Letter from London: Ethic Minority
Matthew Broderick in "Election"
“There is no such thing as a moral or an immoral book. Books are well written or badly written. That is all.”
— Oscar Wilde, The Picture of Dorian Gray
“What’s the difference between morals and ethics anyway? Anyone?”
— Matthew Broderick, Election
If there’s a tipping point in the minds of those casually interested in contemporary art, it’s almost always on moral or ethical grounds. “He/she did what to a dog/sold what for a billion dollars/did what to a dead cow/did what to a crucifix??” your amazed friend asks, and suddenly all credibility is leached from the subject. You’re embarrassed; you get your coat. Later on, you blog resentfully at your friend’s apparent narrow-mindedness (and defriend him: take that!). Art’s leapfrogging of moral and ethical niceties is a Romantic hangover that once was noble and exciting – Courbet, Baudelaire, 2 Live Crew – and now reeks of ghettoized cliché. It’s the thing people don’t like about contemporary art. And the less contemporary art complies with “real world” ethical and moral structures, the less it is of the “real world.” And yet this is what we value in art (in its current late-Romantic state): its ability to discuss the things avoided in the mainstream imagination. To ask difficult questions. This is the double bind of contemporary art’s relationship with ethics. Its purported snubbing of conventional (Judeo-Christian) ethics both allows it to discuss the undiscussable and removes it from the discussion.
When Santiago Sierra created a gas chamber in Pulheim, Germany, in 2006 – filling a synagogue with exhaust fumes from six parked cars, accessible only for five minutes to visitors wearing gas masks – he whipped up a predictable furore. That most critics of the work (including me) never experienced the work doesn’t really matter: that it raised ethical questions does. This is the unfortunate situation contemporary art gets itself into when tackling sensitive ethical or moral issues: the media storm generated by the work is the work, and the original piece itself is drowned out by the buzz of voices. Art of this kind negates its own irrefutable trump card, its visual singularity. The problem is that visual art’s status as chief cultural question-raiser has been gradually usurped, not just by other more immediate cultural products, like cinema or TV (Inglourious Basterds treats the commercialization of the Holocaust in a far more successful – read, “widely seen” and “aesthetically enjoyable” – way), but by the multiplicity of dissenting voices made possible by the advent of the Internet. Why bother jetting in an internationally recognized artist at spectacular fiscal and environmental cost to raise ethical questions when you can do so yourself, sitting at home, with Doritos crumbs all down your shirt?
Letter from London: To The Manner Born
Bronzino: Random!
It’s good, useless fun to pre-emptively define the times you live in. Nicholas Bourriaud’s confusingly limned term “Altermodern,” used to define works in last year’s Tate Triennial and, by extension, contemporary society as a whole, dropped out of parlance as soon as we got used to its pronunciation. Charles Saatchi’s 1999 show, New Neurotic Realism – a compendium of mainly loose-limbed realist painting, including Cecily Brown, Martin Moloney, and Dexter Dalwood – was an unsuccessful attempt at drawing the line under the YBAs. Even Rauschenberg’s and Johns’s “Neo-Dada” back in the late-50s had a lame-duck ring about it. It’s not only our era that has found its unique identity nigh-impossible to define, although the teeth-grinding muddling over “aughts” and “aughties,” “naughts” and “naughties” is perhaps the one thing that is definitively of our time: an anxiety over what our era is actually defined by. (Imagine a “naughts” or “naughties” theme party – well, you won’t have to for long – and you get the picture). Art writers suffer from pre-emptive epochal-definition disorder almost as much as music writers do (remember the New Wave of New Wave? No?), but something particular has entered the argument recently — an attempt to define today’s art in reference to the art of the past, in particular, to the art of Mannerism.
Mannerism is the only pre-Impressionist “movement” that’s meant as an insult. Loosely defined as the stretch of time between the summit of the High Renaissance and the beginnings of the Baroque in the late 1500s, it describes an art of high style (“maniera,” in Italian) and convoluted reference best exemplified in the paintings of Pontormo, Bronzino, and Parmigianino, the sculptures of Giambologna and Cellini, and the buildings of Michaelangelo and Giulio Romano. Its origins as a term are contested, but it seems to have first been used in the modern sense by 17th century theorist Gianpietro Bellori. As John Shearman summarizes it, for Bellori, mannerism “was an ideal born in the artist’s fantasy and based not upon reality but upon pratica: stylistic convention and technical expertise.” A Mannerist audience might bust a gut at Romano’s wonky architraves at the Palazzo del Te, or titter and blush at Bronzino’s filthy Venus and Cupid, or fawn admiringly over Cellini’s camp-as-Christmas salt cellar. It’s an art aimed squarely at Renaissance cognoscenti, full of winking allusion and pictorial trickery. Picture a cross between Raphael and David Copperfield and you’ve more or less got it.
Letter from London: Chris Ofili, A Mixtape
Making mixtapes is one of life’s great non-transferable skills; its lack of import in a pragmatic sense is inversely proportional to the amount of time and effort it requires (rewinding, pausing, forwarding, finding the exact moment the fade-out stops, designing the case – not too glib, not too earnest – and gouging out the square flaps at the top of the tape with a biro nib, so its permanence, and the permanence of the tape-maker’s affections in the mind of the listener, is assured). Mixtapes are tiny monuments of personal authority carried out by those usually lacking it in every other sphere. (It’s got to be a cassette, too: none of this CD business, skipping along at will and missing the carefully calibrated theme — usually a guarded and self-deprecatory expression of adoration for the listener.) I’ve often wondered where those specific and hard-won skills end up, whether they’re transmuted into filing techniques or the arrangement of ties in a wardrobe, or if they dwindle and diminish like an evolutionary cul-de-sac.
It seems increasingly obvious, though, that the mixtape maker’s most evident successor is the curator of works of art. Skip a room or walk through in the wrong order and you’re in danger of missing the theme entirely, and the curators will slam their bedroom doors and crank up The Cure so loud you can’t hear them cry. Admire one of the works and they’ll hum with misappropriated pride.
The new Chris Ofili mid-career retrospective at Tate Britain feels like walking through a mixtape of semi-obscure black American music from the last 50 years, created by a middle-aged record shop owner with an encyclopedic knowledge of musical history and a body odor problem. Arranged in a reverent chronology of the artist’s work – despite sidestepping his hilarious caganer-style defecating Rastafarian sculptures from a few years back – the show not only reveals Ofili’s indebtedness to musical history as a resource, but shows how deeply he’s absorbed it, providing visual equivalence for all manner of forms and themes in the musical past. In the interests of elucidation, then, and to provide to amateur mixtape-makers with a set of guidelines in producing their own audio tour of the show, I have put together a rough soundtrack according to the different phases of the artist’s career. Please pay attention.
David Hammons, "Bliz-aard Ball Sale" (1983)
The first room of the exhibition shows Ofili’s early, heavily David Hammons-inspired work (where are the Hammons retrospectives, by the way, Triple Candie Xerox show notwithstanding?), which introduces principle themes the artist returns to, like a tongue to a bad tooth. Shithead – a ball of dried elephant dung from Whipsnade Zoo, with human teeth and the artist’s trimmed dreads set into it – introduces (via its evident ape-ing of then-established Hammons tropes) Ofili’s major ongoing interest in the mutual attrition of the spiritual and the profane. The Rastafarian reference (Ofili was raised Catholic to Nigerian parents in Manchester, and wore dreadlocks as a student) is as lightly held as any other in the first phase of Ofili’s work. It is preoccupied with the collision of visual information, both laterally (information spreads in clusters across the large canvases, propped against the wall) and in the geological layers of their surfaces (glitter, resin, paint, collage; the material descriptions of the wall labels read like an inventory of Elton John’s costume cupboard). The spacey intricacies of these early works – Spaceshit, Popcorn Tits, and the William Blake-referencing 7 Bitches Tossing Their Pussies Before the Divine Dung – recall magic eye posters of the early nineties as much as their purported origin in African cave painting and Aboriginal Australian art. Their intergalactic obsessions, and fascination with scatology and wild sensuality, finds appropriate sonic form in George Clinton’s varied musical oeuvre, and for this room, the show’s first, the track is Funkadelic’s “Promentalshitbackwashpsychosis Enema Squad (The Doodoo Chasers).”
Letter from London: Avatarnation!
Paul Gauguin, "Pandora" (1892)
What was it like before the internet was invented? Can you remember? Where did all that pent-up aggression go before you were able to express your rage with the world via the medium of the comments thread underneath a video of a cat falling into a pond? Were we all walking around corking a volcano of white-hot fury, clenching and unclenching our fists, unable even to lol or rofl to let off much-needed steam? And what about all those knee and cushion and peanut butter fetishists, trapped in loveless marriages, unable to voice their darkest passions in the anonymity of the chatroom?
The triumphant rise of the lonely voice of boiling frustration and melancholy has transformed the way we interact with culture these days, which brings us on to Avatar, James Cameron’s big, loud, colourful, enjoyable, silly 3D film about magical blue cat-men who live in a neon jungle planet. In it, a soldier in a wheelchair gets to hop and skip with the big blue aliens via a lookalike avatar while his ‘real’ body is passive and immobile, in a brilliant bit of self-reference that has made the film wildly successful among its passive and immobile audiences, perhaps disturbingly so. CNN quotes a blogger named Mike, whose comments on one of many discussion forums for the film characterize what appears to be a widespread phenomenon:
Ever since I went to see Avatar I have been depressed. Watching the wonderful world of Pandora [the neon jungle planet] and all the Na’vi [the magical blue cat-men] made me want to be one of them. I can’t stop thinking about all the things that happened in the film and all of the tears and shivers I got from it. I even contemplate suicide thinking that if I do it I will be rebirthed in a world similar to Pandora.
Another poster, who wisely opts for a psedonym (“Eltu”), comments:
When I woke up this morning after watching Avatar for the first time yesterday, the world seemed … gray. It was like my whole life, everything I’ve done and worked for, lost its meaning. It just seems so … meaningless. I still don’t really see any reason to keep … doing things at all. I live in a dying world.
Evidently for Mike and “Eltu,” the experience of seeing the film unlocked a more profound psychological disquiet that would be insensitive to diagnose. But haven’t we all had similar, if less dramatic, reactions when reaching the end credits of a film we’ve invested in emotionally (for me, it’s Tremors every time)? Who wasn’t depressed when they realized R2D2 wasn’t real? Or elated that the Ewoks weren’t? That’s the nature of art’s power to move (that it’s ephemeral) and the reaction evidence of the possession of a soul. And it might be suggested that the presence of a forum to voice their despair led these writers to exaggerate their angst in a perfect illustration of Godwin’s Law (thanks, Joel). However, the reactions and the extraordinary popularity of the film as cultural phenomenon (buoyed by the proliferation of self-styled “Avatards,” obsessive fans that paint their heads blue and see the film again and again, in alarming echo of Tobias Funke) speaks to a human delight in illusion that’s been a staple of art and its reception for hundreds of years.
Letter from London: Memento Mori
Emily Prince, detail from "American Servicemen and Women Who Have Died in Iraq and Afghanistan..." (from 2004, ongoing)
The numbers kept coming up in the daily reports. Five here, fourteen there, one day after another. And then the growing figure mounting over a thousand. Peripherally it was ever-present, but still only an abstraction. (Emily Prince)
Abstract art is the gift that keeps on giving. Just when serialism felt stretched to snapping point, along came Felix Gonzalez-Torres to re-jig the strategy in his endless stacks of stealable prints, infusing the tradition with a sad generosity. Monochrome painting looked to have painted itself into a corner, until Robert Ryman whipped it into shape, sergeant-major style. Geometric minimalism seemed spent before Eva Hesse replayed it in flaccid fiberglass. As in the Cubist bric-a-brac of the teens, these quasi-satirical take-offs proved the unexpected strength of the chosen medium by showing its capacity to accept transformation. Painting does this all the time. So too with Emily Prince’s new installation at the Saatchi Gallery, which co-opts hoary old modernist plots to create a new kind of anti-memorial, a multifarious monument of strange beauty and quixotic ambition.
Prince’s installation, which was featured in a slightly different form in the 2007 Venice Biennale, consists of thousands of portrait drawings on small (about the size of a cassette tape) rectangular pieces of brown, pink, and pale yellow paper, pinned to the wall according to a pencilled-on grid. You scan the images, pulled in by their tininess. Each drawing has its own legend, written in tiny cursive script: name, date, and place of birth and death, sometimes a character description. “He had wanted to enlist from the time he was 15.” “She was determined in everything she did in her life.” The installation is called American Servicemen and Women Who Have Died in Iraq and Afghanistan (But Not Including the Wounded, Nor the Iraqis, Nor the Afghans). There are 5,218 drawings to date, arranged, in this case, in chronological order of death. The grid has vacancies. Prince will continue to make the drawings in an endless edition until both conflicts cease, in a promise she might be regretting a bit.
Prince has explained (a little confusingly) her reasons for excluding the native dead – “I am an American. This is the material I’m allowed to work with” – but there’s something just a little bit McSweeney’s about that title, isn’t there, with its faux-naïve breathless tongue-tangling. This, I think, is Prince’s problem: how to square the earnestness of a straight-up archiving project – there’s a box of files displayed nearby, showing the cards filed away according to the subjects’ home state – with a kind of knowingness in the conveyance. From the press release:
…this ongoing memorial project brings attention to the human cost of war, turning statistics back into portraits of real lives sacrificed on the field.
And yet it’s the fact that they aren’t portraits – that they are, in a sense, abstractions, inevitably drawn from official photography – that lends the drawings their weird, distanced power. Drawn in “the skinniest, hardest lead I can find,” they’re based, for the most part, on headshots used for official purposes. Each sheet of paper apparently corresponds to its subject’s skin tone, although only in a pretty schematic way: there’s only one kind of dark brown, for example, and only a couple of different pinks, which somewhat defeats any claims for individualized portraiture implied in the press kit. Clearly, the installation owes a lot – might even be seen as an homage to – Byron Kim’s Synecdoche (recently acquired by the National Gallery of Art in Washington, and discussed by Tyler Green in greater depth here), a wall of individual paintings reflecting a range of human skin tones, a somewhat heavy-handed spin on color-chart paintings by Gerhardt Richter and Ellsworth Kelly. Like Kim’s installation, Prince’s work might well be (pace Green) “not an important work of art” (there’s a can of worms for you), but may serve to “engage the most prominent American philosophical conversations.” For a British audience, the lack of dead native servicemen and women is an omission more poignant for its absence, bringing to mind Steve McQueen’s still-unrealized postage stamp project, Queen and Country, featuring photographs of dead British soldiers. (The petition, organized by The Art Fund, is growing in support and can be read about here; I wrote about this project for Art21 here).
Letter from London: Scrooged
Shirazeh Houshiary's 1993 Tate Christmas Tree
Tate Britain has just unveiled its 22nd annual Christmas Tree, designed, as usual, by a contemporary British artist. The Christmas Tree tradition at the Tate started in 1988 with Bill Woodrow’s cardboard box decorations, and has retained its position of locus for skepticism ever since. Michael Landy’s infamous tree – dumped in a bright-red bin amongst crushed beer cans and discarded packaging – looked, in 1997 (the year of Sensation at the Royal Academy), like a final, sarcastic postscript to an annus horribilis for the bastions of traditional art. The current tree, by Tacita Dean, uses a pine tree hung with beeswax candles, lit at 4pm as the sun sets, which burn out by 6, when the gallery closes. It looks like a normal Christmas tree, in other words—a “delightful, almost magical sight,” according to Martin Gayford at Bloomberg. There’s no mistaking the undertone of relief in his words.
What’s changed? Minor though the tree might seem, both institutionally (it’s generally seen as a bit of seasonal frippery on the part of the Tate) and artistically (it’s often an opportunity for artists to do a bit of festive self-mockery), there’s something here of a piece with the choice of Richard Wright as this year’s Turner Prize winner: a shift of institutional focus, maybe. Positioned in the hexagonal entrance hall in Tate Britain, a kind of public hub where exhibition tickets are purchased and directions sought, the Christmas tree is a tone-setter. Dean’s tree acts as a kind of preface, pointing into quietness rather than the sometimes predictable brashness of earlier years. Praising the tree in The Guardian, Jonathan Jones describes Dean’s work as “effortlessly going against any fashion you can think of.” I’m not sure that Dean’s elegiac analogue works (which I’m a fan of) are really so different from works by artists of a similar bent, like Rodney Graham or Rosalind Nashashibi, but never mind. Jones correctly identifies a change of tack, at least in terms of the Tate’s patronage of contemporary art.
That sense of relief – that contemporary British artists had finally “settled down,” that the Tate had stopped being silly, like a 4-year-old falling asleep after a sugar rush – characterized the coverage of the Turner Prize this year. “Publicity-grabbing stunts are refreshingly absent,” claimed Ben Hoyle in The Times, forgetting that any such “publicity stunts” are overwhelmingly orchestrated outside of the shortlist by feeble self-styled mavericks the Stuckists, hopped up on the gleeful idiocy of the tabloid press. “This year’s nominees,” Hoyle continues, “all paint, draw, or make objects that are recognisably works of art.” In actual fact, this year’s shortlist no more or less troubles the definition of art than any previous one has – apart from its continued snubbing of women artists as winners, of course. There have been only three female winners since 1984, an extraordinary situation rarely mentioned in coverage of the prize. Maybe they don’t notice.
Letter from London: Who Gets To Call It Art?
The Contemporary Art World, yesterday
It is possible to read the Court’s opinion … in a variety of ways. In saying this, I imply no criticism of the Court, which in those cases was faced with the task of trying to define what may be indefinable … I shall not today attempt further to define the kinds of material I understand to be embraced within that shorthand description; and perhaps I could never succeed in intelligibly doing so. But I know it when I see it.
— Justice Potter Stewart, Jacobellis vs Ohio, 1964
What does contemporary art look like? What a ridiculous question! It doesn’t look like anything, does it? No one in their right minds would want to begin to map out a common style across the thousands of different approaches littering the white floors and gray walls of contemporary art galleries all over the world. There have been attempts to bracket artists together, notably by Jerry Saltz in a lovely unprintable phrase that’s apparently still in style (judging by this year’s Venice Biennale), but they only ever glance at comprehensiveness. Talent contests like the Turner Prize begin to look like meaningless conflations of the Oscars, the Pulitzer, and the Nobel. Future students of art history on a tight deadline may opt to avoid the obstreperous unwillingness of 21st-century art to slip into easy categories. Yet we still call it contemporary art, and we know it when we see it. Or rather: we think we know it when we don’t.
The Contemporary Art World, this morning
Take, for example, the latest occupant of the empty plinth in Trafalgar Square. On October 14, the 2,400th and final participant in Antony Gormley’s wildly popular One and Other project left the plinth, to be replaced by a large, figure-like shape wrapped in blue plastic in homage to the late Jeanne-Claude. Unwrapped, the sculpture underneath was revealed to be a 6-meter tall figurative sculpture of Battle of Britain hero Sir Keith Park in tawny, bronze-effect fiberglass. Dressed in Royal Flying Corps goggles and lifejacket, the figure looks up to the sky and waggles on a glove in readiness. The sculpture, by Leslie Johnson, is a result of vituperative campaigning from the Sir Keith Park Memorial Campaign, and has drawn perhaps predictable criticism from both sides of the self-imposed “divide”: the Guardian’s Jonathan Jones described it, with knowing irony, as a “fascist icon,” while Frederick Forsyth and William Packer, writing in The Times, proposed that “the statue will push back boundaries and challenge what has become the received wisdom: that traditional art forms do not command as much respect in the contemporary art world.”
Letter from London: Remember, remember…
William Wegman,"Stepmother," 1992. Color Polaroid, 24 x 20 inches. © 2005 William Wegman, courtesy the Artist.
In a recent interview in the New Yorker, artist-of-the-moment Urs Fischer said something about how art and memory work together. I can’t remember the exact quote. It was something about the experience of art not being confined to the present-tense experience of being in a gallery, looking at a thing. Part of art’s test is in its retention in the mind, how it returns and why: The Physical Possibility of Art in the Mind of Someone Living, maybe. Since reading that, I have been attempting to reconstitute recently-seen works of art in my head (try it! it’s fun) and found that I can only properly recall – as in, can mentally reconstruct pretty accurately, could maybe draw — five works at most from the John Baldessari show at Tate Modern (all of those in the first three rooms), ten at the most from the Ed Ruscha show at the Hayward (all of those in the last two rooms), and one from the Damien Hirst show at the Wallace Collection (just before I considered hurling myself down their marble staircase).
Looking even further back this year, the things that have stubbornly refused to shift are a bit of a mixed bag: Roni Horn’s gold sheets for Felix Gonzales-Torres at Tate Modern (the sun in a certain place, so a honeyish glow lit up the floorboards), a Fred Sandback rope piece at the Hayward, stanchioned off with more rope (which I did an “art laugh” at: “pfffnf”), Charles Ray’s boy with frog in Venice, and his (Charles Ray’s) wobbling wire at Frieze. It’s a similar activity to trying to remember parts of a novel you read, even after you’ve just read it: I can’t remember most of Anna Karenina, for example, except for a line about fish (which is my favorite part of any novel, but it’s still a throwaway line in a 600-page behemoth).
Leo Tolstoy (fish not pictured)
Why these things have stuck and others haven’t is really down to the quality of experience, which is made up of a myriad of infinitesimal contributing factors, congruence of mood and temperature and well-being, and abeyance of hunger or tiredness or boredom, who you’re with and whether they owe you money or vice-versa. What these questions probably lead to, apart from several psychology dissertations, is one of the significant questions for educators working with art (especially with contemporary art) – well, for anyone, really: what’s the quality of our experiences with art, and how can these be improved, given so many of them slip out of mind?
The question at the heart of this is maybe: do we need to see original art to have a chance of getting it? Not always. In personal experience, I’ve taught distance learning classes to students via video link-up using color reproductions of works of art that have been as successful (in terms of quality of conversation and active participation of students) as anything done in front of original works of art. It’s preferable that students access original works of art directly, of course, especially when dealing with pre-twentieth century works, where the notion of reproduction (excluding prints and drawings) isn’t implied or understood in the work itself. Although, again, the quality of the experience is the main thing and can often be had via a reproduction, too.
Letter from London: Outside-In
William Scott self-portrait (courtesy of Creative Growth)
How many artists are there in the world right now? Let’s be honest. No matter how globalized we’re constantly being reminded the art world is – in symposia, biennales, lists of powerful people, and the perennial curatorial job description as”‘working between Berlin, LA and Sao Paolo” (pithily pointed out in Hyperallergic) – the contemporary art world barely represents a fraction of artists actually working right now. The art world is a world, not the world, and so it’s perhaps ironic that the institution currently most actively and successfully articulating that idea has sprung up alongside the festivities and venalities of the Frieze Art Fair: the Museum of Everything, a temporary exhibition space in north London, established to display “outsider art” (according to the Museum, “the untrained, unintentional and unseen”).
There are many miraculous things about the Museum of Everything, one of which is its location, right in the heart of the very posh and celebrified Primrose Hill. A huge, semi-dilapidated space that’s been both a dairy and a recording studio, it’s a series of small, scruffy rooms and one huge one, in cracked concrete and rusted beams, which is much less of a cynical presentation style for outsider art than it sounds. The perennial problem of outsider art – apart from its roll call of artists, which includes Henry Darger, Bill Traylor, and Martin Ramirez but not, say, Henri Rousseau or Vincent Van Gogh, despite their very evident fulfillment of “outsider” criteria – is that of presentation. Is a clean, white, sterile gallery space appropriate? Probably not, given its similarity to a mental institution. But a studiedly “mad” and shambolic location is pretty patronizing, too. The Museum of Everything has hedged its bets, and it’s probably as good as it can be — eccentric to a point, but careful and thoughtful above all. The collection, amassed by filmmaker James Brett, has no precedent in UK museums; there’s no outsider art in the Tate Modern collection (or at least none displayed), and the nearest dedicated museum space is in the Irish Museum of Modern Art in Dublin. The absence is puzzling, given the rich tradition of eccentricity in the work of William Blake, say, or the amazing Richard Dadd. Jeremy Deller and Alan Kane’s Folk Archive, shown in the Barbican several years ago, came close, but there’s still no UK equivalent to the American Folk Art Museum in New York. Brett’s museum points towards the articulation of voices left out from mainstream British museum collections, although its permanence is somewhat in question (“if people come, we’ll stay open”).
It’s a collection of amazing quality. Despite no Ramirez, Wolfli or Hundertwasser, there’s a suite of staggering Henry Darger drawings and Bill Traylor paintings as good as any in US collections. Darger’s work continually eludes reductive analysis. His 15,000 page illustrated novel, The Story of the Vivian Girls, prefigures so many contemporary artists’ work, from Jeff Koons to Peter Doig to Marcel Dzama, that it’s sometimes difficult to imagine him working entirely guilelessly. Yet Darger did, working on his vast manuscript and several others entirely in private; this is, as Peter Schjeldahl pointed out, “a culture of one.” And those seeking psychoanalytical rebuses in Darger’s skipping, panicky prepubescent girls would do well to address the works themselves, which are stranger and more resistant to join-the-dots analysis than the biography might suggest.
Brett’s collection also features significant works by artists fostered through Creative Growth in Oakland, California. In a talk by Creative Growth director Tom di Maria and White Columns director Matthew Higgs during Frieze, the work of this nurturing organization – and its roots in radical politics – was discussed. Established over 35 years ago to provide studio and exhibition space, as well as tuition and support for local artists with disabilities, Creative Growth is (in Higgs’ words) “the most important cultural institution of our time.” Higgs has shown a number of Creative Growth artists at White Columns in New York, including the bound objects of Judith Scott. Scott’s works – bulbous, hanging forms, like internal organs or musical instruments, tightly bound in coloured threads – seem unwilling to be described as sculpture. Although artistic kinship can be found in the work of Franz West or Louise Bourgeois, the fact that Scott, who died in 2005, was a deaf woman with Down’s Syndrome who came to art making late in life via Creative Growth, transforms the viewer’s experience. So complete and insistent is Scott’s work that it renders artistic parallels somewhat futile, and comparable artists mannered.
That earnest intensity makes many outsider works both compelling and disturbing. Given that this is work made in “a culture of one,” what’s the role of the viewer here? One can feel complicit in a kind of voyeuristic, sometimes prurient fascination with the lives of the unwittingly and unintentionally excluded. It’s easy to find oneself convulsed in art world guilt over these works, but it’s disingenuous to self-flagellate over the sensation of reading the diaries of madmen. If the works’ communication is only with themselves (which is perhaps the abiding connection between artists whose work is as hugely diverse as the many thousands of nuanced “conditions” they labored under), then the viewer is experiencing a kind of pure blast of creativity unfettered by the heavy breathing of institutional requirements or conventions.
Art is made everywhere, all the time. Another Creative Growth artist, William Scott (no relation to either Judith or the British abstract painter), is shown in the Museum of Everything in some depth. His paintings act as a kind of surrogate social life denied to the artist himself. He appears as “The Tolerant Popular Guy” in a number of self-portraits, and shows himself as a high school basketball star, a besuited prom attendee, a successful police officer, a happy husband. His meticulous pencil drawings show maps of towns he’d inhabit in a “normal” life; he makes paintings of a utopian future San Francisco, ruled over by beaming, voluptuous female bureaucrats. Scott’s disabilities mean that he has had to fictionalize a conventionally successful life; the basketball portrait is emblazoned with the phrase, “Reinvent The Past.” Given that so many of the artists we’d conventionally classify as “outsiders” so successfully, and so variously, fulfill the criteria we should be demanding from artists of our time – command of materials, breadth of imagination, frank and unflinching assessment of the world around them – is it time to start thinking outside-in – and inside-out?
Letter from London: Frieze! Rock!
The Frieze Art Fair, like other kinds of trade fair, isn’t really designed for those outside of the trade it exists to buffer; it’s a bonus if you end up seeing things you like. The organizers’ great trick is to make a trade fair the hub of a weekend of frenetic cultural activity, with big-name museum retrospectives at Tate Modern, the Hayward, and the Serpentine strongarmed into a subsidiary role. Picture an agricultural show or office furniture exposition taking such a commanding presence in the wider culture and you get a sense of the strangeness of the way we experience art now (plus the fact that members of the public paid upwards of £20 to get in). To leaven the outright commercialism of the fair itself, there are the much-vaunted “fringe” events: Club Nutz, a recreation of “the world’s smallest comedy club” in Milwaukee, the SUPERFLEX collective’s series of short films about the financial crisis, experimental/spoken word radio station Resonance FM’s temporary lodgings in the midst of the fair, and Jordan Wolfson’s theoretical physicists discussing string theory at various strategic locations. For all their whimsical appeal, visitors can’t help but sense the sugaring of pills, even while nodding insiderishly at Club Nutz’s techno set played backwards, which sounded like Robocop having a migraine.
Strategically released rumors had it that gallerists were quietly confident about sales, perhaps since many plumped for sure-fire market winners. Current Turbine Hall occupant Miroslaw Balka’s rust-encrusted bric-a-brac popped up several times, as did Emin’s neon scrawls and wall-sized Gilbert and Georges. A lobby-sized Tuymans faced off against a lobby-sized Polke, as if daring collectors to make a choice. Thankfully, not all galleries played it entirely safe. Charles Ray’s hypnotic Moving Wire (1988) at Matthew Marks – aluminium wires slowly protruding from a hole in the wall, quivering under their own weight, then retracting turtleishly back – insisted on a quiet absorption impossible not to give. Jack Strange’s display of MacBooks at Limoncello, each belonging to a different friend of the artist, showed random flippings through their subjects’ iPhoto and iTunes collections, in what was ostensibly a kind of contemporary portraiture but ended up good voyeuristic fun. Art21’s very own Ida Applebroog showed a suite of scary and lush new paintings at Hauser and Wirth alongside a lovely, zinging Mary Heilmann called Some Pretty Colours. Sadly the Heilmann was drowned out by a pair of dirty socks; dumped on the floor in front of the painting, they’re a work by Christoph Buchel. Apparently they reached their asking price of $30,000, lending credence to the truism that a good sign in the art world is literally a sign of insanity in the real one.
Even in a comparatively sober year, Frieze has a carnivalesque brashness about it, and it’s interesting that the major museum shows (of which more next time) that have coincided with the fair’s brief dominance take up the circumspection that is touched upon, if briefly, in the fair itself. At Tate Modern, Miroslaw Balka’s installation in the Turbine Hall – a vast metal room on stilts, accessible by a walkway, whose interior is entirely, pitilessly black, entitled, with weird post-Jacksonian resonance, How It Is – must have been an extraordinarily enveloping experience when first encountered (in other words, in its embryonic press-view state). Sadly, its location sets up certain expectations (light-heartedness, accessibility, interactivity) established by earlier occupants of the site, and the clanging of feet on the metal floor, and the hovering blue squares of mobile phone screens, make it feel like The Buchenwald Experience.
If you’re an artist installing works in an existing museum building, you can either accept the limitations of the space and the collection, or – if you’re Damien Hirst – you can rehang entire galleries in stripy linen to show your latest works to maximum effect. His latest show, entitled, with a characteristic blend of pomposity and unwitting irony, No Love Lost, is a display of paintings made (and this has been used as a selling point, astonishingly) entirely by himself. That they’re weak ’50s Bacon rip-offs knocked out with breathtaking ineptitude is not really the point. The point is that Hirst has been able to wangle decent gallery space inside the Wallace Collection, in the historical collection’s first ever show by a living artist. It’s another example of historical collections’ craven and weak-kneed approach to contemporary art. With an eye on one of Hirst’s gloopy, gloomy skull paintings, you can look through to a Poussin. Guess who looks more conservative, small-souled, and joyless? Go on, guess.
