Thinking In .NET
A place to learn about C# and the .NET Platform by Larry O'Brien. But mostly the obligatory braindump cross-linking that characterizes the blogsphere.
        

The Apollo Circle at Sotheby's

One of the great joys of going to NYC is that my friend Bill sneaks me in to high society through the servants' door and, for a day or two, I gain access to a world quite invisible otherwise. I suppose this world exists everywhere, certainly London and Paris and, say, Vienna, are places where secret gardens are opened to the precisely-phrased nod and relay of greetings from a friend of a friend. It's harder to imagine in California, where I live, but who knows? Perhaps there is a converted train car in Sacramento where gray men gather under portraits of E.H. Harriman and Leland Stanford and plot the future of the Pacific Rim.

Anyhow...

Bill swung us invitations to a lecture for The Apollo Circle, "Young friends of the Metropolitan Museum of Art." The invitation led us to believe that we were going to hear a lecture from Jeff Koons, heir to Andy Warhol's crown as King of Pop Art. I like Koons, because despite the banality or inappropriateness of his work, he never betrays an ironic distance between himself and his work, so he forces the viewer to either accept or flee from his propositions that a continuum exists between, say, European heroic sculptures and a 43-foot-tall puppy defined in flowers. Together with the amazing spectacle of Hairspray: The Musical, the hottest show on Broadway, and one that makes absolutely no concessions to the absurdity of two of its central propositions (Harvey Fierstein as an urban matron and a Baltimore dance show as a pivotal battleground in the civil rights movement), it seemed that post-ironic was the theme of our trip.

Post-ironic is fine by me. Irony is the awareness of a pervasive truth beyond, and in opposition to, the proposed appearance. A legitimate, important, and even noble stance -- by my definition, irony nourishes many of the most sophisticated streams of religion, philosophy, and scientific endeavor. But irony, like existentialism, is a stance that ultimately must be gotten over. We all die alone. Check. Received truths are culturally contingent and highly prone to error. Yep. Now, one legitimate response to these realizations is to disengage from the quest for truth and meaning: become a Buddhist, love your kids, contribute to charity, be just, and fear not. But if you decide not to disengage fully, don't just walk in circles around the pole of irony while insisting that you're orbiting the Earth.

Anyhow...

It turned out that Koons was not speaking and what we saw was a panel discussion that may well have been entitled "How does one valuate conceptual art?" (valuate is one of those buzzwords that's formed by randomly adding and removing suffixes to a perfectly serviceable English word such as "value." In case you're not up on New Economy buzzwords, the "valuation" of something is its value and "to valuate" is "to price.") Two pieces were held out for particular admiration: Felix Gonzalez-Torres' USA Today and Janine Antoni's Gnaw. Gonzalez-Torres piled red, white, and blue candies in a gallery corner and invited viewers to take a piece of their choosing. According to the Guggenheim:

Free for the taking and replaceable, Gonzalez-Torres�s perpetually shrinking and swelling sculptures defy the macho solidity of Minimalist form, while playfully expanding upon the seriality of the genre and the quotidian nature of its materials.

Antoni, who was on the panel, created... well, allow me to quote from the catalogue of the 1993 Whitney Biennial:

Antoni critiques a patriarchal community where eating is transgressive and the fat woman is an obvious taboo. Antoni's performative gesture is to bite away, chew up, and spit out chocolate and lard from large, modernist- looking geometric cubes, the sculpture of the Minimalists. The masticated lard is then remixed with pigment and remolded into lipsticks which are placed in packages, resembling large candy boxes, fabricated from the recycled chocolate. These ``cosmetics'' are displayed in a mirrored cube that in this context reads as something between corporate architecture and modernist sculpture.

Also lauded was a piece in which a naked man and woman stood in the gallery doorway; the entirety of the experience was embodied in the choice, by viewers, of whether they turned towards the man or woman when entering.

These three pieces represent, in my mind, the good, the bad, and the ugly of conceptual art. A major theme of conceptual art is that the viewer's interaction with the piece, whether passive or active, visceral or intellectual, actively generates the meaning of the piece.  Gonzalez-Torrez comments directly on the issue of art as interaction as opposed to reaction and is, I think, excellent. To invite the viewer to not just touch, but to literally consume the piece of art (and it turns out to be nothing but candy), is an accessible metaphor for how one should interact with all art.

I've also got to give credit to the naked people in the entranceway. It's not a work for everyone, but it is a work that speaks directly to the New York "art scene." Presumably, everyone who squeezed past the naked people into the gallery entrance was actively open to and engaged in the avant garde and it's so transient and rooted to a particular place and time that I imagine that it must have generated the particular conversational themes that the artist intended. And for a piece of art that is restricted to and particular to "New York gallery opening" to be about generating conversational themes: yeah, I can see it.

But now we come to Gnaw, a piece whose metaphor is so rarefied that it's essentially necessary to take the artist's word for it. She says that Gnaw is a critigue of the male dominance in Minimalism. My friend Bill, who's an art historian, thought it was a deconstruction of the Platonic ideal of the cube. I might have read it as a Marxist-derived critique of consumerist society. And here we come to the dilemma of conceptual art: on the one horn, if meaning is generated solely by the viewer's interaction with the piece, then conceptual art such as Gnaw is as arbitrary and valueless as an inkblot. If, on the other horn, the artist's intent is an important contributor to meaning, then a piece that requires a catalog or wall card to communicate that intent is, by definition, a failure. (Or, if willing to form a three-horned trilemma, one can insist that the value of the art is precisely its market price, which in the case of Gnaw is $204,000. No one really believes this, but it's such a reductive stance that you can stick to it in a debate even when you're too drunk to think straight. Don't ask how I know.)

Conceptual art's emphasis on semiotic themes such as the role of the viewer in generating meaning is all well and good, an uptown version of "If a tree falls in the woods, and no one is there to hear it, does it make a noise?" Which is fine until one realizes that this panel and these Apollonians, these "young friends of the Metropolitan," are not a bunch of dim sophomores getting stoned in order to feel insightful, but the cream of the high culture crop.

Let's be blunt: art needs the patronage of the rich. Without infusions of money from people engaged in reasonable discourse, the future of art will be, well, the Guggenheim whoring itself to Giorgo Armani and BMW. Conceptual art has come to the end of its usefulness and if the Apollonians and their ilk do not move towards a post-ironic, post-conceptual stance, something that re-establishes the legitimacy of the "created object" as the central concern of art, I believe the visual arts will be displaced by other forms (such as the stage, literature, and music) that have come to (or are coming to) terms with the end of the 20th century.



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Last update: 10/11/2002; 1:08:01 PM.