Catherine Spaeth

I've moved!

2009-03-25T08:08:00.000-07:00

Blogger has served me well, I love it! But it's time to upgrade. You can now find me at: www.catherinespaeth.com.

"Extraordinary Critique": Peter Cowling of Art Connect Interviews Catherine Spaeth

2009-03-13T17:42:00.000-07:00

I was quite flattered to be contacted by Peter Cowling for his second interview in this series for Art Connect. His first interview with Ruben Natal-San Miguel, of ARTmostfierce, makes a wonderful story of the role of photography in the post 9/11 years, so be sure to visit Art Connect and read that as well. But for now:

Peter Cowling - loveart (PC)
You first started blogging back in October 2007. What factors prompted you to commit to writing a blog?

Catherine Spaeth (CS)
I was writing for magazines and newspapers, and after studying the history of contemporary art for so long was very frustrated by the limits upon one’s writing in the established forms of print media. Many magazines, for example, are not interested in reviewing group shows. I provide well-curated art tours privately, and in New York there are amazing appearances of things down the street from one another. This is just the way that art is visible here, works of art can be like ideas bouncing off one another, and this is often very interesting. I felt compelled to write in a way that newspapers and magazines do not appreciate, and there was really nothing to stop me from doing it.

PC
It is one of the very best moments, when you are able to think ‘why not, there is nothing stopping me’.

Now, one opportunity I would like to get your thoughts on would be bloggers who want to develop the ability to produce better-written art critique. Before we start, perhaps you could set out your thoughts on the job of an art historian when writing critique?

CS
I think the first job, really, is to respond to what’s immediately before you, and this is why I am drawn to contemporary art to the extent that I am. It is the job of the art historian to be adequate to that. So description, being able to describe an experience of something, is where it starts. And then it begins to get interesting because there are always competing histories in any choice of words. Knowing the history of art criticism is crucial - you do align yourself within a history of words, carry that history forward even as you are re-writing it, bearing upon it with the inflections, corrections of your own time. The work you are doing remains that of description, these words adhere to the work of art at the same time - they are not loose interpretations and you can really tell when they are failing to stick to the object and when they are successful in describing it.

PC
Okay, so it is completely possible to critique contemporary art as an art historian?

CS
From my perspective, it is impossible not to critique contemporary art as an art historian. This is not in the flippant sense that because I am an art historian I think art historically, but because art actually thinks, and there is a history of thought that it is thinking with and inside of. I feel that if you are not attending to that you are missing the best of it.

PC
I tend to think of the writing on your blog as being highly accessible, but that is probably the wrong description. It is not accessible in the sense that any child could read it, but it is in the sense that it makes the art you critique highly accessible. Is that your intention, and do you have any perspective on the wider debate about the need for art to be ‘dumbed-down’ in order to accommodate a wider audience?

CS
I have been a strong advocate for the expression of difficult ideas in arts writing. I am quick to condemn other art’s writers who make jabs at difficult language when it comes off as sheer anti-intellectualism, and it frequently does. So by making a work of art accessible without skirting away from difficult ideas, one is acknowledging the thought of the work, making it visible - not simply glossing over it. In turn, I always write with something at stake, and those stakes are sensed out of the art.

There is no one art world, and so I don’t have much at stake in condemning art or art writing that is accessible. I do, however, take very strong objection to what you are referring to as “dumbing down” when it is relied upon as uncritical fodder for the market. For this reason there is a very important role for the academy and the museum to uphold a place for scholarly research. But I have also seen some atrocious academic writing, produced by galleries especially, that relies upon a history of philosophical thought to dress something up for the market.

PC
One way in which the writing on your blog stands out is that you do not seek to impose a single flow of thought where none should exist. It seems to me that this works because you build your thoughts around the art, rather than trying to shoehorn the art into an a-z style of writing. Is this an accurate reading of your approach? Could you give some perspective on the overall writing style you utilize when writing a blog entry?

CS
Right. I think there is a way to have authority in your writing by successfully delivering the sense of the object and it meanings, and to do this in such a way that your address to others is quite broad and generous. The form of the blog is perfect for this kind of openness in writing. And it really does start from being very open to the art, attending to it. It is not that there aren’t strong declarative statements in my writing, and I do think I am saying what things are. But there is an awful lot of room in what things are.

PC
Another aspect that stands out is your use of references, and analogies. Do you have any tips on how to balance the desire to be inclusive with the need to maintain momentum?

CS
I don’t think there are tools, per se. Inside of your question there might be something about reach, and I do enjoy having a lot of reach. This has to do with that sense of there being a lot of room in things. By this I mean that the meanings generated by a work of art extend into the larger context of the world at large, and it is here as well that you are becoming art historical. The references and analogies that appear are only appearing because the work of art as I understand it has that kind of reach, it really comes from there. As for momentum, you might call it running room. But in order to see it perhaps you need a lot of curiousity, and the self-criticism to be playfully aware of your own tics and habits. Sometimes even references and analogies are really in the way, will slow things down, and you need to bust through them entirely to get back to the work at hand. It’s not about what you already know, there is a sense of being taken up by a history of thought when you write about art.

PC
Art historians are able to build-up an extensive and detailed understanding of their chosen area of expertise. It is tempting to think, then, that art historians are just the sum of their facts, applied to a given situation. I do not agree with that view – not least because I have seen art historians who provide illuminating insight into art they have little prior knowledge about. Is it the case that art historians develop a systematic approach to viewing and thinking about art?

CS
For myself there is no system or method. If I have a system, I suppose it is that I know the history of words and their use with relevance to the objects they’ve described. So for example if a word like “complicity” shows up when I am looking at and thinking about a work of art, I am automatically beholden to that word and its histories, and can’t help writing from the perspective of the question, “What does it mean, when I look at this specific work of art, to use the word complicity as an expression of this time, given its history with regard to art?” There is a great deal of care in that. And so maybe the systematic approach would be in this way of caring.

Read more...

Emptiness is the New Absolute: theanyspacewhatever and Ann Hamilton at the Guggenheim

2009-03-06T05:18:00.000-08:00

“A giant wave,” is how Frank Lloyd Wright described the Guggenheim, its spiral sweeping away all corners and walls for an unobstucted vision. In 1959, sheer opticality was the Modernist Absolute and painting was its model. In 1971 Daniel Buren's Peinture/Sculpture sliced clear through the center of this unobstructed vision, but was removed before the public could see its perceived violence to the space of exhibition. However, by the late ‘80s a critique of the hegemony of vision made many an academic career.

The recent exhibition "theanyspacewhatever" was a good attempt to consider what it means to hold an exhibition at the Guggenheim in our time. I can only imagine Pierre Huyghe’s Opening from the photograph: Donning my battery-powered miner’s hat in the darkened space of the museum; gradually adjusting to the disconnect betwen the eyes in my head and the orb of light emitted from the lamp above them; losing this orb in a mass of others bobbing across the distance and chasing across the walls and floor; viewing an object in the light of a gathering upon it. This awareness of one's own vision cut away from the self and in play with others is visible to me in the photograph. Viewers'orbs of light echo the moonless and star-filled sky above - Angela Bulloch's Firmamental Night Sky: Oculus 12.

In the course of the exhibition as a whole, leisure took over as a pleasant meandering, a mood in which aesthetic criteria vanish with a casual yes to everything. The “objects” themselves were so slight and so variously and deliberately placed to the furthest edges of the space at the center that the exibition felt as well-designed as a movie soundtrack, barely noticeable but for the occasional shift in action or place, its parameters finely tuned. Here, Maurizio Cattelan's newstand tucked in a remote service corner and offering "The Wrong Times," loaded with interviews between contemporary artists.

The title of the exhibition , "theanyspacewhatever", carried with it a tone of idle disinterest and a lack of care for place and historicity. Much has been made of the globalizing tendencies of the '90s, and the title is a fine enough expression of this. But it is also a reference to the empty spaces that take the place of - serve the broken - narrative in contemporary film. Empty spaces characterized this exhibition to the extent that whatever objects there were between them - what in a conventional exhibition would have been the art - were felt more as forms of punctuation, discrete events that served to amplify the emptiness of space.

"Theanyspacewhatever" is in fact a Deleuzian term, meaning "a space of virtual conjunction, grasped as a pure locus of the possible."* The apparent opposition between a flippant expression, "any space whatever," and the more utopian dream of the possible, has the feel of a carelessness turning away from effort, without tension or traction. Elsewhere in this exhibition such an opposition feels more like duplicity. This sense is borne by the words ARE WE EVIL, a declarative interrogative emblazoned by Douglas Gordon on the floor of the rotunda, both a chilling statement for our time and the snide commentary of a prankster to those who are in on the joke.

Emptiness has different values - in a strictly Western sense it can mean that something is simply not there, or that it rings hollow. But in Asian philosophy there can be very different senses of emptiness, and different stakes set out in one's relation to it. Here is Rirkrit Tiravanija, interviewed by Mary Jane Jacobs in 2004 about his artistic practice and Buddhism. Jacobs asked if Tiravanija's work is about “trust, allowing a work to connect to people in their own way, suspending judgment?” To which he replied:

I think the idea of judgment is interesting in relation to Buddhistic practice. I always get asked, “What are your expectations?” And I say, “ I don’t have any,” because I don’t predetermine things. And, “Do you feel it’s succesful or not?” and I say, “I don’t measure things that way, in terms of good or bad, or success.” It changes how you look at what happens. And I think that is quite important in terms of living in a Buddhistic way: not to have preconceived structures or to close off possibilities; but it’s not even about being open or closed; it’s just about being blank. In a way, of course, you can receive more if you are empty.**

Tiravanija’s work does circumvent expectations and notions of success by being so out of place in its ordinariness that aesthetic criteria are no longer relevant. There is a politics to this, a critique of a productivist society that refuses to labor and seeks exoneration in the always mediated context of the the everyday. In terms of his own practice, formerly characterized by dishing out Thai curry to gallery and museum visitors around the world, Tiravanija upped the ante at the Guggenheim by having illy caffee do his work for him, a company already known for marketing its product in a gallery setting. From the Illy website:

Illy Gallery is an on-going timed event, a happening that’s adjourned in one venue in some place of the world, and then gets going again in another venue in some other place. These venues are places where visitors and patrons can get to know all the products, forms of expression, passions and people that go to make up the world of illy, places where they can experience and get a rare taste of things beautiful and rich in flavour, and discover art and culture at their best.

Strolling at our leisure through the Guggenheim we were asked to and we did suspend our judgment and seamlessly entered the “world of illy.” In fact Cinema Liberte/Bar Lounge (1996- ) is an ongoing collaboration with Douglas Gordon - on the other side of the partition were clips from censored films. The press release stated that "...this installation invokes concepts of political, social and artistic freedom, " and that "it has been made possible by the generous contribution of illy caffee." On one side of the partition, then, was an already long-playing liberation from censorship, and on the other the seamlessness of a life that is produced for us by a globalizing lifestyle culture of refinement and ease. Something like a contradiction is on display, but there is no real contradiction here, no traction at all. The space of opposition has been evacuated, is empty and blank.

In 1984 T.J. Clark wrote about Manet's A Bar at the Folies-Bergere (1882) as an expression of the blase attitude, a recently emerged public demeanor that he describes as arriving upon the heels of public censorship in late nineteenth century France. Popular cultural expression in the cafe concert halls lost the resistant political inflections inside of double entendre, and scepticism about social relations took its place. Lifestyle as a commodity appeared in this moment, and Clark cites Georg Simmel, who described the blase attitude as a psychic mood reflecting the neutrality of money, how it "hollows out the core of things, their peculiarities, their specific values and their uniqueness in a way which is beyond repair." The blank look of Manet's barmaid and the skewed mirror reflection displacing the viewer leads Clark to write that "Doubts about looking accumulate...all reinforcing one another. What begins as a series of limited questions about relationships in space is likely to end as scepticism about relations in general."***

Tiravanija's work does not function as Manet's Bar to disturb our social relations into a quandary of doubt and scepticism as to appearances. Rather, there is a loose certainty projected upon us, and confidence that any questions about the status of illy caffee as art will be appeased, lulled by social relations. The extended psychic mood that has us drifting from marquis to magazine rack to headphones, etc., has the consistency of our pedestrian nods to others in an increasingly franchised world, and this includes the Guggenheim itself.

The strongest criticism of this kind of work so far has been that of Claire Bishop in her essay "Antagonism and Relational Aesthetics," published in 2004. Bishop's claim is that a well-functioning democracy relies upon critical antagonism and that Tiravanija's work in particular is lacking critical consciousness, offering instead a placating and false - produced, in fact - sense of community.**** Bishop is also worrying over the loss of contemplation as a valued experience in viewing a work of art, and that social production has taken it place.

Currently on view at the Guggenheim, and in an exhibition that is handed over entirely to contemplation, is Ann Hamilton's human carriage, 2009. The title is very much about how we carry ourselves in the world, and the work itself offers an alternate model of emptiness. As with Tiravanija's Bar Lounge there is in human carriage a visible laborer, tending to the balance of the machinery she operates. At the top of the spiral of the Guggenheim, she hangs from a carrier Buddhist texts that have been sliced apart and rebound as dangling packages of fragments. These are then lowered to a holding place just above the dry pond in the lobby. A small carriage on wheels is then sent off down the spiral of the Guggenheim, suspended from wheels that glide along a rail attached to the balustrade exterior. When it meets the holding place at the end of the spiraling rail the text fragments are released and fall into the dry pond below. All the way down, whenever there is a bit of extra traction, tilt, or movement of air a pair of bells suspended from the carriage will hit each other and ring.

In the week after September 11th, and just prior to her collaborative performance with Meredith Monk, mercy, I interviewed Ann Hamilton. At the time she was worrying over an installation conceived in previous months, involving papers that fell from the ceiling. I wrote in my review of the performance:

...with her worries of opportunism in mind, it is striking that somewhere between our conversation and the performance of mercy, Hamilton and Monk took the risk of concluding with a spellbinding performance of catastrophe as papers falling from above. Swooping, spiraling or floating, their shadows as tangible as the actual, different temporal layers filled the air. It may be that the success of mercy will be measured by how, or even if, the socially and embodied immersion in catastrophe has a power that both exceeds and informs the actual and political specifics of our present time.*****

It took months of standing atop a ladder to achieve the right float of paper on air, and this subsequently became the foundation of corpus at MassMOCA in 2004, where 7 million sheets of paper were dropped from the ceiling of a room the size of a football field. Joe Thompson the director of MassMOCA, described it as "haunting and, in the end, liturgical, but without liturgy."******

Removed by time from the catastrophe of the World Trade Centers and without the same sense of time adrift that one gets from a falling sheet of paper, human carriage is a different sort of utterance, addressing the space of the Guggenheim and the context of the show. It is nearly as though human carriage is passing through the works in the exhibition in acknowledgment and without attachment. These packages of text are an expression of the value of language and translation in Buddhist thought. The effort to balancing in human carriage is similar to the description offered by Dogen, a 13th century Zen master, of the fairness of the Chinese steelyard - here is an image from EBay:

Writes Dogen, "In emptiness [the steelyard] embodies equilibrium; fairness is the great principle of the steelyard. By virtue of this principle of fairness we weigh emptiness and things; whether it be emptiness or form [we weigh it to] meet fairness."******* Emptiness, then, is not an evacuation of the world and of judgment towards an ideal blank, but is in the effortless effort of calibration, with the sense of buoyancy that one feels in the steelyard above. Hanging in the balance, discernment in human action expounds freely as though from the open mouth of a bell. Hamilton's own work, so quickly leaving behind initial worries of opportunism in the political context of catastrophe, has been able to follow the path of its own weight in emptiness. When human carriage descends, the famous void of the Guggenheim is crowded by the faces at its edges, attentive to just this moment that the bells will ring.

By Catherine Spaeth

*Gilles Deleuze, Cinema I: The Movement Image, Trans. Hugh Tomlinson and Barbara Habberjam, London and New York: Continuum International Publishing Group, 2001, pp. 107-10, as cited in Nancy Spector, "theanyspacewhatever: An Exhibition in Parts," exh. cat., Solomon R. Guggenheim Foundation 2008, p. 16.
** in The Third Mind: American Artists Contemplate Asia, 1860-1989, exh. cat., Guggenheim Museum, c.2009, p. 21.
***T.J. Clark,Painting in Modern Life: Paris in the Art of Manet and His Followers, Princeton, c.1984, p. 251.
****Calire Bishop, "Antagonism and Relational Aesthetics," in October 110, Fall 2004, pp. 51-79.
*****Catherine Spaeth, "mercy: An Interview With Ann Hamilton,: in Dialogue Magazine, November/December, 2001, pp. 49-51
******Annette Grant, "Art: Let 7 Million Sheets of Paper Fall, NYT Sunday April 11th, 2004. http://query.nytimes.com/gst/fullpage.html?res=9D03EEDA1638F932A25757C0A9629C8B63
*******As translated by Hee-Jin Kim, in "Weighing Emptiness," Dogen on Meditation and Thinking: A Reflection on His View of Zen, SUNY, c. 2007, p. 42.

Image Credits:Daniel Buren's Peinture/Sculpture before it was removed from the "Guggenheim International Exhibition" at the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum in 1971, photo Robert E. Mates and Paul Katz, c.SRGF, NY; Pierre Huyghe, OPENING, Installation view, Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York, 2008,© Solomon R. Guggenheim Foundation New York. Photo by Kristopher McKay; Angela Bulloch, Firmamental Night Sky: Oculus 12, 2008, LEDs (light-emitting diodes), neoprene, animated program, control gear, structural elements, power suppliers, and various cables, Courtesy Esther Schipper, Berlin and Galerie Eva Presenhuber, Zurich, Installation view, Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York, 2008, © Solomon R. Guggenheim Foundation New York. Photo by David Heald; The Wrong Gallery, The Wrong Times, 2004–06 (reprinted 2008), Newspaper, Installation view, Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York, 2008, Photo: Kristopher McKay, © The Solomon R. Guggenheim Foundation, New York; Douglas Gordon and Rirkrit Tiravanija, Cinèma Libertè/Bar Lounge, First realized 1996,Made possible by illy caffè,Installation view, Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York, 2008,© Solomon R. Guggenheim Foundation New York. Photo by David Heald; A Bar at the Folies-Bergère (detail), Édouard Manet, 1882, The Samuel Courtauld Trust, Courtauld Institute of Art Gallery, London; Ann Hamilton, human carriage, 2009, Installation composed of cloth, wire, bells, books, string, pipe, pulleys, pages, cable, gravity, air, and sound, Courtesy the artist, photos by photographer David Heald, © Solomon R. Guggenheim Foundation.

The Strategic Museum: George Tooker in Columbus, Ohio and the Value of the National Academy Museum in New York

2009-01-02T14:38:00.000-08:00

Long before the controversy and concern about the National Academy Museum, I contacted Melissa Wolfe, a curator at the Columbus Museum of Art in Ohio and catalog contributor to the show George Tooker, which closes this weekend. What originally inspired me to contact her is that I was struck by the specific value of exhibition and scholarship generated by these smaller museums. In the interview below, the value for New York of the smaller strategic and collaborative museum emerges.

CS: My response to it is maybe personal, but I remember so well at the Columbus Museum of Art Cornice, a painting of a man about to jump off the building, and it was just so curious, among the Sloans and the Bellows'- it’s such an oddball painting.

MW: It’s interesting because we bought that in the ‘50s, and why did we buy that? I mean in the ‘50s that’s an odd purchase for the museum, really. But we always recognized what an interesting painting it was, and we always had it up. Then in 2005 we bought the Schiller Collection in Chicago, he began collecting in the ‘70s artworks that dealt with social issues, and really amassed one of the best collections of Social Realist works from about 1930-1970. We are a collection of collections, more so than a lot of museums. We bought from a collection of the Photo League as well, and our personality has changed massively. When you are a regional museum and you buy 400 works of art it totally changes your personality. So that’s how the other Tooker, Lunch, came in, it was one of the pieces in that collection that was of really strong interest to us...

CS: I remember that Nanette Maciejunes, also of the Columbus Museum of Art, was responsible for bringing Charles Burchfield to life, all of the sudden he showed up as though a brand new discovery and in a sense he was. That’s another example of someone at a regional museum finding this really quirky painting that people in New York were not interested in. There’s the Blakelock show at the Academy too, from the Sheldon Museum of Art at the University of Nebraska, side by side with Tooker, and they make a point in their catalog of saying that this one painting in their museum became the support of the entire show. And it is a show full of very quirky, ‘uneven” one would say, paintings.

At the Metropolitan Museum of Art when they rehung the 19th century they really brought a lot of stuff up from the basement, re-imagining what the curatorial role was and in recent exhibitions wanting to make more visible the history of the institution as well, showing collector’s room after collector’s room. But what you don’t see at the Metropolitan Museum of Art is that while they may decide to have an entire room devoted to Orientalism, or to tourist landscape paintings, you don’t see them landing on one of the curious oddities, such as Cornice, and deciding that they are going to devote an entire show to that. Those kinds of things are just sort of there in the layer of culture.

MW: Well, I think if you are a regional museum, or just a smaller museum, you have a little more leeway to be invested in that one painting that you don’t really get, and in that sense that’s where we can make our mark. Very good curators and strategic museums get that, so with the Tooker, I hung Lunch up immediately. We realize that’s our opening, and the director of the NEA saw it , he was actually here for something else but he saw the George Tooker and fell in love with it, and suggested we nominate him for the National Medal of the Arts, so we did, and he got it the next year, so we initiated that because in Columbus it is large.

The strategic museum is either dwarfed by a larger institution or is in Columbus,Ohio or Lincoln Nebraska. If you’re smart you look at what you’ve got on your walls and you do something with those artists who no one else is doing anything with...We have Hopper, but the Whitney isn’t really loaning out it’s Hoppers to us little museums, so that’s how Nanette got to Burchfield - you can get deep rich exhibitions with works by artists like that, and that’s where you can make your wedge, your mark. Just look at all these Burchfield’s! And you rethink him - the same with George Tooker. The major museums who have him don’t really care if they go. The strategic museum knows that this is good for them, they can get a really rich, deep, multifaceted show.

While George Tooker remains in many ways a New York artist - he was born in Brooklyn in 1920 only moving to Vermont in 1960, studied and taught at the Art Students League, painted Subway, an icon of New York, and his collectors are here - it took the strategic interest of smaller regional museums to make this show happen at the National Academy, and this is a good thing. In turn, the National Academy, with its strong interest in the singular lives of artists and the figurative tradition, is the perfect home for such exhibitions - in this case, one of its own members. Where else in New York could this show have successfully occurred? (The Whitney, which has had Subway in its collection since it was painted?) Finally,to suggest that these paintings have a special meaning for the National Academy, here is a sentence from Melissa Wolfe's catalog essay: "To paint the figure as deliberately and meditatively as does Tooker, is, in a sense, to touch, caress, and care for it."*

*M. Melissa Wolfe, "George Tooker: A Biography, " in George Tooker, Robert Cozzolino, Marshall N. Price, and M. Melissa Wolfe, NY: Merrell Publishers Ltd., 2008, p.33.
Image Credits: All works by George Tooker, American, born 1920: Cornice, c. 1949, Egg-yolk tempera on panel, Columbus Museum of Art, Museum Purchase, Derby Fund, from the Philip J. and Suzanne Schiller Collection of American Social Commentary Art 1930-1970; Lunch, 1964, Egg-yolk tempera on panel, Columbus Museum of Art, Museum Purchase, Derby Fund, from the Philip J. and Suzanne Schiller Collection of American Social Commentary Art 1930-1970: Children and Spastics, 1946, egg tempera on gesso panel, 24 1/2 x 181/2 in. (62.2 x 47 cm), Collection Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago, gift of Mary and Earle Ludgin Collection; Embrace of Peace II, 1988, egg tempera on gesso panel, 18 x 30 in. (45.7 x 76.2 cm), Reis Private Collection.

Untitled (Vicarious) at Gagosian and Michael Fried: Why Photography Matters As Art As Never Before

2008-12-11T13:16:00.000-08:00

Ending today at Gagosian is an exhibition exploring the relationship between sculpture and photography. While the photographers here have created sculptural tableaux in order to photograph them, “Untitled (Vicarious): Photographing the Constructed Object” is not about the photographing of sculpture, per se, but in how photography “dematerializes the constructed object.”

Automatically when I read the word ‘”dematerializes” I see a history of conceptual and performance art that photography has carried along since the late ‘60s, and all the burdens of the photograph as a document that go along with it. But this was not the most striking thing for me in this exhibition - more compelling was that sculptural practices in contemporary photography support an absenting of the figure. In this self-portrait by Cindy Sherman, the dramatically intended detail of a gleaming drop of sex takes over the pictorial field to the extent that an exposed vagina is mere background for the grimace of the figure pinned before it. Carter Mull’s photographs of what appear to be salt crystals, jewels, hair, blood and a halloween mask further exaggerate the thematic disappearance of the figure as a scene of a crime.

The absenting of the figure effectively sidesteps a quite different trajectory in the history of contemporary photography, which understands the camera as a technology that frames and captures what is seen. In this trajectory the camera is a prosthetic of vision extending out into the world as a social construct., and the world’s pictures can only offer themselves to view as socially constructed in turn. From here an emphasis has been placed upon the relations between the photographer and her subject, as in ICP’s first triennial in 2003, “Strangers,” and the current exhibition at the Bronx Museum, “Street Art/StreetLife.”

In a shift away from such a reading of the social technology of vision terms for understanding photography are re-orienting towards more traditional interests in medium-specificities, no less social but a different address entirely. I am also reading Michael Fried’s “Why Photography Matters As Art As Never Before,” and what he refers to as “new art photography” really begins when it takes its full place upon the wall much in the same manner as painting, and now carries the history of painting along with it.

Sculpture has always lent itself well to photography, notably in the case of Constantin Brancusi. Drawn to balanced instabilities, Brancusi explored qualities of surface and light that could project the substance of his compositions. In “Untitled (Vicarious)” David Smith and Moholy-Nagy are the forebears of a sculptural interest in photography. In Untitled (Tableau), 1933, David Smith violently scratches an eye into the surface of the photograph. Radiating lines expose the pulp beneath the gloss of photography so that the surface is looking back, and in doing so makes the picture.

Contrary to Smith’s attention to the surface, Laszlo Moholy-Nagy is drawn to photography for its transparency upon the world. In the 2006 exhibition of Albers and Moholy-Nagy at the Whitney a carousel of Kodak slides whirred and clicked, the projected images only visble for the light passing through surfaces of film. His early color photographs were transparencies, as printing didn’t live up to his standards (it wasn’t until 1973-4 that Eggleston was confident to leave transparencies for the dye-transfer print.) It was when working on constructions of glass and metal that transparency first became for him the essence of a technological modernism. Moholy Nagy believed that modernist transparency could dematerialize sculpture into the motions of shadow and light, ultimately becoming glass architecture.

According to Fried, this sense of photography as ultimately a medium of transparency is what characterizes new art photography - apart from being on the wall as though painting, it has no real interest in the picture plane . Where tenderness (in the sense of both the surface’s raw vulnerability and the care a painter has in tending to this) might have existed for David Smith, in new art photography the surface of the photograph is taken for granted as a transparent screen, “put out of play as a bearer of pictorial meaning.” It is Thomas Demand who best plays this out. Demand describes his own practice as furthered along by what he refers to as the “dehistoricizing effect” of digital media. He is most well known for images of of vacant crime scenes culled from photo agencies - the banality of Jeffrey Dahmer’s vacant hallway, for example, seems to bear no relation at all to the horror of its context. It is a way of screening the viewer’s curiousity out of the scene, without instantiating the pictorial surface itself as an object that faces. Even what is depicted is a paper illusion.

Fried rejects the notion that Demand's photograph has anything to do with the fact that he was trained as a sculptor. It is the controlled intention behind each detail that makes the difference for him, and he refers to Baudelaire, who described the difference between sculpture and painting in 1846:

Sculpture has several drawbacks that are a necessary consequence of its means. brutal and positive like nature, it is at the same time vague and eludes one's grasp, because it presents too many faces at once. It is in vain that the sculptor strives to put himself at the service of a unique point of view; the spectator, who revolves around the figure, can choose a hundred different points of view, except the right one, and it often happens, which is humiliating for the artist, that a chance illumination, an effect of lamplight, reveals a beauty which is not the one he had thought of. A painting is only what he wants it to be; there is no other way of looking at it other than in its own light. Painting has only one point of view; it is exclusive and despotic: and so the expression a painter can command is much stronger.*

Demand's KFC, above, is "there for us" behind the transparent screen of photography, but it is in the absolute control of the artist. Further, the cuts that are visible do not make of this a seamless entry into a world, but a scene cut away from our own, riven throughout by the artist's intent.

Like sculpture, photography is known for being prone to the vagaries of detail, and is valued for this. Based on my experience there is no question that what distinguishes a still photograph from film is that there is always that one detail that will sit with you in a way that it can't in film, and I'm convinced that drawing attention to this is why the archivist-photographer Allan Sekula will show a series of slides via carousel. At issue is the value that one gives to what Roland Barthes referred to as the punctum, an absorbing detail unplanned by the artist and entirely personal to the viewer. That the character of such details is an issue for contemporary photographers is clear in the work of Anne Hardy, who in the photograph above depicts a space completely handed over to an obsessive cataloguing with its own private logic, of no sense to us but doing its best to saturate the room with intention in every detail.

Fried offers another example of how photography excludes the viewer in Sugimoto's Seascapes, an installation of which is currently on view at Gagosian's 21st St. location. In "Untitled (Vicarious)" Colors of Shadow: 1015, 2004, makes a degree of autism visible with regard to Fried's understanding of Sugimoto's work. Sugimoto rented an apartment in Japan, and had expert plasterers sand and polish down the walls, so that every detail has been smoothed out. Only the wooden floor gives away the fact that these fine grays have been photographed with color film. Exhibited with this series of photographs at Sonnabend in 2006 was a sculpture by Robert Morris, four grey cubes from the center of which one could stand - the furthermost sides of these cubes were at such an angle that you were effectively at the center of a truncated pyramid, and felt very positioned by it. That the gallery saw such resonance between Sugimoto's photographs and a minimalist sculpture is not simply because of abstract minimalist forms they share. In "Untitled (Vicarious)" I was struck by Sugimoto's framing. While so much care has been given to sanding these walls down in order to remove the arbitrary effects of light, the print itself has been laid over a bumpy surface, capturing a light not permitted by the depicted surface. Further, Sugimoto very intentionally uses a glass that reflects the lighting of the gallery in green. Not only is the artist drawing attention to the surface in relation to the space outside of it, but Sugimoto also draws attention to the entire space of the gallery from the beholder's point of view as reflected by the framing glass. For a photographer who describes his work as a sculptural practice, a matter of chiseling space, such invitation to the arbitrariness of light in our own space and the denial of it in the photographed image is crucial to extending and putting to the test the ontological claims of medium-specificity that Fried holds dear.

By Catherine Spaeth

* Oeuvres Completes, paris, 1961, pp. 943-4, as quoted in Alex Potts, The Sculptural Imagination, Yale, c. 2000, p. 62-63.
Image Credits: Cindy Sherman, Untitled, 1992, © Cindy Sherman. Courtesy of Metro Pictures, New York;Carter Mull, Sumere...Sumptuary, 2004,© Carter Mull. Courtesy of the artist and Rivington Arms; David Smith, Untitled (Tableau) 1933, © The Estate of David Smith/Licensed by VAGA, New York; Laszlo Moholy-Nagy,Untitled, 1940's, Courtesy of Gagosian Gallery; Thomas Demand, KFC, 2007, Courtesy of Gagosian; Anne Hardy, Untitled VI, 2005, Courtesy of Gagsosian Gallery; Hiroshi Sugimoto, Colors of Shadow 1015, 2004, “© Hiroshi Sugimoto. Courtesy Gagosian Gallery”; Honore Daumier, Salon of 1857, "Sad Countenance of sculpture in the midst of painting."

"Monitor": An Interview With Noah Fischer

2008-11-21T15:55:00.000-08:00

This interview with Noah Fischer occurred at his gallery exhibit, “Monitor,” at Claire Oliver on November 12th. Interesting to me was how an artist who is accustomed to larger installation-based work turned to the discrete object in a gallery context.

What follows is our conversation, lengthy but focused. So get that cup of tea, and enjoy!

CS: So are these like altars in a way for you? The scale of them is very much like an altar.

NF: Sure, I didn't think of that but yeah, sure they are, like in Buddhism how idolatrous is an altar anyway? How much are you really bound to that statue? You can put a basketball on the altar and it can still be serious about the world.

CS: Yeah, it's attending to it, it's a matter of intending.

NF: Exactly, it's attending, it's a commitment to things.

CS: You used that word commitment earlier and in theory the word comes from Sartre's reaction to the nouveau realiste writers in France. It was literature he was writing about, a politically engaged kind of writing, which is a very sort of specific argument to make about what commitment is.

NF: Yeah, I think Adorno wrote about commitment in the context of the political in an artwork, but I wasn't actually thinking that way when I use the word, words are, words can be a little full of baggage, and I'm interested in that, I like to engage with the different meanings when they come up, but I was thinking of emptying that word to mean a constant practice, constant engagement. In that sense it's more like not idealizing or allowing objects to become ideological but also getting personal with them. This is my life, my studio work, and in that sense the objects are more in the tradition of Morandi in the sense of objects that speak to a constant commitment to being an artist and to making work, and the physical nature of that, the commitment to having an artistic life. This is one reason the hand appears persistently in the work.

CS: I used to have a fascination with the word conviction, I was so fascinated by this word because it is so double-sided, such a personal thing but it also means the state and the law. For a long time, like you're using the word commitment, I was using the word conviction, it was something I thought I could really hold on to. Then I discovered what was -even meaningful and powerful don't fall into line here - but, beyond conviction, something being beyond conviction is what supports the energy that I put into things.

NF: Those are really...commitment, conviction are good words to think about. I think that Adorno writes about works of art as a crossing line between supporting a cause and just being art. It's about watching out that your art, that it doesn't support the wrong cause, to have a certain consciousness of politics in the work. With “Monitor,” it's simple, it's a problematic object, in fact it's hardly an object at all because we don't notice it, we have a very strange relationship with it...

CS: Yeah, I sleep with my Apple! There was an essay that Lacan wrote, and I'm not a big Lacan reader, and this was written during the Vietnam war, so there's always a lot of anti-American sentiment, but it's a great description of the American ego and the automobile, about how the American is attached to this thing as a prosthetic extension of themselves, and looking around the world from their little automobile ego. My Apple feels like an extreme relationship to an object, I've never had one like that before. It can have me spellbound for a day straight. And the politics of the iPod, there's been a lot of really good writing about the danger of such commodities.

NF: Oh yeah, there is a danger, and it's why I got into Apple design specifically because the Apple campaign has managed to insinuate itself deeply into the lives of people who wouldn't consider themselves to be materialistic.

CS: Oh, it's kind of uncool now not to have an iPod.

NF: That's really important, that's the thing that's going on that we don't know, give it ten or fifteen years it's going to be whole different thing. Talking about Obama and how he won, by the internet, by the interface, it's an Apple generation thing, he's like an Apple, he's not PC, he's Mac, and it's based on an Apple type of interface, and now that he's President he's keeping his web site up, I don't know if you've noticed...

CS: I've been getting email after the election letting me know that we're all still a part of it, and they're keeping their members aware. I think the last email I got was to purchase t-shirts. That's the first time a presidency has had that kind of connection, and a public.

NF: Well, y'know Facebook, the Obama site is basically working like Facebook now, you can have your own - I have my own page on the Obama web site.

CS: Yeah, me too, but I haven't really done anything with it. It's more than Facebook, though it's a blog.

NF: Yeah, it's the US President, blogging, right? It's a huge resource, that's just sitting there, it's like the fireside chats with FDR on the radio, that era where this squarish object called a radio became the manifest president for a moment. That was a technological era where this one piece of progress embodied the President.

CS: You had to be in a space probably with more people than your one lone self, in a room, listening to sound, and the thing about this is that the president can make his speeches at any place and any time of day, and it is something you do by yourself.

NF: And it's not only that you're by yourself, it's stepping outside of the physical reality and into a world where there's many many more options going on and that you can get lost in, and you meet other people, but you're meeting them in this cyberspace.

CS: And they are real relationships, that will never become in real space. So the other thing I was interested in when I was looking at these objects, I guess I'll call it an "issue" of facingness. Much of the glow of the Apple computer is in that facingness. I was noticing that of course in the wall pieces you have to do that, but in every single one of these, this one is revolving, that one is awry, this I call the ass monitor...

NF: That's a great name for it, I would have called it ass monitor if I'd thought about it.

CS: And here the monitor is a little too high for the face to face thing to happen...these are in a way social objects differently in their facingness than these. So obviously, there is a space issue, these are on the wall, but still there's something abut them belonging to a category of space differently than the things that are in the room and the avoidance of facingness that occurs in these more everyday objects.

NF: Well, that's a very good point, obviously I knew that these wall pieces were doing their own thing aside from the furniture studies. It's a good point you bring up about facingness.

CS: It felt insistent, but you weren't thinking about it as you were doing it?

NF: Maybe unconsciously insistent, y'know. This work is really, the ideas don't come first, put it that way, it's just art work.

CS: Studio.

NF: It's just studio, it's developed in the studio, there's a lot of ideas behind it, I'm always researching, but I have to let go of that stuff when I'm making the work, instead of pointing things in a certain direction.

CS: Well, we are being asked to attend to the objects, and in attending to them I found this thing about facingness.

NF: It's a good point and its true that even this is hung high. Well there's two things going on with it. Everything is about interface, that's why the show is called "Monitors". It's kind of funny, y'know, interface, two faces, your own face facing the face of the thing.

CS: Also face-to-face meetings.

NF: Right, and if the computer is facing away from you there is nothing happening there.

CS: You still try to go in there.

NF: In a way there's a space in the show I was working with, and I knew about it but you put it in a very good way, and the idea is that...These things here are sort of just barely sculptural, there's not too much going on really, it's like a stand-in, almost, for what's going on here, you've got the light, you've got the thing...

CS: But the light does a lot, you've got this empty casing, and I was saying something earlier about hollowness.

NF: It's like Donald Judd, y'know, it’s a sublime space in there y'know, and a sublime shadow very crisp, adding a new dimension to it.

CS: The word hollowness is something that, I teach the history of contemporary sculpture at Purchase and we were reading Fried's essay last night and he uses the word hollowness as a very strong condemnation of Minimalism, something can ring hollow, apart from being descriptive, and so there is something about the interfacing that is occurring in this really quirky place in the history of human consciousness let's say, where this kind of facingness is a subjectivity that's real, but it's constructed and fake and not there.

NF: Right, a whole election happened in this space, so how can you argue that's not real. At the same time it's so new, in a historical sense, it's so new, nobody gets it, nobody knows where its going and what it means, nobody can make an ethical, final argument about whether its a good thing or a bad thing in that sense, the jury is out.

CS: One of my favorite zen things is the Sandokai, form and emptiness, the absolute and the relative, and so there is the sense of something that is empty and hollow being where the world is, where it's happening.

NF: Well, I like that you can use hollowness and emptiness and accept them both in a way, emptiness is good.

CS: In relation to a history of sculpture hollowness is useful as a way to get to emptiness, which is what you started with.

NF: Yeah, it's interesting to think about those words and the history of those words, the thing is that in this work I don't think there's a strong moralistic condemnation of this type of interface, of the hollowness of a sublime digital age for example, because there's a warmth, this is a beautiful lantern, I chose to use the incandescent bulb, a yellowish glow.

So this is talking about re-presenting, but not much changed. These sculptures here, all in a different way, I was chasing after a space, some kind of interaction, in some sense of the violence of that...

CS: Right. Smashing the monitor.

NF: It makes me think of the rubbish piles where the computer monitors are processed, in China for example, so just looking at them even in their pre-junk manifestation as nasty; the toxic part of them, the low kind of, in a way just putting your ass on them, the low chakra aspect, the bodily shit reality.

CS: And sitting on glass and putting yourself at risk in some way.

NF: A little uncomfortable and wanting to bust through, this is not accepting that reality and wanting to bust through it and pop the concept, really,

CS: Wait the violence thing, I want to stop there for a second, because, um, uh, the violence, as you descibed was located in the act of busting these out of their frame and putting them in the chair, but I think of them as violent in the sense that on the one hand these monitors are opaque, they're shut off, and they're in some cold but sexual relationship to the body, perhaps, on the other hand you can't decode them as monitors, so there's a thing about surveillance as well, so there is a sort of violence about opacity and surveillance that...? I'm playing with this word violence and finding where it is.

NF: Yeah, I kind of threw that out there. I think that there's a violence in objects, period, and it kind of has to do with the fact that violence of the body has its symptoms, it's always breaking down, it's not a story with a happy ending, put it that way. Things ending.

CS: So is planned obsolescence a delusional relationship to death?

NF: Yeah, you could say that, I mean sure,because the idea of continuous new generations of technology, you're never watching your object slip all the way into death – you're supposed to replace your cell phone constantly... although I do let mine go all the way to their slow death.

To go back to the surveillance thing you brought up as in "Monitor" – to most people that word right away means surveillance, but I avoided making that obvious show.

CS: So you wanted to return it to this obdurate object...the monitor, without carrying the burdens of surveillance technologies.

NF: I made a monitor for a previous show that had a big eye on it, so it was really directed surveillance, mid-century, '80s surveillance, the problem with that is that it gets very black and white, you're pointing a finger and saying "big brother is doing this to us, it's watching us" and no, actually we're watching ourselves, you can't really point the finger at surveillance. I'm more interested in saying "nobody's watching, we have to watch ourselves interacting with the world and ourselves creating strange and destructive relationships. So when I use the word "monitor", it means monitoring consumption, we are definitely consumers.

CS: How does the use of the word monitor show up in the history of television, do you know, I mean it's curious that this object would be called a monitor.

NF: I have to humbly say that I didn't particularly do research of the development of the word.

CS: It's interesting, the history of this word, I think its right to pull it way from surveillance technologies and give it back to its original meaning, which is more about attending to things, registering things, right, when you monitor your own behavior, labeling.

NF: Right, as you say labeling, monitoring your thought process as it arises in relation to this object. That’s how I use the word to guide the show, actually.

CS: [looking at the map installation on the wall] This really interested me a lot, can you tell me about this specific piece of furniture?

NF: These are things that I grabbed off the internet mixed with snapshots I took. This one was, like, it was a futurist, actually it was contemporary they just labeled it as a futuristic, domestic computer environment.

CS: And this an Apple..

NF: Yeah, that's an Apple, I was interested in it because it's a strong Mac aesthetic.

CS: It also looks like a dentist's chair...

NF: Yeah, it also has that, it's this complete interface with the body...

CS: A pod...

CS: [pointing to another image] This is the console.

NF: This is the entertainment console, true, in the '60s, the moment in the past where you accept it as a sculptural object in your environment, y'know, it's kind of like the sputnik everybody used to have.

CS: Wait. People used to have a sputnik?

NF: Yeah, people used to have sputnik-like sculptures in their environments, like in the '50s, my grandparents did I think.

CS: The sputnik was a spaceship or something, what was the sputnik?

NF: It was a satellite, a completely beautiful polished orb with just antenna legs coming out of it.

CS: I totally remember sculptures and design.

NF: Yeah, because there was such a heightening of technology at this time, the late 1950's, and 1960's, because of space travel and stuff, people were really accepting of sculptures, quasi-sicence-art-objects into their space where the function in question could be opened up a little bit because there was such an elation over this strange object up in outer space, so it was almost religious, an object...

CS: connected to us all...

NF: So people wanted one in their house! That's the context that this comes out of.

CS: Well they're so different, that one is in relation to the body in a way that that one is not, the connection to the body here are the dials, that's what was going on then, dials...

(It's rarely mentioned, but this 1964 Oldenberg, "Soft Switiches," was an example of what Donald Judd referred to in his own writing as a "specific object." People usually only think of Judd's Minimalism.)

NF: This piece, the desk piece which is called "Information Platform" was picking up from my thoughts about furniture and interface, short-circuiting any possible function while at the same time presenting function. You put your keypad on this wooden keypad, so it's already like a double obsolete thing, and this is the light source and it slides... I was thinking it's like a typewriter- another obsolete object that became part of today’s computer.

CS: So you want these really to be in this weird ambivalent space, not like when Donald Judd started making furniture straightforwardly as furniture, alongside of his sculpture. But these are, as you were talking about it, also intended to be used as furniture but they're not really that straightforward as furniture, so there's this kind of weird space that wasn't available to Donald Judd but that is available to you.

NF: Yeah, I would be happy if someone were to use this as furniture for sure, all of this stuff, I could imagine it not being used but i'd much prefer, the best thing somebody could do is use this computer table. Whoever buys it is going to have the newest computer monitor for sure , but then it will be beside this old micro-film reader I found on the street, making the constant nagging comparison.

CS: Helluva name, “Eyecom."

NF: Yeah, “Eyecom," like iPhone or iMac. It's function is light, and a double function is this drawer where you can keep your documents.

CS: The secret spot.

NF: There's layers of obsolescence. I'd be interested in interviewing someone who has had this piece in their life for a few years and asking them, what's your experience working on this station? I think this is a pretty good station to use. There is a strong invitation for people to use it and for people to bring it to their lives because this show is about consciousness in people's lives so I think these objects, work better at home in use, than in a gallery. I'd like to see people live with this obscelete laptop thing here...to use it somehow...

CS: as light...

NF: As art, as light, that's the zen part thing.

CS: Okay, that's that's well, here's the thing, when Turrell and Flavin and all of those things started coming out there was really harsh criticism against all those light people and it was regarded as inviting this kind, well with Turrell this kind of piety - in '68, in the '70s people were very concerned about this use of light in sculpture because the dialogue of the time was about “the real", the “specific object" and when you introduce light into it all of the sudden you get, y'know there's that book Downcast Eyes by Martin Jay, a history of philosophy that is about privileging the eye, enlightenment, as a real sort of problem, a tradition, I'm glad that you're mentioning it, it's also a problem for zen discourse, 'enlightenment,'in terms of relating with a public, when people talk of enlightenment it's often regarded as this purity of achievement. So there's something about light, you can talk about this in an interesting way, in a way that is importantly there in your work.

NF: Of course I was thinking about that, yeah, sure, James Turrell, I was thinking of Flavin, so the question is about sublime light, it stands for enlightenment, also that type of sublime is transcendence of the material world, an optical transcendence of materiality, I've had the experience with James Turrell where I was caught in a space...

CS: Suspended.

NF: Suspended, not sure what I was looking at.

CS: I get something different from Flavin, a colder technology.

NF: Flavin's been kinda overrun by the last decades of the way lighting works now- the way we see it in malls sometimes looks like Flavin.

CS: They don't even make those bulbs any more, it's a real problem for anyone who owns one, they can't turn it on anymore! Obsolete.

NF: I'm not transported by Flavin very much but I saw a Turrell that, I was suspended and it's a strong feeling, I can see that it's almost like a religious experience, a little cheesy...

CS: That was in this criticism that I remembered, and it was specifically in relation to, and this is important, the discourse it was competing with at the time was the concrete, a big word in the Minimalist crowd, the real was a big word, object, objecthood all those words were about being invested in the materiality of our everyday space, something that remained in an art context but was nonetheless an address to an actually lived daily experience. So to bring light, y'know, this is like a hauling it back, retrieving it from the piety let's say of someone like James Turrell, only there's still that facing thing that's going on that can be really powerful.

NF: In general these things don't have one meaning, they're sort of cross-referencing meanings [points to the hole behind the monitor and in the back where the light appears from]

CS: That's a nice touch. It's fake!

NF: I always work with demystification, In a way, in all my earlier work, all the drama, all the cinematic moments are demystified, because you can see, your watching the illusion at the same time as you're watching the machines that create it, so it's kind of like this Plato's cave thing, so it's important that there's immediate demystification of what's going on.

CS: But it's not immediate, you have to be drawn.

NF: But you can figure it out. That's important, but essentially you do get this kind of sublime light. In one sense it's a little sublime as opposed to a big sublime, like a mini-sublime.

CS: It's like an incidental sublime. And you lose it, too, you sort of be in it and then have it vanish.

NF: But the sublime is very important at the same time because that's essentially what the thing is presenting to you is a sublime experience, that's what they have to offer, and if you put the lights down in the gallery or room you'd be even more sucked into the light. So they're sort of offering you this sublime experience that you can demystify on the next take. And its going right back to the artists of the '60s and '70s because I think that this is a strong tradition coming very directly from the work of Donald Judd and Flavin and James Turrell going into the Mac design. And the people who invented Mac knew very well about that type of art. What I think about art is that people think it's a canon that stays in the art world but its really not, the strongest part of what was developed in the '60s ended up having nothing to do with the art world, maybe the so-called art world went on a totally different track- almost more of an economic development thing- the art is the fairs and market today , not the discourse that the Turells and Judds had back then...

CS: As we were talking a word was niggling at the back of my head, we were talking earlier about Fried and Minimalism and all that and a word that was really important and that he didn't find in those sculptures was absorption, and he found that in the history of painting, Diderot's criticism and Chardin and painters like that, and the distinction, he was trying to make sense of this word theatricality by returning to painting and talking about absorption. Which is a really a good word...

NF: I like your theme of coming to different words, it's great, so tell me about absorption.

CS: People like to take him down but I like him a lot, and I don't want to turn him into some kind of "zen" guy because he isn't, but he infamously ends his essay with the statement that "presentness is grace,"and theatricality is presence. Absorption, it turns out, is going to be presentness. And so he talks about paintings in which pictures are not...there's a way of painting a mass of figures as part of a scene where they're performing for you and they're all very actively engaged with each other but the presentation is theatrical precisely because they're not really acknowledging you at all but they're very aware of you being there. Sometimes there were will one pair of eyes, y'know, a stand-in gaze. And you can think of it as some kinds of people, we were talking earlier about how you didn't want this to be overdetermined by ethical moral concerns. but this can be a description of people as well, that theatricality extorts complicity from people. Fried doesn't describe it this way, but I do because this is how people can be. You can be at a party, I've been this person at times, we all have...someone will walk into a room and they're kind of ignoring everybody but in a very theatrical way they're kind of drawing attention to themselves, it's very intentional but in order to pull it off they're refusing the acknowledgment of others.

NF: Performing rather than interacting.

CS: So that word theatricality, I'm not so interested in that but absorption, like a face-to-face meeting, it's not theatrical, its that...

NF: Absorption is a little Martin Buberesque, the I and Thou thing.

CS: Hm hm, right. But Fried was talking about paintings, such as with Courbet, where not only the artist in front of the canvas, his experience in the working of the material, but that artists experience in front of that object was really not different than the beholder's experience in front of the object in terms of materiality and absorption. The success of a good painting is that it hauls you into that space so there's no distinction between the artist and the viewer.

NF: Great, that's awesome, I don't really have anything to add to that. Absolutely.

CS: It's a way of getting at the problem of enlightenment I think and your issue of light, its something like absorption.

NF: What's strong to me is the materiality part of it. Courbet goes through a filter of working and struggling with this viscous material to bring to your eyes the image, right, and that is the same with Morandi. The struggle and honesty with that material are specific to art.

CS: Candor.

NF: Yeah, thank you. The work with that material in a way diminishes the facility by which you can create an illusion but at the same time it presents the same relationship with the artist and then it goes back with the viewer 'cause the artist takes time, and if you are really looking at that kind of picture you have to invest time. So there's the two things going on: the materiality which stops you and then there's another layer that creates the conditions for absorption. Consciously that's what's going on here. Y'know what, a lot of its about time. When you spend time working on a surface and letting things build up...It's great that you bring up this word absorption and I think it's also related to the word I was using, commitment, the way that I meant to use it, because it's about slowing down. Really what's asked for is to cut through a certain media attention span cycle, that's not fast forward, because this is how people consume not only products but also art. What's needed, especially when you're working with contemporary objects or products is to slow that superspeed process down a little bit. So the way I thought to do that was to personally slow down the process in the studio.

CS: So with these pieces something that is definitely going on that is not going on with these others are kind of big things, there's the facingness thing, the enlightenment thing, the absorption thing, but there' also painting here, yes, there's sort of Rachel Harrison painting over there, but this is like painting. And it's very deliberately there, as painting.

NF: Yeah, well, when you think about these as Steinbach objects, in that tradition, which they are, I wanted to continue this project, relate to it, not only thinking about the monitor but thinking about Steinbach and what it means to put consumer objects on a shelf in the Modernist tradition.

CS: And to never change,with Steinbach, it's to never change, he's not in the studio, he's sort of gone into production arrest, which is kind of curious about him.

NF: Frozen in time.

CS: Yeah, there was an exhibition at Sonnabend not too long ago, and I think that the way it works for him is that you purchase the shelf, and then added to the value of the shelf are the receipts literally form Walmart

NF: Is he buying from Walmart now?

CS: Oh, I don't know, I'm sure that he buys from a variety of places, but he's got an interest in the commodity and its value that's different than yours, you're much more, I guess I want to say that you are much more phenomenological in your orientation than he is.

NF: Yeah. But the thing is that he's talking about objects of desire and repositioning them formally in an art tradition.

CS: Butbutbut..hmm..he's in a place where you're not really seeing them that differently, I mean you can take that box of Fruit loops, I mean I'm sure if you owned one of those you'd put on those Hulk boxing gloves that make a noise, or..I think the piece that does it for me the most are those black chewy dog toys, you fill them with dog food and if you were to take those of the shelf they'd be flying around the house! So there's something about the mobility of those objects from the store to the shelf, by the force of desire being driven into the space of the room, y'know, flying off the shelves at either end. And your work has a quality of absorption or "holding power," if you will.

NF: The work relating to the Steinbach, well the painting on the bottom is there in a very conscious way, because the shelf thing he does is kind of flat glossy paint, a perfectly rendered shelf, and then I realized these Steinbach shelves have this big surface on the bottom side that could be used. So it could be a painting.

CS: Actually he's using laminates, they're' sheet goods. They are totally pristine.

NF: he doesn't even make them himself, so a part of this is about efficiency, contrasting with the world of production and wasted space. For one thing, crafting the shelf, whittling it down and exposing the materiality, and taking advantage of what art can be done in the space.

CS: He used to do this kind of vintage shopping, he'd buy a funky lamp with deer hooves as the base and put next to it a pair of Nike sneakers. I don't think he does that so much anymore, so you've got an obsolescence thing going on here, this monitor with the blackout - there's something that's explicitly about planned obsolescence here that doesn't exist in Steinbach's work.

NF: Even without the obsolescence physically being the work, with these and almost everything else in the show there is that knocking on the door of the death of these products, kind of turning the corner around materialist desire and planned obsolescence. You're kind of seeing around the thing because the object is presenting a kind of phenomenological version of itself, without its normal function really there. Probably why Steinbach came upon his project in the '80s is because that was a very materialistic moment in history. I like his work. I thought it was weird, I came upon it for the first time in an old Art in America or something, when I was at school at RISD. You could see he was the big deal in 1985, and it's so strange to come to these previous art histories . Jeff Koons sure got a little more into the art history books than Steinbach did, but his basketball and vacuum cleaner work is very parallel. So it's very much reacting to this Reagan era consumerism. Now, in the same way, we've come to the end of a very similar boom except that it's a tech-boom, I mean, now, everyone needs an iPhone, information is being sold to us as lifestyle, connections, immaterial things, and it's sublime.

CS: An important word that came up for me again as you were talking is this word complicity. Haim Steinbach is regarded as a complicit artist.

NF: Understandably so.

CS: Hal Foster has the most scathing criticism against commodity sculpture and what he refers to as "cynical realism." Complicity is in his text and it's in a lot of other writers at the same time, it suddenly became a term that re-appeared, and now Johanna Drucker has written a whole book about complicity as what defines the art of our time. I don't see what you are doing as involving or critiquing at any level this notion of complicity, which is I think another difference between what you are doing and what Steinbach is doing. It has a lot to do with planned obsolescence, that things fall away.

NF: I just have a problem with that word, complicity, because it sounds pretty moralistic.

CS: But it's been written about as a positive term, that's what Drucker has done is to take what Foster and all these other people were projecting as harsh negative criticism, and with Foster there is usually a bit of a seething Marxist tone. I do think you can charge Steinbach with a level of complicity and that is a zen thing too, I mean how do you deal with judgment and criticism? I do judge.

NF: Of course, we all do.

CS: So I don't want to run away from the word complicity as a negative word, but to investigate what can be earned from it.

NF: In that sense, I 'm thankful to Haim Steinbach because artists have to work with all this stuff they didn't have to before, to work with that material and be involved with it. He set up this thing in his moment that artists like me can react to. I suppose his was a complicit gesture. But I don't feel like what I'm doing is judging his work, just working off it.

CS: You're not critiquing Haim Steinbach by doing this.

NF: I'm not doing that at all. Steinbach's is a different project that is at this point I think quite historical actually. It really does belong to a specific time period, even though it's sort of frozen and as you say, he is still making these shelves. But when I see his work I think of Reagan.

CS: Right. You're talking about the President.

NF: The President is a deep metaphor right now, it's funny...Reagan delivered some unexpected and amazing speeches by the way. But it's also that Steinbach represents a previous moment in the art bubble so thats another aspect of the history-economics.

CS: That moment when people were writing about Steinbach, and there were people who were in the media also, Foster was feeding from others who were also critical of Julian Schnabel, those two were propped up as the artists created by a collector-driven market. So it's a perfect site to reach for from this moment in time. But I have to confide in you, and I think we're already in a place where we can do something with this, I really cannot stand the rampant art historical quotations that are passed off in contemporary art as insider jokes or a flat delivery of a narrative only for the sake of hooking into that narrative.

NF: Right, it's very common, it has to do with artists going to school.

CS: Well artists were going to school when the Minimalists started and they weren't doing that exactly, it's not that it's something else...

NF: Well, it's like everything on Broadway is a re-run now, right? It's how people feel, it's a market trend.

CS: It's also because everybody else is going to school too and they are required to take those art history classes...

NF: Quotations are a value, they already have a brand name, people know about them and people feel good about knowing about that.

CS: Right, so what I'm doing here is looking at these and thinking about this deliberate and specific reach to Haim Steinbach, and that there's something inside of these thoughts about planned obsolescence that has, not a critque, but a sort of moving inside of the operations of history, and not merely quoting them for the sake of quoting them.

NF: It's the first show I've done where I haven't been processing information in this way. Before, I was not referring to art history but to other histories.

CS: You've made ghosts of the information technology you were addicted to!

NF: I realize I've reached a certain point of making art where the fact that people before (like Steinbach) have done other projects that meant different things at different times-becomes to me so important, art history became important to me in a personal way. I wouldn't have done that before because you have to arrive at this moment organically. I know exactly what you're saying about a vogue to quote stuff but it's kind of beside the point in a way because what is needed is perspective to make it a new thing. When you know about an artist long enough, for years say, you can start to comprehend the power in their project and you can really interact with it and have a shadow double of what you are doing so it becomes rich territory.

CS: Without recovering or salvation.

NF: I think it's so important, I feel so good about evoking the Reagan-era '80s, with this show in this time now, I feel very good about it and I think it's a great thing to arise. People have different relationships to it based on according to who's looking at it of course, right?

CS: But we can say something is over, I take comfort in that and it's a lot of false comfort, I know, but..

NF: My work is about history, there's a consciousness of time in history, that's how I'm comfortable making quotations and interacting with art history. It's about a history effect.

Image credits: (All works by Noah Fischer unless otherwise mentioned, courtesy of Claire Oliver and Noah Fischer) Green Essentials, mixed media, 29x16 1/2x29";Giorgio Morandi, grabbed from Metropolitan Museum of Art: iRaq posters by Forkscrew, photo courtesy of Class Warrior; Beige Study Number 3, mixed media sculpture, 32 1/2x16x15 1/2": Chair Study Number 1, mixed media sculpture,14 1/2 by 17 1/2 x35"; Grandfather Clock, mixed media sculpture, 144x12x89"; Perfect Lantern, mixed media sculpture, 18x 33 1/2 x 15:; Chair Study Number 1, detail; Surveillance object; Treasure Map, 56x86x0"; Sputnik lamp; Claes Oldenberg, Softlight Switches, 41 1/8x 11", City Review; Information platform, mixed media sculpture, 60x26x45; James Turrell, Meeting, 1986, Photo by Michael Moran,Courtesy P.S.1 Contemporary Art Center; Beige Study Number 3, detail; Franz Xaver Winterhalter (German, 1805–1873), Florinda, 1853,Oil on canvas, 70 1/4 x 96 3/4 in. (178.4 x 245.7 cm), Courtesy of Metropolitan Museum of Art, Bequest of William H. Webb, 1899; Family Portrait, Mixed media, 32 1/2x53 1/2x 15 1/4"; Haim Steinbach, Orient Point, plastic laminated wood shelf; rubber dog chew; electronic "Hulk" hands; plastic pumpkin lamp, 34 1/2 x 71 x 19" (87 x 180.3 x 48.3 cm) from http://www.haimsteinbach.net/; New Codes, mixed media, 21x9x13" detail; Family Poretrait, detail; Obama logo, Sol Sender; TV Kennedy, mixed media sculpture.

Plagiarism, Art Criticism, and the Web

2008-11-19T03:05:00.000-08:00

My compulsion to write about the absolutely contemporary in art has driven my life beyond disciplinary boundaries and institutional forms. This includes the prestigious magazines and newspapers I have written for, which by my own choice I have slowed down. When I made the choice to post online, concerns about managing intellectual property fell away for the opportunity for my own thought to be publicly accountable in its claims. Intellectual property is here less a matter of real estate and closer to being open to what is earned in the vulnerability of one’s own claims. It is a democracy, and it is no free-for-all.

I do not have a rigid view of what a blog is or does - it can be a savvy pile of links or a conversation that goes on for days. What I do know, however, is that as a media form, the blog is subject to exploitation through information technology as it appears in capitalism. This appears most drastically in the form of the splog, a vehicle by which an ad-free blog with strong content is lifted in its entirety, stealing hits for another’s earnings in Google ads.

People who have been reading this blog know that I recently discovered my writing was plagiarized. I do not distinguish this event fully from the splogging I describe above. Immediately apparent to me is that the plagiarist, Thomas Hollingworth, sapped my writing of all its critical bite in order to provide comparatively glowing fodder, the kind of writing that “member-supported” blogs would support, for example, or the kind of writing of someone who aspires to make his living freelancing to artists and galleries.

Despite any forgiveness that can be offered, this event of plagiarism is beyond the scope of two individual lives. Art criticism is vulnerable to market forces, and we have known this since the early days of Artforum. Here is John Coplans speaking as the former editor of Artforum in a 1977 interview:

“I'm not saying that Artforum played a major role, powerful role, all-embracing role in the marketing. Nevertheless, a bad review sometimes would cause a lack of confidence. Let's put it that way. Maybe it did not even necessarily affect the market, but it made the dealers work harder and think twice and made the clients think twice. They felt that they were operating under a severe handicap. After all, they were advertising in this magazine and this magazine was panning their artists. Time Magazine or any magazine you care to name, the New York Magazine, if somebody advertised it, there was no commitment, far from it, on the part of the Ford Motor Company advertising in Time for Time to describe or write or yell about the products for Time to be skeptical about the products, and there is no problem. They are buying advertising space. Unfortunately, because of the nature of French criticism as it was and certain other magazines that exist now such as Arts and Arts International where you can literally buy space, the feeling is that if a dealer advertises in a magazine, he expects some results from it. There was a time when it was important to advertise in Artforum at the insistence of the artist or it was the artist paying the money indirectly through commissions who was really buying the ad. Later this began to change. Advertising became very regular. It was part of contracts. They should advertise. This feeling was less and less that and the galleries felt that they were buying the space.”

The web has exponentially exaggerated this problem. As much as a few small bloggers such as myself wish to write outside of market interest, the danger of plagiarism in the contemporary art world is that strong critical writing holds no ground of its own outside of the press release.

In researching what one should do when plagiarized, the dominant Google search consideration seems to be that it should all occur behind closed doors, in discrete contact with editors, so that they can deal with the issue in privacy. But recently, critics have been reacting more strongly against their plagiarists, such as Jody Rosen this past August in Slate magazine, and more recently Lane Brown for New York magazine. My own reaction was brutal by comparison, using the violence of an image in the expression of my seething rage.

I have also been teaching art history in the academy for over ten years now, where plagiarism will get you expelled or fired from your tenure track position. Beyond learning disabilities and novice ignorance, in American culture a plagiarist is a wily character who knowingly takes a risk with consideration for his own benefit against all costs. In the case of Thomas Hollingworth, this is someone who lied several times over in signing his name.

Because it undermines the entire purpose of education to inspire thought, the academy requires a clear and final sentence in order to preserve the system. This is no less true for art criticism on the web. But without an institution as its vehicle, what is needed is a form of peer review and activism in blogger culture. This is what occurred in Karen Justl’s discovery. It needs to be extended to those magazines that have failed to live up to their insider credibility in hiring inexperienced and unethical writers (Update and qualification: M: The New York Artworld, which advertises itself as an "insider's" magazine, has still not taken down the plagiarized article. I am also surprised to see that in the midst of all this controversy, Hollingworth has posted on his site an interview for Whitehot Magazine. I did however, advise him to stick with interviews and am happy to see he has taken the suggestion), to those advertisers who wish to protect the status and quality of the work they advertise (CulturePundits has been contacted but as of this posting Hollingworth remains in their network. Update: Thank you, CulturePundits, for withdrawing from your network a site that knowingly published a plagiarized article!), to those web hosts who care about the integrity of their product (WordPress has cultivated a good reputation for this), to those critics who otherwise endorse criminal behavior by granting permission to post their words (in this case Michael Kimmelman of the New York Times), and above all, to those critics who are looking for a reputable place to write.

Catherine Spaeth

* John Coplans interview, 1975 Apr. 4 - 1977 Aug. 4, Archives of American Art, Smithsonian Institution.

Authenticity, Truth and Deception

2008-11-13T11:38:00.000-08:00

Above is a work by Karen Justl, the artist who found the plagiarized writing in the post below. What follows is her statement against plagiarism.

I am an illustrator and graphic designer. I teach design, illustration and layout classes and self-publishing in a zine making class at The Toronto School of art. I am pursuing a masters' degree in the interdisciplinary art, media and design program at OCAD University and am in the process of writing research papers and proposals. At OCAD I am also assisting classes in the History of Modern Art. I conduct tutorials on researching and writing papers and mark essays and examinations.

As an instructor I have an obligation to teach my students to respect the property of other professional artists, writers, critics etc. and to try to adhere to copyright regulations. It is with this respect and proper citation that we can produce reputable work. In the nature of a culture full of sampling, mixing, collage, appropriation and culture jamming, the idea of having intellectual property rights is a little tricky. You can scan, cut, copy, paste, mix, cover-up, layer and present the work as your own as a post modern commentary and become a supra-modern art-star.

In the sphere of academic writing, cutting and pasting text from someone else's writing without citation is not met with such ambiguity. It is called plagiarism and you get booted out of your class if not from the university. There are strict rules regarding the citation of sources and ideas when producing work for an institution. I do research in peer reviewed journals and texts. The citations, respect and professionalism is implicit in these documents. I know that I can trust the writers, editors and publishers, and that my work will be taken seriously.

I also am engaged in the internet as a research tool and as a social networking tool. We inhabit a planet that has seen an increase of questionable actions from our world leaders. This is having a trickling down effect on many other spheres in our lives. There is an increase in self publishing in the face of mainstream media's interest in spin, evasion and omission. Like many who are skeptical and disappointed in the state of our media, I am engaged in the curious pursuit of knowledge and truth. I read blogs, on-line newsletters and I scour the internet for information that I can not find in the mainstream media, television and press. I am interested in credible and easily accessible sources. It is a very tricky business trying to winnow the 'wheat from the chaff'. Blogs are taken seriously. I believe that it is a writer's duty to respect their readership by revealing their sources of information.

Karen Justl

Hollingworth the Plagiarist

2008-11-09T18:35:00.000-08:00

Special note: A sincere and heartfelt apology has been given. My response and reflection will be posted at a later time.

It has been brought to my attention that Thomas Hollingworth plagiarized my writing on Cai Guo-Qiang, here. Note particularly the epigraph, bold and in quotation marks but without a citation reference.

“Bristling with arrows that pin them to space, fake tigers flail aimlessly in ferociousness and beauty. In Cai Guo-Qiang’s Inopportune: Stage Two the baroque suffering that one would expect from such a piercing of arrows is not met by the tigers who bear them, and we may think of acupuncture needles as much as the hunt.”

This is my writing, in fact, the first few sentences of the essay as I wrote it. There are other obvious moments throughout Hollingworth's text as well. Here's a little one: "Although such shamanistic practices are not new, the presentation now of a ‘world healer’ by a globalizing art institution is, at the very least, curious" (Hollingworth) and the original sentence: "Such shamanistic practices are not new, but the presentation of a world healer by a globalizing art institution that everyone either ignores or loves to hate is, at the very least, curious." This is someone who plagiarizes and uses the first few sentences of the same essay he stole from as an uncited "epigraph." He also provides footnotes below, a sign of scholarship, but not his own as he is in fact using my citation of Krauss surrounded by plagiarized words and context.

Even more egregious, another version appears in an essay that he also published in Wynwood Magazine, presumably for pay. Take special note of the epigraph here: there are no quotation marks, as a responsible editor would have asked for the reference. And there is even a third essay published in M: The New York Art World, touting itself as "the insider's source for credible news."

Wrote Karen Justl, the sleuth: "I'm enrolled in an interdisciplinary graduate program at The Ontario College of Art and Design in Toronto. I'm doing research on facial expressions and body language, specifically on lying liars in the media. My critical theory professor will have some thoughts I'm sure...."

For a peek into such an inquiring mind, here is a link to a slideshow of Justl's caricatures, "People and Their Problems." They would be quirky if we didn't know them so well. Karen Justl:

Thank you, Karen Justl! All the evidence and links are thanks to your labor and credit is due. If only I could pay you...

Update: There are some pretty interesting issues regarding blog ethics and the image on Art Fag City and Newsgrist. Responding to Karen's inquiry, Hollingworth wrote,"As many a TV show host once said...the choice is yous.[sic.]" I see the difference between the issues raised in the fair use of images and plagiarism as involving the difference between truth and a lie - given our current political media context his statement is an alarming symptom of ethics in the media.

Catherine Spaeth

Photo credit: White Hot Magazine Further update: Many, many thanks to White Hot Magazine, for responding appropriately, even though you did not carry the plagiarized article in question. It appears that you have taken down Hollingworth pages, and I greatly appreciate it. I would like to add that while I know magazines don't really know what kind of background their freelancers have, it is in fact their job to know, to make good choices and not to pick just any eager writer willing to work for free. There are enough good writers out there, ones who aren't merely showcasing "mots du jour" and advertising themselves through other's words - find out who they are and pay them. This is what an insider knows - be one.

The Sublime and the Picturesque: "After Nature" at the New Museum and "Implant" at UBS

2008-10-18T12:49:00.000-07:00

Because our lives depend upon it how we think of nature is being re-imagined and contested, and it may well be that this will have consequences for how we think of knowledge at all. There is something differently at work in the two exhibitions "After Nature" and "Implant." They are close enough in their orientation towards nature to make visible similar appearances in contemporary art, yet they each align themselves towards these appearances differently.

Both exhibitions show that we are consumed by nature, rather than simply consumers of it. Curated by Massimiliano Gioni, "After Nature" might name the impossible chase after a nature in excess of us. "Implant," curated by Jodie Vicenta Jacobson for the Horticultural Society of New York, explores the co-evolutionary drive of human and botanical desires alike. In "Implant" the borders between nature and culture dissolve in shared beneficent artifice.

Both curators place in our hands a book other than an exhibition catalog. For Gioni, W.G Sebald’s book "After Nature" has exhibition images slipped loosely into its pages. In this book there is no lasting human contact in the face of excess and loss. Its last pages leave us in the “strange, unexplored, African continent,” and with the question of what love can be in such a world. Jacobson is more straightforwardly presenting a theory, and Michael Pollan’s “Botany of Desire” is the point of reference. Pollan explains that for Darwin the use of the word “artifice” was not in the sense of there being something fake so much as in its being an artifact reflecting human will. In our own time even the weather is an artifact, and Darwin’s natural selection - what once took place in the wild - is nearly inconceivable. According to Pollan, however, we are in fact "the objects of other species designs and desires...”.

A comparison of William Christenberry’s Kudzu With Storm Cloud near Akron, Alabama, 1981, from "After Nature," and Felix Gonzalez-Torres’ Untitled (Alice B.Toklas & Gertrude Stein’s Grave, Paris), 1992, from "Implant," bears the weight of this difference. Christenberry has photographed kudzu, an African vine that grows wildly in the American south, and that as a child the artist was fearful of. Growing as much as one and a half feet in the course of a single day, kudzu shrouds the trees that it has choked to death. Gonzalez-Torres’ photograph honors a non-reproductive relationship that has gathered its own flowers, taking root and flourishing. The flowers, themselves immobile and incapable of reproduction but for their dependence on other species, have seduced us and been disseminated in our culture of mourning and love.

On the whole there is a sense of poetic dissonance in "After Nature," qualifying differently the intimacy that a more benevolent coevolution explores. In the video Forest (Diploma Film), 1993, Pawel Althamer abandons his urban life, dropping his clothes at the edge of the city and disappearing into the impossible myth of the lone primate gone back to nature. His sculptural nudes are made of animal intestines sewn together with hemp and stuffed with straw, and of them he says ”the body plays the role of a dress, of an address. My bodily address is Pawel Althamer.” It is as though the self has no core and is only what has been installed in a skinbag for a period of time. Delicate and slightly grotesque, Althamer’s sculptures mimic the forms of a history of sculpture.

In "Implant," Nick Cave floridly adorns the body with a blend of African, Victorian, kitsch and haute couture. There is not even room for eyes to see with from the center of this ornament. In contrast to Pawel’s skinbag, Cave’s figure appears as a form of fantastic masquerade. He says of these works, “I believe that the familiar must move towards the fantastic. I want to evoke feelings that are un-named, that aren’t realized except in dreams.” Cave’s excessive costume is hypnotic and transformative, whereas Pawel’s sculptures seem to depict a frank estrangement of the self in the preservation of it.

What characterizes an outsider is also different for each exhibition. “After Nature” exhibits the prayer cards of Howard Finster, the paintings and TV dinner chicken bone sculptures of Eugene von Breunchenheim, and the Celestographs of August Strindberg. These last, made by laying photo-sensitive paper under the night sky, were both mystical inspiration and failure. Throughout his life Strindberg believed he had captured the night sky, but these beautiful images are in fact traces of dust. The distance between belief and fact is measured by this historical correction, but Strindberg’s nineteenth century mysticism importantly remains embedded there.

"Implant’s" outsiders are those artists associated with mimetic craft. In particular, the botanical paintings of Carol Woodin, Jude Miller’s paper flowers, and the wooden carvings of Jim Sams are straightforward in their mimeticism, but they are hardly matter-of-fact in the awe they can inspire. Jim Sams is self-taught, and he explains that “My goal has remained the same throughout the years - to capture and freeze in time the fleeting beauty and movement of my natural subjects.”

"After Nature" includes the work of 24 artists, and "Implant" 45, with no overlap between them. These are not small exhibitions, and it would be wrong to categorize them entirely, yet these few comparisons barely scratch the surface of a certain kind of symmetry. It is as though old habits have shown up unannounced. There has been some discussion on this blog around the value of concepts for art criticism, and I wonder what is lost or gained if we regard these exhibitions as manifestations of the sublime and the picturesque, not only to describe categories of art and nature but aspects of thought as well.

By Catherine Spaeth

Photo credits, in order of appearance: (from "Implant") Gabriel Orozco (b. 1962, Mexico), Mi Oficina II, 1992, Cibachrome, 16 x 20 inches, Edition EX, Courtesy of Marian Goodman Gallery, New York; William Christenberry, Kudzu with Storm Cloud Near Akron, Alabama, 1981, Digital pigment print, 17x22", Courtesy of Pace/McGill; Felix Gonzalez-Torres (b. 1957, Cuba; d.1996, United States), "Untitled" (Alice B. Toklas' and Gertrude Stein's Grave, Paris), 1992, Framed C-print, 29 1/4 x 36 1/4 inches, Image: 15 3/4 x 23 1/4 inches, Edition of 4, 1 AP,Photo: Peter Muscato,(c) The Felix Gonzalez-Torres Foundation; Courtesy of Andrea Rosen Gallery, New York; Pawel Althamer, Study From Nature, 1991, Grass straw and animal intestine, Courtesy of Dakis Joannou Collection, Athens; Nick Cave (b. 1959, United States), Soundsuit, 2008, Mixed media, 100 x 25 x 14 inches, Courtesy of Jack Shainman Gallery, New York; Jim Sams (b. 1954, United States), Dwarf Crested Iris, 2008, Wood and acrylic paint,6 x 6 x 4 inches, Courtesy of the artist.

All in One Day: The Gallery Give-Away in Changing Economies

2008-09-29T05:54:00.000-07:00

I’m only mildly embarrassed that I’ve been using those gallery give-aways, ubiquitous paper stacks of art, as gift-wrapping paper. These gallery give-aways are a trend that, no matter when they may have actually begun, first took hold in the work of Felix Gonzalez-Torres. But this sense of there being a hold on something, the force of it holding together a loose pile of candy as the body of a man, for example, has since been lost. Increasingly these give-aways feel like just another promotional item and my using them for my own purposes a do-it-yourselfer’s intervention in a system gone wrong.

Last week I grabbed some paper from the pile of an artist who seemed to be mimicking Christopher Wool and Gonzalez-Torres at once (ie really good wrapping paper, and I wanted it bad enough to take more than one). And only a few doors down I also grabbed a give-away from Meredyth Sparks. This was from a stack of empty paper record sleeves sitting beneath a work depicting a record player - and printed on the sleeve was that same record player - clever. In the course of the day it became jumbled in the messy pile of press releases I was snapping off the counters.

But there was so much stuff for free that day that I was becoming interested again. It wasn’t until I got home and really looked that I discovered the record player on the record sleeve was the famous one that allegedly smuggled in the gun to Andreas Baader, of the Baader Meinhof Group, so that he could kill himself in prison. And it also wasn’t until then that I realized the poster I had grabbed from the pile actually WAS Felix Gonzalez-Torres in collaboration with Christopher Wool.

The difference between Gonzalez-Torres and Sparks is important. Gonzalez-Torres' stacked papers were a reference to the history of sculpture - in his love for a dying man, his lover and the figure of his public, he re-inhabited the continuity of art and removed whatever was left of its autonomous pedestal. Spark’s record sleeve seems to belong to the more jaded present, nostalgic for a politicized moment before the Reagan era, that while having its hold upon the world for a while failed to take hold of history. What does it mean to be offered and to take the gun of a known terrorist and alleged suicide? By posing this question in our hands Sparks is at least pressing upon the role of cultural production in an age of aesthetic ambivalence and withdrawal of judgment.

Martha Rosler, on the other hand, makes vivid the contradictions of our mediated lives while stridently refusing ambivalence. Before entering her show one was forced to put a quarter in a turnstile, providing funds for Artists Against War and United for Peace and Justice. On the far side of this turnstile the art gallery noisily exposed the machinery of the info-tainment complex, where high heels and amputated limbs are of the same economy.

Before you dropped your quarter, however, there was a pile of give-away posters of suit-and-tie pretty boys against a backdrop of scorched-earth fire, marked on the back by the words “please post.” At the entrance, the free give-away and its supplicating call for action was different than the drop of an extorted quarter in the turnstile, marking off a different space completely between one side of the turnstile and the other.

Just across the strreet was Xu Zhen’s “ShanghART SUPERMARKET,” a replica of the 24/7 convenience store promoted by the Chinese Government as a form of resistance against American Capitalism, while appearing in its very form. Here, I purchased an empty shrink-wrapped package of a bar of Chinese soap for $1.50. I tried to buy something that expressed the larger work of art, and in retrospect wished I’d chosen something else and even more. Beyond its literal emptiness - everything in the store is only the empty shell of its packaging - my participation as a consumer was conflicted by the variety of brand identities suspended somewhere between American capitalism and China’s new economy. Even so, the ShanghART convenience store sapped out the contradiction visible across the street of all of its power, neutralizing difference within mass produced offerings of toothpaste and condoms, exposing its emptiness with the joyful assurance of our full participation in its economy.

Joanna Spitzner’s little book, 399.75 hours, I got for free at Eyebeam. It documents the project “The Creative Class,” including the fundraising effort of the Joanna Spitzner Foundation, a non-profit that funds artists. In this case, Spitzner took a summer job as a cashier at the local Price Chopper, and recorded the daily events from this other side of the register. You can put down this book at any time and pick it up at another place without knowing the difference as the world goes by on a conveyor belt. At the same time, the most trivial moments, such as discovering EZ-scan temporary tatoos in a drawer, or knowing it is someone’s birthday, bring into high relief the absurdity and sweetness of the world.

Spitzner aims to render institutions and the economy transparent, and in turn how people are shaped by these. The artists she sponsored, Michael Swatt and Thomas Gokey, record their own labor as well . On the accompanying CD the former is painting energetically with loud music and on stage in a local bar; the latter is listening at length on the phone to a biochemist about how to analyze the chemistry of his tears. Michael Swatt asked for $17.50 an hour, Thomas Gokey $8.16 an hour. In the end, Swatt was chosen for the Syracuse Biennial, and Gokey could barely cover the cost of his materials, but he did get a free coffee mug from the biochemical sales team.

Finally, the real score of the day is that I was one of the last to sign a contract to “Adopt Lenin.” Yevgeniy Fiks rescued Lenin memorabilia, buying 90 of these little monuments to Lenin from eBay auctions, and giving them all away for free under the condition that they never be profited from “in any shape or form.” The gallery contract reads, “I will be the sole holder of this object for the remainder of my life unless I pass it on to someone or an institution without monetary gain or tangible benefit to me, and only after having the recipient sign a copy of this same form. Upon my death the object will go to my heirs with same restrictions attached.”

An interesting comparison is the pencil I bought for a dollar from Phoebe Washburn. Printed with the words “This is not a pencil,” the pencil declares that since it has been ordained as art it must never be sharpened. But the contract does not in fact exist, pencils are inadequate for binding signatures, and her DIY economy is exposed in this, enjoying the fragility of the boundaries between art and life.

Signing Fiks’ contract defines my participation as part of a work whose ultimate stake is in my future death, and the deaths of all of those who adopted Lenin with me. Pinned to the wall in an art gallery, a self-defined community is posed in declaration of something apart from the economy of auctions and back room sales, even while both auctions and back room sales are exactly what have made it possible. Like Gonzalez-Torres, Fiks has re-inhabited the conditions of art and refined a community according to its terms. That this community has retracted from the larger public of the more casual and weakened gallery give-away is what constitutes it, re-trenching value from within the specific form of patronage of the gallery system and making it visible to the public at large.

By Catherine Spaeth

Image Credits: Felix Gonzalez-Torres, "Untitled", 1993, In conjunction with Christopher Wool,Printed paper, Endless copies,courtesy of Andrew Edlin Gallery; Meredyth Sparks, from 1977, 2008, Digital scan, aluminum foil, glitter, vinyl, 26.5 x 40 inches (67.3 x 101.6 cm)courtesy of Elizabeth Dee; Martha Rosler, Invasion, 2008, photomantage, 30x53", courtesy of Mitchell-Innes and Nash; Zu Xhen courtesy of James Cohan; Joanna Spitzner courtesy of Joanna Spitzner; Yevgeniy Fiks courtesy of Winkleman Gallery, Martha Rosler, The Gray Drape, photomontage,40x30", courtesy of Mitchell-Innes and Nash.

Louise Bourgeois at the Guggenheim, Peter Blum, and Cheim & Read

2008-09-15T05:10:00.001-07:00

Spiders are known for their industrious persistence. At 97 years, Louise Bourgeois’ career is long and productive enough to map itself out as its own history of form, and that would be enough. But more patent than obvious shifts in material and form is the consistency of a thread, and a composure of thought.

A question such as ”When does emotion become physical?,” for example, might be uttered mid-career when there is an audience for it. The question emerges from the underside like the needle of a back stitch, its thread pulling taut over the past personnages of the late ‘40s. These oversized spindles and needles, made from the abandoned wood of water towers from the rooftops of New York, were explicitly an act of mourning for those left behind in France to the violence of war. Bourgeois also left behind a childhhood of emotional abuse, with the family business of repairing French tapestries providing its ground. Fifty years later in "Cell I" (1991) the needle re-appears from the underside to embroider the words “pain is the ransom of formalism” into bed linens, shocking the body out of aesthetic disinterest and into the world with a heap of tongs nearby. The shift from the animistic abstraction of the late '40s to the traumatic scene of the early '90s is an art historical one, but the consistency is personal.

Bourgeois distances herself from the Surrealist unconscious, finding stronger personal truth in sculpture’s capacity to draw from and render embodied memories. There is a simultaneous inquiry of the body and a honing of its expression that is not percolating through the unconscious so much as compelled by an immersed and witnessing mind. Bourgeois has a way of making the personal evident, and of being able to cast this evidence out into the world's readiness for it. To mention only a few such castings, her personages resonate with the Modernist animism of the late ‘40s; her twist of hemp in "Resin Eight" (1965) could be curated in 1966 as Eccentric Abstraction; her pictorial banquet serving up her own father as a meal could lead to a feminist banquet in her honor in 1974 (the same year that Judy Chicago began Dinner Party); her 1982 retrospective at MoMA arrived upon the scene in the heyday of feminist art historical scholarship; and a formalist historiography could be re-written through her work by Mignon Nixon - as the part-object - and Mieke Bal - as the fold.

As though responding to these graduated achievements over time, Bourgeois has recently been exhibiting books made from her old linens (below from Peter Blum in 2004). A button spine, like that of a children's book detouring language in order to show how to dress, allows one to undo and redo its pages as one wishes. Narrative time is irrelevant in a book that drapes its pages over the skin of the body. The applique of one side is something else again as the stitches on the other - the work of the needle barely echoes its own forms but holds fast nonetheless.

In her current show at Cheim and Read "A Baudelaire I" faces you from the doorway. Large metal etching plates, 60" tall, have been pressed into damp paper, leaving their black ink behind. There are two etchings, one of pods and the other unfolding leaves, that repeat twice in a series of four. Watercolor, gouache and pencil immerse and float in these deep black template forms.

For Baudeleire, nature is the source of our most hideous crimes, driving us to cannibalism, whereas artifice and adornment are the site of our morality. Beauty is divided between what is absolute - what is "eternal and invariable" - and what is relative - the circumstance of "contemporaneity, fashion, morality, passion." Writing at a time when painters clothed their figures in the draperies of the classical and historical past, Baudelaire admires the clothing of the present as "the transient, the fleeting, the contingent," and that modernity is visible in these specific and fleeting charms of fashion. A proud fashion bug, in her current body of work Louise Bourgeois has once again pulled her clothes from her closet.

There is a similarity to her first exhibited body of work, the personnages of the late '40s, and together the title of the exhibit, Echo, and the press release underwrite this connection. But the power of her current work would be lost in formal affiliations of art historical continuity. In "Echo IX" (2007) a fashionable coat has been turned on its head, becoming a carcass or slab of meat in the butcher's shop, its buttons the nipples of a sow, its pockets ruptured flesh, its folds invaginated. Cast bronze painted in white, it is as though the fashionable exterior has been pulled and bound by the spider's encasing web, a husk turned into meat and offering sustenance.

By Catherine Spaeth

Image credits:Installation view of Spider Couple at Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, NY, c. Solomon R. Guggenheim Foundation, NY 2008, photo by David Heald;installation view of Personnages,at Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, NY, c. Solomon R. Guggenheim Foundation, NY 2008, photo by David Heald; Louise Bourgeois, Untitled, 1986, watercolor, ink, oil, charcoal and pencil on paper, 23 3/4x19", Courtesy Cheim and Read, Galerie Karsten Grieve and Hauser and Wirth,photo Christopher Burke, c. Louise Bourgeois;Cumul I, 1968, marble, wood plinth, 20 1/16x50x48 1/16", Fonds national d'art contemporaine, attribution au Musee national d'art moderne, Centre Pompidou en 1976, Cantre Pompidou, Paris,Musee national d'art moderne/Centre de Creation industrielle, c. Louise Bourgeois;Ode a l'oubli, published by Peter Blum Gallery; À BAUDELAIRE 1 2008,Etching, ink, watercolor, gouache and pencil on paper,4 panels,Approx. 60 x 40 inches each panel, courtesy of Cheim and Read; ECHO IX 2007,Bronze painted white, and steel,43 x 26 1/2 x 24 inches,
Edition 3/6, courtesy of Cheim and Read; THE GOOD BREAST 2007,Gouache on paper; suite of 20,14 5/8 x 11 inches, courtesy of Cheim and Read.

A History of Public Sculpture

2008-08-25T20:17:00.000-07:00

Tucked away from the main drive, this gnome garden is protected from real estate agents and letters to the editor of the local paper in prestigious Rye, New York. Dominant culture does not support the garden gnome. The appearance of garden gnomes is illegal and carefully monitored in England’s annual Chelsea Flower Show, and Eva Londos reports that in her curated show “The Garden as Popular Art “ at the Regional Museum of Jonkoping in Sweden, 1998, gnomes were censored, “considered to disgrace the museum's reputation of being an art institution of first class! “. *

However the garden gnome was brought to England in 1846 by Charles Isham, a spiritualist whose family lived in the estate above for over 400 years. Charles Isham was one of the earliest and loudest supporters of the spiritualist movement in England, publicly defending psychics in the press. Wrote four-time prime minister William Gladstone, also somewhat of a spiritualist, upon his visit to Isham’s estate , ”Sir C.I. touched on Spiritualism with me, and Mr Dasent on his favourite belief in Fairies. Most curious are the little low benches and stumps placed under his trees [...] said to be for their accommodation.”**

Spiritualism was a strange confluence of ideas, whose adherents were pious towards both science and religion and at a time when the comparative study of religion, as armchair anthropology, was all the rage. Science was not so far from religion at this time, and the question of how God could enter the dead matter of the world quite real. The rappings of the dead and garden gnomes fit together in this larger picture of a new spiritual era. Anthropologists were driven to define "animism," in order to distinguish the contemporary object from the fetish object of the primitive world.*** The garden gnome, it might be said, was one of industrialism’s figurative cultural defenses against the fetish object - a bone or a piece of wood - of more primitive cultures.

The first garden gnomes were made in Germany in the mid-18th century. Production in Germany stopped during World War II, however. Joseph Goebbels advised Hitler that gnomes as used in popular culture could too easily refer to him. During the Cold War, the American version was one of happy workers surrounding “the most beautiful one of all,” and in protection of her from evil.

This June, a 53 year old man was caught stealing a gnome and is now suspected of stealing the 170 gnomes in his French garden. A little over two weeks ago, a woman in Gloucester England had her stolen garden gnome mysteriously returned to her, along with photographs of his travels through twelve different countries. This has long been a popular prank now encouraged further by Travelocity commercials. In short, the traveling gnome is a cultural expression of our own time where sculpture's conditions of publicity are in its mobility.

By Catherine Spaeth

*Eva Londos, “Kitsch is Dead - Long Live Garden Gnomes,” Home Cultures, Nov. 2006, V. 3#3, pp. 293-306.
** Gladstone Diary, 7/4/79, as cited in Ruth Claton Windscheffel, “Politics, Religion and Text: W. E. Gladstone and Spritualism,” Journal of Victorian Culture, 11.1 (2006) pp. 1-29
***Tomoko Masuzawa, “Troubles with Materiality: The Ghost of Fetishism in the Nineteenth Century,” Comparative Studies in Society and History, Vol. 42, No. 2 (Apr., 2000), pp. 242-267

Image credits: “Wishes to remain anonymous,” Rye, NY, photo moi; Lamport Hall and Gardens, Northampton, England, 1560; Album für Teppichgärtnerei und Gruppenbepflanzung 2nd ed., Erfurt: L. Möller, [1910]; martinklasch.blogspot.com/2007_04_01_archive.html; “mysteriously returned”; Chris Burden, “What my Dad Gave Me,” 2008, 65’ tall, Rockefeller Plaza, photo moi; Takashi Murakami: Oval Buddha, 2007, Aluminum and platinum leaf, 568 x 319 x 310 cm, 590 Sculpture garden, photo courtesy of http://www.flickr.com/photos/wallyg/2447353393/.

Harold Rosenberg Was Not an Art Historian

2008-08-15T05:56:00.000-07:00

In 1975 Tom Wolfe predicted that in Cultureburg of the year 2000 “Up on the walls will be huge copy blocks, eight and a half by eleven feet each, presenting the protean passages of the period...a little “fuliginous flatness” here...a little “action painting” there......and some of that “all great art is about art” just beyond.” That show has happened, and if you haven’t been to the Jewish Museum to see it rush over before it ends on September 21st. Masterpieces of American abstract painting - all the slides an art historian depends upon to tell her story - are in real time and space, hanging side by side in this rare event. Too absorbing to ever be replaced by wall text, the paintings are appended by a room of little magazines spread open in vitrines extending from the walls, and another cluttered by Allan Kaprow’s “Words,” 1962.

And, of course, the exhibition catalog. Although titled “Action/Abstraction: Pollock, De Kooning and American Art, 1940-1976,” the catalog - as text, and not an exhibition of paintings - makes it very clear that this is really a story about the two art critics Clement Greenberg and Harold Rosenberg. While the catalog avoids this aspect of their history, these two critics represent the dawning of philosophical art criticism in America, and in raising these two heads at once the scholarly neglect of Harold Rosenberg is redressed. In 1998 Brian Winkenweder wrote that Rosenberg’s “posthumous reputation seemed to shrink with each subsequent publication analyzing the cause and impact of Abstract Expressionism. When Rosenberg’s name does appear in print, invariably it follows that of Clement Greenberg.”* A fine example of this is Tom Moody’s recent blog entry on the subject. As art history’s fallen term Action Painting keeps appearing as the tic that won’t go away.

For many, Rosenberg symbolizes the ill-formed attempt of a frustrated anti-Stalinist Marxist to find in the artist the new proletariat, and as such he has never left the contained historical context of the New York public intellectual. It’s fair to say that Marx’s failure was Rosenberg’s point of departure. According to Rosenberg Marx’s failure was that the historical character of the proletarian was in fact the absent ego of a class, an abstract economic category mythically personified. It could only ever appear as a false consciousness. The act of the proletarian was unhinged from history, an “historical nothing” - bound to the machine he cannot initiate an act or claim its effect as his own. How could an identity emerge from such an actually lived historical condition?

Seeking resonant forms of an historical nothing in 1932 Rosenberg wrote of the court of law. The unity of identity that is built in narrative theater by the single heroic act is hacked apart by judgment in a court of law. In the court of law there is no final elaboration of the sole individual as a personality - any act that might otherwise lead to the understanding of character is subsumed under one criminal act. Legal judgment “shapes personae like a hatchet,” cutting the individual apart into discrete actions.** Presenting the condition of the one who is judged beside that of the worker, Rosenberg addressed the notion of history and the self as discontinuous. In other words, twenty years before his famous essay was published in Art News in 1952 Rosenberg was in some sense anti-biographical and post-historical, and it is with this in mind that any consideration of Action Painting today is worthwhile.

With his art criticism facing us in this way, we would do well to seek the work of the hatchet. Writes Marjorie Welish, “Rosenberg’s criticism, however prescriptive and strongly voiced, revises its ideological position as it goes along, destabilizing its own fixed points of reference. Over the years, his continual restatement of ‘action’ established a history of seeing art from different points of view and at different levels of generality, a precedent which, if prescriptive, was meant to be contested and to lead to additional intellectual litigation.”***

This sense of Rosenberg’s resistance to the historicist capture to which he has been subjected comes across in comparing two descriptions, those of Arshile Gorky and Barnett Newman. Arshile Gorky was an extraordinary copyist, bouncing from Cezanne to Picasso until out of sheer boredom Gorky was able to scribble his way towards “The Liver and the Cock’s Comb,” 1944.**** Where Gorky faced the world in the spirit of parody and quotation only to turn away from it, Barnett Newman drew upon “the scale of events.” Famously, “Onement I” affected Newman so much that he was unable to paint for nearly a year, claiming “That was, I suppose, the beginning of my present life.” Writes Rosenberg, “It has the intrusive arbitrariness of an act or an event - Newman was justified in regarding himself as closer to the action painters than to the “purists,” Onement I was something he had done, not conceived. No wonder the artist himself was baffled while contemplating it”.*****

Visible in the comparison between Rosenberg’s writings on these two artists is an attention to how their achievement exceeds the constraints of art history by design. This was a very real battle, and in conversations on this blog art history as a rhetorical mode is acknowledged as a problem for recent art. Ironically, it is a trend that Rosenberg himself may have helped to inspire. Charles Harrison wrote of Rosenberg that the ”increasing devotion to a modernist logic of historicity” may have been “partly in reaction against Rosenberg’s rabid Existentialism.”* Similarly, Rosalind Krauss explained that a younger generation of art critics “felt tyrannized and depressed by the psychologizing whine of “Existentialist” criticism. It had seemed evasive to us - the impenetrable hedge of subjectivity whose prerogatives we could not assent to. The remedy had to have, for us, the clear probability of an “if x, then y.”******

Firm resistance to what he observed in the emerging professionalism of art history and its effects upon art is only one side of Harold Rosenberg. The other side is closer to what today we refer to as “visual culture,” a reading of art that is also located outside of art history and belongs more nearly to the journalism of culture at large and its more assertive criticality. This is the Rosenberg who worked by day for the Ad Council, and who in collected essays such as “Artworks and Packages,” writes with the urgency and resolve of one who has arrived on the scene too late. Here he expresses concern over what I have been referring to on this blog as the mobility of art. Increasingly, not only was “all great art about art,” but it was at the same time dumbed down and absorbed by mass media and fetishized as commodity exchange. Perhaps above all else, it is this Rosenberg whine that the art world wishes would go away.

by Catherine Spaeth

* Brian Winkenweder, “Art History, Sartre and Identity in Rosenberg’s America,”’in Art Criticism, V.13, No. 2, 1998. The title of this essay is also from Winkenweder, p. 135.
**Harold Rosenberg, “Character Change and the Drama,” in “The Tradition of the New,” NY: Horizon Press, c. 1966, p. 137.
***Marjorie Welish, “Transforming the Earth (Rosenberg),” in Signifying Art: Essays on Art After 1960, Cambridge University Press, c. 1999, p. 134.
****Harold Rosenberg, “Arshile Gorky: The Man, the Time, the Idea,” NY: Grove Press, 1962.
*****Harold Rosenberg, “Barnett Newman,” NY: Harry N. Abrams, c. 1978.
******Charles Harrison, “Abstract Expressionism,” in Tony Richardson and Nikos Sangos, eds., “Concepts of Modern Art,” NY Harper and Row, 1974, p. 21, note#1; Rosalind Krauss, “A View of Modernism,” Artforum, V. 11 P. 49. As cited in Elaine O’Brien, “The Art Criticism of Harold Rosenberg: Theaters of Love and Combat,” dissertation, CUNY 1997.

Image credits: Jackson Pollock, Convergence, 1952, oil on canvas. Albright-Knox Art Gallery, Buffalo, N.Y., Gift of Seymour H. Knox, Jr., 1956. © The Pollock-Krasner Foundation/Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York; Hedda Sterne, Harold Rosenberg standing, 1964, Ink on paper, 9 x 6 inches, Courtesy of CDS Gallery, New York; Barnett Newman, White and Hot, 1967, acrylic on canvas. Saint Louis Art Museum, Gift of Mr. and Mrs. Joseph Pulitzer, Jr.. © The Barnett Newman Foundation / Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York.

Currentartpics Makes it to the Top

2008-08-13T05:25:00.000-07:00

Good art criticism cannot be reduced to opinion, but as writing it is no less personal for that. CAP stands out in particular as a writer who has found in this very specific form a way of unveiling the sense of art - its touch - beneath the address of words. Refusing to distort or pervert the image as the lure, CAP will only provide links that burst out from beneath descriptive words. It is an extremely pleasurable way to read, and I have found CAP's description to build from this viewing experience into a well-earned judgment upon the work.

Be sure to visit Currentartpics for CAP's last post, a comparison of Olafur Eliasson and Jorge Pardo. In the end CAP writes of Pardo: "The work accommodates all, in part, and yet functions undercut by style and situation at some point immobilize the immersed observer. Where nothing is quite used or useable and style is never settled, the work engulfs its surroundings, blurs its boundaries and includes the observer, only to exclude a vantage point. We regard more stylistically there, but only by retreating from any familiar function, in the end style too dissolves under the withdrawal."

As the 100th, this is CAP's final post. Congratulations!

1968: Eloise Spaeth and the “Art-For-Everybody Movement"

2008-08-04T11:24:00.000-07:00

All the art supply stores had one - a freestanding circular revolving rack of books for 99 cents, with titles such as “Drawing Cats,” “Finger Painting,” or “Oriental Brushwork.” It was my grandmother, Eloise Spaeth, who in 1968 wrote “Collecting Art.” She writes,”...we live in a period more favorable to the arts than any other period in our country. Local museums and art centers are boiling with change. That bang you hear down the street is not a manhole cover blowing off; it’s the cultural explosion. Even local newspapers treat exhibitions as news, and national magazines give art valuable and expensive space.” As though describing our own time, she is also strongly against what she refers to as the “stampede collector” - those who "unwillingly help create and support an artificial art market and discourage potential collectors.” In her 99 cent pamphlet, “With a $1,000 budget you are moving into the big time.”

Her advice to the novice collector:

1. The best education you can get is from visiting the museums.

2. Do not fall into the trap of falling in love with subject matter.

3. Be aware of fads. (Apparently, in 1968 this was African art: “...word seems to have gotten about that it is the thing to have - rush out and buy African art to hang beside your Motherwell.”)

4. Do not be seduced by what is hot off the easel - ask to see those earlier works.

5. “Buy the painting that looks all wrong over the mantle, over the sofa, or in your favorite room.”

6. Your errors are half the fun.

7. “The best way to protect yourself from the scoundrels [is to avoid auctions and] make your purchases at a reputable gallery.”

8. “...don’t allow yourself to become so dependent on one dealer that your walls will look like a showroom for his group of artists.”

9. A visit to the artist's studio is not a way to buy on the cheap, but to better understand the artist and his work.

10. Most interesting is the excellent advice my grandmother had for purchasing work at department stores and museums. Here is a paragraph from the section on buying art in a department store:

Sears Roebuck pioneered in the art-for-everybody movement by employing Vincent Price, whose talents range from depicting suave movie villains to astute collecting, to roam around the world gathering vast assemblages of original works of art. But, as the operation at Sears grew bigger and more people were involved, the quality of the art declined. In the beginning, many “name” artists did original etchings for the collection; and at the present time the print section is the best in the art departments at Sears. However, it is in the complicated area of prints that many department store galleries, whether intentionally or not, are unreliable. The fact that they are ignorant of the techniques and the ethics of the print world is no excuse. They would not sew a Balenciaga label in a Seventh Avenue dress, but they will sell a restrike as a first edition print. Of course there are stores with good print departments, headed by knowledgeable people: Dayton’s in Minneapolis, Hudson’s in Detroit, and Sloan’s in New York, for example.

Fascinating is that in 1968, you could rent a painting from MoMA for a few months, with the option to buy should it grow on you. The idea began in Dayton, Ohio in the 1930’s:

The Dayton Art Institute opens its fall season with an exhibition of its rental gallery works. The director takes great pains with this show, visiting many galleries in New York City and artist's studios so as to have a wide range of paintings for the members to choose from. The paintings are hung in a large gallery with labels showing rental prices, and a calendar is prepared for every month in the coming year...The rush to get in can only be compared to the Oklahoma “run” when, as the gun went off, everyone dashed to stake out a claim.

By Catherine Spaeth

Images: Eloise Spaeth, Collecting Art, NY: Pittman Publishing Corporation, c. 1968; "The Art lending Service, Sponsored by the Junior Council of the Museum of Modern Art", ibid., p. 27; Louis Bouche, "Portrait of Eloise Spaeth,"det., oil on canvas, c. 1940s, Collection of Otto L. Spaeth, Jr.

Art in a Handbag: Business as Usual or a New World Order?

2008-07-29T20:12:00.000-07:00

Chanel's "Mobile Art" pavilion is designed with the quilted CHANEL "2.55" handbag in mind, and it lands in Central Park this fall. Arts patronage is no longer a matter of a full spread announcing the sponsorship of a blockbuster show, but has become the design of the space of exhibition itself as a branding and marketing tool - in this case, plopped down like a handbag.

While the issue of branding has been in the art world for some time, in this year the pitch is remarkably high. Since Rothko, Klein and Warhol there has been an awareness of the artist's work as either susceptible to or embracing of the logic of the brand. But only today does there seem to be a widespread acceptance of it as the condition of art, if not subjectivity at large. Wrote Ben Davis of the "superartist": "appreciation of the work tends to be an appreciation of being part of a collective, as opposed to an individual, esthetic experience, just as the works themselves tend away from personal statements and towards blank social referents -- death, change, media, atmosphere."* There is also Dan Levenson, whose brand "Little Switzerland" presents the work of a single artist as the fictional gallery stable. At this same time, the "personal brand" is currently a very real market in the identity business.

And galleries as well are considering what they do in terms of branding, so that artistic practices, rather than settling into their proper names over time and from within a diverse critical discourse- as Minimalism did, for example - might in the near future (if it has not already happened) be decided upon through a gallery's branding strategy.

As with the Chanel pod above, branded space comes into full play as well. The advice of a gallery consultant is to always send the same size of invitation so that there is a branded space not unlike the Fed Ex space Walead Beshty describes. One might also say that Deitch's consistent practice of enlisting street artists to do full gallery installations is a curious form of branding, let alone that of the pseudonyms the artists themselves - "Swoon," or "Os Gemeos" - are likely to use.

Even further, we might think of the artist's collective as participating fully in the branding exercise, as though taking up residency there for lack of an historical avant-garde. A visit to Critical Art Ensemble's website adequately reveals this.**

How can we speak of the brand with reference to art? Is this a major shift in contemporary art and culture at large? Might it have very real consequences for art and society both? Or is it just business as usual, merely showing itself for what it has always been?

By Catherine Spaeth

Image Credit: Zaha Hadid, Chanel Mobile Art pavilion; Sylvie Fleury, Cristal Custom Commando, both from the New York Times.
* Eric Gelber led me to this article.
**And it was an exchange with Jonathan T.D. Neil that led me here.

Edward Winkleman: Gallerist and Haberdasher

2008-07-16T08:27:00.000-07:00

With shirts on a rack and John McCracken by the foot, the boundaries between art and fashion are falling away in giddy purveyance at Ed Winkleman’s gallery. Curated by artists Christopher K. Ho and Ivin Ballen, the press release of "The Shallow Curator" states that this is “a summer group exhibition with neither urgency nor depth. The exhibition skims the surface of art-making, buoyed by such concerns as an artist’s sense of style.” Even the word “style” thins away from the consistency and substance of art historical proper names (the clothing is designed by George McKracken, and the John McCracken is a "forgery") and enters the simultaneously more capricious and culturally determined realm of fashion. The shallowness is real - with humor and the guise of sheer laziness there is avoidance of the “seriousness” of a theme. In conversation Ed Winkleman described it as “the smartest, dumbest show ever,” and the artists worried over whether or not a critic could even be interested in this show, laughing at the thought that it might be known in the future as “the show that no critic could review.”

This humorous bemoaning of the absence of critical understanding towards the curatorial project is an art world cliché, and “The Shallow Curator” joins such recent conversations with guffaws. It is still recently that Damien Hirst’s Levi’s line was seen on the Gagosian runway, and that Triple Candie’s exhibition of unauthorized Cady Noland knock-off’s, or the monographic retrospective of a fictitious Lester Hayes, caused a stir. By the time these two extremes - the blatant commercialism of Damien Hirst and Triple Candies’ critique of the object and the role of the nonprofit in the New York art world - reach The Shallow Curator, any dialectic between them has been sapped.

For historical comparison, there is the fictitious John Dogg, allegedly created by gallerist Colin de Land and artist Richard Prince, who in 1986 hung Econoline wheel covers on the wall of Lisa Spellman’s 303 Gallery. Here is Mitchell Algus describing what he valued about the work in 2003:
In blithe retrospect, Dogg's show was casually prescient, anticipating Neo-Geo's evolution into the proactive, materially ascetic mode of institutional critique. This shift in focus— from the accessories of power to the social organization of power—was a moral one. It shed in one shot the congenial complicity of the 80s art world. Dogg's was the smart, "I can live without that," frills-free version. Just right for the then impending bust.

The Shallow Curator is notably without prescience or shift, and avoids altogether the gesture of institutional critique. Gisel Florez’s photographs of vicious dogs ripping apart cheesy but glamorous accessories are made not in order to critique planned obsolescence but to generate more commissions for her work. One can imagine such an image very differently in the hands of Barbara Kruger. Likewise, “The Spirit’s” invocation of John McCracken for “Art Within Reach” is a spoof of the new age nostalgia mystique of Carol Bove. For all it’s shallowness and humor, this show has legible intentions, and the curators conclude, “If there is an argument at all, it is to reconsider the disinterested - or “shallow” - eye of modernism, not in order to critique it but in order to expand it.”

This disinterested, shallow eye of Modernism occupies a space without concern for either aura or effect, allowing humor to fill in the blank. But The Shallow Curator’s appeal to modernity is also made with an interest in beauty and the quality of the work, frankly understood as high end luxury goods. It is for this reason that I became interested in interviewing Ed Winkleman more specifically about his gallery’s identity, known largely through the unmoderated populism of his blog. With thousands of hits a day, it is not the postings themselves that draw the attention but the heated dialogue that ensues. What can occur is that the gallery’s identity is at once subjected to the vitriolic contempt of those who think they know it, and at the same time become lost in the fray. I felt a need to hear more specifically from Ed about his gallery programming and its success in defining an identity. The exhibition described above provides an interesting context for the following interview with Ed Winkleman:

CS: What is at stake in defining a gallery around "conceptual art," and what are its boundaries as you see them?

EW: I am somewhat hesitant to go into into too much detail on the blog because the blog is somewhat polarized between anti-conceptualist formalist and pro-conceptualist, and I’m going to throw this in here, pro-conceptualist-formalist, because the more I think of it I don’t really have much interest in anti-formalist conceptualism... I myself have seen tons of conceptualist art that hasn’t raised the bar for formalism - there would need to be in my idea of conceptual art that it must be visual, it must be compelling visually. I see what conceptualist artists are doing today as very consciously pushing past what’s been done before. What I mean by that is, and this is true for all the artists I work with, and why a lot of what our program turns out to be is art history...you have to know your art history pretty well.

Jennifer Dalton is a good example of this, she has a very firm grasp of art history, her work takes visual achievements of other artists and pushes past them, using their vocabulary in ways that accomplish new things more conceptually. In “This is not news” she was dealing with a topic that she is very well known for which is women and disparity in the arts. It’s very straightforward and clearly referencing Felix Gonzalez Torres, so she’s taking this vocabulary that people know already and what Felix was doing with it was perhaps more poetic than what Jen’s doing, but because it existed as art already she was able to pull it forward.

CS: What’s interesting about it is that when people were first defining themselves as Conceptualists, when Kosuth was first defining what Conceptual Art is he was saying “We are against morphology,” and here you have someone who has this very critical sociological perspective who is reinhabiting this morphology. When people talk about conceptual art sometimes they want to make a boundary, and Alexander Alberro limits Conceptual Art from 1966-1977 and after that refers to it as “post -conceptual.” One of the reasons for at least bracketing off the earlier Conceptual Art off from the present is that they were responding to Modernist art criticism, they were responding to Modern art and we’re no longer responding to Modernism in the way that they were.

EW: I would agree that Conceptual Art has a beginning and ending as a “large C” movement, just as every other 20th century movement did, so I am using small “c” conceptualist. I would also agree with anyone that good formalists are working with interesting concepts - John McCracken is a really good example of a formalist who leans it against the wall and kind of leans into conceptualism. Where I became involved in these definitions through the blog was among the camp who began to argue that “conceptualist” as it was broadly being used is anti-aesthetic, and I don’t think it is. If you look at the progression of formalist art it is often at the edge of an aesthetic that people would call ugly, that people would not have thought at the time were necessarily formalist achievements, even though today we would argue they were, and so my ongoing response to folks who think that the conceptualists are anti-aesthetic is that no, they are pushing the boundaries. The artist is free to say it is art, to define beauty, to define aesthetics. So when contemporary formalists describe the work at our gallery as "anti-formalist" or "anti-aesthetic" my response is to a) feel it’s not their role to define that for other artists and b) conclude that they are perhaps missing something, that they have a closed set of choices or values about art.

CS: Do you feel pigeonholed into defining conceptualism?

EW: No I talk about it all day, but I feel pigeonholed in defending its value in the context of beauty, and again, in coming from Ohio, a rusty bridge to me is stunning, this [pointing to a piece by Ivin Ballen] is actually an exquisitely beautiful piece to me, it’s gorgeously composed, it’s gorgeously painted, and yet it’s referencing graffiti, it’s referencing duct tape, it’s referencing a whole bunch of things that one might not see as beautiful, but this is the Rauschenbergian argument...can you find beauty in everyday objects? Yes you can.

CS: So you also have artists like Jennifer Dalton, Yevgeniy Fiks, and Christopher K. Ho, all people who are doing sort of sociological/ethnographic conceptual work, and some of them, would you say all of them, are engaging in art history?

EW: Yevgeniy is sort of interesting in that he’s not engaging in art history as much as he’s so aware of his art history (he teaches art history) the choices he makes are made very specifically because of that awareness. Here are some paintings where he is positioning them between the Social Realist style and Sots Art, a postmodernist sort of cynical ironic painting, and both of these are sort of kitschy, so he is interested in the middle ground. Painting these portraits could only be done with a full knowledge of the critique of both. Pure formalists will only embrace a movement or rejection of that movement and advance it, he is actually going back in time and situating himself right between two other movements, not because he sees this as an advance, not because he sees it as a matter of rejecting, but because he sees very well what those two movements did politically, and he feels the best way to represent these American communists is to balance these two out.

He’s done something else that I see defining the difference between the formalists and the small ‘c” conceptualist camps which is that he’s not invested in a medium to the point of having to defend it, he’s not a painter, he’s not a photographer, so media serves his ideas - but he is a good painter!

CS: And this is something that the latest conceptual art is now taking full ownership of: a strong return to studio practice. I’m really interested in people like Joy Garnett, I think her paintings are so lusciously beautiful, but that it’s also a conceptual practice that’s holding it together.

EW: Can I say that Joy is a really good example in that where - and I haven’t been able to say this on my blog, only because when I do people take it personally and that kind of disintegrates into bickering and unpleasantness - but Joy is a wonderful example of an artist who is painting because it’s one really solid way to explore what she’s interested in, not because she’s invested in it, she’s invested in ideas, the difference goes back to dumb like a painter, she’s not dumb like a painter she’s a scientist. The difference in my mind between the formalists and the conceptualists is that the formalists are - I’m going to really regret saying this - but they are still stuck in Modernism, stuck in the essence of their media, and the folks who have rejected that and see media as a tool for their ideas are more interesting to me, because I reject the essentialism of modernism, the question stopped being what is the essence of art and became what is art, and that’s the more interesting question.

CS: Marian Goodman started with Broodthaers, but I don’t know that you could say she had a program, and that you could say this about many of the older gallerists, that they kind of just went intuitively for who they liked and lined them up. Do you think it’s different now, at a time of branding and corporate identity, that being known as a gallery that specializes in conceptual art is of an historical necessity bound to a gallery system that has changed?

EW: There’s actually three ideas in that question, one is that the model that Marian Goodman is known for is not being rejected by every dealer, I would say that Zach Feuer is following that, he talks about his gallery as having evolved in the same way, these are the artists he thinks are important and interesting, however I think we are at this point trained in terms of thinking of a program, becoming specialists, and that probably is just a sign of the times, having a specialty is expected in any field, but it’s also a response to an overwhelming amount of information, to have the faith in your own eye, that Marian Goodman, or Zach Feuer just down the street is rare, because it is demonstrating an amazing amount of faith in what you are doing.

Why did programs become popular in the first place? About 35 years ago there were people who began to specialize, Edith Halpert, for example, specifically American Art, but now we are seeing that dealers can write with incredible precision about the artists they are working with, so what led to that are two things: one, they are starting to see themselves in more creative terms, and I think that stems from the fact that a lot of artists, art historians, or critics became dealers, with creative visions, and the number of people who can live as working artists has exploded, and so like every other field when you have that much to process, to organize, specialization becomes really attractive, and so I have admiration for Marian and for Zach. When I began noticing that Marian and Zach were not following that program model it started to make me wonder whether that was a better path, and I don’t know, I think I’ve somewhat been pigeonholed as a conceptualist dealer, and I don’t mind that because I love conceptualist work, and yet I have a few artists who I don’t think of that way and I love working with them, Christopher Johnson is a really good example.

CS: I’m using the words branding and corporate identity because not too long ago there was a posting on your blog about how you used to have this other gallery, and what this gallery was going to be and that you were refining your vision, and you used the word branding,it came up in your writing.

EW: I do discuss it in those corporate terms. But the idea of assessing a gallery as a brand is at first to recognize that each of the artists you carry is themselves a brand, and so your umbrella brand had better never compete with or undercut or interfere with your individual product brands, so it is an awareness that you have an umbrella brand. Of even Gagosian, even Zach or even Marian Goodman, you would say whether Marylyn Minter either belongs or doesn’t belong with those galleries, even if you don’t think they have a specialized brand they do, there is a loose brand that definitely has a place to be discussed as such.

CS: So to be clear, you don’t want your gallery to be identified purely with conceptual art?

EW: I do want my gallery to be identified with conceptual art, I don’t want my gallery to be identified exclusively as a conceptualist gallery. I strongly believe in conceptualism, at the point where we are a lot of the most interesting art that’s happening right now is conceptualist, but knowing that the spiral will continue around, and knowing that artists who have a conceptualist practice at the moment may veer into a more formalist mode, these are artists that I want to keep working with. And the reason I want to work with conceptualist artists is that I come out of their studio visits with my head just throbbing with new ideas and I love that, and I don’t get that anywhere else, this is the most intense education I can get, and it’s not from a book, this is as living, breathing, of-a-second kind of education that I can get, and that’s incredible, that’s the real thrill of working with living artists.

By Catherine Spaeth

Image credits: George McKracken, 2009 Spring line, Available at Bergdorf Goodman and other fine stores, Installation view; Gisel Florez, Exquisite Taste (Olive), 2007,Archival Inkjet Print, 21” x 28”, Edition of 10; The Spirit, John McCracken, 2008, Aquaresin, fiberglass, 39 x 14 x 3, Available in any finish; Jennifer Dalton, This Is Not News, 2006, 5 strings of 100 light bulbs, ink on colored paper, string, Dimensions variable (each string 101 feet), Edition of 10; John McCracken, Gold, 2006, Resin, fiberglass, plywood, 93 x 16 x 3 1/2 inches, 236.2 x 40.6 x 8.9 cm, Courtesy the artist and David Zwirner, New York; Ivin Ballen, HEAVEN, 2008, Fiberglass, aquaresin, acrylic, absorbent ground, gouche, 39” x 29” x 6”; Yevgeniy Fiks, Portrait of Jarvis Tyner (Communist Party USA), 2007,Oil on canvas, 36" x 48"; Joy Garnett, Noon, 2007, Oil on canvas, 54" x 60"; Kevin Zucker, The Shallow Painting (conceptual drawing of actual painting...don't have good image of work yet), 2008,Pencil, watercolor, silkscreen and inkjet on canvas,76.5" x 52.5", Courtesy the artist and Greenberg Van Doren Gallery; Ivin Ballen, Speakers (2-Way), 2007, Fiberglass, Aquaresin, absorbent ground, acrylic, gouache, oil, stereo components, Dimensions variable.

Contemporary Genre's Homelessness

2008-07-06T13:13:00.001-07:00

In Brooke Davis Anderson’s wall text for Dargerism: Contemporary Artists and Henry Darger,” she writes “By leaning into the boundaries of the Western canon, 'Dargerism' illustrates how one self-taught master has spawned a new movement, a wholly new ‘ism.’” Other wall text contradicts this spawning - Justine Kurland, for example, was photographing her nomadic waifs before she ever knew of Darger. And there are just too many artists not in this show who have been doing similar work for Darger alone to carry the weight of an “ism.” There is something that extends beyond him and into the fields nearby: In a broader Hegelian manner genre painting is making its appearance in contemporary art.

When Hegel writes about the period that he calls Romanticism, which for him emerges with what he refers to as “so-called genre,” it is the period in which Classical beauty is no longer appropriate to art. Spirit withdraws from nature in order to be intimate with itself, and at this time “the human being, as actual subjectivity, must be made the principle, and thereby alone...does the anthropomorphic reach its consummation.”* Jan Van Eyck’s Ghent Altarpiece, 1426, marks a turn towards Christ as a particular individual, and subjectivity is now at home in the world. Idealism gives way to contingency - “romantic art leaves externality to go its own way again for its part freely and independently, and in this respect allows any and every material, down to flowers, trees and the commonest household gear, to enter the representation without hindrance even in its contingent natural existence.” In its capriciousness painting falls apart from the unity of classical sculpture and becomes divided among genre painting, landscape, still life and portaiture. One can even pick up on national differences - whereas German genre paintings can only reveal “snarling and vicious people,” Dutch paintings leave one in a jovial mood.***

Robert Campin’s Merode Altarpiece,1425-1428, at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, is an excellent example of what Hegel means by being at home in the world. In the Annunciation God appears to Mary as a teeny cross-bearing figure, barely visible as compared to the gleaming copper pot in the background. This rather insignificant figure has flown through the window of the home where this particular man loves this particular woman, and in this love “everything else which by way of interests, circumstances and aims belongs otherwise to actual being and life, [is elevated] into an adornment of this emotion; it tugs everything into this sphere and assigns a value to it only in its relation thereto.”****

In Delia Brown's Autumn Morning, 2008, a fictitious child sits in the window of a well appointed home, a pile of Care Bears filling up the space of a roomy arm chair. In the exhibition "Precious,"false portraits of overly sweet mothers and daughters oozing with silk, pearls and flushing cheeks are staged fantasies caught in the impossible desires of women who never had children. The small scale of the paintings and the exaggerated plushness of being at home in the world is meant as a critique of painting's gendered terms, in which being too precious in one's work is never as serious as masculine austerity and scale. Similarly, Amy Cutler's miniature paintings of nomadic women from elsewhere- pictured above - carry their worlds upon their backs, with no ground below them or heaven above. Carrying their children and households with them as they go, contingent necessity is an adornment in an exotic world without men. Homeless genre enters the more conceptual strategy of Joy Garnett who retrieves images that grab her from the public domain and files them until she can no longer remember their context. Underscoring their placelessness she paints from these digital images in "one go," marking the gap in time and place with the spontaneity of painting.

Stephen Bann wrote that Pop Art was a return to genre as a “generic challenge to personal expression,”***** and it is also true that Gerhard Richter’s self-proclaimed banality was a response to Neo Expressionism. But in the New York ‘80s, also responding to Neo-Expressionism, there was not so much an interest in genre as there was in style - painters such as Sherrie Levine, Ross Bleckner and Philip Taafe, choosing from the work of Bridget Riley or Paul Feeley whose reception marked the problem of style, appropriated their motifs as their own. When genre occurred it was also in the sense of detaching oneself from its conventions and appropriating the style of another. Emphasizing culture above nature, April Gornik evokes Rockwell Kent in Pulling Moon, and in Light Before Heat, also from 1983, it is Fitz Hugh Lane. Genre painting in contemporary art existed, but at this time it had a relation to style that is no longer relevant in the same way.

It is perhaps symptomatic of this general mood that Jennifer Reeves creates characters out of painterly styles, appearing as though in the shift to the genre scene - as here in "Which way to the real deal?".

Currently at the Neuberger Museum of Art is “Future Tense,” the last of several genre exhibitions curated by Dede Young. Holding the recent work of 60 artists it is a landscape painting show, with the exception of a handful of artists working in other media. Striking is how very recent and varied these paintings are - many if not most are here by the courtesy of a gallery. Here is a brief interview excerpted from email exchanges:

CS: How do you find that your exhibitions of still life and landscape painting have informed an understanding of postmodern art? What is the role of genre for our time?
DY: The show supports the adaptability of traditional media to engage immediately relevant issues such as the environment, politics, over population and our use of non-renewable fossil fuel, the war over oil. The show pushes the tradition of landscape forward and reflects our time--all the work is post 9/11, and it demonstrates anxiety levels in this decade.
CS: I take your response to mean that there is nothing special about having a stake in genre, per se, that it exists, and reflects our time, but also that the shows that interested you during your research had nothing to do with genre, but environmental issues at large.
DY: You are correct: historic / traditional genres are a taproot that feed artists---the past is simply information upon which artists can draw. Genres are not relevant, per se, but are great fodder for artists to adapt and adopt. I am looking at how artists move forward and deflect the past. Today's artists cannot claim 'landscape' as a new idea, so how do they infuse it with contemporary relevance? The exhibition explores this, and today 'everything is environment.'

By this account, genre is an empty form for content, losing all its priveleges. For the purposes of "Future Tense" that is enough , but that there was so much to select from is really quite something. I don't need to list what has been visible, enough of it is around, enough to know that still life has been disqualified as sculpture and that history painting at this time has no identity as such unless it is bound to style. But there is now a genre painting in which the sense of being at home in the world has disappeared, and artists were drawn to Darger because of it. What I have gathered is by no means a summing up or an answer and the question still stands: What is the role of genre for our time?

By Catherine Spaeth

*Aesthetics, Lectures on Fine Art, by G.W.F. Hegel, T.M. Knox, trans., Volume II, Oxford University Press, c. 1975, p. 519. First published posthumously in 1835 - Hegel died in 1830.
**Ibid., p. 527.
***Ibid., V. I, p. 169.
****Ibid., V I p. 563
*****Stephen Bann, “Pop Art and Genre,” New Literary History, Vol. 24, No. 1, Culture and Everyday Life (Winter 1993) pp. 115-124.

Image credits: Amy Cutler, Dwelling, 2005,Gouache on paper,22 x 30 inches,Copyright Amy Cutler, 2005, Collection of the Indianapolis Museum of Art, Courtesy Leslie Tonkonow Artworks + Projects; Robert Campin, Merode Altarpiece, 1425-1428, Met, courtesy of the world wide web; Delia Brown, Autumn Morning, 2008, 11x14”, oil on wood, Courtesy od D’Amelio-Terras Gallery; Joy Garnett, Harbor,2007,Oil on canvas,60" x 70",Private Collection. Image courtesy of the artist and Winkleman Gallery, New York; April Gornik, Pulling Moon, 1983, oil on canvas, 76x80”, Courtesy of Danese Gallery; Jennifer Reeves, Which way to the real deal?, 2005, Gouache on paper, 11 x 14 inches, courtesy of Ramis Barquet; Tomory Dodge, Salton Sargasso, 2005, oil on canvas, 90 X 85 inches, Courtesy of CRG Gallery; April Gornik, Light Before Heat, 1983, oil on canvas, 66 x 132 inches, courtesy of Danese Gallery, New York.

Flags of Revolt and Defiance: Polly Apfelbaum

2008-06-24T05:43:00.000-07:00

Flags are to be seen clearly from the distance of the moon, but Polly Apfelbaum’s Flags of Revolt and Defiance (2006) are sharply cut away from their traditional field. A folio of vivid silkscreens on paper, blossom templates are taken to flags of resistance ranging from the Bourbons to the Black Panthers. These templates lend themselves to the logo - typically identified more with a corporate brand than with the explicitly political communication of a flag. In collaboration with Tomas Vu-Daniel and his assistants at the LeRoy Neiman Center for Print Studies, Apfelbaum’s exacting precision in this medium (a precision that required two years of effort) heightens the intensity of color. Their cut of line is completely different than the bleed of color Apfelbaum is most known for, but the hold upon the viewer is no less saturating.

That these flags are intended to be hung vertically on the wall also shifts them from their horizontal register, further emphasizing the graphic field of the logo. Tacked to the wall at the top two corners and lined in rows, their presentation mimics that of a logo design exploration, as in the c. 2000 ExxonMobil example below. In viewing Flags of Revolt and Defiance, however, there is no acceptance or rejection on the basis of a desired unifying concept.

I have always associated Apfelbaum’s work with a powerful phenomenological insistence upon the materialism of direct experience, and this insistence occurs most forcefully in the horizontal field. According to the official code, a flag must never touch the ground. That a flag should have both avoidance of and claim upon the ground as what constitutes it places Flags of Revolt and Defiance in an important dialogue with what Apfelbaum refers to as her “fallen paintings.” Standing at the edges of a piece like Blossom (2001), currently on exhibit at Locks Gallery in Philadelphia , your own body defines the impermanence in the actual fragility of velvet petals laid upon the floor, and is at the same time held by the absorption of their color stains. The immediacy of “one shot painting” has been taken over and fleshed out at our feet in an array that summons the discretion of touch.

In the early ‘80s Apfelbaum was in Spain, away from the New York art scene at a time when cynicism had crept into painterly practice. While Douglas Crimp wrote “The End of Painting,” Apfelbaum was learning from Arte Povera and Supports/Surfaces that the conventions of painting and its exhibition remained quite full. More recently she began to think explicitly about horizontality and verticality as different registers in dialogue with each other.

What space does the logo occupy? There have always been the occasional artists to use a personal logo in the place of signature, such as Leonardo’s flying eyeball, or Whistler’s butterfly. And since Andy Warhol, numerous artists have appropriated corporate logos into their work. In 1968, Richard Artschwager, like Apfelbaum occupying a space somewhere between Minimalism and Pop, began to distribute his blips across a variety of architectural surfaces. But these were of a time that emphasized local incident as much as the more abstract mobility of a logo across a variety of surfaces. For Arstchwager, there was also the psychic effect of horizontal and vertical format - formats owing the force of their address to the difference between landscape and portraiture. When Apfelbaum flips her flags from the horizontal to the vertical register, she is also thinking of this psychic address, and at a time when the personal logo is all the rage.

For a while now I have been thinking about the increasing mobility of art. People first began talking about this when the international art star appeared, moving from site to site to install a project. The distinction between artist and curator increasingly blurred in this context. As the market for contemporary art accelerated, the walls between the museum and the market became permeable in the speed and fluidity of movement. Further, since Murakami’s collaboration with Louis Vuitton in 2003 an artwork has the mobility of a logo across a variety of surfaces. This is apparent in The Gap t-shirt campaign, and we can see it now in Google’s artist theme.

Google’s artist’s themes are a new feature for the personalized home page that, from a list of artist’s names, provides an artist's work as the banner backdrop to the Google search bar. The work of art will change over the course of the day - it is a fragment without title, known only by the proper name of the artist. And the artist’s names will range from Jeff Koons to Lance Armstrong, a bizarre blurring that can only come from the notion of art as simultaneously popular and distinctively elite - a marketer’s dream.

I can think of no artist other than Polly Apfelbaum who in Flags of Defiance and Revolt has critically inhabited the structure and history of the logo as an enterprise. At the same time, few have so critically occupied the horizontal field, exploiting the difference of its register from the vertical as a dialogue with the different aspects of each and their corresponding histories. In considering how firmly these registers can stand apart in her work, I asked Apfelbaum if she thought that while her floor pieces should not appear on Google’s theme palette, her Flags of Revolt and Defiance might have a different relation to mobility and make absolute sense there. The artist agreed.

It used to be that the autonomy of painting in the vertical register was challenged by the threat of becoming wallpaper. In our time, this threat is as likely to be seen as an invitation without challenge. In responding to the visual culture of the logo and its mobility, Flags of Revolt and Defiance positions art’s relation to visual culture in critical dialogue, rather than choosing between flight or embrace.

Image credits:Polly Apfelbaum, Portfolio Title: Flags of Revolt and Defiance, 2006, Color silkscreen, Paper Size: 30 x 19 inches each panel, Carrier: Coventry Rag, smooth, bright white, Edition Size: 27, Portfolio of 31, Courtesy of Leroy Neiman Center for Print Studies; Exxon/Mobil logo presentation, c. 2000, private collection; Bubbles, 2001, synthetic velvet and fabric dye, 12 ft in diameter, Courtesy Locks Gallery, Philadelphia; Richard Artschwager, blips, 1976, Photo by Matthew, Septimus, Courtesy P.S.1 Contemporary Art Center; Pollly Apfelbaum, Flags of Revoltand Defiance - Yippies; Polly Apfelbaum, Flags of Revolt and Defiance - Kurdistan Worker's party; AT&T logo exploration, private collection.

By Catherine Spaeth

After May: Paula Cooper's Inaugural Show, 1968

2008-05-12T11:58:00.000-07:00

During the auction house bidding already begun over at Artworld Salon, we have to fess up to an artworld driven as much by history and the engaged dialogue of criticism as by the numbers game. That this awareness hits us in May 2008, the 40th year anniversary of May 1968, is the sad fact of our war and disaster-ridden time. Reading Arthur Danto’s take on the student take-over of Columbia doesn’t assuage the mood. He writes, “I have a kind of theory that when great social changes are about to take place, something happens in the arts first - think of Romanticism and the French Revolution...” and that “Columbia students back then had little interest in advanced art as such.”*

In France they already thought they knew this about America. The 1966 student manifesto “On the Poverty of Student Life” explains that Americans did not have a theory and as a result their actions ‘were spontaneous mass movements which collapsed because they proved incapable of grasping more than the incidental aspects of alienation,”and that American students would never come to understand that everyday life is controlled by the “psycho-humanist police force.”** Because the events of May were so huge in Paris, and artists so involved, artists there were faced with how to continue to practice on the heels of May - one example is that the Comite du Salon de la Jeune Peinture committed itself to the Communist Party, desiring to continue the project of the Atelier Populiare to change the structure of the artist’s relation to capital.

In the New York October of 1968, Paula Cooper’s inaugural gallery show was the “Exhibition to Benefit the Student Mobilization Committee to End the War in Vietnam.” Along with Lucy Lippard and Ron Wolin the exhibition was primarily curated by Robert Huot, whose work was at that time traveling in “The Art of the Real,” MoMA’s USIA-funded show, just closed in September and about to open in Paris. Lucy Lippard described the Paula Cooper show as “a kind of protest show against the potpourri peace shows with all those burned doll’s heads,” and the first benefit exhibition of non-objective art.*** The statement of the exhibition was that:

“These fourteen non-objective artists are against the war in Vietnam. They are supporting this commitment by contributing major examples of their current work. The artists and the particular pieces were selected to represent a particular aesthetic attitude in the conviction that a cohesive group of important works makes the most forceful statement for peace.”

In appealing to an aesthetic attitude the artists were likely thinking of the recent exhibition curated by Barbara Rose, “Towards a New Aesthetic”, held at the Washington Gallery of Modern Art in 1967. Arguing that there is nothing to constitute a style or a school in the history of American art, Rose believed that the literalism Michael Fried condemned in “Art and Objecthood” was in fact a powerful moment in contemporary art and the measure of its success. E.C. Goossen’s “The Art of the Real,” soon followed, and there was overlap between artists in each, artists who were quite willing to adopt the rhetoric of “the real” as an expression of a specifically American “aesthetic attitude.”

However, the exhibition statement prompted critic Gregory Battcock to write that while he very much liked the exhibition, in these terms it might as well be a wine tasting or a fashion show, and that “We are, as usual, being sold a package. The Modern philosophy of Madison Avenue and the packaging technologist has become everyday fact.”****And Leo Steinberg was critical of the rhetoric of the real as well, in his lecture “Other Criteria,” read at MoMA only months before the opening of The Art of the Real, stating that contemporary art has become the technological research in which the art object ‘”is declared at last to be a real thing, possessed of more “reality” than mere art ever had.”*****

The language that surrounds this show - the curator’s desires to articulate what is art historically of note for their time, and the condemnation of these attempts as mere packaging for a growing market impressed by clean and technical professionalism, belong to it equally and are by now familiar. Responding in a quite physical way to the photo of Bill Bollinger’s floor-to-ceiling tension cable as sculpture, and to the art historical fact that it was in this show that Sol Lewitt made his very first wall drawings, I find this divide to be a curious moment in the history of American art, a moment in which to have an aesthetic attitude was at the same time to get real.

As a “cohesive group of important works,” standing together to fund student opposition to war, does such an attitude count for something more than what any of these works might bring in todays auctions?

The artists: Carl Andre, Jo Baer, Robert Barry, Bill Bollinger, Dan Flavin, Robert Huot, Will Insley, Donald Judd, Sol Lewitt, Robert Mangold, Doug Ohlson, Robert Ryman.

By Catherine Spaeth

*Arthur C. Danto, “Before the Revolution,” in Artforum, May 2008, p. 100.
**Members of the Situationist International and the Students of Strasbourg, “On the Poverty of Student Life Considered in it’s Economic, Political, Psychological, Sexual and Particularly Intellectual Aspects, and a Modest Proposal for its Remedy,” in Beneath the Paving Stones: Situationists and the Beach, May 1968, texts collected by Dark Star, London, :A/K Press, c. 2001, p. 26.
***As quoted by Grace Glueck, Artnotes, Sunday October 27th, 1968.
****Gregory Battcock, “Reviewing the Above Statement,” in New York Free Press Critique, 31, October 1968.
Leo Steinberg, “Other Criteria,” in Other criteria, NY: Oxford University press, c. 1972, p. 1963.

Image Credits: Installation views from "Exhibition to Benefit Student Mobilization Committee to End the War in Vietnam," October 1968. Installation 1, Will Insley, Jo Baer; Installation 2, Carl Andre, Doug Ohlson; Installation 3, Robert Huot, Dan Flavin; Installation 4, Robert Mangold, Bill Bollinger, and Donald Judd. All images courtesy of Paula Cooper Gallery.

David Diao: A Picaresque Tale of Ruins

2008-05-02T15:45:00.000-07:00

David Diao’s paintings over time have been oddly resonant with their historical moments. Diao began exhibiting paintings in New York in 1967, and Untitled (1969) stood out in the exhibit “High Times Hard Times: New York Painting 1967-1975” for its monochromatic scale and subtlety of gesture. A glowing pale pink with a gentle moire effect belied the aggressive and rather silly athletics of repeatedly running from a distance to sweep a dripping sponge of paint over the large horizontal field propped against the wall. This entire exhibit was shot through by multiple and varied desires to take painting to the next level at a time that it was under siege, but it was in Diao’s painting that a certain allegiance to Modernist painting was held, even to the medium-specific aim of revealing the supporting stretchers as a mark of tension in painting’s support. For Artforum in 1969 Emily Wassermann wrote of Diao's paintings that “...these are purely optical surfaces which somehow are not sensed as tactile or palpable.” * Sheer opticality is code for Modernist painting’s achievement, and at this time it was both notable and belated.

Cardboard tubes, push brooms and squeegees came into use during the seventies, but Diao eventually abandoned such approaches as they were “too technological in their thinking.”** In the ‘80s Diao realized along with everyone else that everything he was doing was already a type, that no empirical research within a technological approach to painting was going to ever bust out of convention, as convention is all there is. In response to this "end of painting" other painters began to appropriate styles one after the other, such as Ross Bleckner or Phillip Taaffe, or like David Reed to treat the brush stroke as a free-floating signifier so slick that it might slide across the surface with the click of a mouse. Faced with Postmodernism’s refusal of authenticity and origin, Diao worried over what it meant to “take painting to the next step.” Modernist self-criticism entered the scene, but in the guise of other technologies absorbed into the field of painting: the famous photograph of Malevich’s first show, Alfred Barr’s chart, eye charts, graphs and statistical diagrams marking the sales and exhibition of the artists own work, served as templates for the compositional field. Any distinctions between medium-specific self-criticism and anecdotal self-referentiality were lost in these maneuvers to the point that in Diao's postmodern hands, painting had become colorfully picaresque, somewhere between romance and satire in its enterprise and failure.

Diao explains that the critic Robert Pincus Witten referred to his early paintings, such as Untitled (1969), as ‘oriental screens’ linking Diao’s Chinese heritage to his work. This was long before identity politics was all the rage, and Diao “thought it was a denigration at the time, and it pushed my hand. I began to use Warhol’s synthetic color, and it was only then that I came close to High Modernism and Warhol’s kitsch.” As his art historical references became increasingly personal, he rose to the challenge that Pincus-Witten set before him so long ago, and began to use Bruce Lee as his altar ego, the pop-culture icon standing in for Diao the action painter. More reserved than this brazen parody is Lying 1, 2000, a silkscreened photograph of Diao lounging in a Chinese moon-gazing chair, facing us and set against a Jackson Pollock. This image in turn is set against an expansive monochromatic field. With his own painter’s identity in the languorous pose of the colonialist’s imagination, this is not simply a one-liner but is infused with a longing that, like Manet’s Olympia, implicates painter and viewer alike.

Longing fuses with mourning in Endangered Species 2, 2004, a map of modern houses in New Canaan Conn., with a corresponding key showing those houses that have been demolished and those that are at risk. Against the deep blue monochrome of an architect’s plan, an appropriated graphic system tells the story of Modernism’s demise in the face of newly formed suburban identities appropriating from a more distant past and in search of something bigger. In Sitting in the Glass House, 2003, Diao plants himself in Philip Johnson's house. Johnson died only two years later - visiting the house at the very end of Johnson's life, Diao is gathering up the daily news at the moment of loss and preservation.

Born in 1943, Diao left his home in Chengdu - claimed by the Communist Party for office space - at the age of six, eventually joining his father in New York. He never saw this home again, returning 30 years later to find that it had been demolished. To some extent identifying with his father’s role as an engineer for Robert Moses, alongside of becoming a painter Diao is a connoisseur of Modern architecture. His own home is the Marcel Breuer Wolfson Trailer House. Even though this is one of John Paul Getty’s elite Spartan mansions, the trailer home fused to the walls of the house exhibits what is now a blend of high Modernism and Pop culture in the place where he lives. Diao spends much of his time obsessively preserving this house and campaigning for its survival in the face its extinction.

A sense of loss relating to his own identity appears in Diao’s most recent paintings. In 1991, Diao began exhibiting in Taiwan, and in that same year his father died on a tennis court in New York. Diao now exhibits in Beijing, and in his recent exhibition, March 1-April 5th at Courtyard Gallery Diao exhibited a cycle of paintings named for the house he had known as a child, “Da Hen Li House.” In From My Memory (2007) the house plan appears to the far right of a long horizontal field. Most prominent is the red tennis court against what is otherwise an expanse of dark green, and the stairs that mark the passage from the interior to the exterior of the house. The blankness of the remaining monochromatic field is what can no longer be remembered. The red tennis court reads like a Chinese seal and a burial plot holding the bare memories of a man displaced so long ago that he no longer knows the language, and whose earlier sweeping horizontal gestures were an embodied erasure of his cultural past as much as they were the making of an oriental screen.

An aesthetic of ruins is in full play in Chinese contemporary art. David Spalding describes contemporary Chinese photography as driven by the haunting ruins of “the most radical restructuring of urban space on earth.” China may have bypassed Modernism, but David Diao is in tune with its postmodern ruins, taking up his residency in a field of bold and fragile geometries.

By Catherine Spaeth

* Emily Wassermann, “Three Younger Artists, “ Artforum, Summer 1969, p. 31
**All artist’s statements are from personal interview.

Photos courtesy of David Diao, in order of appearance: Untitled, 1969, acrylic on canvas, 72x96", Allen Memorial Art Museum, Oberlin, Ohio, gift of Ruth Ruosh; Barnett newman, Chronology of Work, 1990-92, acrylic and vinyl on canvas, 96x180", FRAC Bretagne;Lying 1, 2000, acrylic and silkscreen on canvas, 79x115"; Endangered Species 2, 2004, acrylic, silkscreen and enamel on canvas, 84x108"; From My Memory, 2007, vinyl, acrylic and oil on canvas, 42x78"; Demolish 2, 2008, acrylic, vinyl and oil on canvas, 24x24".

Presentness is Grace: How Art Writing Earns Its Bad Name

2008-04-18T07:05:00.000-07:00

There is something that I’ve noticed in blog exchanges, which is not visible in the post so much as the evolving thread, and that is candor in an emerging dialogue. I am enjoying the sense of it, which to my mind is richer than any dream of consensus. In a recent blog thread, extending over the course of several days, Edward Winkleman addressed everyone: “The collective discussion here, facilitated by the technology that permits measured thoughtful responses (as opposed to verbal debate where immediate demand for response heats things up too much) amounts to as satisfying a statement about what's what in art today as any given solo impression (doomed to present only one point of view successfully) could ever present.” and that “You're proving that art writing can perhaps be seen in a vital new way.”

On this blog, a slower conversation has been emerging, at first in response to jargon, and Nicholas Knight responded that even “ordinary language philosophy” has its own burdens, writing: “...constant diligence is absolutely required, because any concept or term can be laden with baggage. And that baggage will ultimately function as the meaning itself. And at such times, the red flags should be flying around everywhere!” and to which I replied with the following from Stanley Cavell:

The first step would be to grant to philosophers the rights of language and vision Austin grants to all other men: to ask of them, in his spirit, why they should say what they say where and when they say it, and to give the full story before claiming satisfaction. That Austin pretends to know the story, to have heard it all before, is no better than his usual antagonists assumption that there is no story necessary to tell, that everything is fine and unproblematic in the tradition, that philosophers may use words as they please, possessing the right or power - denied to other mortals - of knowing, without investigating, the full significance of their words and deeds. (Cavell, "Austin at Criticism," in Must We Mean What We Say, p. 111, Cambridge, c. 1976.)

As Nicholas Knight points out, the infamous critic/art historian Michael Fried was a student of Stanley Cavell. Michael Fried and Clement Greenberg are together the bogeymen of formalist art criticism, and while people have begun to warm up to Greenberg again, I don’t see that happening in the dominant art critical discourse with regard to Fried. For example, Shamim Momim in the Whitney Biennial catalog:

Michael Fried's famous text "Art and Objecthood" (1967) is a seminal illustration of the spatio-temporal anxieties of the sixties. A denunciation of the phenomenological staging of Minimalist sculpture, Fried's frankly hostile view of the "temporal" was based on the idea that art must have purity of presence: read, timelessness. In its proper state, according to Fried, art would test only the limits of its discrete medium and, thus, retain what he called "presentness." This achievement Fried construed as a redemptive one: a moral stance that framed time as the culprit behind all of Minimalism's ills - the theatricality of the objects, the endlessness inherent in industrial production, the notion that meaning exists in the space around an object and is activated by a viewer's presence rather than held autonomously within the object itself. (Time Change, in Whitney Biennial 2008, Whitney Museum. c. 2008,p. 17)

Something has happened between the publication of Fried’s essay and the by now overdetermined dismissal of it as a 'hostile view of "the temporal" - and the red flags are up! Much of the disregard for Fried that I hear in this comes in what is regarded as the moral stance of his last line, “presentness is grace,” and its presumed claim for a certain notion of autonomy.

On the topic of art and Buddhism in the Vietnam war era, I gave a lecture to an audience that I knew would include practicing Buddhists, and described to them what I understood of Fried, who to my knowledge has absolutely nothing to do with Buddhism. It was an interesting exercise in that in order to speak to a very specific audience that had little knowledge of art history I had to jog Fried out of the habits of my own art historical writing. This is what I came up with:

From what I can tell, Michael Fried believes very strongly in convention as the necessary means by which we face one another as human beings. Forms, such as languages, are the containers that make intimate candor possible. One might say that the container can brim over in presentness, as in the deep heartfelt bow of one zen practitioner to another, or it can appear hollow, as in a disingenuous bow. In the first, the distinction between being is and being as is held in such a tense relation that the absolute (presentness) and the relative (in this bow) are indistinct the one from the other. In the second, the ego has occupied the space where presentness might have arisen, and without this presentness, being as is a bloated mimicry that hauls others in its sphere, a sphere that has now become a theatrical event. In their own respect for their tradition, this audience is now expected to be complicit with an ego that has forced a divide between self and other.

Unlike other judgments upon the success or failure of a work of art, what makes Fried's judgment interesting is that the alienating divide he describes between subject and object is felt as an extorted complicity in a social situation. In cautious and qualified accord with the ballyhoo surrounding the Whitney Biennial catalog, perhaps we should say this of arts writing as well.

By Catherine Spaeth

The Tortoise and the Hare

2008-04-12T15:21:00.000-07:00

I happen to be both. With much on my plate, I'm slowing down and focusing this week - in the meantime, if you have not seen Artworld Salon, please do. Also, I've written a lovely review of Bridget Riley in the current issue of Art in America. Back in a flash!

PS: It's also a very hot week over at Edward Winkleman's blog!

Being at Ease With Difficulty

2008-04-02T21:07:00.000-07:00

I will not be an apologist for the following Whitney Biennial wall text cited by Richard Lacayo:

"Many of the projects presented in the exhibition explore fluid communication structures and systems of exchange that index larger social, political and economic contexts, often aiming to invert the more object-oriented operations of the art market. Recurring concerns involve a nuanced investigation of social, domestic and public space and its translation into form — primarly sculptural, but also photographic and cinematic."*

But I also notice that blogger culture lends itself to an anti-intellectualism that has a way of raising its heads in a gang, and that such a self-congratulating posse is not a good thing for arts writing.

The writing on this blog is quirky, making what are sometimes awkward twists and turns. I try to convey in ordinary language thoughts that are difficult to express, and know that I’m guilty of falling into a shorthand academicism or two. I can usually feel this as it happens - poorly used academicisms can snag thought and suspend it from a hook, leaving it to hang there without any opportunity to be in its own mobility. If I feel such a snag I reach for words that arise from the ignorance and generosity of description. What appear are no longer academicisms but opportunisms - repetitions and resonances that emerge from description and course through an essay with their own force. I am wary of these as well, but as opportunisms they are already sticking much more closely to the object at hand.

I also know there is such a thing as strong academic writing, and that what so many reject as pure jargon once had a purpose that was quite generative, plastic and spacious as an opening to thought, not as something owned by an insider group so much as words that belong to a very public but specific history. It does require some effort to know, and there is real danger in confusing this worthy effort with insider elitism.

Art belongs to a history of thought, in all its different aspects and manifestations. As awkward as curatorial writing might be at times, those writers do articulate something visible in the work on view. What I read in the Biennial catalog, then, is a strain in the voice that comes from a lack of ease with difficulty, and good arts writing requires that one be at ease with difficulty. This is a different problem than that of “insider talk” and has more to do with the very real difficulty of art and of thought.

“Interrogates,” “problematizes,” “references,” “transgressive,” “inverts” - these are the words that Richard Lacayo tells us to ban from arts writing. I know I have used them all in my short life, and that I no longer need them. At the same time, however, this call for censorship infuriates me. Althusser, and it is fair to say that these words belong to him more than any other, wrote that “words and concepts are needed to break with words and concepts, and often the old words are charged with the conduct of the rupture throughout the period of the search for new ones.”* It takes using words over and over again to appreciate their fullness and failure, to recognize what might become their eventual staleness, and to seek others that will describe well the rupture in thought that can only feel itself when snagged on the immobility of hooks. What Althusser would be waiting for is a new "problematic" to emerge, a fresh set of concepts to exceed and take the place of the old, not unlike a paradigm shift. Is there such a thing? Does a history of art criticism appear in this way, and are we missing out on something if it doesn't?

Catherine Spaeth

*Althusser, For Marx, Introduction, NY: Penguin Press, c. 1969, p, 36.

Photo: Jim Lambie (British, born 1964;Zobop! 2006;Vinyl tape on floor;Dimensions variable;Installation view, The Museum of Modern Art, New York, 2008.The Museum of Modern Art. Fund for the Twenty-First Century.© 2008 Jim Lambie