Category: Reviews

The Bleeding Obvious

“For The Love Of God” by Damien Hirst is not art, it’s ethically dubious for various reasons, its costing is suspect, the big jewel on the forehead spoils any claim it might have to aesthetic interest, and it’s basically a simple reversal of the usual formula of blinged up teeth in a living skull.

Ceci n’est pas l’art

More interesting is why it isn’t art. An overheated art market assigns and justifies the price of a piece of art as the measure of its worth. It doesn’t matter how materially impoverished the art is, it can be some rags with oily earth scraped on stretched over some pieces of wood and still be worth tens of millions of dollars. This is the point of the market for those who buy. They are doing with art what they did with hedge funds. This is ritual, the economic becoming the symbolic, aesthetic mythology being made into economic icons. This is the assertion of a new class’s self-image and a rearguard action against any newer money. That is what high art usually is.

“For The Love Of God” has catastrophically misunderstood this. It seeks to justify the economics of the market economically. It is an object that has been ridiculously expensive to manufacture and is therefore worthy of a ridiculous price. This doesn’t give the market anything to do. If Hirst wanted to give the market something to really get its wallet out for he should charge 100 million dollars for one of his concepts, or for each of an edition of 100 skulls, or for a genuinely awful painting (his assistants can crank those out by the dozen). That would take some serious dollar transubstantiation.

The argument that Hirst and his business manager are just taking the market for a ride, Jasper-Johns-two-beer-cans-style, doesn’t work. And Hirst’s move here isn’t a Stella-like aesthetic observation of the letter of the law rather than the spirit. It is an erroneous error theory of the market value of art made into an artwork.

Dust Brothers

A limited edition is available of silkscreen prints of a photograph of the skull complete with diamond dust applied to the glaze. Those American commentators who dismiss Hirst as a Koons copyist don’t have an interesting point, but this is pure Warhol. Warhol produced silkscreens of a skull and of himself with a skull. The images over which he sprinkled diamond dust weren’t his best work, the cash value added by diamond dust is an implicit admission of the lack of aesthetic value.

With Dead Head

This is Hirst’s contemporary self-portrait. He is no longer gurning fearfully next to a decapitated head, he has taken its skull and made it a model of his own. There is no contrast between this empty sparkle and his own flesh and bone. The spark has gone, his head has been emptied of what art it contained and replaced with economics.

There is no aesthetic or emotional value in a multi-million dollar memento mori, it is a self-defeating object. All that remains under the bling is the crooked yellow smile. This used to be Damien Hirst. There is the ghost of a tragedy here, but the materialism of economics leaves no place for ghosts.

“No Secret Painting V”, 2006, is a work by Art & Language (A&L) consisting of a large square dark abstract canvas accompanied by a smaller framed text that seems to refer to it.

The accompaniment of a dark abstract square by a text is a scheme that Art & Language used in their “Secret Paintings” and “Guaranteed Paintings” of the 1960s. These referred to Malevich and to Stella, and to certificates of authenticity for conceptual artworks. But unlike the secret paintings the composition of the squares (and lines) within the canvas are perceptible.

The plaid pattern is from A&L’s earlier piece “Wrongs Healed In Official Hope”, an installation of canvases and of filing cabinets made from canvases as a parody or travesty of A&L’s earlier text-based Indices of the 1970s. The text it contained was not a piece of art criticism, politics, or set theory, but an extreme pornographic sado-masochistic fantasy set at a girl’s boarding school rendered increasingly abstract by textual transformation and substitution.

Eventually the text in “Wrongs Healed In Official Hope” became an abstract pattern of squares and lines, a decorative plaid pattern. This decorativeness appears to have no content, only decorative effect, but it is haunted by typographic grids and these lead back to a textual expression of degenerate taste. The implication seemed to be that the plaid was no less a product of that taste. There are no comfortable chairs in the work of A&L.

Accompanying texts that seem to describe or specify some aspect of the image that they are counterposed with were also a feature of A&L’s “Flags For Organizations” and “Gustave Courbet’s Burial At Ornans Expressing…”. It is this last piece that the text in “No Secret Painting” seems to serve a similar function to. It specifies or describes the four sections of the canvas as having certain content. But unlike “Burial At Ornans…” there is an aesthetic and genetic connection between the text and the image. Some of the text of “Wrongs Healed In Official Hope” is incorporated, and the composition of the plaid is mentioned.

In both the visibility of the painting’s pictorial content and in the fact that the text does actually shed some light on that content this is not a secret painting. A secret is neither set up nor revealed. Where the secret paintings pointed an accusing finger, deflating the mysteries of other works and of the viewer’s regard, “No Secret Painting” is self-deflating.

But this is not A&L For Dummies. The painting and the text both refer not just to each other but to “Wrongs Healed…”, and to more than “Wrongs Healed”. This is an index, and the viewer has work to do. As with the apparently blank surfaces of “Index: Now They Are”, these are allegories of an artistic paradigm. I just haven’t quite worked out exactly which one just yet…

Technorati Tags: aesthetics, art, critique

“Portrait of George W. Bush in the style of Jackson Pollock’s ‘Number 5’, 1948”, 2006, is a painting of the current president of the U.S.A executed in the manner of an Jackson Pollock action painting. This refers back to the paintings of Socialist Realist images of Lenin that Art & Language (A&L) executed in the style of Pollock in the early 1980s. Those images brought two opposed ideologies into collision within the same image, synthesizing a dialectic. So does this one.

The Cold War was still being played out in the early 1980s. Socialist Realism was the state art of the USSR and Abstract Expressionism was the high-water mark of American art. Lenin and Pollock were iconography of the mutually reinforcing and self-deceiving public faces of state capitalism and market capitalism. Putting the two in conflict criticised these self-and-other-images. But the map of the world seems to look very different now. Lenin has been disinterred and Pollock is admired for his surplus value not his inner necessity.

Bush is now the other of Pollock. Pollock, the epitome of rugged American democratic individualism and freedom. Bush, the epitome of privileged incompetence and reactionary illiberalism. A grinning idiot rather than a stern-faced revolutionary. This is not a picture of two drunks, it is a picture of two different historical periods. It is an historical dialectic. It is not that history has ended and that the world is politically unipolar. It is just that the best critical resources for America come from its own history, not from religious or nationalistic reactionaries.
There is a “map” of the painting, so this isn’t a visual puzzle where the trick is to find the image hidden in the drips. The portrait of Bush doesn’t seem like a straight travesty of A&L’s earlier work, like the hybrid or historically bogus images that made up part of “Homes From Homes”. A&L don’t refer to their own earlier work in the title, instead they refer to the Pollock directly as the earlier series did. This sets the opposition between Pollock and (media representations of) Bush rather than between Bush and earlier A&L work. The latter would not have the same power.

It is true and illuminating that Bush is the illiberty to Pollock’s freedom, but there is potentially more to the substitution of Bush for Lenin. Bush serves the same place in much mainstream leftist thought that Lenin once did. He is the icon, the person who determines how you are meant to think. But he is an icon for everything that is wrong in the world, and the person who determines how you must not think. Moral virtue simply consists in opposing everything that Bush is regarded as standing for during working hours. If that opposition is to erstwhile leftist values, so be it. Bush is a come-down from the world-changing words and actions of Lenin. He has the opposition he deserves in the form of an opportunistic, incoherent and part-time left-on-your-behalf that keeps the forms of opposition having long since discarded the social content that originally led to those forms. This is the “we” of “we are all Hezbollah now”.

Political Art is big again, but it is generally an art of mindless petulance and vapid recycling of established iconographic and technical resources. It is untransformative market-friendly gestures of resistance to whatever is actually being done at the time. It is hippy wigs at Woolworths. A&L’s Bush serves not as a parody of this so much as an example of how to do it right, how to produce an art that is aware and raises awareness, that gives the viewer something to think about that they have not thought about a hundred times before. It may just be a reacion to too-much, on the order of A&L’s song “Prisoner’s Model”. But even if that’s all it is, this is how you do it.

Technorati Tags: aesthetics, art, critique, review

“Songs Held In Offices”, 2006, is a seried of works by Art & Language (A&L). They consists of colourful paper chains mounted in shallow wooden vitrines. The chains are modernist in their coloured formality, set in minimalist boxes. The effect is a kind of Art Povera postmodernism. Until you consider what the chains mean.

The chain-link looped strips of coloured paper are a kitsch decoration for cheap parties. They are ideal for transforming the office into the site of a crazy party. They are decoration and an inducement to social activity, to human relations. In these works they are frozen and sealed into wooden boxes, stretching across a shallow white space that they are mounted to either side of. There’s a literal reading to be had of the work with the paper chains somehow representing songs and the shallow featureless space representing an office.

From reading A&L’s writing about previous projects it is obvious that the title is from the text of a sado-masochistic pornographic novel. Originally it read “dongs held in orifices”, but Mrs. Malaprop got to it. The loaded fantasy of interpersonal relations is rendered inept. Songs in offices implies an office party, which reinforces the idea of an office party.

Perhaps these chains are a record of social acivity. If so they have missed the point, parties are a collection of people, not a set of decorations. Perhaps they are meant to induce social activity. If so they have missed the point, they are too sterile and in too sterile a place in the gallery to accompany a party, and in themselves have not the power to start a party. They are indices of social activity, but to what end it is hard to say. They would look different during the private view, but we are not all invited to that. Ironically they will have caused that particular social context by being part of the work on display, but they will have done so only in as much as non-relational art does.

This is the social illiteracy of the managerialism-that-protests-too-much of Relational Art laid bare. The happenings and flea-markets of Relationalism are a socially exclusionary art hiding behind gestures of democracy and collaboration. Only the rich and/or well connected can afford to participate in the actual event or to buy a record of it. Relationalism looks like crowd-sourced art as Koons’s art was outsourced art and Warhol’s was mass-produced art. It is not. It is a socioeconomic allegory, but a mystificatory and inept one. Don’t look behind the curtain. This is not crowdsourcing, it is art by Steve Jobs.

These are embarrassing photos of Relationalism trying to dance at the office party. The competent Relational viewer will be frustrated and excluded by the work. The rest of us are actually given something to talk about amongst ourselves by it, although the Relationalist may not like what we have to say.

Technorati Tags: aesthetics, art, critique, review

Two of the most interesting pieces of writing on art that I know of are misunderstandings of paintings by Art & Language (A&L).

A review of the later series of “Hostages” that I now forget the details of made the mistake of treating the paintings as metaphors for a literal hostage situation. The relations of figure and ground were taken as indicating the uncertainties of unfolding reposts of a hostage situation. What is interesting is that the reviewer saw the painting as constructed of these relations but didn’t see (or read) what they represent.

A review of “Index: The Studio At 3 Wesley Place (Painted By Mouth)” by Barbara Kruger made the mistake of judging the painting from a black & white photograph. This renders her confident disparaging of the technical effects of the work funny, and her consideration of the work’s content and ambitions bogus.

I mention these reviews because I am probably about to make the same mistakes as both. I don’t have access to Art & Language’s writings about their latest work and I am going to be looking at photographs of them. A&L’s work is always rewarding in real life whether or not you are in on its textual content, but some of it is designed to resist reproduction. I am deliberately opening myself to embarrassment here. Hopefully A&L will have a show at the Lisson soon and I’ll be able to find out just how embarrassed I should be.

Technorati Tags: aesthetics, art, review

Look, See: May 06, 2007 – May 12, 2007 Archives

A little while ago I wrote a review of Chris Ashley’s weblog “Look, See” for Furtherfield.

Chris has continued making engaging art in HTML at a phenomenal rate . His current images with their drop shadows and eight-bit-looking palettes are wonderful.

Do take a look.