September 28, 2004
Anti-Bush Art Is Puerile: Part One: Visual Art
[This post consults the following for its analysis:
Caryn James, "Political Art, Potshots to Sure Shots," New York Times, August 20, 2004.
Roberta Smith, "Caution: Angry Artists At Work," NYT, August 27, 2004 (and the physical newspaper)
Artforum, September 2004, Special Political Art Section (the physical magazine)
a greg.org post on Richard Serra
a Powerline post on Roberta Smith's article
My own post on Richard Serra's Moral Cowardice
And, for local anti-Bush art, see our sidebar series on "Democracy in America" at ASU]
by Jerome du Bois
When you strike at a king, you must kill him. -- Emerson
Stop Bush. -- Richard Serra
Caryn James of the NYT recently surveyed a baker's dozen of anti-Bush movies and plays. In one example, Nathan Lane's liberal updating of Aristophanes' The Frogs, she writes:
Nathan Lane . . . is Dionysos, who goes to Hades to bring an artist back to earth. He articulates the play's radical and appealing idea that a poet can save civilization with "comfort, wit and wisdom," the idea behind all political art. But "The Frogs" itself relies on a veneer of topical comments, like the line, by far the play's sharpest, describing "the Bully Bush frog that makes pre-emptive strikes, then forgets why it attacked in the first place."[my emphasis]
Bereft of comfort, wit, or wisdom, this line still brings forth praise from Ms. James, at least as a barb. Really! Well, I'm neither pricked nor bleeding, and I doubt W., much less Artistophanes, would be either. The line stinks of an adolescent boy's first rush of testosterone, still hesitating between puerility and pubesence, and its sour vinegar permeates the political art of the season, along with the brassy taste of these artists' lifelong notion of entitlement, an inflated idea of one's importance, one's wit, and one's wisdom, which issues in art trivial, dull, and stupid.
In what follows I will refer to several recent articles and blogs which surveyed or at least sampled the political art (almost all anti-Bush) of this election season. Part One covers (a few) movies and visual art, Part Two the lively and literary arts. It features, not surprisingly, really ugly images -- "The Hole Truth" -- so be forewarned.
But let's not leave Ms. James's examples just yet. She examines thirteen movies and plays: Bowling for Columbine, Bush's Brain, F9/11, The Frogs, The Hunting of the President, The Manchurian Candidate (remake), Mrs. Farnsworth, Outfoxed (about Murdoch & Fox), Silver City, Tanner '88, This Land (web animation), Uncovered, and Yes.
Missing from this list, and telling in their own ways: Robert Redford's The Candidate, Tim Robbins' Bob Roberts, and especially Bulworth, Warren Beatty's witty, wise, and brutal send-up of all the naked emperors. I can understand why Ms. James and her employers would steer clear of Bulworth -- scorchy! -- but what about boilerplate liberals Redford and Robbins? Could it be because their lead characters bear no resemblance to George Bush, but to . . . others?
On Friday, August 27th, the NYT published Roberta Smith's "Caution: Angry Artists At Work," a survey of sixteen exhibitions, which conveniently conflated anti-Bush, anti-Vietnam, and anti-Iraqi-War sentiments. It's an odd mix, some of it cobbled together in obscure or temporary galleries, or in hasty and irrelevant ways.
Reading it online doesn't do it justice. Look at the physical paper: The entire top half of the "Weekend" Section page, above the fold, consists of a full-color photo of Rachel Mason's plaster sculpture Kissing President Bush. As soon as my wife (a former layout artist) saw the layout, she said, "That" -- running her finger around the image, meaning the photo, and its size -- "that was for Laura Bush, a slap in the face." From The New York Times. Welcome to New York City, Mrs. First Lady.
Ms. Smith comments:
. . . a decidedly ambiguous work that is in some ways [not explained] touchingly vulnerable. On first sight, the piece can trigger a number of associations: Jeff Koons's marble sculptures, Bill Clinton and Monica Lewinsky, an incestuous Pietà, entrapment. It may also make you wonder whether any marital infidelities lurk in President Bush's shadow.
Bullshit. The thing was made to shock and embarrass President and Mrs. Bush. And she reaches with her examples, while leaving out Barbara Kruger's much more politically ambiguous sculptures -- such as Family, 1997 -- the first images that came to my mind. But this sculpture is a Beavis & Butthead joke. It is on the same level as this stanky poster (I warned you).
Everywhere I look, I see the mentality of teenage boys (and those who like them). It doesn't matter the artist's age. The latest Artforum leads off its special political section with a statement by Richard Serra from 1970, just when his career was taking off:
Haunted [?] by the activist theatrics of Abbie Hoffman, Serra wondered "whether the times were not forcing us to a completely new set of ideas about what an artist was and what an artist did."
Big talk, little Dick, jibber-jabber on. What he did for the next 34 years was become rich and famous, working hard as a dock mule, nurtured, sheltered, lauded, and promoted by many busy hands, minds, muscles and dollars in this mighty, organized, and steel-rich country. Then BushRabies, or something, takes over and this spoiled old man turns against his greatest benefactor. Not only that, he falls back into a helpless and puerile pose -- what? you think this (courtesy greg.org) isn't a self-portrait? -- and he expects favorable results -- a change to his advantage -- exactly like a pouty ten-year-old denied his Resident Evil. He isn't alone. Back to Ms. Smith's article, writing about a photo-piece in "Freedom Salon," at Jeffrey Deitch Projects, shown during the Republican Convention:
Keep an eye out for AA Bronson's large color photograph of himself hanging naked upside down, an image of powerlessness and humiliation.
I'm not surprised, since Bronson is not even American but Canadian, where shari'a makes inroads, and where they're used to bending over. (So his homosexuality fits right in.) Formerly of the otherwise-late General Idea gay artists group, Bronson makes a big deal about being a Bear, meaning an overgrown hairy queer baby.
[Okay, here we go, I'm stepping it up. Imagine WWF, only with fat bearded guys and sex. Now that the love that dare not speak its name has become the lifestyle that won't shut up, regular folks, including vanilla gays, must now share in the permutations of its continually-arrested development. Like plushies and adult babies and masochists, it's all about reaching that fetid surrender, that mutual humiliation, as directly as possible -- and snaring the viewer in the tacky tar as well. Stinkers. But now the gay shtick has lost its charge, queers are as ordinary as hammers, so what gay male curators (and they're everywhere!) are left with are their own stunted obsessions, whether they be sensitive portraits by Paul P., thrashers, animation, the humiliation of women at every opportunity, or the embarrassments of Bronson and so many others.]
Remember the title of the show: "Freedom Salon." This is how Bronson, a sturdy, middle-aged man, faces the future, freedom, and their enemies. With his droopy little sack and upside-down smile, he welcomes our enemies with, "Did you bring the whips? Good! I deserve it!" Pinhead.
More examples, in no particular order:
Marshall Reese's short, Warholian "Line Up: Unofficial Portraits," which represents the Bush administration in mug-shot-like images . . .
The Experimental Party was founded in 2001 by Randall M. Packer, who in real life is an artist and writer who teaches at American University in Washington. In his art life he is the secretary of the tongue-in-cheek United States Department of Art and Technology . . .
A video by xxx Silva unveils Grandmaster Bush, a DJ in a presidential mask, who skillfully spins a rap song that samples presidential speeches . . .
[from "Bush League," below] Bjorn Melhus's "In Beautiful, Sunny Guantánamo Bay, Cuba." In it he converts the tae of a 2002 news conference conducted by Secretary of Defense Donald H. Rumsfeld into a dazzling bit of self-incriminating rap music.
. . . you can hear the National Anthem sung by Jill Steinberg, a young opera singer and performance artist from Seattle who calls herself "The Voice of America." Occassionally you see Ms. Steinberg on a video screen, standing before the Lincoln Memorial with an American flag draped carefully over her shoulders as she sings.
In "Bush League," at Roebling Hall in Williamsburg, the gamut of expression runs from Dan Ford's Turneresque painting "The Burning of the National Library, Baghdad, Troops Observing Looters" to Laura Parnes's 30-second television ads, which were commissioned by Downtown for Democracy, a group of art world professionals who organized last year --
[For a photo-fest of the latest D4D educational-political event -- "The Liberty Fair" -- complete with face-painting, click here. Will Cotton-Candy decorating cookies was a nice touch. Suggestion for future fairs: ass-painting.]
-- The show also includes Guy Richards Smit's watercolor reworkings of New York Times front pages . . .
. . . and Joan Linder's caricatures of officials in the Bush administration. Using tiny strokes, she depicts them in their underwear and they look like naughty, slightly furry children. Heeheehee . . .
The American cartoonist and writer Jeremy Hutchins contributes a cunning little book titled "Loving the Cheney Within: A Recovery Manual."
[At AIR in Chelsea] . . . art made from or inspired by the images in "The George W. Bush Coloring Book" by Karen Ocker . . .
Wayne Gonzales's "Yellow Poster," a gaudy work that casts the RNC as a common theatrical production . . . It looks like a movie ticket, but with Pfc England doing her leash act in the lower right corner.
. . . and the satiric "Let's Go Republican" pamphlets by the artists' collective Yes Men that let citizens sign away even more rights than those restricted under the Patriot Act.
To quote Hindrocket from Powerline: Oh-Oh, The Artists Are After Us.
I myself am trembling in my black-and-white Stacy Adams spectators.
Cartoons, underwear, mug shots, coloring books, Jerky-Boy impersonations, collage rap music, TV ad takeoffs, scatology . . . boys will be boys. Oh, I know some of these artists are females. Doesn't matter; they're no help; most of them willingly anoint themselves with the rancid oil of self-humiliation.
The rest of Ms. Smith's article -- uphill all the way, doing her yeowoman work in the bankrupt left's forlorn sojourn toward Democratic Sinai -- covers photography, both current and vintage, and some token Seventies and Eighties pieces by Gran Fury (Silence = Death), Barnett Newman, Robert Morris, and Chris Burden. These are largely irrelevant to my thesis, but let me single out Morris, a Serra contemporary, for a moment. Thirty-four years ago, when these lithographs first appeared, Mr. Macho Morris (remember the Castelli ad? with the Wehrmacht helmet?) envisions
a cross-shaped trench filled with chlorine gas and a grid made of see-through coffins that is titled "Infantry Archive" and is meant to be walked on barefoot.
Reading these words, notions and images bloom in my head . . . Mr. Morris has never served in the military, sheltered in academia his whole adult life . . . My father, holding the head -- just the head, with the helmet -- of his buddy, for a moment, before he had to set it aside and rejoin the battle of Okinawa . . . My father, who earned five Purple Hearts, a Bronze Star, and two Silver Stars as a Marine too old, who had to pound on the recruiting office doors to join the war . . . My brother, refusing conscription and Nixon's war, and spending two years in Safford Federal Prison Camp. My father chartered a private plane every month and flew himself, my mother, and me down there for visits. Every month until Tim got out. "Fuck Nixon," my old man would say. All this time, Robert Morris was safely posturing, clenching his fist, grinding his teeth, signing petitions, and thinking up conceptual art shit. What a hero.
Before we leave Ms. Smith to her exertions, I'd like to highlight her closing mention, "The Freedom of Expression National Monument." Behold it in its earlier incarnation, twenty years ago:
(I like the large picture in the Times better, since no one in the crowd even faces, much less pays attention to, the person speaking at the megaphone.)
First constructed in 1984 (that spooky year), someone drug it out for this gig. I picture it here because it serves as an apt symbol of the overweening infantilism of the last two generations of artists.
As a father, I can easily see this photo as the power dream of an infant or very young, preverbal child, the only humans justified to overwhelm us with their voices. Once we begin to talk to each other, we learn to get attention for our needs in other ways. Look, this is a megaphone:
It's light and handy. You can pick it up, hold it, take it with you, and put it down. You can even hand it over to others. That big red thing -- which, since it's immobile in its impotent importance, people have to come around and attend to it -- is a blatant admission of insignificance: Without this big red thing, I'm nuthin. But a substantial person, a person of psychological weight who has something to say, a person with true glamour, could spellbind any crowd simply with his or her words.
Roberta Smith says about these exhibitions:
Taken alone, no one event is very prominent. But the totality -- the critical mass -- makes a powerful statement about the role of the arts in political activism.
People are so easily impressed, my wife says; people love mediocrity best. As a supporter of President Bush, I must encourage all you leftist, anti-Bush artists: More! More! More! Bring It On. If this is the best you can do, the deepest you can go, the hardest you can hit, how will you swallow your four-year-old('s) rage on November 3rd -- Re-Election Day?
The September Artforum features two political sections: seven essays, plus a portfolio of the efforts of fourteen artists. I'll be discussing the whole portfolio, but only a couple of the essays, though I read them all. What was that like, you ask? Well, as I finished, the experience reminded me of a line from Bob Dylan's Lenny Bruce: "I rode with him in a taxi once / only for a mile-and-a-half / seemed like it took a couple of months." And all the while, plowing through that turgid, self-important prose, the air stank of everybody's egos. I will subject you to only one extended quotation for now, from Gregg Bordowitz, who, whatever else he does, is an assistant professor at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago. Listen to his warmed-over Marxism:
As artists we continue to be alienated from our labor; our work, our art continues to be captured from our intentions.[By who?] Our efforts are used to make profits for others in a system largely hostile to creativity [Oh: dem no like us]; a system that institutes conformity by reducing the meaning of our work and the products of our labor to an exchange-value equivalent of countless products in a vast market. [Pass the Kleenex.] These problems are no doubt familiar to many of us [?], and I cringe [you should] as I once again list them for publication -- yet I must [he must!], regardless of their seemingly permanent and intractable nature. [Zzzzz.] They outline the features of an intensifying impasse that remains central to the very definition of modern art. [The Very One!] We cannot ignore them because we are not beyond them. To pretend that we are [Heaven forbid] is tantamount to accepting our own irrelevance. [Aarrgghhh! That Evil Word!] We are at the very least relevant, even vital to the perpetuation of culture.
I know, I know, but quit laughing and get up off the floor. This is serious. Academics have killed a lot of talent. By coincidence, I had just finished Victor David Hanson's latest column, which included this paragraph:
Victor David Hanson, September 24, 2004:
But the regime is crumbling on campuses as well. Too many university professors in the humanities dropped long ago their allegiance to the disinterested search for truth, or to teaching students facts and methods. How could one be so constrained and parochial when a war was raging on, and millions of youth needed to be prepared as ideological warriors in the struggle to remake our culture? Meanwhile, teaching loads decreased, annual tuition soared higher than the rate of inflation, and the baccalaureate no longer reflected much erudition. Surely, progressive academics, of all people, would not stand by while their curriculum was politicized, free speech suppressed, their part-time lecturers systematically exploited, their working-class students priced out of the market, and their research tainted with bias?
Oh yes they would stand by, silently, as long as their jobs are safe.
Bennett Simpson, an associate curator at the Institute for Contemporary Art in Boston, profiles the art / fashion / film collective Bernadette Corporation and the shadowy anarchist group Black Bloc, both approvingly. I'm just going to pick out some key titles, phrases, words . . . Get Rid of Yourself is the title of a documentary about Black Bloc:
At one point a manifesto scrolls across a black background. "They say, 'another world is possible.' But I am another world. Am I possible?"
Awwww. Whiners. Simpson:
To make sense of BC and its many episodes . . . the pertinent question is not "What is an artist today?" but rather "How might an artist evade culture's demand for marketable identity in her person, products, style, and career?"
As if culture was some stalking demon bearing a suffocating cloak to put out your precious, fragile, unique fire, O artist? This is what happens when you get rid of yourself and jettison morality as well.
Final note on Simpson: He describes some of Black Bloc's activities this way:
With their symbolic targets and superfluous actions -- looting supermarkets, ransacking banks -- the groups "zones offensives d'opacité," as members characterize their tactical goal, have sought to disrupt . . .
The actions I've emphasized are crimes. Hey, Simpleton, why don't you invite Black Bloc to ICA and see how your bosses like it?
Why do I select Bordowitz and Simpson for puerility? Because, in Bordowitz's case, Marxism is dead as Kelsey's nuts and only pampered Western academics still mouth its moribund maxims, as if sheer repetition will make their teachers' mantras true. But grown-ups have moved on to democracy, freedom, and individual choice. Bordowitz is a retro-red-diaper baby; scratch him and you'll find a fascist.
Simpson, like a ten-year-old, thinks he can evade consequences even in his thinking. He muses approvingly about Black Bloc's transgressive actions, but he would shit bricks and call the cops if Black Bloc trashed his museum store. If he wanted to keep his job, that is. Words mean, Simpleton.
Let's move on to the portfolio. First is Serra's "Stop Bush" piece. Here Greg Allen steps up as unwitting witness to my thesis:
[via MAN] What's shocking about Richard Serra's poster for pleasevote.com--a thick paintstick silhouette of the hooded Abu Ghraib prisoner--isn't his use of text or figurative representation, both completely absent from the rest of his work (with possibly one 1960's exception).
And it's not his political activity. He's always been an active liberal, and his art challenges both easy commodification and conservative notions of authority. And who can forget his legal battle with the GSA and anti-NEA zealots like Jesse Helms which culminated in the destruction in 1989 of his sculpture Tilted Arc (besides pretty much everyone, that is)?
No, what shocked me was his positively statesman-like restraint, which stands in contrast to the horrible image in his drawing and to current levels of Administration discourse. With STOP BUSH, Serra--who's well known for his angry temper--let's [sic] George off easy.
In 1990, he made an etching as a fundraiser for North Carolina Senate candidate Harvey Gantt, who lost after his opponent ran some race-baiting ads that have become recognized dirty tricks classics. The title of that piece (sorry, mom) was Fuck Helms.
Click here for a picture of the piece that so impressed Mr. Allen.
Notice: two black smears. No way, looking at the image alone, one can infer the title. You have to be told the title. Yet it's the title that carries whatever charge one gets from reading the f-word in 1990, or 2004.
When I was a kid growing up in Hawaii one of my friends' fathers was the character actor Peter Whitney / Engel, and he had a really neat sign in his library. Every time we went over there, we asked to see it. Inside the room, over the entrance door, was a big red banner with white capital letters that spelled out FUCK COMMUNISM!
We thought that was so cool. The Word, right there, spelled out big. But then, it was around 1960, when I was eleven years old. Get the point, Mr. Serra? Mr. Allen?
Moving on. (Some of these images you can find from the link Artforum provides; you just have to click through the slide show.) Rachel Harrison contributes "Saratoga Horse Auction," (it's online) a two-by-three six-photo gang showing details from the event. Get it? The election isn't even a horse race; it's an auction run by a bunch of rich white guys. This is just old-style paranoid leftist conspiracy theory, with some sneering social slurs attached: the black man in the upper left, with the manure shovel; the fat white arm in the white-trash diner; the three obedient, identically-suited white boys, waiting for instructions; the clutch of eminences grisés laughing in their confidence. But conspicuously missing from the photos, because it would ruin the simplistic outline of the conspiracy, are the most dedicated, obsessed horse lovers in the world, who would surely have crowded the event: the Saudis. Didn't she miss a golden opportunity to connect the President with the Saudis? Does she wish to avoid offending the Saudis? Or has she just been affected by all those chemtrails?
Next, language artist Lawrence Weiner contributes "Invitation to the Dance," a concrete-poem text piece which reads Sink or Swim / Your Ass Gets Wet / There is No Excuse, and in smaller text, lower left, Aspirations Not Aspirants. Okay, new metaphor, politics as a dance, except we're in the water (like Esther Williams?), so we might as well get involved, and we're supposed to be impressed by ideals, not people. Here endeth the lesson, and so what?
Pretty limp, but Trisha Donnelly's contribution, "Untitled," is so much thinner that I can reproduce it right here. Imagine this is on the upper left corner of a blank square page:
1
9
3
9
That's it. Because "Bush = Hitler" was already taken. Geeks would call this piece an embodiment of Godwin's Law. This is not political discourse; it's moldy paranoid dogma.
Next, Barbara Kruger must whine at us. Printed over a close-up photo of a dew-dappled red rose:
Look like us.
Think like us.
Talk like us.
Laugh like us.
Fear like us.
Hate like us.
Die like us.
You forgot to say please, Ms. Kruger. Ostensibly a 1984-type exhortation to conformity, these lines -- especially "Fear like us / Hate like us" -- neatly define the current leftist position: we have to get rid of Bush, no matter what, and no matter how. (One reads of academics publicly stating they would lie, cheat, and steal to destroy Israel, for example.) Pathetic. And, by the way, Ms. Kruger, since we are of an age, remember Pete Seeger's "Little Boxes," from oh so long ago? "A Thousand Clowns"? We grew up, Ms. Kruger; but not all of us. It's troubling that someone who concentrates on minting phrases should try to pass on these worn old Naumanisms.
Tom Sachs made the Presidential Seal on the cover, along with a stamp-sized map of New Haven for his page in the portfolio. The Seal, an accurate reproduction, made of wood and plastic, is nicely done, and nine feet across, but you'd never know it from the cover. In the context of no context, it floats, deapan, doing just fine. I have no problem with it at all. Thanks, Tom. Okay, now who wants it? Will it fit in the Artforum offices?
Jonathan Horowitz once again drags out the old and discredited idea that Ronald Reagan caused AIDS deaths by neglect: "Archival Iris Print on Acid Free Paper of an Image Downloaded from the Internet with Two Copies of the New York Post Rotting in Their Frames." The Iris Print, a horizontal, shows a skinny guy lying down in a funereal pose wearing a T-shirt that says "Ignorance = Fear," holding a pitiful clutch of daisies, with KS lesions all over his arms. It's hard to tell if he's dead or alive. Stacked above this framed image, in their own vertical frames, are NY Post newspaper pages depicting Nancy Reagan kissing her husband's coffin (on the left), and Ronald Reagan saluting (on the right).
Two quick notes here: RR didn't help spread AIDS; it was all those guys fucking and sucking each other without protection, long after they should have, that helped spread AIDS, then whining that the government wasn't moving fast enough to save their sorry asses. Big Bad Daddy is supposed to take care of the irresponsible kids no matter what they do, don't you know? Second, Mr. Horowitz cares so little about this unfortunate person -- especially if he knew him -- that he won't dignify the fellow with a name, an age, a date, a birthplace, a short biography . . . No. Replacing them: An Image Downloaded From The Internet. Guess you're heart's all bled out, eh, liberal?
Next we find Isa Gensken's "Empire / Vampire, Who Kills Death," and thank goodness it's online, so I don't have to describe it, except as a cheesy conglomerate of collapse, like a makeshift shrine for 9/11 desecrated, as these heartless ones must, with silver spray paint. But leave untouched the crumpled colorful umbrella, and the dolls, to needle us with memories of seeing the falling ones over and over in our minds.
Laylah Ali's contribution, also online, is notable mostly for its mere presence, a signal of the omnipotence of the artist, and the surrender of the critic and the editor. The drawing itself is typical of an undeveloped psyche; I did this kind of monster stuff with my friends when I was twelve. But more importantly: Laylah Ali can do anything, and they'll accept it. I mean, what kind of depiction did Tim Griffin expect from his assignment? He would be a fool, knowing her stuff, to expect anything but twisted creatures from her stunted brain. Like a spoiled middle-school brat, she can do whatever she wants, pick up any drawing that was laying around, and send it to the magazine. And instead of saying What the hell is this shit? and what does it have to do with politics? they just shrug and forward it to layout. Because she's Laylah Ali, queen of the pygmies!
Kelley Walker's completely inane piece is paradoxically the most enraging. Given an international audience on an important subject, Walker shows a family snapshot in a living room, with some quirky but innocuous details, and under it some kind of stationery, the only significant words scribbled on it: "July 5, 2004; Tim, Getting started on the right foot!" That's it. Leaving us to work out some nonexistent subtext. Asshole.
Then comes Elizabeth Peyton's hilariously devotional high-school portrait of John Kerry (online), which should be signed in the lower right corner, "All my love, Johnny." I'm going to dote on her a bit, since she's the artist of the moment -- and we can only hope that moment will be brief. Remember as you read: she is 39 years old.
The October Vogue, in Dodie Kazanjian's profile, contains a gold mine of Peyton's juvenile, narcissistic thoughts, and accurate descriptions of her work:
I myself have heard her work described as lightweight, "pretty," and as saccharine-sweet as the gushings of an obsessive teenage girl -- another symptom of the youth culture that disfigures our time. . . . Whether what she does can be called portraiture is debatable. . .
By general agreement, a great portrait shows us profound truths about both the sitter and the artist, and Peyton's don't do that. In one sense, they are all self-portraits -- dealized images that reflect her feelings about the people she chooses to paint. She seems to love every one of her subjects -- "That's why I paint them," she says. "I could never do the Windsors, for example, because there's something so evil about them." [But not Kerry the Dismemberer?]
. . . "Gavin [Brown] seemed to understand that it wasn't just painting I was interested in, it was more a sense of my time and history and the power of art, and what it could do to inspire other people and culture. . . ."
[On Kurt Cobain and his suicide]: " . . . I heard his voice on the acoustic album that was put out abut six months after he commited suicide, and I thought, Oh, my God, I can't believe this man was alive at the same time I was. I was so moved that this person had existed and made what he'd made. He was the first person kind of my age, who was American, that I really, really identified with and wanted to paint."
What's constant in all these images [portraits] is not accurate likeness, or even personality, but a kind of obsessive, fanlike identification. Each of her pictures is like an act of love.
It's all about her. And of course the most MOR fashion designer around, Marc Jacobs -- he of the cashmere yawn -- is wild about her stuff.
"It's women like Elizabeth who inspire me," Jacobs told me, "women who are alive today and play a creative role in the world."
Finally -- she's taking landscape classes, and her next portrait subject will be Abraham Lincoln:
"I made some paintings of him the other day," she tells me. "I discovered he looks a lot like Cameron Diaz."
. . . I am usually not at a loss for words, but I flounder as I struggle to find some common ground between Ms. Peyton's tweenie planet and mine, good old Earth.
James Rosenquist contributes the horizontal painting "The Xenophobic Movie Director or Our Foreign Policy." Red, white, and blue predominate, as do, from the left: a cattle skull on a stump which is wrapped in the American flag; in the middle, a golfer's legs in mid-swing; on the right, a big light bulb (the golf club's head?) with Arabic writing on it; and scattered on the ground, numbers in color.
Well, that was easy, Jimmy; thanks. But a little simple. We had a guy here in Phoenix, Alfred Quiroz, who managed to put oil wells, and cocaine snorting, and the Twin Towers, in his clichéd painting.
Next we see a close-up photo of the gate edge of a cyclone fence, the post on the left disappearing vertically out of sight, the diamond-shaped wire filling the frame; except the whole, light-green thing seems made of plastic, or clay. This was made by Chris Hanson & Hendrika Sonnenberg. If they refer to soft or open borders, that's a criticism I agree with -- good fences make good neighbors -- but somehow I think they're saying that Homeland Security is a sham. Maybe I'm wrong, but its flatfooted presentation leads not to enlightenment but frustration.
Finally, Jeremy Deller's "Untitled," also easy to replicate, printed in Impact on a plain white page:
A photograph of
Donald
Rumsfeld
shaking
hands
with
Saddam Hussein
and in smaller letters:
Baghdad, December 20, 1983
This is news? This is art? This is anything? This feckless Brit, known for his so-called complex re-enactments and many-layered conceptual references, wasted a whole page of Artforum to beat a dead horse.
Now consider what Artforum editor Tim Griffin wrote to introduce all these tours de force:
This issue proved by far the most challenging to be assembled by the current editorial group at Artforum -- due in part to a deep-seated resistance we felt to the very pairing of art and politics, or, to recast the matter slightly, the pairing of art and its social context. After all, the most compelling works of art never boil down to that single dimension; who were we to risk doing so with an issue on the subject? The artists who contribute to the portfolio concluding this section shared our dilemma. All were excited to participate, but most refused to call their work "political" -- or if they accepted this nomenclature, they refused to deem their portfolio contribution itself an "artwork." Others argued that "all art is inherently political," making "political art" an almost meaningless framework. In other words, art and politics form an uneasy and highly self-conscious pair in these pages, forcing a constant reevaluation of the potential -- and limits -- of their alliance. No matter how difficult or problematic, this reconsideration remains urgent and necessary today.
He do huff and puff, don't he? Artists are Important People! Relevant and Necessary! Remember that! Sure -- you can tell by these fourteen examples how seriously they take both the political process and the artmaking process.
A long time ago -- I've used this quote before -- the photographer Arthur Tress, a gay man from way back by the way, lamented the technical progress of photography at the expense of other concerns: "Where are the photographs we can pray to, that will scare the hell out of us, that will save our souls?"
And where are the adult artworks? artworks that stand up, and step up, and take on the world, and don't whine?
Alas, nowhere near.
Posted by Jerome at September 28, 2004 01:30 PM | TrackBack