For most of human history art has been associated with religion and spirituality. This changed with the advent of modernity. Religion was one of the victims of modernity and the rise of science. In this sense science had a massive impact on society. On the other hand modern science distances itself from morality: it lends itself to Kant’s division of human faculties into rational, moral and aesthetic. Science remains in the rational divorced from the task of creating values for society. And it can argued that art follows the logic of modernist specialisation and remains in the domain of the aesthetic, also divorced from morality. This is the phenomenon we can refer to as aestheticism. Anti-aestheticism fundamentally refers to a putative attempt to release art from aestheticism, to bring it “into life”, to make it a moral force resisting the alienating, nihilistic, materialism of capitalism.
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The romantic concept of genius is the foundation stone of the modern and postmodern concept of the “fineness” of fine art. Without it the ability of the fine art institution to create its canon of “great artists” and the capacity of the art market to sell faeces and urinals as precious objects would collapse. But at the same time this concept is insidious because it focuses on the least significant aspect of art: its supposed “fineness”. In order to understand the concept of genius, which has insinuated itself into the popular unconscious, we need to take a look at the phenomenon of romanticism which arose in late 18th-century Europe and had a very significant impact upon art of the 19th century, which in turn laid the foundation for 20th century modern and postmodern art.
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It appears that the two principal forces keeping sculpture alive today are: firstly, the art market which always needs new objects to sell; and, secondly, the art education system which is largely unable to provide students with skills in the newer media that are more able to critically communicate in the culture in which we live. It was the sculptor Carl Andre who said why produce new objects when there are already too many, but if you can turn them into gold, and it doesn’t really matter what they look like, then why complain? (more…)
There is a scene in Sam Mendes’ American Beauty, 1999, when Ricky Fitts (Wes Bentley) says to Jane Burnham (Thora Birch) ’do you want to see the most beautiful thing I’ve ever filmed?’ From the standpoint of an aesthetics of contemporary art this is actually quite a significant scene. (more…)
The most interesting works, in my opinion, at the KW institute—and indeed the Biennial as a whole—were videos and I have already posted on two. The next work I would like to treat is by Patricia Esquivias it is entitled Folklore #1, 2006. DVD 15min. This video is intriguing due to its mixture of anthropology, memory and absurdism. (more…)
Ania Molska’s two video projections W=F*s (work), 2008, and P=W:t (power), 2007-2008 were projected onto corner walls in the KW Institute so as to function as a single video installation. It was a very effective combination. (more…)
Annette Wehrmann’s contribution to Munster Sculpture Project 07, Aaspa: Wellness am See (AaSpa Wellness by the Lake) consisted of a simulated building site. Her work can be understood as a symptom of a more general aesthetic zeitgeist in which artists express a desire to be socially useful and immediately deconstruct this outrageous yearning. (more…)
Rudolf Stingel’s, Untitled, 2003 was a massive pseudo-minimalist attempt at an interactive installation installed at the 50th Venice Biennale in 2003. The installation consisted of covering the walls of a small ante-room and a vast main gallery with aluminium foil-coated insulating material punctuated by pseudo-minimalist wall reliefs created by Stingel out of Styrofoam sheets. But, ostensibly, the principal purpose of this work is not to demonstrate the artist’s genius but rather give the viewer a go. The question can be posed, however, as to what exactly the viewer was given a go at. (more…)
Kijong Zin’s piece at Thermocline of Art: New Asian Waves — On Air, 2006 – is demented in the best possible sense of the word. It is a masterpiece of absurdism. At first sight it is not especially prepossessing, simply consist of three television monitors depicting what appear to be slightly weird versions of American television such as CNN and the Discovery Channel. The wonder of the work begins when one notices a little door to the side of the monitors. (more…)
The integration of art and life has been on the radical avantgardist agenda since Duchamp, Dada and Surrealism. There have been innumerable variations on this theme. But few have use humour as a weapon against the adminstered world to the extent evident in the work of Maurizio CattelanLike Slominski, Maurizio Catalan uses humour as a tool of transgression. In 1994 he persuaded his famously promiscuous Paris art dealer Emmanuel Perrotin to spend a month dressed as a giant pink phallus. The history of twenetieth century avant-gardism is one in which gallerists have had to be increasingly more than reasonable in accommodating transgressive art practice. Cattelan is a trickster who uses his artistic licence to the full. And there can be a more serious side to his actions, as one commentator notes:
the comic and the abject are not dissimilar: the feelings they evoke, pity or disgust, often hide behind the mask of the joke: a technique which Freud considered as a form of pleasure, loosening inhibitions within a socially acceptable framework. (Janus 1997)
This particular commentary continues noting Cattalan’s use of ‘situational aesthetics’, an evident reference to the Situationist movement headed by Guy Debord. This reference indicates an attempt by the commentator to imbue Cattalan’s work with social significance.
Maurizio Cattelan Emanuel Perrotin in a rabbit-penis suit. 2000. Cattelan contracted his famously promiscuous Paris gallerist to dress up in a rabbit-penis costume for one month.
In his 1997 installation at Le Consortium, Dijon, Cattalan placed a bland, grey of?ce cupboard in the pristine white gallery reception area. The object of this door was to make the gallery staff who normally inhabited their own secluded zone to enter into the gallery space, effectively becoming the installation. In this way Cattalan played with the political boundaries of the art institution, making visible what was previously invisible and connecting what had previously been unconnected. As the Le Consortium commentary notes, Cattelan forced the staff to ‘come out of their closet’ at least at least once a day {Consortium, 1997}. The rest of the gallery was bare apart from another aggressive intervention in the form of a ‘grave’ dug in the ?oor of one of the galleries. This pit reveals various strata with pebbles and neatly cut plastic pipes. Again the gallery becomes the plaything of the artist: a kind of mini-world that indicates what might happen if art ever did escape out into everyday life.
REFERENCES
Janus, Elizabeth. 1997. ‘Maurizio Cattelan: Le Consortium’ in Frieze no. 34. Online version accessed September 2004: http://www.leconsortium.com/expo95.php (translated from French).
Paul McCarthy, Hot Dog, 1974. Self-immolatory performance art was not uncommon in the 1960s and 1970s.
John Bock and Jason Rhoades were born in the same year, 1965, and their work reflects the exuberant hopelessness of art at the turn of the millennium. There is no real attempt to be emancipatory because to think in terms of emancipation in the context of the globalisation of capitalism seems absurd. It is interesting therefore to examine the work of Rhoades’ mentor Paul McCarthy, who is twenty years his senior and possessed of a world view that belongs more to the 1960s and 1970s that Claire Bishop refers to in her history of installation art (2005). But due to one of the anomalies of the fine art system McCarthy came into stardom with the newer generation and his work tunes in very well with that of Bock and Rhoades due to its obsession with a theatre of the absurd. But there is evidence that this artist has not totally relinquished a social-critical stance. (more…)
Andreas Slominksi does take the viewer into consideration, but not in the relational aesthetic mode evident in Iwai’s work. Slominski has created what might be termed anti-interactive installations that, from one viewpoint, serve to highlight the lack of concern for the viewer-reader that has become entrenched in the dominant discourse of deconstructive art. His work is playful, but it is also serious because of the issue of viewer exclusion that it raises.
We can begin with Slominski’s installation Bucket of Water, 1998. The basic aim of this work is simple, to place a bucket of water in an art museum’s shop. But Slominski goes about achieving this task in a most convoluted manner. He commissioned a plumber:
to come install a 15-meter long pipe from the nearest bathroom to the bucket. In no time the pipe, including a faucet, was installed and the artist was able to fill the bucket. After that was done the pipe was removed and all traces of the action were eliminated, leaving only the bucket full of water behind. It is important to mention that this action took place with no audience present. The only thing the audience was able to see later was the relic of the action, a bucket of water, sitting lost and seemingly forgotten in a museum shop as if the cleaning personnel had left it behind by accident. … the only documentation of the activity were photographs in the publication. (Hoffmann, 2003)
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Jason Rhoades, Detail, The Black Pussy … and the Pagan Idol Workshop, 2005. Hauser and Wirth, London.
If Bock transposes the manic self-expression of Expressionism into a simulacral, hyperreality then Jason Rhoades (1965-2006) does something similar with the American Dream. But whereas Bock takes something putatively ‘authentic’ and transforms it into simulacral theatrics, Rhoades hyperrealises the already hyperreal. Rhoades’ immersive installations are a theatre of dementia and dissolution; and like Bock, Rhoades’ mises en scène take over an entire gallery space thereby becoming thoroughly immersive. The Black Pussy … and the Pagan Idol Workshop is such an installation constructed in London at Hauser and Wirth in 2005. At the sensory, immersive level The Black Pussy … and the Pagan Idol Workshop treats us to an experience not unlike the regression to childhood evident in Bock’s Klutterkammer. In Black Pussy we find an adult psyche metaphorically hurled through the Lacanian mirror into the polymorphous perversity of the American Dream. (more…)
John Bock, Klutterkammer, 2004. Installation at ICA, London. A woman treads carefully through Bock’s grunge ‘art museum’ erected inside the real museum that is ICA, London.
The German artist—his nationality is relevant due to references to expressionism—John Bock’s installations are a self-conscious theatre of the Id. And although his immersive installations appear to be about the body and materiality they are also quite hyperreal. Lacanian theory seems too heavy, too serious as a framework for understanding this artist. The problem is that we are not dealing with authenticity when we examine the work of Bock. There is no question of a traditional German Expressionist romantic exploration of the soul. Instead Bock adopts the persona of the mad artist in the manner of an actor. He appropriates that persona and parades it in a carnivalesque manner but strictly within the confines of the art institution where the parody can be understood and enjoyed by the cognoscenti. But if we think on what Bock is doing, he is actually parading the absurdity and failure of the aesthetic politics of the ‘liberation of desire’. (more…)
