Life Always Trumps Art, So Why Don't Today's Artists Deal With It?
by Jerome du Bois
Boris Pasternak wrote: Art is interested in Life at the moment when the Ray of Power is passing through it.
Thomas Harris wrote, in Hannibal (2000): Now that ceaseless exposure has calloused us to the lewd and vulgar, it is instructive to see what still seems wicked to us. What still slaps the clammy flab of our submissive consciousness hard enough to get our attention?
Ross Bleckner said in an interview (1994): If reality strikes us as a cultural and not a psychological dynamic, then our representations of it are as docile as the forms by which we receive it (as itself). We are placated by merchandising techniques that validate these forms. . . [But] the problem of artistic creation is the problem of madness and death.
Maurizio Cattelan said in an interview (Phaidon 2000): I'm not really sure satire is the key to my work. Comedians manipulate and make fun of reality, whereas I actually think that reality is far more provocative than my art. You should walk on the street and see real beggars, not my fake ones. You should witness a real skinhead rally. I just take it; I'm always borrowing pieces -- crumbs, really -- of everyday reality. If you think my work is provocative, it means that reality is extremely provocative, and we just don't react to it. Maybe we no longer pay attention to the way we live in the world. We are increasingly . . . how do you say, 'don't feel any pain?' . . . We are anaesthetized.
Miguel Calderon said, when an outlandish biography (of a friend) he wanted to film was rejected by an LA producer as unbelievable: Unfortunately all the stories are true. I'm not out to shock, I'm not making cliches, and I can understand how people can misunderstand, but the truth of the matter is my work is coming out of reality.
Life always trumps Art. This means that Art that takes from Life is stronger than Art that takes from Art. Today, a lot of the latter is not even art, it's presentation, and the rest is almost as weak because today's artists -- god's puppies, those in their twenties and thirties -- are afraid of life. They dodge Rays of Power as if they were errant lightning bolts, no matter their irritating relevance.
Much safer to explore issues surrounding subject X with attenuated, elliptical timidity. Or flip it -- we're all sociopaths now -- to infantile pornographic frontality: what's with all the arcing bodily fluids? Or they crouch under the arched eyebrow of irony. And nobody judges nobody. Didn't you read about that survey?
But I say art can never have the weight and authority of any wall that supports it, any structure that houses it, any institution that pays for it. Life -- everything entailed by life -- comes before art. Art is always late, always leftover, always fake. Every esthetic experience, no matter how intense or complete, is a thin temporal envelope sealed with the bitter glue of reality's return -- and sometimes a good cut to remind ya.
Most contemporary art cannot bear even the smallest weight of everyday reality. When Louise Bourgeois's fantastic gigantic Maman spider loomed over New York's Rockefeller Center, it became just the inspiration for a silly Jeannie Moos piece on CNN about arachnids. When, more recently, Matthew Barney swallowed the Guggenheim whole, many remained underwhelmed; some even ran away giggling. Sergei Bugaev Afrika's profoundly direct Stalker 3, at I-20 Gallery, with its verite video of gut-flinging Al Qaeda murderers, caused barely a ripple in a prevailing sea of blasé malaise (Charlie Finch excepted). The last time New York got angry about art was over Eric Fischl's embarrassing, crude Tumbling Woman sculpture. Why they're not livid with rage over Tom Otterness's snide, smug Free Money is beyond me. Slap that clammy flab!
Is Maurizio Cattelan right? Are a lot of us anaesthetized? No, it's worse than that, it's willful denial. Look here: there's a thin sliver of illumination into some young New York minds called "TalkBack" at Artforum magazine online. It's usually worthless masturbatory chat, postgraduate noodlings, and jpeg one-upmanship, but they do monitor the scene -- "Will Cotton looks like a turd" . . . sort of.
So I made sure to check in daily for two weeks during Thanksgiving 2002, when Marina Abramovic, 57, endured her living installation The House With the Ocean View at Sean Kelly Gallery, the best work of art in the United States since Robert Gober's pierced Virgin Mary (1997). (I also think that during this time Abramovic, who fasted for a dozen days, chewed Matthew Barney up and spat him out.) Here was a woman living in a mute, ritualized manner in an art gallery in front of everyone, all day, every day, clothed and naked, more people gathering as the word got around. But the sheeple at "TalkBack" were silent the entire time. Not a thread. Not a whisper. Not a word. That's a tell.
Now consider Thomas Hirschhorn's Cavemanman and Tom Sachs's Nutsy's, which opened the same weekend as each other (November 11, 2002, before Abramovic) in New York City. I saw neither, and the two installations were not in explicit competition, of course, but every word I read and every image I saw persuaded me Tom Sachs got his ass handed to him by the older man.
Both used low-cost and recycled materials and simple, show-your-work construction methods, but Hirschhorn, with eight people in two weeks, transformed the Barbara Gladstone Gallery into a glittery but moody cardboard cave for the subterranean homesick blues; Sachs made an adolescent toy raceway (with real Kyosho Mini-Z Racers!), a foamcore party place filled with modernist replicas and pop culture, and he did it with twice as many assistants and two years' worth of construction (they got videos!).
Most importantly, Hirschhorn's Cavemanman traced a physical narrative from Lascaux, to Plato, to bin Laden, to Lascaux II, to the inside of the oldest part of any homo sapiens sapiens's brain (such as "the Caveman of Manhattan," who triggered Hirschhorn's original thought bomb.) He took from life.
But Tom Sachs took from art and popular culture -- life lite -- then shrunk it all to 1/25th scale -- Brancusi, Calder, LeCorbusier, di Suvero, NASCAR, popular music, and MacDonald's. To what effect? Nutsy's goes around and around until it gets tired of the same exhausted social landscape and then, with a sickly grin, disappears up its own fundamental aperture. And for who? God's puppies! Young culture-suckers with lives of wafer-thin significance. Stoner Cricket Shrine (2001) is their emblem.
Another quick example, from the start of the Iraqi War. Within minutes of each other, I saw aircraft carrier takeoffs through a nightscope (on my TV), and then a popup ad for the movie The Core, showing the Golden Gate Bridge sagging into the Bay like taffy (on my browser).
The second image cost eleventeen million dollars and was perfectly stunning and perfectly boring.
The first image was simply point and shoot and this is what you get. And I couldn't take my eyes off of it. True, unlike the film still, it was a moving image -- the coruscating orange lozenges, floating green ghosts, flaring yellow roars -- but even a short clip of The Core bridge scene would be crisp, clean, replete with music, and slick as a smirk.
I pictured Hollywood directors watching those carrier takeoffs on wall-sized screens and seething into cellphones at cinematographers: "That's the look I want! that's the look I need! Why can't we do that? Why can't we even think of doing that?
I feel for you, but life trumps art:
This statue of boots by Iraqi artist Zerak Mera trumps all 51 of Antony Gormley's new Australian figures.
Any small part of any North Korean parade trumps any Vanessa Beecroft.
Pana Wave Laboratories wipes out Jim Shaw's O-ism/Goodman Image File, and even takes a bite out of Barney's Cremaster 5.
Kimjongilias (mutated poinsettias) trump Eduardo Kac's glowing bunny.
MSNBC's America's Bravest wall trumps Do-Ho Suh's Korean classmate wallpaper.
This photo [warning: very graphic] from RAWA of a smiling Taliban in 1998 holding out two hands and a foot -- not his own -- to the camera, certainly trumps the Chapman brothers's Great Deeds Against the Dead.
An esoteric example, for the bitstreamers: the epistemological outlooks of those who advance 4GW -- Fourth Generation Warfare theory, strategy, and tactics. These people wrestle with a world -- our world -- whose combinatorial explosions far outstrip the most mega-multi-meta virtuality ever invented, or which could be invented. (These same people unzipped Iraq neat as you please. Thank you.)
Artists must respond to the sobering fact that, like most people, they shall always play catch-up with the morning newspaper homepage. Recently, these responses range from the hilarious (Miguel Calderon, Noble & Webster) to the hopeless (too many to count, but here's a sampler: Tracey Emin, Kai Althoff, Neo Rauch, Ann Craven, both Rachels, all Crewdson Crews, Peter Doig, Laura Owens, Jason Meadows, Evan Holloway, und so weider); from the horrible (Wim Delvoye's Cloaca, Rhoades & McCarthy's Shit Plug) to the humiliating (Dawn Mellor, Gillian Wearing, John Currin, Robert Melee pimping his mother).
But I see very little art out there, from sea to shining sea, and definitely here in desert metro/Phoenix, that is so profoundly eccentric as to establish a new center -- or that brings a mature challenge to our expectations -- or that helps anyone into the future -- or that repudiates empty trances -- or that fosters clearer reflection -- or that thrives beyond cultural clichés and other dead horses -- or that takes a strong stand against our common oblivion.
I want to know art that shows the stretch marks of life, scoured with the tears of things.
Years ago photographer Arthur Tress angrily asked, "Where are the photographs we can pray to, that will scare the hell out of us, that will save our souls?"
This yearning attitude is lost on a lot of our local artists, as well as our local curators and directors. The museum-exhibition system here seems determined to dumbly Disneyfy itself down into mere entertainment, to be "audience-friendly" -- that's from Erin Kane, assistant curator at SMOCA. You can have yoga, tai chi, chai tea, or karaoke with your art these days.
You get the soothing milksop of Wolfgang Laib, the dessicated "emoting" (is that even a word?) of Leslie Dill, Ernesto Neto's soma-coma playtime squishies, the infantilizing, blue-pill surrender of Lee Bul's karaoke pods, and the sanctioned soap-operas of Tony Oursler -- but you won't see Abramovic cleaning bloody bones, or the white-knuckled gut-twist of Cattelan's Him.
(Bill Viola was and is an exception. So was the Cuba show at ASU. That's two, and years ago.)
If metro/Phoenix wants to be world-class, should it not pay attention to art that pays attention to the world? Milking the Phillips Collection on its circuit, snagging a Cornelia Parker (even a good one), impressing a New York writer with your single Frida Kahlo (an even better one) and the truly embarrassing Beverly McIver (Jeez-Loueeze, Mr. Rubenstein!), perenially flogging the still-vibrant, civilized hallucinations of Philip Curtis -- sorry: that ain't the Show, that's still the Cactus League (even with James Turrell).
At the alternative galleries -- you know they're alternative by the tired surreal names, like snorkydork -- there's body suspension and skateboarding and sword-swallowing and spoken word and no-category music and belly-dancing (not all at once). They show student-level art. And they're crowded.
Where is the strong art? I don't mean the fifty-odd people I admire, out of thousands over almost forty years. Where is the new strong art that can take the measure of life and act accordingly? that isn't simply rubbed out by the next dreadful matyrdom, or eclipsed by newfangled scientific humdingers, or blindsided by the latest low mark in human behavior?
In the name of Goya, in the name of Bosch, in the name of Johns; in the names of Eva Hesse and Oscar Wilde and Camille Paglia and Walter Pater, I am insulted by the amniotic dreaming so prevalent now on canvases Valleywide, and the cartoon surrealism, and the shallow autobiography ("You are SO Judgmental" -- Annie Lopez), and the one-trick ponies monkeys with their single gimmicks, and the pooped-out pop, and the find-the-bunny abstraction which has oozed out of art schools in a thick, engulfing wave of odorless manure for at least the last decade.
Where is the strong art? We've been looking, and we do find it, and in the days, weeks, and months to come, we'll find even more and write about that, too, making judgments all the way.
We will devote some space to tired, and rehashed, and implosive, and stupid art, too; some of whatever gets put out there. But not much; just enough to slightly alter Jerry Saltz's recent prophecy:
"Future generations will peruse today's art magazines and suppose ours was an age when almost everything was universally admired."
Not if we can help it, beginning in the blogosphere.
We declare this critical attitude with the same moniker we bestow on our own art practice: Twenty-First Century Soul.
This is the new stuff.
Posted by Jerome at June 1, 2003 08:37 PM | TrackBack
