by Jerome du Bois
I just found out (nobody tells me anything) that Bret McCabe (whipcrack name, eh?) of Baltimore's Citipaper Online has a piece about ripoff-artist artist Jon Routson, which quotes my earlier piece, Stealing Is The New Appropriation. (McCabe's piece is well-researched and well-written, and way too sympathetic; in fact, I think he's been played like a banjo, but I'll get to that below.) Greg Allen -- yeah, The Greg Allen of greg.org -- even has a new comment in that earlier piece, which I briefly reply to there.
On his own blog, he refers to me (without linking or a name) as a "wannabe playah with a weblog." Typical ignorant arrogance: if Mr. Allen read even one of my essays (or Catherine King's), he would know that the last thing we need or want to be is "playahs" of any kind, especially in the empty-headed games he and his cohort (I refer to the sociological term) promote (hence the title). We are totally independent, deeply backgrounded, highly motivated, beholden to no one, and grinding the ax of truth -- and we're not afraid to swing it.
Back to the title. I detect the scent of synchronicity. Ms. King had discarded her essay Jon Haddock and What's Wrong With the American Male, which you can read about here; but then we realized that the commenters on our Jon Haddock walkout -- Franklin Einspruch and John Spiak -- were actually helping Ms. King with her project: they were, in their own ways, writing parts of this essay. And so does Gregory Sale, from the Appropriation piece. And so does Greg Allen. And so does Jon Routson. We'll be gathering those threads together in later posts, but for now . . . From McCabe's article:
He is the last person to ask about the meaning of his work. Not that he doesn't know, just that it's not always fully formed.
"I don't really make art in the proper way," Routson says. "The bootlegs aren't profound or have anything to say -- like I didn't make them because I was trying to say some big idea. The meaning of the work never really comes together for me until later, until after the work has been finished, after it has been shown, after it comes down and I'm back at home thinking about it, and it's like, 'Oh, this was about this.'"
And this: "I guess I still have this naive idea about art," Routson muses. "I started making art just to make friends. People would come see the work, and then we'd have something to talk about. And I guess in a way I still do. I know I will eventually have to make work I can and want to sell if I want to make a living as an artist, but I can't really think about creating the work for that reason. It's just not the way I work." [This guy's had a good, well-paying, steady job of one kind or another since 1987; he's not some struggling artist.]
Routson also has a photo-album type series wherein he hires mall Easter Bunnies for portrait photos. Well, that's an easy one to extend -- mall Santas, Birthday Clowns, Sci-Fi-Con Attendees, Ku Klux Klan members -- no, wait, that's been done. (There's also some new guy named Christian Holstad being promoted by another new guy named Daniel Reich. One of his . . . pieces consisted of photocopying every NY Library reference to "homosexual" and displaying it someplace. Thin concepts like these make Tyler Green's Wal-Martists seem positively profound.)
McCabe reports on Routson's Bunnies in an earnest way, and Routson comes across as a media-soaked, post-slacker male puzzling out his troublesome relationship with this lifelong audiovisual flood. What horseshit.
This guy has been in and out of art schools and the art world for about fifteen years. He worked for Vito Acconci's studio. He's got degrees. He worked five years doing records management for the Justice Department. He's competent. And empty.
There is no hunger in Routson, no lack, no dissatisfaction. He's found a gimmick, a shtick, and he's working it. He's smug, and fashionably rumpled in every way, and he knows his lines -- that is, he knows that for art-world "playahs" to understand him, he has to come across as dumb as a bag of elbows:
"They [Koons, R.Prince, Richter] make art that's kind of about art, but not in a very pretentious way," Routson says. "It's coming from some conceptual somewhere. All work, even painting, it's always based conceptually first. It's funner. It feels like you're doing something, instead of just making something to be looked at."
Ah, well. Keep it coming, fellas, we'll make What's Wrong With The American Male an occasional series here at The Tears of Things, where we continue to read it and weep.
[By the way, for now I'm herding every guy I've named above, except Richter and Acconci and myself, under the umbrella of the title. I doubt that, after more research, I'll change my mind about any of them. We'll see. Upcoming: Matthew Ritchie -- another one of 'em. ]
Posted by Jerome at January 21, 2004 10:48 AM | TrackBack