Archives for April 2009

From James Harris, where her work is on view till May 2:

Stephanie Syjuco uses the tactics of bootlegging, reappropriation, and fictional fabrications to address issues of cultural biography, labor, and economic globalization…She constructed small cut-out dioramas taken from tourist photographs of the Philippines and placed them conspicuously throughout her apartment. She then photographed her living space as a personal travelogue….By examining and constructing objects with fictional identities and histories, the artist reveals a larger truth: that we constantly invent narratives about ourselves and about others.

She’s got it all – identity politics, race, the global economy, the shifting mirage of home base and a creative use of multiple media.

As Charles Mudede wrote about her 2005 exhibit at James Harris, these issues have legs. He praises her for not being

dazzled by the phantasmagoria of planetary capitalism but instead uses its physical and visual commodities as the very material (and subject) of her sculptures, photographs, and media installation.

I’d like to know who’s dazzled by that phantasmagoria, besides the heads of international corporations, none of whom are quite as confident as they once were, seeing that global capitalism is on the ropes.

Back to the art. It’s deeply illustrative of its content, which makes it feel like homework. Mudede appears to be in love with the artist’s politics. Art critics can be swayed by underdog efforts, but art doesn’t care. For its own reasons, it favors or ignores lunatics in asylums and painters paid by the court. All the good will in the world cannot turn a weak form into a strong one. I do not claim that Syjuco will never get to the genuine, just that she’s isn’t there yet.

Amelie Chabannes:

Joseph Mills:

Looking up from below, N. P. Thompson:

Randy Kennedy wrote about them here. Slate offered its version here. Art Mobs ventured into the field here. PDL in Seattle topped all these others with For the tan you’ve been craving, stop by Flavin!

Talking in museums is almost always an attempt to tour guide. I try not to bother others as they contemplate art in museums, but sometimes, when confronted with a genuine art critic emergency (Is there an art critic in the house?) I intervene, with varying results.

Latest entry, Momus (Nick Currie). Says Art Fag City:

Momus gives a highly entertaining tour of Schirn Kunsthalle’s Darwin exhibition, fabricating virtually every bit of information he imparts. Don’t skip this video.

Bob Thompson:

This is work from a consumerist eye, an exercise of interpretation, the work of others used in a search for my own voice. Identity is no longer based on creation of something from nothing, but an attachment to a collection of images and ideas, juxtaposed just so, to create ‘the individual.’ Like listing bands, television shows, books and movies as a means to attain a whole. As we surround ourselves with the ghostly remains of history that passed us by, the longing to have taken part in it, overwhelms us and confines us to a life of digging through the trash to find ourselves.

Appropriation not only continues, it’s edging close to the core of contemporary aesthetics. Increasingly, artists explore the ramifications of living in a borrowed world on borrowed time.

The artist’s statement for Second Peoples at The Helm Gallery in Tacoma offers an excellent formulation of the position:

We have coined the name ‘second peoples’ to describe the people who arrive late on the scene, after the beginning, after the abundance, after the traumatic event, after everything’s been said and done, after, even, the end.

We are the second peoples. Chances are, you are too.
This is an exhibition dealing with what it means to be second. We inhabit a landscape of iteration, reverb, elision, and generational noise. Our corner of North America – these mountains, that timber, this rich land – belonged to someone else. Our popular culture-those TV shows, that movie sequel, this new band that is so retro they’re cool-belonged to some other time. Our art is that way, too: this gesture to Donald Judd, that nod to Philip Guston, that Eva Hesse wink.

We are interested in locating the coordinates of this second position. How did we end up here? What is our responsibility for what happened before us? What is our responsibility for the things that happen now in our names? Like Simone de Beauvoir argues in “Second Sex”, we think we should be free to transcend ourselves as subjects, to not be confined to existential leftovers.

Contemporary art is concerned with this alchemy, trying to turn second-handedness into first-handedness, reversing the flow of energy, presenting not representing, creating value from valuelessness. We think this is a worthwhile activity. We also think it is a fraught activity. The work in this exhibition exposes some of the fractures created by this ceaseless turning, and also dreams of a third position, a reification of our desire to escape, a momentary place to stop.

Note to self: Get thee to Tacoma to see this show. (Till May 14)

I’m not convinced Lux moves Thompson any further than Sherrie Levine took Walker Evans in the 1980s. At least he’s conscious of his strategy. 

Compare George Benjamin Luks’ Danty from 1915 at the Frye Art Museum (#3)

to Ryan Hixenbaugh’s Untitled (kid) from 2008.

Same demented intensity. Sometimes an echo is just an echo.

Raising moral objections to art has a long and dishonorable history.
Who today sympathizes with Savonarola, the 15th-century Italian monk who convinced Botticelli at the end of his life that his paintings were sinful, or with Ernest Pinard, the 19th-century prosecutor who tried to ban Madame Bovary?

Savonarola and Pinard are disgraced names, yet some of their censorious ideas are still with us, nagging at the edges of art. “To impose upon art the single rule of public decency is not to enslave it but to honor it,” Pinard claimed.

Ah, the decency rule. Beaten back early in the 20th century, it resurfaced with new vigor during the Cultural Wars, crippling the National Endowment for the Arts and encouraging censorship across the country.

In that aftermath, art critics are loath to appear morally offended by any work of art, no matter how distasteful they find its content. What critic wants to fuel the anti-art fire?
Besides, since the advent of modernism, supporting any kind of morality hasn’t been considered art’s job.

The 19th-century notion of art for art’s sake acquired a spine in the modernist lexicon. Instead of denying the existence of any content but style, modernists claim that art is entitled to any content if the aesthetic can support it.

As W.H. Auden wrote in In Memory of W.B. Yeats (a passage he later considered too preachy and excised), poets have a right to say anything as long as their language is supple:

Time that is intolerant
Of the brave and innocent,
And indifferent in a week
To a beautiful physique,
Worships language and forgives
Everyone by whom it lives;
Pardons cowardice, conceit,
Lays its honors at their feet.

All this Roberta Smith knows well. But because she chose not to confront her underlying moral hostility to Adel Abdessemed’s work until her review’s final sentence, her piece is full of a mystifying contempt. (Review here.)

Great lead:

You can hear the wheels of the international art-stardom machine turning in Adel Abdessemed’s first big commercial gallery show in New York, but they don’t get much traction.

It puts readers on notice that she is going to take this guy down. But then she doesn’t. Why? Because the work pushes back at her.

“Like Mother, Like Son” (above) consists of three small airplanes, cut in half and extended with enormous and beautiful tubes of white felt. They’re something like stretch limos, except that they twist together, like snakes locked in a battle to the death.

Given this sculpture and her grudging admiration, how can she justify the paragraph that preceded it?

The works themselves offer a lexicon of the latest biennial fashions: a mixture of identity politics, Conceptual strategies played out in real life and visceral punch lines. An array of art mediums is used: drawing, installation, video, photography and sculptures that usually involve found or replicated objects.

She can’t justify it.  “Latest biennial fashions?” That’s code for I-hate-you. He’s all about nature red in tooth and claw. She’s repelled but doesn’t say so, because (see above) art critics hesitate to review anybody’s morals. Wouldn’t it have been better if she had opened with an admission of moral qualms? Morality is an aesthetic sinkhole, but when a critic’s in one, an admission is brave and honorable.

Clarity comes at the end the review, and only about one piece. Since I don’t think the artist is justifying the morality of organized religions, Smith seems to be angry at the wrong target.

The oppression of women by organized religions is evil beyond words. Mr. Abdessemed should find a better use for his talent.

I haven’t seen this show, but isn’t that his point?

We’re doomed.

Considering the free flow of cultural influences, why is it that American artists engage the carnival theme with gamey vulgarities, while Europeans produce high-toned spectacle? Extras from splatter and noir movies populate American work, and the gilded glide through their European equivalents.

Case in point: Enrico David, finalist for this year’s Turner Prize and recently at the Seattle Art Museum thanks to SAM curator Michael Darling.

Born in Italy and living in London, David is a slippery devotee of magical thinking. Even when working alone, he creates the illusion of a merry band. Whether he’s embroidering paintings, turning costumes into lampshades and images of black coat racks (with pert breasts) into a chorus to accompany his own version of clowns, his meanings are polished but not fixed.

His figures relate to the past but have shed its baggage. He hopes to enchant the world, not change it. For him the world really is a stage, and he refashions its works (furniture, clothing, commercial illustration, puppet theater, advertisements, street lights and party favors) into his souffle of a drama.

His rigor saves him from whimsy, and his acute visual intelligence from trivia.

In an essay in Frieze, which he opened by declaring, “My
name is not Enrico David,” he spoke for all artists who do not want to
describe their work or have it described for them.

I’m not tour guide, toastmaster, apologist or surrogate. If you are
after meaning of fixed value, then you’re in the wrong shop. Meaning is
a proposition, not an assurance. Meaning is also the name of a nomadic
tribe who offer wares to anyone open to conversation.

That conversation is a silent one between the viewer and artwork. In
his insistence that his work not be explained away, he most resembles
those artists who made their mark a century ago. They were purists,
too.

Other finalists are Roger Hiorns, Lucy Skaer and Richard Wright. Winner to be announced Dec. 7. More here.

From the online-only version of the newspaper at which I once so happily toiled, this sentence:

The King County Sheriff’s Office has released more information on the man who stubbled of the woods early Tuesday near North Bend.

Anybody could write stubbled instead of stumbled, but in the old world, such goofs were far less likely to appear, thanks to copy editors. Readers now serve that role, but at the PI, the writers don’t seem to notice. The story posted at 12:54 p.m. Tuesday. The first correction came in at 2:08. It’s now Wednesday morning, and nobody has changed “stubbled of” to “stumbled out of.”

Here’s the comment thread:

(1) Stubbled? And on the home page, “Brainbridge” and “Bellevue make arrest in homicide”???
Didn’t you guys keep any copy editors around?

(2) Didn’t you know? All the copy editors were laid off. Ouch.

(3) I can’t weight until the staph reproters start taking there owen pitchers.

The lace that peers
out of pockets and lines a neck
like blind worms
in search of soft earth
was free, but Goya charged
extra for hands.

Allowed into a painting, they have the tendency to take over.

 Oskar Kokoschka let them.

Bruce Nauman assigns them lowly roles (false friend or pugilist).

Hannah Wilke, right hand drawn by the left, tracked cancer.

Debra Baxter provided one of hers with a fallback position. She may not be able to take you down, but the brass emblem of intimacy sheltering her middle finger will.

Eduardo Calderon – Caliban in love with unattainable beauty.

Fred Muram – portrait of the artist as an incompetent. (Besides offending left, note limp right in rear.)

Hugo Ludena – male bonding.

Holly Lynton – riding Mother Earth.

Tim Roda – like father, like son.