Tuesday, September 21, 2010

Art in the Culture of Continuous Spectacle

An early draft of a prospectus for SECAC 2011 - Suggestions, criticisms, comments welcome!


Spectacular Voice: Art Criticism’s Itinerary Beyond Postmodernism


How is contemporary art criticism coping with the continuous spectacle brought on by the dominant climate of Internet media and the sustained art fair sensation? Immediate access and mechanical reproduction via the Internet and an inflation in commodity culture reflected in the rising number of global art fairs has certainly had a noticeable impact on the homogenized quality and shift in contemporary art criticism. This essay will seek to present dialogue surrounding the argument of the connection/disconnection between contemporary art criticism and art; affirming the progressive absence of a critical edge as we consider art moving beyond postmodernism.


Nicolas Bourriaud’s theory of Altermodern helps to reexamine this contemporary phenomena—of the spectacle’s insistence on extracting the viewer from reality—by prompting the artist and viewer to reconsider their position beyond capitalist globalization and forge an itinerary, or path with which reconnects with a mode of “authenticity.” As an example, the art fair sensation is dominant and now largely dictates forms of ideological art criticism steeped in commodity, written about rampantly in platforms for contemporary art criticism like newspapers, magazines, catalog essays, and the Internet, while held to a skewed notion of “multiculturalism.” This has resulted in a homogenized criticality and modes of representation on the part of the artist and critic.


Modernism’s once avant-gard, timeline-based surge of new theory and art movements that championed universalism in the 20th century moved into a post-history or postmodernism since the 1980s that revealed a breakdown of linearity into a cultural hybridization .[i] This of course has shifted the critical edge and academic voice in contemporary art criticism to one that blankets art and aesthetics as a reflection on Utopian ideology rather than a modern notion that “traverses time” one that “considers a mode of thought that assumes the shape that circumstances impress upon it.”[ii] Bourriaud suggests that rather than revert back to the “totalitarian temptations and colonialist claims of the modernism of the last century,” it is possible to “take a step beyond postmodern borderlines” and consider the reconstitution of modernity.[iii]


[i] Bourriaud, Nicolas, The Radicant (New York: Lukas & Sternberg), 13.

[ii] Ibid., 15.

[iii] Ibid., 16.

Wednesday, July 7, 2010

Young Curators, New Ideas III

(Untitled) The Masquers by Craig Drennen | Curated by Erin Dziedzic
mr. & mrs. amani olu (formerly amani olu projects), in conjunction with P•P•O•W
511 West 25th Street, Room 301 | July 22 - Aug. 20, 2010 | Reception: July 22, 6-8 p.m.


The Masquers, Craig Drennen’s most recent visualized characters within the Timon of Athens (c. 1605–1608) series recontextualizes David Robbins’ 18 photographic images of major art figures of the 1980s titled Talent (1986). The Masquers (2010) or ladies dressed as Amazons, as indicted in Shakespeare's Timon of Athens, reveal a paradox between the notion of “success” and “failure” in the art world deduced by the history of each individual artist represented since the images’ inception and asks us to imagine a world beyond postmodernism. The skepticism toward Jean-François Lyotard’s questioning of the truth advised through metanarratives, Frederic Jameson’s Neo-Marxist reading of postmodernism as the “dominant cultural logic of late capitalism,” and Jean Baudrillard’s suggested shift of identity to mediations and simulations, do not have the high stakes grandeur in expressing the impotence of modernism they had in the early 1980s. However, the current generations tendency to passively default to these theoretical systems has prompted a lull in reexamining critical theory. Are we riding the wave of the “success” of postmodernism and therefore hesitant to further query on the instances of its “failures?” Just as Robert Rauschenberg, Jasper Johns, Claes Oldenburg, and Jim Dine had reacted to the dominant gestural mark of abstract expressionism by expanding upon it through the recontextualizing of objects to forge Pop art in the late 1950s, contemporary postmodern practices of intertextuality, pastiche, and mediated detachment have become the impetus for a new hybrid art practice.

Furthermore, the title of the exhibition, Young Curators, New Ideas III asks us to peruse the so-called successes and failures in contemporary art but also those whose ideas and visual vocabulary vibrate in between this dichotomy and address a concept of redirection in the current moment.

Drennen’s continued series’ proceed through the entire dramatis personae of the Shakespearean play Timon of Athens, which was never performed during Shakespeare’s life and is often considered a “failed” work. Drennen situates himself within our existing cultural structure and visually explores an unoccupied bandwidth within which a “failed” project resides. The low influx of activity surrounding a “failed” project allows Drennen to insert his own contemporary intertextual modifications driven by intuitive exploration, coupled with the inclusion of a post YouTube mash-up of modern and postmodern ideologies. For The Masquers characters Drennen scanned and enlarged photographic reproductions of each of Robbins’ black and white studio shot portraits from Talent (1986) onto canvas. The glamorized photographic images establish an appropriated identity for viewers, into which Drennen then pulls into the language of painting. He does so by applying a layer of spontaneous drips that call to mind the purification of form and then builds upon them intentionally by adding thick, candy-like masses of oil paint that can be read as embellishment or defacing of the portrait. Small balls of aluminum foil are set into the piles of paint to suggest a beautification of the image, while cigarettes extinguished into the shimmering globs of paint reference both the taboo pleasure of the act of smoking and of putting the lit cigarettes out into a wet painting. This presents an implied abject quality to the portraits and in “defacing” them reemphasizes the notion of a “failed” entity.

Drennen’s works bring to light the possibility of postmodernisms tenure losing ground to a new hybrid practice that assimilates traits from modernism and postmodernism, and in the process intensifies the desire for a new perspective beyond the available vocabulary.

Special thank you to the following: Craig Drennen, Camilo Alvarez, Amani Olu, Brian Newell, Katie Walker, Stephanie Greene, Hugo Aguilera, Christopher Bumgarner (Precision Plastics, Inc.)

Tuesday, June 8, 2010

Nka: Journal of Contemporary African Art

Volume: 2010, Number: 26

Check out my review of Deborah Poynton's exhibition/work from "Everything Matters" in the first issue of Nka: Journal of Contemporary African Art published by Duke University Press.

Saturday, March 6, 2010

Whitney Biennial 2010



Whitney Museum of American Art
Feb. 25 - May 30, 2010

The art world is ready for something new. And although that statement seems somewhat of an impossibility in the art world in terms of new realms of creative thinking, amidst an audience that is given maximum exposure to art, I did come across some moments where the seeds of something new are germinating. With this Whitney Biennial's title, 2010, boasting "an embodiment of a cross section of contemporary art practice" rather than a specific theme I was hoping to engage with the Whitney's reflection on the path that contemporary art has carved in history but a clear command of budding possibilities for the future. What is in exhibition is a nod to the past with the Whitney's Collecting Biennials 5th floor curation of works in the permanent collection that made some of their first appearances in past Whitney Biennials and a strong group of young artists who clearly respect the discourse of Modernism. Now this being a solid entree into the Biennials 75th year and a nod to many artists who have gone on to, or will have a major impact on contemporary art, the 2010 exhibition's mission to respond to the moment and offer a glimpse into the future of the Biennials impact was ever so subtle. What it did offer was a flurry of questions about whether Modernism has come to a close, or maybe if even the age of the over the top, glitter clad, media wrought, exposure driven ventures are quieting down along with the economic climate. In either case, the question remains, what is on the horizon?

There were very interesting works, thoughtful selections, stimulating connections, and curatorial advances taking place. What 2010 did lack was a bit more tailoring and some further insight into a dialogue on the future of museum/biennial curation. After all, the museum, and the spaces which art has shown on a consistent basis have also had major changes in 2009 and 2010. Michael Asher's proposal to keep the museum open for 24 hrs a day for one week and its subsequent impossibility due to budgetary and human resources limitations is a quiet, yet effective piece, which responds conceptually to the ever present financial strain.

Despite any heavy claims and to the credit of the curators, Francesco Bonami and Gary Carrion-Murayari, 2010 has a shortened list of 55 artists in which subtle leads in some of the new paces in video, realism, modernism, and abstraction made an ever so slight gesture towards what to look for in the future. For instance, a quad of artists working in video reference gesture, body movement, body language, and communication. Kelly Nipper, known for her choreographed works, in Weather Center, combines movement with audio of a person counting from one to eight to convey fluctuation in weather, which also suggests a nod to eight count in dance. Around the corner Rashaad Newsome's Untitled and Untitled (New Way) pays homage to voguing, revived in pop culture by Madonna in the 1980s and originating in the Harlem ballroom sub-culture of the 1930s. Fracturing the postures further by building a new choreographed element based on individual interpretations of voguing and the artists editorial decisions on the cutting floor, Newsome engages the force of collaboration, via the body and use of current technology, which generates ideas regarding how works like this can take shape in the future. For example, his gestures are absent of sound leaving more room for the injection of future audio prospects.

Directly across the congested entrance is Kate Gilmore's Standing Here, which poses to explore conquering self-imposed obstacles through themes of displacement, struggle, and female identity. My question remains, why is the female identity visualized as a polka dot dress and heels? I realize that women are still facing many of the social issues they have faced for centuries but why do we continue to keep hitting that same wall with visual representations that suffice to change with the equality women have reached. The generalized notion of this work to channel women as the stylistically fragile outfit charging up against the phallic societal limitations is overwrought. Reaching into this continued struggle in terms of specificity to a certain struggle warrants further investigation as we live in the present and look toward the future.

Jesse Aron Green's single channel video is another strong example of reflecting on the past and developing future ideas in contemporary video art. Blending text material from Daniel Gottlob Moritz Schreber's 1858 book on gymnastic exercises and art historical references of 1960s Minimalist sculpture and Structural filmmaking provides a platform for considering various historical genre as inspiration and mode for critical response. Green's single channel video captures the subdued nature with which the curators present 2010 yet also gives a sense of the same tension and inquisitiveness via the artists method. Tailoring back to a single channel shot is at this state almost enough to confuse viewers amidst video artists who use technology which provides multi-dimensional reach and perspective in video practice who remain fixated on Green's video, waiting for something else to happen. Honestly, is that not what we usually expect, especially at a 75th anniversary biennial, is for "something to happen."

An arc to realism both in reference to paintings use of
trompe l'oeil, which is as historically remarkable today as it was in the 5th Century BCE and revived again in the 17th Century and photography's continued shift on objective reality were both present at the Whitney. Brooklyn-based photographer James Casebere's fabricated communities are so spatially alluring that they render as super-realist paintings until further exploration of the surface reveals their photographic medium. They play with our perceptions of reality and boggle our objective understanding of space, which fulfills the artists intention to invite one into a space, only to be surprised by the reality that lies within. Chicago-based painter Scott Short also reminds us of the process based elements inherent in painting on his large scale canvases resembling sheets of paper that have been copied several times. He transitions our mode of thinking in terms of painting an technology by not only differentiating it in size but by also giving the viewer an appreciation for the tactility that a copied image can provide.

Some not so subtle claims were also addressed, for example, in Lorraine O'Grady's suggestion that Modernism began with nineteenth-century French poet Charles Baudelaire and ended with twentieth-century American musician Michael Jackson. At first, this work seems a bold and contained view of Modernism but upon further investigation, a sense of uncertainty is revealed in where the direction of art is headed. In giving Modernism a "death," perhaps O'Grady offers up an allowance to look to the future of art while at the same time giving out the question of, how do we think of art now that a reigning period has ended? In this consistency with subtlety, perhaps what the curators and the museum look to do is offer art a breather from the confines of -isms and reflect in this holding pattern on what has taken shape over the course of the past 150 years.

Are we slowing down the pace a bit and applying our own associations. Several artists in the exhibition allow us to do so including New York-based Maureen Gallace whose New England inspired landscapes present unembellished houses. These blank facades, like clean slates, provide entry without the pressures of disguised meaning and honor the medium's ability to entice. Gallace's paintings are deceptively unique in that their surfaces alone can take you to another place before the content is even met. A friend of mine who is also an artist stated that these creamy surface were like ice cream spread about.

Lastly, but certainly not least of the artists in the Whitney Biennial, R.H. Quaytman, another New York-based artist coming off of her recent exhibition at the ICA Boston responded to the space so seamlessly as part of her continuing body of work. Distracting, Distance, Chapter 16 is sequential without seeming contrived, is subtle without seeming flat. Quaytman's works gesture to one another, to the viewer, and to the space, carving a light path, one that welcomes new responses and gives a refreshing angle on contemporary painting. The care with which the curators made in choosing or allowing the artist to respond to this particular room within the museum was superior. For me, it was the most commanding, yet the most investigative installation in the biennial that truly presented their curatorial vision of observing the past and future of the Biennial. While I didn't walk away from the Biennial feeling like I had been given a glimpse of the future, or slapped into submission by an over zealous mission, ultimately, there was serious thoughts about the future of the Biennial that emerged via its overall thematic generalization. Maybe it's the age of the Biennial that is taking a soft landing onto new, uncharted territory, and while the initial impact won't jar the viewer, there is a door somewhere that will be opened up onto a new terrain. Therefore, as I wrap up these thoughts on the 75th Whitney Biennial I realize it is that very subtlety that at first triggered my impatience, has now got me highly intrigued about a budding group of artists who are taking on projects with which I hope to track into the future. Now that is a soft landing.

Friday, February 19, 2010

Mini Armory Preview

Location | New York City
Dates | Mar. 3 - 7, 2010

Coming off of the foot heels of my Miami mini review, which seems like only a short while ago I've decided to compile and share a mini Armory preview of some noteworthy fairs, exhibitions, lectures, and parties that my colleagues out there in the art world have generously shared with me. Are we really already into February and looking on to March!? Wow, so that means there is a lot to look forward to.

Of course there is the main fair, The Armory Show, located on Pier 94 and also featuring The Armory Show - Modern temporary home to the modern and secondary market. While these core events are not to be missed there are so many other fairs, projects, and exhibitions launching at the same time. I recommend, if you can obtain a VIP pass, to not miss out on the opportunities to view over twenty private prominent art collections as well as admission to embassies and international cultural consuls and major museums like the Guggenheim and MOMA. My interest in this mini preview reveals a bit about digging your way through the art mecca that is New York during the Armory and some helpful tips along the way.

The Armory Show
General admission is Mar. 4 - 7, 2010 (US$30; Student US$10; Run of the Show Pass (4 day) US$60; The Armory Show/VOLTA NY Pass US$40) * If you are a student I recommend bringing along your student ID and keep in mind that this price will only get you into The Armory Show.
This should surely be a stop as it has 167 contemporary dealers, 66 modern dealers and 10 non-profits hosting national and international exhibitors.

Satellite Fairs
VOLTA NY
| 7W 34th Street | Mar. 4-7, 2010 | US$15 or joint with The Armory US$40 | Preview Mar. 4, 2010 VIP, 12 - 2 p.m. | Public Hours Mar. 4, 2010 2-8 p.m. and Mar. 5-7, 2010 11 a.m. - 7 p.m.
Founded in 2005, VOLTA NY is an invitational show of contemporary art. This year's theme, No Guts No Glory emphasizing the fairs mission of showcasing tightly-focused in a solo format giving this fair its unique character.

TIP: See what you have time for and what peeks your interest. For example if you know you can only hit Armory and one other fair then see if there is a dual pass that will get you into both. Or say you are a student and you want to go to Armory and VOLTA NY. Pay the separate fees, at $15 for VOLTA and $10 for student ticket at Armory, you save $15. Otherwise, you pay the $40 joint ticket fee at VOLTA for the same.

Scope Art Show | Lincoln Center Damrosch Park 62nd Street and Amsterdam (10th Avenue) | US$20 or student $10 | Preview Mar. 4, 2010 VIP, 12 - 8 p.m. | Public Hours Mar. 4-6, 2010 12-8 p.m. and Mar. 7, 2010 12 - 6 p.m.
SCOPE introduces artists, curators, and cutting-edge galleries to new audiences internationally.

TIP: There are several other satellite fairs to visit during the Armory including the ADAA Art Show (Art Dealer's Association of America), Bridge Art Fair, PULSE. A good place to visit to obtain addresses and information for additional art fairs is ARTFORUM/art guide.

Museums
Whitney Museum of American Art |
945 Madison Avenue at 75th Street
2010 Whitney Biennial, Feb. 25 - May 30, 2010

MOMA | 11 W 53rd Street
William Kentridge: Five Themes, Feb. 24–May 17, 2010; note: see accompanying performance and lectures during the Armory.

Tim Burton, Nov. 22, 2009–April 26, 2010

Ernesto Neto: Navedenga, Jan. 22–April 5, 2010

The New Museum | 235 Bowery
Skin Fruit: Selections from the Dakis Joannou Collection Curated by Jeff Koons

Museum of Arts and Design | 2 Columbus Circle
Slash: Paper Under The Knife, Oct. 7, 2009 - April 4, 2010

Additional Events
31 Women in Art Photography, Affirmation Arts 523 W. 37th Street, Mar. 6 – April 10, 2010

Another helpful guide can be found on the Artadia website.

I will add more information as it comes in. If you have any suggestions please send them to me and I will post them!