Nina Power: Do you think art has become indeterminate as well?

Sylvère Lotringer: Absolutely. This has little to do with individual works – whether good or bad – only with the dizzying change of scale, the massive production, circulation and consumption world-wide. The art market has expanded exponentially and has been losing its shape to achieve monstrous proportions. It is occupying all the space, wildly metastasizing in every possible direction. It is so bloated at the core that it doesn’t seem able anymore to digest all the data. It is on its way to surpass its function. The early 1980s orchestrated the return to painting, and gave the art market a chance to fasten its hold. But it didn’t stop there and it didn’t take long before art started outgrowing its own boundaries, opening itself up to the exchangeability of capital. First it absorbed photography, until then considered unworthy; then it move to architecture, fashion and design. Along the way, it has integrated ‘outsider art’, abolishing its own internal limit, and put together ubiquitous ‘installations’ liable to be pitched anywhere and provide a fast pedigree for ‘rogue nations’. Today it is difficult to imagine anything that could be excluded from art. Its field has expanded exponentially to include the entire society. Along the way, it has grabbed anything that could be used for its own purpose, recycling garbage, forging communities, investigating political issues and perfumes, tampering with biology, etc., simultaneously appearing and disappearing with an ambiguous promiscuity. Art has finally fulfilled the program of Dada with a vengeance, embedding art into life. The only thing left for art to do is ‘auto-dissolve.’ Most avant-gardes promised too much and never delivered. Their manifestos of ‘auto-dissolution’, on the contrary, revealed them at their most radical and paroxysmal moment. This moment has come to contemporary art, and it may even spare itself the trouble of publicizing its own exit. Forget art then. Unless it is capable of bringing us up to the next paradigmatic shift, as Andy Warhol once did, forgetting about its own name and past history. Artists themselves maybe have been showing the way by venturing so far astray from home. All it would take is to cut off the umbilical cord that still ties art to the market, or rather turn it into a rich rhizome. Some art groups are already working at it. Autonomists used to say, ‘The margins at the centre’. We haven’t yet given art a chance to grow autonomously.

from “Intelligence Agency” in Frieze, Issue 125, Sep 2009

Lucas Samaras, Mirrored Room, 1966

Human!  Your entire existence takes place in a matrixial hallucination composed of binary data and pre-written loops!

Yin Xiuzhen

More advanced lifeforms from across the Oort Cloud exist in more elaborate dimensions, and your efforts to contact us have been in vain.  Your teeming metropolises are ersatz desnsities of digital matter.  Here… (alien produces a city from its suitcase)

James Turrell - Bridget's Bardot - 2009 - Kunstmuseum Wolfsburg

Actually, I lie, you are actually inside Bridget Bardot’s vagine.

Anthony Gormley, Human Forms

Idiot human. I blast you with my lazer gun.   PEW PEW!!

In his patafictive film F For Fake (1974), Orson Welles ruminates that of all the monuments to where we as humans have been and what we have sought out from existence, perhaps the cathedral at Chartres would be the most appropriate.

Well, while it may not provide the wealth of information about where we have been, whenever I look at the weathered granite runeforms of Tim Hawkinson’s Bear (2005), I picture it also as a potent testament.  I suppose it is more precise to say that I feel this way about the ruin form of the teddybear, to the idea of a monument to the desire for tenderness that must be at the root of so much human drama, and which to me would fit right beside the ancient Hindu excavations that scatter Hampi, India.

Tim Hawksinon, Bear, 2005

Hampi, India

Though it may be impossible for me to describe its mechanism to you,
at least I can say that I slowly forced myself to consider that
wretched life as a deliberate necessity. Never did I seek to make of
it something other than what it was, I did not try to adorn it, to
mask it, but, on the contrary, I wanted to affirm it in its exact
sordidness, and the most sordid signs became for me signs of grandeur.

And what is an authentic madman? It is a man who preferred to become
mad, in the socially accepted sense of the word, rather than forfeit a
certain superior idea of human honor. So society has strangled in its
asylums all those it wanted to get rid of or protect itself from,
because they refused to become its accomplices in certain great
nastinesses. For a madman is also a man whom society did not want to
hear and whom it wanted to prevent from uttering certain intolerable
truths.

-Antonin Artaud in “Van Gogh, the Man Suicided by Society”, 1947

Ours is the culture which burns heretics. The stake is one of the most characteristic emblems of this European culture. The reason is that all religious and social points of view have an inherent need to regard themselves as final and eternally valid, and all who deviate from them after having learned to know them must be regarded as traitors—not as misguided, but as traitors who consciously desire evil. Who desire to insult the state and mock God.

At the entrance to the culture which we call “our own” stand two heresy trials of spiritually gigantic format: The one in Athens and the other in Jerusalem, the trials of Socrates and Jesus, both convicted of blasphemy and threats to the State. These two great judicial murders stand as the gateway to our cultural epoch, and as omens of what would come to characterize it: the individual’s fight against the past. The battle between the individual and the mass. This conflict is the central thing, the very nerve in our culture.

- Jens Bjorneboje in “The Good Pupil”

After seeing the Jonas Akerlund-directed “trailer” for Francesco Vezzoli’s orchestration of the MOCA 30th anniversary gala, entitled Ballet Russes Italian Style (The Shortest Musical You Will Never See Again), featuring the Ballet Russes and Lady Gaga, she instantly became more appealing to me; jaundiced and inobservant had been my eye in not considering the obvious contextualization of her work in the performative tradition of acts like Marlena Dietrich, Klaus Nomi, the Kipper Kids, Sasha Fierce, even Ali G.  It’s also rather timely that I am reading essayist David Shields’ recent “manifesto”, Reality Hunger, which attempts to codify the migration of fiction into real life, and that tonight at the New Museum there is a lecture on the parafictional work Headless by artist duo Senneby + Goldin.  Yet my new contextual reading of Lady Gaga was almost immediately overshadowed by the most fascinating internet meme in recent memory, South African hip-hop group Die Antwoord, who not only developed a global fanbase within days of their website’s launch, but will likely drop the jaws of cultural critics interested in issues of otherness, globalization, and parafiction.  There is no doubt, this is some of the most interesting performance art, understood in the sense of advanced popular culture, possible.

Emilio Chapela Perez

Marcin Maciejowski

Ignacio Uriarte

Alex Villar

Jorge Macchi

Anna Jermolaewa

Bernard Boutet de Monvel

Tina Barney

Brian Kuan Wood

Yann Serandour

Wade Guyton

Trevor Paglen

Reed Seifer

Thomas Demand

Terry Rodgers

Pawel Althamer

Conrad Shawcross

Eric Tabuchi

Marcel Duchamp and John Cage

Ola Rindal

SAMANTHA FIELDS
FROM A SAFE DISTANCE
MARCH 2-7, 2010
RECEPTION MONDAY, MARCH 1, 6-9 PM
300 EAST 57th ST, #14F, NY 10022

CURATED BY CECELIA STUCKER

Download a .pdf of the press release

Press related to the artist:

Samantha Fields in Artweek

Samantha Fields