A quarter century ago, before fashionable irony had morphed into pointlessly reflexive snark, artist Barbara Schreiber would sometimes play a game with the press releases she organized into a bimonthly calendar of regional art exhibitions.
Calling her fellow editors to attention, she would announce, “I’m going to read a list of exhibition titles, and you have to tell me whether this is an Ironic Postmodern Gesture or a Really Dumb Show.” The physical location of the institution was typically the clue as to whether an exhibition referencing, say, tourist memorabilia was an irony-laden cultural critique or a desperate attempt to put together a crowd-pleaser. (The double irony was that the ironic postmodern gesture was as likely to be a desperate attempt at a crowd-pleaser as the earnest piece of populism; it was just aimed at a different crowd.)
Some exhibitions in that long-gone era managed to be both, or perhaps a third thing. “The Cow Show” was an exhibition at Madison-Morgan Cultural Center that addressed the institution’s physical location in the middle of farm country and the need to present the many ways that even the most unlikely of topics could be addressed by contemporary art, in terms of style, emotional register, and philosophical assumptions. Since the art steered clear of the politics of dairy farming and beef production, everyone who attended the opening was pleased.
And I wore my “Cow Show” T-shirt to gallery openings for the rest of the warm-weather part of the Atlanta art season. I was younger; it was a double-edged postmodern gesture.
Now that “The Pictures Generation” has gotten its earnestly historical museum retrospective, we are more aware than ever of how many spins of the irony wheel have gone down since then.
Back then, Umberto Eco was suggesting that irony was the only way to express sincerity, as in “As a Barbara Cartland novel would put it, I love you.” Several faster-than-usual generations later, irony is the only way to express irony, masked by snark to conceal or reveal sincerity. Fake snark masks real resentment. Real snark also masks real admiration, or at other times is used to imply an admiration that is actually false, with a complexity worthy of the proverbial politics of the Renaissance.
And ironic once-postmodern gestures in art become ironic art-historical quotations. (Or perhaps they do. If you catch my meaning, if you get my drift.)
I once curated / juried “The Pear Show,” based on my observation of the remarkable diversity of the earnest amateur replications of a then-ubiquitous subject for art-association still-life painting. Though the organizer felt the need to spell it all out in the call for entries (titling it "Jerry Cullum's Fantasy Pear Show"), I had the expectation that professional artists would understand the implications. And they did; I got few enough straightforward paintings or photos of pears per se, though I also got no conceptual disquisitions on the economics of pear production or food distribution, or pseudo-psychoanalytic reflections on why pear-shaped objects might be pleasing subjects in standard-issue painting-class assignments.
It gave me an opportunity to quote Wallace Stevens’ manifestly untrue observation “The pears are not seen / As the observer wills” (since everything else in Stevens is exactly about how the final belief must be in a fiction that is a collision of the world and the observer’s will). It also gave me an opportunity to create a soundtrack featuring Erik Satie’s “pieces in the form of a pear.”
All this feeds back into my observation of Maurizio Cattelan’s sausage in the biennale gift bag, and the multiple generations of art objects and gestures to which it alludes and which it simultaneously honors and ridicules. It isn’t a great work of art, but it’ll do as a seasonal hors d’oeuvre.
Saturday, July 11, 2009
Sunday, July 5, 2009
Readymades, Reproductions and Repetitions
Deyan Sudjic’s comments on design and art in The Language of Things slides over into the old argument regarding the original and the copy, the readymade and the altered object and on and on.
There is either no more to be said on the topic, or entirely too much, depending on the medium and the history under discussion.
Duchamp’s original readymades may have been altered only by changing their placement and giving them a title, but it seems more than possible that they were as individually fabricated as his later handmade copies of the originals. Apparently there never was a commercial snow shovel designed like the one exhibited as In Advance of the Broken Arm, and apparently no one has ever found another bottle rack quite like that one…and no such French window…which leaves Fountain. But the picture is thoroughly muddled.
Maurizio Cattelan, if I read the newspaper story rightly, has advanced the cause of the readymade substantially by producing an edition of 500 sausages that are indistinguishable from any other sausage of the day’s production run. All that permits their identification is their inclusion in a Venice Biennale gift bag with appropriate identification, not attached to the sausage.
As with the Oxford University stonework that is replaced every century or less by new copies of the now worn-down original, presumably the Cattelan sausages could be replaced by counterfeits bought from the same manufacturer, so long as the paperwork was the original and the design of the label hadn't changed (whether subsequent printings of the label would be identifiably different takes us into the realms of collectibility described by Sudjic with regard to mass-produced objects of design).
And given the dilemmas that a collecting museum is having in figuring out how to acquire and preserve the sausage, Cattelan’s commentary on the cult of the collectible edition is raising issues as provocatively as Damien Hirst’s shark, which already has had to be replaced by another shark.
It is, of course, not raising new issues by any means. Practitioners of relational aesthetics, most notably in such now-classic acts as Rirkrit Tiravanija's cooking food for gallery visitors, have often tried hard to overcome the infinite regress of commodification by providing nothing at all that could be successfully commodified (unlike, say, the now enormously valuable matchboxes or other would-be throwaway multiples that constituted the unsuccessful attempts of earlier generations at defeating the art market).
Cattelan ups the ante by providing, if I have understood the story correctly, a simple commodity, and one that requires refrigeration. Like Joseph Beuys' famous fat corner, it challenges museological preservation techniques and requires a meticulous record of provenance to determine authenticity, and is highly likely to be discarded by an overly zealous cleaning crew.
There is either no more to be said on the topic, or entirely too much, depending on the medium and the history under discussion.
Duchamp’s original readymades may have been altered only by changing their placement and giving them a title, but it seems more than possible that they were as individually fabricated as his later handmade copies of the originals. Apparently there never was a commercial snow shovel designed like the one exhibited as In Advance of the Broken Arm, and apparently no one has ever found another bottle rack quite like that one…and no such French window…which leaves Fountain. But the picture is thoroughly muddled.
Maurizio Cattelan, if I read the newspaper story rightly, has advanced the cause of the readymade substantially by producing an edition of 500 sausages that are indistinguishable from any other sausage of the day’s production run. All that permits their identification is their inclusion in a Venice Biennale gift bag with appropriate identification, not attached to the sausage.
As with the Oxford University stonework that is replaced every century or less by new copies of the now worn-down original, presumably the Cattelan sausages could be replaced by counterfeits bought from the same manufacturer, so long as the paperwork was the original and the design of the label hadn't changed (whether subsequent printings of the label would be identifiably different takes us into the realms of collectibility described by Sudjic with regard to mass-produced objects of design).
And given the dilemmas that a collecting museum is having in figuring out how to acquire and preserve the sausage, Cattelan’s commentary on the cult of the collectible edition is raising issues as provocatively as Damien Hirst’s shark, which already has had to be replaced by another shark.
It is, of course, not raising new issues by any means. Practitioners of relational aesthetics, most notably in such now-classic acts as Rirkrit Tiravanija's cooking food for gallery visitors, have often tried hard to overcome the infinite regress of commodification by providing nothing at all that could be successfully commodified (unlike, say, the now enormously valuable matchboxes or other would-be throwaway multiples that constituted the unsuccessful attempts of earlier generations at defeating the art market).
Cattelan ups the ante by providing, if I have understood the story correctly, a simple commodity, and one that requires refrigeration. Like Joseph Beuys' famous fat corner, it challenges museological preservation techniques and requires a meticulous record of provenance to determine authenticity, and is highly likely to be discarded by an overly zealous cleaning crew.
Tuesday, June 30, 2009
Deyan Sudjic's The Language of Things
In his new book from W. W. Norton, The Language of Things: Understanding the World of Desirable Objects, Design Museum director Deyan Sudjic occasionally seems like a man having an argument with himself regarding the historic nature and function of design. Associated in modernity with function and utility made attractive—the aesthetics were not an add-on in modernist design, but also weren't allowed to get in the way of efficiency and elegance of operation, about which Sudjic also has a great many useful observations—design has become increasingly preoccupied with creating the "desirable objects"of his subtitle. And that means manufacturing consumer desire in a mode previously associated with the fashion industry, using superfluous surface characteristics to present newness itself as a gotta-have-it quality in which the sense of obsolescence is not necessarily related to the onward march of technology. (This is the kind of novelty that leads inevitably to the feeling of "What were we thinking?" when surveying the once-fashionable design disasters of only yesterday.)
Like everything else, design is bound up with larger cultural forces that are easier to discern than to analyze. Some design one-offs of recent years have called attention to this fact, most notably Marc Newson's prototype Ford designed for an alternate present in which "the Soviet Sputnik was the last word in modernity"—a plausible evolutionary track that did not happen—and by Newson's famous Lockheed Lounge, an edition of ten thoroughly elegant but dysfunctional chaises fabricated of aluminum aircraft skin studded with rivets in homage to the impulses of Streamline Moderne's love affair with flight, here incorporated in an ironically metallic, near-unusable object. Made by a surfboard fabricator, it bridges decades of institutional fetishes.
Modernist design, of course, was often more about sculptural quality than functional comfort, but the quality of function puts it in a market category far inferior to sculpture. Sudjic makes much of the disparity in auction prices between a one-of-a-kind version of the Rietveld Chair and a contemporaneous canvas by Mondrian. The singular painting, one in a familiar series, was valued at one hundred times the sales price of the designer's unique object.
This is one of several points at which Sudjic engages in dialectical pirouettes. Design still suffers price-wise from the taint of being good for something—a Rietveld original may be rare, but the design it embodies was meant to be mass-produced, and once one has left the world of unique prototypes it is challenging to set values on early versus late production runs of the object. (However, as any collector of first editions also knows, values are set—in the case of books, this is in spite of the fact that most second printings are indistinguishable from the first). A Rietveld Chair done to specs today isn't appreciably different from the earliest commercially produced examples. The whole point is to eliminate the hand of the maker as a significant variable—a realization pioneered some years before Rietveld in the factories for Thonet bentwood furniture that were scattered along "the edges of the Austro-Hungarian Empire," as Sudjic elegantly puts it.
The prototype of Newson's Lockheed Lounge has sold for prices closer to Mondrian than to Rietveld, or at least at prices closer to contemporary art. This is enough to set Sudjic to musing about Andy Warhol's effortless-looking effort to blur the lines between art and design, between the reproduction and the unique object, between art and outright commerce. The boundaries between art and design have always blurred on the design end of the spectrum—Sudjic cites the Baroque suits of armor never meant to be used for more than public display, and might have cited many more instances where fashion trumped functionality.
In the final stages of writing this book, Sudjic was in the thick of condemning contemporary design's prostitution to ever fluffier tides of fashion and dysfunction when the global financial collapse brought design, for the moment, closer to stripped-down basics. How long it will remain there before market forces resume their normal distortions depends on the response to the bullet that global capitalism appears (appears) to have dodged. Just as with the literal lethal object that gave rise to this commonplace metaphor, it seems unlikely that the close call will result in the financial equivalent of gun control. The forces of excess will doubtless be back in both finance and design, albeit perhaps less forcefully. And it will be time for Sudjic to continue his campaign to ponder what exactly it is that ought to make desirable objects desirable. (His historical reflections on the concept of "luxury" alone are worth the price of the book.)
Like everything else, design is bound up with larger cultural forces that are easier to discern than to analyze. Some design one-offs of recent years have called attention to this fact, most notably Marc Newson's prototype Ford designed for an alternate present in which "the Soviet Sputnik was the last word in modernity"—a plausible evolutionary track that did not happen—and by Newson's famous Lockheed Lounge, an edition of ten thoroughly elegant but dysfunctional chaises fabricated of aluminum aircraft skin studded with rivets in homage to the impulses of Streamline Moderne's love affair with flight, here incorporated in an ironically metallic, near-unusable object. Made by a surfboard fabricator, it bridges decades of institutional fetishes.
Modernist design, of course, was often more about sculptural quality than functional comfort, but the quality of function puts it in a market category far inferior to sculpture. Sudjic makes much of the disparity in auction prices between a one-of-a-kind version of the Rietveld Chair and a contemporaneous canvas by Mondrian. The singular painting, one in a familiar series, was valued at one hundred times the sales price of the designer's unique object.
This is one of several points at which Sudjic engages in dialectical pirouettes. Design still suffers price-wise from the taint of being good for something—a Rietveld original may be rare, but the design it embodies was meant to be mass-produced, and once one has left the world of unique prototypes it is challenging to set values on early versus late production runs of the object. (However, as any collector of first editions also knows, values are set—in the case of books, this is in spite of the fact that most second printings are indistinguishable from the first). A Rietveld Chair done to specs today isn't appreciably different from the earliest commercially produced examples. The whole point is to eliminate the hand of the maker as a significant variable—a realization pioneered some years before Rietveld in the factories for Thonet bentwood furniture that were scattered along "the edges of the Austro-Hungarian Empire," as Sudjic elegantly puts it.
The prototype of Newson's Lockheed Lounge has sold for prices closer to Mondrian than to Rietveld, or at least at prices closer to contemporary art. This is enough to set Sudjic to musing about Andy Warhol's effortless-looking effort to blur the lines between art and design, between the reproduction and the unique object, between art and outright commerce. The boundaries between art and design have always blurred on the design end of the spectrum—Sudjic cites the Baroque suits of armor never meant to be used for more than public display, and might have cited many more instances where fashion trumped functionality.
In the final stages of writing this book, Sudjic was in the thick of condemning contemporary design's prostitution to ever fluffier tides of fashion and dysfunction when the global financial collapse brought design, for the moment, closer to stripped-down basics. How long it will remain there before market forces resume their normal distortions depends on the response to the bullet that global capitalism appears (appears) to have dodged. Just as with the literal lethal object that gave rise to this commonplace metaphor, it seems unlikely that the close call will result in the financial equivalent of gun control. The forces of excess will doubtless be back in both finance and design, albeit perhaps less forcefully. And it will be time for Sudjic to continue his campaign to ponder what exactly it is that ought to make desirable objects desirable. (His historical reflections on the concept of "luxury" alone are worth the price of the book.)
Sunday, June 21, 2009
An Essay on Art Blogging, plus Four Atlanta Shows
An Essay on Art Blogging (for Those Who Care About Such Things, It Also Discusses Exhibitions by Marcia Cohen, Tom Ferguson, Paul S. Benjamin, and the Photographers of “Emerging Visions 2009”)
Jerry Cullum
What art journalism shares with journalism generally is the necessity of creating a nuanced portrait of events in the time available for a tight deadline; the writer is compelled to acquire all the tools of scholarship in a matter of a few days, then discard all the information (or at best inter it decently in long-term memory) because a new deadline demands detailed insider knowledge of something completely different.
In practice, not even magazine art reviewing, which operates on a longer-term deadline than art journalism, gets it right in this department. When more than one reviewer of the recent Tate Triennial harks back to Hiroshima or has recourse to recondite theory to interpret a mushroom cloud sculpture that alludes to a boundary dispute between two of the world’s most recent nuclear powers, it is a sign that such reviewers need to get out more, or at least read more than the online headlines and instant updates. As do we all.
One of the few benefits of blog writing is the permissibility of random commentary. The blogger is expected to allude rather than to explicate, and that is a small but significant compensation for the lack of anything resembling material recompense for the money and time expended in traveling to see and think about the art.
The difficulty for artists is that, because of the lack of comprehensive reviewing at present in most of the world’s art scenes, random blog references are often the only documentation of the details of a show—unless the gallery engages in unusually good online archiving practices or the artist has or is a really good web designer.
Lifetime retrospectives like Tom Ferguson’s at Eyedrum or major exhibitions of recent work like Marcia Cohen’s at MOCA GA (both in Atlanta, for the benefit of readers elsewhere) will doubtless get their full-fledged reviews from writers who have devoted a lifetime to reporting on and evaluating the work of such longtime career artists. So it is perhaps enough to note the interesting presentation of very nearly the full spectrum of Atlanta art practice so far as painters are concerned.
Cohen, of course, is an empirically minded color theorist whose versions of abstraction are conceptual investigations rather than emotional expressions, and everything from the specific environment in an Azores residency to the historically shifting tests for color blindness in textbooks are grist for the color-theory mill, or for the color theory compilations in a conceptually oriented Rolodex.
Ferguson, though his practice pays particular attention to color and texture in the large-scale paintings, is mostly a conceptualist of the concrete world (or of the world of concrete, plus the invisible webs of financial exploitation that get the concrete poured). It would be comforting to divide his work into transient political cartooning and long-term painterly expressions, but the political shenanigans he chronicles are perennial.
These two will get extended attention in print venues far removed from Counterforces. I, Jerry Cullum the blogger (to be distinguished from the differently motivated art reviewer, even if the reviewer was the same person and appeared in print under an identically named byline), am more puzzled and concerned about those who really needed the validation of the superseded format of the print review, and now are typically getting little more than the shout-out of the blog post.
In some ways, the format is advantageous. A clever writer can arrange keywords so that, say, someone looking for Cory Arcangel or even for Paul Klee will encounter a websearch sentence that also mentions Paul S. Benjamin, who has absolutely nothing in common with either of those artists and should not be thought of in the same sentence with them except to illustrate such subterfuges. (In practice, the citations in question would be more probable ones. I have chosen ones designed to come up very far down amid the thousands of results from most websearches.)
But the ephemeral quality of the blog medium ensures that hardly anyone will see the reference unless they stumble upon it for such unintended reasons or already know the artist in question and are looking for the name.
Benjamin, the recipient of the 2008-2009 Forward Art Foundation’s Emerging Artist Award, has his new assemblage sculptures on view at Swan Coach House Gallery in Atlanta through August 8, with artist’s talk scheduled for July 11.
This would appear to be Benjamin’s breakthrough show, though I do not know his earlier work sufficiently to make that assertion myself. The plethora of found objects and discards from an earlier day are recombined into more than the usual pleasingly decorative abstraction of so much assemblage: the objects that aren’t painted matte black are mostly bright red or occasionally metallic: what we have in these symbolically overdetermined pieces are apples, eagles, axes, goblets, bullets, plus a veritable Freudian-fetish of a shiny red shoe that contains the inscription on its lining “all man made materials – made in China.”
One could go on, and a proper review ought to: there is a Cupid and a cornucopia on a made-up captain’s wheel of fortune, and in general the emblems of history gone askew are syncopated visual rhythms mingled with depth psychological metaphors beyond easy counting.
But there is seldom world enough and time for such reviews unless someone is at least paying for transportation if not for lunch, and galleries are forbidden to do such things.
This becomes a major dilemma in the case of juried shows such as Atlanta Photography Group’s “Emerging Visions 2009” (on view until July 3), where juror Chip Simone assembled nine contemporary fresh practitioners who could use all the publicity they can get. (The trade used to call such coverage “ink,” but these days the reportage is as digital as most of the photography.)
Here things become particularly difficult, because though all of these emerging artists are worthy of some degree of recognition, the things they are doing are quite different from one another and really ought to be discussed in terms of their intentions and degrees of influence. Amy Arrington’s digitally manipulated images could be critiqued in terms of small problems and larger successes (I would have done something a little different with the fire-and-ice motif of her most striking image); Margaret Strickland’s photos could be discussed as a continuation of the posed re-creations or reformulations of actual domestic life that we associate with Angela Strassheim and others; Artem Nazarov could be discussed as a digital formalist working beautifully in the aesthetic modes established by earlier generations. (The Wind makes visual poetry from bright window light and a windblown curtain and a tilted mattress and boxspring, the ensemble bespeaking fragility and transience.)
Yen Ngoc Phan should be discussed in detail for the semisurreal transformation of subtle codes of dress and behavior and ethnicity: the images explore a globalized, transcultural world of identity and immigration in which everything without exception has become exotic. (“Alle Menschen sind Ausländer, fast überall,” as the slogan had it a few years back: “Everyone is an alien almost everyplace.”)
Maria Joyner’s silver gelatin prints of railroad tracks and houses in mist and the other mistily mysterious components of A Wonderful Life would be celebrated, in a proper review, for their poetic visual metaphors for subtle emotional conditions: one traditional function of traditional photographic media, and these prints seem to commemorate the degree to which those media, like the objects in these photos, are passing into history.
But some of the digital work is equally nostalgia-laden or history-conscious, and one really ought to look in detail at the images presented by Kevin Tadge, Patricia Chourio, Amelia Alpaugh—and in particular at the exuberant diversity of the work of William Hogan, who seems to range from quietly monochromatic honoring of the isolated object to meticulous documentation of the real world’s range of outrageous color.
But all of that would require the leisure or at least the financial and professional incentive that a print-publication deadline used to afford. Until online editorial guidelines have filled in the gaps in most of the world’s art coverage, blog posts like this one are the less than satisfactory alternative. Sorry.
Jerry Cullum
What art journalism shares with journalism generally is the necessity of creating a nuanced portrait of events in the time available for a tight deadline; the writer is compelled to acquire all the tools of scholarship in a matter of a few days, then discard all the information (or at best inter it decently in long-term memory) because a new deadline demands detailed insider knowledge of something completely different.
In practice, not even magazine art reviewing, which operates on a longer-term deadline than art journalism, gets it right in this department. When more than one reviewer of the recent Tate Triennial harks back to Hiroshima or has recourse to recondite theory to interpret a mushroom cloud sculpture that alludes to a boundary dispute between two of the world’s most recent nuclear powers, it is a sign that such reviewers need to get out more, or at least read more than the online headlines and instant updates. As do we all.
One of the few benefits of blog writing is the permissibility of random commentary. The blogger is expected to allude rather than to explicate, and that is a small but significant compensation for the lack of anything resembling material recompense for the money and time expended in traveling to see and think about the art.
The difficulty for artists is that, because of the lack of comprehensive reviewing at present in most of the world’s art scenes, random blog references are often the only documentation of the details of a show—unless the gallery engages in unusually good online archiving practices or the artist has or is a really good web designer.
Lifetime retrospectives like Tom Ferguson’s at Eyedrum or major exhibitions of recent work like Marcia Cohen’s at MOCA GA (both in Atlanta, for the benefit of readers elsewhere) will doubtless get their full-fledged reviews from writers who have devoted a lifetime to reporting on and evaluating the work of such longtime career artists. So it is perhaps enough to note the interesting presentation of very nearly the full spectrum of Atlanta art practice so far as painters are concerned.
Cohen, of course, is an empirically minded color theorist whose versions of abstraction are conceptual investigations rather than emotional expressions, and everything from the specific environment in an Azores residency to the historically shifting tests for color blindness in textbooks are grist for the color-theory mill, or for the color theory compilations in a conceptually oriented Rolodex.
Ferguson, though his practice pays particular attention to color and texture in the large-scale paintings, is mostly a conceptualist of the concrete world (or of the world of concrete, plus the invisible webs of financial exploitation that get the concrete poured). It would be comforting to divide his work into transient political cartooning and long-term painterly expressions, but the political shenanigans he chronicles are perennial.
These two will get extended attention in print venues far removed from Counterforces. I, Jerry Cullum the blogger (to be distinguished from the differently motivated art reviewer, even if the reviewer was the same person and appeared in print under an identically named byline), am more puzzled and concerned about those who really needed the validation of the superseded format of the print review, and now are typically getting little more than the shout-out of the blog post.
In some ways, the format is advantageous. A clever writer can arrange keywords so that, say, someone looking for Cory Arcangel or even for Paul Klee will encounter a websearch sentence that also mentions Paul S. Benjamin, who has absolutely nothing in common with either of those artists and should not be thought of in the same sentence with them except to illustrate such subterfuges. (In practice, the citations in question would be more probable ones. I have chosen ones designed to come up very far down amid the thousands of results from most websearches.)
But the ephemeral quality of the blog medium ensures that hardly anyone will see the reference unless they stumble upon it for such unintended reasons or already know the artist in question and are looking for the name.
Benjamin, the recipient of the 2008-2009 Forward Art Foundation’s Emerging Artist Award, has his new assemblage sculptures on view at Swan Coach House Gallery in Atlanta through August 8, with artist’s talk scheduled for July 11.
This would appear to be Benjamin’s breakthrough show, though I do not know his earlier work sufficiently to make that assertion myself. The plethora of found objects and discards from an earlier day are recombined into more than the usual pleasingly decorative abstraction of so much assemblage: the objects that aren’t painted matte black are mostly bright red or occasionally metallic: what we have in these symbolically overdetermined pieces are apples, eagles, axes, goblets, bullets, plus a veritable Freudian-fetish of a shiny red shoe that contains the inscription on its lining “all man made materials – made in China.”
One could go on, and a proper review ought to: there is a Cupid and a cornucopia on a made-up captain’s wheel of fortune, and in general the emblems of history gone askew are syncopated visual rhythms mingled with depth psychological metaphors beyond easy counting.
But there is seldom world enough and time for such reviews unless someone is at least paying for transportation if not for lunch, and galleries are forbidden to do such things.
This becomes a major dilemma in the case of juried shows such as Atlanta Photography Group’s “Emerging Visions 2009” (on view until July 3), where juror Chip Simone assembled nine contemporary fresh practitioners who could use all the publicity they can get. (The trade used to call such coverage “ink,” but these days the reportage is as digital as most of the photography.)
Here things become particularly difficult, because though all of these emerging artists are worthy of some degree of recognition, the things they are doing are quite different from one another and really ought to be discussed in terms of their intentions and degrees of influence. Amy Arrington’s digitally manipulated images could be critiqued in terms of small problems and larger successes (I would have done something a little different with the fire-and-ice motif of her most striking image); Margaret Strickland’s photos could be discussed as a continuation of the posed re-creations or reformulations of actual domestic life that we associate with Angela Strassheim and others; Artem Nazarov could be discussed as a digital formalist working beautifully in the aesthetic modes established by earlier generations. (The Wind makes visual poetry from bright window light and a windblown curtain and a tilted mattress and boxspring, the ensemble bespeaking fragility and transience.)
Yen Ngoc Phan should be discussed in detail for the semisurreal transformation of subtle codes of dress and behavior and ethnicity: the images explore a globalized, transcultural world of identity and immigration in which everything without exception has become exotic. (“Alle Menschen sind Ausländer, fast überall,” as the slogan had it a few years back: “Everyone is an alien almost everyplace.”)
Maria Joyner’s silver gelatin prints of railroad tracks and houses in mist and the other mistily mysterious components of A Wonderful Life would be celebrated, in a proper review, for their poetic visual metaphors for subtle emotional conditions: one traditional function of traditional photographic media, and these prints seem to commemorate the degree to which those media, like the objects in these photos, are passing into history.
But some of the digital work is equally nostalgia-laden or history-conscious, and one really ought to look in detail at the images presented by Kevin Tadge, Patricia Chourio, Amelia Alpaugh—and in particular at the exuberant diversity of the work of William Hogan, who seems to range from quietly monochromatic honoring of the isolated object to meticulous documentation of the real world’s range of outrageous color.
But all of that would require the leisure or at least the financial and professional incentive that a print-publication deadline used to afford. Until online editorial guidelines have filled in the gaps in most of the world’s art coverage, blog posts like this one are the less than satisfactory alternative. Sorry.
Thursday, June 18, 2009
Without whom, not; footnote to the foregoing
Dr. John Decker curated "Images of the Apocalypse," based on his course on the topic, with the jurying assistance of Tim Flowers, Pam Longobardi and Ruth Stanford.
And while I am at it, I have come across an agreeably post-apocalyptic publication, Volume magazine #11, "Cities Unbuilt," a book-length study of well-nigh apocalyptic destruction and modes of restoration in sites and situations from Beirut to Kosovo and the South Caucasus, but a volume of Volume that may already have become a collector's item.
Rem Koolhaas is a driving editorial force behind Volume, which permits me to use this excuse to remind Atlanta readers that Angelbert Metoyer and Charlie Koolhaas' inconsistent but intriguing collaborative work is still on view at Sandler Hudson Gallery through July 11.
And while I am at it, I have come across an agreeably post-apocalyptic publication, Volume magazine #11, "Cities Unbuilt," a book-length study of well-nigh apocalyptic destruction and modes of restoration in sites and situations from Beirut to Kosovo and the South Caucasus, but a volume of Volume that may already have become a collector's item.
Rem Koolhaas is a driving editorial force behind Volume, which permits me to use this excuse to remind Atlanta readers that Angelbert Metoyer and Charlie Koolhaas' inconsistent but intriguing collaborative work is still on view at Sandler Hudson Gallery through July 11.
The End of the World (As We Know It), or....
The End of the World (As We Know It), or, Smiling Through the Apocalypse
Jerry Cullum
The 2008-2009 art season in Atlanta, Georgia, U.S.A. has been bracketed by apocalypse, though nobody planned it that way.
Wm. Turner Gallery’s Matthew Rose exhibition “The End of the World” opened, purely by chance, a day or two after the beginning of America’s financial crisis of mid-September, causing one viewer (me) to misremember the title consistently as though it had been borrowed from the song from another season of financial and cultural upheaval, “It’s the End of the World As We Know It (and I Feel Fine).” (“Smiling Through the Apocalypse” is the title of a completely unrelated book.)
In the parts of the world dominated by Peoples of the Book, apocalyptic thinking has wrung multiple metaphoric meanings from history: the end of the world has often been a vision of renovatio or of the Great Instauration of ultimate perfection rather than of the end of all things. (But note that 1 Peter’s “the end of all things is at hand” would have remained in the Christian scriptures even if the Revelation to John on Patmos had been expunged by the church councils, and Islamic and Jewish visions of the sky rolled up like a scroll are firmly fixed in the words of the respective scriptures.)
But rather than running off to the loci classici of books by Norman Cohn or Ernst Bloch, let’s note that Georgia State University has just opened a summerlong (through August 12) “Images of the Apocalypse” exhibition, giving us often paradoxically lovely new work by Stephanie Kolpy, Etienne Jackson, and many others. (Dahlan Foah’s video of images of the apocalypse contains some images that aren’t entirely of the End Times—Dante’s tripartite Inferno-Purgatorio-Paradiso being the pre-apocalyptic arrangement that will, as Dante tells us, be greatly modified when time shall be no more—but the point here is the structure of the human imagination, and its repeated returns to the issues associated with the sense of an ending.)
The G.S.U. exhibition is primarily about the contemporary religious and secular responses to notions of the end of all things. These begin with the imaginative consequences of Christian fundamentalists’ expectations of the Rapture or of the Second Coming, depending on their particular version of Protestant theology. (See my citation in a previous post of the bluegrass song in which the lyrics’ response to a beautiful day is to think about how great it would be to have all this loveliness abruptly brought to an end in the ultimate Beautiful Day…it’s part of a dialectic that is at least as old as the prophet Amos’s “Woe to you who desire the day of the Lord! Why would you have the day of the Lord? It is darkness, and not light….”)
The Gospel’s declaration of a final judgment in which those who did not feed the hungry or visit the sick and prisoners will be sent into everlasting fire isn’t the predominant model of the Apocalypse these days. Prevailing imaginative models are more like…well, let’s not go there, but get back to the art at G.S.U.
For in any case, the art responds more often to the other current models of the apocalypse, secular but nevertheless archetypal expectations of imminent machine-based or nuclear obliteration and/or environmental catastrophe. If we are about to (metaphorically speaking) topple over the cliff as in one of Kolpy’s images, the issue is whether we can pull ourselves back from the brink.
And all the old predilections show up in these latest incarnations of an ancient imaginative structure. The recent pastoral visit by Daniel Pinchbeck to the faithful in the evolver.net(work), discussed in an earlier post, reveals an approach to the anticipated end of all things that ranges from the ultimate optimism that Pinchbeck claims as revealed truth (articulated by the elders) to others’ gleeful or apprehensive expectations of utter destruction instead of fundamental positive transformation. Those who believe themselves to be relentlessly secular are still enraptured by images of an ending that have more to do with ancient modes and models than with realistic statistical mappings of what is most likely to come.
And that version of visionary expectation makes the vehement comic-book weirdness of Leisa Rich’s “Beauty from the Beast” of particular interest. Rich’s show, at Callanwolde Fine Arts Center through August 28, features a 3-D garden of soft sculptures that imagines the vegetal forms evolved through the mutation with the physical detritus left behind following humankind’s extinction; the forms, which quote the shapes of actual flowers, incorporate hundreds if not thousands of cut-up plastic straws, recycled carpet samples, recycled food labels, and too many other found materials to list comfortably.
This lush garden of all too earthly post-artificial delights pretty much covers the floor of the gallery; the walls contain a stitched and collaged oversized comic book wiping out the planet (or actually, just the United States’ portion of it) in eight concisely imagined disasters: “Pacific Northwest Megathrust Earthquake,” “N.Y.C. Hurricane,” “Asteroid Impact” (that could take care of everybody else, too), “L.A. Tsunami,” “Supervolcano,” “Midwest Earthquake,” “Heat Waves” (that would also be sufficient to finish off the rest of the planet), and “East and West Coast Tsunami.”
The environmental apocalypse may arrive whether anyone tries to stop it or not; certain Pacific and Indian Ocean island countries are making real-life plans to evacuate. Nuclear proliferation remains whatever threat level it always was, even if the scenarios for total obliteration shift.
The alternate positive version of the apocalyptic vision, of the renewal of all things, is changing moment by historical moment just as past political versions of apocalyptic thinking did; as predicted a couple of generations ago, the revolution will not be televised, but we are in an era when forces that came to power through yesterday’s technologies now confront the elusive counterforces of digital networks. The end of the end will not be what was born in dreams at the beginning.
Which is how the imagination of apocalypse, for good or for ill, has also always played out. Our beginnings never know our ends, but as the pre-post-millennialist voice called from the audience at Pinchbeck’s appearance at Eyedrum, we know what we wish would happen.
Jerry Cullum
The 2008-2009 art season in Atlanta, Georgia, U.S.A. has been bracketed by apocalypse, though nobody planned it that way.
Wm. Turner Gallery’s Matthew Rose exhibition “The End of the World” opened, purely by chance, a day or two after the beginning of America’s financial crisis of mid-September, causing one viewer (me) to misremember the title consistently as though it had been borrowed from the song from another season of financial and cultural upheaval, “It’s the End of the World As We Know It (and I Feel Fine).” (“Smiling Through the Apocalypse” is the title of a completely unrelated book.)
In the parts of the world dominated by Peoples of the Book, apocalyptic thinking has wrung multiple metaphoric meanings from history: the end of the world has often been a vision of renovatio or of the Great Instauration of ultimate perfection rather than of the end of all things. (But note that 1 Peter’s “the end of all things is at hand” would have remained in the Christian scriptures even if the Revelation to John on Patmos had been expunged by the church councils, and Islamic and Jewish visions of the sky rolled up like a scroll are firmly fixed in the words of the respective scriptures.)
But rather than running off to the loci classici of books by Norman Cohn or Ernst Bloch, let’s note that Georgia State University has just opened a summerlong (through August 12) “Images of the Apocalypse” exhibition, giving us often paradoxically lovely new work by Stephanie Kolpy, Etienne Jackson, and many others. (Dahlan Foah’s video of images of the apocalypse contains some images that aren’t entirely of the End Times—Dante’s tripartite Inferno-Purgatorio-Paradiso being the pre-apocalyptic arrangement that will, as Dante tells us, be greatly modified when time shall be no more—but the point here is the structure of the human imagination, and its repeated returns to the issues associated with the sense of an ending.)
The G.S.U. exhibition is primarily about the contemporary religious and secular responses to notions of the end of all things. These begin with the imaginative consequences of Christian fundamentalists’ expectations of the Rapture or of the Second Coming, depending on their particular version of Protestant theology. (See my citation in a previous post of the bluegrass song in which the lyrics’ response to a beautiful day is to think about how great it would be to have all this loveliness abruptly brought to an end in the ultimate Beautiful Day…it’s part of a dialectic that is at least as old as the prophet Amos’s “Woe to you who desire the day of the Lord! Why would you have the day of the Lord? It is darkness, and not light….”)
The Gospel’s declaration of a final judgment in which those who did not feed the hungry or visit the sick and prisoners will be sent into everlasting fire isn’t the predominant model of the Apocalypse these days. Prevailing imaginative models are more like…well, let’s not go there, but get back to the art at G.S.U.
For in any case, the art responds more often to the other current models of the apocalypse, secular but nevertheless archetypal expectations of imminent machine-based or nuclear obliteration and/or environmental catastrophe. If we are about to (metaphorically speaking) topple over the cliff as in one of Kolpy’s images, the issue is whether we can pull ourselves back from the brink.
And all the old predilections show up in these latest incarnations of an ancient imaginative structure. The recent pastoral visit by Daniel Pinchbeck to the faithful in the evolver.net(work), discussed in an earlier post, reveals an approach to the anticipated end of all things that ranges from the ultimate optimism that Pinchbeck claims as revealed truth (articulated by the elders) to others’ gleeful or apprehensive expectations of utter destruction instead of fundamental positive transformation. Those who believe themselves to be relentlessly secular are still enraptured by images of an ending that have more to do with ancient modes and models than with realistic statistical mappings of what is most likely to come.
And that version of visionary expectation makes the vehement comic-book weirdness of Leisa Rich’s “Beauty from the Beast” of particular interest. Rich’s show, at Callanwolde Fine Arts Center through August 28, features a 3-D garden of soft sculptures that imagines the vegetal forms evolved through the mutation with the physical detritus left behind following humankind’s extinction; the forms, which quote the shapes of actual flowers, incorporate hundreds if not thousands of cut-up plastic straws, recycled carpet samples, recycled food labels, and too many other found materials to list comfortably.
This lush garden of all too earthly post-artificial delights pretty much covers the floor of the gallery; the walls contain a stitched and collaged oversized comic book wiping out the planet (or actually, just the United States’ portion of it) in eight concisely imagined disasters: “Pacific Northwest Megathrust Earthquake,” “N.Y.C. Hurricane,” “Asteroid Impact” (that could take care of everybody else, too), “L.A. Tsunami,” “Supervolcano,” “Midwest Earthquake,” “Heat Waves” (that would also be sufficient to finish off the rest of the planet), and “East and West Coast Tsunami.”
The environmental apocalypse may arrive whether anyone tries to stop it or not; certain Pacific and Indian Ocean island countries are making real-life plans to evacuate. Nuclear proliferation remains whatever threat level it always was, even if the scenarios for total obliteration shift.
The alternate positive version of the apocalyptic vision, of the renewal of all things, is changing moment by historical moment just as past political versions of apocalyptic thinking did; as predicted a couple of generations ago, the revolution will not be televised, but we are in an era when forces that came to power through yesterday’s technologies now confront the elusive counterforces of digital networks. The end of the end will not be what was born in dreams at the beginning.
Which is how the imagination of apocalypse, for good or for ill, has also always played out. Our beginnings never know our ends, but as the pre-post-millennialist voice called from the audience at Pinchbeck’s appearance at Eyedrum, we know what we wish would happen.
Tuesday, June 16, 2009
in lieu of a review...images tk, I hope, from MINT's "Outlines and Outliers"
Anyone coming to art writing with vague recollections of reader-response theory rather than Greenbergian formalism may have fewer problems than most with the notion that purported art critics’ first reactions to work are “I like this,” or “I don’t like this, but it needs to be reviewed positively,” or “I like this, but I know I shouldn’t, and I need to explain why,” or “I don’t like this, but other people do, and it would be worth discussing why they do and perhaps ought not to,” or “I like this, and I need to do a lot of research so I can explain what else is going on beyond my first positive reaction,” or occasionally, “I like this, and the reasons I like it have nothing at all to do with why the work is good.”
That being said, I must confess that the pressures of earning a living constrain me from doing justice to “Outlines and Outliars,” a three-person show at Atlanta’s MINT Gallery. I initially misread the title as “Outliers,” for a good many of the isolated figures in this trio’s drawings and video could be read as lying somewhere just outside the boundaries of whatever ingroup they are not members of. The young women in the images seem to have greater emotional kinship with the birds and animals around them than with the human society that is implied by their different and distinct modes of dressing. Occasionally, as in Kelly McKernan’s Cuckold, the animals become purely allegorical, the bird tied by thread to the woman’s more perfunctorily rendered cuckold’s horns, a literary symbol older than Shakespeare.
But it would require more time than I have in the duration of this two-week show (open two more weekends, actually) to deal properly with the reasons why McKernan and her fellow artists Chelsea Raflo and Cristina Vidal have individual visions of particular interest. Raflo’s video and her diverse drawings all seem to focus on unexpected complexities, and experiences that prove elusive to the experiencer and the society around her (or him, but the focus is on the females). Vidal’s conceptually and imagistically elaborate drawings deserve to be revisited, and I hope that this initial shout-out of a blog post will evolve into something more like a full review as time goes by.
The work in this exhibition ranges from pieces only slightly more than simple drawing exercises to ambitious, immense compositions. It is in the interests of full disclosure that I reveal that I bought one lowest-price-range work each by Raflo and Vidal to accompany the McKernan postcard reproductions I bought at Artlantis the previous weekend. (McKernan’s original work at MINT is accompanied by some of her eminently affordable reproductions—let’s not confuse the issue by calling them “prints,” unless there is no original of the image other than the file on the computer. Does “digital re-creations” work as an intermediate category?)
I was instantly struck by the quality of the exhibition’s one video work, which had no label apart from the brief identification of the artist at the end, and found myself inquiring as to the artist’s identity, to someone who turned out to be the artist. Raflo identifies her influences as Casey Jex Smith, Alex Lucas (who I suppose is not to be confused with Alex Lukas), Alex McLeod, and Whitney Stansell. It was the loose kinship with Stansell’s work that struck me at first viewing, and it is a pleasure to find that Stansell is coming into her own as an influence so relatively soon after becoming a fixture on the Atlanta scene. (For the record, I have never bought any of Stansell’s work, and of course I am aware that Stansell has her own influences.)
This first-person exploratory account (not review) is an initial attempt at the type of hybrid genre we shall have to evolve in the world’s local art scenes—and one that should have evolved in global art scenes, given the extent to which art gossip has been based on which artist or gallery is presumed (not always correctly) to be financially or erotically entangled with the curator or critic. On the world’s local scenes, it is seldom the case that the curators or critics are trying to increase the value of their own minimal acquisitions—apart from such exceptions as major museum shows, they would fail dismally if they did try—and critics are more often complained to sarcastically than courted. Most local curation and criticism is effectively invisible and without impact beyond a minor viewership, even though the era of viral media may be beginning to change this.
However, as I have remarked over the years in the now-fading print media, artists had rather have their names in print, or accessible to a Google search, than not; and as Henry Kissinger noted long ago regarding the struggles of university faculties, the passions run high because the stakes are low. Credibility is built at first by accretion and only later by more substantial modes of validation. It is the more substantial modes of validation that kick-start careers, but it does begin with having one's name spelled right.
That being said, I must confess that the pressures of earning a living constrain me from doing justice to “Outlines and Outliars,” a three-person show at Atlanta’s MINT Gallery. I initially misread the title as “Outliers,” for a good many of the isolated figures in this trio’s drawings and video could be read as lying somewhere just outside the boundaries of whatever ingroup they are not members of. The young women in the images seem to have greater emotional kinship with the birds and animals around them than with the human society that is implied by their different and distinct modes of dressing. Occasionally, as in Kelly McKernan’s Cuckold, the animals become purely allegorical, the bird tied by thread to the woman’s more perfunctorily rendered cuckold’s horns, a literary symbol older than Shakespeare.
But it would require more time than I have in the duration of this two-week show (open two more weekends, actually) to deal properly with the reasons why McKernan and her fellow artists Chelsea Raflo and Cristina Vidal have individual visions of particular interest. Raflo’s video and her diverse drawings all seem to focus on unexpected complexities, and experiences that prove elusive to the experiencer and the society around her (or him, but the focus is on the females). Vidal’s conceptually and imagistically elaborate drawings deserve to be revisited, and I hope that this initial shout-out of a blog post will evolve into something more like a full review as time goes by.
The work in this exhibition ranges from pieces only slightly more than simple drawing exercises to ambitious, immense compositions. It is in the interests of full disclosure that I reveal that I bought one lowest-price-range work each by Raflo and Vidal to accompany the McKernan postcard reproductions I bought at Artlantis the previous weekend. (McKernan’s original work at MINT is accompanied by some of her eminently affordable reproductions—let’s not confuse the issue by calling them “prints,” unless there is no original of the image other than the file on the computer. Does “digital re-creations” work as an intermediate category?)
I was instantly struck by the quality of the exhibition’s one video work, which had no label apart from the brief identification of the artist at the end, and found myself inquiring as to the artist’s identity, to someone who turned out to be the artist. Raflo identifies her influences as Casey Jex Smith, Alex Lucas (who I suppose is not to be confused with Alex Lukas), Alex McLeod, and Whitney Stansell. It was the loose kinship with Stansell’s work that struck me at first viewing, and it is a pleasure to find that Stansell is coming into her own as an influence so relatively soon after becoming a fixture on the Atlanta scene. (For the record, I have never bought any of Stansell’s work, and of course I am aware that Stansell has her own influences.)
This first-person exploratory account (not review) is an initial attempt at the type of hybrid genre we shall have to evolve in the world’s local art scenes—and one that should have evolved in global art scenes, given the extent to which art gossip has been based on which artist or gallery is presumed (not always correctly) to be financially or erotically entangled with the curator or critic. On the world’s local scenes, it is seldom the case that the curators or critics are trying to increase the value of their own minimal acquisitions—apart from such exceptions as major museum shows, they would fail dismally if they did try—and critics are more often complained to sarcastically than courted. Most local curation and criticism is effectively invisible and without impact beyond a minor viewership, even though the era of viral media may be beginning to change this.
However, as I have remarked over the years in the now-fading print media, artists had rather have their names in print, or accessible to a Google search, than not; and as Henry Kissinger noted long ago regarding the struggles of university faculties, the passions run high because the stakes are low. Credibility is built at first by accretion and only later by more substantial modes of validation. It is the more substantial modes of validation that kick-start careers, but it does begin with having one's name spelled right.
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