As the number of SPAMBOT droppings in my comment section reaches 15,000, I began to clean them out. Housekeeping. To my surprise, I found an exchange in the comment section, a rich hunk of golden ore gleaming in the mud.
The discussion was about the work of Dana Schutz. james e. had a critique of her work and of the artworld in general.
Commenters james e. and tommy crossed swords and as in a good fencing match, it began with a salute, proceeded with the sting of blades and ended with handshakes. Fantastic.
Here are my favorite parts:
james e.:
I didn't mean for my response to sound like just a rant, but I think the sucess of someone like Schutz is a problem and continues to show the problems with the art world. The art world constantly convinces itself that it is fresh and in the avant-garde when it is far from that anymore.I do like some of Schutz's work because I like painting with bizarre imagery etc.. and I have seen her work since her college days and I definitley think she should be shown, but not at the level she is now at. She is barely out of grad school still and hailed as the greatest thing since sliced bread which is a joke.
I think that there are many artworlds. Such a train of thought helps to alieviate anxiety and provides places for the many competing claims of art to enjoy their own homes. A manifold artworld(s) idea is democratic (I think it's the best way to teach) and it also dethrones what I believe is a fictive singular artworld, the illusion of an elite club of our grad schooled imaginations in which we suffer the anxiety of possibly, probably being denied entry by the bouncer at the door. I've heard that Dave Hickey suffers a negative crit (I may be wrong) in the East Coast (james' and tommy's home I assume), but I like how he (Hickey)regards the marketplace of art in terms of concentric audience rings (my figuration here), wherein the center of the target is the artist as first audience with expanding rings of friends and friends of friends and then the strangers at large. The atmosphere at the outer rings is hype itself.
Better than begrudging the awesome party at the clubs that we can't gain access to. It is far better to have your own party. It may be lonely at the beginning, it may be lonely forever, but at least it's your kind of party.
...If you talk to schutz or listen to her comments, her paintings are more about painting than anything else,...
GOOOOOAAAALLLL!!!!
...while her gallery and critic fans attempt to read into the work all kinds of cultural importance which is simply not there. That is the problem really, painting about painting has been done...
(dusting off the hands) all done! no need to think about that anymore!
EMOTICON: friendly jesting ;-)
...and is not contributing anything new culturally to this world. No one gives a fuck about painting or paintings issues etc.. who isn't in the art world. Can painting really afford to keep making work about itself with very slight references to the world?
So much here. Painting has always been about itself and its' references to the world tambien. As far as what people give a f---- about? The artist is the first audience, remember?
This whole controversy about painting being dead a few years ago, well, with the success of artists like schutz painting in an ahistorical zone of idiosyncratic nostalgia, yeah, painting is dead!
I hope to write more about my views about the "Death of Painting" meme in the next installment of "POP after POP after POP". The short version is that by the end of the eighties, this meme had enjoyed about a twenty year run in art schools in North America. But the roots of it belong with the turn from the hey day of AbEx(NYC-World) to POP(NYC-World), an monumental agenda inversion. My shorthand: "Where once artists tried to touch G-d via material means, now artists try to touch the physical world through conceptual means." And thus ushered in the PostModern era.
From Pop to Minimalism to Conceptualism to Continetal Theory to whatever, the brisk rapids smoothed out into the broad delta (PostModern) art is today. The fruit of this tree is the conceptual (Sol LeWit) and true to the watercourse model, a revolution won't happen until the delta disappears into the sea and the water evaporates into the sky and the clouds darken over the mountains for the inevitable flashflood to come.
I think we are in the cloud formation stage, by the way. And what is my point here? This idea of the new is not only antithetical to the basis of PostModernism, any evolution beyond our seeming Postmodern end of history will not be possible until we begin to critique the entire forty year plus history of PostModernity. We have not done this yet. This "new" (no, I will not discount its existence) my be in our midst, but we won't be able to recognize it without the critique.
(Whew, I got a little operatic there.)
...oh, and if you look at her new show at lfl this month, it illustrates my comments. It looks more like 'her greatest hits' more than a new show of painting.
I hate the idea of art as showbiz. Who calls the tempo of our curiosities, the artist or the audience?
tommy responds:
james is clearly paying more attention to hype than art- notice how his beef with prices, the art world, grad school etc is the basis of his discontent and that his need for something new betrays the unexamined, oppressive and dated values, ie avant garde, he brings to the world of painting.
A hit, a palpable hit!
He goes on to correct the record very effectively in three ways and ends with this:
Also, take it from the other painters- everyone from different camps agrees she's the shit and I've never seen that before.
So many camps, too.
james e. responds:
Tommy, thanks for the comments. Like I said before I have no question that she is good, I just don't think she is as good as everyone seems to justify. I also don't mean when I say 'new' something that has never seen before, just that artists such as schutz are hailed as innovative when (if you really break it down) aren't that innovative at all. I don't think Furnace is innovative or paticularly good either. I don't have a beef with the things you mention, but clearly they are all contributing to the lack of new ideas in painting.
What a gent! He could have flamed on tommy there, but no. He recovers, assesses and corrects. He's open. How rare, unfortunately.
But he's back at it with the "new".
(the name Furnas is corrected, here's a link)
tommy:
How does one "contribute" to a "lack" of new ideas in anything?
A fat seventies Elvis once said at a Jaycees press conference "there's the man, and then there's the image. I put it this way; It's very hard for a man to live up to his image." If you think innacurate hype is bad for a good artist, and that being characterized as great is jumping the gun, right on. But once again, you pass the buck when it comes to hype
A beautiful golden nugget that was. "Inacurate hype", how incisive. His question: James, do you believe in accurate hype?
james e:
I have to say that I often write before thinking about what I am saying. So you make a lot of good points....
What honesty. How open. Growth, before our eyes.
I do that too, trying to flow.
.... I guess in the end, I was simply saying what you said at the end. Is she great yet? We don't know because yeah, she is still young and for me that is the problem, she (and others) are hailed as great, treated like geniuses before they have barely scratched the surface of a career.
That's not her fault. Being the genius apparent is actually a burden.
tommy:
I understand your discontent on three levels-
Three levels, I'm ecstatic!
...that art reached a visual impasse (some say with Warhol), beyond which all formal and aesthetic innovations have been recycled several times over;
This is the essence of "Pop after Pop after Pop", and I wonder how much of the rest of the artworld sees this as a problem too.
...that art institutions have largely perpetuated the pastiche of art history under the guise of context shifts;
In the same way newsrooms became profit centers, so too the institutional (museum/school) artworld.
...and that art schools and the managerial class of the artworld have failed to provide adequate solutions or somehow ignored the problem.
I think that relationships form (artist-curator-gallery-collector-critic-museum) for probably legitamate reasons and stay connect for what becomes over time illegitamate reasons. The music is playing and no one wants to get up out of their chairs for the circular dance. No one gives up power voluntarily.
Except Seinfeld.
Catastrophy theory, tipping points and all that.
...Discontent is fine in this situation. But innovation is rarely a clean break with the past- in fact I can't think of a single avante garde movement that didn't overlook or take for granted some dimension of artmaking that has later served as the basis for its own endgame critique.
Thank G-d, for I don't think art would exist otherwise. All arguments involve artiface. It's when the artiface exists for its' own sake, when people begin to believe the gram of B.S. that the knees of the argument falter.
... What I do know is that no one has ever made the mistake of saying- in writing at least- that Schutz represents something never seen before. Innovation, by definition, builds on something.
and then tommy ends with a flourish:
As for the art world, it's not some monolith or a conspiracy of navel gazers. It is a larger, more dysfunctional herd that includes you and your friends, me and mine, Dennis Hollingsworth
Gracias, Se?or.
...and hundreds of other entities. It has its own laissez faire economy, its own rumor mill, no center, and no single direction.
I think it is an anarchic environment.
No rules.
Wild.
And the schools release wide eyed innocents into this world every Spring, a Wild West populated with fortune seekers, visionaries, adventurers, dead ended natives and predators who feed on the minnows and the others as well.
And just like in the real world, "a rumor can travel halfway around the world while the truth is still putting on its shoes." (my new fav Mark Twain quote). All I'm saying is lighten up on the artist for reasons other than the work itself, and don't go searching for someone to blame for the hype- you're in this game of operator too.
Brilliant.
I'd like to meet these guys someday. A beer or a coffee when I get to NYC, fellas?
Posted by Dennis at November 20, 2004 5:47 PM
dennis,
i've just found this blog recently-
first, I hope it continues, because it's great.
Lots of inspiration here, from your work and writing and photos. It's also informative, tons of great little links to things i've not seen. Your blog is a great example of what makes blogging so cool or perhaps kool fits better.
second, about your work. What is the degree of self-consciencenous in your working method(s). Is an accident in your work really an accident?
Third, what medium are you using in your impasto areas. I'm wondering, because if you look at one of Twombly's paintings from the sixties with the paint blobs, they've shriveled quite a bit, as the volume dissapears from the paint. How are your paintings "surviving"?
I forgot to mention that in regards to this blog entry, dana's work is over-hyped if it is hyped at all. Paintings/painters can be good in so many special ways, but dana's aren't that good in many ways some of which are probally subjective, granted. Still, it's suprising that one would argue against the fact that she is a perfect example of what can be considered a problem in the artworld.
My parallel would be kara walker. her work fails on multiple levels (number one always: aesthetics)...She was definitely overhyped, but also shows how the artworld corrects itself
Hello Patrick:
Nice to make your acquaintance online. And thanks for high five.
In regards to the material change in the paint (oils), I've accepted a degree of movement after the painting leaves the studio. A kind of vanititas seems appropriate for one so invested in fat corporeality.
The important word is "degree".
I see that the paint will shrink according to the surface characteristics. And paint of course dries from the surface to the interior. Many of the forms are derived from a kind of ballistic energy or the sea urchin forms are numerous cone-tendrils that are each sharper as they shrink. Paint color and thickness of mass are other factors. I've noticed that a flattened surface will show the minute imperfections of the pallete knife that delivered them as the painting dries. It's as if the painting sharpens with age.
Some paintings dry and wrinkle in alarming ways, usually it happens fast, during the weeks they are in the studio. I have seen unexpected wrinkling in older paintings but these sightings have been rare.
We shall see, won't we?
(cont.)
Hello Patrick (cont.):
Last word on the survivalbility: they don't. Sculpture is a better bet, but with enough time, they won't survive either. So far, most of what I've seen of older work is still looking good.
As for accidents, perhaps I pretend that there aren't any. Intention intrudes even and especially when you don't want it to. An accident is to be thrown off your course. I like when that happens.
The problem is the variabilty in all the options and all their implications and the crunch time it takes to consider and choose the best way through them all. When the chosen limit is the dry time of paint, there's some pressure to take one path or the other and prove it out.
The way you keep the work from being overdetermined (maybe) is to take it on in small steps, branches of decision trees, many of them. Digitalize. I know the next color or a design argument that starts the next painting, but the final form is yet to be divined.
At each step, a subsequent "move" (there's got to be a better word) might be a flat note or a magnificent gem. A string of serendipity can be wiped out in one fell swoop. A series of failures can be redeemed in the next stroke.
**
As for the art world... what can I say? It's a rotten, lovely place.
-Dennis