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SATIRE DELIVERS PEOPLE
The Yes Men receiving the Leonore Annenberg Prize for Art and Social Change, New York 2009, Photograph by Sam Horine, courtesy Creative Time
A flame war of sorts began recently beneath Claire Bishop’s on-line review of a lecture program entitled: Revolutions in Public Practice, produced by the New York-based arts presenter, Creative Time. Amongst raising various themes for future discussion, Bishop positioned that “an ontological conundrum”[1] was a foot as The Yes Men had won the inaugural Leonore Annenberg Prize for Art and Social Change, the event’s marquee $25,000 USD prize. Bishop contented that although “the Yes Men adamantly refuse to be called artists (they prefer “activists”)… most of their funding comes from art institutions, and their biggest fans seem to be in the art world.” [2] And, to the institution’s defense, the curator of record for the series, Nato Thompson, responded in the review’s talk back section to this and other queries by saying, “admittedly, the question of what constitutes art (I prefer the term culture) wasn’t addressed head on”[3]. Instead of assessing what is art, a discussion in which “cultural production’s relevance to everyday life”[4] was tackled in general by looking at the “evolution of the filed of political based public practice”[5] in the specific, which is fair enough. Although much of this flame war—which included seventeen replies of varying length, several from not only the project’s curator, but from the presenting artists as well as attendees, and focused primarily on the symposium at large—few bothered to care about Bishop’s opening question: is their a problem when professionals from defined fields outside of art disciplines are happy to interlope when there is cash on the line, and conversely, why do art institutions participate in this practice? This is a question different from asking what is or isn’t art, nor does it ask if art should become more interdisciplinary, it is a question about motivation and exploitation.
To the credit of the overall program which did offer an extensive and generous survey of the burgeoning field of contemporary “social practice” as its now called in the art milieu, the awarding of The Yes Men was a intriguing addition—however, if an institution wishes to position itself in the light of the expanded humanities and not simply that of an “arts” organization, more thoughts and examples from other and related fields need to be presented comprehensively. But to get back to the case at hand, why would such an institution present and award satirists as artists—that is to say since the program was not on the idea of media satire and didn’t juxtapose The Yes Man’s work with political cartoonists, comedians, filmmakers and the like to look at the intrinsic economies of satire?
To unpack this a bit, we need first to look at the institution(s) itself (themselves) and ask not why these projects are funded, but why there is funding in place for them already. This is of course a question regarding value, that is to say, what is the justification for these kinds of projects and why are there funds and institutional forums in place for them in the art world? An easy answer would be that both the institution and the award recipient share some form of political disposition and commitment to it, and that is reason enough, almost like a pat on the back. However, if this is the case, why wouldn’t the award go to South Park for example or simply to a community organizer, union leader or anyone who shared this disposition, instead of jumping through hoops and pretending that just because a project is aesthetically composed, as almost all are, that it is automatically art in the professional sense of the term? Also, what does this say about art; is this a reactionary reply to the cultural critics that are currently deriding the field for being “inaccessible”, that it has lost touch with society and needs to find relevance through some form of direction interaction with society-at-large—an argument based on an idea of art’s general utility as paramount.
Philosophically speaking, and this is the tricky part, qualifying a project through the lens of funding would depend on the calculation of some form of measurable return, which would reframe any project. In the context of socially based practice, which all art is, or any practice for this matter where no object is traded and sold, and idea of profit or gain would need to be posited and measured through a definable “result”. Most often, this “result”, institutionally, is measured in acceptance, that is to say, popularity and transmission, since very few projects effect other quantifiable social changes when artifacts are presented after the fact—except in an educative sense, which is inherent to all displays. The thing that might raise an eyebrow or two for some is that this popularity is not bound to the internal economies of a work’s artistic production, that is to say a mass interested in questions about the crafting of art and its discourses, but is an appeal tethered to the “secondary” effects of reception, audience procurement and satisfaction, i.e. campaigning. Although an audience may witness a cathartic or empowering presentation in this framework, it is also institutionally necessary to award the presenters as a recognizable franchise. In this case, confirmation is found in the recycling of the same simplistic rhetoric lambasting more or less the same targets—Haliburton, the Iraq War, Climate Change, as if many weren’t already covering this in greater detail, as well as The Bhopal Disaster—to an extant no further than: here are the bad guys, lets make fun of them, and one day maybe make them pay. It is this set-up, which appeals to both institutions and donors alike, as it is a position more akin to media sound bites than to academic, or shall I say, some measure of political discourse questioning how the administering of justice can be preventative and not simply punitive. Maybe by tackling the “big transgressors” as subjects, some form of ground swell may occur—and I do think that the Yes Men are humorous enough comics to win this kind of interest—however, it’s too early to gauge if these actives offer a way out of mass consumption, or like its form and trade, is simply another product of it.
Quite simply, what unites many utilitarian social projects is that by definition they need to create some form of concusses to have a group in the first place, that is an audience, which in many ways delivers a market, or if you prefer a constituency. As all conversations need to have some focus or center point to rally upon, many of these projects propose a target, which in this realm generally revolve around issues of power and inequity. Rightly so, these are issues to question, ridicule and the like, and are also tantalizing subjects. Yet, from the point of their inception, this act of growing consensus is the goal and as such, formulates a teleological aim or platform to be packaged and replayed. To this end, that is achieving consensus, aesthetics are often marshaled in order to make light of an issue, that is make it attractive to a wider public—which in itself poses a larger societal problem, that social justice needs to compete with entertainment. As the target of a given consensus driven investigation is not aimed at deriving pleasure from the making of this project as an end in itself, even if such pleasure is achieved, or better yet, in the sharing of the skills of the presentation’s construction, aka, self-reflexivity, the resultant activity is by definition instrumental when looked at from the position of artistic production—for how else would art effect social change if it did not poses instrumental capacities? So, what might be the problem?
Well, herein is the readymade value for an institution; since these projects are good at uniting broad audiences through a broad topical appeal, they have a quantifiable public, like their fellow satirists, Steven Colbert and John Stewart for example, who frankly are better at it. Now, this is certainly not a bad thing, especially if the target of critique is “just”, but it does poses unique difficulties, not only to an idea of art itself as a profession, but also to artists, socially minded or otherwise, who’s work may not be able to foster a mass appeal. And here is where some of the animosity may stem, particularly when aesthetic devises can be used to also create the semblance of an artistic practice that is then leveraged into the funding bodies for an already existing community—without give back much to it. However, again, this is an extrinsic problem related to the labor relations of art practitioners. Yet, if more of this kind is able to leverage into the presentation mechanisms of art, the field of art presentations may skew toward the economy of popularity or mediagenics over that of more self-reflexive, investigative, and less populist presentations. In the United States, this is already the case as blockbuster shows already exhibit, but should this too become the direction for socially minded projects?
Practically speaking, this award did bring a level of exposure to the forty or so other participants in the symposium and with it, most likely some extra support. And this is nothing to scoff at. However, the question still remains, is a trickledown economy of “exemplars” a necessary evil to break through the noise of contemporary media culture? Did there need to be an award in the first place, that is if the theme of the symposium was justifiable in itself, and to that end, if there was a need, why look outside for the recipient instead of championing socially aware practices closer to home?
[1] Bishop, Claire. “Public Opinion”. Artforum.com: New York, 10.29.09.
[2] Ibid.
[3] Ibid.
[4] Ibid.
[5] Ibid.
Adam Kleinman is Curator at Lower Manhattan Cultural Council.
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Featured
DI Why, not?: A review and an application of the DAS INSTITUT method
DAS INSTITUT, "D I Why?", Swiss Institute Contemporary Art New York, New York, 2009, exhibition view, copyright: Kerstin Brätsch, Adele Röder, Swiss Institute
If the spring brings rebirth, then the fall is certainly a period of restructuring. As trees burn their leaves for stores of energy, the fall “season” in the culture business shimmers with collection launches, premieres and other great efforts to grab audience back— thus securing a reason for continued existence. In this particularly lean recession year, the stance of many New York commercial galleries has been to brace against the coming chill with “modest” exhibitions that hedge bets until a mythic spring—prophesized by a now steadily raising Dow Jones Industrial Index. Beyond the obligatory scaling down of list prices, size of works and preciousness of media, the oxymoronic concept of the “multi-solo-show” where a gallery divides its space into smaller lots, each featuring the work of a different artist, is again the norm. Of course the bazaar-like presentation of a “main space” and a “project room” is by no means new. However, the something for everyone and a little of everything survival tactic is now seeping into the non-profit world as well as art practice itself – for its own set of survival reasons.
In the market of the non-profit ghetto, the reasons for this restructuring are undoubtedly varied—and possibly essential given the complexities of funding—yet tend to stem form a dual-agenda: to display more artistic practices while justifying to supporters and the like that more artists are being “served”. From the standpoint of day-to-day operating, the subdividing of the exhibition space into little islands makes the job of the curator a little more “economical” as the selection and parceling of the gallery into little commissions becomes more the game then the arranging of comprehensive and slow to materialize larger exhibits. With equal cleverness, the administration of the gallery itself into specialized zones and series such as the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum’s summer pilot run of “an experimental series to allow the museum to respond quickly to innovations and new developments in contemporary art” dubbed “Intervals”, is presented in the otherwise undesirable real-estate of the building’s stair case. This kind of consort allows to get more out of a respective space, to market exhibitions—and the persona of the curator—in addition to the artwork, and form an easy to manage production calendar freeing the curators, directors, and the like to focus more on fundraising and other related business, travel, research, and the like. In a form of true elegance, the abstracting of what is on view into a themed program creates a neat package for foundations, donors, and press releases. Unlike simple marketing, this kind of re-branding not only presents an outward view of a company or institution, but is also done so as to reframe a new mode of production or operation.
Whether or not the above model has been followed, it is within this context that the Swiss Institute opened its fall season with “A New Era”, a collection of six handsomely presented, yet disparate shows, in a newly renovated—and subdivided—gallery space. Sitting in the center of it all was another “institute” whose publishing blithely and ambiguously parodies the many forms of branding inherent in the New York milieu, particularly these ulterior motives by both galleries, and as I’ll show, artist alike. Setting up as an “import/export agency” founded in 2007, DAS INSTITUT, is a collaborative art practice run by the German born and New York based artists Kerstin Brätsch and Adele Röder both of whom have their own independent practice. When entering “DI WHY?”, their exhibition which closed last week, it was a little hard to make out what exactly this agency does—the copy states that DAS INSTITUT focuses on marketing and communications issues through the production of objects which facilitate these aims. Eschewing immediate legibility, an almost totalizing universe of bold lines and vivid colors approaches the viewer in a massive array of theatrically hung, shelved or laid paintings, prints, stickers, and a few other objects. Instead of creating garish discomfort, the vivacious and alluringly colored works give off a strong sense of unity as their respective placement is balanced in a way that a set-designer might temper a void by featuring non-competing points of attraction at various scales and orientations—the mise-en-scène of the room is heightened by the artists interplay between paintings on transparent Mylar and prints on opaque surfaces creating a harmonizing play of light and planes of compositional reference. In many ways, the display takes on the appearance of a showroom or boutique. As one would expect of a hip agency, a clear but slightly obscured— à la a viral campaign—identity is articulated as shared motifs quickly become apparent with the prints possessing elements from the paintings and vice versa. Herein, what might actually be “imported” and “exported” starts to take shape.
DAS INSTITUT, "Das Institute invites Five Friends: Ourania Fasoulidou (artist catalogue), Debo Eilers (video), Lukas Knipscher (photographs), Nikolas Gambaroff (drawings)", 2009, Swiss Institute Contemporary Art New York, New York, 2009, installation view (detail), copyright: Kerstin Brätsch, Adele Röder, Swiss Institute
Lining an entire wall of the gallery space is a collection of objects arranged along a very long shelf. The heftiest of such is a telephone book-sized catalog entitled Starline Necessary Couture authored by Adele Röder for DAS INSTITUT. The contents of this “bible” are stores of related abstract patterns created solely through Adobe Photoshop without importing any source material—that is to say that all of the patterns where “drawn” directly through Photoshop’s native tools, and as such are purely digital and non-representational. As the title suggests, the catalog is a kind of pattern or swatch sourcebook from which to sample from, and to use toward, the realization of a stylized and fashionable high end product—slyly posited in the exhibition as “fine art”. It is with this compendium that DAS INSTITUT ’s production and division of labor set forth.
As a first action, Brätsch cribs through, or shall we say, “appropriates” patterns from this swatch book and tries to reproduce them via her large-scale paintings on Mylar. Neither a quassi-Heraclitian exercise on the impossibility to paint the same thing twice, or a critique on repetition and identity, Brätsch’s new works simply follow from the pattern guides almost in “fair-use” and are in turn subjectively altered a bit. As a kind of retort, Röder bounces these altered patterns into her own digital prints on paper and so on and so forth creating a business of “importing” and “exporting” visual images between the two artists as playful, or inspired ciphers. This quite literal back-and-forth process of knee jerk reactions and variations ultimately produces the collection on display—it would be safe to speculate that some editing was done. Although this process of simple intuitive inter-subjectivity is rather benign, for some reason DAS INSTITUT has couched this whole system of mutual interrupting in the guise of some conceptual framework, namely an “import/export agency” that is interested in marketing and branding—which I’m defining as a promotional that both marks and masks a shift in production.
Kerstin Brätsch für DAS INSITUT, "Mylar Paintings", 2009, "D I Why?", Swiss Institute Contemporary Art New York, New York, 2009, installation view, copyright: Kerstin Brätsch, Adele Röder, Swiss Institute
Even though actual importing and exporting companies are a backbone of any contemporary economy, the expression “import/export business” is often colloquially used as a cover for shadiness and tends to connote some form of illicit trade—often by immigrants. With this in mind, DAS INSTITUT ’s practice and the inquisitive title of the show, “DI WHY?”, could possibly point to a more perverse meaning.
So, what could this questionable nature be? DAS INSTITUT might be scratching at the overriding trend for both artists and experimental curators to imbue great importance to the branding frame works of their respective “practice” when little actual self-reflexive or discursive thought related to these purported themes can be found in the artwork itself. DAS INSTITUT has already been swept into this type of sound bite exhibitionism earlier this year through their inclusion in the New Museum’s Younger Than Jesus, a simple biannual marketed as a “generational” which functioned in the means of a typical survey with little analysis of demographical issues in the artwork or by curatorial study—pick up a copy of this exhibition’s catalog to see how the curatorial leg work, such as studio visits, recommendations and other like responsibilities were done through a basically out-sourced and non-paid email exchange branded and sold as celebration of social networks. Along these lines, DAS INSTITUT could also be chiding the work of their colleagues such as Reena Spaulings Fine Arts and their advertizing of a fabricated art dealer persona—whatever musings good or bad might be wrought out of this conceit, it is still fundamentally a promotional device for an actual business as well. However, instead of simply issuing these slogans by fiat, DAS INSTITUT ’s showing leverages similar barbs within their art making as well.
From the very announcement of the show, a question has been delivered through its title: “DI WHY?”. This is of course a cleaver pun on the expression DIY, or Do it yourself, but the positioning of this idea as a rhetorical question flags a hidden complexity when viewing the art on display.
On a base level, the DIY moniker is used to describe the process of making or altering something without the aid of experts or professionals, thus there is an obvious paradox here. DAS INSTITUT are quite literally experts and professionals—attested to by their training, show history, and inclusion in the Swiss Institute’s program—yet the work on display follows many aesthetic conventions that grew out of DIY culture such as printed collage-like reproductions of “borrowed” materials rendered with a general “messy” attitude in both material choice and application to imbue a sprit of being made in haste and in urgency. With this in mind, the “why” of the title is to some degree pejoratively asking the gallery visitor: why make something on your own when you can get it “homemade” from the professionals. But this is the leaser point and not the true “shadiness”.
This question of “why” is best aimed at the current cult of the in situ formalist as rebel embodied in the detritus chic of Gedi Sibony for example. In this “style”, thin semiotic valances between the forms and vocabularies of bricolage are conflated to form some kind of narrative polemic and panacea on everything from the fracturing of social society to global warming. Take for example the verbiage employed by the Contemporary Art Musuem St. Louis’ exhibition of Sibony’s work curated by Anthony Huberman earlier this year: “[sic] In the context of the near-collapse of our contemporary socio-political reality, these works quietly promote an economy of means, re-use, transparency, and the power and beauty of bare essentials”. Inherent in this rhetoric is a totemic celebration of the abject ritualized via “references” to other non-hegemonic symbolism such as squatter and working class lifestyles, social or political activism, indie music, and so on. And here DAS INSTITUT seems to accept these metaphors not as simulations—cheap materials in the context of an art gallery is by no means equitable to the harsh realities of a make-do existence at the weak end of the global economic or political spectrum—but simply as today’s fashion statement of “necessary couture”. Humorously enough, some of the works in “DI WHY?” are printed as decorations on party napkins that could potentially become frivolous trash after being soiled, but could also be “completed” by said use and thus made collectable. Even still, another line of argument could arise if DAS INSTITUT ’s question of “why?” is taken in earnest—as both readings of the question are valid—that is, if this mode of pseudo-DIY is today’s radical chic, why is that? Why do curators wish to “traffic” in it, and why for that matter, have certain artists decided to use these crude techniques?
DAS INSTITUT, "D I Why?", Swiss Institute Contemporary Art New York, 2009, exhibition view, copyright: Kerstin Brätsch, Adele Röder, Swiss Institute
Although there have been many recent talks on the “crises of criticism” for some time now, the real answer is that there is no “crisis” per se. Instead there is a clash within a new restructuring; the curatorial desire to inscribe new artworks within a particular collection or canon paired physical with the ability to do so through presentation and insertion is a more attractive and popular form than the historian’s effort to do so through writing aided by scant reproductions. Since artworks ostensibly need to sit together in exhibition, various formal and conversational tactics have been taking place so that the artist can demonstrate these genealogical or culturally significant interrelations superficially and through glib means. In suit, a work with more referential characteristics, be they media, distribution channels, and other conceptual trappings, become more attractive to the curator as there are simply more tangents to run off of and to “connect” with—especially in these DIY-esque works that are not really pastiches of styles and forms per se, but are literally collections banal artifacts waiting to be easily defined, digested and then deposited. Likewise, the guise of this kind of work being critically minded lends a form of social importance allaying any insecurities of being simply “beautiful”—as much of it actually is in an empathetic way, and should be celebrated as such. This kind of special interest vehicle, which allows structural or organization goals to frame the reception of contemporary art practice is similar to the like strategies of dividing the gallery space as yet another form of streamlined packaging. However, the joke is actually on the curator, as many artists have learned to feed this desire with work made quickly, but with enough conceptual acrobatics to make them acceptable as part of a canon of their own oeuvre—or that of a supposed canon on the critique of modernity. And here, the artist has found a way not only to maximize the circulation of his/her work, but also to reduce the budget in terms of both time and materials—the original shady business of “skimming”, although one that is justifiable considering the low rate of artist fee’s. Within this particular loop, a potential critique of excess is ensnared as another symptom of that very excess. And it is with this dual farce of today’s production and related branding activities, namely the desire for the curator to collect and justify an artistic industry of prefab and ready-at-hand esoterics, that one should enjoy DAS INSTITUT’s irreverent something for everybody with a little for everyone approach.
“DI Why?” treats referents like refreshments at a party, from appropriation, to the politics of representation, to subculture fetishism, to pop, and even Relational Aesthetics—there was an opening event with an “exotic” food import: Currywurst and Berliner Weisse mit Schuss. What is truly unique about this show is that all of these devices are derived from completely blank and empty signifiers, the art-for-art sake drawings of the Starline Necessary Couture catalog. Likewise, DAS INSTITUT never makes any claims to as to what the “glyphs” are. In many ways, this hollow pit at the core of this project has its greatest affinity with the mythic muted post horn ambiguously subtitled “W.A.S.T.E.” in the Crying of Lot 49 —a graffiti motif in the book which could point to a vast global conspiracy, a reoccurring adolescent prank, or could simply be the mad hallucinations which a narcissistic protagonist constructs to find meaning in an uncertain world. Through their “all in” stance, DAS INSTITUT has rekindled a novel form of critique, that of the court jester. With it, they playfully aim this mockery toward their immediate and supposedly kingly suitors, the fine art world. A “why” questions which remains though is: “why” taunt a second time? To do so, would turn the parody on itself. Let’s hope DAS INSTITUT turns their cunning on a less insular subject next time around—and considering the last meaning which could be wrangled out of the title’s question of “DI WHY?”, or “DAS INSTITUT WHY?”, it would be possible to reason that they have the introspective grit to do so.
Adam Kleinman is Curator at Lower Manhattan Cultural Council.
New York Letters
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