I used to write print-media reviews of exhibitions, back in the day before Lehman Brothers went under

Blogs exist to get thought into the world in a hurry. Whether the thoughts were worth thinking, whether they might not have been improved by the time taken for their maturation and slow reworking—well, that’s the question with almost any piece of writing.

It comes as a shock to realize that I am within a few weeks of the twenty-fifth anniversary of my first piece of art reviewing, of “Kandinsky: Russian and Bauhaus Years” at the High Museum. It was based on my research for a book idea that I soon abandoned, and I insisted it was a contribution to art history, not an exhibition review—when Xenia Zed convinced me to write an art historical piece about the “Demons and Angels” exhibition at the Center for Puppetry Arts some months later, I insisted that I didn’t have enough time to research the traditional masks and had no idea how to write about artists of whom I knew nothing and who had no secondary literature associated with them.

My first attempts to write about art, on request from artist friends years earlier, had been even more awkwardly literary. But most working critics have had a steep learning curve. Few of them decided in high school that they really wanted to be art critics someday.

I soon realized I had better learn how to produce some of the works of art I wanted to see that weren’t already in existence, if only to get the processes firmly in mind and thus remember what any given artist was up against. (The thought was an extension of a remark in a letter by my mentor Robert Detweiler, who had said that all literary critics should be required to write a certain number of short stories, poems and/or novellas—all of which should then be destroyed as an act of kindness to the world.) But I ended up making only the art I wanted to make, except when an auction deadline pushed me to create something. When I didn’t like the results, I sold them cheaply, once to the woman who today is the director of the Walker Art Center. (Well, actually, Marcia Wood sold that one on my behalf, out of a group exhibition called “The Shrine Show.”)

I feel like a complete troglodyte when I recall that my first published essay and that first published piece of art writing were both marred by entire lines omitted by the typesetter and names misspelled by the proofreader. Today we are required to submit copy ready for electronic composition, but editors and proofreaders still do their dirty work, and an unnoticed highlighting plus a random keystroke can wipe out a phrase as effectively as the eye of a tired typist ever did.

Almost all of my newspaper reviews, some of which I am now in the process of posting to a wiki in their original rough-draft format, bore titles for which I bore no responsibility. Headline writers are as prone to cutesy misunderstandings as reviewers themselves are.

And the format is murderous. There is always more to be said, except when there is even less to be said because one has no idea where to start. After a few years of paring down and discarding paragraphs, one learns to think in five-hundred-word segments, then in three hundred fifty words, and then two hundred fifty. There is no point in delving deeper because it will all have to be dumped in favor of the next deadline.

Blogs allow for two thousand or ten thousand words, but there is no deadline and sometimes the words never get written. Other times, they ought not to have been.

a footnote to reviews not yet written

I have more posts about accidental overlaps in recent Atlanta exhibitions than I have time to write. So I shall instead report that the touring "Dinosaurs" exhibition opening tomorrow at Fernbank Museum of Natural History is an extraordinary piece of exhibition design as well as a thoroughly informative update on recent thinking regarding the great saurians and their demise and/or continuation.

Leaving aside the biomechanics of motion, which is explained succinctly in a manner calculated to entertain adults and educate children, I wish to comment upon the remarkable diorama of a Chinese landscape of 130,000,000 years ago:



You will notice the look of this creature, which appears in close proximity to this one:



Now, those who read the Science Times closely will know all about the proliferation of recent discoveries of previously unsuspected species of feathered dinosaurs and such. Anyone over the age of twenty-five who last checked into the status of paleontology in their childhood is woefully misinformed.

Even those who read the National Geographic updates more than a few years ago are woefully misinformed. The exhibition presents not only the changing opinions of how fast dinosaurs could move, it lists the hypotheses for their extinction that have now been definitively disproved or rendered so improbable that they may safely be dismissed.

This has set me to thinking again (well, actually, reading Gary Indiana's Utopia's Debris concurrently with George Steiner at the New Yorker and the new issue of the New York Review of Books has set me to thinking again) of the necessity of re-presenting and rethinking the entirety of human culture every ten to twenty years. (Ten years or thereabouts for rethinking, twenty for simply re-presenting.)

Anyone who has witnessed the fortyish Old School thinkers being vituperative about the sixtyish Older School thinkers will feel rather grateful for the examples of such deceased worthies as Susan Sontag, who had no difficulty discarding her early opinions if she decided they were wrong. As she said late in her life, and I quote Gary Indiana's essay from memory, "You become old when you start acting like an old person."

We are now at the far side of a fundamental shift in everyday perception, and it is in the process of bringing about the demise of such venerable institutions as the daily newspaper, the weekly newsmagazine and at least the throwaway species of hard-copy book. (Kindle and its kinfolk won't obliterate the lovelier versions of bound volumes any more than the compact disk wiped out vinyl or paperbacks destroyed hardcovers.) Magazine distributors are shutting down abruptly and new economies of scale are appearing throughout all the media of information creation and retrieval.

But what is more significant is the shift in habits of language, the quick transformation of traditions, the disappearance of some forms of social gathering and the rise of alternative ones...it all affects how or even whether we read, say, the epigrams of Martial, regarding which the NYRB publishes a lovely critical review of Garry Wills' gracefully pornographic renderings.

The review of Wills' reinvention of the Romans' less respectable species of writing (which has inspired generation upon generation of gleefully adaptive transgressions) is followed in the issue by Zadie Smith's lecture regarding those who switch easily among many different vernaculars from the different communities...of which she finds President Obama's Dreams from My Father a particularly instructive example.

The idea that there might not be only one way of keeping it real is germane to my topic: writers and cultural information fall out of fashion if they are not constantly updated or rediscovered. Eventually even the oldest interpretations take on a fresh relevance, but if there is not an attempt made to interest each successive generation, or even the generations that have gotten tired of thinking about the stuff, the result is akin to letting data sit on modes of information retrieval that don't work on the newest generation of data readers.

Think of older critical surveys as the equivalent of eight-inch floppy disks...perfectly readable by legacy equipment, but unintelligible to newer models. The challenge, and it is a daunting one, is to find ways of transferring the inherited information of the world's many cultures into modes that fit the world of 2009.

Especially when so many books based on the assumptions of, say, 2003 have suddenly turned quaint-seeming, whereas texts from 1930 take on a new air of contemporaneity.

coming attractions

I am pondering the implications of the review of the museum show on Robert Williams and the Juxtapoz Factor. I am also thinking there need to be reviews of recent, not so recent, and forthcoming books on aspects of folk and visionary art and architecture, reviews which would fruitfully complexify the Juxtapoz review. So I am reluctant to do anything until I know what I am doing (which is usually a recipe for total inaction). Watch this space for developments.

In the Land of Retinal Delights: Robert Williams and His Juxtapositions


In 2000, the late Robert Rosenblum staged a monumental exhibition titled 1900, accompanied by an equally monumental catalogue.

A survey of international art circa 1900, it was designed to show that the shape of art was still very much in play, that a lively variety of trends were afoot, and that the shape of art as art history would later define it was then far from obvious. 1900 gave no clues at all as to what would emerge in the pivotal years just prior to the First World War (a war that no one saw coming, incidentally; in 1900, recently resolved or ongoing colonial conflicts from Samoa to Morocco would have suggested the potential for a European war, but not the one that Europe got in 1914).

However, Rosenblum mischievously stacked the deck in his version of 1900; he picked the most resolved and stimulating work by the numerous now-forgotten artists who were winning international awards in 1900, and some of the worst work by those who a dozen years later would emerge as the pioneers and eventual icons of canonical twentieth century art.

Otis College of Art and Design gallery director Meg Linton has done something similar with In the Land of Retinal Delights: The Juxtapoz Factor, the 2008 exhibition at Laguna Art Museum, and hence with the long-awaited 2009 catalogue of the same name published in association with Gingko Press, which reproduces most of the work from the show.

The exhibition takes its title from Robert Williams’ confrontational painting from 1968, a visually overcrowded rebuke to Marcel Duchamp and to the whole cerebral-conceptual approach to art. Coming out of the world of Ed “Big Daddy” Roth’s custom car shop and studio (“a hotbed for all sorts of irreverent, iconoclastic types,” as Laguna Art Museum director Bolton Colburn puts it), and emerging at the same time as the creators of the infamous Zap Comix, Williams championed a type of art that would eventually find its expression in his magazine, a publication he declared was meant to “stay below everyone’s dignity.”

There would be notorious and influential museum and gallery shows along the way to the birth of Juxtapoz in 1994. In 1987, Beyond Illustration: The New Pop, a portion of a category-breaking Tokyo museum exhibition, came to Otis Parsons College of Art and Design (which has since lost the “Parsons”). Featuring Robert Williams, Todd Schorr, Mark Mothersbaugh, Gary Panter and sixty-some others, it was an indication that the West Coast in particular was spawning a type of art that had little enough to do with the self-importance of the German return to figurative painting, or with Cindy Sherman, Barbara Kruger or Julian Schnabel, for that matter. Whether it was Anselm Kiefer’s darkly imagistic confrontation with history or Kruger’s sarcastic appropriation of old-school advertising photos, L.A.-and-environs was having none of it. (Cal Arts, of course, was a very different story, and yet a story that was conversant with word on the street alongside concept-laden theory—and it shows in the artists that Cal Arts turned out, then and now.)

In 1986, Billy Shire opened La Luz de Jesus Gallery of folk, fetish, and underground art on Melrose Avenue, and the rest is history. The appearance of Billy Shire Fine Arts in 2004 in Culver City certified the arrival of a movement that has acquired a permanent artworld place in tandem with what Shire calls his mission “to bring underground artists and counter culture to the masses”—and more importantly, to monied collectors.

Juxtapoz itself has evolved in pursuit of a diverse eclecticism, and Linton’s show is meant to show that the showy art that Juxtapoz has influenced is itself too diverse to be embraced by any single name or aesthetic school. But she mischievously chooses not to identify the superstars who appear alongside the ne’er-do-wells and the “mere illustrators,” and indeed in her selection it is impossible to sort out who is the sentimental illustrator, who the isolated self-taught visionary, and who the Whitney Biennial superstar. Who knew that Margaret Keane produced at least one painting that is scarier than many of the ones produced by her Pop Surrealist imitators?

Linton provides some of the key quotes from Williams’ many successive manifestoes: “Juxtapoz is made up of every loose nut and bolt that has fallen through the cracks of the formal art establishment, and if you look through the pages of this magazine you will find everything from sticker peddlers to cigarette-lighter salesmen, pin stripers to pornographers, high strung illustrators to wall defacers. What we are short on is conformity.” “It’s not a matter of good or bad. ‘Good or bad’ is over. It is now a matter of relative interests, the energy and pleasure (or pain) you get from interests relative to you. Whether you like it or not, we are all participants in a gaseous thought plasma of abstract modern art. How you react to it is all important, and you must understand if you get depressed over the nebulous lack of structure in the modern art world, you haven’t come to enjoy the freedoms that now exist in art. Just as it is now possible to declare body waste as art, there also exists a forum for very beautifully done meticulous works that can be free of otherwise liberal prejudices. All art is great—all art is shit. … Juxtapoz is simply trying to come up with art you won’t see in a more policed environment. We will deal with art that is considered meretricious, tawdry, sleazy, and commonly referred to by the name of the greatest architects of the 20th century, ‘Gaudy.’”

Linton wisely doesn’t put “[sic]” by the plural “architects” (which may not be Williams’ fault, since we find a reference to “Santa Moncia” in the catalogue) and lets the Anglicization of Gaudi for the sake of a pun slide by just as silently. Nor does she contextualize Williams’ frantic race to stay ahead of the curve of pleasurable offensiveness; for ever since the declaration of the age of pluralism in the 1970s, art has been engaged in a quest for high-style bad taste and trendiness, and the joke behind Manzoni’s canned excrement of the artist has long since been lost. For nearly two decades, critics and dealers and collectors have not only looked for gold in the outhouse, they have found it. And it has had genuine exchange value.

And Left Coast art led the way in that department. Systematic transgression has been the received piety of the world of art for so long that it took a Robert Williams to rouse protests against the gender-related political incorrectness of his paintings in the generally transgressive 1992 exhibition Helter Skelter: LA Art in the 1990s.

Perhaps (or perhaps not) Linton’s parentheses should be noted in her description of the magazine’s pages as “filled with strong art: figurative, narrative imagery teeming with references to cartoons, animation, television, hot rods, pulp fiction, pornography (primarily heterosexual), rock posters, album covers, pin striping, tattoos, science fiction, fantasy, graffiti, propaganda, advertising, film, toys, and other pop culture paraphernalia from the urban street and the suburban cul-de-sac.”

Linton’s checklist of her chosen “artisans” (her word choice) gathers up work by Kara Walker (a shout-out, please, to the regrettably defunct Atlanta College of Art), David Sandlin, Thomas Woodruff, Joel-Peter Witkin, Jeff Soto, Manuel Ocampo, Masami Teraoka, Sue Coe, Liza Lou, Laurie Hogin, Wangechi Mutu, Coop, Shag, Dalek, Ed “Big Daddy” Roth, Christina Vergano, Gajin Fujita, Margaret Kilgallen, Raymond Pettibon, Savage Pencil, Kenny Scharf, Andres Serrano (one of the few photographers in the show, along with Witkin), Enrique Chagoya, and among the hundred and twenty or so artists not yet named in this list, Kevin Ancell, represented by Aloha Oe’s “motorized cast resin figures [of hula dancers] with weapons.”

Going from Roth’s bloodshot-eye cartoon to Tiffany Bozic’s Walton-Ford-like Untitled (Egrets and Fox), one feels like playing “which of these do not belong to this group.” But in this case, the range of representational diversity is the family resemblance, to borrow Wittgenstein’s antique category.

But as with family gatherings that range from siblings to kissin’ cousins, these are artists that may or may not play well together. They reference popular culture of one century or another, but that means everything from naïve portraiture from the Spanish Colonial period to 1930s margarine ads to J. J. Audubon’s Birds of America. It is all vivid, it is all narrative, but it varies in intent and in complexity from passing silliness to provocative philosophizing.

Shepard Fairey is represented by a diptych obverse-and-reverse of a banknote, more conceptually convoluted than his posters and stencil art, even though it incorporates Andre the Giant and “Obey” into Two Sides of Capitalism: Good (Red), Bad (Green). Fairey’s version of street art is as Juxtapozable as it gets, but the look of this work makes it more juxtaposable with some of its visual neighbors.

And indeed, Linton acknowledges the epochal influence of Marcia Tucker’s 1978 show “Bad” Painting in terms of the collapsing of distinctions between high and low. And many of the artists in that exhibition produced work that would never be confused with Robert Williams’ version of Lowbrow, even though some of them would have fitted right into the pages of Juxtapoz if the magazine had existed then.

Just as canonical art covers an immense range of sensibility, global pop culture and the art that springs from it does the same. There are forces, and there are counterforces, all at play in the same field.

The Los Angeles artists included in the 1987 exhibition Bad Influences opined that unlike the Pop artists who only referred to popular culture, they themselves had emerged “FROM the popular culture,” and they declared their work “Anti-Vague, Anti-Elite, and Entertaining.” But not all of the work in In the Land of Retinal Delights fits that rubric, which makes Linton’s show vague, differently elite, and entertaining.

But that means we still have work to do, with permission to have fun to have while we are doing it.

Jerry Cullum
February 8, 2009

A Dusty Look at Art Rosenbaum's New Digital Offering: Resources for the Post-Post-Postmodern Era

Art Rosenbaum and the Birth of the Post-Post-Postmodern



Atlanta’s NPR station WABE today featured an extended report on the folk music fieldwork of the visual artist and musician Art Rosenbaum, who has been traveling far afield indeed from his home base of Athens, Georgia in quest of the last survivors of traditional folk music.

Rosenbaum has tracked down one particularly memorable 92-year-old singer and comparable octo- and nonagenarians across America who learned traditional ballads from their elders and have carried on an unbroken strand of transmission that is now at its end in the age of digitized globalization. Sexagenarians grew up with television and rock and roll, and septuagenarians remember their childhood spent listening to music on the radio.

But Rosenbaum is capturing the heritage at the last possible moment, and thus it becomes fresh data for the age of digitized globalism. His second compilation of The Art of Field Recording has just had its launch party in Athens (see http://artrosenbaum.org/).

And thus the last remnants of a vanishing past have been recaptured as we balance on the edge of a future that is more uncertain than it looked not all that long ago.

A century ago, the world was at a similar though less generally predicted tipping point, socially, economically, technologically, and artistically. The artists of Der Blaue Reiter, responding to tensions and possibilities the larger society had scarcely even begun to imagine, were on the verge of publishing a magazine that juxtaposed South German folk paintings on glass with masks and sculptures from the Netherlands East Indies. Across the Channel, artists were casting off Victorian representations to reinvent visual forms in terms borrowed from cultures across the planet, and recovering bits of histories that their elders had lost track of long before, along with ones that no one had known for millennia. (The same went for their other contemporaries on the Continent. It was an age of great archaeological discoveries; the Venus of Willendorf was uncovered in 1908, and the designs on the artifacts of Schliemann’s Troy were there to influence Gustav Klimt. But nineteenth-century Egyptomania had yet to be revived by the discovery of the tomb of Tutenkhamun, and a good thing, too; Egypt had laid a heavy hand on the fashions of post-Napoleonic Europe, but commingled more lightly with the styles of the Jazz Age.)

Hugh Kenner wrote, regarding Ezra Pound and Henri Gaudier’s reinvention of lost histories, that societies forget that for which they can find no present use; poets and artists who re-create that past are establishing a different past to fit a different present. Historians do the same, of course; historiography varies in its emphases from generation to generation, and the fictional component is perceived differently also; we are past the naïve belief that we can write it all down or even intuit it wie es eigentlich gewesen. (No "ist" after "gewesen"; there is an online discussion of Ranke's original quote that discusses the grammar of his very famous formulation.)

What does not change is the raw material. Nobody knew in 1909 that by 1919 most of the kings of Europe would be gone, the economy of the continent would be sunk in postwar debt and devastation, and large parts of the optimistic avant-garde of 1909 swept away by the intervening cataclysm. But (unlike in the greater cataclysm a quarter-century later) the cultural materials of history and of that avant-garde were still available for later re-inventions and fresh instigations.

And thus we have gone through the collapse of the modernist impulse circa 1965, the birth of postmodernism circa 1979, and the rapid collapse of postmodernism as a period style in the age of globalization, so thoroughly that by 1991 I was already writing about post-postmodernism.

Now the economic era inaugurated by Reagan and Thatcher appears to be behind us, and digital technology is advancing at a pace so accelerated that flexible screens developed for the military are there to be used when print newspapers are succeeded entirely by websites (assuming that the controlling enterprises do not go out of business in the next six months, leaving nothing for the websites compiling news reports to compile).

The arts are confronted with a challenge comparable to the one faced by modernism a century ago, and what emerges will have a different name entirely; three “post”s are three too many, and we are already talking, albeit with an ironic edge, about the “post-contemporary” in art and style.

But thanks to ol’ Art Rosenbaum, we have some raw material to sample and remix that we would never have had otherwise. Good for him.

a Leanne Shapton addendum

For those of you who don't care about reading things in the proper sequence, this is a passage I've just added to the Important Artifacts review, with no guarantees that I won't keep tweaking:



For the sake of the story, enough personal items have to be included to convey character as well as event. Some of the items do seem improbable (that is one source of the book's subtle but abundant humor); but then the auction is meant to represent all the things that are gotten rid of at the end of a painful relationship, and both parties will later regret having deaccessioned some of them so rashly.

Hence the inclusion in Shapton’s auction items of a good many small heirlooms and substantial library items along with the love notes and conversational exchanges written on theatre programs. If her fictional Doolan and Morris had been archivally inclined or pack rats, there would have been no story. (And if Shapton herself weren’t so knowing in the ways of material culture, there wouldn’t have been a story, either.)

The regular dispersion of personal and family possessions constitutes a problem for the new academic discipline of material-culture studies: between the mobility of global society (whether from war or economic migration) and the rise of eBay, the material is always getting sold or abandoned.

All this hopelessly lost stuff is precisely the pile of debris that the Angel of History contemplates with such dismay in Walter Benjamin’s “Theses on the Philosophy of History” (or in Laurie Anderson’s spoken-word recycling of same on Strange Angels). Only in moments of our own catastrophe do we perceive the human and physical wreckage we have left behind in the relentless march of what, according to Benjamin, we are pleased to call “progress.”

Auctions, thrift shops, and eBay complete the process by finding new owners for the detritus, covering the tracks of the crime by removing the evidence and finding a new use for what has become refuse, if not emotional toxic waste.

It is the function formerly performed by the ragpickers of Charles Baudelaire’s famous poem, a poetic analogy that Walter Benjamin recycled as productively as he did the frantic winged creature of Paul Klee’s Angelus Novus..

So Shapton has given us underlying issues to think about as well as a story to piece together.

that was me, in case you were wondering

Since Leanne Shapton and her publishers may be (ought to be) websearching for references to her Important Artifacts book, I guess I had better let them know that that review was by Jerry Cullum.