Problem perspectives of a short scenario

I tried to create some kind of framework for looking at Liam Gillick's show "Three perspectives and a short scenario" now on view at the Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago. I didn't want to just explain what each element supposedly "meant," which wouldn't be true anyway, since describing an object's origin does not describe its meaning. Nor was it possible to jump into analysis without A) research on the artist—his ideas, the ideas of others he is interested in, and the ideas others have about him—which I only have begun to delve into, or B) still having to explain at least some of the basics, which are complicated. I don't know if you would call it a review, more of a discussion, or a view somewhere between and overview and an in-depth view. A subsurface view. A scratched surface view.

ARTSLANT
IMAGES

The 39 Steps

Iñigo Manglano-Ovalle • untitled, papavera somnifarum, from the installation Nocturne (white poppies) • commissioned by the Museum of Modern Art, New York • 2002-09 • artificial poppies • dimensions variable

This past Sunday, Industry of the Ordinary staged a happening entitled 39 Verbs at Packer Schopf Gallery, part of Chicago Artists Month. Featured Chicago Artists Month artist Candida Alvarez's work was one of the first seen upon entering the space. As much a post-painterly dissection with overtones of Robert Ryman, it was a sign of resignation: "I'm Done," curved around the surface of raw linen, sandwiched between the edge of the support and the edge of a smaller canvas smooshed, face-first to the linen one. The verb given to her to interpret was "provide."

The story is over at ArtSlant. In some ways writing about this was closer to covering a social event than an exhibition. Especially since so many of Chicago's well-known "cultural workers" were participating and and/or in attendance. It felt a little like Scene & Herd on Artforum.com.

> Review
> Event Page


Dan S. Wang • Verb #1, Conclusions • 2009 • letterpress & stone seal • edition of 22 • 18 x 14 inches

Reviews

Up now on ArtSlant:


From left: installation view of SUBSTANCE (for Julian) by Tilman • courtesy of The Suburban • installation view of elena Trepp Appear to Disappear • courtesy of the artist and Andrew Rafacz • Zak Smith • drawing from We Did Porn • courtesy of Tin House Books

SUBSTANCE (for Julian) by Tilman at The Suburban
>Review • >Venue

Selena Trepp Appear to Disappear at Andrew Rafacz
>Review • >Venue

Zak Smith We Did Porn published by Tin House Books
>Review • >Book


Julian Dashper • Left: untitled • 1996 • Right: Artfrom • 1992 • Dashper took an ad out in Artforum reading "Artfrom New Zealand" instead of "Artforum International" a subsequent ad went on to review the imaginary exhibition.

In my review of the show at The Suburban I refer to statements Julian Dashper made at his talk last year the University of Chicago’s Contemporary Art Workshop*. I have more notes from his talk that I think are worth sharing here:

Known more for interest in footnotes rather than the main story.

Suspect of canonization from underneath: the younger artists saying an older one is cool.

Uses the activity of Minimalism, politics of the reductive, to not show much. “I show a lot, but I don’t show much when I show.”**

I encourage you to make the most of your situation. Use them saying “NO” as gunpowder.

Shows CV as a work of art, it is for sale. Printed on black paper. Like porn, you have to look at it very closely. People are obsessed with CV’s but don’t admit, like porn.

I painted a painting and then spent my time sanding it off.

Leaves lights where they were from last show.

Recorded the last 15 minutes of the Venice Biennale.

Leave blank spaces in exhibitions. “Breathing spaces.”

At university you aren’t making art, you’re studying it. It’s like you are student of medicine.

What is your public?
I view it as an awful word “art literate” or “gallery-goer.” But also people on the street, they are informed by artists… There is not one truth, but series of truths. I don’t believe the artist necessarily owns the meaning, it is cumulative.

* CAW is a joint venture of the Art History and Visual Arts departments at the University that tries to bridge that uncanny valley between theory and practice. Dashper, in town for The Suburban project spoke to CAW at the invitation of a colleague from New Zealand.

** That’s the way he said it, and I like the way it sounds. The doubling up of “show” is interesting. What he is saying is that he participates in a lot of shows, but the amount of work he shows in those exhibitions is sparse. This for him was based in Minimalist aesthetics/politics. It also, for me, fits into the aspect of his practice of “not being there,” but in a way that absence is present. Much like leaving empty “breathing spaces.” That is a sound installation tactic everyone thinking about putting art out in a space to be looked at should take to heart.

We Watched Porn

Mandy Morbid & Lystra Making A Tentacle Porn Movie (triptych) • Zak Smith • courtesy Tin House Books

On ArtSlant I have a review of sorts of a book about life, and life in “alt-porn” told through engaging paragraph-long sentences and intricate drawings on bits of paper by Zak Smith (aka Zak Sabbath). Although in the book he admits following the porn name game rules it should be "Starchy Third." I’m new to reviewing books, his book is about being new to porn, so it works out well, I think. If you haven’t noticed, the much-derided hipster onslaught has invaded everything, and now hipsters are making their own porn. Vivid, a major pornhouse, has it’s own alternative division, Vivid-ALT (which produced some of the films Sabbath has appeared in) is like the Urban Outfitters of porn. I say that over American Apparel, or Forever 21, which are much pornier, because Urban Outfitters has a better and more varied sense of design and it’s pretty arty, like Vivid-ALT.

How arty is Vivid-ALT? It is lorded over by an art school graduate whose nomme de porn is Eon McKai (you might get the reference.) Looking at any number of videos by people—who are about the same age with the same neo new wave musical tastes—in art galleries and exhibitions that put forth that youthful, ironic, decadent, way-too-skinny, tight-pants-ed, sexy with black and neon squirted on top milleu, it makes sense there is that kind of porn out there. Compare Cody Critchloe’s BOY on view at the Smart Museum’s "Heartland" with McKai’s D<3D. And like everything in the alternative mainstream niche, it might be incredibly radical and feminist or misogynist, or art, or selling out. No one’s sure. What’s nice about porn, though, is there is a certain degree of straightforwardness. When it comes down to it, it’s all about fucking and you can’t deny it. Whether it is better in some way then regular porn, or more alternative, or sexually liberating or art or just like everything else that appeals to a certain audience that’s convinced itself it is somehow different than every other demographic, all that is extraneous.


Pixie Pearl • Zak Smith • courtesy Tin House Books

In this way, McKai’s two features on art school (Art School Sluts, his first porn, and the remake Art School Girls Are Easy, his latest) are amazing and brutal in the way Art School Confidential was: opening up the private workings of a world full of creative dreamers who are all “gonna make it” to the ridicule of a wider audience. Any lingering sincerity you might have had about the romantic academy were young artists mingle and make are skewered with the all-too-true lines that start off the previews for both movies: “My name’s Mia, on days I feel like it, I go to art school.” God damn it, I went to art school every day, because I felt like it. That’s why I have this fucking blog instead of Chlamydia.

But we’re here to talk about the book by Zak Smith, which is about a lot more than porn. Here are some choice excerpts:

So where do you register that complaint, and what do you do with all that wasted experience?
The only place to put wasted experience to use is in art, and the only place to register a complete with the order of existence is art.
You draw it. I saw that. I’m registering my complaint–and I have made it pretty, since all things that are useless had better be pretty.

I think men must seem really like dogs to women—hungry and large, often slobbering—as a species, unpredictable and sometimes dangerous … but as individuals, predictable and clockwork and cute... Some are tiny and harmless, some are harmless and big as bears, but all have predatory, long-boned bodies with teeth and claws essentially made to hunt and hurt smaller things. To deliver yourself sexually to an unknown one must be like putting yourself at the mercy of a strange, large, imprecise, and hairy animal that you can just only hope is well-trained. Straight men should imagine how much differently they’d behave if their lovers were—to scale up—wolves.

On the message of Star Wars (the original three, of course):

[M]aybe you squabble among yourselves, maybe you believe in the Force or maybe you don’t, maybe you worry about the odds or you kiss your sister or maybe you speak in enigmatic noises only your friends can understand, maybe you worry too much or maybe you are inarticulate and hairy, but in the end you all have a role to play in the fall of the empire, which is evil…

Zak Smith • courtesy Tin House Books

And finally, since I’m sure you are curious about what it’s like on the set:

It’s quickly obvious that, from the point of view of Rebecca Black, my job is to be a dildo, and that as long as I behave essentially like a dildo and do only that which dildos do, she is capable of having toward me an y of the surprising and subtle array of emotions a woman might reserve for all the dildos in her life, corrected for style, size, color and consistency.

This is probably the best context I’ll ever have to bring up this final note. Young artists are always knocking boots with pornography. Scottish artist Lucy McKenzie has cited Cosey Fanni Tutti (of Throbbing Gristle) as an inspiration. And has followed in her idol’s footsteps, posing for famous cult fetish photographer and friend of Sonic Youth, Richard Kern.


Both photographs by Richard Kern • left: Lucy McKenzie, 1997 via T. Tex's Hexes • right via Italian Vice
Painting: Lucy McKenzie • untitled • 2005 • courtesy the artist & Metro Pictures, New York • via Tate

> Review
> Tin House
> Eon McKai
> Alt Porn on Wikipedia

Un-Learning Modernism

Recently I began noticing that interest in Modernist aesthetic approaches seemed to be cropping up. The trends that interest me are described not by what they are, but what they are next to. Not a “return,” “re-examination” or “re-evaluation” but something near that. Certainly not “re-vival” or “re-birth.” Maybe “resuscitation.” But then, only of very specific elements. In my schizophrenic statement for my recent exhibition at 65GRAND, I stated:

That is the condition of art, and painting in particular, that most weighed down and burdened of all the media, a consciousness of its own history and its need for, or habit of, self-criticality. So Modernist, but is that not what art after Modernism does too? It is almost exclusively engaged in self-criticality. And it seems there is a generalized trend brewing, not a return to the Modern, but an increasing interest in sifting through the trash heap and salvaging, repairing or reconsidering aspects of the Modernist project that have promise of a new relevancy.

Basically, I believe art is always in a condition of self-examination and evaluation. At different times it is called different things, indeed this is because at different moments there are different aims and ends, different areas being scrutinized. A lot of it is contextual and situational.

Even in the short time I have started to notice this sort of instinctive examination of the bits and pieces of Modernism many colleagues are doing, it has become overwhelming. And unfortunately it is confused. There is now a wholesale wave of Modernism crashing down to such an extent that it as though it never went away. And all the generic understandings are returning with it. Modernism, or any other moment can never really return because time has moved on.

I was, and perhaps still am, interested in the idiosyncratic approach to Modernism. For me it is at times the personal aesthetic mindset of living inside a Barnett Newman, an imaginary one that embodies all the best Newman’s, and then having that sort of overlay in how I look at the world. That is the kind of use Modernism has. Not a tired re-hashing of the conflation of architecture and art or talking about the Bauhaus. And especially not the naïve utopian ideals about the world-healing power of the perfect marriage of art and design. There is nothing new or useful to dragging those ideas from the back of the top shelf of the closet.

Admittedly my aesthetic fascination with Modernism, and my taste, are limited to a very narrow period with a very narrow number of artists. This is based in an accurate understanding of said artists and their period—as accurate as is possible for anyone looking to a historical moment they didn’t directly witness—but I quickly go astray. Not out of laziness or ignorance, something I would accuse sincere proponents of a re-release re-mastered re-issue of Modernism, but out of an internal necessity to mine the past for use in the present. That is the point of art, if there is to be anything gained from looking at Modernism, it is in its use as material. And so when I am interested in Modernist art, and I am interested in the work of certain artists at present utilizing it, it is in a moment of synthesis.

Looking at bits and pieces of the Modern to use in one’s own practice is not based on prescribed historical criteria, or accuracy. It is based on an intuitive and personal understanding eccentrically related to one’s own aims and agenda within an artistic project. In short it is the synthesis of Modernist and Postmodernist approaches to art making, that is neither nor.

I am not interested in some sort of reverent resurrection or some violent antagonism. Those are safe and established zones in which to act and it would be very hard to come up with anything useful in either mindset. In both cases it is a mistake to think of Modernism as one thing. Modernism had many nuances, sidetracks and variously opposing elements. So Modernism is not one idea you can bring back, or one you can kill. That is why I would encourage any discussion around Modernism to be as specific and precise as possible. That just might not be possible though, because these days when we speak of art, we only speak in generalizations.

As it stands at the moment I am inclined to purposefully distance myself from “the Modern” in general and painting in particular.

Talk Talk

I will be doing a lecture this weekend as part of Julius Caesar’s “Fest Fest” fundraiser about the ideas and art that transpired during the residency I was at in Bern, Switzerland in August.


Space Space installation by Ethan Breckenridge in the Zentrum Paul Klee Forum.

Erik Wenzel
“Talk Talk”

Saturday, September 26
3:30 – 4:30 p.m.
3144 West Carroll Avenue, 2G
Chicago, IL, 60612

Wenzel will present a lecture on the Sommerakademie 2009: “Internal Necessity,” held this past August at the Zentrum Paul Klee in Bern Switzerland and curated by Tirdad Zolghadr. The talk will cover the art and experiences of the Sommerakademie. Overarching themes related to “Internal Necessity” from the Sommerakademie such as Labor and Free Time, Im/materiality, Withdrawal, and Specificity will be introduced and lead into an open discussion in which everyone is welcome to participate.

More information on the Sommerakademie:
> Internal Necessity

Full listings of the “Fest Fest” weekend’s events, including a “benefit auction”:
> Fest Fest

All events are free and open to the public. Donations are accepted.

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On Openings

WHENEVER I HAVE GONE THERE, THERE HAVE BEEN EITHER SO MANY PEOPLE THAT I HAVE NOT BEEN ABLE TO SEE THE PICTURES, WHICH WERE DREADFUL, OR SO MANY PICTURES THAT I HAVE NOT BEEN ABLE TO SEE THE PEOPLE, WHICH IS WORSE.

– Oscar Wilde, The Picture of Dorian Gray