July 2009

The New Museum's show "Younger Than Jesus," closing July 12, offends not so much for its air of faux-transgressive silliness, as captured in this Gawker post (hat tip AFC), as its patronizing premise: essentially that an institution run by old farts is going to tell us what the "younger generation" (artists born after 1976) "thinks." (Of the three curators, only one is younger than the exhibition's cut off age; all are serving at the pleasure of museum employees and backers older than Jesus [was when he died].)

This is Margaret Mead anthropology, or colonialism based on age. ("Our curators went into the colleges, the clubs, to find out what these krazy kids are up to.") The results are slightly zany but not too upsetting--almost a textbook example of what an old person would think a young person thinks like.

What if a trio of under-30 curators decided to focus on peers who wanted to "bring back painting and sculpture"? Or shock the system with racial epithets a la Lenny Bruce (or Rush Limbaugh)? We'll never know, because the museum inherently taints the subject matter with its own, aging perspectives based on the conceptual/performance tradition circa 1968, identity politics circa the mid'90s, and limousine liberal humanism.

Let's take one example: Guthrie Lonergan's curated selection of random people's MySpace intros. This piece was altered beyond recognition for "YTJ." Originally it appeared as a YouTube favorites list where "you kind of had to know about it" or maybe stumbled across it while clicking around YouTube. Its intelligence and melancholy perspective stood out from the morass of baby and cat videos and terrible musical gear demos.

In the New Museum the intros are plucked from their original banal context and made into a series of slick stand-alone videos, running on two monitors with no web trappings in sight. Seen as standard video art rather than something new in the Web 2.0 context, it is documentary/performance business as usual: a sexy or unsexy "other" talking confessionally into a video camera. There's even a wall label telling us about how these anonymous others are "constructing their identities."

This blog's hypothetical young artist would think the above was "not too rad."

As discussed in the previous posts, artist Philip Smith was excluded from the Metropolitan Museum of Art's "Pictures Generation" show even though he was one of a handful of artists in the original 1977 "Pictures" show curated by Douglas Crimp. Many people are upset by this but almost no one is taking the opportunity to talk about what the exclusion means in terms of defining what a "Pictures artist" is. Above, a Philip Smith in his typical style (the image of a subtly layered, predominately red painting has been brutally inverted and made grisaille to emphasize the drawing). Imagery such as this is anathema to what we think of as the "cool," mass media-conscious style of Sherrie Levine, Richard Prince, et al. Elements that might be considered corny, trite or unhip, in combination or not: DNA, quacking duck, acrobats, palmistry hand, bird, clock, cell mitosis.

Above, a Robert Longo enamel on cast aluminum work in the Met's "Pictures Generation" show. The image may also seem corny or trite, almost folksy in execution, but the hipness of the source is impeccable: a still from a Fassbinder movie reproduced in the Village Voice. Also, the single "iconic" image syncs more readily with the Pop ethos (which the Pictures artists are essentially a continuation of), as opposed to the allover, AbExpressive roots of Smith's cornucopia of imagery.

Much crying and rending of garments has resulted from artist Philip Smith's omission from the Metropolitan Museum of Art's "Pictures Generation" show. See Anaba and AFC for links to all the pro-Smith coverage. Many top critics excoriated Met curator Doug Eklund for excluding an artist who was part of the original "Pictures" show back in the '70s from his current survey. So far I haven't read anything like a statement that "Smith deviated so far from the 'Pictures' script in his subsequent work that he had to be excluded on doctrinal grounds"--it's all been a pity party for Smith and attacks on Eklund's selective scholarship. (I haven't read everything.)

Eklund's statement "I didn't respond to [Philip Smith's] work strongly enough to include it" sounds like a hedge. Surely something like this is closer to the truth: "The Pictures artists as we've come to understand them make tough and unsentimental work, but it's also very cool work that sits quietly on museum walls and in collector's homes (barring the occasional lapse such as Richard Prince's 'de Koonings'). For all the attention to building up paint layers in Smith's paintings, they are ultimately about his drawing, which is often 'uncool,' as in cartoony, New-Yorker-Magazine-wacky, occasionally cornball, and ultimately conventionally self-expressive. We can't have that in a show of Pictures artists, it totally blows the vibe of studied cool. It's not that I don't respond to it; I respond to it like hell; I want it out of my sight."

Smith's absence might do more to define what "Pictures" art is than the tendentious statements about individual works on the Met's website.

How "Pictures" art differs from mere Pop is question for another post.

Update: image comparison

...or nonsensical ones, or faint ones, written with the objective of supplying art with a purpose after the fact, from a web page documenting the Metropolitan Museum of Art's "Pictures Generation" exhibition:

In Big Camera, Small Camera, Simmons shows how deeply photography permeated the inner life of her generation and how from the 1950s forward we would all have images coursing through our veins.

Acting as art director, artist, and viewer, he imagined his purloined images as stills from a movie in his head. He developed a repertoire of strategies—blurring, cropping, enlarging, grouping—that revealed the hallucinatory strangeness, or "social science fiction," of his seemingly natural source material.

The artist's greatest coup came in 1984, when she was granted full access to the Connecticut home of twentieth-century collectors Mr. and Mrs. Burton Tremaine.

For his MFA thesis exhibition, Welling presented examples from his series Men, along with even more provisional-looking works that floated free from any particular medium—collage seems too potent for these enigmatic presentations of excised magazine pages—and put both artist and viewer in the strange position of being understood by the image rather than vice versa.

McMahon's pastels were greeted quizzically by Conceptual artists of the previous generation, who tried to expunge systematically all traces of recognizable imagery and discrete media from their work (pastel may be seen as one of the most elite and rarefied).

The works of both men hunt back the violence that permeates our society to its source in the play of a typical 1950s American childhood.

Mullican's unbounded archiving of the self is the result of his constant testing of the boundary between objective and subjective reality; for Mullican, images have equal weight in both those worlds.

In each picture, the artist foregrounds the elements of cinematic form—from gaze and camera angle to lighting, costume, and backdrop—that trigger the stock narratives and characters from which our identities are composed.

Despite their seeming simplicity, however, the artist was playing complex games with the way that images normally include or exclude segments of the audience, and bringing to the forefront the kinds of power plays that underlie all forms of communication.

Using the camera to question photography's cherished myths of documentary veracity and transparent objectivity, Casebere virtually invented the tradition of setup photography as it is practiced today by artists such as Thomas Demand and Vik Muniz.

The caption is only one of many expressions of a desire that treats the image with the mechanistic devotion appropriate to a fetish. The obsessive manipulations, alterations, applications of words are the materialization of a reverie. But because desire comes about only in the sphere of frustration, the image remains forever at a distance.