Frieze
Summer 1996
Cover of
Artforum
Summer 1996
Cover of
Art in America
Summer 1996
|
the magazine rack
by Patterson Beckwith
summer 1996
Frieze
Artforum
Art in America
On page 34 of the Summer 1996 issue of
Frieze, the London-based art magazine,
there is an article by Susan Hapgood about
two recent exhibitions of multiples, "Some
Things Brought to Mind: the Multiples of
Lawrence Weiner" and "Editions (Or, works
and related articles, things, props, which
are multiplied): The Past Ten Years," which
was a show of multiples by Joseph Kosuth.
Hapgood talks about the favorite typefaces
of the two famous conceptual artists: "The
color scheme in Kosuth's show was...black,
white, gray, and silver, complementing his
use of elegant serif typefaces, most often
Garamond and Bodoni. Both typefaces are
considered classics, and are derived from
Roman letters: Garamond was the standard
European type of the 16th century, and
Bodoni was introduced in the late 18th
century. When combined with the often
lengthy philosophical texts in Kosuth's
art, the serif typefaces conjure up
scholarly locales, intellectual rigor and
library stacks lined with books." Hapgood
says that Weiner's lettering looks like a
stencil: "Utilitarian simplicity
characterizes the standard typeface of
Weiner's choice, Franklin Gothic Extra
Condensed, invented by an American in
1903...stencils may be a nostalgic hangover
from the places he worked during the late
`50s--in the engine room of a tanker, on
the docks and on railroad cars--and perhaps
also owe something to the art of Jasper
Johns."
Hapgood interviewed both artists, asking
them about the connotations of their chosen
typefaces: "In conversation with the
author, both artists protested vehemently
when adjectives that carry uncomfortable
ideological weight were used to describe the
appearance of their work--for Kosuth, the
word is 'academic' for Weiner,
'proletarian.' They both decried these
labels as oversimplified and ultimately
meaningless in the present cultural
context, warning repeatedly that focusing
on form is not the way to perceive their
art." Hapgood ends by making her point,
"That an artist's esthetic eventually turns
up, despite efforts to neutralize or thwart
it, and that it effects the understanding,
however nonvisual that understanding may
ultimately be." She adds, "to ignore
conceptual art's visual attributes, so
amply evident at this point in history,
seems like willful myopia."
On page 41, David Deitcher has an article
called "Death and the Marketplace," where
he describes "misgivings that for some time
have overtaken me when encountering death
in the marketplace for art." "If [artists]
exhibit work that they have dedicated to
someone who is ill or has died, then
conflicted thoughts and feelings crowd the
viewer's mind. Does the work embody a
profound engagement with the individual to
whom it is dedicated? Does it depart in any
significant way from whatever the artist
would otherwise be doing? To what extent
does the dedication bathe the artist in a
righteous, narcissistic, glow as he or she
grapples with loss? Not too long ago,"
Deitcher continues, "Julian Schnabel
exhibited a series of very large paintings
dedicated to his studio assistant, Paolo
Malfi. Expressionistic renderings of
Adieu or Il Conversion di San Paolo
Malfi, served as the most prominent
element in these otherwise abstract works.
Turning grief into a motif, Schnabel made
it impossible for the viewer to determine
whether the untimely death of his friend in
a motorcycle mishap in Rome was the tragic
inspiration or the clincher the artist
needed to lend a note of gravity to these
sunny decorations."
Deitcher admits that "Schnabel has always
been an easy target," but says that he
represents good example of "the
predisposition of the market economy to
embrace death." He writes about Nan Goldin,
identifying a "bohemian glamour" in her
photographs: "it is evident that Bohemia
still functions as an indispensable trope,
helping the market culture to sell its
wares. And within that stereotypically
colorful and incendiary romance, death
still plays a part--establishing the
ultimate in tragic realness." He says that
Goldin's work used to be unassuming,
"modestly scaled and barely framed, or [it]
appeared as projections." But that "now
that so many of the individuals Goldin
pictured have passed away, it is upsetting
to see their images recycled as large-scale
Cibachromes." He talks about ACT UP, and
the '80s-activist argument that, in the
midst of the AIDS crisis, "gallery art that
addressed AIDS, death and loss, art that
relied upon the more private resources of
individual reflection, art that
memorialized, that lamented, that described
pain instead of promising empowerment, are
ill-affordable luxuries [which] could
supply liberal viewers with the effortless
'out' of distanced empathy. Deitcher says
that "ACT UP still exists, but only as a
vestige of its former self. Loss of life
within the coalition has been staggering."
Noting that the "lucid, empowering graphics
that accompanied [their] demonstrations...
could most recently be found gracing the
walls in historical exhibitions such as Exit
Art's 'Counterculture,' and the Drawing
Center's 'Cultural Economies'." Deitcher ends
his article saying that everyone should
"keep in mind the disfiguring effects of the
market economy as it encourages cultural
practitioners to equate success with
profit, and profit with exploitation not
just of the living, but of the dead."
On page 47, there is an article by James
Roberts about the Walt Disney movie Toy
Story, which is the "first entirely
computer-generated animated feature film."
Roberts introduces the movie, and the
technology that produced it, as "in many
ways an extension and encapsulation of a
program of research that began with 15th-
century studies in light and perspective,"
saying that fine artists have largely
abandoned the project of describing the
seen world to photographers. "Now, at the
end of the 20th century, the analysis of
optical reality is largely the domain of
software engineers and scientists involved
in computer-generated imagery." He says
that the rendering techniques are the
result of the development of capitalism:
that the "techniques used in the
digitization and analogue reconstruction of
audio and visual material today stem from
the digital signal processing theory so
vital to the 20th century's greatest
commodity: communications. When Western
visual art has come closest to optical
verisimilitude--in Renaissance Italy, the
15th-17th century in the Netherlands, in
the 19th-century Britain of the Pre-
Raphaelites--it has been at moments when
these countries reached their mercantile
zenith."
A chapter from a Camus novel called Tricks
begins on page 52, accompanied by
photographs by six different artists.
Introduced by Bruce Hainley as kind of "an
amazing fuck journal," each chapter is an
account of a sexual interaction with a
different man, titled with his name and the
date of their encounter and ending with an
afterword describing what kind of
relationship, if any, Camus continues to
have with him. In the chapter reproduced in
Frieze, Camus notes at the end, "This trick
may not be a trick...that is, to constitute
a trick, someone must come."
On page 58, Glenn O'Brien has a two-page
review of the work of the video artist Alex
Bag called "Who's That Girl". He begins the
article by saying" Alex Bag, my favorite
new young vixen gamine ingenue artist,
(sorry) is a monologist." It is not clear
who he is apologizing to, but O'Brien seems
to really like Bag's work, describing her
as "the Cindy Sherman of shtick, or a
rarefied Carol Burnett." He thinks her work
("really funny videotapes of herself
talking, playing a wide variety of amusing,
highly detailed characters, all shot in
splendid low-tech style") is good enough
for her to be able to "do one-person shows
in off-Broadway theaters and act in Oliver
Stone movies and make CDs...she seems like
she has more than what it takes to be a big
star in major-league satire, if she wants
to." O'Brien reminds us that, "Hey, once
you're successful you're not a performance
artist anymore, you're an entertainer, you
know." The potential for Bag's work to be
consumed by a non-art audience is well
articulated in the article; O'Brien sees
the art world (read: counterculture) as a
springboard into mainstream culture, and
reading Bag's work as if it were already on
TV, he says that she is a "perfectionist
satirist. Her characters are drawn with
perfect language, perfect intonation...
attitude...hair and make-up."O'Brien says
that "now that the art world has
downsized and is no longer an arena for
wildly profitable spec buys, publicity
fiestas or covert real estate gambits, it
seems like it's going to become a great
showplace for doomed or emerging or fringe
or binless, categoryless and otherwise
venueless cultural practices. The charm of
the art world now is that while everything
else in the, uh, lively arts--film, music,
literature, comedy, fashion, etc.--has
become more rigidly defined, staked out,
categorized and organized by the forces of
ultramodern marketing (see Alternative
Music), art has become even more
undefined."
This month's Artforum, the summer issue,
has an ad on page 8 for Metro Pictures,
Matthew Marks and Barbara Gladstone. It
announces their new location on West 24th
street. Your present correspondent is in
heaven because, on page 17, Mark Van De
Walle's column about the World Wide Web,
Hot List, mentions "Magazine Rack". He says
that ArtNet Magazine "actually has most of
the things you expect from an art magazine,
along with some things you might even want
(like a horoscope, and reviews of other
magazines--they actually mentioned this
column)." He also says that this magazine
is "built for speed" and that "Walter
Robinson, who used to run Art in America's
news section, is the editor, so there's
actually some content."
On page 40, there is an article by Jon
Savage about pirate radio in London, called
"Concrete Jungle." He writes about a
station called Pressure FM, which plays
jungle music, "with its layer upon layer of
pitch-bent sound, its insistence on the
pleasures and possibilities of technology."
He says that the station is "a child of
rave culture" and that "the Pressure FM
crew sound impossibly, deliriously alive.
They reaffirm the metropolis as Techno
City." Savage ends his piece by writing
about what political message a radio
station that is neither the BBC nor a major
commercial interest has. "They provide the
perfect antidote to the historical
fantasies pumped out by the mainstream.
This, not Britpop with its whitebread '60s
fetish, is the sound rockin' London town."
On page 72 there is a two-page ad for the
new SoHo Grand Hotel. The first page of the
ad is devoted to the SoHo Arts Festival, "A
celebration of the new art season," which
will take place at the beginning of
September. The second page of the ad is
for the mega-hotel, which is on West
Broadway. The ad for the hotel has a
picture of some really old-looking cast-
iron SoHo stairs (which aren't part of the
hotel) and says that the hotel will be open
in August.
On page 78, there is an interview by Rikrit
Tiravanija with the Swiss artists Fischli
and Weiss. The article also includes three
sidebars about the artists, by Robert
Storr, Peter Schjeldahl and Bruce Hainley.
The interview is cute; Tiravanija met with
the artists in Zurich while they were
preparing for their show at the Walker Art
Center. They talk about their piece for
last year's Venice Biennial, which Fischli
explains as "an encyclopedia of personal
interest. We just filmed things we thought
we would like to go and see." This newest
project of theirs was presented in Venice
running simultaneously on 12 monitors, and
consisted of videos of car trips, a dentist
visit, someone making cheese, men cleaning
a sewer, and animals. Weiss says, "when you
go around with the video camera you know
exactly how much time you spend with
something, and how long you are
interested."
The cover of the magazine has a picture of
their handmade plastic reproductions of
objects found in the storerooms of
Sonnabend Gallery, which Bruce Hainley
describes in his sidebar: "Coffee cups,
small buckets, janitorial supplies,
installation gear, sponges: odds and ends
of various processes. Stuff...Fischli and
Weiss' things copy things in the world, but
they are things in the world too. Their
objects are no more interesting than the
things they mimic, but what is really
fascinating is that they are no less
interesting either...their copies return
attention to the things themselves, that
is, the work of Fischli and Weiss." At one
point in the interview Tiravanija asks
about these sculptures and Weiss says, "For
me the main focus of the objects is that
you 'see something' that you also know is
not there. Of course it is there, but the
chair is not a chair, the table is not a
table. Or it's not there as what we usually
know about these objects. You can't use
them, because their functions are lost."
Fischli adds: "It is just the surface of
these things that you make believe is
there."
In his sidebar, Peter Schjeldahl writes
about the different reception that their
collaboration gets from the art audience,
saying that they have "a status that is
uniquely available to artist duos: Komar
and Melamid, McDermott and McGough, William
Wegman and Man Ray. The members of an
artist pair project an emotional repletion,
from being apparently sufficient to each
other, that no individual (except the
certifiably bonkers outsider artist) could
command. Tacitly lonesome and needy, the
individual artist seeks consummation our
response. This may arouse anxiety and
resentment, as in any case where someone
confronts us with a proposed relationship,
[but] a two-artist team offers itself as an
already consummated tiny community that
does not reach out but, rather, invites us
in. By agreeing to its predilections, we
get a carefree sense of belonging."
On page 96, there is a four-page article by
Jeff Weinstein about the sculptures of
Charles LeDray called Tender Buttons.
Weinstein writes about the "noise" of
everyday objects, meaning, it seems, the
distraction that the connotations of
fabrication, use, and reuse cause for the
viewer of representational art. "Clothing,
even clothing with quotes around it, is
risky to employ as an art ingredient
because it is among the 'noisiest' of
object categories: immediately and
universally recognizable yet culturally and
personally specific, reverberating with
centuries of connotation and cliché."
Writing that "LeDray's strategies of
'silencing' the common noise of what he
represents are a good measure of his art."
Weinstein says that LeDray "dampens the din
of usefulness" by making all of his objects
himself. He began his career sewing doll
clothes and teddy bears, and more recently
he has been throwing and glazing thousands
of tiny porcelain pots. Weinstein says that
the pots, which were part of a sculpture
called Milk and Honey, are a "statement of
achievement, of placement in the world of
creative history." The 2,000 inch-high
vessels were placed on shelves in a wooden
vitrine, "no two exactly alike, Korean
teapot to Carolina dirt dish, to George Ohr
to Betty Woodman...celebrating the long and
happy marriage of utility to art."
Weinstein talked to LeDray about his work:
"In an interview, the artist acknowledged
another possible reading, the therapeutic
power of handiwork, and he did not deny
that his difficult, abused childhood might
call for what is commonly termed 'healing.'
His core understanding of his work,
however, corresponds to that of a precious
few other workers, hurt or not, artist or
not: work is LeDray's life...this blunt
belief in the humanity of work [is] a
textbook affirmation of the survival of
unalienated labor."
On page 35 of the June issue of Art in
America, there is a three-page article by
Eleanor Heartney about two recent shows at
non-profit art institutions in New York,
one at Exit Art and another at the Drawing
Center. The Exit Art show was a history of
underground magazines and newspapers called
"Counterculture: Alternative Information
from the Underground Press to the
Internet." The show was curated by Brian
Wallis, a contributing editor at Art in
America. Heartney describes the show: "Over
2,000 pieces of printed matter preserved
the scruffy, ephemeral quality of the
alternative press. Publications and posters
covered all available walls and spilled
into numerous vitrines and tables. They
were grouped according to political cause
or position and arranged in a roughly
chronological order." She says that while
the show was "dauntingly text intensive" it
offered a "fascinating story in which the
rhetoric of revolution was transformed into
the advocacy of specific causes." Heartney
says that the artifacts from the '60s and
early '70s were "permeated with calls for
strikes and Marxist revolution," but that
by the mid-'70's the publications were
"celebrating anarchy and various
antiauthoritarian impulses, and more
focused, specialized struggles...feminism,
gay liberation and environmental awareness,
culminating in the AIDS activism of today."
Heartney writes that this "retreat from
calls for general revolution in favor of
more specific, group-identified objectives
suggests a growing realism about the
possibilities of activism," but that "it
may also have encouraged the substitution
of identity politics for economic analysis
among politically active artists." Heartney
seems depressed about the prospects for the
'90s, asking, "Is the ultimate legacy of
the counterculture simply the creation of a
multibillion-dollar youth market?" The show
ends with some material about the Internet,
which Heartney does not describe. "This
survey of alternative media ends with the
Internet as the '90s version of the
alternative publication. From one point of
view, there seems to be a parallel between
the wide-ranging countercultures spawned in
the '60s and the proliferation of
subcultures and specialized interest groups
in cyberspace. However, in other ways the
Internet represents the antithesis of the
impulses behind many countercultural
publications. The world-wide network of
computers and modems is available only to
those with the means to purchase the
necessary equipment, and thus threatens to
create a new class divide, between techno
haves and have-nots. In contrast to the
strategies of '60s political activists, the
Internet emphasizes the isolated individual
over collective activities, and its
marketing potential threatens to overwhelm
its slight claims as an instrument of
democracy."
The show at the Drawing Center, "Cultural
Economies: Histories from the Alternative
Arts Movement, NYC," was curated by Julie
Ault, a founding member of the
collaborative called Group Material.
Heartney says, "In a manner familiar from
installations by Group Material, Ault
combined works of art, photographic
documentation and newspaper and magazine
clips" so that "visitors could wend their
way through the politically conscious
landscape of the early 1980s." The show,
which Heartney says was "easier on the
eyes than Counterculture," included
artwork by John Ahearn, Tim Rollins and
KOS, Martha Rosler, Group Material, the
Guerrilla Girls and Gran Fury, along with
documentation of Fashion Moda, ABC No Rio
and the Artworkers Coalition, whose 1970
effort to persuade Pablo Picasso to remove
Guernica from the Museum of Modern Art as a
protest against the war in Vietnam was
documented in the exhibition. There was a
panel discussion conducted during the show,
and Heartney writes that "Ault observed
that audiences of younger artists seem to
feel remote from the activism of the '70s
and '80s." During the same discussion, Steve
Kurtz, a member of the Critical Art
Ensemble, noted that even the term
"'community' has become institutionalized in
the '90s, actually transformed into a
category on grant forms."
On page 52 of Art in America, there is the
same two-page ad that was in Artforum for
the new SoHo Grand Hotel.
On page 68, there is an article by Richard
Kalina about three NYC shows of the
fluorescent light art of Dan Flavin. Kalina
thinks that the emotional, "spiritual or
transcendent" aspects of Flavin's work have
been too long overlooked. He describes
Flavin as a "classical Minimalist," whose
"approach to material is straightforward,"
but asks, "Are the similarities to Newman's
zips or Rothko's floods of suffused color
purely coincidental?" Kalina answers
himself: "The very nature of Flavin's
artistic approach ensures he can have it
both ways." Kalina writes glowingly of the
work in the installations (one
retrospective at the Guggenheim, another at
Dia, and the third at Flavin's gallery,
Pace), saying that "classic Minimalism
depends upon, and in a sense embodies a
built-in rigidity...implicit in this
esthetic is a desire for control that has
led most Minimalist artists to keep strict
rein on their work's formal variables."
Kalina says that "Dan Flavin's work is in
many ways paradigmatic. While remaining
true to its principles, it has continued to
grow in complexity."
On page 74, there is an eight-page article
by Jill Johnston about an outdoor sculpture
project by Jean Tinguely called Le Cyclop.
Described as a "life project" of the
artist, the cyclops is a 75-foot-high
sculpture of a head installed in a wooded
area outside Paris. Tinguely worked on the
piece from 1969 until his death in 1991. He
collaborated with his wife, Niki de Saint-
Phalle, and 15 other artists, to make a
kind of museum with installations inside
and around the head. The face of the
cyclops is a mirrored mosaic by Saint-
Phalle, and inside there are stairways,
mezzanines, terraces and balconies with
works by the 15 other artists, including
Larry Rivers and Jean-Pierre Raynaud.
On page 82, there is a piece by Robert
Simon called "Message in a Bottle" about a
photographic project by Alan Sekula called
Fish Story. The project, which was produced
both as a book and as an exhibition with
over a hundred large color photographs, 26
text panels and two slide shows, is the
result of the artist's six-year-long
investigation of international maritime
trade. The article begins with a quote from
one of the text panels, which were written
by the artist: "Most sea stories are
allegories of authority. In this sense
alone, politics are never far away." The
photographs were taken on board fishing
boats and large container cargo ships, and
on docks, fish markets and shipyards. Simon
says that "Sekula questions, at least
implicitly, the prospects for critical art-
making at the end of the 20th century. The
most influential adversarial American art
of recent years has typically been directed
to the problematics of identity politics
(race, ethnicity, gender, sexuality), or
the commodification of images, or the
institutions and presentational modes of
art itself. Sekula's abiding concern, on
the other hand, remains with class,
capital, and labor.
"Fish Story" asserts the continuing
significance of the tools of a traditional
leftist and materialist analysis in the
cultural field--despite the fact that such
a perspective has never had great purchase
on late 20th-century American avant-gardist
art." The 26 wall texts appear in the Fish
Story book as a continuous log-essay called
"Dismal Science," which Simon describes as
the story of "the worldwide transformation
of seaports, maritime military and economic
enterprise, and ocean-related labor from
the 17th to the 20th century. As his
commentary traverses examples taken from
painting, film, photography, literature,
politics and naval history, we follow an
uneven ebb and flow of capital, shipboard
mutinies and visual mediums." Simon also
says that it seems like the villain of the
essay is the container cargo ship--"Vehicle
of displaced labor...for Sekula, the
metaphoric antithesis of the ship filled
with rebellious sailors, of which
Eisenstein's Battleship Potemkin provides a
famous model."
On page 86, there is a six-page article by
Nancy Princenthal about the German sculptor
Stephan Balkenhol. Princenthal cites some
artists as progenitors for Balkenhol's
carved wooden statues of clothed people and
animals, naming Baselitz, for his
expressionistic wood carving, Nauman and
Charles Ray "for their punning figuration"
and the German artists Katharina Fritsch
and Thomas Schutte. Of the last two, she
says, "both are far more engaged than
Balkenhol in cultural critique. Schutte, in
fact, finds Balkenhol's work so willfully
detached from social reality that he has
dismissed it as religious."
On page 92 is the cover story, a short
essay by Holland Cotter about the latest
show by the video installation artist Tony
Oursler at Metro Pictures. Underneath the
title of the essay, an editor wrote:
"Widely known for his lifelike video
projections on cloth dummies, Tony Oursler
recently showed a new body of work that
explores the dynamics of perception through
close-up scrutiny of the human eyeball."
For his second show at Metro Pictures,
Oursler had 13 little LCD video projectors
on tripods projecting videos of eyeballs
onto white plastic balls. He videotaped the
eyes of some artist friends of his (Gary
Simmons, Constance DeJong, Kristin Lucas
and Kiki Smith, among others) watching
different things on TV, and the videos are
supposed to show the eye-activity of the
viewers. Cotter says that "Kristin Lucas'
glance skitters around frenetically as she
follows the Atari game in front of her."
For her performance, Kiki Smith watched a
Sonic Youth video, and Gary Simmons was
channel surfing. Cotter writes that "as
part of a generation of artists that grew
up on a steady diet of television, Oursler
is keenly aware of the way that medium
shapes our perception of the world. The
eyes in his installations are anxious or
dull or entranced, but in almost every case
the stimulant they're reacting to is
artificial." Cotter continues, saying, "The
new works find Oursler moving into riskier
terrain," and that "Oursler's pieces are
little morality tales of postmodern life,
emblems of control and complacency. They
turn the ubiquitous 'gaze' of recent art
theory into a hapless set of Pavlovian
tics. They suggest a culture of
fragmentation without getting heavy-
handed."
Patterson Beckwith is an artist who lives
and works in New York.
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