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„Manual: sex." Narcissister, „This Massquerade", Abrons Art Center, New York
Narcissister, „This Masquerade", photo: Ves Pitts, 2011
Pleasure, and the ability to withhold or offer it, can create some of the most dynamic power relations. Possibly to tap into this strength, the art of burlesque, which has been encountering a stunning revival recently catapulting it even into the realms of Hollywood, has pushed tantalization not only toward sex as a carnal, orgasmic aim, as is often case in the more one-dimensional land of striping, lap dances and the like, but instead uses narrative images from costume and set to characterization and so on, to promise various manipulations of the psyche so as to ultimately renege on them. And like a loaded suggestion, Narcissister’s „This Masquerade" sends the performer/audience expectation to new places of reflection.
Narcissister is the stage name of a female performer, who was once a former dancer with the Alvin Ailey American Dance Theater troupe—or so the bio says; she also seems to prefer to stay under her cover name for reasons that become clear through the performance. Since this tenure, Narcissister, has been performing a series of what could be called neo-burlesque acts which have taken place mostly in clubs, but also recently in the context of performance spaces and art exhibitions. These pieces have ranged in the past from “reverse” short stripteases where a naked performer pulls out an entire costume hidden within an oversized afro-wig and gets dressed with it, to an exercise routine featuring a bicycle-weight machine hybrid outfitted with moving dildos and the like that caress the user to give new meaning to the term, “runners high”.
„This Masquerade", is a larger, 40-min through composed stage piece that shows the vestiges of her past performances by relying on short 4-min vignettes as scenes. These routines, more or less coalesce into a uniform whole; in further iterations, this sum could use some more work—this current performance is a reworking of an earlier staging at the Kitchen (Center for video, music, dance, performance, film, and literature) Spring 2010. That aside, each individual set dares to one-up the next so as to surprise the audience with each new invention.
Narcissister, „This Masquerade", photo: Ves Pitts, 2011
The black-box performance at Abrons, a catch-all, performance heavy, community art, residency, and education center which often delights in its eclecticism, opens with hisses of smoke that cover a dimly light stage scattered with mirrors and other like shiny objects. A droning bassline plays out a series of naked women crawling in to view, all, on all fours. Each dancer is outfitted and objectified with the same mask, a plastic Barbie caricature-cum-sex-fetish kind of thing—a requirement in depersonalized Narcissister universe. As the first scene continues, the dancers move to and fro with theirs backs raised in the air and at the audience so as to show nude G-strings adorned with oversized pubic wigs. The music cuts in a state of forward-rewind replay, back-and-forth, back-and-forth, wink, wink. The air begins to fill with the smell of the sweat of the dancers, in this dirty nightclub fantasy, as the “lead” Narcissister debuts a solo over her groveling entourage. Rear stage left, an older non-masked lady, Naricisister’s mother in fact, sits in a rocking chair and knits—Freud anyone?—while a large, muscular person, in similar mask, stands at a gong à la The Gong Show. Like a classical overture, this scene acts as a foretaste of what is to come…
Narcissister, „This Masquerade", photo: Ves Pitts, 2011
Following the opening, the set is rapidly changed as the backdrop/prop is pushed forward and reconfigured into a red velvet-like draped sex shop with Arabic signage—this rapidly adaptable scenography carries throughout, and advances a tangential, dream-like transitional device. As some of the masked naked dancers return to the stage, each grabs part of the red curtain, which has been tailored so as to form a giant three-head burka. They enrobe and dance in intentionally contrived gestures, such as the „Walk like an Egyptian”, while Narcissister bounds out for a highly athletic and frenetic pass-as-protest to The Clash’s Rock the Casbah. As the music plays on, the lead waves in and about this hydra, and alternates between toying with designer trappings, Chanel bags, cell phones, etc, and the shop’s kink objects in suit. As dance-friendly empowerment-themed tracks from Western-pop swap from „The Clash" to a Janet Jackson’s Rhythm Nation—the video for which coincidently also displayed a kind of collectivist aesthetic—the “Arabian” lead finds this exchange of culture and consumer goods impossibly irreconcilable. She runs off, only to return in a comically bloated burka. By now, the backing dancers have ripped their Velcro bonds and have turned into a distinct chorus of three, darting about madly. Laughably macabre, they goat the swollen Narcissister, who is trying, in vein, to throw off her dress—every time she removes a layer, another, and more sumptuous silk burka is revealed, 20 or more times over. This parody goes on for a minute, with outfit after outfit being revealed as the dancer fatigues to the point of collapse. Lights out.
Narcissister, „This Masquerade", photo: Ves Pitts, 2011
Continuing along, we have further dichotomy plays such as; man/woman, as an androgens dancer comes out and reveals a cock—or is it a dildo?—; black/white, as “mammy” strips into a waspy lady; proper/improper, as various Victorians “unbutton”, and so on. This checklist of gender and race roles, replete with dances that degenerate and often get “gonged” or booed off, seldom finds any “resolution”. Tension grows after each folly till the point in which Narcissiter, literally splits.
At first this new schizoid persona follows the old vaudevillian trope of having the front of the performer in one set of clothing, while the back is complimented with a rear head mask and different costume. Narcissister, in this get up, flips recto-and-verso to display two identities. Still “confused”, this doubling is then carried head-over-heels in the next skit, as shoes are placed on hands as well as feet for a Tête-bêche dance against herself—wait is that a head attached to her crotch peeking out from under her dress!? This conflict returns later as a naked Narcissister—sans harness to hold the still in place dummy head to her pelvic cavity as if giving birth—mounts a pedestal, center stage, and contorts. Maternity is scraped though as the act reaches its climax with a highly eroticized, and for the first time, relaxed, dance, with her-selves—all the other performers have left the stage.
Going “beyond the pleasure principle” is only meant to bring pain, as the body can only take a certain limit of enjoyment, so the theory goes. And yet, this still begs the question, can pain be transcended as well? As far as the first, Narcissister, tackles the problems of simple voyeurism and its darker side of exploitation with her litany of stereotypes and related oppressions that all end in disrepair. Yet, taken as a whole, these typical fantasies point to a lack of inspiration as each is rendered in at-hand taboos as if from a role-play menu sheet. Possibly stuck in these repeating cliché, the act teases a final, yet also troubling synthesis.
Simple, enough, the performance finds optimism in something as obvious as “love thy self”—every time I type „Narcissister”, autocorrect, adeptly, wants to change the word to „Narcissistic”. Taking the portmanteau of the performers’ blanket name further, Narci-, as in narcotic or drug, is wedded to and idea of sisterhood. In other words, the whole persona could be question of how to make an additive bond between each other. Yet, drugs after all, lull the senses into a state of torpor and take over the subject, sometimes to the point of destruction—maybe sex does the same? With this in mind, the proposed togetherness, could be the ultimate form of human desire, but also unattainable as the harsh deconstructions only give way to joyous solipsism. Fundamentally, the faceless masks of all the Narcissister duplicates reveal not a corpus of individuals, but a conformist gaggle. Here, everyone becomes an object, to be destroyed or deconstructed, but at the same time, become indestructible tropes of self-replicating, multiple-like, codes. Totality complete, this shared fetishism parallels a kind of mass consumerism, as psychological desires are neatly cataloged into hackneyed and easily traded images. Ironically enough, e pluribus unum, already featured on all American coins, can be exchanged for the entrance fee.
Narcissister, „This Massquerade" Abrons Art Center, New YorkFebruary 11, 12, 17, 18, 19, 2011
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"Empty Inside"
Tobias Kaspar, "Why Sex Now?", Installation View, Alex Zachary
The scene is set, interior, Alex Zachary’s narrow first floor/cellar duplex-cum-gallery in the posh Upper East Side section of Manhattan. This former townhouse, remolded in 1979, and covered in parts with grey wall-to-wall carpet decries a recently erased memory of a time and style of the not-so-far-past. Although a bit quirky, the gallery finds charm with its tiled double-height atria that leads out to a garden and with its chromed in-wall fireplace that sits at about picture window level. With the blend of low ceilings and a large bathroom, the first time visitor might ask not, if this is an alternative to the white cube, but may rather weigh the pros and the cons of if it was/is a good apartment or not. And while walking though the various rooms, trying to figure how to position the furniture, a question that becomes a little unclear is where to put the bed. Possibly to alight this mystery of lost lives lived with greater voyeuristic splendor, artist Tobias Kaspar installed, "Why Sex Now", a collection of four linked photographs printed in two additions and one proof, all on view.
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Tobias Kaspar, "In bed, afert the party", 2010
The pictures themselves are rather nondescript as they feature faint black & white copy stand snaps of an anorak culled from the artist’s own closet. Somewhat catalog like in appearance, these four images present tightly cropped details, a pocket, a button hole, a zipper, a pull cord and the like, floating on an oversized white background resembling a magazine format. Adding to this lightness of touch, the flat lit and low contrast images are framed in white and hung from the ceiling so as to avoid contact with the wall or the ground. To do as such, each was hung with airplane cables and hooks, which followed the house track lighting as a coordinate grid. With this move, these large, somewhat vague objects, seductively dance through the apartment in a kind of fragmentary waltz. Since each is hung free of the wall, the recto and verso can be seen as visitors create their own choreography of ducking and weaving between each plane. Here another system, like the edited shots and their regimented display can be detected, as the rear mounted labels are plain to see.
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Tobias Kaspar, "Nina coloring her hair", 2010
Each of the four works appears to have their own diarist captions as titles, respectfully, Nina coloring her hair; Berlin, Wed June 1 (kitchen); In bed, after the party; A normal day in the city: coffee. Although discontinuous, these snippets do amount to a loose if not quotidian itinerary. In so doing, we have returned to a kind of domestic tourism as the reader of these titles is apparently being let into the personal life of the titular or implied subject. Yet, unlike descriptive handwritten notes on the back of old pictures, there is very little correspondence between image and text as here, “Nina coloring her hair” features a c-print of an obscured breast pocket. Eschewing the idea that these captions only function as non sequitur, they do, like the logics of the photo content and their hanging, appear to follow some kind of specific, categorical system. And although none of these topics match, each in their own way follows a similar spirit of discontinuity and submission to order. As such, in total, these pairings may point to the larger question implied by the exhibition’s title, Why Sex Now? [sic].
Tobias Kaspar, "Why Sex Now?", Installation View, Alex Zachary
To answer such a query it would be necessary to develop some sense of context. For one, the works inhabit a ghost like living space and features, almost intimately, a set of personal accounts through the titles. Likewise, the photographs themselves surrender a personal item of clothing, which in a most suggestive way, focuses on pockets and zippers and other Freudian innuendos. Taking these slightly eroticized, yet highly regulated vignettes together, one can only think of the rite of consummation, or some other related beseech to justify intercourse. In such a fashion, the exhibition asks, not should we have sex now, but inquires if we are ready, if are we complete. This idea of fulfillment could take many forms, such as asking if the audience, or the artist, or both, are satisfied with the work, or, as the pseudo-documentary commentary suggests, we are offered here a meditation on photography’s ability, or lack there of, to embrace with the inner lives of its subjects. Within this void of unknowing, a contingent question arises, what if “why sex now” was not asked when it needed to be, hence the disjunction between caption and image. Now begging the question why sex then, any stance by the flirting initiates, the visitors, the gallerists, the collectors and curators, and so on, becomes colored by the conceit of being potentially premature and a tease. Tempered by these lose flirtations and hazy bonds, the long walk home from the exhibition mirrors an internal reflection spurred upon returning home from a one-night stand. With this newfound hindsight, a sensibility replete with emptiness and disunion roosts.
Tobias Kaspar, "Why Sex Now?" at Alex Zachary, New York. 2011 January 21 - February 19
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Steven Baldi and Lucas Knipscher’s at Andrew Kreps in New York
Steven Baldi and Lucas Knipscher, Installation view at Andrew Kreps in New York, 2010
Yet each man kills the thing he loves
-- Oscar Wilde “The ballad of reading gaol”
As the adage goes, if a show isn’t reviewed then it doesn’t exist. However, instead of considering this saying in terms of a need to simply circulate an exhibition as part of a hype and critical validation machine, publishing of course offers another value, posterity. Beyond the goals of the text, the catalog in particular has become a source par excellence for artists to dig and borrow from, taking cues from photographic reproductions of artwork in old magazines as well as other printed matter. And although this provisional library has been yellowing since at least the 1960s, it does offer a wealth of inspiration. The pitfall of this kind of influence is that it can lead to simple aesthetic absorption and reiterated quotational art making, as knee-jerk visual affinities, over seeing the work in person or of considering the accompanying text closely, leads the production of new work—which in term fosters a form of art criticism by analogy instead of analysis. It is this push and pull between the forces of sympathy and derivation, which lay at the heart of Steven Baldi and Lucas Knipscher’s recent two-person exhibition at Andrew Kreps, their first commercial gallery showing in New York City—although not a collaborative, the two artists share a studio and occasionally work in tandem on projects, most particularly in a related iteration of this show at Vox Populi Gallery in Philadelphia earlier this year.
When entering the gallery, the viewer is approached by the now familiar austere stance one accepts as a trite “critique of modernism”; Spartan placement of monochromatic work that appropriates the style as style of say Bauhaus design or whatnot and is often divested from the political underpinnings, or goals in its own historical consequence. In this show, Steven Baldi in particular poaches actual designs by Max Bill via a series of exhibition posters imbued with the designer’s typography as well as 6-photorealistic paintings of one of his clocks manufactured by Junghans—it is also complimented by facsimiles of Le Corbusier and Amadée Ozenfant’s magazine L'Esprit Nouveau. These simulations of course were all sourced from monographs, and could point to rather shell-like allusions to Bill, Corbusier, et al’s agenda. However, instead of simply reproducing the image as an empty sign of familiarity, the strength of Baldi’s offer is in its display, in space, and with it, its chide at photography, documentation, and distribution.
Eschewing, for the moment, the rhetoric of photographic simulacra, the show’s layout offers something that a camera simply cannot do, that is to represent space and the unfolding of spatial order in time 4-dimensionally. This is done not by just having the referent act as an insider’s cue, but through the repetition of these images as flags or, quite literally, as physical reference or focal points.
On the walls of the gallery, Baldi presents 3-main devices, the clock paintings, the posters, and long leather strips of trimming resembling wristwatch bands—a forgivable pun indeed. All of these elements encircle the space, however, their pacing, although balanced, is irregular. At one moment a clock is presented next to a band, at another, the band is alone, and on another, it is conjoined with a poster to make a kind of flag at half mass—a tongue-in-check reference to death, perhaps? This serial change of frame of course mirrors that of animation—humorously, there is a 16mm film of a perched African Gray parrot also included in the show, which might be another ape at those who repeat and copy without reflection. Yet, when configured in real space, in real time, these frames act as data to delineate a visitor’s relation to these objects and the viewer’s visual field and memory—also aided by the fact that each analog clock reads with a different time. This regimented dividing of the space is further enhanced by Knipscher’s display.
For his section, Knipscher presents a series of appropriated images from photographed movie posters, such as Joel Schumacher’s The Lost Boys (1987), to pictures of manicured hands, which are all printed on color tinted window films—a material with a gloss that is hard to photograph without serious manipulation of light and shadow. Instead of presenting these photographs as pictures to be viewed in the normative fashion, they are all rolled into tubes pinned together by magnets—and as such are best viewed in the round as 3-dimensional objects. In suit, these cylinders stand on a zig-zag conveyor belt-like table, which not only snakes throughout the gallery, but does so at about the level of a bar or low counter setting up a recognizable relation of a visitor’s body to the space it occupies. In addition, this shelf takes on the semblance of an old storage room archive in which old rolled up ephemera sit silently and unread.
Steven Baldi and Lucas Knipscher, Installation view at Andrew Kreps in New York, 2010
The gallery space itself is rather simple, a white rectangular box almost bisected as two walls jut out from center to form a clunky barbell-like plan. Enhanced by Baldi and Knipscher’s simple interventions, the one creating vantage points on the perimeter, the other defining two zones within the gallery, the display defines the space through a promenade within it: one movement to the left, and an object is precluded, a few steps more, another is relieved. These apparent “jump cuts” between location in the gallery as well as between 2-d and 3-d objects, are made smooth as each is grounded on a given, set plane.
To borrow from the rhetoric of mid-20th Century art and architecture, this kind of layered dance between objects slipping in and out of view can function to create a “contradiction of spatial dimensions”, while at the same time imply some fundamental order as shared rhythms and massing ultimately from a logical master procession on the whole. Building on New Bauhaus (IIT Institute of Design) theoretician György Kepes’ idea that this overlapping produces a form of “transparency” wherein a “simultaneous perception of different spatial locations” can be superimposed, theorists Colin Rowe and Robert Slutzky proposed that this “inherent quality of organization” was a central and innovative device employed by Le Corbusier—for an example, the writers point to the plays of flatness and depth visible across various vantage points in the Villa Garches. Rowe and Slutzky went on to say that this form of transparency “ceases to be that which is perfectly clear, and becomes instead that which is clearly ambiguous”_1.It is worth noting that Baldi and Knipscher did present an exhibition, which had to be visited in real space to comprehend—and thus is more about primary experience than record—while also actually following the design procedures of their forbearers, instead of hinting at them. Yet, a greater paradox as to their actual relation to glib referentially in general should be addressed—and in so doing possibly points not to the artists understanding of Max Bill, Le Corbusier, et al’s political milieu, but our own contemporary one.
The choice of the word “ambiguity” to describe the momentary confusion of order that occurs when two agendas are set apart dialectically is one worth exploring here. In addition to the physical issues of Baldi and Knipscher’s exhibition, which compliment the ideas of Rowe and Slutzky, there is also another overlap: are the two trying to cast yet another new derivative from the same old mould, or are they attempting to break through it? On the one hand, the two have dug into the archive of representation and basically reiterated it, yet on the other, they have done so in an artistic way that really must be seen first hand and not via its reproduction as more documentation. Along these lines, two curious interjections by the artists stand out.
The first is a simple little catalog, which sits at the gallery’s front desk. More cut-up chapbook than standard essay, it features mostly appropriated texts and images which one could suppose ramble on the use and distribution of images, most particularly in its reprinting of several pages of Roland Barthes’ Empire of Signs. As a counterpoint, this booklet in relation to the show, can be read as a satire of contemporary art speak and pastiche, however, since the booklet will circulate as a record devoid of the actual exhibition, it poses the greatest possible folly of the exhibition. The second item within the show concerning the “quotational turn” is a Plexiglas sculpture by Knipscher cut to look like a speech balloon. Although materially transparent, this object is empty in the sense that no quotation is actually printed onto it. And as a further jibe, the triangles, which usually descend from talk bubbles to point to the speaker, are here rendered as a vampire’s fangs—an idea hit home by one of the rolled-up photo objects sourced on the horror movie poster for The Lost Boys, 1987. With this object, Knipscher could be pointing to the idea that the artists may not actually be simply alluding to the work of others, but highlighting the current quasi-academic trend to suck dry styles from art history without leaving much behind in way of anemic commentary—the piece rests on its side, on the floor, as if it is either lurking or has been deposed. As noted, although the artists have come together for this project, it will be interesting to see if these stances will run as a subtext in their own independent work. Only then will we see if the artists are actually bitten by their own critical teeth or not.
Notes
1_ Colin Rowe and Robert Slutzky, Transparency: Literal and Phenomenal, In The Mathematics of the Ideal Villa and Other Essays. (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1982), 160.
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In conversation: Jim Finn
Jim Finn, "The Juche Idea", 2008, Filmstill
In his survey of the use of archival footage, Films Beget Films (1964), the American filmmaker and historian Jay Leyda (1910-1988) famously coined the term “compilation” film to refer to a kind of documentary wherein newsreel footage and other found materials would be cut-up and recombined to create new meanings. An early masterpiece of this type was Soviet filmmaker Esfir Shub’s (1894-1959) The Fall of the Romanov Dynasty (1927), the first part in a trilogy of then recent Russian history, which in the words of historian Josh Malitsky utilized the archival collections of the then Soviet film factory-archives “to diminish the present by looking to the future through the prism of the past.” 1 Possibly due to editorial oversight as well as other ideological motivations such as the development of montage theory, Shub’s “documentaries” offer clear and polemical views of the gentry’s corruption dialectically set against exploitation of workers, soldiers and so forth. In any case, the influence of Shub’s de-contextualized and then re-contextualized editing style is undisputable, whether looking at documentary film, or even avant-garde video work.
Now fast forward to the early 21st century, after the so-called collapse of the Soviet Project. And here we find American filmmaker Jim Finn (born 1968) noted for creating a set of three films not interested in the formation of a communist state, or propagandizing per se, but aimed at digging into to these very histories, utopian ideologies, and most importantly, film production styles. Yet, instead of being a reporter of record, Finn’s films--Interkosmos (2006), a comedic pseudo-documentary on the fate of an imaginary GDR/USSR deep space colonization program, La Trinchera Luminosa del Presidente Gonzalo (2007), a fictionalized day-in-the-life exposé of a Peruvian woman’s prison populated by Shining Path Maoists, and The Juche Idea (2008), a constructed propaganda film centered around the conceit that a video artist from the Republic of Korea was invited to update the Democratic People's Republic of Korea’s film system via an hybrid farming residency for artists--invert the form of the historical documentary into a new hybrid, part archeology, part satire. Complete with simulated original material, this new trilogy looks toward our own neoliberal future through the prism of the Soviet past. And considering that these works have been at the center of a recent retrospective at Anthology Film Archives earlier this month, and will be screening as part of MoMA / PS1’s “Greater New York 2010” exhibition later this summer, it would be easy to say that New York is experiencing a bit of a Jim Finn moment. For this and many other reasons, Jim and I shot back-and-forth a series of emails discussing his work.
Adam Kleinman: What are you currently working on?
Jim Finn: I made three short features about ideologies and systems outside the US that I shot inside the US. Now I'm making a film about the US that I have shot outside of it over the last year and a half. I'm working on a film that is about the connections between the Cold War and the War on Terror with a bit of Reagan and liberation theology.
Kleinman: This inversion of place you mention, is it deliberate?
Finn: In a way. I'm taking advantage of the international flights I've been getting. I am an opportunist. Just when I have made enough films, and have gotten enough recognition to get some well deserved funding for my work, the global economy imploded. Neo-experimental pseudo-comedic films are not high on the funding list these days, so I have to make the films any way I can. Using festival flights helps.Kleinman: This new film sort of continues your interest in societies that have no idea they are passing into history, or at least seem to be headed that way, a theme that can also be seen in your short on President Carter as well. Would you mind sharing with us your thoughts on politics and ways of life that seem to be on the brink?
Finn: With the first film Interkosmos I thought about a Utopian project within this larger failed quasi-Stalinist Utopia. The only way for it to really work without direct state control would be to put it in outer space. Also there is that appeal of starting again. Ok, we screwed that up, but if we try it this way, in this environment it will work. What appealed to me about the Shining Path was this idea of claiming to be on the right side of history but in reality being totally isolated physically and politically. Of course North Korea is a strange historical oddity.
Kleinman: Considering that your current project deals with the US directly, do you think that there are analogies, anachronisms, and the like, influencing the “American way of life”?
Finn: One of my inspirations was growing up in Catholic schools in the US. I had some discipline problems and moved around schools a lot so I ended up with the St. Joseph nuns, Christian Bros, Jesuits, and Benedictine monks. These people were living in the second-half of the 20th Century but acting like nothing much had changed on the planet in the last millennia. I think that influenced me. Plus, the first President I ever got excited about was Jimmy Carter who was universally considered to be a failure and an aberration, especially when compared with the shining beacon of hope for the earth who followed: Ronald Reagan. I lived in Latin America working with Guatemalan refugees who were living outside their country in part because of the US intervention in their country with the CIA overthrow of Arbenz in the 50s. And Reagan basically represents a sanitization of that history—the idea that the 50s were all about General Motors and getting to second base in the back seat, and not about murder, and mayhem, and killing the dreams of entire nations.
Kleinman: It is interesting that you are taking on the so-called right in this new film, as you have tended to tackle failures of the so-called left. Looking at your work as a whole, it is hard to pin down politically; by undermining both sides you seem to be producing a kind of skeptical filmmaking, no?
Finn: I yell at the TV and stuff like all good leftists. But, I have felt held hostage over the years by certain views you are supposed to have. One of the criticisms I got for working on these three previous films during the second-half of the most extreme rightwing government the US has had in a long time, is that I should be focusing my talents on taking apart US ideology and not these discredited and basically long-dead ideologies. But in a way, the Cold War didn't really end as much as it just popped like a balloon. One side just went away at the exact wrong moment—when neoliberal Friedmanite ideology was at its peak. So there was this idea that laissez faire capitalism was the ultimate anti-Utopian Utopia that would provide us with everything we need in the world. What it has given many people on the planet instead is despair. So I want to make work that deals with anti-despair. Work that takes apart these ideologies that try and provide us with political (i.e. realistic spirituality) reasons to live.
Kleinman: Is that where your humor plays in? I’m thinking here of your absurd pairings like the conceit of connecting the gerbil as a symbol of capitalism due to its wily and near survoirist behavior, or in Interkosmos where two cosmonauts are flirting and singing campy songs over the radio while looking at a moon of Saturn. Like all good satire, these jokes make your films thoroughly enjoyable, yet also create a mockery of the grand ideas professed by each of the regimes you cover. Do you have a distrust of ideology and rhetoric?
Finn: I am certainly a smart ass. No doubt about that. But I balance the humor with the serious bit and try to keep a straight face throughout. In a sense, I could have been a court jester of Marxism: making fun of capitalism but also ribbing the king (Chairman Gonzalo, Kim Jong Il, Karl himself).
Kleinman: Yes, I can see a bit of a Fallstaffian temperament in you, particularly in your literary sense of narrative structure. Speaking of which, you tend to employ alternate histories as a device, however, these new histories are often presented without closure, or at least in an obvious way. Would you mind speaking about the lack of certainty portrayed in your narratives?
Finn: I mentioned the lack of closure in the Cold War. There was no peace agreement, no planned transition to democracy, just the shock and awe of depression capitalism. Tuberculosis, mass prostitution and organized crime become normal in the former Eastern bloc. I think in film there is a false sense of closure sometimes. And yet the characters in my films are in these isolated environments (outer space, prison, farm residency) and we don't really know what has happened to them. I think that keeps them living in our brains in a way. You wonder about them in a way you wonder about someone you used to know who isn't on facebook or whatever. But also they have that mythic appeal of a failed guerrilla movement.
Kleinman: Speaking of lost or buried antecedents, and maybe I’m reading too much into this, but I do see you as a bit of a cineaste trying to find new ways to push film while knowing its history. What are some of your influences, inspirations, and the like, and how might you be working through them?
Finn: I love old Hollywood films where you have these rules of what you can do and say forcing filmmakers to work within constraints. I wanted to create that kind of studio system in an experimental socialistic way with my movies. I watched a lot of Juche cinema, which is a kind of B-movie studio system in North Korea, to prepare for The Juche Idea. You mentioned the cosmonaut dialogue; Ninotchka (1939), Lubitsch’s film with Greta Garbo as a Stalinist apparatchik who flirts with a crappy French playboy, inspired that. I wanted to invert that history, so that the French playboy follows her out to a future in socialist space. I love the Buñuel films where he is working within the Mexican studio system: Simon of the Desert (1965), Susana (1951), Mexican Bus Ride (1952) are examples in this respect. There is this tension between his vision and the studio system, which I like. I think also that people are really much more media savvy than we give them credit for. I have to work much harder to make my fictions believable since they are not shot with any real budget to speak of. I come from a poetry writing and experimental film/video background so I do like to push the form. And that includes not accepting inclusion within the ghetto of experimental filmmaking or the ghetto of mockumentary or the ghetto of political filmmaking.
Kleinman: Before we get deeper into your play with genre, I think its important to speak a little about distribution and what you mean by various audience “ghettoizations”. Currently your work is distributed via art world formats such as exhibitions as well as in film festivals and cinemas. So, my question is, how does distribution and display effect the reception of the work?
Finn: I have a certain crossover appeal. A video art distributor disseminates my work and it has screened in festivals, museums and galleries. I see my work more in the history of film, though my disregard for the conventions of genre is appealing to the art world. The first festivals to screen my work were experimental and underground festivals. The features have screened extensively internationally, mostly in festivals. I started getting these retrospectives (the first was at BAFICI in Argentina) and that has really helped me because people can see how my work and ideas are developing. In Latin America especially the response has been interesting. I think my irreverence and political obsessions have a certain appeal especially since they have been held hostage to a certain kind of earnest political filmmaking. The communist trilogy was just acquired by the Museum of Modern Art in New York, but then The Juche Idea is being distributed by a traditional film company, Kino Lorber. Films like mine need all the help they can get. I've been lucky with some great press, which has helped to push the films along.
Kleinman: Do you have any concerns with how galleries and museums present films in the format of an exhibition?
Finn: As long as the film is seen from beginning to end, I don't really care where people see it. The nice thing about the art world context is that people are less likely to have a preconceived idea of the film as a documentary, mockumentary, comedy, etc… I hope it works to my advantage.
Kleinman: What are your thoughts on genre as well as the converse; on abstract art cinema, which tends to eschew genre, narrative, etc.
Finn: I had this idea that countries would invite me to go through their archives and make films in any way I wanted to. I created that explicit fiction in The Juche Idea. But really a lot of my work has this found appeal. Even my first short film Sharambaba (1999) or many of my other shorts have this conceit of being discovered historical objects. In the same way that authors create characters, I want to create historical fictions. I get the look and feel and language and politics and then get some of my own odd poetic language and absurd ideas in. Ultimately this idea of classifying work into genres is really about marketing, isn't it? So if you accept this role of experimental filmmaker, you are announcing that you are above this dirty business of marketing and so you are part of this alternative organic market. But then that has its own rewards doesn't it? In academia, in the art world, etc… the important thing is to make the film you want to make.
Note1 "Esfir Shub and the Film Factory-Archive: Soviet Documentary from 1925-1928." Screening the Past 17 (2004).
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False Modesty
"Primary Atmosphere: Works from california 1960-1970", 2010, David Zwirner Gallery, New York, credits: David Zwirner, foto: Cathy Carver.
"...in recent years, the balances of curatorial competence and institutional power seem to have tilted toward commercial enterprise, as though at this moment only capital can sustain artistic knowledge and mediate aesthetic desire.One explanation might be that museums have to pretend to be public, and therefore tend to popularize, whereas capital and speculative investment can be elusive and must be exclusive. "
Benjamin H.D. Buchloh, "Manzoni: A Retrospective", Artforum December 2009
"You can spend your own money on yourself. And when you spend your own money on yourself, you're very careful on what you spend it on and you make sure you get the most for your dollar."
Milton and Rose Friedman on the "4 Ways to Spend Money" in Free To Chose: A Personal Statement
Although unexpected at first, counter-intuitive moves, once enacted, give themselves away. Take for example 23 Wall Street. There, a disproportionably small but grand one-story building occupies one of the most expensive real estate lots in history. This address, known simply as "The Corner" was built during the first skyscraper boom to serve as J.P. Morgan's personal office. Bucking the tower building trend -besides being prestigious, a tower was perceived as "a machine to make the land pay"1 according to the architect Cass Gilbert-Morgan boldly demonstrated that he didn't need to offset the financing of his properties with stories upon stories of rent collecting offices. Morgan, and more importantly his banking empire, was doing so well that it could afford the most apparently wasteful of luxuries. Yet, beyond self-flattery, this iconic move did pay in terms of public relations by instilling near supreme confidence in the Morgan Bank and its assets. And it is with this brilliant marketing strategy, wherein presumed losses afford other gains that we shall visit a recent example in the current spate of "museum quality" shows in major commercial galleries where many objects are not for sale.
Looking at the most recent show at David Zwirner, the excellent "Primary Atmospheres: Works from California 1960 - 1970", what sticks out most in this frame is that some of the works are in fact for sale, around 2/3s of the show. Even so, relegating 1/3 of the show toward a deficit is quite a bit. So why do it? In some regards, the loaning of artworks does allow the curators, in this case Tim Nye and Kristine Bell, to create a more handsome show, but this ideal alone cannot be used to justify a budget. In these lean years, well in all years actually, markets thrive on confidence-it is no coincidence that the English word for credit is rooted in the Latin credo, or "faith", while at the same time the negative term "con man" referees to a trickster who steals confidence. With this in mind, what better way to assert the soundness of a gallery and its investments by showing that its business is so far from being in trouble that it can afford to be interested in supporting and funding scholarship and other extra-business goals? With this kind of display, there is an implication that the gallery's other businesses, its private and second hand dealings in particular, must being doing exceeding well-or such is the perception. And possibly for these reasons, only some of the largest galleries, Gagosian and Zwirner in particular have been able or interested in pulling off this feat. Following this logic, though, the best thing would of course be to have no-thing for sale at all in these exhibitions. Yet, after all, this is a secondary market on view in a place of sale. And here comes the other bonus of putting up work for sale next to work that isn't. The actual pieces on-loan from museums and private collections function in this context quite simply as complements to the orphaned secondary market pieces. Instead of only following the general curatorial strategy of placing artworks side-by-side to create conceptual valances, this mixing creates a different kind of implication: buyer, you could be getting a museum quality piece for your own collection! This is probably accurate as well, but the need to broadcast it is a bit of a boast as if to put on airs on the privilege to be allowed to shop in this boutique. Subtexts aside, let's look at the scholarship of the show itself.
"Primary Atmosphere: Works from California 1960-1970", 2010, David Zwirner Gallery, New York, credits: David Zwirner, foto: Cathy Carver.
As a "museum-style" show, that is a commercial gallery show which attempts to art historicize in a manner of serious study as well as display work for sale, "Primary Atmospheres" feels the desire to offer a thesis: California, or more particularly, the region's environs have influenced the phenomenology of the artworks considered, and as such, delineate some kind of proto-critical regionalism. Sure, that is a wonderful lens with which to experience the installations through as thoughts of Joshua trees, rosy-fingered dawns, and neon lit highway gas stations just at the edge of the horizon trickle through your minds eye. But instead of a mere poetic imaging, this idea is forced into a grander thesis as the work is set diametrically against the austere work of minimalist practice in New York in the 1960s-begging the question, should Donald Judd be read in relation to the harsh and cold surroundings of New York City? This argument is summed up quite simply in the supporting 2-page press release which severs as the only didactics-there is a catalog with an essay by Dave Hickey for the show and a bookshelf on each artist of course, however, there is no place to sit an read them comfortably-in the gallery:
Distinguishing themselves from their east coast minimalists counterparts, the California artists in the exhibition where reacting to local concerns with light and atmosphere often evoking the qualities of the bright Los Angeles sunlight and the shiny, finished surfaces of the city's ubiquitous signs and automobiles.
In the interest of scholarship, it is curious that there is no mention of a similar thesis set up by Rosalind E. Krauss when reviewing the 2006 museum retrospective of the Angelino art scene of the same period:
while the car culture supported by the maze of freeways that crosses the city brought an emphasis on artificial materials and high grades of finish into the domain of artistic expression. The relentless sunshine of the California coast made light into an aesthetic tool, as apparent in the work of James Turrell, Doug Wheeler, Larry Bell and Robert Irwin.2
Yet if this is the case, why does James Turrell's site-specific installation "Meeting" (1986) work so well in Queens New York and for that matter, why does it have a twin in Pittsburg Pennsylvania? Likewise, why does Donald Judd's work find its ultimate expression in Marfa, Texas?
Mirroring Krauss yet again, the curatorial statement speaks about other "California-nesses" but then mentions that:
Cutting-edge materials and processes, such as fiberglass reinforced polyester, cast polyester resin, and vacuum coated glass, led to astonishing surfaces and contributed to the moniker "Finish Fetish".
"Primary Atmosphere: Works from California 1960-1970", 2010, David Zwirner Gallery, New York, credits: David Zwirner, foto: Cathy Carver.
Here, instead of some sense of place, we find that the work was informed by being of a technophile bent or at least took advantage of new materials that defined a more well known moniker: "the space age". Considering "Primary Atmospheres" in the context of the 1960s, many of the works, like the fresh vacuum formed lozenges of Craig Kaufman's "Untitled Wall Relief" (1968) or De Wien Valentine's "Triple Disk Red Metal Flake - Black Edge" (1966), match perfectly well with the same kinds of finishes, colors, forms, investigations, etc of say an Eero Arnio chair (Finland), an Archigram poster (England) or Olivetti typewriter by Ettore Sottsass (Italy)-Laddie John Dill's enigmatic "Untitled" (1969), is a veritable 3d cousin of a Superstudio collage. Interesting enough, the title of the show is an astronomical term for heavy gas environs like those found on Saturn. I'm not sure why the organizers had to add the second half of their title, "Works from California 1960 - 1970s" and then rehash a thesis around it. This doesn't really add much other than a rather cliché East Coast / West Cost thing, and the claims to this being some kind of unique school needs a little more support-Krauss centers her investigation on the power struggle between competing art schools, magazines and other sites of ideology production. In many ways, this show, although it looked somewhat museum-like, is really more in the mood of a subjective gallery group show, which is actually its greatest strength.
Possibly due to the "ambiance" of the works included coupled with the "nonchalant" attitude of the galleries' emptiness, the show offered a rather unprecedented amount of space between each work and thus for each work-for New York City that is, if one is comparing these museum-quality shows to say MoMA, its vast collection, and its throngs of visitors. This freedom to explore the works slowly, intimately, and on their own terms is truly a pleasure, if not the main public audience reward. Zwirner in particular has been leading this trend of not over doing it and allowing the work to speak for some time. Their simple yet effective "6 Works, 6 Rooms" show last fall is the best example of this kind of posture. To some extent, "Primary Atmospheres" might have worked better had it skipped the revisionist history all together, just as it eschewed wall text and other musicological didactics, and literally displayed "Works From California: 1960-1970." Even still, it would be silly to divorce this kind of historical group show from the history of the gallery itself. For instance, is it a mere chance that Zwirner represents John McCracken and Dan Flavin, who were featured in "Primary Atmospheres" and "6 Works", respectively, around the same time that the gallery devoted large and more typical solo-shows of their work? Who is to say, but galleries as well might be just as guilty of catering to pseudo-popular "preferences" in order to get the most out of their own dollar, so to speak.
Notes
1 Irish, Sharon. "A Machine That Makes the Land Pay: The West Street Building in New York," Technology and Culture 20 (April 1989).
2 Rosalind E. Krauss, "Play It As It Lays / on "Los Angeles 1955-1985" at the Centre Pompidou, Paris", Texte zur Kunst Issue Nr. 63 / Septemer 2006 "Flight or Disobedience?"
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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