Peyton Place or the altermodern?
Oct. 10th, 2008 12:29 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
imomusI'm pretty busy preparing my AA talk on The Ideology of the Iconic just now, so everything I see becomes grist to my "so tired of pop culture and high culture being mixed up" mill. This video report by James Kalm of the Elizabeth Peyton retrospective at the New Museum, for instance:
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There are two interesting moments, for me, in the video. The first is where the curator (looking, as curators often do, a bit panicked to have Kalm's video camera turned on her) tries to explain her assertion that Peyton's work mixes representation with conceptualism by saying that Peyton was married for ten years or so to conceptualist Rirkrit Tiravanija, and that they remain close, and that therefore, somehow, the Relational Aesthetics approach has rubbed off on Peyton, whose work (depicting, mostly, "iconic" 90s rock stars) is "an encounter" with her audience. (I don't buy that for a moment, by the way, but I can see why a curator might feel the need to say it of Peyton's work, just as they would say it of Jutta Koether's work, to avoid charges that it's "just bad painting", or snobby, or Darwinian, or an in-joke.)
The second classic moment in the video is when Kalm asks a professional critic what he thinks, and the man says: "It's just grad-school level work". I buy that much more readily, but my perplexity with Peyton's work goes much deeper. I can see some good things about it -- the fact that it's about grace and beauty, and manages to make even apes like the Gallaghers into these delicate, refined Wildean creatures. I can see how it's a kind of painterly version of Starlust-style slash fiction, which makes it in some way "democratic" as well as aristocratic (it's quite literally aristocratic: lots of pictures of the queen in there).
But mostly I really dislike Peyton's work. It makes me sigh and cringe. It seems utterly complicit with the most idiotic celebrity culture (come on, calling your first museum retrospective Live Forever after an Oasis song, in 2008!), sub-Warholian, postmodern at a time when postmodernism is teetering on its last legs, collectible in the most craven way, "iconic" in the stupidest way. It ushers popular culture into a gallery space I'd much rather see ignoring popular culture (already too omnipresent in our lives), and it chooses to celebrate an outdated, conservative, past-its-sell-by-date popular culture at that -- retro necro 90s Dadrock.
I'll open a flank for counter-attacks here ("This is all just sour grapes, Momus!") by saying that in my first visits to New York I was introduced to Elizabeth Peyton by Japanese painter Tam Ochiai, who was interviewing me for a magazine called Music and invited Peyton around too. If I was being checked out as a possible painting subject, I obviously failed. I did get invited to her studio, though, and got shown her paintings of HM the Queen, David Hockney, Marie Antoinette (quite possibly the inspiration for Sofia Coppola's anti-revolutionary shopping-and-fucking film) and Noel Gallagher. I think chinks in her tolerance began to appear when I tried to tell her that these were conservative, passé figures to dwell on, but I remember agreeing, just before emerging out onto Tompkins Square, that her images were about desire, and that that was A Good Thing.
Later, relations chilled further. I'd encounter Elizabeth at art bar Passerby, and once gaffed by asking my friend Steve Lafreniere "Why is someone playing Oasis? Elizabeth Peyton isn't here, is she?" only to see a hunched Elizabeth rise up, Oasis album in hand, to glare at me. I'm probably naive, I tend to assume New York artists are aesthetic and social radicals or are somehow against the status quo, when in fact they just want to join it and milk it. "All I wanna do," as MIA would say, "is take your money".
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Anyway, after that I noticed that Elizabeth was getting her photo in the society pages of Vanity Fair, or being spotted at the parties of ultra-rich people out in the Hamptons. She seemed to join the celebrities she'd painted, almost as if her cave paintings had actually bagged her real life versions of the bulls and boars they depicted. I consoled myself with the thought that her paintings of 90s Dadrockers would date as quickly as their music.
Fast forward to now. The financial bubble which sustains the Marie-Antoinettish art-society world has burst. We're sick to death of the postmodernist collapse of high and low, which has filled galleries with "iconic" celebrities we could as easily see in cinemas, newspapers, concert halls and TV, thus wasting the few critical cultural lab spaces we have.
Nicolas Bourriaud -- the man who coined the term "Relational Aesthetics", and co-founded the Palais de Tokyo -- is now talking about something he calls the altermodern; the thing that comes after postmodernism. The next Tate Triennial, opening in February 2009, is titled Altermodern and curated by Bourriaud, and the blurb for it says "the term describes art made in today’s global context which is a reaction against standardisation and commercialism".
From what I've read (Shumon Basar's interview with Bourriaud in the current edition of Tank, for instance), the altermodern is about staging narratives of modernity and autonomy against the backdrop of the new globalization of multipolarity, a point-to-point, many-to-many model rather than the New World Order of 90s globalization, which arranged everything around a single, central hub (the US, the West). It's post-post-colonial, if you like.
"The altermodern" (alternative modernities, the rise of the rest) is a label that may or may not supercede "postmodernism". What it is likely to lead to (and I welcome this) is more shows like Cairoscape and fewer like Live Forever -- a phrase which is sounding more and more like an ironic epitaph, incidentally. Not just for Oasis or for Britpop or for the 90s, not just for the exhausted postmodernist habit of appropriating popular culture, celebrity and the "iconic", and not even for our culture's ouroboros-like tendency to banquet endlessly on its own tail, but for our sense, in the West, of the eternity of our centrality. It's over, Elizabeth, and it's okay.
[Error: unknown template video]
There are two interesting moments, for me, in the video. The first is where the curator (looking, as curators often do, a bit panicked to have Kalm's video camera turned on her) tries to explain her assertion that Peyton's work mixes representation with conceptualism by saying that Peyton was married for ten years or so to conceptualist Rirkrit Tiravanija, and that they remain close, and that therefore, somehow, the Relational Aesthetics approach has rubbed off on Peyton, whose work (depicting, mostly, "iconic" 90s rock stars) is "an encounter" with her audience. (I don't buy that for a moment, by the way, but I can see why a curator might feel the need to say it of Peyton's work, just as they would say it of Jutta Koether's work, to avoid charges that it's "just bad painting", or snobby, or Darwinian, or an in-joke.)
The second classic moment in the video is when Kalm asks a professional critic what he thinks, and the man says: "It's just grad-school level work". I buy that much more readily, but my perplexity with Peyton's work goes much deeper. I can see some good things about it -- the fact that it's about grace and beauty, and manages to make even apes like the Gallaghers into these delicate, refined Wildean creatures. I can see how it's a kind of painterly version of Starlust-style slash fiction, which makes it in some way "democratic" as well as aristocratic (it's quite literally aristocratic: lots of pictures of the queen in there).
But mostly I really dislike Peyton's work. It makes me sigh and cringe. It seems utterly complicit with the most idiotic celebrity culture (come on, calling your first museum retrospective Live Forever after an Oasis song, in 2008!), sub-Warholian, postmodern at a time when postmodernism is teetering on its last legs, collectible in the most craven way, "iconic" in the stupidest way. It ushers popular culture into a gallery space I'd much rather see ignoring popular culture (already too omnipresent in our lives), and it chooses to celebrate an outdated, conservative, past-its-sell-by-date popular culture at that -- retro necro 90s Dadrock.
I'll open a flank for counter-attacks here ("This is all just sour grapes, Momus!") by saying that in my first visits to New York I was introduced to Elizabeth Peyton by Japanese painter Tam Ochiai, who was interviewing me for a magazine called Music and invited Peyton around too. If I was being checked out as a possible painting subject, I obviously failed. I did get invited to her studio, though, and got shown her paintings of HM the Queen, David Hockney, Marie Antoinette (quite possibly the inspiration for Sofia Coppola's anti-revolutionary shopping-and-fucking film) and Noel Gallagher. I think chinks in her tolerance began to appear when I tried to tell her that these were conservative, passé figures to dwell on, but I remember agreeing, just before emerging out onto Tompkins Square, that her images were about desire, and that that was A Good Thing.
Later, relations chilled further. I'd encounter Elizabeth at art bar Passerby, and once gaffed by asking my friend Steve Lafreniere "Why is someone playing Oasis? Elizabeth Peyton isn't here, is she?" only to see a hunched Elizabeth rise up, Oasis album in hand, to glare at me. I'm probably naive, I tend to assume New York artists are aesthetic and social radicals or are somehow against the status quo, when in fact they just want to join it and milk it. "All I wanna do," as MIA would say, "is take your money".
[Error: unknown template video]
Anyway, after that I noticed that Elizabeth was getting her photo in the society pages of Vanity Fair, or being spotted at the parties of ultra-rich people out in the Hamptons. She seemed to join the celebrities she'd painted, almost as if her cave paintings had actually bagged her real life versions of the bulls and boars they depicted. I consoled myself with the thought that her paintings of 90s Dadrockers would date as quickly as their music.
Fast forward to now. The financial bubble which sustains the Marie-Antoinettish art-society world has burst. We're sick to death of the postmodernist collapse of high and low, which has filled galleries with "iconic" celebrities we could as easily see in cinemas, newspapers, concert halls and TV, thus wasting the few critical cultural lab spaces we have.
Nicolas Bourriaud -- the man who coined the term "Relational Aesthetics", and co-founded the Palais de Tokyo -- is now talking about something he calls the altermodern; the thing that comes after postmodernism. The next Tate Triennial, opening in February 2009, is titled Altermodern and curated by Bourriaud, and the blurb for it says "the term describes art made in today’s global context which is a reaction against standardisation and commercialism".
From what I've read (Shumon Basar's interview with Bourriaud in the current edition of Tank, for instance), the altermodern is about staging narratives of modernity and autonomy against the backdrop of the new globalization of multipolarity, a point-to-point, many-to-many model rather than the New World Order of 90s globalization, which arranged everything around a single, central hub (the US, the West). It's post-post-colonial, if you like.
"The altermodern" (alternative modernities, the rise of the rest) is a label that may or may not supercede "postmodernism". What it is likely to lead to (and I welcome this) is more shows like Cairoscape and fewer like Live Forever -- a phrase which is sounding more and more like an ironic epitaph, incidentally. Not just for Oasis or for Britpop or for the 90s, not just for the exhausted postmodernist habit of appropriating popular culture, celebrity and the "iconic", and not even for our culture's ouroboros-like tendency to banquet endlessly on its own tail, but for our sense, in the West, of the eternity of our centrality. It's over, Elizabeth, and it's okay.
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OFF TOPIC
Date: 2008-10-09 11:33 pm (UTC)http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20081009/ap_on_bi_ge/financial_meltdown (http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20081009/ap_on_bi_ge/financial_meltdown)
WE ARE SO SCREWED!
i live in the USA(ssholes) ...i'm very scared!
save us Momus, please!
Re: OFF TOPIC
Date: 2008-10-09 11:48 pm (UTC)"Shipping rates for transporting raw materials to the great manufacturing economies of the world, as measured by the Baltic Exchange Dry Index, have halved over the past month - and have fallen 75% since mid-May... There's been a further sharp drop in the price of commodity and energy prices. Good news in a way, if it leads to lower household bills."
It also seems to be getting Obama elected.
Re: OFF TOPIC
Date: 2008-10-10 02:54 am (UTC)Re: OFF TOPIC
Date: 2008-10-10 10:55 am (UTC)The Californians are ahead of the game, and are planning their own high-speed rail system (http://www.cahighspeedrail.ca.gov/) linking the Bay Area, LA and San Diego.
Re: OFF TOPIC
Date: 2008-10-10 02:49 pm (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2008-10-10 12:15 am (UTC)The success of her work, as I see it, is in the way they are made. The surfaces are lovely, and heavily worked upon, but give the initial impression of something made hastily, because of the thin washes of color. And my work is a bit like that. But I don't obsess about smooth surface, or feel beholden to surface, otherwise the paintings get bad and too precious. She is really walking that line, and crossing over it in most cases.
What bothers me about her work is that it always feels like fandom, and I don't get off on that. It feels a bit juvenile and trite to me. When I started seeing her picture in the party spreads of the fashion magazines, something was confirmed for me. I feel that Peyton has been constructing fame, and that her paintings are the way she gets in with the popular kids.
(no subject)
Date: 2008-10-10 02:49 am (UTC)It's like MIA says in Paper Planes:
Everyone's a winner now we're making that fame
Bonafide hustler making my name
Or Oasis in Live Forever:
Maybe I will never be
All the things that I want to be
But now is not the time to cry
Now's the time to find out why
I think you're the same as me
We see things they'll never see
You and I are gonna live forever
(Now, if you'll excuse me, I must go detox in a big tub of Dettol.)
(no subject)
Date: 2008-10-10 09:31 pm (UTC)She's got a sister
And god only knows how I've missed her
On the palm of her hand is a blister
(no subject)
Date: 2008-10-10 03:10 am (UTC)"Edward's friends Zeph and Caroline, dot-com cash-outs, and their borderline-autistic colleague, who is known as the Artiste, introduce him to a Myst-like computer game called Momus. Zeph takes Edward to a LAN party -- LAN stands for Local Area Network -- where dozens of undersocialized information technology professionals pit their wits over high-bandwidth cables. ''Dude, I feel like you're leading me right into the heart of dorkness,'' Edward says. He's a stranger in the world of computer gamers and programmers, just as he is in the library; we enter it with him: ''He was starting to see what people found so addictive about these games. Momus had none of the slapdash inefficiency of reality: every moment was tense with hushed anticipation, foreordained meaning. It was a brighter, higher-grade, more compelling, better-engineered version of reality.'' You might say, just like fiction.
Zeph doesn't think so. Momus is an open-source code, collaborative software. ''Momus is big,'' Zeph tells Edward. ''Nobody knows who started it, it just bubbled up from our collective unconscious via the Internet. Not even the Artiste knows about everything that's in it. It's bigger than books. That library you're messing around with? Obsolete information technology. We're witnessing the dawn of a whole new artistic medium, and we don't even appreciate it.''
(no subject)
Date: 2008-10-10 01:41 pm (UTC)FANGIRLS
Date: 2008-10-10 05:23 am (UTC)Re: FANGIRLS
Date: 2008-10-10 06:23 am (UTC)Peytonize: Set level of runniness 0-10. Preview / Cancel.
Re: FANGIRLS
Date: 2008-10-10 07:08 am (UTC)Similar feelings of injustice stir in me when I see Peyton's work -- she shouldn't be shitting up our galleries with this stuff, she should be in the BL (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Boys_love) section of a Comiket (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Comiket) selling her Doujinshi (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dōjinshi); She should have been born Japanese. Sure, she's white, rich and renowned, but she could have been Japanese, part of the fandom and emotionally understood.
Re: FANGIRLS
Date: 2008-10-10 08:26 pm (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2008-10-10 07:31 am (UTC)Postmodernism is the name of the cultural period we're all in. I see your attempts to 'transcend' or 'deny' this as a form of bad faith. And I think postmodernism will not be superceded by denials and reactions against its core values, but by a complete embracing of them. That's why I like pop records like Cher's 'Believe'. By embracing postmodern production, by showing that there's no contradiction between the human voice and an electronic harmoniser, between technology and emotion, between contrivance and sincerity, or confection and belief, or the engineer and the humanist, 'Believe' brings the end of postmodernism closer because it brings closer the day in which to be postmodern will be as natural as breathing.
(no subject)
Date: 2008-10-10 02:37 pm (UTC)Postmodernism is the sandbox allotted to artists by the financial elites who actually define context. Small wonder then that it would be looking a bit gaunt and shaky now.
-Jace
(no subject)
Date: 2008-10-10 07:40 am (UTC)Her work is superficial.
But I wonder if you think painting even has a place in the future "altermodern" world? You are certainly part of the current zeitgeist with its love for intervention, conceptual anti-art, and new media installation ...
so what about painting and sculpture, that old-fashioned stuff .. a total waste of time?
(no subject)
Date: 2008-10-10 08:26 am (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2008-10-10 01:36 pm (UTC)examines concepts of space in the medium of film
Paris's buildings become giant screens
a huge installation based on digital hacking
Working with a group of young Munich actors within a structure designed by the artist, Liam Gillick produces and directs a play
presents a wide variety of works made mostly from material borrowed or simply taken in order to create the new
assembles British folklore items and documents such as customized motorbike helmets or banners from demonstrations
None of that is painting, and all of it sounds rather exciting to me. It's mostly mid-career work by established artists like Jeremy Deller, Liam Gillick, Ryoji Ikeda, Jeff Wall. I would certainly anticipate visual excitement, but it wouldn't be painterly. Some of this is sculpture, though, if you extend the definition wide enough.
Personally, I tend to associate painting with the idea of art fairs, and rather conservative galleries just trying to sell nice canvases for rich people to put on their walls. When it gets into museum shows, painting now has to be justified, as I said in the piece, by claims that it's conceptual and part of an installation.
I think of painting as almost a different artform now. It's one that can give me some minor pleasures, but in general doesn't excite me. I think I'd expect a painter, now, to have a little bit of extra justification for why they'd chosen the medium. Why they'd chosen its limitations and its conservatism. I might well be satisfied by the answer, but I'd want to ask.
(no subject)
Date: 2008-10-10 05:35 pm (UTC)For me the art you reference on vernisage.tv mostly comes across as obscurist, elitist and effervescent, in a bad sense. I call this kind of work "potato chip art", because its not quite filling, despite the way it plays with sensation and spectacle. But this kind of work is ubiquitous now, in the ascendant, and the curators are playing glass bead games, creating little careers for recent art grads. There are lots of games to be played in pursuing a career in the arts.
Painting/Drawing is the most natural and oldest form of art. Its about human mark making and representation. Why does one media need to be justified over another? I sense as a cultural critic this is really more about you positioning yourself in a contemporary scene, of which you are a dedicated member, than it is about art and its purpose. Or maybe that is all that art is in the West anymore.
(no subject)
Date: 2008-10-10 06:00 pm (UTC)Nicolas Bourriaud in Tank:
"SB: Why did you, as an art curator and critic, feel the need to
engage with globalisation and shifting identities?
NB: Because these mutations recalibrate how art is made and how we understand it. Art is an alternative editing table for reality and its major political task consists in showing how precarious our so-called “natural” context is. Art can convey doubts about the dominant social and cultural spheres we live in. It illuminates that there are always alternatives."
Do you see the difference between what you're saying and what Bourriaud is saying? You use the word "natural" to justify the eternal validity of mark-making as art's main activity. Bourriaud wants art to be "an editing table" which brings the apparent naturalness of certain social processes into question. You talk about the past, Bourriaud is interested in highlighting alternative ways of living, being and seeing which may be of use in constructing the future.
I'm personally excited by this "editing table" approach to art. I think the only criticism that might be leveled against it is that it's too ambitious, that it seeks to do lots of political and sociological work in the art world that would be better done in politics and sociology. But politics seems to lack vision just now, so I think art really has something to contribute here. (Liam Gillick's work is particularly interesting as an alternative politics.)
(no subject)
Date: 2008-10-10 06:33 pm (UTC)There has long been this struggle in art between naturalism and artifice, its just different ways of viewing the world. I don't believe there is any one right way of doing things. I like the plurality of approaches and visions. So why do you want to exclude painters from the party?
That said I like the sociological approach to art, and I would never be so dogmatic to suggest there is not good work being done in that vein. The attempt to wed art with the political remains utopian, unfortunately. We are slow in transcending our foolish power structures. But now that the castle is falling, perhaps we can play more in the ruins.
You would perhaps argue that painting (and the market system around it) are symptoms of empire. I see it more individualistically. Painting is a way of communicating with the environment, it is a form of zen. The collectors and curators pervert it, in their materialism ...
(no subject)
Date: 2008-10-10 07:31 pm (UTC)Oh, I didn't say that. Just that I think painting has a little more explaining to do when it comes to justifying the epithet "contemporary", precisely because it's got a longer history, and is seen as "timeless" and "natural".
The same problem afflicts painting that has recently been afflicting rock: that if you don't tear up the rulebook and start again, you condemn artists to always be measured against the masters of the past. They can rarely transcend them if they're playing by the same rules as they did. They condemn themselves to the status of runners-up.
That becomes clear when you read the comments under the Kalm video of the Peyton show: "most people/artists" says one commenter, "see no difference between a Holbien, Manet, Hockney and Peyton- when they should be able to describe those differences..." Painting's "timelessness" is a curse if every painter working today has to compete somehow with Holbein -- the product of a completely different world, the master of a completely different set of skills, and holding a completely different set of criteria about the definition of art. Yet this kind of comparison, and this kind of "failure", is the inevitable result of the conservative notion of painting's continuity -- the idea that it, in fact, "lives forever" as the dominant artistic medium.
(no subject)
Date: 2008-10-10 09:44 pm (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2008-10-10 10:13 pm (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2008-10-11 01:23 am (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2008-10-10 09:37 am (UTC)90% of sixteen year old girls could produce it, and do.
I hate the world sometimes, for handing people money for shit.
(no subject)
Date: 2008-10-10 02:51 pm (UTC)Usually a very good show, this one was awful but I was woken up when Scream asked Goldie if still painted. Goldie said he could knock out a canvas and that would be ten grand.
(no subject)
Date: 2008-10-10 08:02 pm (UTC)-r
(no subject)
Date: 2008-10-10 09:46 pm (UTC)You may want to check out emule though.
Whether they have english subs is another matter.
(no subject)
Date: 2008-10-10 09:41 pm (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2008-10-10 11:14 pm (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2008-10-10 11:45 pm (UTC)