Dennis Hollingsworth

(Emphasis Mine)

This edition of (Emphasis Mine) grew a bit larger, so much more than the front of this blogpost should handle, so here is instead an image that I wanted to see, one of the George Page prints inverted so I can see what might happen if the black plate is printed in white or some such lighter tonality instead.

1.

A traditional program in studio art typically begins with a course in drawing, where students are introduced to the basics of line, form and tone. Life drawing is fundamental to this process, not only because of the complexity of the human form (that limber scaffolding of struts and masses) but because it is the object for which we have the most familiarity -- and sympathy. Students invariably bristle at the drawing requirement, wishing to vault ahead to the stage where they make "real art," but in my experience, students who skip the drawing stages do not have the same visual acuity, and the ability to see where a good idea might be made better.

Following this introduction, students might specialize in painting, sculpture or such newer media as photography or video. A rigorous college art program provides a strong vertical structure, so that students take a sequence of ever more challenging courses in the same medium. Most undergraduate programs culminate in a senior show, a high-spirited and uneven romp in which students' clever ideas race far ahead of their execution and workmanship. It was for just such a show that Ms. Shvarts's project was, so to speak, conceived.

It is often said that great achievement requires in one's formative years two teachers: a stern taskmaster who teaches the rules and an inspirational guru who teaches one to break the rules. But they must come in that order. Childhood training in Bach can prepare one to play free jazz and ballet instruction can prepare one to be a modern dancer, but it does not work the other way around. One cannot be liberated from fetters one has never worn; all one can do is to make pastiches of the liberations of others. And such seems to be the case with Ms. Shvarts.

* * *

In "My Life Among the Deathworks," the sociologist Philip Rieff coined the term "deathworks" to describe works of art that celebrated creative destruction, and which posed "an all-out assault upon something vital to the established culture." He argued that the principal artistic achievements of the 20th century were such deathworks, which, however lovely or brilliant, served primarily to negate or transgress the existing culture, rather than to affirm or celebrate it. He did not live to see Ms. Shvarts's piece, but one suspects that he would have had much to say.

Isn't the idea to celebrate by negating or transgression? To break the egg? " As what is becoming my habit, I took the opportunity to explore the characteristic working methods of my compatriots, to see if I can find a way to "break the egg" (a phrase we used by Henry and I when we critiqued Alberto's recent work talking about the need to overcome one's p.o.v. in order to grow into a new one)."

Mr. Rieff was especially interested in those who treated their bodies as an instrument of art, especially those who used them in masochistic or repugnant ways. By now, it is hardly an innovation to do so. Nearly two generations have passed since Chris Burden had a bullet fired into his body. It is even longer since the Italian artist Piero Manzoni sold tin cans charmingly labeled Merde d'artista, which contained exactly that. Even Ms. Shvarts's central proposition -- that the discomfort we feel at the word miscarriage is itself a species of linguistic oppression -- is a relic of the highly politicized literary theory of the late 1980s.

Chris Burden's bullet to the arm is an excellent example. His early work served an artworld narrative that was successfully embodied in BCAM. Burden's later career could not develop that narrative any further. Instead he became known via his work as a sheer force of personality rather than the iconoclastic bull in the performance/conceptual China shop. Still a bull he is to be sure, but it is no longer the same ring positioned by the dialog twenty to thirty years ago.

2.

What has not been widely recognized is that the Ayatollah Khomeini?s 1989 fatwa against Satanic Verses author Salman Rushdie introduced a new kind of jihad. Instead of assaulting Western ships or buildings, Kho? meini took aim at a fundamental Western freedom: freedom of speech. In recent years, other Islamists have joined this crusade, seeking to undermine Western societies? basic liberties and extend sharia within those societies.

The cultural jihadists have enjoyed disturbing success. Two events in particular?the 2004 assassination in Amsterdam of Theo van Gogh in retaliation for his film about Islam?s oppression of women, and the global wave of riots, murders, and vandalism that followed a Danish newspaper?s 2005 publication of cartoons satirizing Mohammed?have had a massive ripple effect throughout the West. Motivated variously, and doubtless sometimes simultaneously, by fear, misguided sympathy, and multicultural ideology?which teaches us to belittle our freedoms and to genuflect to non-Western cultures, however repressive?people at every level of Western society, but especially elites, have allowed concerns about what fundamentalist Muslims will feel, think, or do to influence their actions and expressions. These Westerners have begun, in other words, to internalize the strictures of sharia, and thus implicitly to accept the deferential status of dhimmis?infidels living in Muslim societies.

Call it a cultural surrender. The House of War is slowly?or not so slowly, in Europe?s case?being absorbed into the House of Submission.

3.

Michael?s Realism

THE STRATEGY that ultimately saves the Corleone family from the Sollozzo threat and equips it for coping with multipolarity comes from Michael, the youngest and least experienced of the don?s sons. Unlike Tom, whose labors as family lawyer have produced an exaggerated devotion to negotiation, and Sonny, whose position as untested heir apparent has produced a zeal for utilizing the family arsenal, Michael has no formulaic fixation on a particular policy instrument. Instead, his overriding goal is to protect the family?s interests and save it from impending ruin by any and all means necessary. In today?s foreign-policy terminology, Michael is a realist.

Viewing the world through untinted lenses, he sees that the age of dominance the family enjoyed for so long under his father is ending. Alone among the three brothers, Michael senses that a shift is underway toward a more diffuse power arrangement, in which multiple power centers will jockey for position and influence. To survive and succeed in this new environment, Michael knows the family will have to adapt...

...For all his talk about diplomacy, Tom believes in the family?s dominance; like today?s liberal institutionalists, he assumes that allies will continue to pay fealty to the family as a matter of course, as they have in the past. Similarly, Sonny assumes that other powers will gravitate toward the family or risk irrelevance; like most neocons, he sees allies as essentially disposable. By contrast, Michael intuitively grasps the value of family friends and the role that reciprocity plays in retaining their support for future crises. Thus, he is seen offering encouragement and a cigarette to Enzo, the timid neighborhood baker, whose help he enlisted to protect his father at the hospital. In this, he is imitating his father, Vito, who saw alliances as the true foundation of Corleone power and was mindful of the need to tend the family?s ?base? of support, not only with big players like Clemenza and Tessio (Britain and France) but with small players like the cake maker and undertaker (Poland and Romania), whose loyalty he is seen cultivating in the opening scenes of the movie. As Michael knows, even small allies could potentially prove crucial in ?tipping the scales? to the family?s advantage, as they will for America, once multipolarity is in full swing. Relearning the lost Sicilian art of alliance management will be necessary if Washington is to regain the confidence of the growing list of allies whose blood and treasure were frittered away, with little or nothing to show in return, in the sands of Iraq.

I think of this article in terms of mapping a similar divide in our artworld: between conceptual (Tom) and material (Sonny), between the deskillers normally found in grad schools; and the skillers in undergrad schools; between the marketplace and theory. Michael's Realism in this respect would be a rejection of one-instead-of-the-other and a choice of what was referred to in the article as a "toolbox": "Michael relinquishes the mechanistic, one-trick-pony policy approaches of his brothers in favor of a ?toolbox,? in which soft and hard power are used in flexible combinations and as circumstances dictate. ". Therefore, instead of rejecting conceptuality wholesale, better to embrace an expansion of conceptuality and steer away from sound bites and simplistic intellectual reductions. Instead of the crude brute facts of (mediated?) materiality, let's seek instead material nuance and subtlety. More information per cubic inch. The embrace of Both/And instead of Either/Or directs us towards suppleness in "flexible combinations and as circumstances dictate", "finding theory in skills, finding skills in theory".

4. (A very interesting New Yorker article by Jerry Saltz)

Each on his own is good at this mannered nonstyle. But their show, while roguish, is merely occupying a well-defined position. A heat-seeking art world, mindlessly drawn to the familiar, has deemed that current art should look this way, so more art does. That?s part of the bad thing.

Like so many recent exhibitions (numbing swaths of the Whitney Biennial, portions of the New Museum?s ?Unmonumental?) the Colen-Lowman outing resembles a disheveled rec room. The palette du jour in these shows is black-and-white, black-and-silver, monochrome, Day-Glo, or printer?s colors like magenta and cyan applied mechanically or in intentionally messy ways. Posters, gaffer?s tape, magazine pages, and found objects are placed about. Images are usually derived from newspapers, ads, or porn. Text and jokes often appear (? la Richard Prince); holes are often bashed in walls; Sheetrock and plywood are broken up and spray painted. Noland?s ideas about sculpture and Prince?s about appropriation are so prevalent that those artists ought to be drawing royalties.

Much of this work takes visual cues from the photographs that appeared in art magazines of the sixties and seventies, translating that smudgy halftone quality to three dimensions. These artists seem to want to crawl into the skins of Gordon Matta-Clark and Robert Smithson, whose work did intrusive things to the large and familiar, and a preapproved roster from the so-called ?greatest generation.? It?s a cool school based on an older cool school, and it gains attention the way a child of a celebrity does. Many artists of this stripe went to art school and have apparently internalized the beliefs of their teachers, using strategies common when those instructors were young. They?re making art in ways that their teachers thought art should be made. This is an Oedipal-aesthetic feedback loop, a death wish. Some of this art is good. Most of it already looks very dated, or will soon.

Of course, I see familiar themes here of death and musical chairs.

Posted by Dennis at April 29, 2008 3:54 PM