited by the Rijksmuseum to create a work of art inspired by The Night Watch. The result, the spectacular La berceuse (for Van Gogh), for which he was given complete free rein, will be on display in the Rijksmuseum’s Night Watch Gallery in the Philips Wing from 7 May.
Born in March 1945, just before the end of the Second World War, Anselm Kiefer has always been fascinated and inspired by German history. His work, which is shaped by historical, mythological and spiritual themes, is always large-scale and uses materials such as straw, ash, clay, lead and dried plants. Kiefer’s work is exhibited in all major modern art museums worldwide.
Kiefer’s artwork for the Night Watch Gallery belongs to a long tradition among artists of creating work inspired by their predecessors. The collection of the Rijksmuseum, the museum of the Netherlands, is an inexhaustible source of inspiration for such work. In this dialogue between the past and the present, artworks are seen in a new light and given new meaning.
Kiefer is no stranger to the Netherlands. Having visited Dutch museums early on in his career, his first exhibition – composed by Rudi Fuchs – in the Van Abbe Museum in 1979 represented his international breakthrough and prior to that, in 1974, his works were exhibited at Galerie ’t Venster in Rotterdam. Dutch collectors were the first to purchase his work. Kiefer’s last exhibition of recent work was in 1986 in the Stedelijk Museum in Amsterdam. The collections of the Van Abbe, Boijmans, Stedelijk and Groninger museums all include works by Kiefer, but no new works.
The Saga of Julianne Academie
by Stephanie LaCava
We call ourselves The Nabis.
Our gatherings happen late night in my family’s townhouse
decorated in homage to Pierre Bonard and Edouard Vuillard.
I guess that’s where we got the idea for our name,
a reference to the artist collective in which they both took part
during the late nineteenth century.
There are a few rules that must be followed, if you’re to join us.
There are no pictures allowed, no recording, no filming.
We believe in living to tell stories--paint pictures, if you will,
from emotion and memory.
With all these bloggers, contraband I-phones in hand,
we’ve been having trouble keeping up our original ethos.
Suddenly, we’re snapped--captured unexpectedly en situ.
A few nights ago, something was amiss.
I had slicked my hair back and dusted it blue
and tried on a few of my favorite dresses by Mary Katranzou
and then, I heard him. Someone had snuck into the house...
Production Credits
Styling by Heidi Bivens at The Wall Group
Set design by Shaun Kato Samuel
Hair by Weasley O’Meara at The Wall Group
Make-Up by Deanna Melluso at Artlist
Model Janice at Ford
Photo assistant Shay Harrington
Post Production work by Versatile Studios
On Monday 25 February 1980, at the invitation of the future French culture minister Jack Lang, Roland Barthes attended a lunch hosted by François Mitterrand. As he rallied support for his presidential campaign of the following year, the leader of the Socialist party was in the habit of entertaining Parisian writers and intellectuals at relatively informal gatherings; political cajolery aside, it was said that Mitterrand simply liked to be apprised of new ideas in art and culture. Barthes, however, had wavered before giving in to yet another interruption of his working routine. It may well have been exasperation or boredom (for he was often bored) that made him decide, when the lunch concluded, to clear his head and walk home alone to his apartment on the rue Servandoni.
At about 3.45pm, witnesses recalled, Barthes paused before crossing the street at 44 rue des Écoles; he looked left and right, but failed to spot an advancing laundry van, which knocked him down. Unconscious and bleeding from the nose, he was taken to the Salpêtrière hospital, where it took several hours to establish his identity. The following day his publisher, Éditions du Seuil, announced that the 64-year-old writer’s condition was stable and there was no cause for concern.
Barthes had spent the previous two months correcting proofs, then sending out signed copies, of his latest book - which would turn out to be his last - and subsequently slumping into something close to despair as hostile reviews began to appear in the press. Two days before the accident, his former student Julia Kristeva had spoken to him by phone and had been perplexed by an awkward turn of phrase that she put down to his depression. The book in question, about whose reception he seemed more than usually fretful, was La Chambre claire (translated as Camera Lucida): a "note on photography", as the French subtitle has it, which in retrospect looks calculated to affront. Because what Barthes had written was neither a work of theoretical strictness nor avant-garde polemic, still less a history or sociology of photography. Instead, it was frankly personal, even sentimental: an essay in 48 fragments that deliberately frustrated readers looking for the semiotics of photography they imagined Barthes would (or should) write.
The subjective turn in Barthes’s thought and writing had come into view slightly earlier, with the publication of a ludic "autobiography", Roland Barthes by Roland Barthes, in 1975, and his anxious anatomy of desire, A Lover’s Discourse, in 1977. (In truth, early and late Barthes are not so easily told apart; as Michael Wood has argued, he was throughout his career a writer who engaged head and heart at the same time.) Camera Lucida, however, was different: not so much a knowing application of semiotic methods to intimate experience as a search for the aspect of experience that evaded study or critique. In short, it was a book about love and grief, written directly out of the loss of his mother in 1977, and shadowed by the "mourning diary" (published last year in France) that he had begun to keep after her death. Barthes had composed a ghost story of sorts, in which neither Henriette Barthes nor the book’s ostensible subject, photography, could quite be grasped.
Camera Lucida is a distinctly odd volume to have attained, in the 30 years since its publication, such a canonical place in the study of photography. As the scholar Geoffrey Batchen points out in Photography Degree Zero, a recent collection of essays about Barthes’s text, it is probably the most widely read and influential book on the subject. But the nature of that influence remains obscure - what exactly does one learn from Camera Lucida? Barthes certainly shrinks from being comprehensive; he has no interest in the techniques of photography, in arguments over its status as art, nor really in its role in contemporary media or culture, which he leaves to sociologists such as Pierre Bourdieu. He is allergic to cleverness in photography (much of Henri Cartier-Bresson would surely qualify), disparages colour (in the era of William Eggleston, no less) as always looking as if it’s been added later, and calls himself a realist at exactly the moment when postmodernist artists and critics were declaring the image a performance or sham. Worse, he risks this sort of aphoristic provocation: "in order to see a photograph well, it is best to look away or close your eyes."
What, then, was Barthes looking for when he looked at photographs? In the first half of the book, he elaborates a distinction between two planes of the image. The first, which he calls the studium, is the manifest subject, meaning and context of the photograph: everything that belongs to history, culture, even to art. "The studium is a kind of education," he writes. It’s here that we learn, say, about Moscow in a William Klein street photograph from 1959, or about the comportment of a well-dressed African-American family in a 1926 picture by James Van Der Zee. But it’s the second category that really skewers Barthes’s sensibility. He calls it the punctum: that aspect (often a detail) of a photograph that holds our gaze without condescending to mere meaning or beauty. In the same Van Der Zee photograph, the punctum is one woman’s strapped pumps, though it later shifts, as the image "works" on the author, to her gold necklace. This is one of a few curious moments in the book where Barthes blatantly misreads the image at hand; the woman is actually wearing a string of pearls. But his point survives: he has been indelibly touched by the poignant detail.
It’s this (in academic terms quite scandalous) embrace of the subjective which allows Barthes to begin the quest that makes his book so moving. Having lost his mother, with whom he had lived most of his life, he goes looking for her among old photographs; time and again the face he finds is not quite hers, even if objectively she looks like herself. At last, he discovers her true likeness, the "air" that he remembers, in a picture of Henriette aged five, taken in a winter garden in 1898. (In the journal entry that recounts this discovery, Barthes simply notes: "Je pleure.") In narrative terms, it’s an astonishing moment, comparable to the onrush of memories as madeleine meets teacup in Proust, or the scene in Citizen Kane when the maddened Kane first grasps the snow globe, emblem of all he has left behind. Barthes, however, is a temperamentally discreet narrator, so never shows us the photograph: "It exists only for me. For you, it would be nothing but an indifferent picture."
Camera Lucida is a short book, but with the winter garden photograph it begins all over again. Suddenly every photograph is for Barthes a memorial; the very essence of the medium is its spectral conjuring of death-in-life. Contemplating a portrait by Alexander Gardner of the condemned Lewis Payne - sentenced to death for the attempted murder of US Secretary of State WH Seward in 1865 - Barthes sees only this fearful temporal paradox: "He is dead and he is going to die." And his book starts to sound weirdly premonitory: here is Barthes surrounded by his glum little icons, fantasising his own "total, undialectical death".
Heaven knows what students schooled to think of Barthes as a rigorous semiotician must feel today about this lugubrious turn in his final book, more in keeping with one of Poe’s portrait tales than a work of cultural theory. If there are critical legacies to Camera Lucida, the first is probably its insistence (not as obvious as it seems) that photographs are always photographs of something. The book’s more penetrating influence has certainly to do with photography and mortality: both the memorial uses to which photographs have long been put - one thinks of Victorian mourning portraits, or the profusion of post-9/11 mementos - and the vertigo we can feel in the face of even the most vivid and living subject. But few of Barthes’s heirs - and Batchen’s essay collection reprints three decades’ worth of critical appraisal and envy of Camera Lucida - have ever reproduced or fully accounted for the strange air of searching and susceptibility that permeates his brief "note". As the art critic Martin Herbert has put it, "I don’t go looking for ’ideas about photography’ in that book; I read it for a certain kind of vulnerability."
Perhaps it is artists and writers who have come closest to capturing and developing Barthes’s insights, whether consciously or in parallel projects that explored the mnemonic powers of ordinary snapshots. In his composite photograph Every Page of Roland Barthes’s Book Camera Lucida (2004), Idris Khan <http://tinyurl.com/4s2ls9x> has presented the book as a blackened palimpsest, its famous images mere blurred phantoms among illegible lines of text. And artists such as Gerhard Richter, Christian Boltanski, Tacita Dean and Fiona Tan have all amassed archives of everyday portraits that owe much of their allure to Barthes’s "imperious sign of my future death". In fiction, WG Sebald admitted a profound debt to Camera Lucida; in Austerlitz, the protagonist’s search for an image of his lost mother is clearly modelled on Barthes’s desire for a glimpse of "the unique being".
Barthes himself lingered with the living for about a month after his accident. As a tubercular young man, he had spent time in a sanatorium, but it seemed to his physicians that his long-weakened constitution could still recover from the recent shock. Students and colleagues gathered at the hospital. He spoke of the "stupidity" of the accident with intimates such as Michel Foucault and Philippe Sollers. The latter would write later of the crushing boredom and the "complications with boys" that had afflicted his friend in the three years since Henriette’s death. Barthes’s condition began to worsen; his breathing faltered, a tracheotomy took away his voice, and it seemed to those around him that he had lost the will or interest required to live. He died of "pulmonary complications" on 25 March. The last manuscript on which he worked (an essay on Stendhal, left on his desk on the day of the accident) had been entitled "One Always Fails to Speak of the Things One Loves".
By Brian Dillon
© Guardian News and Media Limited 2011
As you get older, in the art world as elsewhere, you’re confronted with some choices about how to conduct yourself. You can, for instance, stay locked in the style you strutted when you were younger and hipper--that is, continuing to wear a ponytail and tight cowboy shirts with mother-of-pearl buttons long after you’ve gone bald on top and acquired a gut. Or you can try to keep up with today’s younger people by copying their fashions: Shave your head, wear small, expensive blue Italian sunglasses and a shiny suit over a black T-shirt and try to blend in with the 30something critics and curators. Or you can just give up altogether on trying to wax contemporary--and wear bow ties, tweed jackets with elbow patches, and take your proud place as a naysayer who thinks that this time the art world really has gone to hell in a hand basket.
I find myself thinking about this stuff lately because I’m now almost 70 --an age I seem to have reached suddenly, and quite unjustly, overnight. I realize that I entered the art world, with a newly minted MFA degree, almost 45 years ago. Back then, an artist as mature as I am now would have entered the art world in--Omigod!--the 1920s! Which is to say: The art world in which I now find myself is as different from the one that I entered as the one that I entered was from the art world in the days of the Calvin Coolidge Administration.
Although such early American modernist artists as Arthur Dove, John Marin and Georgia O’Keeffe were already prominent in fairly small circles in the 1920s, the American equivalents of the saccharine French academic painter William Bouguereau were much more the typical fare in gallery exhibitions. And the most prominent American art critic was Royal Cortissoz, who wrote that "Modernism is of precisely the same heterogeneous alien origin [as the flood of recent immigrants] and is imperiling the republic of art in the same way. ... Such movements [are]crude, crotchety, tasteless, abounding in arrogant assertion, making a fetich [sic] of ugliness and, above all else, rife in ignorance of the technical amenities. These movements have been promoted by types not yet fitted for their first papers in aesthetic naturalization--the makers of true Ellis Island art."
I’m a dedicated modernist and I’m certainly no nativist. But I am a negativist by temperament, and experience has confirmed that 90 percent of what’s offered for sale by the galleries today is bad art, and that 90 percent of the art offered for viewing by museums isn’t nearly as good as their press releases say it is. Although my reasons for thinking this are wildly different from Cortissoz’s condemnation of modernism, I have, over the last 20 years or so, written about the deleterious effects on contemporary art of pervasive irony, the unfortunately increasing overlap of art and superficial entertainment in gallery offerings, the preening confluence of art and the runway fashion industry, and even the morphing of call-it-like-you-see-it art criticism in more or less plain language into theoretical, judgment-averse "post-criticism."
When I started writing reviews for Artforum in Los Angeles in 1965, in my mid-twenties, I was harder on the art than most of the other contributors. To this day, I see the flaws in art first, and have a tendency immediately to "argue" with art instead of letting it wash over me first. Also contributing to my critical dyspepsia is the fact that I’m an artist and a critic. I play on both sides of the street and may, occasionally, fall victim to conflicts-of-interest, express and implied. Finally, in an art world--if not an entire culture--devoted to youth, to "emerging" artists, I collect Social Security. Although I’ve tried mightily not to act like a cranky ol’ eminence grise and to remain as colloquial (even as wise-ass) as I can, I still sometimes fear that I’m doomed to repeat the perennial cycle of sinking into circle-the-wagons artistic conservatism as I age.
With that confessional prologue in hand, let’s take a look at how the art world* has changed since I got into it. Let’s consider three different art worlds: the "Old Art World" of 1964, the "Changed Art World" of circa 1979, and the "New Art World" of more or less now. In the Old Art World, the typical young, ambitious artist was a white male with an MFA in painting or sculpture. He prided himself on sheer time spent in the studio and what he wanted most in his work were integrity and consistency; he wanted his work--at least consciously--to express his deepest feelings and esthetic principles without catering to an audience or market. His heroes were grizzled old modernist bastards, guys like Stuart Davis and David Smith, who’d wrestled Cubism into a kind of abstraction and made of it something pragmatically American. Conversation with his artist-buddies was about what was going on during all those hours they spent in their studios. He read the art magazines and took practically every word in them all too seriously.
Our typical young artist ca. 1964 wanted to be able to move to New York so he could expose his work to some influential critics. His idea of really "making it" was to be able to earn a modest living off his work without having to hold an outside job, and he figured if things went right with his career he might be able to do it by age 45. Failing that, he’d settle for a full-time teaching job at a good art school or university where he’d be able to teach good graduate students who wanted to be artists like he was.
But he didn’t want to be more than three hours’ drive from New York or Chicago or Los Angeles or San Francisco. Even if he never got to be a player in one of those four cities, he’d be an "artist’s artist," known for the "toughness" of his work and, perhaps, his teaching effect on students who did go on to make it in the big city.
In the Changed Art World of fifteen or so years later, our typical young artist had a B.A. in something other than art--e.g., anthropology or philosophy--and had gotten interested in art by meeting some artists who came to lecture at his college, or reading art criticism or books on art theory. He thought, "Hey, I can do this." Although our artist was still likely to be a white male, there were starting to be more women artists in the art world. (Even so, for simplicity’s sake I’m going to keep the pronoun male for a bit longer.)
Our artist leapt beyond Minimalism--that last gasp of Cubism which reduced it to a single cube--and made "post-Minimal" sculpture that emphasized process over product. He used conspicuously natural materials (e.g., rocks and earth and sticks and twigs) or industrial detritus or just odd combos of material, such as rope and wax. Much of the time, his work was militantly impermanent--where materials were dispersed throughout a gallery to make an "installation," rather than joined together to make an object. It’s primary aim certainly wasn’t to be beautiful, but rather intellectually deep (or at least enigmatic). Our artist’s heroes were European thinkers who didn’t write directly about art, but instead said profound things that could be applied to making art. Such ideas were what he talked about with his friends.
Although a university (rather than an art-school) teaching job would have been nice, it wasn’t absolutely necessary because an artist back then could get all kinds of municipal, state, federal and foundation grants and fellowships to make work which, he thought, ought to be as "unmarketable" as possible anyway. And being right in a major urban art center wasn’t as crucial, either, as long as he could be represented by a good New York dealer. The dealer had to be in New York so that the gallery’s reputation could get him shows in Europe. The point of his having shows in Europe wasn’t so much sales as it was for his improved reputation getting him invited to do "installations" in museums. His target age for getting on the exhibition-and-installation circuit was before he turned 40, maybe as soon as 35.
In the New Art World of today, the typical young ambitious artist once more has an MFA degree. But in order to get career traction right from the start, it has to be from a short list of "hot" schools, especially one of the big three in southern California: UCLA, CalArts, or Art Center. Since the artist’s MFA is now probably in some form of "new media," his or her work (our artist is now just as likely to be female as male) will consist of either some tricky configuration of projected video, or retro-Pop-Art objects in some kind of fancy plastic made on order by a fabricator. Since all but the most minimum-wage adjunct teaching jobs are as scarce as hen’s teeth, and since government grants to artists are for all intents and purposes extinct, sales now count for just about everything. So our young artist makes work whose point can be quickly apprehended by peripatetic collectors.
Our artist reads art magazines again, but pays much more attention to such web photo-and-gossip web pages as "Out with Mary" on Artnet.com and "Scene and Herd" on Artforum.com. A good dealer is still a must, but the dealer should be nearly as young and sexy as the art world wants artists to be. Since dealers love to say that an artist is "Atlanta-based," or "Berlin-based" or "Croatia-based" or "Paducah-based" more than simply "lives in New York" or "lives in Los Angeles," our artist can--once his or her name pops up in a few art magazines and on enough websites--live anywhere he or she pleases and (with the dealer) arrange sales over the Internet. Our artist talks with friends mostly about prices and money, and starts to feel the sour breath of failure on the back of the neck if he or she hasn’t achieved career orbit by a year or two after turning 30.
In the Old Art World described above, what I’ll call "material culture" (art consisting of stationary physical objects, live theater, acoustic music performed live, etc.) may no longer have been a majority culture, but it was still a formidable minority. Painting and sculpture still had some clout in the general culture. Think Jasper Johns, Robert Rauschenberg, Roy Lichtenstein or Don Judd. Today, material culture has been reduced to an almost quaint, antiquarian minority when measured against reproduced or electronic culture--movies, television, and recorded music--which in turn has gone digital and is bulldozing everything in its path.
Whatever clout painting and sculpture still enjoy in the general culture has to do with either money (that is, sensationally high prices) or the artists being "hot" (that is, photogenic and starting to command high prices). Except for the occasional scandal involving the depiction of sex, or a satire of a religious belief, no really consequential ideas or philosophical tenets expressed in an embodied way in a contemporary painting or sculpture gets much attention at all. Contemporary painting or sculpture is all about clever irony. Think John Currin, Lisa Yuskavage, or Jeff Koons.
But if the art objects of material culture, and the artists who make them are handled adroitly by art dealers--that is, in close conjunction and synchronization with the vast trade in luxury goods, a desire to be in on the latest trends, and through slick magazines, gossipy art blogs, Venice-Biennale-type "festival" exhibitions, cultural tourism, and art trade fairs (e.g., Art Basel Miami, and The Armory Show in New York), --artists can prosper, at least monetarily. Contemporary art objects can function quite nicely as high-risk investments (the cultural equivalent of 1980s junk bonds) and as ostensible evidence of their owners’ being hipper, deeper, more complex people than you might otherwise have thought they were. The reason so many showbiz movers and shakers now so avidly collect contemporary art is that people making a lot of money in reproduced or electronic culture want to prove their chops by showing they appreciate material culture--which, down deep, they suspect is still more profound than the electronic and reproducible culture in which they make their sumptuous livings.
Obviously, there’s a boom market right now in contemporary art--although it well may collapse in a major recession. Younger artists take this condition for granted. They’ve grown up with $2500 or $3000 being the absolute minimum price for any serious work of art that isn’t a very tiny print in a very large edition. They see their peers--the ones who’ve gotten dealers in big cities, at least--charge mid-five-figures for works in their first gallery solos. And they’ve seen photographs of the ways in which artists the likes of Julian Schnabel, Brice Marden and Jeff Koons live very, very large. A critic friend says he recently went to an art fair (the art world’s version of a boat show) and dropped in at a gallery’s booth where a six-foot-by-six-foot painting by the late, well-regarded abstract painter Ray Parker--among those in a recently discovered roll of Parker canvases--was being shown to a potential buyer. The painting was in pristine condition on a new stretcher, and was priced at an unbelievably low $75,000. The collector, however, said to the gallery attendant, "Well, I might be able to enjoy that if I were poor."
The new, boom-market art world is also frenetically international, which, these days, means not just Euro-American. In Asia and South America the art market is also booming. And in the Euro-American art world (that is, the gallery-and-museum network extending from Berlin--and perhaps farther east, from Moscow--to as far west as Los Angeles), galleries and art fairs are wildly interested in non-Euro-American art, especially by Asian artists, and specifically by Chinese artists.
Many contemporary Chinese artists were academically trained in realistic drawing and painting so that they could produce propaganda images. With China going capitalist in its own strange way--"directed capitalism," they call it--these artists have either been freed--or abandoned, take your pick--to fend for their entrepreneurial selves. So they’ve smartly morphed their pictures of Mao and his loyal followers into a gently satirical form of Pop-Artified Surrealism that plays well with Western collectors. The work is still relatively cheap (although the more well-known artists are getting expensive fast) and collecting contemporary Chinese art gives Western collectors that heady feeling of being "ahead of the curve."
Actually, everybody--artists, dealers, curators, collectors and, yes, critics--wants to be "ahead of the curve." The desire to be ahead of the curve is a product of four forces. First is collecting for investment, collecting with an eye on buying before the prices go up. Second, there’s the emphasis on youth, that is "hot" artists whose greater fame is yet to come. Third, the vestiges of the idea of the avant-garde have metastasized into the wider culture. We (meaning all of us, not just the art world) have accepted "avant-garde" as merely a part of the standard product appeal needed to get something as banal as a cell phone to succeed in the marketplace. "Avant-garde" (a term the late artist Dan Flavin said "ought to be restored to the French military where its sense of futility can be properly appreciated") became "cutting edge," which became merely "edgy" which has now become, of course, merely "cool." Finally, the current art world operates at a frenzied pace. It used to be that even insiders got their news from the monthly art magazines. These days, insiders check such websites as Artnet.com and blogs like Tyler Green’s "Modern Art Notes" on Artsjournal.com to be updated daily.
In this today’s art world, art dealers (the fashionable term is "gallerist") aren’t idealist connoisseurs who wait for a good review or two to send a stray collector or two their way. They’re sharp, aggressive and tireless business people taking their wares from one art trade fair booth to another, badgering one collector after another, importuning one curator after another. Today’s museum curators don’t stay bent over books and slides in windowless offices, venturing out only to check on the condition of, or do esoteric scholarship on, neglected works in museum storage. Rather, they’re on the go in designer clothes, clutching Blackberrys, visiting those "wherever-based" artists and trying to figure out how to gather a show of a group of artists who aren’t well known enough yet for a competing institution to be putting together a group show of them.
All that about the saleability of contemporary art objects having been said, going to the art galleries in New York or L.A. these days is increasingly like going to an "alternative" film and video festival with multiple venues. I’d say that in one out of four galleries I visit on a round in the Chelsea or Brooklyn gallery districts, I’m required to go into a darkened chamber and stand (there’s usually no seating or very little seating) and watch a projected film or video for as long as I can bear it or until my schedule bids me move on. A culturally conservative colleague who reviews books and the occasional movie at Newsweek once said when I took him with me to a few galleries, "Face it, Peter, they all want to direct."
Sculptor Matthew Barney’s Cremaster series of films (the final one was three hours long and included an intermission), and his recent epic Drawing Restraint 9, co-starring his partner, the pop singer Bjork, have just about bridged the gap between Hollywood cinema--let alone art-house movies--and the art gallery. (Actually, I rather like Barney’s films, although they remind me of such early Surrealist films as Salvador Dali’s 1929 silent, Le chien andalou, except for a bigger budget.) But Barney is not the only artist working this way. Increasingly, with artists like Eija-Liisa Ahtila from Finland and the Canadian Stan Douglas, films by artists shown in art galleries have story lines that aren’t much more fractured than those in such recent Hollywood movies as Crash or Babel or Vantage Point. The production values aren’t that much worse, either.
William Wilson, the art critic for the Los Angeles Times from the 1960s into much of the 1990s, unironically used the term "veteran vanguardist" as an adjective phrase for artists who worked in the vein of, say, the California abstract painter Richard Diebenkorn, but were less well-known. When Bill used the term, he meant an artist considerably to the left, so to speak, of a traditional landscape painter, but whose work was still quite to right, so to speak, of deliberately scandalous "performance art." Often, the Diebenkornesque artist was a tenured college professor having his yearly or biennial gallery show. The term "veteran vanguardist," which was a little silly even back then, would seem completely silly now. There’s no such thing as a "vanguardist" because there’s no such thing as an avant-garde. True, some artists still push the envelope of what’s permissible in sexual and political content, or what’s legal in terms of doing things on public property, or what’s doable in terms of technological sophistication and complexity, or what galleries and museums will put up with in the way of physical risk, inconvenience and insurance liability. But artists doing those sorts of things is so expected it’s almost academic.
Contemporary art still isn’t quite mainstream, however. In terms of cultural popularity and clout, it doesn’t hold a candle to movies, TV, pop music, etc. How many art exhibitions are reviewed on cable television or National Public Radio? How many artists does Terri Gross interview on "Fresh Air"? How many big-time artists’ private lives are the subject of tabloid coverage? Part of this comparative neglect is due to the fact that--artists’ films, videos and performances notwithstanding--contemporary art remains mostly about stationary physical objects. It attracts a relatively small audience because viewers have to come to the art in order to see the original, to get the effect intended by the artist. Television and pop music have no "originals" and come to the viewers and listeners in endlessly reproducible versions. And although you still have to go to the movies in order to see a film on the big screen, everywhere in America except perhaps Manhattan, a cineplex is more nearby than a serious art gallery or museum.
But part of the comparative neglect also comes from the fact that contemporary art still isn’t intended for a large audience. A contemporary artist doesn’t want a million people to give him or her a dollar apiece to look at his or her work. He or she wants one person to pay a million dollars to own his or her work. That being the case, the contemporary artist--whatever his or her still-sublimated movie-directing ambitions--isn’t required to make the work intelligible to a greater public. Chances are, in fact, that the collector the artist has abstractly in mind as a buyer wants the work to look a little weird and indecipherable. After all, that’s part of the staying-ahead-of-the-curve feeling the collector is paying for.
The late French sociologist Jean Baudrillard said that we Western urbanites were now living in a "simulacrum" of reality, rather than reality itself--that is, in a kind of Disney World version of Main Street rather than on Main Street itself. His pronouncements used to seem kind of wacky--typical Gallic over-the-top exaggerations which might contain, at best, a grain or two of truth. Now they seem rather like a "so what?" description of our everyday lives, especially to some of us in the art world.
Back in the mid-1960s, right about the time I received my MFA degree in that Old Art World, artists without much money but with a need for working space started illegally homesteading derelict manufacturing buildings in downtown Manhattan. Soon, artists attracted some pioneer galleries, the galleries attracted a few bars and cafes, and the cafes attracted small grocery stores and delicatessens. The arty "SoHo" was born. Then it got to be stylish for architects and lawyers and young bankers to live the way artists supposedly lived, only with a few more amenities. What I call the "imported-beer-ad SoHo" was born.
Rapidly, all but the most successful artists (or those, like me and my wife, who found a loft to rent just in time to be grandfathered in under the protective "Loft Laws" passed in the late 1960s and early ’70s) were priced out, and loft buildings were converted to fashionable residences, a lot of them with doormen, and a couple I know of with commissioned works of art by well-known artists in the lobbies. Sometimes--with Barney’s films or the British artist Damien Hirst’s public manipulations of the fevered market (first, selling a diamond-encrusted skull for $100 million, and then raking in $200 million gross by having Sotheby’s in London auction off his work instead of selling it through a gallery)--I get the eerie feeling that I’m living not so much in a "new" art world as in a distended simulacrum of one.
But by sticking more and more to painting my paintings and only occasionally contributing articles to Newsweek, no longer suffering a full-time journalist’s responsibility to try to cover as much of the art-world waterfront as I can, I am, in this strange new art world, increasingly demurring. I see fewer shows, read fewer reviews, and certainly go to fewer art parties. In the 1970s, when I was still a cultural tourist in New York, I visited the then-abstract painter Jake Berthot (he’s now a sort of landscapist) in his studio way downtown on Canal Street. Walking to his studio, I was fascinated as usual by the cacophony of posters advertising rock concerts, nightclub appearances, lectures and art exhibitions. I said to Jake that it must be exciting to live in a place where you can go to all this stuff anytime you want to. "Oh, I don’t go out much at all," he said. "Why not?" I asked. "If you don’t, what’s the point of living in New York?"
"There’s a big difference," he answered, "between not going out because there’s no place to go and not going out because you choose not to." Likewise, the young artist entering the art world now--as Jake and I did about 45 years ago--will eventually enjoy the same realization--that the choice lies among going out because everybody else is, holing up in the boonies where nobody goes out, or sticking to your guns while smiling wryly at the teeming hordes.
Perhaps I should indicate what I mean by "art world." There are, after all, many art worlds. There’s the whole world of "Western art," all that Frederic Remington-like stuff that sells for six figures in places like Jackson Hole, Wyoming, and Sedona, Arizona. There’s a whole world of "classical realism," headquartered in Minnesota, in which realist painters of a Poussiniste persuasion paint, sell, and teach disciples in an old-fashioned master-apprentice way. There are the worlds of "outsider art," of "community murals," and so on. For this essay’s purpose, by "art world" I mean the one that trades in the kind of modern and contemporary art regularly reviewed in The New York Times.
Illuminate Me; Let There Be Light
(c) MH & A Publishing, LLC.
05.03.2011 - 07.08.2011 Art & Fashion. Between Skin and Clothing Walter Van Beirendonck · Louise Bourgeois · Hussein Chalayan · Christophe Coppens · Comme des Garçons · Salvador Dalí · Naomi Filmer · Robert Gober · Martin Margiela · Viktor & Rolf · Anna-Nicole Ziesche · u.v.a.
Fashion and objects by Walter Van Beirendonck, Louise Bourgeois, Hussein Chalayan, Christophe Coppens, Comme des Garçons, Salvador Dalí, Naomi Filmer, Robert Gober, Martin Margiela, Francesco Vezzoli, Viktor & Rolf, Anna-Nicole Zische and many others.
The exhibition explores the relation between art and fashion. Since the sixties art and fashion share the same avant garde feeling. From then on fashion no longer expresses power, money and social class. Instead it starts to express art and culture. Fashion and popular visual cultures – like pop art – became from the sixties on the new visual aesthetics of society. Fashion and Art became in the same way conceptual. During the eighties Japanese designers as Yohji Yamamoto and Comme des Garçons start to explore the boundaries of clothing and the meaning of fashion. Viktor & Rolf and Hussein Chalayan too started to present fashion shows in the new millenium that looked like art-installations.
The exhibition, which first has been shown at the Museum Boijmans Van Beuningen in Rotterdam, curated by José Teunissen and Han Nefkens, will be reshaped for Kunstmuseum Wolfsburg by José Teunissen and Annelie Lütgens, curator of Kunstmuseum Wolfsburg.
On Tuesday last week, the staff at Soho Film Laboratory were told by their new owners, Deluxe, that they were stopping the printing of 16mm film, effective immediately. Len Thornton, who looks after 16mm, was told he could take no new orders. That was it: medium eviction without notice. This news will devastate my working life and that of many others, and means that I will have to take the production of my work for Tate Modern’s Turbine Hall commission out of Britain.
Soho Film Lab was the last professional lab to be printing 16mm in the UK. In recent years, as 16mm has grown as a medium for artists, the lab has been inundated with work, both from this country and abroad. Contrary to what people imagine, it is a growing and captive market, albeit a small one, with a new generation of younger artists turning to analogue technologies to make and show their work: Thornton says he handles work from more than 170 artists. Then there’s the effect that this will have on the BFI and their conservation of the many thousands of reels of Movietone news footage, television, documentaries, features and much else.
These last few days have been like having my bag stolen and remembering, bit by bit, what I had inside it. My relationship with the lab is an intimate one; they watch over my work, and are, in a sense, its protectors. I have made more than 40 films, and each one has several internegatives (a copy of the original negative). In the vaults of Soho Film Lab are racks packed high with cans containing my life’s work to date, including the negatives of films I never made. I order countless prints each year, as projecting my films on loop systems in museums and galleries inevitably means that they become scratched and exhausted. Thornton and his colleagues know the titles of all these films, and when I make a new film, I turn up at the lab and grade every colour in every scene. Film is chemistry: chemistry that has produced the miracle of the moving image. Decades of knowledge, skill and experience have gone into my saying, "I think that shot is too green, but the next one is too pink."
Deluxe (who responded that they have "nothing to say at this time") are, admittedly, ending only one tiny part of an ongoing process: they will not stop processing 16mm negative, and will continue to process and print 35mm. It is not as though they are giving up the chemicals and going dry. But they are stopping 16mm print because the cinema industry does not need it any more, and it is they who run the labs and are dictating that movies go digital and celluloid be phased out. Printing 16mm is an irritant to them, as it is time away from printing feature films, and features are the industry and all that matters. Pitched against this, art is voiceless and insignificant. My films are depictions of their subject and therefore closer to painting than they are to narrative cinema. I shoot on negative that is then taken to the lab, in much the same way you used to drop your photos off to be developed. The 16mm print I get back is called the rush print. The negative stays in the lab. Working alone on a cutting table over many weeks, I cut my film out of the rush print. Using tape, I stick the shots together, working as both artist and artisan. It is the heart of my process, and the way I form the film is intrinsically bound up with these solitary hours of watching, spooling and splicing.
When I have finished, I take my reel of taped film, now called my cutting copy, to a negative cutter, who cuts the original negative and delivers it to the lab, which then prints it as a film. My relationship to film begins at that moment of shooting, and ends in the moment of projection. Along the way, there are several stages of magical transformation that imbue the work with varying layers of intensity. This is why the film image is different from the digital image: it is not only emulsion versus pixels, or light versus electronics but something deeper – something to do with poetry.
Many of us are exhausted from grieving over the dismantling of analogue technologies. Digital is not better than analogue, but different. What we are asking for is co-existence: that analogue film might be allowed to remain an option for those who want it, and for the ascendency of one not to have to mean the extinguishing of the other.
The real crux of the difference is that artists exhibit, and so care about the final presentation and presence of the artwork in the space. Other professions have their work mediated into different formats: TV, magazines, billboards, books. It remains only in galleries and museums that the physical encounter is so critical, which is why artists, in the widest sense, are the most distressed by the obsolescence of analogue mediums. But it is also in these spaces that a younger generation born in the digital age are taking up analogue mediums in enormous numbers. At the recent Berlin art fair, 16mm film projections outnumbered digital projections by two to one.
The decision to end 16mm print at Soho Film Lab, newly named Deluxe Soho, seems to be worldwide policy (they have already ended 16mm printing in their labs in New York and Toronto), so it is unlikely we will be able to reverse the decision locally. I spent my weekend writing to Martin Scorsese and Steven Spielberg, who are both understood to care about celluloid film, even 16mm. I am also trying to make contact through the Guggenheim with the US owner of Deluxe, Ron Perelman, who, as a patron of the arts, might not have understood the devastating impact this presumably financially negligible decision might have on a growing group of contemporary artists, the galleries and museums that show them and the national collections that own their work.
In the end, the decision is more cultural than fiscal, and needs to be taken away from the cinema industry. What we need in the UK is a specialist laboratory for conservation-quality 16mm and 35mm prints, possibly affiliated to the BFI. This needs to happen quickly, before the equipment, technology and experience is irreparably dismantled, and Deluxe must help with this. In the meantime, I will look to the last remaining labs in Europe to print my 16mm films.
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The art world that most people hear about is a dystopian one of auction headlines. It’s glossy features and gossip reporting. It’s the fast-food menu of celebrity artists arranged in starchitect-designed museum wings. It’s a world of power and money where taste gets issued by self-interested decree. And those are its better points. What makes this homogenized culture bad is how it obscures good art from public view.
A better art world revolves around nimble commercial galleries and non-profit spaces. Some of the best places for art are located in Chelsea, but many more are peripheral, alternative, and do-it-yourself (diy). Even if the art on display is sometimes bad, the vitality of this world is good, with its artist-packed openings and the chatter of conversation across a variety of styles.
The challenge for this world is how to broadcast and sustain itself with limited means in an environment that ignores it. A couple of issues back, I sounded a cautionary note about the intersection of criticism and new media. I was concerned about the messianism that accompanies new technology, especially when it’s employed by one of art’s most oxygen-depleting power brokers (see "My Jerry Saltz Problem," December 2010 <http://tinyurl.com/2bxkhzf> ).
That doesn’t mean we should disregard new media’s potential. The promise of new media is its ability to do an end-run around traditional networks of information. Facebook and Twitter have become essential tools for broadcasting shows and learning about art to see. Artists especially have benefited from becoming active online users, if only to take ownership and invest in their own representation.
For all of us, new media has elevated the issues of networking and connectivity from silent considerations into conscious actions. Thanks to Facebook, the word "Friend" is now a transitive verb. Those tools of social networking offer new ways to visualize our relationships while expanding our access to information.
Parallel to these developments, a school of art is now at work depicting the structures and connections of the art world in various graphic forms, while also using new media to draw attention to itself and the art of others.
I wrote about the paintings and video work of Loren Munk at the end of last month’s column, but they deserve further review. I am not the only one who thinks so. This is shaping up to be the Year of the Munk, as many more of us realize this quirky artist of strange diagrams and obsessive record-keeping is the prophet of a new art we are only starting to understand.
In addition to his exhibition at the gallery Minus Space, Munk has been invited to exhibit his paintings and videos in half-a-dozen recent group shows around New York. That list includes exhibitions at Storefront in Bushwick, Sideshow Gallery in Williamsburg, Janet Kurnatowski Gallery in Greenpoint, The Elizabeth Foundation in Midtown Manhattan, and an exhibition curated by the online editor Hrag Vartanian at Outpost gallery in Ridgewood, Queens, called "#TheSocialGraph: An Evolving Exploration of Social Media Art."[1]
Munk creates his online videos of gallery openings and studio visits under the pseudonym James Kalm. If you take away anything from this column, search for his videos on YouTube under "JamesKalm" and "JamesKalmRoughCut" and subscribe to his feed. I predict this singular record of diy clips, most of them ten-minute windows on the art of today, will be more important to art history than almost anything being written about the contemporary scene.
I didn’t always think so. When I first heard about Munk’s video project several years ago-which he described as an expansion of his artistic practice-it sounded like an obsessive excuse to get out of the studio. Munk says he started filming around 2006, when he accidentally hit the video switch on his point-and-shoot camera. He has now made 500 or so videos, all filmed with similar low-tech equipment and a large memory card.
When I initially saw them, the look of the videos seemed as weird as the concept. Each report begins with Munk arriving at his gallery destination by bike (heavy breathing is a constant as he narrates what he encounters). His scenes combine observations of the people he sees with close-up views of art and thumbnail sketches of the artists. Since he films the gallery shows unannounced and often unauthorized, he holds his camera out as if taking a digital picture. Other times the camera dangles from a strap around his neck. The shooting style appeared rough back in 2006. Today it resonates with the amateur videos we all seem to be taking with our smart phones and flip cameras.
The amateur idiosyncrasies of these videos ultimately make them inviting. Munk records and overlays the performances of street musicians to get around the limitations of professional copyrights. He also thanks his wife Kate at the end of each clip. These are great touches. As opposed to most video art, which attempts to destabilize and confuse, his videos become more sensible with each view. Watch enough of them and it’s professional programming that starts to seem strange. Amateur videos have become the new normal.
Munk’s videos relate not only to new media (technically, he has created a video blog or "vlog") but also to social networking and indeed his artistic project. The James Kalm Report connects the dots between artist, artwork, and viewer. It relates one show to the next. Through filming out-of-the-way galleries and non-headline personalities, his work documents an artistic network we might not otherwise see and broadcasts it to the greater public, without costing a dime (and without so far earning him a penny).
Munk came to New York to paint. When he’s not recording videos or writing about shows for The Brooklyn Rail, he is painting in his studio. He has been living and working in the same Red Hook loft since 1979. This history gets reflected in both his style in oil, which is heavily impastoed, rough, and rich in color, and in the connections he now depicts in his work.
Munk makes the case that personal connections matter and have always mattered in the world of art. Our links to the past matter as much as our connections to the present. So his paintings record the New York art scene in maps and lists from 1900 to today and document the inter-connectivity of a city’s artistic culture. For Munk, social media art, his videos, and his writing are all extensions of a reverential urbanism. (Hint: The City of New York could do worse than employ this urban historian for some grand artistic project.)
Munk’s best work highlights the connections of the artistic world he is invested in. Of his paintings now on view, the example up at Sideshow, Symbolic Clusters (STUDY) (2009-10), was my least favorite, because its analysis of the influences of contemporary British art seemed the most remote to Munk’s own world. In contrast, A Tree Grows in Brooklyn (2006-10) at the Elizabeth Foundation is iconic. Here, lines of color rise up from a map of Brooklyn to form the trunk of a tree, which then open into leaves that serve as labels for the location of artist studios-the flowering of an art scene in Munk’s own back yard.
As for their composition, these paintings, much like his videos, can seem strange, almost garish, but their weirdness becomes welcoming. Munk makes a conscious decision to connect with the history of painting not only in his work but also through his medium. His influences include the English Occultist Robert Fludd and the modernists Alfred Jensen and Ad Reinhardt. Hans Hofmann and Clement Greenberg hover in the background and sometimes feature in the diagrams themselves. The eccentricities that creep into Munk’s style also make his paintings instantly recognizable. The colors and typography borrow the visuals of signage to state their messages as boldly as possible. They are the exclamatory paintings of a reserved artist.
The Elizabeth Foundation show, curated by the artist Eric Doeringer, offers a survey of many of the younger artists working in modes related to Munk’s own. Art Basel Miami Beach Hooverville, by William Powhida and Jade Townsend <http://tinyurl.com/4uctjkm> <http://tinyurl.com/4vmrzfj> , is already a modern classic. This hyper-detailed drawing depicts a fictional shanty-town of artists, critics, dealers, and collectors congregated outside the gates of the Miami Beach Convention Center, where arguably the country’s most important and most superficial art fair takes place each December. Friends and enemies are identified by name. Inside jokes are everywhere. Recently someone said the work resembled the centerfold of an old issue of Cracked magazine, a description that hints at the work’s punk humor mixed with a fantasy view of adult depravity and adolescent triumph. In the back of the image, beneath a plume of smoke, the artists depict their own "Siege Tower" made of "wood, rope, steel, iron will" directed at the front gate of the fair.
Through visual criticism, appropriation, and humor, the message here is that the good art world is coming to take on the bad. Powhida, along with the artist Jennifer Dalton and the alternative gallery owner Edward Winkleman, are leading this charge through artistic projects and webcast symposiums called #class and #rank (those #s are Twitter "hashtags" used for online organization). Powhida, a high school art teacher, has even developed a bratty alter ego for deep cover in the boozy-money world of celebrity art.
Munk’s project, though less confrontational, ultimately seems more subversive. Rather than take on the power and corruption of the bad art world, Munk strengthens the networks of the good. At the very least, he shows us the art world alternative. We should take note that on February 3, Munk, Powhida, Dalton, and Doeringer will meet at the Elizabeth Foundation to discuss their influences and try to arrive at a common term to describe their art (Munk likes "Informationism.")
If the Elizabeth Foundation show brings together the criticisms of the mainstream, the group show now at Sideshow Gallery <http://tinyurl.com/4rakpqo> reveals the triumphs of the alternative network. The Brooklyn gallery’s owner, Richard Timperio, is not dissimilar from Munk in his attraction to the artists of his local scene. His annual group show brings together everyone he knows. With something like 500 works arranged floor to ceiling, this exhibition breaks every rule of gallery etiquette. In doing so it becomes a fantasy show of artistic friendships. The art of modern masters like Paul Resika, Thornton Willis, Nicolas Carone, Dan Christensen, Ronnie Landfield, Larry Poons, Peter Reginato, and Tadasky gets positioned next to the work of people (husbands of artists, other gallery owners) that you didn’t even realize made art. Then there are those under-represented artists here like Dana Gordon, Lori Ellison, and Tom Evans whom you would like to see much more often. Loren Munk used to be one of them. Now, through the vision of his art and a lot of pedaling, he’s everywhere.
[1] "New Year, New Work, New Faces" was on view at Storefront Gallery, Brooklyn, from January 1 through January 23, 2011; "It’s All Good!!: Apocalypse Now" opened at Sideshow Gallery, Brooklyn, on January 8 and remains on view through February 20, 2011; "Paper 2011" opened at Janet Kurnatowski Gallery on January 14 and remains on view through February 13, 2011; "I Like the Art World and the Art World Likes Me" opened at the Elizabeth Foundation for the Arts on January 14 and remains on view through March 5, 2011; "#TheSocialGraph: An Evolving Exploration of Social Media Art" was on view at Outpost gallery, Queens, from November 12 through November 27, 2010.
James Panero is the Managing Editor of The New Criterion.
Copyright © 2011 The New Criterion
It is clear that curatorial practice today goes well beyond mounting art exhibitions and caring for works of art. Curators do a lot more: they administer the experience of art by selecting what is made visible, contextualize and frame the production of artists, and oversee the distribution of production funds, fees, and prizes that artists compete for. Curators also court collectors, sponsors, and museum trustees, entertain corporate executives, and collaborate with the press, politicians, and government bureaucrats; in other words, they act as intermediaries between producers of art and the power structure of our society.
A press release for a recent conference on curatorial practice (at which I originally presented this paper) portrayed the figure of the curator as a knowledgeable and transparent agent moving between cultures and disciplines-a cultural producer par excellence. Furthermore, it seemed to suggest that art has become a subgenre of "the Curatorial":
The conference "Cultures of the Curatorial" aims at positioning the Curatorial-a practice which goes decisively beyond the making of exhibitions-within a transdisciplinary and transcultural context and exploring it as a genuine method of generating, mediating and reflecting experience and knowledge. . . . Between art and science forms of practice, techniques, formats and aesthetics have emerged which can be subsumed under the notion of the "Curatorial"-not dissimilar to the functions of the concepts of the filmic or the literary.
The necessity of going "beyond the making of exhibitions" should not become a justification for the work of curators to supersede the work of artists, nor a reinforcement of authorial claims that render artists and artworks merely actors and props for illustrating curatorial concepts. Movement in such a direction runs a serious risk of diminishing the space of art by undermining the agency of its producers: artists.
1. Overreaching
Curatorial practice is predicated upon the existence of artistic production and has a supporting role in its activity. While artists may well produce art in the absence of curators, if no art is being produced, curators of contemporary art, at least, are out of a job. For this reason, attempts to curatorially "produce" art and artists by the simple expedient of including them in a show often result in little more than a curatorial embarrassment, as in the famous case of Roger Buergel’s inclusion of celebrity chef Ferran Adrià in the last Documenta.3 While Adrià may indeed be a genius as a chef, his talent does not automatically turn his cooking into a new form of art, and neither did Buergel’s framing of it. As Buergel said shortly before the opening of the show:
I have invited Ferran Adrià because he has succeeded in generating his own aesthetic which has become something very influential within the international scene. This is what I am interested in and not whether people consider it to be art or not. It is important to say that artistic intelligence doesn’t manifest itself in a particular medium, that art doesn’t have to be identified simply with photography, sculpture and painting etc., or with cooking in general; however, under certain conditions, it can become art.4
All true up to a point, but what is that point? What are these "certain circumstances" that Buergel alludes to, under which cooking can come to be considered art? Part of the reason why the transformation of cooking into art did not take place at Documenta is that Adrià’s cooking was not already anchored in the stream of commodities and careers constituted by the art system; in this regard it is interesting to note in comparison that Rirkrit Tiravanija cooks and is still recognized as an artist, though in reality he is only an average cook.5 The extraordinary aspect of his cooking is not its quality as cooking, but rather its presentation by Tiravanija himself as an artist who cooks. It is important to distinguish between the artistic decision to include an activity within an artwork and the curatorial power to designate something as art or like art through its inclusion in an exhibition.
Another example of how curatorial power can be distinguished from artistic authorship by its legislative authority over what takes place within the space of art could be seen in the last São Paulo Biennial. Whereas, in a kind of grand authorial gesture meant as a comment on the crisis of biennials, the curators first announced that the entire biennial would be devoid of art, the concept later changed, presumably when this gesture was found to discourage professional visitors from attending. The void became merely partial: only the second floor of Oscar Niemeyer’s biennial building was to remain empty, while the ground floor became a "public square," "opening itself up as the ágora in the tradition of the Greek polis, a space for meetings, confrontations, frictions."6 However, when a group of local graffiti artists decided to intervene and tag the second floor, the curators reacted in a punitive, institutional fashion by having one of them arrested and then testifying against her in court, leading to her being jailed with common criminals for nearly two months and eventually sentenced to four years’ probation.
This incident again brings to mind the work of Tiravanija, who also encouraged indeterminate, open spaces. At an opening of one of his early exhibitions in New York in the early 1990s, a belligerent visitor picked up some of the raw eggs Tiravanija was intending to cook with, and proceeded to smash them against the gallery’s walls. But in this situation, no one was punished, or even asked to stop and leave. This negative action was allowed to run its course, just as any other activity in the space of Tiravanija’s artwork, and this person eventually stopped and left the gallery.
Yet another example of such a tendency is the "Curating Degree Zero Archive," a traveling exhibition of "curatorial research" designed as a kind of artistic installation. Conceived by curators, the exhibition circulates through a network of public art institutions largely run by curators. The issue is not whether curators should have archives or open them to others, or to what degree this is interesting or not; rather, the question concerns whether the people in charge of administering exhibitions of art should be using the spaces and funding available for art to exhibit their own reading lists, references, and sources as a kind of artwork. Even more ludicrous is the fact that the dissolution of the self-contained (autonomous) artwork is cited as a justification for supplanting the work of artists in the museum altogether, as shown on the website of this curatorial project:
"Archives have become an increasingly common practice in the art world since the 1960s. On the one hand, there are archives founded by artists or collectors; on the other, a more recent development, there are those founded by curators, who sought to make their collections of materials accessible and make their selection criteria public. That desire may have arisen from the dissolution of the notion of the self-contained artwork, which has been eclipsed by a contingent art object that makes a new form of cultural memory necessary and always contains a note of protest and a critique of museum practices."
2. The Job
Curatorial work is a profession, and people working in the field are not free agents but are rather employed to perform a task on behalf of an institution or a client. It’s a job, both for those affiliated with institutions and for so-called independent curators. With the job come institutional power, a degree of security, and a mandate for a certain range of activity, which may involve a certain sense of institutional authorship, but emphatically, to my mind, does not include artistic claim to the artwork on which this activity is predicated.
While some artists occasionally do work as curators, it’s important to acknowledge that the relationship between artists and curators is structurally somewhat like the relationship between workforce and management: like the workers, most artists suspect that their "supervisors," the curators, do not really understand the art, that they are controlling, egocentric, and ignorant, and are mismanaging the (art) factory and mistreating the producers (something like the scene from Godard’s sausage factory in Tout va bien). Yet there is real resentment out there, not very different from the feelings artists harbored towards art critics in the 1960s and ’70s. Many artists-from extremely established artists to younger practitioners new to the field of art-feel that curatorial power and arrogance are out of control.
For artists, precarious working conditions have been a reality for most of the history of modern and contemporary art. Artists have never benefitted from the kind of organization that many Fordist factory workers or other unionized laborers managed to achieve, and whose improved wages, hours, and working conditions improved the situation even in many non-unionized fields. Artists, in their capacity as artists, have always worked as independent producers, mostly without stipends, salaries, pensions, unemployment protection, or contracts.
Naturally there have been exceptions, such as the artists’ union in the USSR. However, it’s enough to read the letters of Rodchenko to realize that the union was more of a problem than a solution: it was an instrument of a totalitarian state, the ideology of which by that time excluded Rodchenko’s type of production.8 Consequently, he was unable to receive a pension and died in poverty. Meanwhile, at the center of the so-called "free world," Mondrian also died in poverty in New York. Neither ideological structure provided much security for even the most accomplished artists.
Before we attribute the rise in popularity or social relevance of curators since the 1990s to larger ideological, geopolitical, or economic shifts such as that from Fordism to Post-Fordism, let’s again consider the institution of art: it seems to me that this increase in social significance came partly from the declining power of art criticism, with curators assuming the agency of the critic in addition to their executive power in the museum. It may be argued that art critics did deserve to be marginalized for having vastly overreached at a certain point in the 1960s, when it seemed more culturally significant for a certain art critic such as Clement Greenberg to write about a work of art than for that work to have been made in the first place. But imagine the frustration of the artist who believes herself to be liberated from the tyranny of the critic only to discover that the situation has changed: rather than two competing powers-the critic and the curator, who could be played against each other-there is now only a single totalizing figure that she cannot bypass!
Furthermore, are we sure that this curatorial gain does not bring a correspondingly diminished status for the artist? The nightmare scenario for artists is that the supervisors bypass the workers altogether and begin producing art themselves, or automate the process of art production to render artists redundant. For owners of the culture factory-whether state or privately owned-it would be rather convenient if artists, who are a historically disobedient group, could be replaced with a disciplined contingent trained to obey authority, and production costs slashed through the elimination of a large part of the labor force. In such a scenario the economic gain would be enormous, entailing the replacement of a group that holds the rights to their own production with one comprised of salaried employees.
3. Curator as Producer
Last year I was invited to speak at a conference in Philadelphia on "curatorial activism." One of the participants spoke about her salaried directorship of a New York art institution as an activist practice. When I pointed out that people who are paid to go to a demonstration are not activists, but essentially hired bodies, the audience became visibly uncomfortable. But my point was less about money than why it is not enough these days to take on a challenging job, do it well, with real dedication and engagement, and take pride in that, without trying to upgrade its status by presenting it as activism, cultural production, or the production of art.
In fact, the debate with regard to the boundary between curatorial practice and artistic production is one that curators are engaging in among themselves, as Michelle White makes clear in a recent conversation with fellow curator Nato Thompson:
"I also think that the term cultural producer, aside from the particular conditions of our moment, is a healthier or more honest way to articulate the contemporary role of the curator. It acknowledges the complexity of the collaboration that has to happen when something like an exhibition is organized or a project is carried out, which involves, as you said, a much more complex institutional web of financial as well as physical logistics from the relationship of collectors, patrons, boards of trustees to the possibilities of display space. It is certainly beyond the simple curator/artist dichotomy. But at the same time, in working on site-specific projects or exhibitions with living artists where collaboration is essential to produce meaning, I have found myself questioning the boundaries of my involvement in the aesthetic and conceptual production. So, I wonder, are there risks in assuming this more egalitarian position as producer?"
To respond to this question: yes, there are big risks for artists. As an artist, how do you exactly say no to the curator who invited you to participate in a show, but seems to want to credit herself as a collaborator or co-author, when you risk not being invited the next time? While perhaps politically and socially well-meaning, this type of approach runs the risk of making an unsolicited claim of co-authoring artists’ works commissioned by the curator. I really do not think that many artists feel that collaboration with a curator is essential to produce meaning. To my mind, this type of claim would be an extremely unwelcome and unwarranted intrusion, particularly if one keeps in mind that the figure claiming this share of authorship is not some underpaid art installer or intern researcher, but someone with the power to include, commission, or exclude artworks.
Similarly, it seems to me that we should also be very careful to avoid assigning any kind of meta-artistic capacity to curatorial practice. While steps taken in this direction have often been made with good intentions, invoking the expansion of a more general category of "cultural practice," they nevertheless carry with them the danger of lending credibility to something like a potential colonization of artistic practice by academia and a new class of cultural managers. If the artist is already expected to question the social, the economic, the cultural, and so forth, then it goes without saying that when a curator supersedes the artist’s capacity as a social critic, we abandon the critical function embodied by the role of the artist and reduce the agency of art.
If there is to be critical art, the role of the artist as a sovereign agent must be maintained. By sovereignty, I mean simply certain conditions of production in which artists are able to determine the direction of their work, its subject matter and form, and the methodologies they use-rather than having them dictated by institutions, critics, curators, academics, collectors, dealers, the public, and so forth. While this may be taken for granted now, historically the possibility of artistic self-determination has been literally fought for and hard won from the Church, the aristocracy, public taste, and so on. In my view, this sovereignty is at the very center of what we actually understand as art these days: an irreducible element considered to be the "freedom of art."
I suspect that it’s not coincidental that the rise of the "independent curator" has taken place alongside a pattern of increasing privatization over the past couple of decades in the cultural field. Curators and institutions of art, whose authority is in part derived from representing public interests and being responsible to the public, are increasingly becoming private agents guided largely by self-interest. For this reason they have begun to assume the appearance of something with authorial characteristics, while still retaining a certain claim to objectivity in their evaluation of art and in their obligation to public address.
It has recently been pointed out to me that as artistic production becomes increasingly deskilled-and, by extension, less identifiable by publics as art when placed outside the exhibition environment-exhibitions themselves become the singular context through which art can be made visible as art. This alone makes it easy to understand why so many now think that inclusion in an exhibition produces art, rather than artists themselves. But this is a completely wrong approach in my opinion: what most urgently needs to be done is to further expand the space of art by developing new circulation networks through which art can encounter its publics-through education, publication, dissemination, and so forth-rather than perpetuate existing institutions of art and their agents at the expense of the agency of artists by immortalizing the exhibition as art’s only possible, ultimate destination.
4. Artist as Curator
On the other hand, there is quite a history of artists making use of certain aspects of curatorial and organizational work in their practice by assuming the role of curator. At times this has been a response to the inadequacy of existing institutions, their hostility to artists, or their total absence-prompting the creation of many of the artist-run spaces of the 1970s-or as a response to a particular emergency, as with ACT UP and Gran Fury. As Group Material, Martha Rosler, and other artists in the 1980s demonstrated, curating can become a part of artistic practice just as any social form or activity can. For example, Martha Rosler’s If You Lived Here began as an immediate response to a lack of institutional support for an exhibition she was invited to do at the Dia Center for the Arts. Rosler felt that the best way to do something there was by positioning herself as curator/organizer-a kind of one-person institution rather than an individual artist. This resulted in a project comprising several exhibitions on housing and homelessness involving numerous artists, architects, activists, and community groups, which then turned out to be a seminal artwork that influenced several generations of artists including Rirkrit Tiravanija, Renée Green, Liam Gillick, Jeanne van Heeswijk, Marion von Osten, and many others.
Likewise, what passed largely unnoticed in Paul Chan’s production of Waiting for Godot in New Orleans was Chan’s peculiar positioning of the artist in relation to the work: he did not write the play, direct it, or act in it. The set was essentially a city street. Chan’s artistic involvement consisted largely of spending many months teaching as a volunteer in a local college, building close relationships with local community groups and grassroots organizations-in other words, creating the conditions necessary for the production and reception of the play, while ensuring that part of the money raised for the project would go to local needs other than culture.
I feel that whereas artists’ engagement with a range of social forms and practices not normally considered part of the vocabulary of art serves to open up the space of art and grant it increased agency, curatorial and institutional attempts to recontextualize their own activities as artistic-or generalize art into a form of cultural production-has the opposite effect: they shrink the space of art and reduce the agency of artists.
An artist can aspire to a certain sovereignty, which today implies that in addition to producing art, one also has to produce the conditions that enable such production, its channels of circulation. Sometimes the production of these conditions can become so critical to the production of work that it assumes the shape of the work itself. This should not be confused with the job curators have and the work they do. As an artist, I would not attempt to propose a solution for curators; they themselves need to come up with ways of thinking and working that do not undercut the sovereignty of artists.
At first glance, Google’s new Art Project is a wondrous thing. The Internet colossus is collaborating with 17 heavyweight international museums, including the Met in New York, the Hermitage in St Petersburg, the Uffizi in Florence, and the National Gallery in London, to provide an online simulacrum of the experience of visiting a world-class gallery. Using Google’s "Street View" technology, viewers can take a virtual tour around the museums, and look at high-resolution images of more than 1,060 works of art from their collections.
In addition, each institution has nominated a single piece as a "Gigapixel Artwork", which Google has photographed "using super high resolution or ’gigapixel’ photo capturing technology". This may sound like pseudo-scientific hokum, but apparently it produces an electronic image containing 7 billion pixels, allowing viewers to study the work in microscopic detail. In most, but not all, cases, the artworks chosen for the "Gigapixel" treatment are lodestars of a particular collection - such as Botticelli’s The Birth of Venus in the Uffizi. The results are undeniably stunning: for instance, the National Gallery’s "Gigapixel Artwork" is Holbein’s Ambassadors; zoom in, and you can make out the craquelure of the oil paint. So what’s not to like? Don’t get me wrong: I admire Google’s faith in its own ability to further the causes of democracy via technology. Every political bone in my body believes it is wrong that, even today, in 2011, fine art is still so exclusive. Great art must never be the preserve of the powerful and wealthy alone. A masterpiece is universal, and in an ideal world, it should be seen for free. If Google’s free Art Project introduces some of the treasures of these museums to a new audience, then that is a fine thing.
But while I love the idea of the Art Project, its execution is problematic. For one thing, the project is far from definitive; in truth, as things stand, it is frustratingly partial. Not every celebrated museum in the world is taking part - what about the Prado in Madrid, or the Vatican Museums in Rome? Google offers the illusion that it is casting a net around the greatest works of art in the world. But lots have got away, such as Velazquez’s Las Meninas, or the antique marble Laocoon.In addition, Google’s grainy "Street View" photography reminds me of the kind of handheld footage favoured in horror movies such as The Blair Witch Project - a "look" that is surely anathema to the carefully orchestrated clarity of the galleries in reality. Moreover, at the moment only a small proportion of works from each collection is available in high-resolution. One of the pleasures of exploring a museum is that you can follow your eyes, and linger in front of any work of art that takes your fancy. This is impossible with Google’s Art Project since it prescribes which images you are allowed to study in any depth. Their selection from the collection of the Museum of Modern Art in New York, for instance, favours Neo- and Post-Impressionist painting by the likes of Seurat, Gauguin, Van Gogh and Cezanne, at the expense of modernist masterpieces. In other words, someone else is deciding what images are worthy of study on your behalf - an impulse that surely runs counter to the "democratic" motivation of the project in the first place. Essentially, Google’s Art Project is a cherry-picking tool, but I would much rather choose the cherries I want to pick myself.
As for the choice of the "Gigapixel Artworks", supposedly the stars of each collection, sometimes the selection is perverse. The Museo Reina Sofia in Madrid opts for a Cubist composition by Juan Gris instead of Picasso’s Guernica, which, for many people, is the only reason they actually visit the museum in the first place (the Art Project does not offer Guernica as a high-res artwork, either). Tate Britain’s "Gigapixel Artwork" is a painting by the contemporary artist Chris Ofili. Is No Woman, No Cry really on a par with other "Gigapixel" paintings, such as Rembrandt’s Night Watch? (Incidentally, Van Gogh and Holbein are both honoured with two "Gigapixel" paintings each, which seems a little unfair on the legions of first-rate artists who have been overlooked.)
Google might respond that, over time, they hope to redress the balance, and that they dream of a day when every single work of art in every single museum around the world will be photographed in "super high resolution". Fine, but the worrying implication of their Art Project is that in the future there will no longer be any need to visit a museum. According to Google’s own press release, an image containing around 7 billion pixels allows the viewer "to study details of the brushwork and patina beyond that possible with the naked eye [sic]". If Google’s technology trumps the powers of the naked eye, then why bother with reality at all? What can be gleaned from looking at Holbein’s Ambassadors on a trip to the National Gallery that cannot be enhanced by looking at a simulacrum of it on Google’s Art Project? This is a profound philosophical problem, but my instinct is that I would much prefer to visit the National Gallery to see Holbein’s Ambassadors with my own eyes than to examine it through Google’s "super-high-resolution" prism. Every time. Google’s Art Project is a wonderful resource, but it is no substitute for the experiencing of looking at art for real.
From the Telegraph United Kingdom
There was a time when I regarded the Tea Party as noisy, but mostly harmless geeks -- with their Triangle Hats and Jefferson quotes, they reminded me of the same dopes who were in the Civil Defense League when I was a kid. A crowd of Dolts and Dumb-bells who were mostly in it for the hats, the walkie-talkies, and the opportunity to hold forth like the assholes they watch on TV. Glenn Beck, Rush Limbaugh, Bill O’Reilly and other lesser McCarthyites who’d like to tell the rest of us how to be Americans and have cast themselves as victims since Barack Obama was elected. You know the types -- they forswear big Gub’mint, until their particular industry goes tits-up and they need a bail-out -- they hold the Constitution sacrosanct, but gave not a fuck when the Bush administration shreds Habeas Corpus and the Bill of Rights in the name of Homeland Security. Where were all the Triangular Hats back then?
When John McCain picked Sarah Palin for his running mate, a little over two years ago, I thought it was his way of giving up. If you look at the tape of the end sputter of the McCain campaign -- one could tell this was a guy who really didn’t want the job -- He was always a temperamental fuck -- a guy who honestly resented being asked questions -- any question -- he was clearly a man far more used to giving orders than having to explain himself or his position. You see, John McCain, for all of his years as a political animal, thought he was running for CEO of the United States. He cultivated the skills of an executive and not those of a President. You can’t fire Congress. At the end of his campaign, one could tell he was relieved to have lost.
Palin, if you believe all of the subsequent reportage, was a disastrous candidate, unable to stay on message, full of platitudes and an appalling lack of depth when it came to issues of a global nature. Her home-spun, golly-gee, small-town Dip-Shit act played with the Republican base -- the culturally conservative South loved Caribou Barbie. Never mind the howls of protest from her own state colleagues, claiming she wanted to remove books from public libraries she found objectionable. Sarah Palin was able to take a threadbare ideology and stretch out its shelf-life. She parlayed her Gidget goes to Alaska shtick into a now-canceled TV show, in which she takes almost surreal delight in blowing the brains out of Alaska’s native wildlife. It is odd to see a public official that turned-on by firearms.
She then saw her opportunity with the Drool-Cases in the Tea Party -- this was a huge pool of disaffected, low IQ ass-hats who could be mined for votes. Give her credit for being able to read the God, Guns and Country zeitgeist. She saw them coming -- the Birthers, the Tea Party, and the Anti-Immigration crowd -- the newly minted Constitutionalists so infuriated by the idea of a President of color; they’d follow an ideological husk like Palin -- no matter how hollow. It was about then I started to think of the Tea Party and its ilk as something less innocuous. When one of their number brought a loaded handgun to one of our President’s speeches, I came to the conclusion that these guys were essentially David Duke without the linen.
She used all of the amped up "lock and load" rhetoric -- the "Obama wants to kill your Grandpa" scare tactics about Medicaid and Social Security -- the ugly anti-immigration bigotry -- She used it so well, Rupert Murdoch made room for her on the FOX network, to help spoon feed the hatred to the yokels, shit-kickers and stump-jumpers.
I still think the Tea Party is largely comprised of underachieving Slap-Dicks, looking for someone to blame for where they are in the world. Your basic, garden variety bigots who chafe at the idea of an African American as leader of the free world. I’d like to think they are mostly harmless.
And then came Saturday. . . Congressman Gabrielle Giffords -- a fairly conservative Democrat -- was gunned down -- and seven others were murdered, including a nine-year old girl, by some nut with a belly and head full of muddled rectitude and hatred.
The Tea Party and Right Wing went in to full on denial mode -- trotting out the ’lone-nut’ scenario almost immediately -- listing every whack-job tract Jared Loughner had ever read from his My Space page, including a few of their own. It should not be lost on us that this is the first Assassin with a My Space page -- fortunately, also not lost in the furious denials were Palin’s own propaganda with the gun-sights marking political targets -- Congressman Giffords’ district among them. If this is an act of an isolated madman, why Senator Giffords? Why Tucson, Arizona? -- whose own sheriff lamented that his state had become the capital of hate-speech and prejudice.
A year ago, my publisher and I took a road trip through the American West. Of particular interest to me was New Mexico and Arizona.
These states were at the white-hot center of the debate on immigration. National xenophobe Lou Dobbs was frothing at the mouth about the threat of Illegal Aliens and the Minute-Men fools were "helping" the Border Patrol in what looked like vigilante squads comprised of bigots. Not long after this, Lou Dobbs’ fat ass got canned and there seemed to be some rationality returning to this discussion. But everywhere we went in those states -- it was made clear to us that we were in their America -- was the culture of the gun. At a restaurant we stopped at in Tucson, there was a sign at the hostess stand that said, "Please check your Firearm before you are seated." I honestly thought they were kidding -- the waitress assured me they were not.
Surely there were other places the disaffected "lone nut" Loughner could have unleashed his fury on -- places where guns are easy to get and the Second Amendment is just as revered.
Jared Loughner chose Tucson. He chose Senator Giffords. And sadly, he chose 19 others as well. And the reason is that this discourse of fear and hatred is in the air in this state -- part of its language currency at this moment -- fueled by a very focused bigotry and a shitty economy -- the heated-up anti-government, anti-Obama, anti-immigrant speech took up residence in Mr. Loughner’s tin-foil hat and it rattled around like a BB in a box-car until this fucked-up, pissed-off American decided to make somebody pay.
It is days like Saturday, January 8, 2011, I fear that we have the country we deserve.
I thought I had made my peace with the death of originality. Personally, I do not believe that originality has died, but I recognize that the obituaries cannot exactly be ignored. I keep abreast of whatever is being said about the death-of-originality movement’s dead white males, Marcel Duchamp and Andy Warhol. And I try to see as much as I can of the work of practitioners who, paradoxically, are alive and kicking, beginning with Jeff Koons and Richard Prince. Mostly, I don’t comment on this stuff, figuring that as a critic who still believes in originality I am under no obligation to chronicle its demise. But a comment is in order now, because the very people who brought us the death of originality are increasingly preoccupied with the defense of their own originality. Nobody has said it better than the art historian Rainer Crone, who worked closely with Warhol from 1968 onward, and recently wrote that Warhol’s unique contribution to contemporary art was "the rejection of authorship as an essential feature of authenticity and originality." I guess that means that the death of originality is a new form of originality.
Such circular reasoning explains why Jeff Koons, the creator of sculptures based on the image of a balloon dog, recently sent a cease-and-desist letter to a company selling bookends that represent a balloon dog and to the manufacturer of said dogs. It is doubtful Koons could win this one in court. We have all watched at a street fair as somebody twists long balloons into dogs or other animals. So what can Koons say is really his? The man has made his reputation as an appropriator-as an artist who borrows images and styles and ideas more or less wholesale from other more or less creative spirits. He himself has been sued for copyright violation four times, which may help to explain his eagerness to establish some legal precedent for appropriation as a form of creation. It is easy to make fun of Koons. But to the collectors, dealers, curators, critics, and historians who have invested time and in many cases considerable sums of money in his work and that of Warhol and other appropriators, the originality of the death of originality cannot be taken lightly. I think there is some concern that the artists will not finally escape what Sir Joshua Reynolds, in speaking about artists’ appropriations from other artists to the students at the Royal Academy in 1774, referred to as "the servility of plagiarism."
Warhol’s silkscreen technique, which allowed for the repetition of the same image over and over again, could be said to be a send-up of plagiarism. Rainer Crone made his statement about the rejection of authorship as a form of authenticity in a letter to The New York Review of Books, commenting on the refusal of the Andy Warhol Foundation to authenticate a silkscreen self-portrait that Warhol instructed somebody else to make. Warhol had signed the painting and authorized its inclusion in his first catalogue raisonné, where it was even reproduced on the cover. I am not sure that anybody has actually said that this silkscreen is in fact a plagiary, but the Foundation will not say that it is real, either. Crone thinks the disputed Warhol should be authenticated, along with nine others done at the same time. In addition to everything else, he sees this silkscreen self-portrait as a stellar example of the originality of Warhol’s decision to allow other people to produce original Warhols. And to do it, moreover, when Warhol wasn’t even present; the artist spoke to the fabricator on the phone, to specify the red that he wanted. As for the Warhol Foundation, I assume they also regard the rejection of authorship as a form of originality, but want to make a distinction between some anti-original originals and other anti-original originals. Will the real rip-off artist please stand up?
I do understand the arguments. A snow shovel or a urinal exhibited by Duchamp in a gallery, a silkscreen reproduction made by Warhol of Leonardo’s Mona Lisa or Last Supper, and a balloon dog that Koons has cast in shiny metal and exhibited at the Metropolitan Museum of Art will strike us as different from the snow shovel in one’s garage, the urinal in the men’s room, the Mona Lisa in the Louvre, The Last Supper in Milan, and a balloon dog at a street fair. But different in what way? And different to what purpose? These are the issues that really need to be addressed. And here is where matters become increasingly murky, because many people are all too eager to see Duchamp’s readymade and Koons’s appropriation as just the latest twist in a tradition of copying, quoting, borrowing, replicating, and forging that goes back to the Ancient Greeks, if not earlier. In 1978, when the Whitney Museum mounted a show called "Art About Art," the art historian Leo Steinberg-author of penetrating studies of Leonardo, Michelangelo, and Picasso-provided an introduction in which he did not exactly foreclose the possibility that the history of art might be viewed as a proto-Duchampian goof, a goof underscored by his insistence on giving the subsections in his essay funny headings like "The Stainless Steal" and "The Cover-Up." Warhol crops up in the first chapter of an erudite new art historical study, Forgery Replica Fiction: Temporalities of German Renaissance Art, by Christopher S. Wood (University of Chicago Press). Wood appears to concur with Crone’s view of the originality of anti-originality, observing that "to represent the copy is to reassert the distinction between copy and original." Wood believes the obsession with originality that dominated the Renaissance eradicated an entirely different kind of thinking, a time when "copying was the normal way to make new things." By focusing on what he maintains is an earlier mode of thinking, I cannot help but feel that Wood is presenting a backstory tailored to support, albeit in some opposites attract way, Duchamp, Warhol, and Koons. When Steinberg and Wood argue that borrowing, appropriating, copying, and even stealing are at the very crux of the Western tradition, they must be aware that whatever the scholarly import of their work, they are simultaneously readying their readers for the readymade.
Jeff Koons, when accused of copyright infringement, tends to settle out of court. One has the impression that he prefers writing a check to actually discovering what a judge or a jury might have to say. But in his heart of hearts Koons probably feels that if Poussin became Poussin by stealing from Titian and Raphael, why on earth is he being bothered by questions of copyright and fair use? With the balloon dog case, he has decided to go on the offensive. Crone’s argument that "the rejection of authorship" can be "an essential feature of authenticity and originality," although absurd to some, is not so easily refuted. One can, if so inclined, certainly find support for this view in the history of Western art. Don’t the gorgeously impersonal, porcelain-like surfaces of Ingres’s greatest portraits suggest a rejection of authorship? And can’t we see an act of appropriation in Titian’s wholesale incorporation, in his late Pietà, of Michelangelo’s Pietà? Those who are appalled by the very thought of comparing Titian and Warhol will argue that Titian’s embrace of Michelangelo involved a deeply felt salute from one master to another. But some will say that is precisely what Warhol was doing when, toward the end of his life, he appropriated Leonardo’s Last Supper.
I believe people who see appropriation as an expression of susceptibility are kidding themselves. And susceptibility, the sense of emotional connectedness, is what influence is all about as it unfolds in Western art, in the work of Michelangelo, Poussin, Delacroix, Cézanne, Picasso, and countless others. The chill of appropriation, with its emphasis on impersonality and anonymity, suggests not the great tradition but the academic tradition, a calculation about the past rather than an engagement with the past. Andy Warhol, for all that his admirers may want to portray him as a trickster, was more like the worst kind of academic artist, for whom copying is not the starting point but the defining point. No wonder some words from Sir Joshua Reynolds, that wisest of academicians, can almost sound like a critique addressed to Warhol. "He should enter into a competition with his original, and endeavour to improve what he is appropriating to his own work. Such imitation is so far from having any thing in it of the servility of plagiarism, that it is a perpetual exercise of the mind, a continual invention." Some would say that is precisely what Warhol did when he transformed Campbell’s Soup cans and old master paintings into silkscreened originals. As far as I’m concerned, Duchamp, Warhol, and Koons never escape "the servility of plagiarism." Is it any wonder that Koons is panicked about being plagiarized? It takes one to know one.
Jed Perl is art critic for The New Republic.
The New Republic
Art and social media -- it’s all anyone wants to talk about these days. The discussion extends from the staid -- the National Endowment for the Arts released a report titled "Audience 2.0: How Technology Influences Arts Participation" -- to more spicy ruminations on what "social media art" offers as a new category, as in the artist An Xiao’s recent three-part series for Hyperallergic.
On the one hand, this faddish obsession with "social media" is understandable. The Facebook Corp. has begun to wrap its fingers around every other aspect of life, so it is clearly logical to ask what effects social media might have on art-making. But at the same time, I find the chatter somehow sad, as if visual art’s power to inspire passion among a larger audience is so attenuated that it has to throw itself on whatever trendy thing is out there, to win some reflected glory for itself.
So, the question for me is this: Is there any more interesting way to think about the topic than the loose and impressionistic manner that it is currently framed? Maybe it’s worth noting that, of all the buzzwords of the present-day lexicon, "social media" is perhaps the only one that is more vaguely defined than "art." Let’s begin, then, by clarifying terms to see if we can get to a more interesting place.
ART VS. SOCIAL MEDIA
By "art," let’s say we mean the products of the traditional, professionalized art world, a privileged class of esthetic objects set apart from ordinary communicative acts, authored by a special person called an artist.
For "social media," let’s say we mean all these new-fangled media platforms which are highly accessible, and based around enabling open-ended conversations between networks of participants.
The utility of this operation is that it lets us see that the question of "art and social media" actually involves an opposition between two different fields, with different logics: a relatively exclusive, closed-in type of expression vs. a relatively open, relation-based mode of operation.
This means that there can be no harmonious merger of the two terms, just various ways of navigating the tension between them. (The only thing that would be "social media art" in the full and genuine sense would be a social networking service actually designed as an art project, which would raise all sorts of questions.)
Once we have this clear, we can move on to a second move, which is to rethink the question via a handy "Greimasian Semiotic Square."
THE SEMIOTIC SQUARE
Invented by French semiotician A.J. Greimas, the Semiotic Square is one of the favorite intellectual toys of theory-minded art critics. In a legendary essay, "Sculpture in the Expanded Field," Rosalind Krauss used it to chart the different manifestations of postmodern sculpture as reactions to the opposition "landscape" and "architecture," though she uses a quirky version of the device; a much more satisfying and orthodox example is the way Hal Foster used the Square to illustrate the different positions within Russian Constructivism, as outgrowths of the opposition between "Art" and "Production."
Basically, the Semiotic Square is a way of visually representing a matrix of possible relationships generated by a given opposition. The idea is relatively simple: Any principal opposition between contrary terms -- between "a" and "b" -- can be expanded to include a secondary pair of "contradictory" terms, "non-a" and "non-b." These contradictory terms have a natural relation of affinity with the respective contrary terms of the original binary, thus allowing you to form a kind of map of potential relationships within a given presupposed opposition. (You get, in Krauss words, "a quaternary field which both mirrors the original opposition and at the same time opens it.")
A useful example for me is the opposition between "law" and "crime." It’s not too difficult to see how this simple binary implies two additional terms that relate to the original terms, but are actually their internal negations. What you might call "non-law" -- people who act in the name of the law, but act unjustly (your corrupt cops, your dictators, and so on) -- is both a negation of what "law" stands for, but also has a clear relationship with the concept of "crime." And similarly, "non-crime" -- those who break the law in order to act in the name of justice (your Robin Hoods, your Rosa Parks) -- both contradicts the normal idea of criminality, and has an affinity with the sense of "law," as justice.
NON-ART/NON-SOCIAL MEDIA
We have our primary opposition, "art" vs. "social media." What, then, would be our contradictory terms, given this cardinal opposition?
Since we are talking about "art" in the traditional sense, as a designation reserved for a privileged class of object, I think "non-art" here is best thought of as amateur art production -- it may follow all the same rules as traditional work, and look a lot like it, but falls outside of its logic of exclusivity and privileged authorship.
On the other side, what would "non-social media" be? Since "social media" is a designation to distinguish a class of new phenomena from a more traditional kind of technology, "non-social media" will here be the variety of new media that could be confused with "social media," but aren’t truly participatory in any meaningful sense, even when they present a modicum of apparent openness. A classic videogame, for instance, is interactive, and involves the user making choices -- but only within pre-defined set of parameters. Its logic is ultimately top-down in the "old," closed, non-social (asocial?) way.
"ART THAT USES SOCIAL NETWORKS"
With these basic definitions dealt with, we can now go on to imagine how the different axes on our Semiotic Square might suggest different ways of exploring the potential field opened up by "art and social media."
The top axis (Greimas called it the "complex axis") which relates "traditional art" to "social media," is the most obvious and basic way of relating the two logics: "art that uses social networks." Just as there is nothing that says that a traditional magazine can’t make use of a Facebook page, and online New York Times articles -- which still speak in the voice of authority of the traditional, professional reporter -- include readers’ comments sections, artists can use new-fangled "social" applications in a variety of ways, without substantially altering how we understand their creations as artworks.
Take a project by Man Bartlett, an artist known for his explorations of Twitter. His recent 24-hour performance at PPOW Gallery had him recite whatever people sent to him over Twitter, performing them for a camera feed. On the one hand, using Twitter as a channel to the public is integral to the meaning of the piece. On the other, the "work" is Bartlett’s performance, plus the camera feed of him -- the Tweets are just a component that adds a new shade to a tried-and-true type of artwork.
An interesting note about work of this type: The opposition between "art" and "social media," as we have constructed it, closely mirrors (in rhetoric, at least) the opposition between a traditional, object-based paradigm of art and the more recent, process-based idea of artworks as "relational" -- that is, as incorporating or even being reducible to social interaction. Consequently, the paradigm of "social media art" that has begun to crystallize often takes its cues from the "relational esthetics" tradition.
Take Nic Rad’s performance at Rare gallery, for which he gave away caricatures of media figures to people who "bid" for them by soliciting his attention via various social networks, posting their solicitations with the image online. People Matter, as the piece is called, might be read as a jokey, info-age update of the themes of Group Material’s classic meditation on community esthetic values, The People’s Choice (Arroz con Mango) (1981) -- though Group Material, of course, was more engaged with the values of an actual community. (In fact, if you wanted to be sinister about it, you could say that such "social media art" represents the idealistic, quasi-utopian component of "relational esthetics" being farmed out to large, standardized corporate media platforms).
"NEW MEDIA ART"
Next, we move to the left-hand vertical of our Square (the "positive deixis"), the relationship between "traditional art" and "non-social media."
Given how we have defined our terms, this has a fairly straight-forward identity we can assign to it: A great many artworks that are simply "new media works" are falsely classified as "social media art," because they involve technology and take social media as subject matter.
A perfect example of this is Guthrie Lonergan’s video-art project, shown at the New Museum’s "Younger than Jesus" show, which involved a curated selection of "found" MySpace videos (remember MySpace?), as a reflection of how identity is constructed on the web. The work is "about" social media; it couldn’t exist without MySpace; but it is not itself "social" in the least, anymore than Debo Eilers’ combine painting, Twitterrific, presented in the current "Greater New York" show at PS1, is "social media art" just because it centers on an image of Twitter’s happy little blue bird symbol.
It’s also worth noting that there are art projects that actually involve social media but lack any meaningful "social" dimension. I personally was a big fan of Texas web artist Brian Piana’s project Ellsworth Kelly Hacked My Twitter, a project that uses input from Twitter, transforming Tweets by people the author follows into blocks of color, to form an evolving, abstract grid pattern. Yet if you think of the two key characteristics of "social media" -- the ability for anyone to participate, and the facilitation of interactions between networks of people -- neither is part of the design of Ellsworth Kelly Hacked My Twitter. The work makes art out of social media, so to speak, by using it in a "non-social" way.
(In the wider world, Facebook Ads might provide a good corollary: Though they respond to their audience, they are still ads in a very conventional sense, just hopped up with Facebook’s data-mining capabilities. They are a "non-social" aspect of social media.)
"SOCIAL ART COLLABORATION"
Things become more interesting when we consider what the relationship of the terms on the right-hand side of our Square might imply: the relationship of affinity between "social media" with "non-art."
This, I would say, is much rarer form of production -- but the internet does offer one monster example: Wikipedia. The crowd-sourced online encyclopedia is thoroughly "social," in the sense that its entire project revolves around the open exchange of ideas between a potentially unlimited number of people, and no single author takes sole credit for the final product. Formally, however, it is an amateur-written encyclopedia (quite literally the "contradictory" term to traditional encyclopedias -- it is putting them out of business!)
The paradigm of collaborative, "social" art projects seems to me to be a rich territory to explore. However, mass authorship and amateur participation both go against art-world norms (for reasons that are constitutive of the field of the visual arts as a sphere trading in luxury goods and based on intellectual prestige). Perhaps for this reason, the esthetic project that I can think of that comes closest to this paradigm is not a fine art work at all, but "The Johnny Cash Project," an online, collaboratively built music video for Cash’s posthumously released Ain’t No Grave. The website allows users to draw and contribute a frame for the film, tracing over an original, but also adding their own personal spin or departing from the original altogether. Then it sequences the results randomly together, to form a kind of flickering, crowd-sourced stop-motion animation for the single.
Users can rate frames from other participants, and have options to view the video according to "Highest Rated Frames," "Most Brushstrokes per Frame," "Random Frames," and so on (the project lacks only the ability for visitors to "curate" their own versions). It’s actually quite amazing.
"ART MODS"
Which brings us, finally, to the lower rung of our Square (what Greimas called the "neutral axis," because it relates the two contradictory terms of our original pair: It is "neither S1 nor S2"). What would that be? There is indeed a kind of creative project that explores the tension between these two terms, "non-social art" -- new technology, minus the "social" aspect -- and "non-art," that is, amateur creativity, outside the art world proper. I’d call this the paradigm of the "art mod" (Philippa Stalker uses the term "non-interactive art mod" to describe certain "art video games"). This term doesn’t encompass every single phenomenon I have in mind, but does capture the essence of a certain subculture of tech-savvy bricolage.
When someone builds their "Mii" character for the Nintendo Wii, she or he is creating something using a virtual vocabulary that they don’t get to determine. Some of the resulting creations are clearly more creative than others -- there was even a brief rage for people styling themselves "Mii Artisans" -- and the criteria by which one instinctively judges which of these creations are particularly interesting stems from how the user works within the given constraints to eke out something unexpected.
A better example comes from the hokey online role-playing world of Second Life: The case of StarAx Statosky, the avatar name of a particularly legendary Second Life artiste. In addition to a variety of cartoonish in-world sculptures, Statosky invented a "magic wand" which exploited a flaw in the game’s graphic-rendering system, allowing users to transform their character dialogue into whimsical, living illustrations. He actually sold copies of the virtual item to other players, and StarAx’s Wand was called "possibly the coolest single thing you can own in SL" by the CEO of Linden Labs, the company behind the game. (Alas, an update to Second Life eliminated the flaw, and the wand is no more.)
The canonical example of the "art mod" paradigm, however, is "machinima," fan films made by appropriating bits of video-games, a phenomena that has its own robust subculture (it got an outing at the "World of Warcraft" show at the Laguna Beach Museum last year). Back in 2005, Friedrich Kirschner, for instance, took clips from the game Unreal Tournament and reworked them into a kind of abstract, melancholy noir film, person2184 (watchable either as a film or inside the game itself). On a more light-hearted note, a minor classic of the genre is Chris Brandt’s Dance, Voldo, Dance, a "machinima dance video" created by recording a synchronized routine between characters in the fighting game SoulCaliber.
In such works, the fact that the medium is closed ("non-social") is part of the point, since the whole fun is in doing something by manipulating the world’s pre-given signifiers. But it’s also important that this form of creativity represents a subculture of amateur production ("non-art") -- it’s a fan-oriented phenomenon, existing at a reflected second remove from mass culture.
SYMBOLIC CLOSURE
With this, we have arrived at a basic state of symbolic completeness, at least with respect to our original pair of "art and social media." But what does it mean to consider "art mods" as the counterpoint to "social media art"? In fact, the existence of the former does offer the unconscious truth of the whole "social media art" discussion, helping to explain the exaggerated art-world investment in it.
"Contemporary art" defines itself as a special sphere, not just different but better -- more sophisticated and smarter -- than other media phenomenon. The problem with this self-image is that the contemporary world is ruled by technologies that are vastly more technically sophisticated than anything within reach of the conventional art world -- a vast gulf separates what is taught at the most sophisticated art school from what is taught in the most basic computer engineering class.
Generally, the art world either responds to this by retreating to art-historical tradition and ceding the field, or engaging with technology in an ironic, deliberately primitive or critical way, in order to carve out its own intellectual space in relation to it, and project a purpose. The sincerity -- the nerdiness, really -- of "art mods," as manifestations of a subculture truly invested with inhabiting the language of tech phenomena from within, as a fan, stands for everything typically arch art-world explorations of technology are not.
What is the promise of "social media art"? It allows contemporary artists to tap easily into a vein of technological excitement, puts them on the same plane as everyone else, and offers a space hospitable to gestures already familiar from "relational esthetics" art. In this sense, our complex term, "art that uses social networks" offers an imaginary resolution for the contradiction of the visual arts in a world ruled by technology whose sophistication and complexity transcends them.
OUTSIDE THE BOX
The Semiotic Square has served us here a way of carving out some initial boundaries, distinctions and points of reference, and of pointing out tensions and affinities between a variety of phenomenon. It’s worth noting, however, that for the purposes of real analysis, such a structure does not by any means exhaust the meaning of a given creative gesture, which may well draw on all kinds of other material. (Greimas: "nothing permits us to assert that a semiotic manifestation is dependent on only one system at a time.")
Indeed, the fact that the device is as clarifying as it is with regard to present-day "social media art" is probably the result of the formative state of the field. Present discourse is primitive enough that the opposition between the two terms is still itself the primary content of many of the artworks produced under the banner of "social media art" -- the thrill of the trendy new association is the primary interest of the works.
In this sense, our Square is not a map of absolute possibilities. It is a map of different possibilities to be explored and exhausted. It is not a frame to think within. It is a box that needs to be escaped.
BEN DAVIS is associate editor of Artnet Magazine. Copyright Artnet
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