reprising Jeff Dahlgren

I presume that many readers of Counterforces (especially the international ones) do not subscribe to the Public Domain listserv in Atlanta.

I had been going to post one of my intermittent manifestoes to the artworld of Atlanta regarding the deeply unsatisfactory condition of art reporting in the burg. burnaway.org can't do it all, or even most of it. I do not even pretend to be functioning as a critic these days, and only write when something sufficiently overlapping with my well-known sets of concerns happens along. Even then, as with Christian Bradley West / Mehmet Dogu / Chen-cheng Hung, I am capable of forgetting that I intended to do it.

Jeff Dahlgren is one of those productive gadflies that every art scene needs, though as with most such gadflies he sometimes tends towards logorrhea, as do I. But I was struck by the writing quality of this manifesto, from which I have excised a few expletives but not all, and would like to share it with the world since it has already been shared with the listserv at large.

Dahlgren doesn't know the whole Fahamu Pecou story, of how a conceptual joke about being famous for being famous actually made him famous (as I predicted, one of the two cases in which my predictions have been borne out—this being a respectable average because I rarely suggest that someone is going places).

Atlantans might want to know that newspaper critic Catherine Fox has in fact been picking the right shows to cover within her one-review-per-week limits. There is little enough out there that fits into the global picture, which is why I am pleased with Karen Tauches' insistence that local scenes need to address their local picture. I have said the same, and was thinking just the other day of my essay of a decade or so ago, "The Whole World Is Watching—But It's Tuned to Another Channel." Jeff is right that until the local scene has the courage to say that really bad artists stink, and to say why, we are effectively dead. I have always preferred to write about the good stuff, and by no means all of the good stuff, which should be evident by how much it takes to get me to post something. (A hundred bucks a column from a now-deceased print venue used to be a certain incentive to produce copy, even though it increasingly barely covered weekly expenses, and my need for hitching rides to openings after dark was increasing exponentially. Now I no longer need to function as anything but an opinionated public intellectual, like everybody else out there...speaking as one who has never been able to jump start anyone's career, anyway, as a look at the roster of artists I have championed will indicate. But then, I am hard pressed to name an Atlanta critic whose writing has actually gotten somebody into a gallery, though it has sometimes reminded museums that they had meant to buy a piece from the non-Atlanta artist, anyway. And I dearly wish that the artists I have juried into regional shows had had a more consistent career track than most of them have appeared to have: some other Atlanta critics do have more international connections, but Jeff's irony is well taken: local critics are not going to launch people on the career track, even if those who are better connected than I can offer advice.)

Anyway, here is Jeff's eloquent cri de coeur to the Atlanta art community. I can testify that all or at least most, of the artists I have written about on Counterforces fall into his category of sacred artists rather than careerists...which tendency has not always brought them into a condition of other than severe financial discomfort:

"I can easily understand a self-aware artist with self-aware safe work realizing through careful studies and carefully written bios & resumes,that there is a matter of chess-like negotiation to the thought that goes into even the very making of their art. This type of artist considers their moves,much in the same way any business person would consider their moves. I'd like to contrast this with the times and the fact that we as people seem somehow subdued by technology and media in the face of obviously tulmultuous times. I'd also like to contrast this with ART itself in relation to any other business a person might engage .
"Art tends to behave as the canary in the coal mine. It still seems to be doing so in that honest passion itself has found no escape from being subverted and succumbing to a need (or lack of choice?)to utilize channels that render it meaningless-if it had meaning from the getgo.
"A certain intent reveals itself in art making,yes? It seeps through the work and shows itself for what it is. A perfect example would be Fahamu Pecou. His work borrows from a sentiment that wishes to make an observation about the media. It almost seems to slyly make a comment from an honest and angered place,a place that speaks truth to power. But as is obvious,it does not.It is utilizing the very system itself in the work itself. If there's is anything to discuss about this work as freshly handling a traditional topic,it is that it is unaware of any observation it may have accidently made in hopes of making some sales. It is incapable of existing without negating itself and is as cheap as a bacardi coaster left on the floor of a night club. It has grabbed its ankles for that very same power,the very same observation it wishes to mock. If that is its strength,its observation,then what we as a people are saying is that the doom some have been prognosticating is all ready amongst us- and laughs at how it has coaxed itself into our lives. Laughs as it drugs and renders mediocre artists with pure intentions.
"I beg of any of you with these pure intentions to hold on. To maintain the vision. To seek to circumvent these dead routes. Or perhaps even attack them.It is about the work itself. The work itself is the investment that,yes-it ultimately achieves the very same unspeakable goal. But in doing so shows how to dig deep and fertilize the soil,not rape it and move on for your own benefits. Simply do not go after it directly. Destroy it as you go.It will fall and turn to delicious mulch for future generations.
"But wait-Is this not the very technique that video taped night vision nobodies use to **** **** all the way to fame by? To shave their heads and go "crazy" for attention? To curse out stage hands for 5 minutes to faciltate ticket purchasing attention? Is there an escape from the cycle at this point? When big corporations use the very same culture jamming techniques to sell us back our asses? Don't you all want a chance to be on teee veeee? (WOOP TEE DOO GUYS)

"Do we have any other choice but to address the thing itself? Anything else is part of it.
"We look to our critics as mentors-dont we? Word on the street tells their real lecherous motivations-and we all know it. They know the ropes and how to help us position our work,don't they? They will steer you right,wont they? Don't they know? Here in Atlanta,the proof is in the puddin'. Bang up job so far guys. You help create our perception of ourselves you useless ****s. Thanks for being on our sides. Thanks for not utilizing the sacred thing that is ART to cowtow to backwards unproductive business traditions- traditions that secure future hacks of jobs to maintain your ******* cyclic dead scene. Not ours. Ours is sacred. Again...the proof is in itself. Step back and take a look if you need to.
"Is there any hope for work to slam an honest fist through all of it -based entirely on the strength of FEELINGS. of ART.Nothing logical to it,it expresses and is a conduit and
serves to carry us forward,serves people so that we may move forward to write about this history.Not become it.So that WE may record the important happenings.
"Must everything be about adding something to your resume or your bio? To being safe and proper? What's that???Where does that belong??? This is applicable to certain styles of art. Your work bores and is given a pass as hopeless dead weight to the word ART.. You know who you are."

another topic to write about, someday

I just got through notifying my LiveJournal readers (of whom a fair number reside in the United Kingdom) about an upcoming exhibition that reminded me of a topic I need to re-evaluate someday on Counterforces. But not today.

Here's a slightly edited extract from the joculum post:

Haunch of Venison London will celebrate its relocation from Haunch of Venison Yard to the former site of the Museum of Mankind by turning 6 Burlington Gardens into "Mythologies," an immense group show of internationally celebrated artists whose work "evoke[s] the uncanny and extraordinary, as seen in historic anthropological and archaeological collections such as the Pitt Rivers, Hunterian, Petrie, Horniman and Sir John Soane's Museums. For the exhibition Burlington Gardens will be transformed into a giant Cabinet of Curiosities."

It would be lovely to see this show, which recalls Eduardo Paolozzi's "Lost Magic Kingdoms" at the Museum of Mankind a quarter century or so back. The difference, I suspect or hope, is that now we have lost the sense of outrage at potential political incorrectness that Paolozzi's show stirred up: global migration has so hybridized our cultures that perhaps we can recapture the naive—or "second-naive"—sense of wonder, realizing that everything that we regard as ordinary is exotic to somebody else, and our silliest everyday phrases are grist for somebody else's T-shirt full of garbled foreign slogans. (I still cherish the denim jacket I saw in Berlin on which a completely nonsensical English sentence was prefaced by the all-caps declaration "SLANG:"...and as utopyr said of his sojourn in the Czech Republic, he wanted to stay long enough that he wouldn't just be exclaiming about how wonderfully strange the fire hydrants were, but would see what was really distinctive about Czech culture.)

This raises a lot of art issues dealt with in the past by Thomas McEvilley and others (beginning with the row caused by the 1984 "'Primitivism' in Twentieth Century Art" show at MoMA in New York and continuing at least through 1989's "Magiciens de la Terre" at the Centre Georges Pompidou, after which "The Decade Show" at several New York venues more or less announced, from a distinctly American perspective, the arrival of the era of artworld globalism)...all of which need to be re-evaluated in the greatly changed circumstances of 2009. We have gone through a cycle of global biennials and even more global art fairs in the wake of economic globalization, and it will be intriguing to see how all of this shakes out as the planet turns back toward the temptation of less than informed localism, alongside the promise of what one hopes will be an era of globalized financial oversight.

Art Dubai, anybody?

it looks like one thing, but it's something else....

I have been reminded of one of the posts I had intended to produce when Atlanta viewers could actually have seen all of the works in question, but the basic point remains valid.

Exhibitions at MOCA GA and Spruill reveal a remarkable tendency of workers in traditional media to produce work that looks exactly like some other medium.

Chen-cheng Hung's spectacular imitations in pastel of color photography and video stills were a major feature of the now-closed "Go Figure" exhibition. The SCAD Atlanta professor uses an unforgiving drawing medium to render the effects of depth of field so precisely that the virtuoso large-scale portrait that greeted visitors in the front gallery bore more of a resemblance to a photograph incidentally overlaid with a few bravura strokes of pigment. From a distance, even this effect vanished, and a good many visitors may have walked by without ever realizing they were seeing a work executed entirely in pastels. The same was true of the apparent video stills, which the artist actually produced without reference to any single original, though observation of numerous photographic images is part of his practice.

Christian Bradley West's drawings at MOCA GA that allude to the photographic collections of Masao Yamamoto's "Boxes of Ku" are equally spectacular in terms of a feat of composite trompe l'oeil. Though their status as drawings becomes apparent on close inspection, the seeming photographs posted on the wall above a wooden box (with other drawings placed loose in the box, just as Yamamoto arranges his various photographs) are so meticulously rendered that they replicate effects of damage as well as the tonalities of various photographic techniques.

Approaching the problem from the opposite direction, Mehmet Dogu (sorry, I don't know how to produce the appropriate diacritical marks in his name) photographed details of Karl Friedrich's Schinkel's Altes Museum on Berlin's Museeninsel and produced enlargements that, while undeniably color photographs, look more like photographs of some anonymous artist's architectural renderings. It is difficult to believe that the original source of the photographic image is the actually existing stone columns and red marble slabs rather than, say, meticulously executed drawings in pastel.

Without making conscious reference to one another, these three examples bring us full circle as regards the question of the degree to which photography has, as has been asserted for the past hundred fifty years, displaced the work of the artist's hand when it comes to realistic rendering.

The owls are not what they seem.

Small (and not so small) galleries in any American city could use our support at this difficult financial moment, so I want to call attention to Young Blood Gallery's forthcoming opening of Abby Glassenberg & David Hale, "Birds of a Feather" - Saturday, March 7th, 7:00 - 10:00 p.m. (That's in Atlanta, which goes without saying for Counterforces posts that make no mention of city—but which needs to be reiterated occasionally, since this weblog is read by at least one or two of the joculum blog's modest number of national and international readers.)

I make no particular claims for the status of either Glassenberg or Hale pending actual viewing of the exhibition, but the work looks visually attractive (sweet-tempered in the case of Glassenberg's soft sculptures, and "visionary," as the gallery claims, in the case of Hale), and ought to attract a buying audience. Glassenberg's Master of Arts degree is from Harvard, and Hale's BFA is from the University of Georgia, which has produced its fair share of visionarily inclined realist painters:

Katherine Taylor at Marcia Wood; Elizabeth D'Angelo at Callanwolde

I keep wanting to write some comprehensive essay on the neo-romantic imagination in the 21st century...my sense is that the genre has passed beyond both naiveté and cynicism and attained something like what the late Paul Ricoeur termed "second naiveté": which is a bit like Heinrich von Kleist's assertion in "On the Marionette Theatre" that we must eat again of the tree of knowledge in order to return to the state of innocence. (Kleist's protagonist thought that this would be "the last chapter in the history of the world," but we won't dwell on that.)

Katherine Taylor's paintings on canvas and works on paper (watercolor and charcoal) at Marcia Wood Gallery are virtuoso departures from Taylor's earlier explorations of the imagination of disaster, although at least one such storm-damage image plus a video of a road trip through territories of hurricane devastation are also part of the exhibition.

The repeated images of dreamlike palm trees are rendered in a blur that is paradoxically exact; Taylor works minimally, each brush movement creating the illusion of maximum visual information. (Closer attention reveals a mix of degrees of blurriness that might be possible to sort out in terms of whether midground or background are in sharper focus, but the effect is still more that of a landscape recalled in memory or archetypalized in dream. This is not changed by the fact that the visual clues in the foreground suggest that the scene is being viewed through a closed car window—movement being another naturalistic reason for blurriness.)



Elizabeth D'Angelo's archetypal portraits at Callanwolde deserve more attention than I have as yet found time to give them. Simply the title of Beyond Grey Matter Matters and Beneath Flesh Water Winters deserves to be recorded as a one-line poem akin to Apollinaire's double and triple puns in "Et l'unique cordeau des trompettes marines" but the painting itself also needs to be seen:


D'Angelo's metaphor of the "artichoke heart," another inspired play on words, is a lovely image, given the fleshiness of the artichoke leaves that are peeled off in layers en route to the center. And here is You Expose My Artichoke Heart, which is an unusually simplistic title for D'Angelo's baroquely artichoke-layered imagination:



The sheer variety of people and implicit personalities symbolized in this show is worthy of note, and invites a very long process of thought that I don't have time for at present. Here are I Am Deep Quinachrodone Violet and I Am, Therefore I Am—and the existentialist riposte to Descartes in the latter is probably so mirrored in the details that the work demands to be read in the sense that, say, Norman Bryson "reads" a still life. (Pure free association, but one could describe both Taylor and D'Angelo's shows with the title of the Bryson book I have in mind: Looking at the Overlooked.)

'80s antiquities and other dated punchlines

Richard Prince, for a while, combined cartoons with different punchlines and produced artworks that were nothing but detached antique jokes.

So it is now appropriate that the Metropolitan Museum of Art is presenting, from April 21 through August 2, "The Pictures Generation, 1974-1984," a most odd historical cutoff point, since 1984 was roughly when that generation of New York artists began to be copied by the rest of the country. I suppose that is the snide point of this historical survey; when the rest of the country has learned how to copy it, it is over. (One of my mentors said many years ago regarding an essay on deconstruction he was writing at the request of a publication that will remain nameless because I do not remember what it was, "When the nuns and the Republicans want you to explain it to them, you know it is over.")

Of course, copying a generation of self-conscious copyists offered the potential of metacopying, and I did a fair amount of that in my time. I also produced an artwork in which I critiqued one of my own artworks and offered a rebuttal by the artist.

footnotes to foregoing posts

I have corrected a couple of errors in my previous post about the now-closed show of Tibetan contemporary art from the Rubins' personal collection. I wish I had time and information to write more about what Norbu is doing in Nepal, or Tsering Nyandak in Lhasa. Like Gade, he seems to be commenting sincerely on contemporary situations (though Gade's "new Buddhas" using Spiderman et al are also eminently salable in London, creating an undecidable situation). Tsering Nyandak returned to Tibet after being educated in exile, and this alone makes me want to know more.