Rough Trade Art

Theoretical Disengagement - Series

2007-11-07T14:41:00.000-05:00

These blogs originally appeared at Henri Art Magazine. They are a discussion of the issues facing art in the early 21th Century. Rough Trade is determined to confront Postmodern issues and bring those ideas to the forefront of art discussion. We believe that painting, particularly abstract painting, is due to find a new vision and we present a few artists that we believe will move these new visions forward. As David Hockney said in Secret Knowledge, "Exciting Times Lie Ahead!"

Theoretical Disengagement Part VII

2007-11-07T14:39:00.000-05:00

In this series of blogs we've shown how Postmodernism has changed the structures of art - how it's conceived, how it's produced, how it's marketed and how it's fundamentally changed the definition of an artist. In this final installment we will discuss a new type of artist growing out of the end of Postmodernism.

...better to ask forgiveness than permission...

The problem with a new thing is that we don't quite understand what to look for or what we're looking at and so we miss it. It is a problem of vision. Modernism, the great unknown of the late 19th and early 20th century, beginning with the Impressionists and ending with the Abstract Expressionist, created a culture where radical visions were formed out of the challenges of accepted ones. Each ground breaking theoretical idea was part of the dismantling of the old western visual tradition and each answered the challenge to "make it new." Which meant, above all, to explore one's moment in this short life, to honor one's difference and to say what is true within oneself. Through all of these fast and violent changes in vision over the last 100 years or so, the concept of an artist had remained steady. Along with their connection to the history of art, artists were always responsibile to the concept that vision moved forward, ideas were built out of historic accomplishments and advancement came from the development of art's perceived weaknesses. To be an artist meant to find truth through one's vision, to think with sight, to understand and ruminate about the truth as it lay before one's eyes.

For artists, vision is both a verb and a noun - to see, to interpret, to understand, and more importantly, it is a description of the revelation itself. After the final success and ultimate failure of American-type abstraction, Postmoderism filled the descriptive void, changing the game, creating an auteur class - the concept of a visionary, an artist was destroyed - first through Postmodern theory, then through its practice. Fine Art Culture became endemic, tied to economics, education and entertainment. It is a billion dollar industry, driven by corporate economic systems, fueled by academic institutions and maintained by art professionals - all in the business of manufacturing and selling luxury leisure products graciously upgraded for today's contemporary tastes. And with the rise of this economic system we've seen the extinction of what used to be called the avant garde - but that is changing.

It is easy to assume a style. Especially with a lens and a computer. After that all you need is a technician to produce it - to give the product that handmade, one-of-a-kind sheen, 5 to a series - a reproduced original. Art is, today, all about the manufacturing of luxury goods. In fact most all of the arts are now subject to reproduction, because most all of art production is designed through programming. Series of cibachromes, series of sculptures, series of DVDs - the idea of the one-off does no one any good in a market driven world. Andy said it best - everyone gets the same Coke. The unique product is too unstable, is too uneven, too unknown, and therefore too risky as a business proposition - it may fail to sell to enough collectors to be economically viable for those who sell and those who invest. Andy became a machine, and once his machine patent was out in the public domain lots of little machines got built fast. The industry of machines are clicking, whirring and humming along as you are reading this, creating art products left and right, employing hordes of assistants, technicians, bankers, lawyers, shipping agents, clerks, salesmen, gallerists, bloggers, websites, professors, students, art supply stores, and well, the list is endless....Autuers direct the product, provide the name recognition and live as celebrities in our small world. They pick and choose, direct and manage, but rarely actually create. How do we know this is true? Because there has been no real stylistic change or theoretical challenge to visual art in the last 40 years, just a plethora of personality driven product. 40 Years at least - 2 generations. (It may be more - you can trace this back to the Surrealists - but that is pushing a point.)

So what are we talking about?
I have seen the promise of a few 21st Century artists' work. It shows up occassionally for a bright moment and then falls away just as quickly. A recent example was Chris Ofili's show at Zwirner (which we have written about.) He pushed himself in an old way, and came up with a new idea for his work. He wasn't making product, but trying to push his vision, his style to a different level. There was risk on the wall and you could feel it if you looked for it. The show blipped on our screens because of who he is and his history with the press - but once that personality excitement came and went the work of the show disappeared. For the most part the show was written about like all the other product, but some of us saw the difference of Matisse in the work, and we took note. Here was someone struggling to understand what was on offer, what remained in the challenge left us by the master - and he put it out there for all to see. Chris fought well. His vision sharpened - he found expansiveness, but he didn't win - he's not strong enough just now. Still an artist strives to find style. There are others as well, but they come in small bits and pieces to the public. These shows usually get overlooked, because most who go to galleries don't know the history of what they're looking at - they know the narrative of the press release, sure, but they don't know what's at stake. For them art started with Warhol and flowered with Koons and Hirst. What they know about history is served up in auction catalogue descriptions, executive summaries prepared in gallery borchures, or what is blurbed about in a feel good essay written by an academic critic for an autuer's show catalogue. What's at stake for artists is HUGE, and yet Postmodernism continues to foster and manufacture this endless solipsism.

"...overripe bits of rough trade, with yearning mouths and hair like black ice cream." Robert Hughes' description of Caravaggio

Artists inherit their time. It is what's given to them to make sense of. They live as all humans have lived - against and within the time they inherit. Matisse and Picasso existed through 2 world wars and a world wide economic collapse. They spent their times developing a visual memory of that epic. Occassionally they looked to the past for help, for inspiration, for sustenance, but they never expected that past to express their unique moment. Humans live as they always have - if you'll forgive - with Eros and Thanatos - the urge to Life and the urge to Death. It's simple enough. You live, and it's up to you to pack as much life as you can in that time - you're going to die - and even though you may be young and healthy - death can come at any moment. For artists this underscores their urge to create, to put their memories, their life, into their work. Matisse found the need for joy and fullness, color and form - women, women, women! Picasso wanted power and strength and physicality and flesh - women, women, women! Both had an urge for life and an urge to build their memories, to fill their lives with the images of their time and existence, and to recreate that memory, those images, those fleeting moments in the minds of others.

Matisse sat in his home surrounded by as much comfort as he could afford - large cages of birds singing, flowers, patterned fabrics, overstuffed chairs and naked women, Ingres' promise of Odalisques made real in his life. And what emerged was a body of work celebrating that promise. Picasso chased greatness and power - pushed his way into the vangarde - packed his mind with images of speed, form and light and remade the Western Visual Tradition in his own flesh. His work defined how we see form and physicality in the 20th Century. Their achievement was at an apex of culture - a time that had been made ready for change by fantastic artists pushing forward to new visions.

But what of those artists that inherit a "virgin" time - a time that has no supporting precedent for what their vision can bring? What happens to those who are the first innovators, those that must clear the fields, clear the land - those who see something different in the system they inherit - the first artists rather than the grand ones? Giotto, Bellini, Donatello, Tintoretto, Caravaggio, Delacroix, Manet, Cezanne, Gorky - Are they any less for being the first to take in hand a new expression, for opening the door for others to walk through, for risking acceptance and giving permission to those who follow - Phillips before Alexanders? Would we have recognized their innovation if we had been part of their time or would it have slipped by unnoticed? Would we have just seen crazy fuckers working hard on wacky projects? What is happening at this cultural moment is something similar to what art has seen in the past. Artists are starting to make good on the promise of avant garde art. Occasionally we see them wresting the future from the decadent mannerist art world we've inherited.

What we are talking about is the LIFE of art. Art that comes from one's existence, and is witnessed not through lenses, not through reproductions, not made by teams of professionals, but up close, in the flesh, real and breathing in front of YOUR eyes. What is it like to be alive at this point in time - how do we SEE, how do we remember, how do we express? Hell, we understand that we are digitized, blackberryed, uploaded and programmed, but when you take your lover in your arms - what is it to be alive at that moment? How do we see joy, life, pain, death - what is the VISION of our lives? What are we seeing and feeling, and how do we express it? Whether we're about pleasure or power - what is our life like in the 21st century? We want direct interpretation, we want to see through those eyes, not mediated through contextual interpretation or presented as a bought-and-paid-for product. We want the things artists experience, but even more, we want the things that artists have poured into their memories, that define experience. And because these types of artists don't ask permission, they're willing to express it in the first person and stand out of the comfortable systems on their own.

We are living through an incredible moment for human history, and America is supposedly leading the world into the future. We are experiencing climate change, war, the collapse of our democracy, the political rise of corporations, the spread of super diseases, the rise of fundamentalism, the patenting of DNA, the digitization of human existence and fuck all. Huge amazing changes are happening in quick succession and somehow the art world is fixated on the next auction, whose prices are up, or which gallery so and so is showing at. Auteurs continue to ply their POMO strategies and none of it, none of it, speaks to this time, to what it means to be human right now. Rough Trade it is then - out of the systems of comfort and through our own experiences. Here's where the new visual memories are being made. "I´ve seen things you people wouldn't believe...." Just as the great artists did "strange" things without permission in order to make new art, just as they forged a visual record of their memories and lives, a few 21st Century artist are starting to understand what's at stake, and for those that do, maybe forgiveness awaits.
Exciting Times Lie Ahead!

Theoretical Disengagement Part VI

2007-11-07T14:38:00.000-05:00

Auteur Theory is defined as “…reading and appraising films through the imprint of an auteur (author), usually meant to be the director.” The implication is that there are many forces that go into making a motion picture, and they are driven by the vision of the director. This idea of the auteur was developed to discuss the ghost in the "Hollywood" machine - it was a way to find style in the corporate mix. Auteurism, once used to describe only film directors, has been expanded by Postmodernist theorists to describe the personalities behind recognizable production styles. The idea of the auteur has been stretched to include actors who pursue a type of character or acting style, producers a type of film, writers a type of story and it’s been used ad nauseum to describe creative individuals in a slew of other professions. In addition to defining the functions of style a main contingent of auteur theory is the acknowledgment that the product is influenced and built in collaboration with a team of other auteurs. For instance, Stephen Spielberg’s visual style and look of his movies has developed over the years as he has changed his cinematographers - since the early 1990s he has collaborated with the DOP Janusz Kaminski. Though Spielberg continues to employ the same directorial tropes that defined his early career, the visual presentation has become markedly different because of the photographic sensibilities of Kaminski - who has changed the lighting, camera movement, angles, and textures of the images.

This idea of auteur collaboration can also be seen in architecture. The public ascendancy of the engineer Cecil Balmond has been instructive and difficult for the architectural attribution system. Balmond, a structural genius, is responsible for many of the technical innovations in architecture that we’ve seen over the last 20 years. His ideas of engineering have pushed the material planning and production of contemporary architects into new visual territories - creating many of the amazing architectural forms of the early 21st century.

His solutions inevitably have an enormous impact on buildings, but it’s not as if
he wants them to look like “feats of engineering.” Instead they appear so integral to each project that you can’t tell the engineering from the architecture. This brings up all sorts of authorship questions. “The whole question of influence in my view is barely relevant,” Koolhaas says. “And I would even say so is the issue of authorship.” The issue nearly got Balmond sued by a young firm he worked with in the late 1990s when it accused him of
taking too much credit for the work.

As with Balmond, true innovators cause concern when they clash with the Postmodernist corporate auteur model and its subservience to the corporate hierarchy. Auteurship when it is seen as innovation erases the conceptual limits of the production system - which can cause problems for management - especially if a personality becomes larger than the controlling system. Where does the idea of authorship begin and end within this corporate structure? Who is driving the aesthetic engine?

Let’s face it - auteurship is designed to meld nicely within the political structures of a CEO driven economic model. This prototype is based on the top down heroic creative “decider” and is essential to the institutionalization of corporate hierarchy. It can be compared to a modern-day version of an Alexandrian mythology or Arthurian Right to Rule - the leader is uplifted and supported by an army of dedicated heroes realizing the ambitions of a god-like MBA/MFA. The corporate system is designed to compartmentalize and decentralize production - research, marketing, and manufacturing - each isolated and dependent on the directed flow of the system - all of which are in place to foster a personality culture rather than a revolutionary one. The CEO becomes the synthesizing force - a boardroom Caesar, a Napoleon of desire - ensuring a top down institution with a creative force that is expendable and replaceable. What is interesting in this structure is the hierarchy of command to control, and how the corporation can then implement the creative act without any observance of distinctive personalities or their contributions of individual style.

Fukuyama’s essay in “The End of History and the Last Man” makes quite a display of Hegel in regards to the triumph of post-historical consciousness. His contention is that with the collapse of communism and the rise and dominance of corporate (my word) economics history has ceased to exist. Western economic structures now proliferate throughout the world and they tend to establish systems of control that best support these types of economic structures - in his estimation - liberal democracies and free markets. Little is actually said about human beings and their adjustment to this post-historical society except at the end of the essay…

In the post-historical period there will be neither art nor philosophy, just the
perpetual caretaking of the museum of human history. I can feel in myself, and see in others around me, a powerful nostalgia for the time when history existed. Such nostalgia, in fact, will continue to fuel competition and conflict even in the post-historical world for some time to come.

I like the phrase “caretaking of the museum of human history.” This describes the postmodern relationship to theoretics in a nutshell. Even though the POMOs make the claim that they are outside of history they are bound by it, even subservient to it - caretakers one and all. The subtext of history has become the context of art. POMOs can not move forward, can not create new forms - they can only recombine or reproduce. We see this in the art, the galleries and the museums; art that mashes past styles together or customizes previous styles, galleries that recontextualize much like the recent show of Old master’s work and contemporary painters at Zwirner and Wirth, and museums that mix and match their collections to create new “resonance” with the works. The term “parasitic” is used by Postmodernists to describe their practice - they need a host in order to feed - ultimately depleting the source and creating only waste and disease (OK that’s harsh, but I reserve the right to hit hard and mean against a bigger, uglier opponent.)

For now let’s examine the auteur’s relationship to this control model using the Hegelian Master/Slave dialectic - so often cited by POMOs -

…if one of the two should die (in the confrontation) the achievement of self-consciousness fails. Hegel refers to this failure as “abstract negation” not the negation or sublation required (for freedom). This death is avoided by the agreement, communication of, or subordination to, slavery. In this struggle the Master emerges as Master because he doesn’t fear death as much as the slave, and the slave out of this fear consents to the slavery. This experience of fear on the part of the slave is crucial, however, in a later moment of the dialectic, where it becomes the prerequisite experience for the slave’s further development…Truth of oneself as self-conscious is achieved only if both live, the recognition of the other gives each one the objective truth and self-certainty required for self-consciousness. Thus, the two enter into the relation of master/slave and preserve the recognition of each other….The master self-consciousness is dependent on the slave for recognition and also has a mediated relation with
nature; the slave works with nature and begins to shape it into products for the master. The master only has an evanescent desire/pleasure relation to things whereas the slave sees his work objectified in products. Only when slavery is abolished and there is mutual recognition will both fully achieve self-consciousness.

Using these concepts we might be right to think that the final capitulation by the auteur/slave to the CEO/master reinforces the idea of the Postmodernist as a consciousness outside of history. But unlike Hegel's hoped for move beyond subservience to a free consciousness, Postmodernism must preserve the mechanics of the dialectic. This could be the beginning of a post-creative society based on the concept of the Last Man - acceptance of corporate structure as life. The CEO/master remains in an endless state of desire micromanaging the fluctuations of his disposition - the auteur/slave works to manufacture recombinations of familiar product in order to perpetuate that desire - perfect symbiosis. It ensures that the auteur/slave never moves beyond the confines of acceptance - never breaking the dialectic. And it leaves the CEO/master to experience constant fluctuations of unfulfilled desire - never experiencing consummation - perpetuating the system. We’ve seen this dialectical endgame in the art world for the past 30 years as the Postmodern economic and theoretic structures continue to perpetuate themselves - we are deep into our third reworking of this system.

This political/economic structure finally hailed as Post-History is the basis of POMO sensibility. Postmodernism’s theoretical debasement of singular innovative consciousness, and its disbanding of an independent avant garde have resulted in a corporate art product culture driven by the recombination and marketability of a recontextualized "art historical resource." The theoretics underlying POMO is based on the mining of history instead of the production of possibility - exemplified by the emergence of the auteur class - a creative that works within the confines of a corporate structured milieu. If the auteur moves beyond the confines of recombination, institutionalism and marketability to innovation an old and dangerous idea tends to emerge - that of the artist.

We will conclude this series in Part VII…

Theoretical Disengagement Part V

2007-11-07T14:37:00.000-05:00

Galleries look for the branded artist - or an artist that can be branded. They develop an idea about who that artist is and what they do. In the corporate world of PR this is called Perception Management. These are techniques used to manage the public's knowledge of what the brand is doing. We see this stuff all the time in the media world. My favorites were all that "green" advertising that BP was doing a couple of years ago. TV advertising, billboards in Times Square, that sort of stuff all of it designed to promote one of the largest oil companies as friendly to the environment and looking to improve environmental problems for the future. They must've spent millions. It was designed to have the company appear as caring and concerned about the future of the environment and practical in their search for alternative energy. This goodguy advertising hit the air just as oil futures began their ascent to the stars. Wall Street analysts, economics experts, government committees and now Alan Greenspan have all been stating over the last couple of years that oil will hit 100 dollars a barrell, and that this amount for oil futures is still a feasible price for the non-inflationary US economy. Oil speculators have been pushing the 100 dollar price ever since the first futures speculations hit the air waves. It is now almost at 90 a barrell thanks to speculators on the commodities market driving the price up by creating artificial shortages and price spikes. The oil companies are busy coming up with further perception management advertising which will come at us in torrents, especially as profits now in the the super billions of dollars, make their way into news stories. Sorry for the aside - but it is advertising's job to provide a perception of the brand, and I just wanted to make a point.

In the artworld we have similar branding going on through business, entertainment and art media. I can point to a few easy cases like Koons, Barney and Hirst, but we will go for a lesser known artist who shows at a very connected corporate gallery.
I think this is one of the iconic pictures of the last 15 years of an artist in their studio. I wanted to visually break it down a bit. First, this story on Ms. Boesky and her new gallery space appeared in Conde Nast's new business magazine entitled Portfolio. What struck me right off in this picture that accompanied the story was that Barnaby was wearing a lab coat. I don't know about you, but I don't know too many artists that wear lab coats in their studios. So why was Barnaby wearing a lab coat that had a pen in the pocket along with something that looks like a name tag (I can't make it out in the picture) - like he would write me perscription, and enter something in my medical record? Additionally, the painting is laying on a table, as if he's unrolled plans for a presentation meeting, or he's going to present a proposal to a group of investors. In the background is the only hint as to what is happening in the studio - a still life of painting materials - which brings it back to creativity - R&D in a studio equals art. I thought this picture of the artist was at odds with the work that I had just seen at Boesky's gallery. Basically the show included a number of itchy drawing/paintings of Jesus-like figures in expressionistic backdrops - plus a room full of giant paintings with huge swaths of red paint waves. In his Saatchi online PR bit it says..."Drawing from the ultra-violence of big-screen cinema and illicit video games, Barnaby Furnas develops his own subversive cartoon world, populated by rock stars and Abe-Lincoln look-a-likes hell-bent on maniacal destruction. Barnaby Furnas uses his blood-and-guts subjects as a means to flirt with abstraction and design, entrenching his hyper-contemporary scenes in historical tradition." The incongruity of the image of the artist in Portfolio as a professional medical type and the over-the-top violent painterly iconography is a brilliant stroke of manipulative marketing genius. This image of the artist levels the images in the work. It makes the collectors feel at ease, especially if they can deal with one of their own. And what is more corporate or professional than a nicely groomed man in a lab coat? I'm not sure how much of this is staged, but it is interesting in the context of Barnaby's agressive visual images.

There are many other examples of this type of PR at work - especially in this media saturated art world. But branding an artist is part and parcel of the corporate structures that push product on us. Barnaby's work is very well made, very professional, but visually, it covers no new territory, offers no new aesthetic ideas. Nor is it particularly engaging or thought provoking. It is decorative and timely, and unfortunately, it suffers from the POMO preponderance on a bigger is better routine - especially in the giant red wave paintings. But what is very interesting is how this show and artist were marketed in Portfolio - tied to the fortunes of the gallery and part of the idea of Ms. Boesky as a tastemaker and aesthetic adventurer. Perception Management for good or ill is now part and parcel of the marketing of the artworld - artists need to confront these sort of ideas in order to push their work into new territories. I say this because the aesthetics, theoretics and economics have now become all the same thing. It is a Cerberus that keeps new ideas at bay.

Theoretical Disengagement Part IV

2007-11-07T14:36:00.000-05:00

I recently bought the book Shock Doctrine by Naomi Klein, the author of No Logo. And without finding myself seated in the lunatic fringe section I'd like to play with a few observations. It is Ms. Klein's contention that The Shock Doctrine is the way in which..."America’s “free market” policies have come to dominate the world-- through the exploitation of disaster-shocked people and countries." Conspiracy theory aside there are many real ideas of how those in positions of power can and do push their policies into place and set up systems to keep that power in their hands. The book takes a hard look at these Machiavellian techniques used by both political and economic systems in the Postmodern age. It an't pretty.

As I thought about it, I realized that I've been saying something similar about our smaller Art World which has experienced a similar shock indoctrination both aesthetically and economically. Let's discuss the economics of it first. In the early 1990's the art world shrank precipitously after the economic shock of the late 80s. Galleries that had expanded from the East Village into Soho were suddenly faced with the fact that their better-known artists were leaving for more established galleries because the economy had dried up. No one was buying art - the stock market had crashed and money was tight. There were no new millionaires looking to decorate their apartments, and those who had survived the fallout were waiting to see what would happen while they tried to sell their now worthless work. It is called a contraction - a painting that sold for $10000 a year ago was now worth $5000. A lot of artists started to look for a bigger gallery - one that would protect them during just such an economic downturn. It was the beginning of the super gallery - which would take on the look of Pace, Gagosian or Marks - galleries with outlets all over the world. It also began the practice of galleries partnering with auction houses - if I remember right, the first I heard of this was with Emmerich gallery, later Deitch came on board - now the auction houses are actually creating their own galleries. It was a way to create a conduit, an economic line to capital. Galleries were now offically part of the money train known as the secondary market feeding directly into it, and those economics demanded that along with the delivery system - a consistent product had to be developed.

Which brings us to the product. Postmodern theoretics has been around since the early 1960s. About the time that Andy Warhol became a machine a new type of art based on electronic media had begun to develop. Artists became schooled in the discipline. By the 1980s the schools were turning out Postmodernists left and right - they were the generation - most in their 30s - who were part of the boom and part of the new media friendly art world. They were also the ones who suffered when the market collapsed, just as they were beginning to raise families, finding themselves with new financial responsibilities and/or suffering from the horror of AIDs. When the showing markets dried up, those who didn't disappear, went back to the universities. The entrenchment of Postmodernism had begun and continues today. Video, photography, installation, sculpture and painting all began to have a certain look - the theoretics around each new artist began to have a similar sound. A standardization of aesthetics hardened into a pure Mannerism. And with the standardization came all the production values of corporate materialism. Artists and galleries realized that the product would sell better in series. Thus work started to be made in series. A one-off like a painting or sculpture no longer would suffice for a system intent on delivering product. The one-off would be the advertisement. Damien's diamond skull has been the launch pad for a thousand prints. Even better, the image of the artist or the media inflated image of the artist would suffice - limited editions of 10 DVDs of Matthew Barney's movie. Art, to be truly economically successful, had to become accessible to more money.

We've been dealing with a corporatized art for the last 10 years. You can trace the beginnings of it with the move to Chelsea. The entire art community by 2001 was there. After 9/11 the fortunes of the art world went with the privatization politics of the Bush economy. By 2007 there were art fairs, biennials, galleries, and auction houses by the bucketful showing the same works, by the same artists, in the same styles. There hasn't been a serious theoretical challenge to the aesthetic establishment in nearly 25 years. But there is plenty of product. Art is moribund while art products fly off the shelves. As I thought about it - the shock doctrine offers a bit of clarity about the systems. How we get by this is up to us - the rough trade. For us, it's about the personal, about actual vision - how we see - how we experience our lives - in this new media world. It's about seeing life - not about systems, not about text. To rework the visual we have to get back into our physical lives and get over the shock.

Theoretical Disengagement III

2007-11-07T14:35:00.000-05:00

Artists are always judged and categorized by their first public efforts. Most underfunded artists do not have the capital to invest in the production side of their work, and must rely on their own skills in order to create and fabricate it. Depending on the level of skill of the individual these first public steps are the beginnings of a "personal style." Without any corporate budgetary excesses what you are getting is the unfettered artist - the beginnings of an autuer - or that is the narrative. The autuer must make do with what is available and affordable in order to manifest a production. In the art industry lack of capital or venture investment can and does confer a certain handmade heft and value to the production of the work. And it is the handmade nature of the work that defines the perception of autheticity regarding the artist.

For critics, collectors and gallerists the twin barrels of youth and “newness” are aimed squarely between the eyes of every critical investigation - or better - the recognition of style. This is the pure artist at work. The artist relying on their own skills in order to create a physical manifestation of their ideas. Loaded with the ammunition of a biographical backstory, usually viewed as brashness, spareness, and economy, the critical implications of youth are that the artist / auteur is both authentic and noncorporate - outside the system because they are outside capital. Like a vast reserve of oil beneath the desert sands they are an untapped natural resource. As a “new” artist the economy of the production of the work is part of the experience of its authenticity. This handmade production confers a certain theoretical weight to what you may be looking at because it is tied to the physical abilities of the artist. For most, the ideas of youth and lack of venture capital create this illusion of raw style, of newness, of potential, and mostly authenticity. And for the auteur the story behind the production of these works is what is being sold to the viewing public - more so than the actual work. The accompanying narrative insures that the work is the real deal because it hasn't been paid for, it hasn't been tapped, and it comes from lived experience.

In the film industry a 3 million dollar film that grosses 20 million dollars is a huge hit, and the auteur will be guaranteed a bigger production, a bigger budget for his next film. In the art world it is similar. The artist who manages a sell out a first show (either at the fair or in the gallery) and get publicity (of any kind) at an entry level gallery is guaranteed collectors' further interest and perhaps a larger venue from the more upscale galleries and collectors. We hear so much about the youth factor in collecting new work. Ideas of "Youth" and the "New" are both connected by coded narratives that bolster the appreciation and salability of the work. And these narratives usually have to do with outre lifestyles, rough stories of banal existence, drugs, danger, death and sex. Narratives are the insurance factors that exist outside and beyond the value of the work itself, and deal with the legend of the artist - the work is merely a token of that narrative - an illustration of the story of the artist. It is this backstory of the autuer that is fascinating, and usually, their first projects retell and mythologize that backstory. Later the "youthful" narrative will become the problem that must be overcome.

Once the indie auteur has access to a larger budget the weaknesses of their intellectual theoretical involvement and physical artistic abilities can become apparent fairly quickly. With the growth of budget comes the inevitable upscaling of production - this is called ambition. Painters are required to become better painters and sculptors better sculptors etc etc. Ambition requires a leap in skill by the artist / autuer. However the cobbled together nature of their original enterprises and the backstories surrounding these works were the original enticement to the buying public - not the content nor the physicality of the piece itself. The raw production values enhanced by the narrative actually are the intended art piece. (A good example of this idea of narrative and production can be seen in the recent discussions of Tracy Emin's lackluster paintings and drawings in the British Pavillion in the Venice Biennale. She had for years been making installations of a specific handmade nature tied to her lifestyle excesses and for the Biennale decided to create a more traditional painting and drawing exhibition based on her backstory.) Our aesthetic expectations in front of new artists’ works have come to rely on this “economy” - in today’s art world it is visually coded and presented through slapdash paint handling - crap found materials - familiar visual ideas - faux naive drawing - and elaborate undefined narratives. Artistic reality is continually re-presented by this spareness and nakedness - artists strip down, go back to basics (“getting real”) and economize. These ideas become the driving claim to poetic depth in the work. We equate seriousness and realness with economy. Similarly we hear about a corporation’s stock that is not doing well in the markets - they make cutbacks - trim the fat - which means they are getting serious about increasing the value of their real product - their stock. IN the artworld the real product being sold are the autuers themselves . This view of economic reality is always tied to production and it's seen through industry, thrift, value, seriousness, and ultimately, success. For the indie auteurs managing the economics of the backstory is the ultimate work and pathway to a more successful public career.

A further conundrum to this success is the autuer's ability to satisfy the demand for product while maintaining authenticity. As an autuer becomes more known the production of art objects must be ramped up. In order to do that a certain standardization of form must take place. Most artists / autuers these days outsource their work. This is actually cheaper than keeping a large studio full of employees. And it has become the norm as a few production companies now make many different artists work. "...ARTISTS have relied on the aid of apprentices, artisans and studio assistants for centuries. Raphael, Titian, Rubens and Rembrandt all presided over busy workshops where apprentices churned out paintings to which the master would add finishing touches — and his signature. What has changed is the expectation that artists actually possess the skills to produce their own work." The point is that with outsourced production the standardization of style is now a key factor in extending the autuer's economic viability and career. The backstory accompanying the style must be managed during this difficult transition from autuer to ceo. And it is done through media. Damian Hirst's career is an effective example - going from rough art school entreprenuer, to provacatuer, to rehab-bound slider, to rejuvenated CEO of Hirst Inc to the tune of 130 million dollars net worth.Hirst has documented every aspect of his career using techniques developed by his first collector Charles Saatchi.

In art today the look of the handmade is the preferred indie auteur trope (a rough type of drawing - a scrawled line - a careless impasto - graffiti from the street - prefabricated found objects - refabricated found objects.) This sort of handmade "reality" has now gone across the boards in all the arts - music, video, movies - without any discernable appreciation as to its fuller meaning. The indie auteur feels that “reality” is ultimately uplifted as art through the delivery systems - galleries, theatres, art fairs, museums, etc. (A photographic depiction of a blow job can seem like art when it’s hung on gallery walls - regardless of its author's intention.) The autuer's style has to be codified into the mass production of art objects. IN essence once the style has been coded work can progress without the autuer - this is called branding (we shall speak more of this later.) Additionally, the importance of the delivery system is defined by the calculated programming of the venues themselves (galleries, art fairs, museums etc), which can not, will not, and do not differentiate the content. It cleans it up, it packages it for consumption and provides a venue for the marketing of saleable objects. The delivery system is designed to transform any content into a diversion - making the content familiar and acceptable - or more commonly - an entertainment product to be consumed. We no longer are confronted or challenged by ideas - instead we are entertained by them once they are packaged by the delivery systems. This concept of entertainment is the great leveling force in all of this marketability. It creates an illusion of safety by distancing the content of the work presented from any implication as to its deeper meaning. Jeff Koons’ porn pictures of the early 90s used all the visual tropes of the porn industry. The critical establishment around these paintings still maintains that they are not pornography. Why? Other than the fact that they are shown in a gallery and made by a “famous” artist - what is the difference, and more importantly, why should we differentiate? The autuers' discussion will always be on the production values in creating the piece, not on the theoretics behind the presentation of the blow job - one is tied to the backstory, the other tied to ideas. Jeff maintains these paintings are about innocence and love, and I have no doubt that is ALL they are about. Anything deeper, and they would devolve into their content, becoming calculated and specific destroying the backstory that creates the value of the work. Entertainment creates a nebulous sort of safety, a kind of cushion for consumption. The auteur must maintain the tropes of this defined reality in order to titillate, to create a stir, to create heat for consumption all the while maintaining the simplicity and innocence of the original backstory. These ingredients must mix in the minds of the viewing audience in order to re-create the distance required for saleable entertainment.

part IV to come....

Theoretical Disengagement II

2007-11-07T14:33:00.000-05:00

In our Postmodern society (contrary to recent wishful thinking - this theoretical juggernaut is still with us) the avant gardist, once the progenitor of new visual ideas, has been replaced by the more sellable indie auteur. The auteur begins her career as a "creative," then later, slides easily into a progenitor of product. But first, let’s discuss the idea of originality - so throughly discredited by Postmodernism. Today’s new artist is not required to find new ideas or even combine old ones, but it has become imperative that he repackage and rebrand previously successful themes. This is done in the same way that the advertising industry or fashion industry revamps an old product. We have discussed this previously in a blog entitled the New New and you can get it here. Basically the “new new” artist will “customize” a brand - in music it could be neo punk, in fashion neo 70s and in POMO art it’s whatever Taschen book happens to land in the hands of an ambitious grad student. It is the customization that is looked upon as innovation - leaving the basic product/form intact. It is an art production process based on precedent, basically adding the auteur's "taste" to familiar forms - this customization can be used across many sale points. Murakami is instructive for this idea with his latest show in LA opening a Louis Vuitton boutique selling the artist's customized high end goods to the art going masses. The artist who is pushing to rethink history or create theoretical visual advancement is missing the point of the new art entertainment corporation.

R&D is no longer the driving creative force behind the corporate or art world endgames. Mergers, takeovers & acquisitions and outsourcing drive the theoretical and economic engines of both the business and art worlds. The idea is that one swallows up one's competitors and their intellectual property instead of developing one's own. This strategy does two things - eliminates competition and insures the continuity and integrity of one's brand. An artist no longer has to understand the historic changes of art or develop a physical technical skill - the object is to use this history as a catalogue of styles to mix and match developing a branded product - cut and paste academicism. An example of this sort of styling in the art world is found in Jeff Koons' co-opting of James Rosenquist's painting style - customizing this style with his own treasure trove of symbolic tropes applied by a large staff of workers. Or more recently Richard Prince's use of a customized car that he "found" (thanks to Marcel Duchamp) as his sculpture...." Mr. Prince said he was still not quite sure what to consider the car, although he does plan an edition of three, and he thinks of the first one, recently completed for him by XV Motorsports in Irvington, N.Y., a high-end builder of modernized muscle cars, as an artist’s proof. (Its first appearance will be at the Frieze Art Fair next month in London, where the car was recently shipped.) Aside from minor customizing Mr. Prince asked for, the car is identical to an earlier Challenger XV made using vintage shells but filling them with new high-performance engines, suspension and steering. (The company’s prices start at $140,000.)" POMO theoretics is simply a catch-all for this subjective coordination. In basic terms - one doesn’t have to know how to design or build a car in order to drive it, or more importantly, show it. In this recent article in the Times about cooking shows examines the issue of concept over practice and how that has become the ground to launch entertainment products. The article makes clear that entertainment production is not the same as actual art practice..." As they pump out their books, sign their latest endorsement deals and add 3rd or 6th or 10th restaurants to their burgeoning empires, they move farther away from the meals that the diners in those restaurants eat. They’re less creators than conferrers, lending an aura of glamour to products manufactured and projects maintained by others." Understanding and developing theory - its practice and its physical applications is unimportant - only the "good taste" or belief of the chooser (decider) is at risk, and it is the successful tastemaker auteur who will later become the chief executive officer.

Over the last few years we’ve seen the art industry align itself with this corporate model - a corporate model based on the billion dollar entertainment industry. Big business strategies have become the endgame of the current art making and selling economy. Monetary and budgetary concerns are foremost in the minds of popular artists and their gallery venture partners today - not because they struggle to earn a living in a garrett - but because the professional manufacturing, advertising and proliferation of the work is an expensive enterprise in an international art market context. Additionally the Return On Investment must be corporate in nature. In order to meet the demands of a wider audience production outsourcing has become the preferred way to manufacture one’s fine art product - this practice has replaced Warhol’s factory, which in turn, had replaced Ruben’s studio. With this change in nature of art production comes the 20th Century POMO idea of an artist as a corporate director or chief executive of a branded style. As the artist has given up the actual work to others - the pieces can be designed by staff members (assistants), made by manufacturers (skilled workers) and sold through distribution centers (galleries) - all contracted, guided and approved by the chief executive tastemaker. But the road to becoming the CAO (chief artistic officer) of one’s own art corporation begins by obtaining the mythology of indie creativity that fuels this corporate entertainment industry. We shall examine these ideas in our next installment.

part 3 to come...

Theoretical Disengagement I

2007-11-07T14:31:00.000-05:00

We have come to expect an art to entertain - not just exist as some things on the wall. And in the art world that art entertainment has come to be defined more and more by the “Theater of Cruelty.” Artaud created this surrealist action in order to bring art and life together. Through the years there have been many productions that experimented with this form of surrealist enterprise. It blossomed most fully in the dance world where form, movement and poetry could come together without words. First with the famous surreal theatre in the 20s and 30s. Then in the 70s and 80s it truly blossomed and went mainstream as the new Postmodern culture became defined by Surrealism. In movies, Cronenberg, Greenaway and Lynch, in dance and theatre Pina Bausch, Robert Wilson and Carole Armitage expanded the possibilities of surrealist theatre through an over the top mannerism - elongations of performance time (some pieces lasting for many hours - some for many days), breaking down the “fourth wall” (creating theatre in everyday settings - including the audience in the performance, etc) and expanding the ideas of what dance and theater could present (including circus animals, stunt men, flatulation, fornication, urination, defecation and Methodists [paraphrasing Mel Brooks] - among many other things.) It has become an extremely successful sales pitch for the avante garde. Advanced theatre productions and organizations such as BAM would not exist without it. In our smaller art world this idea of theatre as “lived” experience has been translated for gallery goers and utilized by some of our more successful entrepreneurs. In so doing it has been instrumental in the changes to the way art is made and presented.

Artists after Allen Kaprow began to seriously explore the idea of theatre in art by creating Happenings. A Happening was simply an art event staged for a select audience. It was an attempt by artists to push open the possibilities of expression and align art practice to life - making both one. Happenings are the very mixture of art and life that Oscar Wilde thought could not exist as he resided behind bars. A man well ahead of his time. These theatrical ideas began to go mainstream in the art world of the 50s with European artists like Yves Klein and in the States with the Hampton Beats ( the scene was a convergence of Manhattan painters, poets [especially Crane and Ginsberg], ne’re-do-wells, beats, alcoholics and Methodists ) - it expanded and popped in Manhattan during the early 60s with the POP crowd. We know of Rauschenberg, Dine, Oldenberg and many others who put together these events. Oldenberg even going so far as to actually create a store to sell his wares in the East Village. Happenings brought together a broad range of sensibilities and added the excitement of theatre to once staid openings and art parties. Since then the idea of a staged event has expanded to include (besides heavy drinking ) installations, videos and movies. All three are now ubiquitous in the art world, and in Rauschenberg’s sense, this form of art presentation lives in the gap between art and life. The “event” has come to define the expectations not only of artists, but gallery goers as well. Artists who continue to insist on showing more traditional wall hung work have had to find ways to bring the contents of that work into the physical world of the gallery - by expansion of the work through the “extended field” (creating a theatrical context - a stage set - for the presentation of the work) or more importantly, through the event of the opening itself (who attended, who purchased, who came to the after party, how large were the crowds, etc.) Without a doubt both galleries and artists have become dependent on the attendance and review of an opening to create buzz and spectacle around the presentation of more traditional work. These days reviews of openings are followed as closely in the art world as they are in the film or theatre industry. That and the profit taking that follows....

Most openings are now part of larger public events. In fact the absolute “show-i-ness” of the art fair or biennial is defined by its ability to entertain art goers rather than present art. These industry events have become the meeting places for the theatre of the absurd. This September as the new season starts - there will be a tremendous amount of art-i-zens gathering to become part of the opening spectacle that the Thursday thru Saturday grand junkanoos present throughout the month. Galleries will have become little more than theme park experiences with the public moving among wall paintings, contrived art objects (usually meaningful flotsam), recreated set pieces, dark video rooms, sound scapes or combinations of the same. Some will continue these events with performances or parties at strategic venues all around the city. In truth the events will be greater than the art seen (scene) to the gallery going public. The totality of these events and the amount of press generated, both paper and cybernetic, will be the greatest artwork on view. By taking the focus off the power of the art presented, the product becomes just one factor in a larger event, allowing the party scene to determine the value of the work. This is a solid marketing ploy and it is seen best in tourist destinations across the world- businesses selling memorabilia. The basic entertainment factor and its fastidious marketing to the art crowd are the diversion - visual strength, sound ideas or ground breaking tactics do not matter in the selling of the product. The event must be bigger than the product.

end part 1...

POMO Package RTS

2007-04-29T17:10:00.000-04:00

Robert Rauschenberg

Roy Lichtenstein

Gerhard Richter

Ross Bleckner

Jonathan Lasker

Peter Halley

Sue Williams

Brice Marden

David Row

Fabian Marcaccio

Sean Scully

Michele’s Tomb by Vasari

This is part two of my critique on POMO abstraction. Again let me say that I have respect and admiration for a lot of these artists and their achievements - but it's time to have a serious discussion about the future of abstract painting. I really hate to do this but I will provide illustrations to make the point. (if you're having trouble reading the blog - formatting problems - click here)

Why isolationist? It has to do with lens based painting. The nature of the lens is that it isolates subjects, it flattens space and volume and presents a pin point representation of whatever it is FOCUSED on. As a subject of a few photographs over my life (like many of us) I realized that photography was a strange way to represent my (really) ordinary appearance. I do not have the square jaw, jutting chin, razorlike cheekbones that photograph so well and make a few of us media darlings and most of us just another facemap in the corner of a drivers license. It always struck me as funny. I think this has been true of painting as well.

Painting after Abstract Expressionism fractured. Those following Greenberg's ideas of physicality became minimalists - those looking for imagery went to Pop. Of course that's simplistic but it will have to do. First there was Rauschenberg and his influence. He drained the brush stroke of it's meaning - essentially giving it the status of material to be used in a collage. And he used it over and over until the idea got through that the second generation of ABEX was incapable of finding reality in the stroke itself. The physicality of the material was tied to the idea of technique rather than expression. Rauschenberg was radical - his work sort of looked like ABEX but it didn't act like it. He was commenting not only on his time, but on the recent history of painting. He had stepped back when everyone else was knee deep in painting sludge.

Roy Lichtenstein, one of the coolest customers to walk the art planet, then went further. By taking the reproduction industry and turning it on painting. He was the first to use isolation to comment on the structure of painting itself. Yes I understand the concept of cartooning, etc, but the basis of this isolation is the lens. The lens isolates and defines certain aspects of the subject and in this case it is the "nature" of the stroke - the essence of it - that Lichtenstein was after. It is the same for Warhol - especially in his later portrait paintings where the ground is sloppy strokes overlaid with the aspects of someone's features. The isolated stroke is the driving force and ground for an empty caricature. Through this lens based reproduction - Abstraction - particularly American Physical Abstraction - was located and drained of meaning - pushing the dialog into the physical.

In the 1970's American abstraction was wholly physical having found itself on the floor after the Post Painterly squishies and OpArt catastrophies - or as I call it - the broken stretcher bar years. However in Europe there was a whole other thing going on. They were working out the implications of Pop and Minimalism in ways we couldn't fathom. We didn't have the pictorial history nor the intellectual base. 1968 saw the academic rebellion in France and the unleashing of a "new" critical/philosphical change all through Europe. Postmodernism essentially is recognized as starting at that time - though it's basis begins years before. Derrida, Baudrillard and Foucault among others started to argue the Postmodern perdicament. For painters these years were spearheaded by Polke (who we've discussed) and Gerhard Richter. Richter's work is the epitome of this time. It is all about isolation - of honing in on the elements of images.

He did it through actual newspaper images - pulling his brushes across the wet surface of a meticulously painted photo-image to make it look as if it had been published - to give it the feel of reproduction - of media. He also made paintings based on mathematical puzzles - slathering a brush with ugly grey paint and creating looping strokes over and over - commenting on the idea of the act of painting, minimalism and reproduction. He was isolating process. Finally the work I came to know and love/hate were the abstractions of the 80s and 90s. They were like blow ups of larger paintings - again using the smearing and flattening techniques of photography to isolate and push the viewer into a disengagement with meaning - and in essence - creating the same meaninglessness as David Salle did with his images. Richter's critique was aimed at the process and the outcome of that process - heightening the experience of physicality while isolating that physicality in an image of a painting. He was the flip side of Polke (who used images to overload and drain meaning.) Richter used the physical/technical to create the same effect.

American abstract painting was bogged down in the 70s - lost in the endless mindfuck of physical meaning - broken stretcher bars. There was no way out. Painters began to paint symbolic images in monochrome goop, but it lead no where (in museums you can still see them - called the "New Imagists.") Finally in the late seventies something happened. I can't stress the importance of the "punk movement" and how it changed the attitude to image based painting here in the States. Suddenly images came streaming out of our repressed conciousness by the truckload, and all those years of growing up in front of a Television came slopping out in buckets of paint. The early 80's saw this energy everywhere - but the problem was that America did not have a painting history of its own. It only went back to the 50s and that came from European Modernism - POP was our first homegrown movement. Which explains - in part - why there was little new with these early works - a distaste for intellectual theory/history and a need to paint equals fuck all (much like our situation today.) But a few painters - those who had been watching - began to pick up on the changes. Bleckner, Reed, Lasker and Halley were really the 4 American abstract painters to understand the European critique and adapt this POMO isolationist critique to their work.

Bleckner began with the stripe paintings - cleverly riffing on Optical Art's failings and opening a painterly dialog with actual photographic vision (much like Richter's hazy images.) In fact as time went on he actually painted in the trippy hallucinations that OpArt hoped you'd see. Lasker went after the process of unconcious thought - zooming in and blowing up the doodles that he conciously put together - a very deliberate brush stroke is suddenly human sized, a pen scribble thick like a Dekooning passage. Halley went after the structures of Modernism themselves, isolating and delineating the systematic procedures of painting - a box becomes a cell, a line becomes a conduit. Again - it is about isolation and expansion of the process. Finally, Reed found that process was procedure and by melding these techniques he created isolated, photographic looking strokes against the structures of a Modernist ground. For all of these painters there is the need to account for the American reliance on painterly physicality - then merging that idea with a self conscious photo-image structure. It is why the paintings themselves are so physically beautiful as things - immaculate surfaces, fetish finishes and customized stretchers. By amping up the finish they push the image into a critique of abstraction.

Additionally there are other abstractionists following this visual thought as well, but I chose the previous 4 because I think they exemplify the movement best. A few of them follow: Fabian Marcaccio who cleverly plays with images and painting strokes. Sean Scully who began with stripes and boxes has now settled into a thick brick oily stroke, Brice Marden trails his brush through the grounds of designer colors. James Nares isolates the process/stroke to ninja-like perfection. Also I'm not forgetting Sue Williams, Suzanne McClelland, Elliot Puckette and David Row, Stephen Ellis, Jon Zinsser, & Leslie Wayne among many, many others. All of these artists have had to deal with the process of abstract painting left over from the High Times Hard Times of the 70s distilling that process down to create a pumped up IMAGE of abstract painting by isolating the physicality of paint through lens based viewing.

This isolationist idea of image carried over into the late 90s figurative painters and even in today's 4th reinvention of POMO abstraction - the other 3 happening in 1991, 1997 and 2001. There are also many of these POMO Isolationists working today - like the POMO Maximalists you can find them across the internet. I am loath to do this but at Saatchi's gallery there is a show called USA Today with a cross section of this 4th generation of POMO Abstractionists. There is absolutely nothing NEW going on here - these artists still claim irony, distance and a critique of technique and physicality - though I will say that I like a couple of the artists involved (I am not a total prick.) Look at the images on the left. Look at the intention in these works and it sets up the same painting dialog as the Maximalists. I keep coming back to David Salle's idea that the images have no meaning, that the viewer brings meaning into the work. Or if you like - Derrida's margins or Baudrillard's hyper-reality. It's as if the painter is pumping up the painterly volume in order to be heard above Serra's steel sheets - and if you look back at our culture of the 80s & 90s especially - it was all about being pumped up. Arnold, shoulder pads, breast implants, SUVs, WWF, stock market, internet, 3000 cable channels, viagara, Shock & Awe I, steroids, New World Order etc etc. Painting did the same thing - the problem is that the emotional base, the point of visual poetry is missing in most of this critique.

Post-Modernism is Mannerism - it is the extension of ideas without a basis of emotional depth. It is like looking at the tomb Vasari designed for Michelangelo. The tomb has all of Michele's architectural design tropes, but absolutely none of the grace and strength of the master's feeling. Vasari - forever enthralled by the master - is doomed to reproduce the parts left behind in order to try to understand the essence of the art. For the POMO crowd - both Maximalists and Isolationists - there is only the reworking, the parts and what remains behind.

We'll discuss some ideas about the future in the next post.

POMO Package

2007-04-29T16:57:00.002-04:00

Francis Picabia

Robert Raschenberg

James Rosenquist

Andy Warhol

David Salle

Christopher Wool

Albert Oehlen

Sigmar Polke

Giles Lyon

Julie Mehretu

Lydia Dona

Matthew Richie

Terry Winters

Jackson Pollock

I am hesitant to do this but I’ve had a few comments from folks that make me think that my critique against Postmodernism is not understood. I have decided then to show you as well and hope that the fog of misunderstanding will lift from your fevered brows. But let me also warn you that even though I show these works it doesn’t mean that I do not enjoy or respect these paintings or this style. Many of these artists are innovative, intelligent and strong. What I am saying is that it’s time for CHANGE. (if you're having format problems please click here!)

Postmodernism has developed an official style for abstraction. It’s roots lie in Surrealism of the 1930s – usually traced back to Francis Picabia. But most artists won’t know this. Their reference point is POP – mainly Rauschenberg, Warhol and Rosenquist and its here that we see the visual ideas that drive lens based painting, reproduction and programming coming together. For Rosenquist it is the overlaying of media images across a bulletin board like space. For Warhol it is the space of print media and the skewed repetition of reproduction. For Rauschenberg it was the use of both of these strategies – mixed with an isolation of the painting technique. The play of space in these works is shallow and flat, mainly because of the physicality of the images themselves. Rosenquist plays with the idea of actual photo/painting reproduction – the outsized advertising image – Rauschenberg plays with the painted collaged reproduction itself. Painting is the textual underbelly for both of these artists – in Rauschenberg’s work through ABEX painting - Rosenquist takes the next step and deals with the primacy of the collaged images. Warhol is the final element. His work is about the breakdown of images into programmed components and flat color field/surface – exemplified by the missed registration/repetition – the flat color ground – the overhead projector tracing that circumvents the idea of physical 3d visual illusion. Warhol was designing a painting and he created the idea of anti-painting – and this idea remains strong in the POMO canon. Over the years these strategies have become the tools of the POMO academy and we are going to examine these through some of the practitioners of the prevalent style.

When collage space first started back in Cubist days it was an intimate space - one of physical touch. By that I mean we were encountering a figure in a room or a still life like set up – traditional spaces of intimacy. The pieces of the image were flattened and symbolized by the pieces of the collage. I believe that these artists were being highly influenced by cameras and movies - time compression – the way montages happen or one scene fades into another. IN later American painting that began to change. First with DeKooning creating a more physical cubist space by marrying the act of painting with the image - then Pollock who collapsed that space totally by eradicating the image through the ACT of painting itself. This is the end of the traditional space of intimate painting – begun in the previous century with the Impressionists. As we ended the 50s painting in the Western tradition was finished. Modernism was exhausted and painters looked to the burgeoning lens culture that was emerging. Pop painting began with the idea that we were becoming a society that was all about media and programming. And it is the beginning of the current style of abstraction. There are two camps the maximalists and the isolationists. Both remain distanced and public in their critique of painting. For our purposes here we’re dealing with the maximalists.

Abstract painting spun through many designed movements in the 60s all clinical or decorative then it died a horrible screaming death after the High Times Hard Times of the 1970s. It had become for all intents and purposes sculpture. All the physical elements of painting were thrown into question and the idea that painting anything was anathema to everyone with a recent MFA – and universities were starting to manufacture these degrees at an increasing rate at this point. Then came the Punk movement and with it an explosion of images and a need to express discontent with the stasis and boredom of American suburban existence -Voila – Neo Expressionism! Suddenly the Academy of Broken Stretcher bars didn’t matter and painters began to pick up their brushes. The problem for the academy was there wasn’t enough critique in the work – it was too retro – too DIY - and the revenge of the professional quickly took over. However, the problem was how to begin again - after being resurrected and the academies began to look about for precedent – finally finding it with the Europeans who all the while had continued down our pop pathway creating a body of visual work and true theory that boggled the American mind. How did we know we had all this was going on with POP? We’d been playing in the sandbox! Enter Sigmar Polke and the German painters par excellence.

This is the beginning of the current POMO Maximalist Academy. Polke had taken on Rauschenberg's strategies and used them in combination with Cubist collage traditions. Where Rauschenberg was dealing with the painterly physical spaces of ABEX painting - the Europeans - smartly - emptied the problem of painterly space from the dialog. The critique - anti-painterly in it's stance - was directed at images and the abstract nature of image culture. Images- particularly lens based images - became the focus of painters. David Salle adopted the same techniques as Sigmar Polke and ostensibly became one of the first Americans to engage the European critique.

For Salle the images are emptied of meaning except those provided by the viewer. Once again the meaning is that culture is over-saturated with meaning and the painter can no longer provide meaning to images. By overlaying the images the painter tries to provide depth without actually creating depth. The viewer must put it together themselves or provide further understanding through lived experience. Additionally the historical elements are connected to the idea of reproduction. Art history is an image bank along with every other reproduction. This has lead to a veritible storm of overlaid reproduction images in POMO abstraction and a huge increase in profits for overhead projector manufacturers.

In the 1990s the intent of abstract painters changed without the corresponding change to HOW the imagery was used or how it was presented. Painters began to hunger again for some kind of meaning or at least some control of the meaning of the images presented in addition to retaining the "critical" distance. Artists like Matthew Ritchie developed huge textual cosmologies of narrative regarding the meaning of their work - it was an attempt to reclaim the critique of imagery and meaning - and this was important to the reading of the work. Artists were beginning to try to infuse subjectivity into the overlays but failed to overcome the academic technique - continuing the collapsed media spaces and the look of critical distance that was so carefully formulated in the 80s. IN other words abstraction was using the technique of appropriation against itself. By the end of the 90s this was evident in a lot of painters work and there was a resurgence of this academic painterly enterprise with the overlaying of images. At this point it became really apparent to me that we had reached the tipping point and POMO abstraction was now a full blown mannerist enterprise.

It is ironic that there was a lot of critical writing by a number of artists stating that we had entered a Baroque age of abstraction - Frank Stella and David Reed among them. The problem was that unlike 17th Century Baroque painting there wasn't a corresponding shift in visual perspective. The changes in the uses of form and space between say Tintoretto - a Mannerist - and Caravaggio - a Baroque painter - are staggering. The Mannerists were using space in similar ways to the POMO painters - the use of appropriation - and the reliance on text for definition place these two forms in similar painting territory. The intentions of the artists today may be different, but the way the paintings work is not. We are yet to define a Baroque visual experience for abstract painting. Again I say that what did change was the intention of the artists rather than a corresponding change to the way a painting is made or experienced.

We will begin to define this new Baroque experience in another post. For now mix and match the imagery on the left and see how it falls into the same parts of POMO abstraction - appropriation, overlaying imagery, shallow billboard/collage space. My final point about this academic style is that it is now prevalent throughout our culture with the proliferation of computers, lens and programming. Right now in Times Square there is a Pepsi billboard that was designed by internet users playing with a primitive Photoshop program. At various times the program would screen capture and the image created by many hands would be saved and judged. The images used were randomly picked but related to the product. It is a POMO abstraction - the perfect fit of corporate advertising, academic styling and institutional acceptance.

I believe that a lot of today's artists are still trying to find a way past the conundrum that plagued Pollock after his great success. Once one has pushed into the physical painterly realm edging on the collapse of meaning in decoration - how does one find again meaning in imagery or attempt meaningful imagery? That is why Pollock's great triumph is posted on the left. Pollock strained it all out for contemporary painters and we've been going at it ever since - coming to Pollock's same space over and over. We must break this cycle and I believe that part of the solution is in the breaking point of Cubism and the American insistence on physicality. We need a different question and maybe a different answer will present itself. Abstraction is ripe for new ideas.

There are lots of artists following this POMO pathway. If you take the time and head over to some of the registries you'll see it. Most rely on the idea of computer technology without the corresponding critique of the underlying properties of computer programming. Another problem is the lens itself and the visual myopia it has caused. Finally there is a disconnect between the public and the private - objectivity and subjectivity. This is having a profound affect on how we process meaning and how we paint it. Abstraction is now at an exciting point of profound change and it is up to us to ask different questions about its future.

We'll discuss the isolationists in another post and we'll wind it up with some thoughts about the future. It should be interesting!

Same As It Ever Was

2007-04-22T16:41:00.000-04:00

I've been pounding on Postmodernism pretty hard this week, but I'm not about to let up now. In today's Times there is an article on the summer reunion tours of defunct bands. Ben Ratliff asks, "...Aren’t we supposed to form a community of taste around living culture, not afterlife culture? Isn’t a great band supposed to be more than just a band, but an embodiment of a particular age, a state of mind, a place? " These questions are good ones and can be used to describe our situation as well. We in the art world have been revisiting the last 50 years of art over and over again. We keep reviving and recontextualizing the same sort of work again and again. It is why we are currently undergoing another revival - this time of 1980s work and those artists that are known as the drivers of that decade - are experiencing renewed interest - Brice Marden, Sean Scully, David Salle, Jonathan Lasker, Peter Halley and Jeff Koons are all getting love (and money) like they never used to. They have become "masters."
"There are clear reasons for this trend. We’re seeing the winnowing of the live-music era in America, as well as the end of belief in the album. Any crisis of belief leads to sanctification and orthodoxy; people want to see the saints work their magic." IN our world painting is prevalent, but it is the orthodoxy. The lapse of painting's power to reinvent itself - like the belief in the album - has caused us to cling to the familiar and find comfort in nostalgia. The Postmodern bulletin board, the overlaying of media images, reproduction, the surefire proportions of lens painting, the comfort of ironic distance, the predominance of re-run programming all play to make us feel safe and secure in our investment of time, thought and money. Precedent equals comfort, and comfort is 401k steady baby!
Later Ben talks with Gary Bongiovanni, editor of Pollstar, the concert-industry magazine..."[who] is so used to old acts propping up the industry that he doesn’t believe this year’s picture is substantially different. “Last year you had Bob Seger, this year you have Genesis,” he said evenly over the phone recently. He is not sure whether new bands — Arcade Fire, say — are striking deeply enough into the soul of the culture to necessitate their own reunions down the road. I think context will determine it. If there are lots of great new bands in the next 10 years, we won’t feel we need an Arcade Fire reunion. If there aren’t, we will. " For the art world it is the same. So many of the new artists are here for such a short time. The career track used to be 5 years and a gallery would spend the energy and time trying to move their artists forward. Today it is 2 years at the most with those artists who are selling moving on to bigger corporate style galleries or if they don't sell - fall off the planet. For most painters the career doesn't last that long. The key is selling and painters' easiest way to sell is to fall in line with what sells. If you rock the boat, you'll be swimming with the fishes or worse yet - working at Starbucks. The idea that new work isn't striking deeply enough into the soul of culture is a sign of our time. By reworking old ideas in similar ways or actually engaging in active nostalgia the up and coming generation doesn't resonate, it doesn't create it's own ideas or visions. It doesn't get to the soul - and we don't remember them. Listen, it's not about "youth" or "beauty" or "newness" but about resonating ideas. Titian, DeKooning, Guston, Tintoretto, Michelangelo, Picasso, Monet, Cezanne and Matisse among others redefined their work for new generations in their later years - looking more radical and pioneering than those who were following the rules. These painters defined new iconic ideas for those that followed - simply because they took chances with their work rather than look cool or fill the form. How many artists today would feel the need to continue to innovate after their success? Not many - look at the "consistency" of the eighties painters' work. For the most part there is very little change from 1985 to 2005 - and in a couple of cases - absolutely nothing new.
As Ben finishes - like all writers in the arts - he tries to put an upbeat spin to things. "That feeling people talked about during the Pixies shows a few years ago — the word “eerie” was used a great deal — seems similar to descriptions of the feeling generated in the Village Vanguard when Dexter Gordon played his comeback shows there in 1976, after living abroad. Since then, jazz has advanced into a culture of incessant re-experience, endless tributes. Actual reunions are barely noticed: a huge percentage of the music refers to great moments of the past. Yet that doesn’t mean that jazz can’t still be fantastic, even transformative. It is, all the time." The key line and the disclaimer in this passage is "Since then, jazz has advanced into a culture of incessant re-experience, endless tributes. " I am reminded of a line in one of Prince's songs - there is joy in repetition - which glorifies the familiar, the easy, the known path, the understood idea, and the comfort of precedent - it takes you to a place where it all makes sense. POMO painting is like the energy production industry - tearing up the world to create moments of comfort and ease at the expense of the future. It is the reason painting has become a product for the corporate investment industry - it all makes sense.
In a nod to Ben and his wonderful article I will try to end this in an upbeat manner by quoting the Talking Heads - "Stop Making Sense!"

Fill in the Blank

2007-04-22T16:37:00.000-04:00

This week I made my way uptown and caught the High Times Hard Times Show along with a bunch of claustrophic gallery shows sympathetic to the cause. I guess you had to be there to appreciate a lot of this stuff. High Times Hard Times is problematic to me - it looked like all the work that my older professors were making - painting as stuff to be fucked with. Conceptual art had really blown people's minds I guess, and you can almost smell the acrid rag weed that these folks must have been smoking - I know - my old professors smoked the same crap. The would also say things like - hey man it's all about the...then you'd have to fill in the blank . Luckily I had some early eighties hipsters that encouraged painting - but they used to say things like - hey man it's all about the...then you'd fill in the blank. Thankfully I drank Jim Beam with pitchers of 2 dollar beer and after a couple of shots the rag wasn't so bad...then I'd fill in the blank - I had to get to New York. Most of my professors were from New York and a motley bunch they were - from different schools of thought - 60s, 70s and 80s - they had left for easier climates, easier jobs and suburban group sex parties - those that live on are on their third marriages, have tenure, and show once a year at the faculty exhibit and the local downtown antique shop/gallery - the days of group sex parties a distant memory - along with 30 inch waistlines, a full head of hair & any dreams of real thought about art.
A few of the paintings in this show have tropes I recognize - Ross Bleckner saw a couple of these - Peter Halley saw a couple of these - in fact neo geo abstraction had it's grounding here. This HTHT painting mixed with lens based image production, Walter Benjamin, Baudrillad and phase one 80s marketing equals the "postmodern american painting" that I've come all this way to have an argument with. My work both here on Henri and in my studio is nothing like any of this - it is an unusual animal. Maybe it's just that parental authority thing or that sibling thing - but I ain't buying it. It's better to rule in Hell than serve in Heaven...or somesuch Miltonian horsecaca. The problem for me again is the insistence on materiality. It is the American solution to everything. Make it bigger, make it physical, make it real. And all the while we fall deeper into the trap of our own visual myopia. We mistake appearance for reality. Postmodernism is all about the appearance of things. We pump things up to enjoy their physicality without first developing the underlying field of reality that provides a foundation for this bigness. It's like Pam Anderson's breasts and the tiny little body that is slowly and sadly shrinking beneath them. Or Hollywood's need for the big opening weekend. Or the epidemic of obesity. Or the museum addition. Or the expanding art fairs. Or... fill in the blank.
HTHT had moments of real clarity for painting. The power of the big stroke. The power of painterly illusion. The power of a visual identity. It also failed miserably to provide a future, a groundwork for painters to grow or react to - which is why Pop returned first as expressionism, then as abstraction and now as figuration. Pop was split in three through the eighties and nineties, hell it even swallowed up Minimalism and made it cute. Today we refer to it as plurality even though it all comes from the same group of chefs. Like Mcdonalds we have a choice of hamburger, chickenburger or fishburger - but it's all Mcdonalds. Postmodernism has failed, it was failing fast in HTHT but it was Europe that revived America's idea bank for a short while with an infusion of the (what was the word...oh yeah...) transavantegarde and the beginnings of marketable POMO. Richter, Polke, The Italians, The English etc etc - gave us back their take on our ABEX/Pop/Minimal culture just as we collapsed into a puddle of paint poured on the floor. Warhol was reborn, painting began selling again, the Loisaida exploded, Rent became the runaway musical experience, the art market rose, blipped and rose even higher, art selling modeled itself as a corporate enterprise deciding to never again have a down time because success is never a risk - but greatness is, and well, fill in the blank.
I got all this from HTHT. Can you imagine what a terrifying bore I must be in person, walking through this show, my mind racing, my thoughts careening from my life to these times and back again, wondering if soandso saw this artist and recognizing this or that and relating it to work I saw last week in Chelsea or years ago in Soho? I am formulating something else for painting and it is in my own studio work - the personal, the image, the abstract, Matisse, Tintoretto, Picasso, Veronese, Late Dekooning and ideas and images that I fill into the blank. As I said my work is an unusual animal. HTHT hopefully will not be forgotten soon - some of the painting in the show is thoughtful and real - David Reed - a very unusual animal himself - and a staunch defender and exemplar of abstraction - writes a wonderful essay about HTHT in the catalogue. Basically he salutes those artists & times, laments that they have gone unknown and challenges all of us to fill in the blank. Kudos Mr. Reed!

Brass Tacks

2007-04-22T16:34:00.000-04:00

Jerry reviews PS 1's show "Not for Sale." The show is about art by hot artists that for one reason or other is not for sale. Jerry's review is fair and on target and he deals with the blatant hypocrisy that runs through a show featuring market darlings that "withhold" work from that market - as if this is some form of saying, "...see I have retained my cred - for even though I could sell this - I haven't."
Jerry's addendum is different and worthy of a kick. "...today’s fixation on the market has created two ridiculous camps: the moralists, who sneer that artists and dealers who sell a lot of art are insufficiently radical, and the idiots who believe that art that sells is better than art that doesn’t." I think Jerry has missed the point about the market. It isn't about moralizing, but about the examination of new ideas. If one is able to make something new and exciting or change something to make it better will it be seen?
Lawrence Lessig talks about similar issues in his amazing book Free Culture. In it he discusses the prevalence of large corporate conglomerates that use copyright issues to control the market for their products. It is the same sort of control in the gallery system where the big auction houses, galleries, dealers and artists now have REAL control over what is dissemenated and how things are maintained. This system has been discussed ad nauseum so I'll let it be, but the point is the CONTROL of the visual enterprise is directed by Corporate Market Viability - ie. what shows, what sells, how it's marketed, who buys it, what institutions approve it etc etc. this must fit in with precedential material. A leads to B leads to C with subset a,b & c. It all winds up circling back to the same few galleries, dealers, artists and institutions. If an artist actually has a different view of what constitutes art and is unable to show it because the market is closed to innovation or change - then how does it get disseminated? Markets work on self perpetuation not on innovation. This is not moralism but hard won observation.
Contrary to his quoting Gerhard Richter's notebook writings - while quaint - Richter's observations no longer make sense - artists no longer control the visual dialog, and worse, these writings are grounded in a 19th Century gentleman's idea of business. Art will survive is the message and it will all work out in the end. Yes, but how it will all work out and who will be seen is the rub. If there is opportunity to show in a pluralistic market then new ideas will have a chance - if however that market is limited in its scope and vision beause its capital flow is the guiding principle - then there is a problem for those who find other ideas that contradict precedent and may find a different visual path. Richter sounds like someone who is polishing his own brass - those that rise to the top deserve to be there - which is the conceit of the successful. Richter's work, though intellectually rigorous, was hardly ever innovative or contrary to historical artistic precedent. He is part of the system and though he struggled to be shown at first, he was part of a University, part of a gallery system and now part of the museum system - he is the market. I think Jerry is using the same form of critique here as the curator of the PS1 show and risks being hypocritical. I would love to see Jerry tackle the market system - which he hasn't done to any great depth as yet. He is more adept, more in tune and more involved than most ciritics and he's slowly been picking up the gauntlet. C'mon Jerry, let loose - Like Madeline Kahn in Blazing Saddles - "let's get down to bwass tacks."
As for the conjunction of sales and quality - what the collector gets is a well made product and in the market of today that is what's being sold. Success is not greatness - it's what sells. True not everything has to be great - but neither does everthing seen have to be success. This steadiness of upscale products has dulled the edges of innovation. What is now considered "outlandish" or "innovative" is usually calculated by issues outside of art like copyright infringement, sexual practices or political intrusion - Jeff Koons - a good example. The way art is made or the ideas that change how something is encountered rarely gain market attention - because they might actually bump the market precedent. For the market - sales do equal quality because it reinforces itself - that's how markets work - the real product being sold is the quality of the market.
Finally, most of us are not hand wringing but trying to innovate. We are not moralists, we are artists doing our job and part of that job is to get the ideas out in whatever way we can. Face it - NYC rents are out of reach for most of us - we work at jobs that "suck our souls" to keep a roof over our heads and most of us do not have the benefits of a tony degree/apprenticeship program available to the select 1%. That's why the internet is flooded with those of us - the 99% that Jerry alludes to - who are hammering away at the system. At least here it is democratic to some degree. We can fight back, we do speak. Whether we get heard is another thing, but at least we have the opportunity - which we don't get elsewhere. Jpegs have now become both the bane (let's face it - they suck!) and possibility (some part of the visual idea gets to many people fast) for we 99ers. Though easily dismissed and clicked over, sometimes the context leads to someone pausing and looking and maybe even asking for a studio visit. I've known a few artists that have had this experience. This also is not moralistic position - it is our reality. The studio visit - well that's a black swan.

Maybe It's True - NOT

2007-04-22T15:58:00.000-04:00

The first line of the article on Jeff Koons in the article of the current New Yorker is..."If art is ever delivered from the grip of postmodern irony, a large share of the credit will go to Jeff Koons." Yeah if it's a reaction against this type of corporate ready-made work! Calvin Tomkins basically lays out the Koons biography with bits of thought pumped in for critical non-distance. Later in the same paragraph he writes - "If there is irony here it is lost on the artist." And I guess he's right because Jeff Koons has always maintained that he is what he says he is. The work is too. It comes straight out of the corporate superpowers and I believe that Koons' work has always been about the total takeover of imagination by the insipid Madison Avenue advertisers. I remember reading a story told by Koons where at a dinner party he raised his glass to toast his guests to say "here's to good friends..." and realized later that was from an advertisement for some beer or other. He was happy about that. It seems he's happy to be a part of the superficial and fastidious - finding heartfelt expression in the artificial. And after reading about some of the intrigue in his life you kinda feel sorry for old Koons - maybe he really does enjoy the Koolaid.
He strives to make his work middlebrow and accessible. The art part of it is in the "perfectionism" of execution that he demands - and this part is hammered home again and again. For Koons art is not really in the idea part of it - which is usually using someone else's hard won style as a backdrop - like Rosenquist for his painting - or Brancusi for his sculpture - but in the blowing up of the form, the perfection of manufacturing or the endless re-contextualizing that goes on. Koons will spin a tale around a toy lobster that will make you think you're dealing with 300 years of art history. But all this means in the end is one thing - consumate bullshit - or in the art world - postmodern irony.
IN Harry G. Frankfurt's essay "On Bullshit" he lays out the guiding principles behind this POMO media drenched age of advertising sloganeering and approrpiation culture. As Harry might define it - Jeff Koons' obsession with perfection falls within these parameters...
"The notion of carefully wrought bullshit involves, then, a certain inner strain. Thoughtful attention to detail requires discipline and objectivity. It entails accepting standards and limitations that forbid the indulgence of impulse or whim. It is this selflessness that, in connection with bullshit, strikes us as inapposite. But in fact it is not out of the question at all. The realms of advertising and of public relations, and the nowadays closely related realm of politics, are replete with instances of bullshit so unmitigated that they can serve among the most indisputable and classic paradigms of the concept. And in these realms there are exquisitely sophisticated craftsmen who — with the help of advanced and demanding techniques of market research, of public opinion polling, of psychological testing, and so forth — dedicate themselves tirelessly to getting every word and image they produce exactly right."
The article reports that Koon's has on staff 80 people. 80. All working on giant paintings, sculptures and computers. Koons apparently touches nothing, but spends his time getting every thing to his exacting specifications. In other words it's about control rather than creation. He picks media images from many sources, has them uploaded then directs the photoshopping, the color choices, the sizes etc. He is the head of a large design firm that realizes his choices. This is art based on the corporate model - CEO top down execution. The works are being made to specifications then adjusted through the processes with major re-works done to reinsititute the power of the director. In Koons' case the reworking of a painted color or the sheen of sculpture. Now god knows - artists are all about getting the color right and the patina just so - but for Koons these adjustments run into the thousands of dollars (and in some cases lawsuits costing millions of dollars) which are then used to publicize his art credentials. This sort of attention to detail has made Koons the darling of corporate America - where this sort of getting it right - is all about power and control. I refer you to the recent article on Frank Gehry's new building here in Manhattan as a good example.
"It was Mr. Diller who insisted, for instance, that the building be sheathed in glass, instead of the titanium or metal that Mr. Gehry is so renowned for. Mr. Diller is also the one who insisted on white windows. When Mr. Gehry first showed Mr. Diller a model of his design, he used a white material to represent the window panes, and Mr. Diller fell in love with the idea of white windows.
“Barry got fixated on having a white glass building,” Mr. Gehry said. “Which can’t be done. For a long time, he didn’t want to believe that you couldn’t do it.” Eventually, Mr. Gehry presented Mr. Diller with windows that were half white, which he accomplished through an engineering innovation, and Mr. Diller accepted it.
True to his reputation for micromanaging, Mr. Diller was immersed deeply in even the tiniest detail. He picked out the bathroom tiles and pored over the rug samples. The boardroom has a big, bold, oval conference table that harkens to the iconic conference furniture of yore — except that a small, hidden computer can slide out for every person present. All of these touches speak to Mr. Diller’s obsessive involvement in the project."
It is this involvement in the details that has become mistaken for art or even for competence - but it is actually about control. By controlling the details one hamstrings the creative process and it's search for some kind of visual truth. By controlling the details one controls the pathways to understanding. Details are the perfect place to set up a monopoly on understanding and it insures the only ambiguity allowed is one's own - this monopoly on truth is really part and parcel of this corporate age. It is this failure of actual open visual dialog that is called into question. Control's best weapon is bullshit so once again we head back to Harry for a little more clarification.
"What bullshit essentially misrepresents is neither the state of affairs to which it refers nor the beliefs of the speaker concerning that state of affairs. Those are what lies misrepresent, by virtue of being false. Since bullshit need not be false, it differs from lies in its misrepresentational intent. The bullshitter may not deceive us, or even intend to do so, either about the facts or about what he takes the facts to be. What he does necessarily attempt to deceive us about is his enterprise. His only indispensably distinctive characteristic is that in a certain way he misrepresents what he is up to."
The ultimate POMO gesture is found in Koons' new locomotive "sculpture." He hangs a locomotive engine from a crane over the entrance to the new Renzo Piano building at the LACMA. This steaming chugging behemoth will be a right of passage into the art of the 20th Century. Michael Govan says, "You'll be able to see the crane from the number 10 freeway, from Hollywood, from downtown. The metaphor here is to create a town square. It's like a clock tower- you'll measure your distance by it...." And once again we read the need for control and power. It will be seen, it will be a center and you'll measure your distance. You will be controlled through the sight and workings of this train. This is an American aesthetic through and through starting with the reactive materialism of Abstract Expression to the corrupted visual aesthetic of European Modernism and ending with the Corporate Postmodern Entertainment Industry. Big physical works that demand big physical gestures - large museums, huge exhibition halls, art fairs, biennials, giant cranes, outscaled ballons, silver blow up animals. This is Postmodern America - and it's guiding principles. Will a suspended locomotive become a sexual metaphor as Koons insists or is it yet another badge of honor and light entertainment for the equestrian classes? It's this ambiguity that must be constantly micromanaged from on high.
Harry writes..."It is impossible for someone to lie unless he thinks he knows the truth. Producing bullshit requires no such conviction. A person who lies is thereby responding to the truth, and he is to that extent respectful of it. When an honest man speaks, he says only what he believes to be true; and for the liar, it is correspondingly indispensable that he considers his statements to be false. For the bullshitter, however, all these bets are off: he is neither on the side of the true nor on the side of the false. His eye is not on the facts at all, as the eyes of the honest man and of the liar are, except insofar as they may be pertinent to his interest in getting away with what he says. He does not care whether the things he says describe reality correctly. He just picks them out, or makes them up, to suit his purpose."
Of course Koons' is the king of POMO. He is it's best practictioner and true believer. He is not "post-postmodern" as this article seems to want to say. The trope of his work lies in its absolute sincerity about insincere things. Their aesthetic reality is enhanced through the guaranty of the institutions that collect them. It is the continuing conundrum of power rather than innovation - of academy over thought. For postmodernism power is in controlling the language around belief. The less one questions the more in tune with the culture. As Koons himself says in the article, "I realized you don't have to know anything, and I think my work always lets the viewer know that...."

Hockney's Run at POMO

2007-02-02T13:48:00.000-05:00

A few years back David Hockney presented the art world with a startling idea. That was that Western painting and its tradition of naturalism was tied to the use, proliferation and development of lenses. I attended the conference here in NYC, stood in line to view the camera obscura demonstrations, watched the BBC documentary and listened to the heated debate that followed. For me it was a sensational weekend of discovery and it confirmed some of my thoughts about today's abstract painting and painting in general.

Postmodernism at that moment was at its apex with a new group of figurative painters splashed across the pages of the glossy mags and shown in the premier galleries. Nearly all of them were working from photobased resources - more often than not computer derived. Some had decided to consolidate the billboard space of Early POMO and collage images in continuous space - some decided to reassert the material qualities of the paint itself. Slick professional technique was hot, hot, hot and for the most part painting looked very much like handmade photographs. Others opted for a kind of academic naturalism based on standard painting practices and photographic distortions. Jeff Koons, Luc Tuymans, Jenny Saville, Damien Loeb, John Currin, Lisa Yuskavage, and Damien Hirst among many others have all adopted this computer-derived photography for their resources. POMO once again was raiding the grab bag of history and re-presenting old ideas for a new generation of collectors. It would take a moment of clarity by an artist - who for years had been following a traditional style - to open a new door.Hockney's radical thesis was that lenses had shaped vision in the west. Seeing from the single vantage point of the lens had pushed the limits of the WAY that we see. As Martin Kemp writes in his essay "Master Class in Cheating" we can..."acknowledge that Hockney's bigger picture brings home to us how the mainstream of western image-making after the invention of photography went not so much into the specialised practice of "art" but into photography itself, into film and television, and now into all the forms of graphic realism produced by computers." Most artists working during our time are aping the look, the finish or the space of photography. Richter blurs and smudges the image to ape the printing process, Close digitizes the form with grided abstraction, and Rosenquist - who created the principles behind the coding of photoshop - continues to collage. Even in abstraction this practice is everywhere – with such artists as Ritchie, Mehertu and Marcaccio - we find the proliferation of digitization and the spatial constructs realized through electronic programming. With electronic culture we were now at a point of losing the "eyeball" or the subjective vision. Hockney’s findings begin an argument for a different kind of painterly expression in this digital age.

Aside from the historically radical perspective of lens based vision at the beginning of the Renaissance - Hockney opens the door to exploring how we might push our vision beyond the similar overlaying of imagery and collage based bulletin boards that predominate abstraction without falling back on Postmodernist strategies of Material or Lens based space. Hockney implies that we can manipulate the image beyond the programming and he lays out a simple pathway through the Northern European Renaissance. Hockney’s idea is that space in Northern Europe was thought as additive – that lens based reproductions would be added together – a kind of collage of reality that existed in ONE space. He calls this a wonky space and I am fond of the term. Wonky describes how we see with two eyes. We catch glimpses of things in panorama, in periphery – things are not isolated – but involved in the sweep of both eyes. So to make a bigger space Hockney says we add space in a physical way creating various vanishing points, various times, and various images. He insists that in this way we are close up to everything. The implication is that we are involved, we are not outside the space looking in, but we are a part of the space. It is similar to Stella’s idea of the kind of space that we need today. Hockney’s idea is not found in the discussion of lens space or the physicality of material but in the breakdown of how we actually use our eyes - how we concentrate on things in differing intensities – how we engage with our vision and use it as a way to understand existence. He states that Modernism broke with the lens in order to find a more real and engaged space. He wants the vision of the eyewitness – where 3 people seeing the same thing all come to different conclusions. It is also the vision of touch - how does space or form feel when experienced through the eyes? You can see this in movie love scenes where the camera closes in and breaks over forms, where light reveals, where shadows imply. The camera cannot relay touch the way vision can – you are always at a remove limited to a single viewpoint – a single moment. Hockney wants a direct involvement in the physical space from the vantage of our binocular vision – we are in depth, through time, from many vantage points. An exciting thought that can be used in making NEW abstract images!

End Part 3…

POMO 2 - Stella's Space

2007-01-20T17:28:00.000-05:00

In our discussions on the ideas surrounding the collapse of Postmodernism we left off with the idea that vision - the way we see and understand - has been irrevocably changed through the rise of electronic culture. I thought it might be helpful to follow the career of Frank Stella a bit to see more clearly the split between the Materialists and the Programists.
Stella began his career with the black paintings. These paintings are really the logical outcome of the tenets behind the materialism of Abstract Expressionism. These tenets emphasized the materiality of paint, the surface of the painting and ultimately the physicality of the object. In other words painting was moving off the wall - no longer a window but a thing in itself. Stella's use of stripes - his use of strict geometry - was determined by the logic of the rectangular stretcher. The fact that he was one of the first - if not the first - American painter to use a deeper stretcher bar, quickly established the materiality and surface/structure of the painting for the generations that followed. Rosenberg's action painters were now displaced by painters in action. Stella did away with the idea of color by displacing it with the idea of material - later bringing in the bronze and aluminum paintings – both material based paints. Additionally he explored the structures of the allover composition by following the logic of geometry and it's ties to the surface support - moving sequentially from point to point. This is a mapping feature of the Renaissance - one needs only think of Alberti to understand this sequential logic. The difference for Stella was the vanishing point - the stripes didn't vanish in the distance - they ran out of material - making the vision a thought problem, i.e. what if these stripes continued over there or up there - the question of space is always off the canvas surface. The illusion was not in the painting but in the continuity of the painted grid – it's in the construction of the material itself. Finally the structure of the painting becomes all important. The thicker stretcher bar offsets the surface of the painting and moves it out of the frame. The raw canvas on the sides - rather than being an after thought - are carefully taped and covered so as to assert the clear physicality of the surface structure. Stella's precedent in moving the painting from window to box is still reverberating through abstraction today. Here are the beginning tenets of material logic. First, the isolation of technique in the stripe. Second, the isolation of space in sequential materiality. Third, the isolation of visual interplay through the physicality of the painted thing in itself. These are all strategies of cartography - a mapping of "reality" and the beginning of the POMO split.
As Stella's career progressed he moved quickly through many endgame changes following the logic of construction - adding fluorescent colors (a more optical/physical form of tint) and sophisticated geometry, making the works larger and thicker, bringing actual reliefs into the geometric space - until he finally made the break. This break is all important and begins the second phase of Postmodernism - the Programist phase. Stella began collaging elements in three dimensions, still hanging onto the materialist idea. His paintings were now free standing from the wall, actual elements that moved outward in to the viewers' space - a new sort of sculptural painting, not high relief sculpture but materialistic illusion of shallow space. The logic of the space is still undeniably tied to the material. A swoop of metal actually comes into our space, but Stella begins to deny that physicality by painting it back to the support structure. It's here that we begin to see the idea of programming becoming important. When standing in front of these reality-constructs one can not be surprised at how flat they appear. With this understanding of the painting Stella proceeded to overlay the material realities. Computers added this collaged space. Soon he was blowing smoke rings into small camera boxes, then photographing and digitizing them on computers, schematicizing them and having them etched in aluminum. The visual coding of his existence was being programmed and overlaid in the work - melding it to the physical attributes of the support structure and then denying the physical properties of the support through paint and program. Space was no longer on the surface or an allusion off the support, it was contained in the work and turned inside out. Space no longer receded in Alberti's vision, nor did it play on the surface like the Materialists but suddenly was lost in the vanishing point of the viewer standing in front of the painting. We were in the space - and maybe even in back of it - making us the subject of the work or if you prefer we are in Frank's psyche looking back at ourselves through the history of painting. The Von Kleist series, where Stella finally collapses the support back to the canvas plane, is among the most rich and exciting abstraction in the last 50 years. Here is the Programists doctrine in spades. First, the collaging of elements, codes, schematics, architectural elements, spatial anomalies and thought problems. Second, there is the marriage of lens visual culture, programming, and Renaissance visual space - this allows an overload of information to exist at once causing a melding of the visual DNA - if you've seen the movie the Fly, the encoding of both the scientist and the fly created a hybrid - this is exactly what happens here. Third the space is non-sequential, overlaid and complicated. It is the space of electronic life where existence is lived at different speeds, different physicalities and different probabilities. These are the strategies of the Programists and they encode information to define reality and the space it occupies.
Programists wish to define reality and Materialists wish to map reality. Stella has embodied this arc more than any other artist in the latter half of the 20th Century and is instrumental to understanding the next step we must take to move beyond this current painting conundrum.
End Part 2

Postmodernism and Its Discontents

2007-01-17T19:44:00.000-05:00

This is the post originally from www.Henrimag.com our other publication!

It's been a slow news week in the Art World - so I've been ruminating on Postmodernism and it's affects on abstract painting. I think it boils down to 2 distinct types.
They sometimes overlap but their origins lie in Abstract Expressionism's split into Pop and Minimalism. This is the great fork in the road at the end of Modernist abstraction. The Pop side is what I call the Lens Based – Computer Driven group, the Minimalist side is Material Based – Technique Driven. Lens Based Computer Driven abstraction is defined by collaged space, media reproduction and system delineation. A few of the artists who practice this form of Postmodern Abstraction are Frank Stella, David Reed, David Salle, Shirley Kaneda, Matthew Richie and Fabian Marcaccio. For this group the computer is important to organization, reproduction and fabrication of the final model. These artists either use or employ techniques of organization or understanding that model their visual interactions on electronic media's broadcasting saturation and programming. Basically it is a type of composition allowed through a hyper-collage – a systematic visual dump. The employment of systems organizations or contextual interpretation is imperative to understanding this type of work.
The Minimalist side is the Material Based Technique Driven group which is defined by surface/support issues, painterly techniques and cartographic assimilation. Some artists connected with this form of Postmodernism are Brice Marden, Sean Scully, Terry Winters, Carroll Dunham, Ross Bleckner and Phillip Taaffe. Here we see the historical model as a basis for continuation. Materiality of paint, surface, support and grid are imperative to the operation of these paintings. Composition is all-over related to High Modernism's grid. The techniques of standard painting are emphasized as subject and content of the work. It is basically a handmade operation aping the space of lens based reproduction - isolation and flatness. A mapping of space or implications of spatial connectiveness are freely elucidated - like a bulletin board - and this is important to the understanding of the work. This cartography is used to obtain a kind of simplification and examination of the painting subject and ground . It is a reductive form rather than an additive one. It demands a poetic interpretation of subject and ground rather than a schematic one of program and sequence.
For both of these groups the use of historical perspectives are the basis for their interpretation of visual experience and this remains tied to the use of reproductions and the lens.
This split in POMO is really where I've begun to concentrate. I prefer to think of this as the Gordian Knot of abstraction. The point now is to untie it. Both of these forms of abstraction are reactionary and mannered. They rely on previous forms and ideas in order to make paintings - these works do not come out of lived experience but out of perceived experience. Of particular note in this precedential mannerism are the punning forms of Bleckner and Taaffe and the over indulgence in materials of Winters and Scully. These artists remain tied to the visual precepts of a generation lost to the success of american type abstraction. What we need is a more personal involvement in defining how we understand, how we see and how we might translate this vision into painting. I think that we must - like Matisse and Picasso - find a way to abstract our humanity. What is an encounter with another human or landscape, what does it look like at this time?
With lenses everywhere mediating how we see one another - how do we actually see - I can elucidate. The lens is specific in the things it picks up and the ways it parcels space. It is governed by a certain flatness that demands sharp angles and broad planes to define forms. It skews reality in ways that we do not actually see in real life. An arm closer to the lens is huge in comparison to the shoulder that it's attached to, and the arc of that measuring is visually fast so that a ballooning effect happens. What is close is huge - what is behind is flat. That is why plastic surgery is used in Hollywood. It's not for us in the real world, but it is for the camera - it is how reality is reformed to make sense in the lens. A bent or bulbous nose can balloon in many ways through the lens - but a straight and aquiline nose recesses nicely. We make ourselves over for the lens. This is but one example of lens hegemony that has infiltrated all interactions in our lives - how we conduct business, how we obtain and generate information, even how we look into our own bodies - it has become necessary to define a new theoretical base of visual understanding.
End of part 1....

Fascination

2006-11-12T13:12:00.000-05:00

I am still entranced by the tidal change that seems to have happened this month. Who wouldn't be? But like all selfish artists I am interested in its effect on our small world and for me it gives hope - with political change comes cultural change. It won't happen immediately, but there are more than enough signs out there that the old guard has run out of steam.
First the incessant criticism in the art press of wasted opportunities and botched renovations in the corporate museum world - the MOMA mall, Whitney's once again stalled renovation plans, DIA's collapse and the Guggy's persistent flight away from NY. All of these have been addressed by Saltz, Smith, Finch and Henri as the larger issues of money, power and aesthetic lassitude have been addressed. Not to mention the out of control gallery world cowtowing to business principles when they should be bucking the system and discovering new ways of presenting new ideas. Castelli changed the course of art in this country by looking, listening and presenting new artists to the old guard. Where is the new Castelli?
Second the twin doughnut shows of Marden and Scully which are glazed over with postmodern theoretical visual effects, puffed up with corporate capital and hot air, and served up with a steaming cup of art lifestyle affectation. If Cezanne were working today, this is what he'd be working against! These shows all go down well in the media, but they provide no real sustenance for those of us who are art hungry. These are plain and simple - the art careerist's ultimate sugar rush.
Third the Wonder Twins, Currin and Yuskavage, who've hung their hats on the postmodern figurative rack and now find themselves at a mannerist crossroads. For Lisa her show is a transition and hopefully she'll make her way through to something deeper and more real. She's under a lot of hard pressure having to perform for a new gallery. I haven't seen John's show yet and I'm trying to keep an open mind. As I said yesterday the hype for this show has been incredible. Who knows what to make out of the porn connection?
Fourth the absence of any real talk about Abstraction. Most galleries continue to follow the POMO line or the tried and true corporate decoration that abstract painting has become. We must stop following the path of the American model of Greenberg's abstraction - which is tied to materiality and surface. This sort of painting is like Easter Island. All those painting tropes and resources are used up and we're left encountering the artifacts of a long dead culture. Early Modernism holds the key. We must think about the legacy of Matisse and Picasso to create a new painting choice. Abstraction is not at a crossroads, it has hit the wall and fallen down a hole. We must re-encounter that moment when ABEX won. We must reformulate the question for this century. In his recent review of the Whitney show Jerry says, "Everyone knows that Picasso influenced everything, but Picasso didn’t act alone. He was influenced by everyone as well. Modernism wasn’t a two-way street; it was a 10,000-way street." Let's travel down a few new roads. Abstraction is due!
Fifth Jerry Saltz said it in his lovely tribute to Marcia Tucker. "Tucker created something lasting, chaotic and effective. As she put it in 1998, "Richard Tuttle ruined my life." Of course, she meant that in a sense he made her life. Tucker also excelled at ending things. In 1997, after 22 years of directing her beloved institution, she did another thing people don’t do much: She voluntarily stepped aside. Nudge-nudge, museum people everywhere, and I suppose also art critics. Like I said, Tucker was a hero. " Jerry understands that it's time for change, cultural, aesthetic, and political. Henri is a strong, vociferous advocate of this change!
Let's hope that after the thumpin' there might be an opening for dialog!

Walk in Closet

2006-11-10T16:12:00.000-05:00

Cleaning up after the Postmodernists is the theme at the moment, and we have two retrospectives that are finalizing this time. Brice Marden and his rubber wand and Sean Scully and his gooey schmear. Color is very important to both of these artists and the tasteful GAP colors are really a wonder to behold. One can feel postively entranced by the almost limitless layering of tasty designer hues. In the Scully show one is confronted with walls of light, well more like bricks of color. In the Marden show one is to enter into the spaces of light. Light, light and more Light. At least that's the talk. For me it's the endgame of materiality and post-modernity - say one thing do another. These are definitely fin de siecle paintings for the salon of postmodern abstract decadence. This kind of abstraction, formed in the 80's, has been slowly unwinding through the last twenty years becoming decadent and corrupt, culminating in bodies of work that cosy up to the lobbies of corporations and upscale hotel bar rooms. It is an art for architecture and decoration - lame duck abstraction.
Both artists keep chanting about the light, but what comes across is simply ground, color, and surface. The space in these paintings is claustrophic, untenable, flat and material. Maybe after coming of age in the Minimalist era both artists found painterly salvation through the multiplicity of uniformity - the joy of repetition. One moving from waxy grounds, the other from painted boxes. Marden settled on the lazy loop, Scully on the gloopy brick. Marden opting for the bulletin board ground of Postmodernism overlays, scumbles and scrapes. Scully layers the color on his thick geometry. Both artists refuse to break the bounds of the surface or side of their canvases, politely stopping at the edges and corners as they have done all their careers. Both paint the object, and both claim that the object is space. They preach the word of Greenberg colored by the rhetoric of Western figurative painting. Unlike Stella who said, "what you see is what you see" today's abstractionists use the evangelical double talk of postmodernism. These postmodernists preach light and space while hiding in the closeted reality of surface and side.
This week we saw the end of a political hegemony. It is as if enough history had passed for us to realize that we had to change course. It is a watershed moment. Now new ideas, new thoughts and new experiences can be examined and tried. For painters it is the same watershed moment seen and experienced through these two retrospectives. And the timing is perfect. This sort of abstract painting can no longer define this moment, our moment, and speak to the future. Postmodern abstraction must be retired and new ideas about the future of abstract painting must come to the fore.

Rough Trade Art

2006-11-04T17:38:00.000-05:00

This will be a blog to for an examination of the state of abstract painting in the 21st Century. In the legendary words of Frank Stella, "Faced with the present predicament in painting, we believe it is important to declare ourselves, to take a stand, to make an effort to do something about the situation." Our intension is to discuss in depth the issues surrounding the reformation of abstract painting. Check out our sites at Rough Trade and Hockney Dilemma.