contemporary monkey

Felix Gonzales Torres, "Untitled", aka flaccid light bulb thingy

“In 1992, he commenced a series of strands of low-watt white lightbulbs, which he strung along walls or vertically, from ceilings.  Alluding to purity, spirituality, and enlightenment, these delicate and flaccid garlands, which willfully surrender to the forces of gravity, are also a campy commentary on the phallic underpinnings of numerous Minimalist creations, particularly Dan Flavins’ rigid light sculptures.”

Um, OK…get much sleep last night?

If you want to get to know the inner workings of someone, the part that allows you to walk in their shoes,  take them to a museum and make them stare at the most inexplicable art piece on the property.

Dan Flavin's electric rods of...sensual-ness-ity-ish?

It’s a difficult job, art analysis.  It’s what binds the middle-men of writers, critics, PR hacks, gallery marketing assistants, museum curators, and most confused art insiders charged with the Herculean effort of decanting contemporary art.  In the end, nearly all share the same results: irrelevance, confusion, disorientation, muddiness, bewilderment  If nothing else, they’re a consistent lot.

I think the quote above was written by someone aching to forget last night’s experience of one-too-many rigid phallic “sculptures”?  Placing the comment back in context - if that’s still possible, because, well, we’re all now thinking about rigid light sculptures - it originates from the Guggenheim Museums’ web site identifying an installation from the works of Felix Gonzales-Torres called Untitled (Arena), 1993.  Gonzales-Torres was considered a pioneer for what was “the next ism” in the 1990s: Relational Aesthetics.  Relational, in that you and a community of people like you as viewers, are creators of the artwork, along with the artist.  In Untitled (Arena), 1993, it works like this: there you are, with a friend that you dragged along to the museum, and who probably didn’t really want to be there in the first place.  Instructions are given for you and your new partner to dance within the confines of the “flaccid garland” of low-wattage light bulbs.  At the time the Guggenheim show took place, in 1993, a walkman was available with dual headphones so the two of you could keep time without looking like goofy white people.

Anyway, that’s Relational Aesthetics, and the point made by Gonzales-Torres was to participate.  His art has absolutely nothing to do with comparing it to a previous, minimalist artist whose chosen medium was fluorescent light tubing.  I know, I know, contemporary art is personal, so maybe someone does see a relation to another artist, and can visualise the comparison of rigid v. flaccid.  But doesn’t that make the Guggenheim complicit in adding more smoke into the fog bank of contemporary art?

On the other hand, it’s OK for you and I to take a guess at meaning, because we’re not art professionals.  According to the Relational Aesthetics people, we’re artists, and we add meaning to objects.  Any creation found in a MOMA, SFMOMA, COMA or even OKLAHOMA was set forth by the artists’ hand, but now it’s our turn.  We don’t need a referee from the Guggenheim to witness the man hug of artist to artist.  It’s our turn to attach some twisted, shape-shifting, amorphous meaning to the still-oozing object/painting/creature we see before us, and hopefully we don’t embarrass ourselves on verbalization.  If the artwork that is currently furrowing your brow says to you, “Ah, clearly  a canonical correlation via plasticity between the Manson family and Paris Hilton,” well that’s fine by me.  It’s probably a passive aggressive tendency with a side order of Reaction Formation, but good for you.  Whoa, look at the time, let’s pick this up next week.  That’ll be £100 Bubba.  Please pay the museum guard on your way out.

As an artist - as a hungry, wanting, miserable-existing, low-rent-living, desperately seeking appreciation artist - wouldn’t you want to have maximum exposure so that any one of us buyers and lovers of art might catch on that you, well, exist?  More philosophically, if you have a showing of your work, and it lasts only one day, do you, or the art itself, really exist?

In the November issue of Art Forum (the leading industry publication, but really the advertising brochure for the art gallery world), we find ourselves an artist committed to producing multiple pieces, only to show them for one, single, here today, gone tomorrow, 24 hour period.  This mysterious exhibit, called Dia de Frutas y Nubes Negras (Day of Fruits and Black Clouds) showed (past tense) a series of empty wooden crates devised by Gabriel Sierra, hanging about the whole of the otherwise empty art space.  His inspiration for the empty crates are taken from a broader idea, the success of which is not worth debating, mostly because nobody saw them.  It is, however, worth pointing out, and reflecting upon, and possibly even to remedy the situation for, the myriad and colourful ways contemporary artists seem to find for lodging bullet firmly in foot.

Gabriel Sierra: Artist for a Day

What’s more, for our intrepid artist above, the one day opening wasn’t enough of a operational hurdle.  The show was held in an area between the centre of Bogata, Columbia and a nearby slum.  For all of us clairvoyant enough to be there on this day of magic, the signage on the outside of the artist-run studio was nearly non-existent (hmmm,  “artist run” you say, perhaps a hint for what went wrong).  Above the art space doorway was one of the artist’s pieces signaling to all passers-by for what lay inside; like a flag for the secret tribe of the world’s least ambitious carpenters.  This was art determined to be ignored.

But let us not cast stones in the house of glass.  Perhaps our artist friend could do with aid from my favourite subject,  “Mathematics for Artists”.  For this second chapter, I thought to help the poor lad out with a bit of logical instruction, in the hopes that other artists might learn from a brethren’s mistake.

KEY TO GRAPH

P = Population. Think of this number as people, animals, even plants that might want to see your show.  You want this number to be a large one.

T = Time. This is a number working against you.  Against all of us actually. This number will always increase, and rarely, if ever,  go backwards (even in the artist world).

The horizontal line has two important points: “o” for open, and “c” for close.  The distance between the two is the duration of your show.  If measured in days, you want this to be a big number; certainly bigger than one, as exemplified by our dauntless friend above.

The vertical axis has two points as well.  The lower one, “n” = nobody. This “n” happens to everyone, even a Jeff Koons or a Damien Hirst.  There has to be a nobody before the show opens; otherwise, it wouldn’t need opening.  The second point, “m” correlates with your new goal, and represents the multitude, or mob, if you like.  As time moves forward, your goal is to get more people to see your work.  That’s why you do, what you do.  This unpleasant, but indispensable “strategy” will greatly benefit your future, and help us out as well.

The third point on the horizontal axis, “r” represents the point in time that critical reviews are published in art magazines.  Reviews have nothing to do with adding more people to your visitor list.  In fact, nearly all reviews surface in the public pool of influence after shows have been closed.  Nobody knows why this is, but keep in mind that it doesn’t matter.  Critical reviews are to the artist, what a spatula is to an athlete: completely useless.

Commit this graphical image to memory and your success is nearly guaranteed.  All you have to do is produce original, thought-provoking art (a mathematical lesson for a later time).

James Turrell; probably somewhere not very near you

Just how far would an artist go to alienate his followers, to the point of eliminating even the mildest of interest in the work?  I can guess your first response.  I’m discounting the witless wonders who produce harebrained art while claiming canonical importance, when nearly every left and right brain thinker (not including the sycophants of course) will disagree loudly.  They get more attention than deserve.  Take any old example, say, The Turner Prize, which consistently awards finalist-status to some or other oddball in the hopes of gathering steam for said oddball, along with oddball prize.  That’s far too many ears and eyes paying attention in my view.

I’m talking about an artist, followed by a knowing bunch of art-heads, deliberately making it arduous for anyone, let alone a handful of hangers on, to even find the produced artwork.  John Baldessari once burned all of his studio’s work in the 1970’s.  That’s the kind of oblivion-seeking I’m talking about; a real deal ender.  Unfortunately, Baldessari spent the following 20-30 years building up another oeuvre, kind of defeating the purpose really.  I don’t think his heart was really in this conceptual, guess-where-my-stuff-is-now, business.

Through the September issue of Art Review, I may have found the next Catch Me If You Can personality that really knows how to shake off the scent.  The artist is James Turrell, and his mission, for the past 30 years, has been to build a naked-eye observatory in an extinct volcano - that he bought - in the Arizona desert.  He’s nearly finished - it opens to the public in 2011.  Imagine how many fans he must have had over the years before they sort of forgot about him, or worse, died.  Should you ask that much from your support team, to wait out death?  Donald Judd worked not too far away (in distance and loneliness) but at least Judd surfaced every once in a while, and crated his work to a museum or ten.

The good news is Turrell just opened another project, so for those who can’t wait another two years (you should be ashamed of yourself - you’re nearly there!) you’ll be able to witness the wonders of Turrell in relative real time.  This project is named The James Turrell Museum, of course, and was built by one of Turrell’s long suffering fans in California.  A wine maker, by the name of Donald Hess, who no doubt has 30-year old wine stored somewhere in honour of the (potentially) Grand Opening Weekend and Beard Trimming, has been “collecting” Turrells since the 1960s.  Collecting in this case is a big stack of books with directions on assembling the final design, which in this case is exactly none.  Apparently, Hess never got around to any of it.  I guess the name Turrell is an antithesis to the word “exhibition”.  As in, my agent promised me this wicked solo gallery show in Chelsea, but this credit crunch really Turrelled me.

Inside the building, the works are more ocular science and 1970’s grooviness than art.  The rooms are psychedelically lit with various colours of light, both natural and manufactured.  Walking through each colour chamber requires your greatest, age-old hippie tricks to appreciate the strange sensation.  Art Review describes the space as “pre-history” , which nobody really understands, but from the sounds of it, has the making of being inside a Hopi Indian smoke tent with charged-up iPods of Yes or Pink Floyd or Flotation Toy Warning if you’re really current, floating through your ears.  The whole thing strikes me as belonging to a bucket list for burned out, space travelers from the 1960’s, but it’s not art.  Unless you count the drugs and music and Hopi Indian smoke tent along with it.  No, this is just a friendly reminder of a trip from the good old days.  Hey, come to think of it, this project would have been really really useful about 30 years ago!!

Still, it would be good to get an eyeful of the whole thing, except for one essential fact: it’s in Argentina.  Seventeen hours by car from Buenos Aires, 20 from Santiago, Chile.  Assuming you make the trip, what if you get there and it’s closed?  How do you explain that to your travel insurance company?

I don’t quite understand the idea of trompe l’oeil, the french phrase for fooling the eye.  Other than the obvious: to prove you can make something so good it fools others into thinking art is reality, it seems to be more science than art.  To be accomplished at it is to be technically skilled, and enormously patient at your special ability.  But that also describes people who make Ferraris.  You’re proving your own virtuosity. Although you could be having a laugh at fooling other people.  Like the roadrunner and coyote in Warner Brothers animation, where the coyote paints a tunnel on a solid face, only for the roadrunner to make the trick a reality.

This week I made my way to see this sort of thing firsthand in Sheffield.  I’ve never been to Sheffield before, itself a trompe l’oeil of English pastures from the Victorian era.  The show was called “Out of the Ordinary” at Sheffield’s Millennium Gallery, and focused on craft usage in contemporary times.  Among the handful of artist was a Japanese person called Yoshihiro Suda.  The short biography of him is, “He creates hyper-realistic flowers and weeds from wood.”  I get the irony, but isn’t that like carving the perfect pebble from a rock.  Or to use the Ferrari analogy, making a car out of a new refrigerator.  His flower “sculpture” was protected by walls and a security rope where you couldn’t get any closer than about 12 feet.  I was beginning to doubt the quality.  How good can it be if I’m standing across the room to look at it?

Yoshihiro Suda

Trompe l’oeil comes up in the Autumn issue of Tate Etc. magazine as well, where a section of the magazine is devoted to the history of fooling the eye, back to the early 15th century.  Back then the point was to make it as realistic as possible because until then, I guess, nobody did it.  The article continues to 20th century artists like Rene Magritte, Duane Hanson, Andy Warhol.  I remember seeing my first Duane Hanson “statue” of an overweight tourist.  It was more creepy than sublime, but nonetheless it made me flinch, which is what good quality art is supposed to do.  Let’s add that to the list of results from trompe l’oeil: in addition to be impressive by way of its craft quality, it can creep you out too.

In the same article is a reference to a work at the Venice Biennale: a mural by Thomas Demand called “Clearing”.  It’s a very large photograph of the very thing it’s supposed to hide: the forest behind it.  This one goes one loop further though; it’s a photograph, of a sculptural stage, of a photograph of trees.  A long way to go, right?  The sculpture is made from 280,000 separate pieces of coloured paper, constructed by 30 people working for three months.  That IS a long way to go.  Apparently not only do you need the technical mastery to do these things, you have to have a lot of friends, or a lot of money.

Thomas Demand: Clearing

Discoveries this week are this: trompe l’oeil requires loads of patience, technical ability, friends, money and a sense of humour.  All this work to prove one thing: you can do something better than anyone else.  Just like making a Ferrari.

(Don't worry, I wouldn't call this art either)

Attention all artists: stop the inconsequential discussion with yourselves in the secluded and singular vacuum World Of One.  The reason nobody understands what you’re doing is very simple to explain: your work doesn’t mean anything to anyone but you.  This is not public art.  It’s not even contextual art.  It’s Art for One.  I hope you liked it, because the rest of us passed it right by.

In the June/July issue of Art World, Anna Barriball describes her recent time-based project in this way: “I like using things that have fallen between the cracks in some way, making the invisible visible.”  What’s she’s talking about is a series of text-based posters she’s made for the London Underground that use very short and featureless phrases in place of visuals.  One of the text reads, “on way to birthday party”.  Another: “I think I’m being watched”.

I remember seeing the latter not too long ago.  Those that use the London Underground will probably agree with me that the first thing on anyone’s mind while using the underground is, where’s the exit.  I’m usually placing full concentration on avoiding the push and pull of the stinking masses, while stepping over their left-behind detritus.  When I’m dodging people on the platform at Kings Cross, the last thing on my mind is art.  Especially art I have to work to understand.  Even the masses of sudoku gamers couldn’t be bothered.

Barriball goes on to say that these un-imaginative phrases were taken from the back of photographs, and she wanted them to be experienced in the present.  Her hope is that they trigger people’s memories or immediate experiences.  Her hope is misplaced by an underground mile.  The only thing they’re going to trigger is hunger satiation for rats after midnight.

I don’t know which is worse, this specific and pointless concept, or Art World for wasting valuable paper and ink.