Outreach and ingroups
Apr. 2nd, 2006 10:43 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
imomus
"I'd be just as happy to show my photographs in a community center as at the Whitney," said Zoe Strauss at our panel discussion last night. "Actually, that's a lie. I'm fucking delighted they're in the Whitney." Zoe, who seemed like a very real person, got the best laugh of her panel with that. The best laugh of the next panel came when Jutta Koether, discussing a completely unreal painter called Lee Williams with her fictional gallerist Reena Spaulings (played in this instance by John Kelsey and Emily Sundblad) listed three painters called Lee (one of them was Lee Krasner) and said that Williams was "the fourth Lee". Just one person in the audience was clued-in enough to find that funny, but he found it very funny indeed.I won't say much about my own panel; the most interesting thing about it was Chrissie Iles talking about the themes that she and Philippe Vergne noticed emerging from their hundreds of studio visits as they selected artists for the Biennial. There were, apparently, a lot of people doing porn-related work "but not really able to explain why", and there was a lot of "somewhat diluted psychedelia".
But what really fascinated me was the contrast between the second and third panels. I'd been haunted by a comment conservative Henry Perri made on Click Opera a couple of weeks ago. Quoting Philippe Vergne's statement that "culture is like a gene pool: the more diverse, the better," Perri asked us to "notice how, even while using the "umbrella of inclusion," the curators unsurprisingly failed to include the conservative American viewpoint into their show."Now, I deplore the conservative American viewpoint, and I don't think it has any place in art. There are very few openly conservative artists (John Currin may be one). It's part of art's function to oppose power (and, some would say, to play footsy with the market, playing both hard- and easy-to-get, resisting money only to capitulate to it when the price is right). I'm happy for something like the Whitney Biennial to be "oppositional", but I do think it's a bit dodgy mixing Darwin with Marx in your rhetoric. Talk of a "diverse genepool" is Darwinian, whereas talk of post-America, dark times, the death of the Enlightenment and so on is, to use very reductive shorthand, Marxist. Of course, Darwin can be reconciled with a vaguely Marxian rhetoric by the idea of "inclusion", which maps the "gene pool" to the "workers of the world". But, as Perri pointed out, not everybody is included, because the powerful and the conservative are silenced. They have their own channels of expression, after all; TV channels, for instance.
But, given that we artists are all opposed to Bush and to conservatism and even, rather more ambivalently, to "the market", are we therefore all the same? Not at all. We may all be presenting ourselves as "subversive", but we're subverting in markedly different ways. The difference in tone between the second and third panels last night was so gob-smacking that I couldn't help wondering if some new kind of left-right split hadn't inscribed itself into the leftish consensus, in the manner of Freud's "narcissism of minor differences". Tone and texture, mannerism and body type, gesture, outlook and focus were all fascinatingly different (see Figure 1).Panel 2 was all women; two documentary film-makers, Lori Cheatle and Daisy Wright, talked about their anti-corporate film This Land is Your Land. (Interestingly enough, when we perform our cabaret at Tonic on May 20th, Toog and Flo intend to do a cover version of the Woody Guthrie song this film takes its title from, perhaps the closest thing America has to an anthem of socialism.) Zoe Strauss told us how she'd converted the pillars under the I-95 highway in Philadelphia into a people's art gallery, selling her photos there for $5 apiece. And Carolina Caycedo told us about a barter scheme she's devised, where she exchanges services with people. It mostly seemed to involve massage, and take place in a van she's decorated with rainbow blankets. When I spoke to Carolina after the panel, I told her that designers Abake had a similar exchange scheme involving a stall at the Columbia Road flower market in London.
If Panel 2 smacked of social outreach, Panel 3 was all about ingroups. Jutta Koether and "Reena Spaulings" hit the stage wearing shy, slightly smug smiles and (in Emily's case) what looked like riding britches and boots. Like slightly naughty, precocious schoolchildren who'd decided to concoct a big, clever lie for the headmistress, they proceeded to tell us about fictional painter Lee Williams. Lee, like Reena, is a mask, a distributed personality, but mostly seems to be a side project for the skeletal and aristocratic Jutta, who looks like a cross between Virginia Woolf and Helene Weigel. Here, then, was the part of the biennial which is all about masks and cabaret. It's a part as close to my heart as the radical, responsible, oppositional, socialist part, and at a stretch it can use the same rhetorics of justification: this is "subversion", it's defying the market (because how do you buy art made by a fictional person?), it's collective. Yet it's turned inward, a private game played by metropolitan hipsters, for metropolitan hipsters. The three panellists of Panel 3 seemed evasive; rather than playing to the crowd or responding directly to Chrissie's questions, they glanced conspiratorially at each other, like twins or triplets delighted by their own in-jokes, their clever private games. This might have been fascinating if the contrast with the previous panel hadn't made it slightly grotesque.But I couldn't help wondering which of these panels would come first to the Biennial's excluded -- and yet omni-present -- element, George W. Bush. Imagine the art world as a game of snakes and ladders, with Bush at both the bottom and the top. Imagine the strategy of social outreach as the snakes and the strategy of ingroups and roleplays as the ladders. They both lead to conservatism, because the more you talk to, and include, "the common people", the more likely it is you'll reach the people who actually voted for Bush. And the more you cut yourself off from the world and act out power games in an aristocratic masked ball, the more you resemble the decadent cliques currently running America. Bush, the excluded element in this leftish biennial, waits right at the edge of the frame.
By the way, today the Unreliable Tour Guide gets his own article in the New York Times. The biennial, unexplained, by Jeff McIntyre, juxtaposes the catalogue's description of some of the artworks on display with my unreliable narrations. The Associated Press piece about me the other day had me wearing suspenders; this one has me in a kimono. It's amazing that neither reporter noticed that I am, in fact, doing this show completely naked, in an imperial gesture of solidarity with all people, everywhere.
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(no subject)
Date: 2006-04-02 03:47 pm (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2006-04-02 03:52 pm (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2006-04-02 04:17 pm (UTC)A kind of pseduo-elitism - the quest for Celebrity and Status - tends to pervade much of the class-in-itself, so possibly some variety of elitism and populism go hand-in-hand...
(no subject)
Date: 2006-04-02 04:29 pm (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2006-04-02 04:42 pm (UTC)There's an interesting piece (http://www.lrb.co.uk/v28/n07/zize01_.html) in the LRB by Slavoj Zizek on this phenomenon, although his populist use of metaphors might disqualify him from truly belonging to the in-crowd.
(no subject)
Date: 2006-04-02 04:44 pm (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2006-04-02 04:49 pm (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2006-04-02 04:59 pm (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2006-04-02 05:02 pm (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2006-04-02 05:06 pm (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2006-04-02 05:23 pm (UTC)If I was to draw a lesson from your back catalogue it would be that the aristocrat's always at his best when he's impoverished, and the outsider is always at his best when he used to be an insider.
The kind of play that you're describing seems like a deliberate flight from power, though, for both the ingroup and the outgroup. That in itself can function as a commentary on GW, because he's not actually a conservative. (Conservatism is by definition reactionary, an oppositional viewpoint.) He's just a man with uncomplicated black and white values and too much influence. We think about our fantasies of regime change and we lurch away from him by disarming and confusing ourselves.
speaking of truthiness
Date: 2006-04-02 05:38 pm (UTC)(Stephen Colbert, Senior Conceptual Art Correspondent, standing in front of the Gates)
Stephen Colbert (SC):
Simply put the Gates are a triumph , an artistic milestone, that may finally put New York City on the cultural map.... this may finally do for New York City what West Wing did for Washington... or what the band Asia did for that continent.
John, the Gates is a triumph of contemporary installation art. Each gate redefining its section of the park as not a public place for private reflection but a private place for public reflection. Juxtaposed with the barrenness of the midwinter, the gates posits a chromatic orgy. This riot of color achieves a rare redefamiliarization with the nature of place, time, the Whatness of our Whereness. No longer framed ...
I'm Sorry, I've run out of crap.
JS:
Is this great art?
SC:
Yes, John, because like all great art it challenges what we thought we knew about the world.
For instance, I used to think 21 million dollars could be used to achieve something noble, like,... I don't know, --- building a hospital wing, but in this case the Gates has forced me to recontextualize my notion of what 21 million dollars can be used for.....
in this case, redecorate a bike path.
JS:
So you believe shrouding these walkways with orange curtains will somehow change our lives in New York?
SC:
Well it's happening already.
Just today, I saw an installation artist take a sandwich and wrap it in a paper-like substance,--- I don't know,--- almost waxy in texture. He kept wrapping -- I'm not doing this justice John, --- until he had visually achieved Not Sandwich. Then, --- this is the genius John,--- he cut it in 2 in a final act of Resandwichment.
JS:
So, --- you had lunch at a deli.
SC:
Okay fine. ---- I was in a (signalling quotation marks with his hands) "deli" ordering "lunch" if that is how you need to think of it, ----- "John".
(no subject)
Date: 2006-04-02 05:39 pm (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2006-04-02 07:01 pm (UTC)Some sectors of the left have reduced what you're saying to a trite truism: people tend to vote contrary to their own interests. And it's that thinking that makes us further and further estranged from the right. We become less and less concerned with true working class issues, all the while telling ourselves that we're doing so much more for the working class than they are doing for themselves.
By the way, Momus, I just heard your music through pandora.com, of all places. I plan to acquire some of your records next time I have money.
Re: speaking of truthiness
Date: 2006-04-02 07:01 pm (UTC)Re: speaking of truthiness
Date: 2006-04-02 08:49 pm (UTC)piu piu from tenminutesolder.blogspot.com
(no subject)
Date: 2006-04-02 10:23 pm (UTC)You know, I like your analysis, but I hope that I don't fit in to either category, and I think it's a dire reading if taken broadly- I hope that there is hope for unpretentious art that goes beyond the first category. I like to think that art insiders can do well if they just get over themselves and get brave. The problem, as you've said, is the smugness. The clubbiness of the art world only hurts it. The money is a problem too- those art tricks sell, and when I get really depressed about art I think that too many people buy visual art as a wall accessory that testifies to membership in an elite group. (That's why my art is poppy without irony: I think irony about pop culture visual forms is part of class warfare, comrade.)
I think there can be art that is baroque, that has its eyes open, that talks to lots of people, and of course I think there is. I'm also afraid of your categories because my work is fiction, it's in-group and out-groupy, and it's been a problem: it's very visually accessible which means that art people seldom get it (it does not speak their language) and the non-art public generally does- but they often miss the reading I expect from the clued-in readers. (Oh, poor me- I get plenty of shows, and lots of people get it, so I'm just whining here...) I imagine the curators would have grouped it in with fake psychadelia, because I think that I know the trend they're talking about - but I think they misinterpret that work: I think it shows a shift towards visual pleasure: people are trying to get to a visceral response to art again after years of dryness.
The part about beginning and ending with Bush is just sick. There's a good lecure on the web that speaks to that same freakiness. (I found it on itunes- it's called "What's the matter with Kansas" and it's by the guy who wrote the book of the same name.
Gates
Date: 2006-04-02 10:30 pm (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2006-04-02 11:10 pm (UTC)there is a large number of wealthy new york scenesters included in this biennial.
and they are all fucking friends, bull shit
bullshit on all trust fund artists for the most part.
(no subject)
Date: 2006-04-03 12:51 am (UTC)Re: Gates
Date: 2006-04-03 03:01 am (UTC)Re: Gates
Date: 2006-04-03 03:04 am (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2006-04-03 04:35 am (UTC)Are Panel 3 earning a living from that sort of thing? Who writes their catalogues, James Frey? JT Leroy? It all sounds a bit tiresome, to be honest. Though I like the britches.
Your Unreliable Tour Guide reminds me a little of my time as a minimum wage custodian at Kenwood House, the Hampstead stately home and art gallery. Some custodians were asked to give the public tours, but only by way of making their job more interesting. They weren't being paid anything extra.
One guide used to deliberately make up the information he was devulging to the visitors. This was actually more depressing than funny, though, as it was more a symptom of his contempt for the management of the day. I should add this was over five years ago, in case anyone from English Heritage is reading.
I think he also wrote into the Guardian's Notes & Queries pages with deliberate wrong answers.
Laurie Anderson: "If you MUST become a performance artist, the least you can do is use humour."
Re: Gates
Date: 2006-04-03 04:53 am (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2006-04-03 12:52 pm (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2006-04-03 02:13 pm (UTC)I was a liberal not too long ago. I was confused when the Fox News commentators labeled John Kerry an “elite.” I thought we were the populist party, looking out for the little guy? But modern liberalism is only a populist movement on the surface. In actual fact, most liberals despise the "average American." Wal-Mart, pick-up trucks, NASCAR, strip malls, suburban tract homes, trailer parks: all dirty words in Blue State America. The desire to empower the blue collar worker is not based on any sort of fellow-feeling, but is simply a philosophical stance taken for the high moral position it gives us. Liberalism grants us immunity on touchy social issues that we feel guilty about (race/sex/money etc).
So I think you’re correct to observe this divide between the collectivist liberals (panel 2) and the modern sort (panel 3 and, from what I can tell, the curators of the Biennial).
The “common person” in America has essentially remained the same for the last 50 years. These are the same bumpkins and squares that voted for liberals in the past. They understand that the stability of society rests on a certain level of decency and restraint. This is what is meant when voters cite “moral values” for the reason they went out to the polls. The liberals used to understand this, but the “tear down all social barriers” mentality of the sixties counter culture movement has yet to leave the bloodstream.
(no subject)
Date: 2006-04-03 05:30 pm (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2006-04-03 07:28 pm (UTC)