NEXT seems like a promising art fair.  I don’t know.  I saw it on Noah Becker’s facebook feed (he runs Whitehot Magazine; now that I’ve written that, maybe I will get introduced to Ana Finel Honigman please, thank you).  Two people had already clicked “like”.  Sounds good.  It’s in Chicago.  In all seriousness, what might be interesting to selfportrait members, seeing as there are a fair number of you located outside the major centers of art, is that in their open invitation for project submissions they “will look especially favorably on submissions from under-represented areas in the U.S. and abroad.” So, don’t be from Guangzhou.

http://www.nextartfair.com/show-information/2010-open-invitation/

Slide show from last year’s NEXT:

Iconoclasm is a fascinating, often depressing, sometimes quite entertaining, and seemingly omnipresent phenomenon in the history of art. There are countless examples of it.  And though most intentional “image-breaking” has probably occurred either in the name religion and religious reformation, or as a necessity in the case of bronze sculptures being melted down for the purposes of warfare (to which the paucity of existing ancient Greek sculpture is attributed), the particular form of (mostly) modern iconoclasm in which art is destroyed with some kind of artistic intention, is the most interesting to me.  Within that category, numerous strategies have been taken, from institutional critique, to appropriation, to forgery, to vandalism.  One of the most famous stories is of art dealer Tony Shafrazi’s 1974 spray-painting of Picasso’s Guernica at the MoMA in New York.  “KILL LIES ALL,” he scrawled, with the purported intention of retrieving the work from the cobwebs of the museum-as-mausoleum, and bringing it up to date.  The artistic avant-garde has frequently used iconoclasm as a strategy to demand a radical break from the past — it was the Italian Futurists who proposed the demolishing of Italy’s museums and libraries, and Malevich who implored that we ‘let all periods burn, as one dead body.’

There is a subcategory of artistically motivated iconoclasm, which is ironically not typically the destruction, but the use or reintegration of readymades.

Let’s look at Marcel Duchamp’s Fountain, perhaps the most pivotal work in the trajectory of modern art, akin in a certain sense to Einstein’s Theory of Relativity or Leibniz’s calculus.  Certainly it was easier to conceive and execute than those examples, and perhaps the stakes of modern art are lower than the stakes of cosmic reality (perhaps not…), but its influence was game changing in the same ontological way.

Artists who have urinated in/on Duchamp’s Fountain:

Note: There are eight copies of Fountain.  I don’t know to which ones these recorded acts happened.

• Pierre Pinoncelli – 1993 – Dada show at the Centre Pompidou (in 2006, Pinocelli also attacked with a hammer and slightly chipped Fountain, while on display in Nimes)

• Bjorn Kjelltoft – 1999 – Moderna Museet in Stockholm

• Yuan Chai and Jian Jun Xi – 2000 – Tate Modern in London (the artists were prevented from urinating into Fountain directly by its Perspex case;  the artist duo had also frolicked in Tracy Emin’s Unmade Bed the year before)

Any others?  Obviously, certain artists have taken into question the limits and teleology of readymades.  Readymades strafe around the traditional notions of artist as producer, and so at what point does it become fair game to directly engage these objects in order to transfigure the gesture once more?  These artists have all stated that Duchamp would have approved of their additions to the work.

Similarly, when, in 1994, Mark Bridger spilled black ink into Damien Hirst’s Away From The Flock at Serptenine Gallery in London, he claimed to have hoped that Hirst would accept his gesture as a form of dialogue.  The observation has been made that since Hirst’s work often possesses parasitic qualities, this adds to the justifiability of Bridger’s addition; readymades, in comparison, could be argued as even more parasitic than some of Hirst’s work — should this logic actually encourage their re-appropriation, as in the case of urinating into an appropriated urinal?

Many would say absolutely not and are appalled by people like Pinoncelli, and while it is true that the irrevocable demolition of an object that is a historical artifact is usually going to be a negative thing, under circumstances of thoughtfulness and a nuanced understanding of what works might be most interesting and not just affective as broken objects, I consider these acts daring at the least, and, at the most … democratic in the antagonistic sense that the debate over relational aesthetics in the last fifteen years has revolved around (a la Guattari, Deleuze, Laca, Mouffe, and others).  Daniel Birnbaum, in an essay for Frieze magazine (June-August 1997), discusses the distinctions that have been made among artists between the metaphorical proposition of a work’s destruction and the actual execution. Birnbaum gives the examples of Duchamp’s Green Box (1934) (the positively fascinating collection of notes by Duchamp chronicling the creative process behind The Bride Stripped Bare By Her Bachelors, Even (The Large Glass) (1923)), in which he talked of using ‘a Rembrandt as an ironing board,’ and Antonia Saura, who dreamed of knifing the vaginas in Guernica.  Perhaps the discussion of the desire to destroy a work can be an equally potent gesture intellectually speaking, but it does not physically write history as Shafrazi did.  As a clever and old fox twist, Shafrazi Gallery in New York hosted an excellent exhibition in 2008, conceived by Gavin Brown and Urs Fischer, called Who’s Afraid of Jasper Johns?, in which the works were hung over and in relation to wallpaper reproductions of other works that had previously displayed at the gallery, or that served as influences.

Picasso was the very same one who said in 1954, “For me, an image is the sum of its destructions.”  An intriguing implication of this statement – although I am willfully misreading Picasso’s words in this case – is that it intersects with what Dario Gamboni writes in The Destruction of Art: Iconoclasm and Vandalism (1997), which is that an act of iconoclasm, even when performed by a non-artist, perhaps motivated by religion, politics, feminism, or pathology, always has artistic meaning, even if unconscious.  This is interesting with regard to readymades, since they are often objects originally intended for non-artistic use.  Suddenly, using Gamboni’s logic, all use of objects, even in the most quotidien way, is in some sense art, and all destruction somehow iconoclasm.

One of the more recent developments in what is by now the very broadly defined iconoclasm, is that, in the thoroughly post-modern era (assuming the usefulness of such a designation for a moment) of at least the last fifty years or so, institutional critique of all stripes has become increasingly institutionalized; provocation, as Birnbaum puts it, is expected in the modern house of worship.  Ideas vary about the potency of most contemporary art that aims to provoke; activism is surely still alive, and the borders between art and other communication media have been corroding perhaps since those borders were first consciously erected when “high art” was invented, but much contemporary art that talks to other contemporary art seems sportive. A sport. ” Guaranteed sanity,” as Louise Bourgeoise defines art.  So, when Russian artist Alexandr Brener goes to the Stedelijk Museum and sprays a green dollar sign over Malevich’s White Cross on Gray (1927), I find the gesture refreshingly dangerous.  I’ll save the rant about the hyper-abundance of art images today that casts a pall on all traditional image and object making’s.  I will say, though, that a truly radical art critic would be one who would, if she felt it necessary, destroy or physically alter a work in the name of art.  It might follow from that logic that curators, too, should play a more antagonistic role in the exhibiting of art and the shaping of artistic practice and reception.  It seems appropriate to return to Duchamp, as we often find ourselves doing, for it was he who taught the great Walter Hopps the “cardinal curatorial rule: in the organization of exhibitions, the work must not stand in the way.”

Alexandr Brener's vandalism/critique on capitalism, over Malevich

a reproduction of Pinoncelli's defiling of the French state's copy Fountain

Mark Bridger's addition or ruination of Damien Hirst's Away From The Flock

Lazlo Toth being carried away after attacking Michelangelo's Pieta, and claiming that he was Jesus Christ, at the Vatican

Felix Gmelin's re-painting of Picasso's Guernica after Shafrazi's intervention; part of a series where he further modified vandalized images

Marcel Duchamp's Green Box contents displayed

Martijn Hendriks - xxxxx In The Expanded Field, a redacted version of Rosalind Krauss' key text, with all references to 'art' removed

Martijn Hendrik's Healed Britney, part of a series in which he "healed" images of celebrities that had been defiled in public spaces

Wall view of Who's Afraid of Jasper Johns (2008) at Shafrazi Gallery

Here are some photos of the work on display.  Visitors are welcome to view the exhibition, view the rest of our inventory of artists, read from our library of post-Marxist .pdfs, auction catalogs, and monographs, and have an espresso,  between 10 AM and 6 PM, Monday through Friday.  Feel free to ask any questions at info@selfportrait.net

“Koons realises, far more than Deitch, that the development of third nature radically transforms the practice of art. Its separation from other communication media is an artifact of class snobbery and little else.”

-Mckenzie Wark – Post Human? All Too Human

In today’s New York Times, Roberta Smith gives a double review of Anselm Reyle at Gagosian Gallery in Chelsea, and Bernadette Corporation’s show at Greene Naftali.  As she sees it, the shows define the two extremes of a “fuzzy dichotomy” that appears to exist in contemporary art (at least in Manhattan), essentially between shiny stuff, and cerebral stuff.  Sometimes, of course, the shiny stuff can have intellectual gravitas, and the ostensibly cerebral stuff can actually be slick and condescending.  I usually find myself in discipular agreement with Roberta Smith, but she is too forgiving with both of these offerings.  Of Bernadette Corporation I can’t say much as I haven’t seen the show, but it seems one could look much further (away from fashion!) afield into the array of contemporary art practice to find that which is truly of the no-money-thanks intellectual ilk.  Bernadette Corporation’s work may be mysterious, antagonistic, and unique, but it is also featured in Purple Magazine.

Reyle’s work at Gagosian represents an entrenched formalism (still globally popular in artmaking and art collecting) that has not left Modernism, and that unfortunately believes resolutely in a restricted mode of image and object making that looks dated.  It is the kind of work, that Claes Oldenberg would likely say, “sits on its ass in a museum.”  Now, Reyle apparently embraces criticisms that his work aims for light entertainment.  Smith notes, not dissmively but matter-of-factly, that his product amounts mostly to “exceptional high-end lobby art,” and does not dissapoint in that regard.  But read the following description of a — get this — untitled work of Reyle’s from the Saatchi website:

“Reyle reclaims the cliché and the kitsch to create his own brand of ‘authenticity’, meeting the shifting aspects lifestyle and art industry demands. Untitled reworks Brancusi’s Africanism, creating an exotic ‘primitivism’ in space age funkadelic purple.”

-anonymous Saatchi she-goat sieve holder

My current view, which many I have spoken to find unpalatable and depressing, is that gleaming, superficial, highly expensive to produce work, needs to justify its continued production with some thoughtful, powerful, and updated theory.  Tom Wolfe, in The Painted Word (1975), criticized not just the avant-garde, Warhol, deKooning, Pollock, Newman, et al. but the art critical triumverate of Greenberg, Steinberg, and Rosenberg, for having transformed art from a visual experience into the manifestation of theory, writ (usually) large on a gallery wall.  Why haven’t the myriad ingenius critics and theorists since them had the power to diss work like this out of the mainstream?  It’s not that it smacks on Reyle or Gagosian’s part of pandering to sources of what Smith astutely calls “lucre” — which William Tynsdale translated as “filthy profit”, from aishkron kerdos in his version of the Bible — its that work like this further sends the nearly empty word ‘art’ down the gyre of impotence in the face of image, object, and idea making that popular culture (not just creative popular culture, but politics, science, journalism, hobby, and business) generates with astonishing consistency.

“The body is obsolete.  I fight against God and DNA!” – Orlan

In this morning’s mail I received notice of two shows, sk-interfaces at Casino Luxembourg: forum d’art contemporaine (via e-flux), and ORLAN at the abbaye de Maubisson (via Art-Agenda), the press releases for which reminded me very much of one show in my exhibition-historical (thanks Hans Ulrich Obrist) vocabulary: Post Human (1992), Jeffrey Deitch’s most ambitious curatorial endeavor  (Here is the catalog essay by Jeffrey Deitch himself, for that exhibition).  The presmise for sk-interfaces is as follows: “Skin is our natural “interface” with the world – more and more, however, technological extensions are taking over its role; “interfaces” create both new freedoms and new constraints”. Without having seen the show yet, I know that the territory has been explored in artistic practice and interpreted curatorially, but the concept is not old hat: the imagery and tropes connected to transplantation, genetics, prosthesis, cosmetic surgery,  and, above all, morphing senses of self-perception are informed today by a wealth of realities that have, in general, matured artistic practices engaging the question of what it means to be human.  In 1992, gender issues, the subaltern, and cyberculture seem to have dominated the discourse surrounding the aforementioned area of artistic practice; today, those issues are to a degree in a benign state, and the discourse leans heavily towards genetics, environmentalism, futurism, biogerontology, and re-examinations of the sweep of human history.

The state of “post humanism” Deitch refers to is inexorably bound to technology, but he traces art’s representation of evolving notions of self-perception as far back as Hans Holbein the Younger’s portrait of Erasmus, a progenitor to the genre of modern portraiture (concomitant with an emerging heightened awareness of self in the Renaissance), through Modernism and the influence of Freudian psychoanalysis, Dadaism, Pop Art, the 1970s “me” generation, and into the chaotic present state of post-historical, post humanism:

Deitch continues his illustration of the succession of self-perception with the following:

Houdon's bust of Diderot (1771)

Gericault - Portrait of a Kleptomaniac (1819)

Edvard Munch - The Dead Mother (1899-1900)

Picasso - Portrait of Ambroise Vollard (1910)

Oskar Kokoschka - Selbstbildnis (1917)

Andy Warhol - Self Portrait (1966)

Jeff Koons - Ilona on Top (1990)

Kiki Smith - Untitled (1990)

Yasumasa Morimura - Daughter of Art History (1990)

(1990)”]

Robert Gober - Untitled [Leg

Charles Ray - Fall (1992)

Orlan - still from Nine Surgery Performance (1993)

Stelarc's Third Hand

Clegg and Guttmann - Matrimonial Portrait (1986)

To Be Continued Tomorrow…

Recommended Reading:

Suspending Life – SEED Magazine – 2008

The Aesthetics and Rhetoric of the Technological Arts Interface Machines

Post Human? All Too Human – McKenzie Wark

This weekend I read A Brief History of Time (1988), by Stephen Hawking.  Without fail, any time I read lucid, non-specialist writing about cosmology or theoretical physics, I am temporarily struck by the same feeling: most art looks pale, and the pursuit of knowing art seems merely sportive.  Although I spend a lot of time pursuing what I hope will one day be a fluent knowledge of art and art history, the feeling, while it lasts, isn’t depressing;  “istigkeit”, the 12th century German theologian Meister Eckhart might have called it: neither agreeable nor disagreeable – just is.

The same day I came across a passage from Aldous Huxley’s 1954 book The Doors of Perception, in which he describes a somewhat similar feeling about art in the face of the cosmos.  I am interested to know what you readers think.

“I strongly suspect that most of the great knowers of Suchness paid very little attention to art…. (To a person whose transfigured and transfiguring mind can see the All in every this, the first-rateness or tenth-rateness of even a religious painting will be a matter of the most sovereign indifference.) Art, I suppose, is only for beginners, or else for those resolute dead-enders, who have made up their minds to be content with the ersatz of Suchness, with symbols rather than with what they signify, with the elegantly composed recipe in lieu of actual dinner.” — Aldous Huxley

Since this is a visual art site, it seems appropriate to add this image of Carl Sagan and Frank Drake’s ‘artwork’, the Pioneer Plaque, an image intended to represent all of humanity and human knowledge to other forms of sentient life, placed aboard the Pioneer 10 spacecraft in 1972.

The Opening Reception for “Mapping the Body: New Forms and Perspectives on the Human Figure,” will take place on Monday, September 14^th from 8-11 pm, at 37 West 28^th Street, 3^rd Floor, directly following the N:F:P Spring 2010 fashion show across the street at NYCAMS Gallery directly across the street (44 West 28^th Street, 7^th Floor from 6:30-8pm).

As the first show in a series of art exhibitions entitled Aesthetic Encounters, N:F:P has asked curator Selby Drummond to respond to the designer Gail Travis and the launch of her Body Mapping knitwear collection by assembling a group show exploring perspectives and reflections on the human body.

Selby Drummond has created, as a counterpoint to Travis’s work-which emphasizes self expression, change and connectivity through an elaborate and calculated process of defining and “mapping” the body-a collection of contemporary works in a variety of media which explore the figure, its limits, representations, forms and energies through strategies of reduction, abstraction, composites and light indexing. Through a study both of the literal presence of the form in space and the effect achieved by endowing inanimate forms with personalities and anthropomorphic gestures, the work comprises a spectrum between romantic homage to the purity of the nude and radical departures from figuration. Work which explicitly engages the body is juxtaposed with work which does not directly invoke the human figure, but teases us to draw parallels between materiality, form, energy and weight. The compilation, therefore, tests our addiction to the body’s legacies in imagery, upholding the charge that even abstract work contains (or inspires) vestiges of man’s subconscious desire to commune with art through a common language of anthropomorphism and psychic elevation. Featuring the work of artists Bill Durgin, Venske Spanle, Yeni Mao, Victoria Haven, Eric Shaw, Marty St. James, Olivia Malone, Chris McDonald, Matthew Callinan, and John Silvis, among others, this show seeks to survey the variety of contemporary methods of interrogating the self in art, and its psychic and literal proliferations in man-made objects and images.