Artist Is Shocked To Discover Postmodern Theory May Be Relevant To Real Life

I recommend Joshua Alston's thoughtful piece in The Feminist Wire, "Confessions Of A Black Morrissey Fan." I had some immediate thoughts about it but ultimately decided to leave Alston's comment section free of abstruse reflections from this particular long-winded White person. So I'm writing them here instead.

Alston brings up that classic predicament of enjoying art by an artist who personally is odious in some way, whether they violate one's core principles or they are bad, bad people. (I've written about this issue before). Though Alston doesn't mention it many such articles weigh the guilt of giving money and support to the odious artist through CD purchases and the like with the enjoyment the listener or viewer gets from the art. Many also point out that there are many other, better artists out there to whom one could devote time and money, people who could use the money and publicity. So there are typically three considerations for consuming art by odious artists:

1. The effect on the artist,
2. The effect on the viewer, and
3. The effect on (and existence of) the cultural climate in which the art exists and is consumed (i.e. the other artists, what the act of consumption means to the outside world, and even the cultural context in which one may try to judge how relevant the particular act of odiousness is).

For Alston, though, there is the added predicament of not only disapproving of the artist, but also being the object of the artist's aggression because he belongs to a class of people who are made out to be "The Other" by the artist's actions (Morrissey is "probably" racist according to Alston's analysis*, and Alston is a fan who is Black).

When I (a woman) consider the experience of consuming art made by egregious misogynists, of being The Other while involving myself with the artwork, it is different than, say, reflecting on Caravaggio's murderous personal life and thinking, "What an asshole. But this painting is nice." Because Caravaggio's crimes had nothing to do with me it is easy to assume the role of Any Given Viewer of his paintings. He intended his paintings to be seen by viewers, and I'm a viewer.

But when the odiousness is misogyny I am not Any Given Viewer. I am The Other and the object of alienation. And yet there I am, seeing and judging the artist's work as if I belonged in their very closest circle. It is akin to being accidentally invited inside someone's home when one knows one is not ordinarily welcome. As a viewer that can put one in a position of unexpected power, or it could feel eerie or gross. Even when the viewer puts aside their personal involvement and adopts a clinical interest it is impossible to have that no-questions-asked feeling of invitation into the direct experience of the art.

To put it another way, I said "[Caravaggio] intended his paintings to be seen by viewers, and I'm a viewer." However when an artist's othering mindset is shared by their culture, and often by the viewer's culture as well, they probably think of a generic "viewer" as automatically not inclusive of that Other. It's a type of attitude which many people are unaware of having in which they categorically speak of "people" and the Other as two separate groups. For instance, "All these immigrants are making it really hard for people to find jobs," ("people" isn't inclusive if "immigrant") or "What nobody understands is that when women say one thing they really mean another," ("nobody" means "no man").

So when the misogynist artist makes art for a "viewer," they don't mean me, and why would they?

It's also an attitude that precipitates the tendency of TV producers to cater to a generic "audience" of imaginary middle class white men, although that is beginning to change. Yet Others in the audience experience this alienation (often as skepticism) at the same time that they get swept along in the emotions and narratives that the artists intend to create, which ultimately distances the Other from the direct experience of getting swept up. The Other instead experiences "getting swept up" as relative to his or her feelings of alienation, and relative to his or her relationship to the artists within society.

A rare flipping of the "audience is automatically male" script: famous "sweater girl" Jane Russell enjoys the other side of the sexually objectifying gaze in Gentlemen Prefer Blondes. The scene is unusual in that, I assume, it was written for the benefit of women in the audience at the expense of male audience discomfort. [Image: A sporty white woman holding a tennis racket frolics through an array of muscled white men wearing tiny skin-colored swimsuits and sticking their butts up at her. In the background more Adonises in tiny swimsuits strike showy poses while "working out" on gym equipment.]

***

Which brings me, as always, to postmodern theory.

Kelsey Elisabeth Nelson on Zadie Smith's critical showdown

This is a great essay. Kelsey Elisabeth Nelson discusses Zadie Smith's writing in which she compares two approaches to art (and writing) criticism: the poststructuralist method favored by Barthes and the more old-fashioned method favored by Nabokov. She takes two complicated theoretical schools and applies them, but the essay itself is quite simple and easy to read (I promise!). I guess this is what post-postmodernism is: postmodernism is now just another completed tool in our toolbox.

Liz Miller at REDUX: Picturesque Evacuation Ploy

You walk into REDUX to see Liz Miller's installation and you're hit with a shocking orange wall at the same time that a friendly front desk person greets you with brochures. Then you notice the title off to the side of the orange wall: "Picturesque Evacuation Ploy."

You walk timidly around the wall through the opening to the gallery and are hit with this:

The rhythmic part of the installation that greets the viewer when they walk in the door. This is the part that reminds me of the gym. Other people were reminded of dragons. [Image: A wall about ten feet long painted shocking tangerine orange. Seven or eight identical 3-D structures made of thin flat felt emerge from the wall, each about six or eight feet tall and reaching six or eight feet from the wall toward the viewer's walkway. The felt is black, robin's egg pale blue, tangerine orange and blood red. Each piece is cut into intricate decorative shapes made from silhouettes of pistols, rifles and other shapes I cannot make out assembled in a kaleidoscopic manner. The felt pieces are attached using brads with tiny orange heads. Together the structures give the effect of a giant 3-d crepe paper banner than has been made of folded cut paper. On the perpendicular wall the white under-paint is left visible in some spots. At the orange-white border little black shapes march like ants. They could be mice, birds or something else entirely.]

And you say, "Woooooowwwww!"

 You can see the scale of the sculpture in relation to this viewer and her stylin' blue-lined boots: probably fifteen feet tall, like the branches of a giant fir tree.

Then you wonder aloud how she did it, then you gingerly step in between some shapes and briefly fantasize about living in them.

My friend noticed the pistol and rifle shapes first, then I could see them everywhere. At that point I decided to read the Artist's Statement. Miller writes that her installations, "...recontextualize shapes, signs and symbols from disparate historical and contemporary imagery to create abstract fictions. Existing forms from a multitude of sources are co-opted, altered and spliced to create hybrid identities...." 

A small portion of one of Miller's felt shapes where you can see the revolver motif that is otherwise obscured through kaleidoscopic repetition (the revolver points to the left in the image). [Image: flat black revolver shape viewed from the side on a flat white wall]

Dear Readers, at this time I should also explain, as I see it, an art historical/theoretical concept involving deconstruction and post-structuralism generally called, "Death of the Author." The term comes from a 1967 essay of that title by Roland Barthes.

Let's say that Wile E. Coyote is about to fall off a cliff. He holds up a sign that reads, "HELP," drops the sign, and vanishes over the cliff. But a few minute later, along comes a hiker who sees the sign. What does it mean? Well, that depends on what the hiker and their culture brings to the table. "Help Wanted?" The Beatles' "Help?" An offer of help? A meaningless sign in a foreign language? A reminder of their job as a 911 dispatcher? Wile E. Coyote's intentions and psyche become irrelevant and the mesh of meanings and contexts to any given sign, symbol or word, along with the viewer's experience, provide legitimate sources of meaning and interpretation for the sign.

Culturally, for example, this is significant because this essay (and the work of Jacques Derrida, postmodern linguists and others) became popular in the academic world at a time when Western culture, previously seen generally though the lens of middle- and upper-class white male society, was experiencing movements for decolonization, civil rights, women's rights, and GL (later BTQ) rights, as well as foreign involvement in Vietnam, Cuba and Latin America, and massive immigration from Southeast Asia, all of which persistently revealed myriad points of view. I can think of many times when someone has made an offensive cultural joke or comment and tried, unsuccessfully, to follow up with, "...but that's not what I meant!" Death of the Author, in action.

Artistically, this idea was central to the transition from Modernism to Post-Modernism. Whereas objects of art had been viewed as distinct objects unaffected by a viewer, both physically and contextually, created by an artist whose psyche and intent is up for artistic interpretation, PoMo subverted this. Some artists, like the pristine minimalist sculptor Donald Judd, erased the expressive brushstrokes and fingerprints of the artist, so prized in Modernism, so that the object stood on its own in meditative coexistence with the viewer. Other artists took an interactive approach, such as Felix González-Torres, who made piles of candy in galleries that the viewers could take. Artists sought to make viewers aware of the act of interpretation. Other artists emphasized the power of the viewer in relation to the artistic intent by making themselves pawns in their own art: putting themselves through documented ordeals, for example, or using their own body as sculpture or artistic tool. Still others emphasized the shared physical space of a work of art and the viewer by making intrusive or interactive art or working with installation, which envelops rather than confronts a viewer, as a way of undermining the fixed fortress-like connotations of Modernist paintings and sculptures.

***

So now you can see why, when reading Miller's Artist's Statement, I immediately thought of Death of the Author.   Miller has chosen to literally deconstruct symbols by physically obscuring them and actually bending them. She has stripped the gun symbol down to its physical components and used those components to create a pretty, softly tactile modern fairy-tale environment which suspends disbelieve through sheer craftsmanship and scale. She has also made flat shapes emerge from the wall into the third dimension. Merging painting/2-D with sculpture has been a hallmark of Post-Modernism but is particularly relevant to Miller's physical manipulation of symbols. The lacework of shadows on the walls from the felt recalls Dan Flavin's neon sculptures and their emphasis on the immaterial interaction of artwork and environment. Because the installation is so large and you can step between some of the shapes it is also somewhat interactive. The viewer's space is sufficiently invaded. At this point I interpreted the title, Picturesque Evacuation Ploy, as yet another symbol that had been stripped of its meaning and context, and recontextualised in an abstract fictive manner by putting disparate words together in a nonsensical way. What, now, does "picturesque evacuation ploy" even mean besides the title of this specific show?

But I think there are other conflicting messages in this show that make it much more than an homage to the Death of the Author. For instance I mentioned that my friends and I immediately wondered how she created the installation. Hand-cut or laser-cut? How was it assembled, etc. Because of the level of in-your-face craftsmanship the viewer's attention is immediately diverted to the artist creating the piece. What was her process, what were her intentions? Moreover, even as I appreciate how Miller has stripped the symbols of their meanings, I still wonder, why those symbols? I revert back to the generally acknowledged meaning of "gun" as a weapon while I wonder why she chose that symbol to deconstruct. The repetition also poses a problem for me: making a marking into a symbol is supposed to add meaning rather than remove it. And repeating an image ad nauseam a la Warhol's "Marilyn" can make an image into a symbol. But repetition can also, like Warhol's repeated $ sign, strip a symbol of its meaning. The title is beginning to recover some, if not much, of the words' former meanings and becomes, like the show, attention-grabbing and complicated, evocative of a beautiful emergency.

The gun is in some ways an apt metaphor for the show: it's a visual assault in bright colors that creates a "Bam!" effect when you walk in. The shapes seem machine-like and, along one wall, rhythmically echo a military drumbeat. Walking through the gallery feels a little like walking through the interior world of any given addled person with a gun who makes tragic headlines: sort of crazy, poundingly rhythmic in some places, culminating in a frenzied upward spiral of jumbled shapes.

The irony is clear: fuzzy soft pretty gun shapes in felt. Pretty guns dominating an environment created by someone who, because of her gender, is more likely to be a victim of gun violence, and because of her nationality (I assume she is American) willingly or unwillingly, benefits from massive military violence perpetrated by the US.

A portion of the less structured side of the installation, showing how the shapes continue fluidly from 2-D wall images to a 3-D structure. Also shows the full height (fifteen feet?).

Miller's Artist's Statement goes on to read, "...Forged relationships between benign and malignant forms confuse the original implications of each while revealing the precariousness of perception and how easily it can be tampered with. Recent projects pit Baroque and Gothic pattern and ornament against forms derived from armor and weaponry. Seemingly oppositional pairings create duplicitous environments where conflicting messages are conveyed." 

My mind was already heading down the rabbit hole of military actions and public perception: the Iran-Contra Affair, the CIA, proxy wars, police actions, the military-industrial complex, war-time bans on free press, censorship of images of dead soldiers, the complicit media. At this time the meaningfulness and meaninglessness of repetition began to sink in. How Miller, like the media, has numbed the symbol of the gun and created something vibrant and attractive in its place. The small symbols that march ant-like around the orange/white borders suddenly leap off the wall-- or out of the distant space of our television sets-- and clash in three dimensions, in a way that invades our physical space. How it all takes place in an installation that looks fun and contemporary, like an anime future-world or Tord Boontje for Target. I reconsidered the title: "picturesque," attractive, staged; "evacuation," escapism, vacuousness; "ploy," conspiracy, coy persuasion. A misleading invitation to escape into attractive fictions. 

A portion of the less structured side of the exhibit showing the orange paint on the floor and the play of light and shadow cast by the felt.

I stupidly missed the Artist Lecture, so this whole post could be way off base, but the show will remain up at REDUX through November 26, 2011. Go see it!!

Artist Lecture at the City Gallery: Conrad Guevara!

So yesterday I wrote about Melinda Mead, who spoke with Conrad Guevara at the City Gallery at Waterfront Park. I'm quoting from memory, so hopefully it's accurate!

Yes I took these with my iPhone in a dimly lit gallery. Sorry. If you really want to see the work go to the show.

Like all great things Guevara's talk was in the form of a PowerPoint Presentation, in which he showed what inspired him: photos of the kids he teaches, the materials he uses, and a music video with a bunch of people rushing a basketball court, with pompoms, spotlights and dry ice. "I love this, it's so... everything is great. So I wanted to make the mylar like--" he pauses as we watch a man in a gorrilla suit making a slam dunk go sailing through a cloud of glitter and dry ice in slow motion--"a party."

Guevara had 3 things on display: a crocheted pipe sculpture, a cut-paper "painting," and an installation of 4 large sculptural panels covered with grids of fluttering cut silver mylar (assisted by a small oscillating fan) and painted hot pink at the back. I would classify them as "modernist toys." As in, toy versions of modernist painting and sculpture. I'm saying "modernist," and I mean the highbrow cult of Abstract Expressionism of the 50's and 60's and the criticism of it, plus to an extent some Minimalism which can be seen as an extension of formal abstract experiments and was admired by the same sort of crowd. Guevara used the word, "serious." "I want to communicate these serious ideas and have serious work, but disguised with this easy-to-digest fun style," he explains, referring to the sparkle-tastic mylar and candy-colored squishy yarn.

"Exploding Pipes at the Pompidou"

As a teacher, communicating "serious" ideas in a fun way is obviously important to Guevara. He said he wants kids to be able to relate to his work and was particularly happy that one of his mylar sculptures was hanging in the Children's Museum (the birthday party room!). This could be why I got the impression they were toys.

Guevara also talked about getting studio space in Redux and how that changed his process and really encouraged a flow of ideas and focus. He describes how he got materials-- paper, paint samples, a bag of free yarn-- and how relieved he was to have such cheap materials to use (omg, I can relate). He seems to have stuck with them, though, and they seem to be working really well for him. In this way he seemed to portray himself as a bit of an outsider to professional art-making, focusing on kids, free materials, and a "not serious" approach. I didn't get that from his work at all, though. In fact, of what I see of local artists, Guevara's work seems the most likely to be at home in a big city gallery and be really finely attuned to postmodern trends.

Yarn and fabric, for instance, have been popular choices since the '70s. When artists got frustrated with the limitations of the "cult of Modernism," I mentioned earlier, or Very Serious Abstract Expressionism, there was an outpouring of theretofore completely unacceptable artwork: art by women, crafters, illustrators, performers, people of color, openly gay people, and people with non-NY/LA backgrounds who had all been conspicuously excluded from the so-called 'universal' Modernist movement. Flaunting that which had been forbidden, many women utilized traditional women's crafts like sewing and crocheting as a means of sculpture (as opposed to steel, marble or bronze of the Modernist heyday) and later artists like Felix Gonzalez-Torres used ordinary objects and large quantities of cheap, fun stuff associated with nightlife and ordinary life (as opposed to strictly oil paint on canvas).

"The Universe Pokes Holes In You." Guevara explained that the title referenced when things in your life seem to be on an upward trajectory and then your plans get sliced in half by The Universe.

Paper has also gained popularity as a postmodern material of choice. It brings so many things to mind: illustration, comic books, note-taking, education, office work, sketches, magazines, transitory throwaway stuff that had no place in Serious Modernism but is now the focus of inquiry. Mylar, similarly, is a material more visual artists are familiar with today as it is simply a newer product (developed in the mid-1950s and used by... wait for it... NASA) and as photography, printmaking, industrial design, old-fashioned hand-done graphic design and other technical fields are celebrated in visual arts curricula (a departure from the '60s) more visual artists are introduced to the material. Mylar has also been popular because it looks like commercial packaging and is *shiny* so has been a popular choice to access a modern commercial aesthetic.

But one interesting thing about the way Guevara used these materials is that, as he explained, they were cheap. But rather than use cheap materials to make a purposefully shoddy-looking product (as did many conceptual artists and Arte Povera artists who sought to criticize the "beautiful, original, expensive art object" values of Serious Art) or taking wildly expensive materials and making them look like shit (as does Jeff Koons or some of those Young British Artists) Guevara has taken cheap materials and made them look like either an expensive designer toy or famous high-priced paintings. Each object he displayed is highly finished and very covet-able. Moreover the cheap products he's using are only cheap in a modern industrialized country: only because of high capitalism, for instance, are reams of neon polyester yarn or millions of immaculately screen-printed paint samples a cheap byproduct.

Moreover the paper, as Guevara used it to mimic a Serious Painting, suggests the way the current generation of artists understands Modernism. We usually only see it on paper: in books, in abstracts of famous essays, photocopied and handed out. Postmodern artists usually reference Modernism in order to play around with the ideas or critique it or completely tear it down. But in order to reference it we collectively construct a quick intellectual mock-up of the movement in order to tear it down. Developing a visual short-hand for "the way things used to be" is essential, and I would argue that that short-hand consists partially of pedestals, canvases, drips, the Mona Lisa, images of 1950s housewives and the color white. The way Guevara used both yarn and paper, though obviously very time-consuming, suggests just such a quick mock-up. The yarn, too, suggests the playful malleability of Modernist ideas in the hands of the current generation.

Still his aim remains unclear to me. He said in the lecture that he wants to disguise Serious Stuff in a fun and kid-friendly way and not once did he mention satire. But his work isn't an all-out party. The pieces themselves are very careful and contained and this suggests a flip-side of doubt or unease. Before hearing him speak I interpreted an element of bitter sarcasm in the work, a sort of love-hate relationship with the work he was referencing (the Centre Pompidou, the minimalist work of Donald Judd, Barnett Newman and unnamed Abstract Expressionists). His fun packaging slices through the bullshit "untouchable genius" narrative built around the Modernists but also through the respectability of those artists. Of course it doesn't necessarily follow that in the wake of this respectability one would hate the Modernists; there is still room for appreciation, fondness, curiosity. Entire generations of Dadaists, Pop Artists and Surrealists came and went without ever dismantling the public awe of Modernism and Serious Art.

His work will be up at the City Gallery at Waterfront Park (i.e. Pineapple Fountain park) as part of the Under the Radar show till July 31, along with work by D.H. Cooper, Rebecca West Fraser, Nina Garner, Melinda Mead, Greg Hart, Alan W. Jackson and Lauren Frances Moore. So go see it! Plus hopefully I'll be writing about the next two artist lectures, which are this Saturday, July 16 and the next Saturday, July 23 at 5 pm.

Edit: Oh yeah, I almost forgot! I blogged about Guevara's work a few months ago, from the ReNude show.

Portraiture right now.

It's difficult to get a grip on what an artistic era is really about, to sum it up and notice big trends until some time has passed. When I look around at this decade's paintings and sculpture, there's such a variety of art in top galleries and museums, but I'm just starting to notice what isn't there: portraiture. I'm excluding, for the moment, self-portraiture because the exploration of self is huge right now: heritage, the self in society, one's self as a marginalized person, one's own subconscious, etc. And there are some celebrity portraits too, but those are often by artists who have never met that celebrity, and I think their intent is usually to reference what that celebrity stands for, not to provide any insight into that person. What I'm not seeing is artwork that focuses on a separate, individual person for the sake of exploring that personality.

After Modigliani, Andrew Wyeth, David Hockney, Lucian Freud, Alice Neel... I come up a bit short. And when artists such as Elizabeth Peyton do focus on portraying others exclusively the thinking art world takes note of this idiosyncrasy and declares it ironic on some level.

After the seventies or so I have to look to photography to find many searching, insightful or dedicated portraitists. William Eggleston, Cindy Sherman (self-portraits, I know), Emmet Gowin, Arnold Newman, Nan Goldin, Annie Leibovitz. Most of the big headlines and controversies of photography have involved portraits: Sally Mann's kids, Diane Arbus inspiring ever photography student who ever set foot in an art school for at least the last fifteen years.

I would have guessed that because portraiture isn't shown often in top venues right now, it means issues of portraiture are simply no longer considered relevant in fine art-- but those same issues figure prominently in contemporary photography. I wonder if the difference lies in the way the two art forms are sponsored and by whom they are created and displayed. Paintings got bigger and more dramatic during the AbEx years, and then came PoMo installations and shows that take up entire galleries. I think painting and sculpture are seen as public events nowadays, whereas photography is still associated with ordinary people and family photos, as well as magazines that cater to ordinary people and with Myspace and Facebook usage. That makes photography seem smaller-scale in terms of production cost, therefore less is at stake. Perhaps that makes it more acceptable for photographers to simply portray a specific person, rather than make grand observations of society at large or explore one's own psyche in such a specific way as to be nearly universal and thus accessible to the public.

Then again maybe portraiture is no longer as esteemed in the eyes of the art world. There is, of course, the unsavory association with making a living. And perhaps as an interest in others, a form of art that is literally like a communication between two specific people (portraitist and subject), portraiture is seen as feminine, in contrast with grander, less personally specific themes of society, abstracted human experience, and massive abstract forms, which could be construed as masculine. And, being feminized, portraiture is not as valued today. Or portraiture could have fallen by the wayside during the Abstract Expressionist Movement, when a completely abstract portrait would, I'd argue, be possible but would certainly present problems for both artist and viewer. Portraiture would have continued to be sidelined by Conceptualism-- conceptual portraits are possible but also problematic-- and again by Pop Art because the movement's focus on pop culture would preclude a focus on individual non-celebrities.

I don't for a moment think portraiture is over. The genre is too basic, too essential to art history and human expression, to be abandoned. It's still alive and kicking outside of the elitest of white boxes but I expect the comeback to be from outsider art that makes its way into the art world.