contemporary monkey

Ikon Gallery's summer offering of everything

Ikon Gallery violated one of my pet peeves from cultural institutions by organising a retrospective of its own existence. Ordinarily the realm of magazine publishers through distribution of anniversary issues, releasing new content is fairly non-existent. It’s like going to your granny’s 90th birthday where she recounts her memories of every year. In the end, it provides the average citizen a good reason to give it a miss. Especially in the summer.

To be fair, San Francisco’s MOMA is doing the same thing this summer, with the vast space of the museum devoted to its collection. Entitled, “75 Years of Looking Forward”, SF MOMA sneaks around the obvious reference to the past by assuming the collection was made for future generations. A neat trick, but it’s the same result as that of magazine publishers: an easy, and less interesting, content generator.

Usually these things are “activated” as they say in not very good art-speak - produced, as the rest of humanity would say - for revenue producing purposes. If National Geographic magazine, for example, has a 125th anniversary issue, other than the ad sales people who are thrilled beyond belief to have an accelerator to reach their target, it matters much less to readers. Because museums don’t profit much from this type of strategy, my guess is that someone at gallery central had a brilliant idea that didn’t pan out at the last minute, and the historical closet was raided for second-best ideas.

The Ikon summer show, entitled “This Could Happen to You: Ikon in the 1970s”, is Part Two of what probably retroactively became a bigger idea. Part One, as no doubt it will now be called, was a show exhibited in 2004 based on Ikon as a seed of an idea: “Some of the Best Things Happen Accidentally: the Beginning of Ikon”. Extrapolating to the future, my guess is that, sometime around 2015 we’ll see something like “Life Under Thatcher: How the Ikon was Plunged into Darkness”.

When these sorts of things pop up, in whatever medium they exist, my strategy is to blitz through the the event like Hitler in 1930s Poland. It won’t be important to remember the artist, because, like 95% of contemporary artists, most were forgotten in the memories of the public about 5 years after their arrival. Instead, I found two over-arching themes for this show: 1. drugs and 2. stuff.

The Ikon adds too much intellectualism into the drug addled days sandwiched in between the revolutionary 1960s and consumerist 1980s. Describing an animated piece by Ian Emes for Pink Floyd, the exhibition guide reads, “…it chimes in with a kind of abstract painting that came to the fore in the 1970s, hard-edged, flat and large-scaled, essentially formalist in its proposition.” Um OK, but really it was all about the drugs and watching the colours bleed and dance and bounce around our brains. Oh to be young and naive like the kids in the galleries these days.

“Stuff” was represented throughout the exhibition via not painting, but not sculpture either. The result of two floors of exhibits suggest the typical 1970s artist had tired of traditional art media. Canvas that is more sculpture than painting; medical equipment that bears no relation to its title; spray guns loaded with paint in place of brushes; drug-induced images resulting from reflections off a car bonnet; variants of the colour green on horizontal canvases. And of course the Pink Floyd animation, with, oddly, individual cells on display (something you’d more likely see in a Disney/Warner Brothers store of the 1990s).

An Ikon recap for those who have a summer to be using up, and have no time for indoor activity: drugs, stuff, materials, history, remembrance, waiting for part three, and when do the hallucinogenics kick in, are my take on 1970s art in Birmingham. Sounds like the 1970s generally.

Ad publication with some (cryptic) text

Take comfort, common man and woman, in knowing that the world’s finest museums and galleries are thinking about the plural “you” and your struggles in appreciating art. Don’t get the wrong idea, it’s not that they’re interested in your opinion. If they wanted that, as the saying almost goes, they’d box it up in a happy meal and demand that you swallow it whole. Instead, they’d rather suffer uninterrupted arguments between each other on strategies to get John and Jane Q Public (that’s you) into their world of Art of the Now, also known as contemporary art. They see the writing on the wall, and it says museums and galleries are for the likes of Lord and Lady Thickbottom, with their moneyed mansions, vast networks of wealthy friends, and Job-like patience to brave out the insane ranting of the world’s maddest and most mis-understood artist. Said writing-upon-wall also say museums are definitely not for most taxpaying suckers like you. Don’t blame me, you’re the wall writer.

Meanwhile, over at the (pick your favourite) music festival, (pick your favourite) 3D cinema, (pick your favourite) restaurant, concert hall, reading club, jazz house, cable show, or whatever else consumes the time of contemporary man and woman, people are discovering culture elsewhere. The endless sea of once common pounds sterling and dollars from 2006 are getting sucked down the drain of debt and bill paying, and nobody is finding the stopper anytime soon. Seems the precious museum and gallery are last on the list of invitees to the new economy of hunker down and turn the lights off.

For it is in the Summer 2010 edition of the Great Big Fat Book of Art Gallery Ads, or as they prefer to be called, ArtForum, where the condition of the present day museum is put before several insiders. By several, I mean 27. They are nothing if not thorough, these ArtForum publishers, and if they don’t have an ad from every single New York, London, Paris, Amsterdam, Tokyo gallery in their pages, I’d be shocked and disappointed at the same time. Of course by insiders I do NOT mean those that walk “inside” a museum or public gallery, flummoxed by what the artist considers to be art, with absolutely no clue as to why he or she bothered to re-construct this considerably sized mass of metal in the first place. By insiders, I refer to those that are currently museum staff, museum architects, museum owners, museum suppliers (or if you prefer, artists), as well as those anchored just off the tropically perfect island of Museumland: auction houses, universities, and even an ArtForum publisher. It’s like asking the owners of vinyl record stores what their views are on the iPod.

Art insiders are keenly aware of the problem, with the solution being a complex cocktail that includes you: Mr. Average and Mrs. Medium. Contributors of the issue use words like, participation, democratization, interaction, even “polyphonic exchange” (that’s discussion to you and me). They get the new media; the twitter, the google, the facebook, with their coarse and vulgar “inclusive” environments; they just have difficulty doing anything about it. It’s not that they lack intelligence, social commitment, heaps of money, to get you to see it their way; they simply forgot to ask you. Your phone must have been off.

The breed of people who buy Art Forum, however, don’t usually include the rough and unwashed of the world, which fits them snugly into the vertical market of art and academia. You’d only read ArtForum if you were interested in art. Not necessarily the appreciating of it, but the running of it and ensuring its bolt-hold onto exclusivity. If you’re a commercial gallery owner, you’d “read” ArtForum to ensure your ad is well placed upfront, well ahead of your competitors’ ads who are covertly stealing your well-placed clients. Unfortunately, museums and galleries are usually held in the public trust, so it’s quite obvious someone is missing from ArtForum’s jabbering on the state of play, and that “missing someone” is you. You and your small minded, limited thinking, shrinking bank account, politically correct choices, bringer of screaming children into the public realm, BlackBerry habit of typing at the wrong place and wrong time, burden of a citizen. But thanks for the tax dollars, Joe, we promise to spend it wisely.

After reading about half of the 27 essays (I’m not reading all of them - some aren’t even using this planet’s languages), it appears that the business life of a museum and gallery knave is one of hand-wringing and foreboding. Recommendations span from Crank up the Revolution (Olafur Eliasson) to the Capitalists are Coming to Replace the State (Jeffrey Kastner). By all accounts, you’d swear the museum system in the western world is crippled. Most essayists in this issue see the function of the institutions as an intermediary: provide the stage for what artists are currently producing. If the primary role of the museum is one of negotiation between you and the artist (or artists if you’re “polyphonic” enabled), then apparently the museum isn’t doing its job. I think we could have told them that if they’d just ask.

Tom Friedman: funny man

Pubs are probably a fertile incubation space for art. All sorts of unhinged, but nonetheless possibly valid ideas begin life in a pub amongst friends, usually after at least four quick pints. Laced with alcohol, people say the most outrageous things which nearly always require proof of concept outside the fantasy world of your local pub. Proof that must come at a later time, because, well, everyone’s busy drinking and saying rubbish things at the moment. Remind them in the morning.

The artist Tom Friedman, I imagine in my mind’s eye, must be a pub drinker with several demented friends at the ready. The results of his imagination actually do prove something half-baked to be possible. I can imagine Friedman saying, “I’ll bet I can make anything out of styrofoam and a lick of paint.” To which his friends laugh uncontrollably, and bet him even more pints that he couldn’t. Then I can imagine Friedman having a staggering memory, and recalling the next morning his bet about making anything out of “…what was it…oh yeah, styrofoam and pints…wait it was paint. Styrofoam and paint. Right, I’ve got my day ahead of me….”

The results of his big night out (remember, the pub night out part is my addition to the story, not his genuine working habits) can be seen in a London gallery with a wide range of everyday items. When I first read about this in the May issue of Art Review, I must admit my eyeballs nearly floated back in my head. Another replicant from the ready-made moment 100 years ago wants to prove they can re-animate Marcel Duchamp. After reading the materials list, however, my mind was changed forever. You’d never know by looking at it, but what resembles strings, are actually paint fibers. A peeled banana, a breeze-block, a rose, a gavel, pencils, even torn cardboard - all styrofoam. Random objects arranged in haphazard compositions are not so much ready-made, as just-made. Friedman has persevered to construct a paper towel dispenser made of styrofoam that looks more like something out of Wallace and Gromit’s Big Day in the Toilet. Flowing from the mouth of the dispenser is a thin layer of paint made to look like paper towel. It’s a brilliant riposte to any artist who pulls a tin can out of a rubbish bin, calling it art because the ready-made represents man’s inhumanity to man.

Tom Friedman; user of everything

Tom Friedman, I’ve also discovered, is obsessive about finding beginning and end points of art, employing Buddhism in large measures to hunt down these mileposts. Based on his earlier works, he certainly has the monastic patience of a man in solitary. Friedman once started a day off with one toothpick, resolving then to create something more grand, with more toothpicks. 30,000 toothpicks later, his sculpture resembled a splintery galactic explosion. He stopped at 30,000 because, well, the project could go on indefinitely; and really, doesn’t 30,000 get the point across? Personally I would have stopped at about 100 toothpicks because I wouldn’t have thought to purchase the 30,000 to begin with. Also, I can’t imagine a project with 30,000 of anything in front of me. Think of the missed pub time.

Thankfully someone like Tom Friedman exists if for no other reason than assigning him the patience to wait out an idea and jumping on it before the flimsy idea floats off to the lost island of forgotten ideas. The search for the beginning of something; or maybe it’s the end of something else, was a key starting point for him. To Friedman, beginnings and endings can be the same thing. When he says that filling something up is the same as making it completely empty, it sounds like something the physicist Richard Feynman would say. Once when he,  Friedman, not Feynman, couldn’t quite figure out his next move, he cleaned out his studio, boarded up the windows, and painted the whole space completely white, with the intention of determining a new starting point for his art education. It must have been a personal, big-bang moment. The very next day, Friedman began focusing on one object each day in his freshly constructed clean room. On Day 1, a metronome; day 2, a plate; and so on. Each day he asked questions of the thing’s existence. What is it, what’s it called, why does it take up the space it does, what’s it doing here, why am I talking to it…He then asked questions of his relationship with the object as a viewer. He was playing you and me as gallery and museum groupie. For a time, Friedman did nothing but think about the object and himself in this universe of one small white room, like a mini-museum, seeking out his “point A”.  More importantly, hoping it led to something worthwhile, like “point B”. His process reminds me of the end of the film “Castaway” when the Tom Hanks character is literally at a cross roads to his future. The difference is that Friedman has more to think about than simply turning left or right. He’s got infinity ahead of him.

about as useless as a real one

Another of his projects involved a jigsaw puzzle. As he got closer to the end of seeing the final image, he pulled all the pieces away from “interlock” mode, separated the pieces with a few inches of floor space, and laid everything out in grid-like fashion. You couldn’t tell what the puzzle was a puzzle of, until you looked at individual pieces. Only then could you make the synaptic leap to imagine the bigger picture.

Tom Friedman may be my new comedy art hero, even if he doesn’t think his work is supposed to be amusing. But there I am, just me staring at his objects, asking questions like, why is this here, what’s its purpose, what’s it doing near me, why am I laughing?

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).