SQUARE GODS: OLIVIA NORMILE
Instagram is a fantasy on which the artist presents art that is not their art. It’s a fetishictic game of “let’s pretend”. We all know it’s “let’s pretend”. But we go along with it anyway. We have to. We like to. It satisfies. It satiates. There seems to be no alternative to the square gods.
This displacement of desire or loss followed by disavowal is what Jacques Lacan calls “fetishistic disavowal”: the unconscious objectification of desire or loss displaced onto another object as fantasy. Yet in Lacan’s analysis the fetish is a fear of over-proximity to the object of desire, contra-Freud’s ever-reaching hand for the ever-distant & lost object of desire.
The Insta image feeds off this desire & the loss of the art object we mourn without a tear. Like when tears don’t quite come at the funeral of a loved one until later, much later, & when least expected.
Some 5 years ago I invested some time in experiencing a web art installation that some artist sent me from stateside. It didn’t really work for me in a sensory or intellectual capacity. It was more message than medium, & as we all know “the medium is the message”.
Today I experienced a web installation entitled “Dog-Eared Paradise” by Olivia Normile on the pragmatically named “Screen Service”, which broke the solitaire tiles of Instagram.
I’m too close to it now to know why it worked, if “worked” is the right word: its half-tone mapping; its cardboard cut-out sensibility; its absurd theatre; its cuteness; its Gilliam hand-gesturing “click” “follow” & “touch”; its sense of play & erasure of all-too human angst for foraging animals; down low, up high, this way that…; line; negative; space; penned-in; but no square god in sight; & thus “liberation” (the artist’s word).
It brought to mind (among many other things): Patrick Jolley’s film This Monkey; Kai Althoff’s settings for his paintings; Lars von Trier's Dogville; Arthur Schopenhaur’s will-to-live philosophy of animals; The Theatre of the Absurd; & this quote by Alexandre Kojève, “man is a fatal disease of the animal”. But words & references are just another form of fetishistic disavowal.
CRAIG OWENS: WHY CULTURAL PRODUCTION?
“There remains art as production, as production”
Good models of art criticism (not art writing) are hard to come by these “vile days”, the words Gary Indiana used to describe his few years as an art critic for the Village Voice in the mid-1980s —something I’m not sure if he regrets or celebrates in his commentary after the fact.
The models I chose early on were ones that didn’t treat art as an autonomous art object separate from its context, but focused on the “frame” of art, what psychoanalysts Jean Laplanche and Jean-Bertrand Pontalis state as the setting: “the fantasy is not the object of desire, but its setting”. One such critical model that afforded the frame or setting its due vigilance was by Craig Owens.
“Who is free to define, manipulate and, ultimately, to benefit from the codes and conventions of cultural production? These questions shift attention away from the work and its producer and onto its frame— The work with which I find myself in most sympathy is the kind that is involved in an analysis of its own relationship to the institutions it relies on. And the terms by which it’s presented.”
For some time now I have put off writing on Craig Owens, because I wanted to keep him to myself. But in recent years he has gained a second wave of attention in the States and here in Europe.
In America in 2018, Paul Chan of Badlands Unlimited transcribed, edited and published a videotaped interview with the critic from 1984, conducted by feminists Lyn Blumenthal and Kate Horsfield. On the book’s cover Craig Owens is portrayed tall and vampiric in a Quaker College photograph, which he attended as a young man, one of the rare instances when Owens was caught on camera, like Vlad in the mirror before he became Dracula. The book title Portrait of a Young Critic, not only represents Craig Owens’ premature death by AIDS at 39, but the forever young fate of a brilliant generation of American artists at the turn of the 1980s.
In Europe in 2021, a limited dual-edition (Eng/German translation) of Craig Owens’ essay From Work to Frame, or, Is There Life After ‘The Death of the Author’? was published and launched during the pandemic at saxpublishers / FELIX GAUDLITZ, Vienna, as part of their essay serial (S*I*G), which works under this statement: “S*I*G is dedicated to the periodic presentation of singular essays. Manifest in printed form, it is light enough to not be inhibited by an institutional parent, while pitching a format for exchange of thought.”
It was wonderful to witness Craig Owens (and art criticism) being recognised in this way, three decades after his death. And yet I’m still not sure what it is about Craig Owens’ art criticism that influenced mine when I first started reading him over a decade ago. Maybe it was a passage like this:
“I feel it’s time to abandon this battle on behalf of art or culture. We have to begin to investigate the status of art and culture and the political and economic interests that it serves. That’s certainly a change in criticism. There is a tendency that we inherited from Clement Greenberg that characterises art as an endangered species. This seems to me to be so blind and so contrary to the facts, to this extraordinary proliferation of cultural activity. We ought to ask the real questions about why capitalism promotes this and what it gains from it, and how its interests are vested in it.”
It was also the way Craig Owens channelled contemporary artists’ voices in his essays, an artist’s voice we don’t hear so much these vile days, probably because of what Robert Smithson wrote in the mid-1970s in Artforum, words which Craig Owens would use to his own critical ends:
“Cultural confinement takes place when a curator imposes his own limits on an art exhibition, rather than asking an artist to set his limits [...] Some artists imagine they’ve got a hold on this apparatus, which in fact has got a hold of them. As a result, they end up supporting a cultural prison that is out of their control [...] Museums, like asylums and jails, have wards and cells in other words, neutral rooms called ‘galleries.’ [...] Works of art seen in such spaces seem to be going through a kind of esthetic convalescence.”
ROSALIND KRAUSS
Craig Owens emerged first as a student of the critic and editor of October Magazine, Rosalind Krauss, after a stint in what he described as the “Off-Off Broadway” theatre. His first mentor, Krauss became forever infamous in the artworld after she split-off from Artforum Magazine after artist Lynda Benglis’s celebrated dildo spread from 1974 was given a fully erect thumbs up by the magazine’s co-editors. Personally, I have grown to reject and regard the consensus around Benglis and the demonisation of Krauss and her so-perceived uppity October that emerged from the Artforum split as too one-sided. So much so that I have actively gone out of my way to read Krauss and discover she is a rare breed of art critic.
Lynda Benglis, Artforum vol. 13, no. 3, 1974 (November 1974 Artforum magazine, vol. 13, no. 3, containing a portrait advertisement by the artist.)
Krauss would recruit Craig Owens to write for the recondite and rarified October (3000 print run). It was in the same October environment Craig Owens would meet Douglas Crimp, the critic (who heralded “The End of Painting” in a 1981 issue of October) and curator of the famous Pictures exhibition (1977) at Artists Space New York. They became best friends.
During the Q&A that followed the launch of Craig Owens: Portrait of a Young Critic at the New Museum New York in 2018, art critic Rosalyn Deutsche — whose critical tone I confused with Krauss until being corrected by Lynne Tillman (see comments below )who wrote the introduction to the interview book with Craig — was quick to make everyone in attendance uncomfortable, by warning the congregation to not sanctify Craig Owens. This sentiment reflected the black, white and red all over words of Barbara Kruger’s WE DON'T NEED ANOTHER HERO, which is cited in the preface to Portrait of a Young Critic, and a critical retort Craig Owens would have appreciated.
Barbara Kruger, Untitled (We Don't Need Another Hero), screenprint on vinyl. 276.5 × 531.3 × 6.4 cm, 1987
The art market, as a frame, was Craig Owens’ main bone of contention. Not just the market machinations and institutional massaging of the artworld, but his own entanglement within it as a critic. When he left Krauss’ October to become editor at Art and America, he acknowledged his growing complicity with the market, ie., The galleries who paid for the magazine through advertising were now paying his wages.
I’ve learnt from Craig Owens that the critic’s job is to dig holes, and leave them open, like freshly cut wounds or graves. Why Craig Owens is a model of criticism I try to follow is he held conflicting ideas in his head and writing, not willing or able to disavow their equal significance. He was a cognitive dissonant par excellence, returning time and again to the wound and grave of his criticism, to reflect, to revise. He went so far as to question how criticism could be a workable tool when the artwork aligns with the beliefs and desires the critic has for art. He was worried about the theoretical bias of his critical thesis on the art of the present moment.
“Yes. More than it being an explanation of the work or promotion of the work, it’s trying to carry out a parallel activity, I think, a kind of running critique of my own activity. But this leads to a certain dilemma for a critic, because it doesn’t leave much room for criticism of the work. How do you criticize a work that you feel a fundamental solidarity with? If you feel that you’re doing something alongside the work and you have certain goals in common with the goals of the work, then is it appropriate to say in print, “I think that this work doesn’t achieve its goals,” or that “it contradicts itself here”? Is that destructive to the general project? Does that provide the opposition with ammunition for a rejection of the work as well as the overall criticism that is being lodged? What about the overall analysis that you’re trying to make?”
Craig Owens' gift and curse was self-reflexivity. This is good for the critic, something I have tried to adopt, influenced by my reading of Craig Owens and the rare others I respect as models for criticism. But what made Craig Owens special was, even though he was plagued by self doubt, not allowing his writings to be published as a collection at the behest of his friends (put together posthumously by Barbara Kruger et al), he never adopted coy or ironic critique, or sycophantic art writing symptomatic of today’s art reviewers and artist catalogue essayists, now a cultural hegemony.
“Craig was not a joiner” Lynne Tillman mentioned at the book launch of Portrait of a Young Critic. Craig Owens admitted later that he left October for Art in America for economic reasons, and came to understand the economic plight of the artist when life and responsibilities force you to make choices and compromises that you wouldn’t have otherwise made as a young vagabond. The moment when disavowal creeps in, ideology takes form.
Later, Craig Owens would criticise October for, in so many words, the magazine’s hermetic withdrawal into an incubated esotericism, going so far as to say that the writers in October were writing for one another, which, when you say it out loud, doesn’t sound all that bad, except when it becomes too comfortable, affirming and institutional.
“The politics we were talking about [at October] were essentially a withdrawal from mass culture and from the media. And maintaining certain standards of seriousness, of complexity. […] This kind of work was operating marginally and didn’t really have ambitions, or didn’t seem to have ambitions to aspire to a certain kind of commercial validation, and also validation within the mainstream press.”
Owens quotes Derrida to locate the contextual frame he found himself entangled in as editor at Art and America, being paid with the loose change of art dealers:
“The movements of deconstruction do not destroy structures from the outside. They are not possible and effective, nor can they take accurate aim, except by inhabiting those structures.”
In the late 1970s Craig Owens was part of an inflated critical and political recruitment of French theory which catalysed a panoply of theoretical frameworks through feminist and psychoanalytic thought, such as “allegory”, and of course “postmodernism”.
There was also a recruitment of groups of artists aligned with this new wave of theory, especially in respect to the female artists who exhibited in Crimp’s seminal Pictures, and later in the pages of October, such as Sherrie Levine, Barbara Kruger, Louise Lawler and later Cindy Sherman. All of whom Craig Owens would recruit under his critical wing when he began to fold feminism into the developing framework of his theoretical and practical ambitions of his art criticism.
Cultural production is a process of filling the abyss or running from the void. The core source of cultural production must come from a sodden or fiery site of malcontent with the world. Whether this malcontent is with what Wittgenstein called the default language games of consumer capitalist culture not being adequate enough to express this malcontent, or a Freudian miscarriage of care. I really don’t know. All the above and more I guess. But it has been there with me from the start, malcontent, as both an artist and critic. Maybe it is the reason why I sympathised so deeply with Craig Owens’ self-reflexivity with regard to the artists he critically recruited alongside his own biases and disavowals behind such critical recruitment. Thing is, when I don’t see this malcontent reflected back to me in the art and artists I meet as objects and persons in the world, I ask, “Then why be an artist?”
So I will leave you with Craig Owens and his opening salvo in From Work to Frame, which S*I*G have also generously translated into German:
“Towards the end of his career, Robert Smithson—who, in an attempt to regain control over his own production had removed his practice from the urban centres to the abandoned slag heaps and strip mines of an “infernal” post industrial landscape expressed new or renewed interest in the value-producing mechanisms of the art world: “Paintings are bought and sold,” he told an interviewer in 1972. “The artist sits in his solitude, knocks out his paintings, assembles them, then waits for someone to confer the value, some external source. The artist isn’t in control of his value. And that’s the way it operates.” As if predicting the fallout from the following year’s auction of the Robert Scull collection—which would prompt some angry words from Rauschenberg about the “profiteering of dealers and collectors” (his Double Feature (1959), for which Scull had paid $2,500, was auctioned for $90,000)—Smithson continued: “Whatever a painting goes for at Parke Bernet is really somebody else’s decision, not the artist’s decision, so there’s a division, on the broad social realm, the value is separated from the artist, the artist is estranged from his own production.””
—James Merrigan
JORDAN PETERSON RE:PUBLIC
“Despite my proclivity to feel guilt, which is quite substantive. And despite my temperamental unwillingness to engage in conflict. Not only do I not see what I did wrong. I think what I’ve done on the public communication front is my responsibility as a clinician to tell the truth about what I see.
SO WE’LL MAKE IT PUBLIC! ”
JORDAN PETERSON was first introduced to the world in 2016, via the news-media fervour that surrounded his public criticism of Ontario Canada’s legislation of alternative pronoun usage beyond the gender-specific personal pronouns s/he in the English language. His rejection of the legislation was a very public proclamation and (what he felt) defence of free speech against the emergent societal hue and cry of political correctness.
In one of his first mainstream TV appearances, following the heated student protests surrounding the pronoun issue on the campus of the Toronto University where he taught, Peterson debated with fellow university non-binary professor, A.W. Peet on CBS News. The latter academic demonstrated, in no uncertain terms, a critique of Peterson’s individualism in the wake of public attention Peterson was receiving for his criticism of the legislation, and public attention Peet invalidated — with a slice of competitive academic envy — as a “tempest in a teacup”. How wrong Peet was! Peterson has since accumulated 7.4m followers on YouTube; 4.6m on X (formerly Twitter); and 5m book sales for his 2018 bestseller 12 Rules for Life; An Antidote to Chaos.
In 2019 I was reintroduced to Peterson by a student who was “saved” by his 12 Rules — not the last time I would encounter, in real life, “saved” and “Jordan Peterson” mentioned in the same breath. I was curious. So I went online and discovered that Peterson had become a YouTube phenomenon in a broad spectrum of academic and cultural settings. He was debating (what his followers describe as “destroying”) intellectuals and philosophers — Left and Right but mainly Left —like Sam Harris and Slavoj Žižek. There was even an interview with a gallery director about the psychology of the artist, which was fascinating from a psychological perspective.
Yet even though the philosophical and psychological foundations of Peterson’s ideas are very well articulated and convincing at times, the overall delivery of his opinions, their Nietzschean and doctrinal sources, and the trenchant subjectivities that make up the matrix of his conservative and christian-leaning beliefs, is questionable. I believe that Peterson the saviour is a phenomenon that says more about the culture we now live in than the individuals — Elon Musk, Joe Rogan et al — that run the hyper-mediated show online (i.e., Andrew Tate’s interview with Tucker Carlson became the most watched video of all time online in 2023.)
It was Elon Musk’s X and the Joe Rogan Podcast where the public paper trail of Peterson’s critical oratory — from criticisms of Justin Troudeau (the Canadian prime minister) and doubts regarding economic predictions based on climate-change science, to deadnaming actor Eliot Page and other antagonistic transphobic online commentary — that the Ontario court upheld the bizarre order of social media training and reeducation issued by the College of Psychologists of Ontario. Peterson has been ordered by the court to partake in a 12-month programme and pay for the retraining, or he will lose his clinical licence. Peterson is no longer a private clinician due in part, if not fully, to his growing publicness and messianism.
Critics of Peterson generally invalidate his opinions by labelling his audience as mainly disenfranchised young white men (INCELS). They also bring up his christian conservatism, which, before his close brush with death during the pandemic, seemed more Jungian mythical and archetypal. It’s easy to demonise Peterson, especially within the context of his audience and extended brat pack of epigones and gaslighters, like Ben Shapiro. But… I thought I had a But…
Last week, the now infamous psychologist appeared on his YouTube channel dressed in a suit that was a harlequin patchwork of asymmetrically placed yellow, red, black and silver, with Peterson’s signature vertiginously and cursively scrawled on one lapel. His address to his YouTube followers in the presence of his daughter, Mikhaila, who fielded dad’s responses and criticisms of the court ruling, was very specific and precise in terms of word-use. And yet you have to question Peterson’s bedside manner when he likened transgender surgery to “1930’s lobotomy”, and described the profession of the surgeon as the preferred job of choice of the psychopath.
Peterson’s repeated use of the word “professional” in the address has stuck with me above all other provocations in his YouTube response. Especially within the YouTube setting, where Peterson has found himself broadcasting to the world, untethered to an institution, wearing Harvey Dent inspired fashion, and far, far away from the Toronto University campus steps where he was first found dressed in a simple generic black suit, white shirt and tie, and an audience of ragtag students being pulled this way and that by ideologies propelled by energy not experience. Back then Peterson was private as both an educator and clinician. According to his academic peers, so private that any attention achieved would only amount to a “tempest in a teacup”.
Today Jordan Peterson is “public”, with no intuitional straight jacket to bind his words, no matter how divisive and offensive. His financially costly appeal against the court ruling has nothing to do with keeping his licence as a psychologist. He can get another licence in another Canadian jurisdiction. No. This is Jordan Peterson saving us again from the plight of legislative rule by governmental institutions with what he believes are arbitrary and self-serving regulations and rules that spoil what was yesterday called the truth and tomorrow a lie.
Peterson’s objection to the legislation of alternative pronouns thrust him into the limelight; this current objection with yet another Ontario institution will just add to that thrust. It’s interesting to note that the etymology of limelight comes from the 1800s, “when theatre stages were lit by heating a cylinder of the mineral called lime — the result was an intensely bright white light. The word limelight came to have its figurative meaning of at the centre of attention.”
Like the repeated use of the word “professional”, I can’t get Peterson’s suit out of my mind either, what I described earlier, as a “harlequin patchwork of asymmetrically placed yellow, red, black and silver, with Peterson’s signature vertiginously scrawled on one lapel”.
The figure of the harlequin in the philosophy of one of my favourite philosophers, Michel Serres, is someone who peels off their multicoloured threads to reveal another and another and yet another multicoloured garment, until a naked and tattooed body finally emerges after successive disrobes to reveal “a medley of colours than skin”. Further, the harlequin in Serres’ philosophy is a figure who “mixes genders so that it is impossible to locate the vicinities, the places, or borders where the sexes stop and begin”.
When broached on the subject of politics, the psychoanalyst and essayist, Adam Phillips, turned down the invitation, denouncing the idea of the political psychoanalyst as “grandiose”. Politics has to be public and grandiose or else it is impotent. The same publicity goes for the heralding aloft of the enemy contra the privacy of the friend in Derrida’s philosophy of friendship. There is something about Peterson’s publicness that is increasingly grandiose and theatrical, not to mention the increased and very public shedding of tears. Lest we forget, the limelight has a theatrical provenance. And when we undress the harlequin we are witnesses to “a medley of colours than skin”.—James Merrigan
*Images prompted by author using the name “Jordan Peterson” and various descriptors (without images) on AI system OpenAI DALL·E
photo: Christina Nicotra
TANAD AARON: WE
“Under the overpass
In the parking lot,
we’re still waiting
It’s already passed
So move your feet from hot pavement
And into the grass
’Cause it’s already passed
It’s already, already passed”
*Published first and during the exhibition run on Village Magazine here
IN THE 1990s, artists working in diverse mediums, from painting to installation, redescribed the world in the image of the “non-place”. Coined by French anthropologist Marc Augé, non-places are transitional spaces (motorways, airports, hotel rooms) found between places that are more culturally established and static. In such non-places the socially constructed identity of the individual is less certain, groups cannot form, and loneliness permeates. As Gertrude Stein said, “there is no there in a non-place”.
Art, in one sense, is the display of the parts of the world we don’t notice or value, but discover anew in the work of art
For the contemporary artist, these non-places are a perfect metaphor for a distracted body politic, whose members go about their workaday lives without paying attention to the liminal nooks and crannies of society. In a sense, the transitional non-place is a marvellous foil and opportunity for the artist to exhibit what is in plain sight, something both familiar but ignored by society at large. Art, in one sense, is the display of the parts of the world we don’t notice or value, but discover anew in the work of art.
The most common non-places redescribed by the contemporary artist have an uncanny quality that evince a Freudian influence. Installation artists such as Mike Nelson, Mark Manders, Miroslaw Balka, Gregor Schneider, and photographers Thomas Demand and Jeff Wall, construct strange yet familiar spaces dotted with objects and props, that unsettle their architecture’s normalcy with the theatre of the absurd and the psychology of fear.
photo: Jennifer Harrington
In the same uncanny vein, the conceptual and minimalist artists of the 1970s presented the viewer with almost empty gallery spaces, such as Michael Asher’s removal of a gallery partition to reveal the machinations of the gallery administration and nothing more; or the masturbatory mechanics of desire performed in Vito Acconci’s Seedbed, where the artist jerked off under a solitary timber ramp in an otherwise empty gallery. Closer to the mainstream, Lars von Trier’s Dogville (2003) starring Nicole Kidman, is a good example of how stripping back a film stage to chalk-outlines can haunt the viewer with their own imagination and desires, like the inkblot Rorschach dramatised in the psychological TV drama.
Why the long preface to a review (my first review for Village Magazine) of the solo exhibition We’ll See You Now by Tanad Aaron at Pallas-Projects Dublin? Well, I want to begin this critical venture by making explicit the importance of context and setting in the appreciation — what Christoph Menke calls more appropriately “apprehension” — of contemporary art. If we are dealing with subjectivities and ideologies over truths and facts in the apprehension of art, it helps if you are armed with a little context.
photo: Christina Nicotra
The context (or ghost) that haunts Tanad Aaron’s work at Pallas Projects Dublin is collaboration. For close to a decade the artist has been instrumental in building timber displays and gallery furniture for exhibitions in the Irish art scene. Curators, art institutions and artists have commissioned Aaron’s artisan sensibility to consistent effect. In the early days, Aaron was known as part of a trio of artists (with Andreas von Knobloch and Tom Watt), who made exhibitions on their own terms, not under the aegis of curators and art institutions, who wanted yet another piece of shelving or table to decorate their administrative settings. In these curated contexts Aaron, von Knobloch and Watt became artist-technicians, commissioned for their carpentry skills to fabricate settings for exhibitions, which was at first novel, but then became convention.
Going it alone at Pallas Projects is both an intriguing and challenging prospect for Aaron. Pallas Projects is a small gallery space, divided by a hinged partition that facilitates one large gallery space or two smaller ones. Aaron has gone for the latter configuration, using the larger entrance room to display some wall- and floor-bound objects, including tentative oil paintings that redescribe the shape of the curved ramp that arcs into the smaller room of the gallery.
photo: Jennifer Harrington
The gallery is dark, with the alien vibration of blue and green light emanating from argon tube lights that form illegible doodles in plain sight, or in-hiding under the platform. The lighting, which some might refer to as obsolescent neon without referring to the list of artworks, sets the mood, the feeling, that this is a space that tries to evade easy description. Empty speech bubbles, in their glass and refracted-light manifestations, testify wordlessly throughout the gallery.
For those who aren’t equipped with context, whether historical or local, I can only imagine that Aaron’s exhibition presents a conceptual stumbling block, even though the timber platform is accessible via a smoothly crafted ramp. Craft is a big thing in Aaron’s toolbox. Even in his use of cheap plywood, MDF and paper bags, every corner and edge is finely bevelled and pleated in a dutiful alchemy. So much so that my attention is repeatedly drawn to the corners and edges of his timber fabrications, at the expense of digging deeper into the elusive content.
You might say that this is to Aaron’s credit, that he is not interested in presenting the theories or issues of the day, rather they exist here as sublimation, not a headline. In the user-friendly press release the artist casually signposts to “waiting rooms” and sites of permanence and impermanence. And yet without other signposts, whether philosophical, journalistic, or literary, the installation slip-slides away, always going with the grain, without any breaks in the uniformly tanned language of MDF. If you refer to the gallery map, as I did, it does help to divide and conquer the wholeness of this exhibition into bit-parts, named and orphaned from their maternal MDF embrace.
photo: Jennifer Harrington
Socially primed for pronoun usage, the use of the pronoun we, as in the exhibition title We’ll See You Now, does (or doesn’t) do one of two things: it points to the obvious fascination the art world (and every other institutional bubble) has these days with the we of inclusion and community; or two, it presents the substitution or absence of some agent (doctor) who is introduced with the words, ‘The doctor will see you now’. But, more interestingly, in the context of Aaron’s collaborative history, he has used the pronoun we to introduce a solo exhibition. After years of being instrumental in the exhibitions of others as a scene-setter and stage maker, we presents the ghost of collaboration. Making this a far lonelier and vulnerable exhibition than it would be without context.
Many visitors who frequent visual art exhibitions scapegoat taste, which infers class, in their embrace or rejection of contemporary art. To my mind, a better word to ascribe to the experience of art is ‘predilection’. My predilection when it comes to installation art is that the artist presents the viewer with a physical quandary that taps into the desires and anxieties already inherent in contemporary culture. Aaron’s installation satisfies the visceral memories I have of previous installations, but fails to conjure new ones. That said, it is a significant exhibition to conceive and realise today, not twenty years ago, when installation art of this type was more commonplace.
photo: author
Today, art objects and art experiences have been substituted and commodified as digital images on Instagram. Installation art is the domain of boredom and anxiety, where you bear your frustrations and escape with a haunted sense of self and society. During the pandemic this haunted sense of self-manifested online as the internet aesthetic “liminal spaces”, which pictured eerie non-spaces devoid of people but illuminated by a mood not far off what is installed at Pallas Projects right now. Aaron’s exhibition points towards those feelings, even hints at their radical possibilities for art. I just hope a new generation of artists experience this exhibition as a present and future possibility in their work. We need more exhibitions that test our capacity to experience art as a physical quandary rather than a digital swipe.
Tanad Aaron’s We’ll See You Now continues through 15 July at Pallas Projects Dublin.
THE 411 ON THE 141
On 28 June, 2023, 141 artists — covering various cultural disciplines from architecture to visual art — received an email from the Arts Council stating that they had been awarded the Next Generation Artists Award (25k max + prestige). Alas the content of the email was not for the 141, but for the exclusive handful who were the actual NGA awardees. At the time of writing this, there is no 411 on whether the actual awardees received a PFO. Probably not, as the winners take it all.
Receiving PFO’s in the post, or in more recent years by email — through which you don’t have the psychological cushion of the small envelope (PFO) vs the big envelope (cha-ching) — from the Arts Council after a failed award application is tough, especially in the arts sector, as you are being judged by your peers. The generic phraseology of the PFO doesn’t help, especially: “The applications we received were of a very high standard”. Translated: If the applications were of a lower standard, like yours, you might have had a chance.
I received two PFO’s from the Arts Council this month (June 2023): one for the Individual Artist Bursary (something I never apply to) and one for the Project Award (one I always apply to). I was disappointed, especially the kicked-when-down feeling of it all. But I rethought everything I had planned and committed to (in theory) and felt a little freer without those commitments to produce and realise projects within a specified deadline. All those theoretical partnerships fell away to leave a chalk rubble of institutions that vapourised before my very eyes. I choked a bit on the dust, even shed a tear in the petrified dryness. I would have to de-scab my stale inks, and prime over some older work, but at least I would be free to destroy to my heart’s contempt. I mean content.
The feeling of being awarded dulls in comparison to the feeling of being rejected. As a previous awardee and reject, I know the score, and the score keeps score on both counts. On being awarded you first get an almighty buzz. Then you realise you have signed a contract with a series of commitments that include public outcomes and institutional marriages that have to be honoured (generally speaking, successful Arts Council applications are fed back into the institutional network of galleries, curators and ‘mentors’).
On being awarded, the next year or more of your life will be dedicated to these outcomes and commitments, and the work you make will have to align with the things stated in your application. There is room to swerve off track in respect to such stated outcomes, and the Arts Council neither monitors nor interrogates the dirt roads that you take into the wilderness of procrastination and dead ends of art-making. That said, you feel obliged, ethically or morally or whatever, to not get lost on the Lost Highway. This is public money you have been awarded after all. So you feel civic guilt, even without a god watching.
Artists wouldn’t apply to such awards if they didn’t believe they could win the spoils. So with every PFO there is a shadow of disbelief and desperation. Even though artists have the hope of public funding on this island (unlike stateside where each individual artist receives $1 from the government’s public purse every year), such high hopes can crush when not realised.
I can’t imagine the wave, barrel, wipeout and injury these 141 individual artists experienced on 28 June. No doubt, this latest administrational error has broken hearts and minds. The dopamine dump of acceptance followed by the anger and depression of rejection minutes or hours later is real and unfathomable. The Arts Council’s next day Instagram post with an image of a generic apology was a desperate way to put out fires, but lit a larger one with the oxygenated comment box of hue and cry below.
The Instagram post was a wrong move on the part of the Arts Council. So big was the error that a more personal approach was needed, even direct phone calls to the artists affected, or at the very least more personalised emails, like the ones the NGA awardees surely received, or will receive in the coming days. The language used to respond to such fuck-ups cannot be self-serving or beurocatric or even typed. It has to be spoken, direct, explicit, emotive, like the words spoken directly after the email was sent, including the “fucks”, “shits”, and “oh my god’s”.
Hearts will mend, minds will repress, and artists will move on and survive. They always do. Survive. Some artists will be embittered forever; some artists will be better off without the pressures of realising institutional commitments. This is public money after all, awarded based on its potential to be recycled back into the public as cultural capital. The calls of nepotism and for people to lose their jobs at the Arts Council is a manifestation of the pressures that artists are under to survive in this world. 141 artists were going to be disappointed no matter what on 28 June. That disappointment was upgraded to devastation with this administrational error.
I’ve fucked-up many times in the past, and will fuck-up many times in the future (I’m probable fucking-up right now writing this text). The person who emailed the 141 is 411 not to blame. A series of missteps and near misses, institutional and personal, led to this mistake. Agreed, it was a royal fuck-up (and we know how fucked-up the royals are), but a fuck-up nonetheless, without malice or intent.
From now on, big brother eyes and administrational hand-holding will be Tarsier big and long at the Arts Council. And yet with all the paperwork institutions have to generate for the digital paper mill of bureaucratic optics these days, more mistakes will inevitably occur. Where there’s paperwork there is the potential for fire; where there’s digital paperwork there’s the potential for an inferno. —James Merrigan
IMAGES: Edward Ruscha, Various Small Fires and Milk, 1964, artist book.
GIVE UP ART
Maria Fusco’s GIVE UP ART is a disappointing book — in retrospect. I read it twice in 2021, hoping it would live up to the fantasy I held for Fusco, whom I first came across as the enigmatic editor of The Happy Hypocrite, what Kaleidoscope Magazine described as being “cloaked in the aura of legend and celebrated as one of the last bastions of experimentation”. But auras are something that institutions want to commandeer, where they burn brightly for a while, before becoming another instrument in the institution. The Happy Hypocrite proffered an alternative for writing on art, and like all alternatives, probably manifested out of the frustration and limitations of not being accepted by the mainstream.
On reading GIVE UP ART I wrote and posted an unpublished letter (pasted below this text) to Maria Fusco, dripping with memetic and prolix descriptions that avoid what Rancière calls the critical and meaningful “excursions” of the word. So it is in retrospect I return to GIVE UP ART in the context of a question I have for myself and the artists in the local art scene: How much time and energy should you give an art scene before you give up on the art scene? (I am emphasising “art scene” not “art” here because the word “art” — in GIVE UP ART — encapsulates or threads two parallel worlds, the private world of the artist’s studio, and the public world of exhibiting and promoting.)
Let me explain.
Maria Fusco’s proclamation GIVE UP ART is something artists recite to themselves all the time (I’m reciting it right now as I write this). Sometimes give up art comes dressed as a promise, but most of the time, a threat. But what does the artist mean by their promises and threats to give up art?
I feel it’s not art the artist is promising or threatening to give up here, art as in the bare making and doing of things in the studio. Whereas ART in GIVE UP ART is a standin for everything outside the pleasures and obsessions of the artist’s studio. Everything that promises more than the act of making and doing. Everything that promises a public and a way to sustain a life and career as an artist in the eyes of a public.
Those artists that promise or threaten to GIVE UP ART are talking about the pursuit of art outside the studio. And yet is it possible or healthy to separate private and public in the work and life of an artist? Isn’t art activated by the outside? And this dependency on the outside is both the promise of more, and the threat of nothing?
The picture of the button-sized badge on the front cover of Maria Fusco’s book is another stand-in, a punkish-pukish self-portrait. The book is dust-jacketed in two self-portraits, one a metaphor (the badge), the other a full-page glam head. The metaphor of the badge doesn’t exactly offset the glamour of the head shot. In a sense it compounds the issue I have for books that are too self-consciously complicated about the setting in which the words are protectively cradled. As if words could never survive in the prosaic world of arbitrariness and distraction. The button badge is a badge of honour. The wearer of the badge who proclaims GIVE UP ART is resisting its tug on their shirt in their daily routine of being an artist. The badge is a reminder that art is — in Deleuze’s word — “resistance”, or at least the thug of resistance on your T-shirt or leather jacket.
My promise and threat to give up art is chronic. Weirdly I gave up my making and doing art in the studio over 10 years ago before the birth of my son. And yet I didn’t give up on the art I have located here outside the studio as an empty promise and threat, named the artworld. I have worn Fusco’s badge, but the needle has pricked too hard and too persistently. To give up art, metaphorically, is not not a form of resistance. What such a badge represents to me, as an art critic, is a meta standin for real resistance, real criticism. To wear a badge that proclaims GIVE UP ART is fashionable resistance a la Urban Outfitters.
Fusco’s book title is meta in all the ways meta exists in the artworld. Sometimes I think the artworld is meta in every conceivable way, in the way it takes risks without the risk. Especially in how it inhabits the world as a reclusive reflection of the hurts of the artist and the whims of the rich. The artworld (spelt one word, the way I have always spelt it) exists as distance, denial or avoidance of the real world. The artworld is nothing but a fantasy. Something that promises the threat of the promise.
If the artworld is so bad, why is it so hard to GIVE UP ART? I think when you become aware of the artworld, after exiting the privacy of your bedroom to reveal the drawing hidden under the crook of your elbow, it becomes a horizon of promise to aim for, even though the waves are rare, high, short-lived and crushing. Ignorance is bliss is defining and determinant in an artist's work and life. In the Jean-Michel Basquiat documentary The Radiant Child (2010), a contemporary of Basquiat’s blames the market rise of the artist in the 1980s, for poisoning his brain of the promise of more than the No Wave bohemian dereliction of the New York artist’s 1970’s lifeworld could ever promise.
I came out from under the crook of my arm immediately after my MFA. I rode the wave and got off before it crashed. I enjoyed it. But the Irish art circuit is acute, hairpin corners that turn back on themselves, so you end up reversing down the road you whence came. Awareness can’t be unseen. And when you avert your eyes and contact from what was seen, what was seen becomes fantasy, the most insidious eye.
So what are the alternatives to the art institution? There is always a sadness when artists not only become aware of a bigger world outside their studio, but also when they are picked up by the institution in all its various commercial and reputational economies. As an art critic, I have watched artists come and go and hang-on. In my experience, when artists get what they want from the international artworld, they invariably cut ties with the local art scene, unless they have a local institutional job (Isabelle Graw discusses this phenomenon in The Benefits of Friendship). When artists don’t get what they want from the local or international artworld, they get resentful and retreat into some regional backwater, or GIVE UP ART for good.
And yet I really think we can create alternatives, or at least start thinking alternatives that are not the accepted, unthinking kind. Being accepted is the worst style. Being alternative means being small but influential, critical but not mean-spirited, generous but selective, against but also for something. Art is not the commercial gallery, museum, art fair, art magazine, Instagram. Art is an attitude. Art is resistance. And art owes you nothing, in the end.
———————
Dear Maria Fusco.
Although I really couldn't afford it, as per the subtext of your inerasable and inductive essay… Incunabulum... I treated myself to a hardback copy of your most recent book GIVE UP ART: when did desire (or art) ever yield to the banality of responsibility? I’ve worn your book for the last week as a way to get to know it as a ‘thing’—in Susan Sontag’s terminal terminology. The glossy wraparound with two portraits of you, front and back, past and present; the arachnid knitted hardback; the yoke yellow dermis—sounds like Bataille. Thing is, I've had a fidelity for books as objects for as long as I can remember, certainly before I could read. I remember, the same way I can remember the worried palms of my mother’s hands, the book covers and bindings of my brother’s and sister’s copies of Animal Farm, The Old Man and the Sea and The Witches of Eastwick. Learning of the story behind the badge pictured on the cover of your book, an object from your childhood that has the aftershock of prescience considering where you have ended up on the back cover alongside James Elkins’ em-dash (note: not en dash) salute, gives this book the providence of autobiography, proffering a narrative beyond the content to layer another dermis, especially for those that value and treat art objects—if this is indeed Art as Martin Herbert blurbs (which I think it is)—as receptacles for lives that can be owned, worn, worn. The object that I acknowledged first on the cover as a badge that you might wear on one’s well-worn punk lapel is, beneath the patina of art criticism, a needle that threads you to the book’s contents. Two portraits, front and back, you the wearer and the wearable, is generous. Very generous. When I read Herbert’s phrasing of your phrasing as “angular” I thought of Dostoyevsky’s “cater-corner” and David Foster Wallace's “athwart”. But blurbs, always performative, don’t get to the muscle of your verbal gait. As I perused and palmed your book all this week I felt that I was always walking sideways into some of your sentences, slipping headlong into an entrance that was too narrow for the wide breadth of my shoulders, that interminable male Ego, a badge turned inward, beneath the skin, but the pin still visible as a piercing, forever chrome. I am still questioning the performativity of writing on art, not just yours, but all writing on art. Mine. You have made me dip into the dictionary a few times during this one. The list of words: Metaleptic, Theurgic, Utile, Ipseity, Titration, Incunabulum, Nosological. Maybe I have words that you don’t know? Or you don't care to know… truth and caring that Heideggerian romance. I'm not sure if I would borrow from this list. Why not! I see you used the academically self-conscious “apposite” once and the almost hardcore “apt” more than once. I have a thing about ‘apposite’--as an editor I've asked writers to drop it. My thing. At the moment, by my bedside, Vladimir Nabokov and Jack Kerouac are stacked seven-years high, presenting performance and experience as a double bind. Nabokov has made me trip and dip more than most, especially in the beginning; he's an unadulterated and unapproachable performer. Kerouac is the verbal equivalent of a rush of experience. For now I am at this fork; performance one way, experience the other. Two fingers that give me permission to either fuck or love. I am left with your shade-of-grey endnotes and your trysts and turns in the book shop. I leave you with one sentence by Kerouac (a gift I hope) wherein performance and experience merge towards the very end of On the Road. It was worth it! Don't you think? Here's to our own personal Pooh Bear!
“So in America when the sun goes down and I sit on the old broken-down river pier watching the long, long skies over New Jersey and sense all that raw land that rolls in one unbelievable huge bulge over to the West Coast, and all that road going, and all the people dreaming in the immensity of it, and in Iowa I know by now the children must be crying in the land where they let the children cry, and tonight the stars'll be out, and don't you know that God is Pooh Bear? the evening star must be drooping and shedding her sparkler dims on the prairie, which is just before the coming of complete night that blesses the earth, darkens all the rivers, cups the peaks and folds the final shore in, and nobody, nobody knows what's going to happen to anybody besides the forlorn rags of growing old, I think of Dean Moriarty, I even think of Old Dean Moriarty the father we never found, I think of Dean Moriarty.”
*Note: As my letter to Maria Fusco exemplifies, words are seductive things. In the reading of words, a formalism takes hold in the reader/writer that is transposed later onto the act of writing. Belle Lettre, beautiful word, beautifully said, says it all. It was the phrase art critics used at the moment, some 10 years ago, in defence and defiance against the wave of art writing that flooded the art world. James Elkins’ blurb on the back cover about the possibilities of nonfiction that Fusco practises is interesting. As the art academic par excellence, who writes with academic h-index purpose not belle lettre frivolity, Elkins’ praise can be read in many ways, two ways being that Fusco does something Elkins wishes he could do with words, or doesn’t wish he could do with words.
ART AS LABOUR; ARTIST AS LABOURER
“The labourer stops his arms in order to let his eyes take possession of the place. His ‘disinterested look’ means a disjunction between the activity of the hands and the activity of the eyes. We can call it an aesthetic experience. The aesthetic experience is not the experience of an aesthete enjoying art for art’s sake. Quite the contrary, it is the redistribution of the sensible, a dissociation of the body of the Platonic artisan whose eyes were supposed to focus only on the work of his arms. It is a way of taking time he does not have. This is what emancipation first means: an exercise of equality that is an experience of dissociation of the body, space and time of work.”
Jacques Rancière’s description of aesthetic experience is one without an aesthetic as we know it in the visual arts. There is no image as such, but enough social signposts to bring an image to mind. Contra aesthetic, it is a deeply political scene. “The labourer stops his arms in order to let his eyes take possession of the place.” Designated as a labourer, we are immediately thrown into an activity that is determined by production over creativity, reification over daydreaming. This is a place far, far away from art for art’s sake.
I first ask: What labour and production is taking place in this non-place? And When? Is it the quaint scene of the seventeenth century artisan, where and when Rancière likes to build his proletarian characters within bourgeois power narratives? Or is it a cartel drug lab, where half-naked women cut drugs in a snowglobe of cocaine-shuttered light. Or is it the studio setting of the contemporary painter, taking a breather to gaze at the stillness of the image that has been worked through and over, over time?
Work and time, labour and art are the things I have been working through and over these last few months (my recent article GIVE UP ART discusses similar ideas). Rancière’s philosophies of the poor, education, aesthetics and politics has helped me with these ruminations; rumination being a psychic process that focuses and leans into the negative content of the past or present.
Rancière defines aesthetics not in relation to art or beauty, or the man of taste considering the work of art at a distance, a disinterested distance, but within the not special, not unusual or interesting (ordinary) workaday. Certainly not a cocaine snow globe.
For Rancière the relationship between politics and aesthetics came long before the relationship between art and aesthetics. That is why Rancière’s passage on the labourer is exorcised of the artifice of aesthetics a la art. There are no distentrested objects to consume for art’s sake. There is just the labourer and the setting, whatever, wherever and whenever that workaday setting may be.
Rancière’s labourer has no time, but still takes the time. This taking of time to reflect and pause, to occupy a moment without labour, is freedom, what Rancière calls emancipation, and in this instance “aesthetic experience”, or other instances, the “distribution of the sensible”. Distribution is important in Rancière’s terminology. Especially when you ask some critical questions, such as: Who gets to take or enjoy aesthetic experience? For whom is aesthetic experience for? The art of the past proffers a picture of what Rancière’s scene might look like before the taking of aesthetic experience.
Gustave Courbet’s The Stone Breakers (1849), destroyed during the bombing of Dresden in 1945, portrays men at work in the sweat, dirt and smell of building stone walls. One heaves, the other breaks. As we look at the painting we can imagine others standing alongside us, the bourgeoisie, us and them experiencing the painting as aesthetic experience in the curtained and smokey parlour of art for art’s sake. In the painting’s setting there is a dog-ear of blue sky, the sun’s angle high, its flash, Polaroid. It’s meta in all the ways art interpretation and criticism is meta — self fulfilling prophecy or paradox. It’s a strange painting, especially considering Rancière’s vignette and the Realism that Courbet propagandised through his art.
I have been ruminating on Rancière’s labourer based on the idea that the contemporary artist is still a labourer after all this time, with less freedoms or power under the wing of an arts administration that calls the shots. The artist is not so distinct from Rancière’s labourer as the artist might claim. What is the difference between the artisan in their workshop, skilfully making objects within the setting of the local community, versus the artist making objects for the gallery and its collectors. Are Courbet’s stone breakers artisans, artists or labourers?
The only difference is the setting, and the meanings attached to labour. The artist’s work, after it goes public, speaks more than the artisan’s mute craft and pragmatism. The contemporary artist is above community and utility. The contemporary artist speaks; the contemporary art audience speaks; and money whispers in the aisles.
Two years ago I discussed — in a text named To be: The Painter — Philip Guston’s (or John Cage’s) chimeric observation on the ontology of the artist at work:
“I believe it was John Cage who once told me, ‘When you start working, everybody is in your studio—the past, your friends, enemies, the art world, and above all, your own ideas—all are there. But as you continue painting, they start leaving, one by one, and you are left completely alone. Then, if you’re lucky, even you leave.’”
I responded to the anecdote: “When the almost too famous line is spoken aloud by painters, or in the presence of painters, it is never elaborated upon. There is no need to elaborate: it is understood, absolute, tout court. It is a line that stages a possibility. The line unburdens the painter of all their fears, their “past”, their “friends (let’s from now on call a spade a spade: ‘influences’) & “enemies”, their “art world”, “and above all” else, their “ideas”, releasing them to do the doing of painting, before the verb of painting inevitably, and sometimes regrettably, becomes a noun.”
I return to Guston’s anecdote here in the context of Rancière's labourer for the same reason the artist finds it difficult to unpack the studio of all the above. What Guston’s anecdote signals is that there is something very sacred about isolation for the artist when working. Without such isolation in body and mind, the act of labour becomes invested in the outside world. The question I have for the gallery artist: After you jettison everyone and everything from the studio, why on earth do you invite them back in? Why do artists exhibit, especially in settings that are about the sale and flip of art objects? What is art for? Is it simply the consumption of luxury goods so the privileged can exercise aesthetic experience minus the exercise of labour?
The artist’s hope of jettisoning everything, even extricating themselves from the process, is the only way towards art in Cage’s and Guston’s mythology. If we create synonyms for “the past”, “your friends”, “enemies”, “the art world”, what Guston is referring to here is exterior influences. Coming from Cage, the composer of negation, is understandable. But you can understand why artists like Guston are attracted to this idea of complete erasure and exorcism, like Rauschenberg erasing or exorcising DeKooning for his own material and reputational gains.
To my mind, labour and aesthetic experience go hand in hand. Perhaps, as labourers, artisans and artists, we can only experience aesthetic experience in relation to labour. Whereas the soft-handed transaction of art as commodity in the public sphere of galleries and art fairs is not aesthetic experience. These types of transactions are empty gestures. Aesthetic experience, for the artist, is the blind and empty labour of art making which, from time to time, opens a fissure in space and time, no bigger than a dog-eared sky.
Andrea Fraser asks “What do I, as an artist, provide?” I find this question hard to swallow, as it points towards the service industry. Provide? Whom? The galleries? The artworld? The art administration? The artist? I ask: “What is art for?” Maurizo Cattelan answers both our questions, but more importantly, Rancière’s distinction between the hand and eye, making and looking: “I don’t know what art does for people who look at it, but it saves people that make it.”
—James Merrigan
VENICE VIGNETTES 2022
Honestly, I never enjoy entering the Irish Pavilion, & I have been doing this since 2009 (except for John Gerrard’s “collateral” event that same virgin year). There’s something subjective already brewing inside that obscures one’s POV in terms of one’s own National Pavillion. An inadequate objectivity, like not seeing the wood for the trees in a familial relationship. Pure subjectivity. Those Irish writers that do write on the aforementioned take a travel-writer approach, which induces the fantasy of distance & ends up like Lonely Planet promo, with no real effort to break through their intimate & complicated relationship to the Irish artist’s work. Perhaps it’s public expectation, or the unsaid or empty “amazings” that come with such reputational economies. O’Malley’s metal, glass & video works work on the level of “through a glass darkly”. They do that mid-century modern & minimalist thing of utilising space, poetic space, to pause, to think, to speculate, to imagine beyond their holey architecture. You have to bring yourself to O’Malleys work, to be solicited by it. The artist is not speaking here in tongues or testaments, she is mouthing meaning, serifs without font. Her sculptures attune to the nature of negative space & positive movements — air blows through a filmic vent, a crow bobs its head in water: elemental. Atomised up close, soldered at a distance, & vice versa, intimacy & distance tag team in this controlled affair with silhouettes of the elemental. Following what is always a hysterically installed Arsenale compared to the gallery structure of the main-space Giardini & most of its Pavilions, O’Malley’s installation reads as a Giardini show within the Arsenale. No spectacle; the spectacle, like subjectivity, resides in the uncanny gap between perception & the essence of a thing, a thought, a pathological bobbing crow, the soft shuttering of a vent. But is composure a good thing in Venice? Should we go full-Eurovision? I don’t know. I like O’Malley’s work here. It verges on the transparent & self-shielding but leaves itself open to be invisible or bruised. It shows & conceals without being erotic. An earthly accident that may go unnoticed.
Located outside the main-space Arsenale, Peru’s Pavilion is a true outlier in temperament, tone & time. The artist’s name is Herbert Rodríguez. Remember him. His work comes out of the socio-political instability in Peru in the mid-1980s, situated in the crossfire between successive militant state governments & the communist party Shining Path. Rodríguez’s critical subjectivity is not bourgeois reflexivity — the luxury of time is not on his side. There’s a punk urgency to his social manifesto, collaged & conjoined to resist the politically oppressive agenda via a subterranean ideal, the punk underground. Though the underground is an ideology born of the very thing it tries to rally against, institutions & authoritarianism, a rebellion that ends up being recycled by the same institutions — like here in Venice, there’s something about the chewing & spitting of mass-media imagery against the backdrop of political propaganda that retains a DIY spirit. Compared to Barbara Kruger, who takes centre stage in the Arsenale, & who we laugh & love along with as bourgeois consumers in a knowing meta-institutional critique, the “zombie argument” still stands: Kruger’s work exists in & because of the very institutions it critiques. Rodríguez’s craft is less FUTURA-fast, truncated or on the nose. The curators of this retroactive retrospective spanning just 5 years (1985-1990) try unsuccessfully to connect what drove Rodríguez to what drives the overriding earth-mother craftiness of the 59th Biennale. The curators plainly state in the cheap takeaway newspaper catalogue the artist was against one thing that undergirds every Biennale: bourgeois culture backed by big institutions, countries, galleries, money, power. The whole punk DIY mood is retained in how the curators display work on MDF partitions & under glass in chipboard display cases, strikingly unlike the civilised vitrines protecting Marlene Dumas’ drawings in the Palazzo Grassi. Herbert Rodríguez did then what today’s *content as culture* youth do today: recycle the image so it loses itself. But his agenda seems different somehow. There’s no vision of a better world here, just the world as it was, is, will be.
Why is Francis Alÿs’ work the most moving work in Venice this year? It’s difficult to express in words, because there’s no words. No rhetorical or metaphorical justifications. No identity politics. No vaunted inclusiveness. No irony, or disguised cynicism as irony. No minimal absences or maximal excesses. No critical posturing or medium competitiveness. No egos or individualism. No theory thumping, feminist or climate-change oratory. No meta-reflections or regressions on art about art. No context or closed esoteric framing. No archive or legacy touting. No marvelous excavations in history or the artist’s warped mind. No “familiar” or familiarising. No cheap empathetic tactics or political, social or cultural bandwagoning, waving or saluting. What there is, is children. Children at play. That’s it. That’s all. Sure, there’s that rarest type of painting, paintings that have a consistent mood (not style) in a painter’s repertoire, that dot the entrance rooms to the Belgium Pavilion like snapshots from an orphaned traveller’s family album. But that’s not what makes Alÿs work special. It’s his video installation of children playing games on the sand, soot, snow, desert, concrete, everywhere, with the merest of means. That’s it. No clever conceit or aha moment, just that — children playing games & captured in the present moment playing them, for fun, for friendship. Overall, it’s a quiet Biennale this year. Here it’s crowded. No queues, just an unadulterated hoard of adults with eyes open & lips upturned. The smile is contagious. Alÿs manages to indirectly express what other artist’s try to express through themselves via an entity divorced from every adult artist, an entity whose sense of play & subjectivity the artist wants back: the child. And it’s nothing to do with innocence. Children are more Macivillian in their desires than adults can ever remember. Children’s play is for its own sake. It's a nihilistic play. Play that is born to be destroyed so it can be born again. Like the Phoenix, it’s golden. If there is a message to be gleaned here, it’s one pragmatist Richard Rorty said time & again, the world can only be saved with our children’s future in mind.
The architectural determinism of the Palazzo Ducale Venice deterministically prevents any detours or by-passes through the labyrinthine stone stairways & grand rooms of marbel, panelling & painting. In other words - you are corralled where to go. So you go & go & go. A long time ago I appreciated this type of painting in books, when it was compressed down to a page, a photograph, cropped by the art historian who must have kitted out this place in scaffolding to blot out the rest, in order to find some recondite gesture or secret pentimenti to make a name for himself among his monocle-wearing peers. Or he just saw it in books like me. Here, taking it all in, in one breath, it reads as craft, as tradition, as toil, as rule-bound, as silly, as patronage, as deterministic. It’s fine, fine art even, but art is definitely a different thing today. Anyway, we are here for Anselm Kiefer, the big German man-artist of metaphysical painting who rolls around in the phenomenological dirt, toil, guilt & alchemy of history, which is all myth through his eyes. Fuck, they are big. After the Disneyland courtrooms of god signalling, here is a painter as god & without god. Whereas the renaissance that leads to here tries to render the metaphysical, Kiefer digs it up. These are dirty paintings, drenched in metal rain, treacherous gold & silver. But let’s take the monocle off for a second, they are dumb too. (Sorry for all the following repeated “actuals”.) There’s an actual metal coffin flung open in one; there’s a line of actual bicycles ET-style ranging across the top of another; & down low, a school of actual metal toy submarines. But, fuck me they are big. Everyone is a Sunday painter in comparison, or Thursday painter (Luc Tuymans paints on Thursdays. True story!). With the monocle back on, what Kiefer does really well is landscape. The scale helps, but looking from afar, or adrift, he transcends landscape painting into actual landscape; landscape embroiled in the dawn & dusk of civilisation, when there was no civilisation, no renaissance, no rebirth, no middle, just twilight burning on both ends. And there were tingles! Dare I say it, a religious experience (without a god).
THE PERFORMATIVE ATTITUDE
Believe me, when a critic calls out another critic on something they have written, there is always something behind it. Call it posturing, or a fear of irrelevance, there's something behind it. It took a few days to decide whether or not to post this text. I wondered what was the value of such a response, what did it matter. Was I performing the same thing I was being critical of? Would it be better just to shrug off the above tweet as social media performance (something we are all guilty of), or invest some time in the emotion that made the artist share the tweet with me in the first place. I think I would have shrugged it off if I had come across it directly on Twitter, not second hand by text message. “Twitter is not writing, it’s signalling.” (Margaret Astwood). And yet this tweet's whispered momentum made it more attractive. What was it about this shruggless tweet that kept parroting on my shoulder? To be honest it was the critical attitude performed in the two sentences conjoined by the personal and the public, the confessional and the performative, all entangled in the artist, institution and journalist that interested me. It was also the timing. After years of writing art criticism, I have only recently begun to question the performative in writing on art, whether an excess in irony, sincerity, modesty, posturing, or the literary, all masks that afford the writer evasiveness rather than commitment. Lastly, but perhaps most importantly, it is the artist's shugging silence that meets a social media post like this that rubs me the wrong way. I know I have publicaly silenced artists from time to time through my art criticism, negative or positive or performed, but I have always tried (and failed) my very best to unpack my later criticism in long form. Even though art criticism is dead, I still find myself invested in its zombie purpose. To write is to resist.
A few things need to be disclosed before I continue: I am a friend of the artist named in the above tweet, and I participated as an interviewer and writer for the exhibition in question; I have not corresponded with Damien Flood at the time of writing this response as I did not want to create any more conflicts of interest or biases that already exist. Knowing all this I would like you, the reader (artist or other), to do a thought-experiment: while reading the above tweet, substitute Damien Flood's name with your own name, and see how it rubs.
At first glance the above tweet posted at 12.40pm on July 9th 2021 by art journalist Gemma Tipton, and forwarded to me by an artist but not the artist directly addressed in the tweet, may not warrant such close analysis, being a tweet written when “hungover”. But here I am digging into a banality that seems to give a more profound picture of the social media world we perform in, than something supposedly more profound in its ambitions and the subject that provoked this tweet, art.
It is the compliment “Loving” used to soften the original intent of the critical expression to follow that can be used as an opportunity to helter skelter the sobriety of Irish newspaper art criticism, something that Irish artists have forever been disenchanted with but tolerate for promotion sake, into one that might be more drunk, interesting, and absurd in its knee-jerk manifestations online. What's the harm in criticising a gallery map anyway?
Well, context decides. We first have to take into account the context of a newspaper journalist with over 3,000 followers writing for one of the few mainstream newspapers that cover visual art in this country. Should a person of rare journalistic influence in the arts critique the administration of the gallery setting in a hungover state, a state that precludes one to experience the exhibition the way it was set up to be experienced in the first place, and then tweet it? Is the map the problem, or is the hangover the problem? Is the relationship between hangover and map not mutually inclusive?
Let's take the first line “Loving Damien Flood @RHAGallery but am way too hungover to negotiate the gallery map.” “Loving” of course is social media argo, like the ubiquitous “amazing” and “great” on Instagram. It's a way of saying something positive without doing the work. It is the public proclamation of your presence in the here and now of the gallery, on your own time, experiencing the free work of art, and the artist and institution in question should be privy to that fact, along with any default followers. In essence, tweets posted while in the art gallery are more about the person posting them than the event they are momentarily hosting on their social media feeds. This is the point of such expressions, whether hungover or not. “Loving, amazing, great” are not, I repeat not, value judgments. They are expressions that barely exist before floating into the air like the child's birthday balloon. The crying comes much later, and in private.
“Loving” followed by “but” can be translated as, “I was loving this but…” It's a case of stringing Cupid's bow but twanging the arrow's release and missing the heart. And there's lots missing here in this tweet (not just gallery wall numbers). Further, the misses are performative misses; for instance the missing 'I' in “but am way too hungover”. This is of course another symptom of social media expression, to feign casualness through grammatical suicide. We do this all the time to inscribe tone or attitude in our free and loose social-media commentary, which goes by a set of rules harsher and more institutionalised than the ones policed by the outside world. Just because we are in control of the rules of our expressions doesn’t mean they are not institutionalised, whether by Facebook or other people posting and policing your feed. This tweet, critically banal but fascinatingly absurd as it may be, brings to the surface the existence of the private consciousness we all bear but somehow believe we subsume beneath our tonal acrobatics via word use, emoji choice and abbreviation on social media towards some attitude that is conditioned by the external world that we think we are resisting.
The second line of the tweet — “Would even a small and discrete number here and there be too much to ask?” — is not a question but a criticism and rhetorical demand: of course the exhibition at this stage of its run will not be changed based on an individual's tweet no matter who they are. It's the “too much to ask” that is performative. The only question is: to whom is the tweet being addressed, the artist or the institution, as usually both have a hand in the administration of the gallery setting? The tweet's openness is the issue here. (Damien Flood is not tagged in the tweet, the RHA Gallery is, but the artist will surely find out about it, either as to alert him of its absurdity or its promotional value, the same way I was alerted to its existence second hand by way of a text message.)
A criticism of a gallery map (which indeed looks like a pinball machine) is the most banal criticism. However banality should not be confused with harmlessness. The question that such a banality proffers – written as it was in a “hungover state” – is: was the hangover the cause of Gemma Tipton’s inability to navigate the map? Most likely. Was the absence of gallery wall numbers the cause of Gemma Tipton’s confusion? Perhaps. Or was the tweet, written in the cabbage sweat of a hangover, just a silly amalgamation and manifestation of all those things: hangover, map, performative tweet? I use "silly" performatively to make my next point.
I understand provocation as someone who has practised it many times as an freelance art critic for over a decade. In my youthful criticism I used provocation to elicit a response from what I felt was a silenced arts body politic. As someone who was an exhibiting artist, shy in temperament and evasive of conflict in the real world, I performed my provocations absolutely, which is one of the reasons I worked under the moniker Billion Journal for so long, as I could shore the responses to my criticism on a psychologically separate island. But I grew up, and decided to really think through my tendency and desire to critique – criticism being something I think is more necessary today than ever – to bridge the gap between a probing journalistic temperament and one that is more critically nuanced and reflective on the personal source of that naturally dissenting attitude.
Social media is a performative space where we create attitudes not real people. The harmful thing about this is we begin to believe in our social media attitude because of the validation it gets, validation we do not get in real life. Social media is a personal poison but also a spiralling venomous snake held by the tip of the tail. I learnt in recent years that art criticism is about working through rather than over the personal source of your criticisms of the world in private before sharing those criticisms with the world in essay form. Nothing less will do. You are implicated in your criticisms – that's the personal risk. The performative brevity of social media is not the place for commited art criticism, because it is entangled in the performative attitude of the individual.
—James Merrigan
Sarah Pierce, vinyl text (Detail) IMMA, May 2023
LOVE, SARAH
“...when this community dissolves, it leaves the impression that it could never have existed, even if it existed. ”
“Myths never were, they always are. ”
“There really is no such thing as Art. There are only artists. ”
“The artist is a myth. ”
The artist Sarah Pierce has always been an enigma to me, a myth. I say this with trepidation, as I don't necessarily want this line to find her in the world (if she exists).
During my time as an MFA student at NCAD Dublin, I came to know the website named “The Metropolitan Complex”, and via that website the name “Sarah Pierce”. Today I know what it was about the name The Metropolitan Complex that struck a nerve more than 15 years ago. It wasn’t its ChatGPT definition — : “a region consisting of a densely populated urban core and its less-populated surrounding territories”. It was more that the name pointed to my own insecurities as a hicksville native living in the big city. I hadn’t acquired a metropolitan complex, because I wasn’t fully institutionalised by the city, or for that matter, NCAD. I was equipped with the idea that the city was the place where I would find myself as an artist, not the Wicklow mountains. Further, I would grow to know, with the help of one supervisor in particular, Joan Fowler, that the art institution would be the thing that I would end up questioning after a honeymoon period of flirting for its attention.
The enigmatic and mythical status I hold for Sarah Pierce is not only based on never meeting her in person, or having an image of her to project some idealistic personality onto, or the fantasy that she doesn’t exist at all. It’s more that her unobtrusive presence in the Irish art scene, a presence that doesn’t force itself into the community as ego, but locates itself on the periphery, is enigmatic and mythical in the way psychoanalyst James Hillman describes myth: “We live myth before we declare it as ‘myth.’”
At the time of coming across The Metropolitan Complex I was painting, and I had no real idea as to what contemporary art was or could be. I was fresh meat; innocence caught in the headlights of the art institution. Through word of mouth the name Sarah Pierce would be voiced from time to time, but never really manifested for me as an object-experience in the world. In the early days I’m sure I experienced Sarah Pierce’s work at Lee Welch’s Four Gallery and Annie Fletcher’s EVA, and certainly at NCAD Gallery, but I can’t really invoke or describe what those object-experiences were, except for some text-based works on brown paper, and the Laocoön sculpture, borrowed and relocated from the NCAD campus.
Laocoön sculpture, NCAD Gallery
All I knew was, the artist named Sarah Pierce made work that had elements of discursivity which propagandised community against and within the administrational setting of the institution of exhibition-making (or something like that). I was a fan, and still am a fan of Andrea Fraser’s narcissistic institutional critique, which interrogates the institutions of the exhibition and the artist with the very agents and stationary that prop up the art institution. But whereas Fraser psychoanalytically splits to embody the agents and stationary to self-harming extremes, such as in Untitled 2003, my sense of Sarah Pierce’s work was she herself is absent.
And yet such absence is auteurist in nature. The ready-made research that digs deep into the archive for the forgotten and marvellous is left to do its cultural ventriloquising of history and precedent, presented before the — once again — headlights of the art institution and its wilful but lost audience. Sarah Pierce's work presents what James Hillman defines in terms of myth, as being something that is not about history or memory, but something existing in the world throughout time for eternity.
So it was with eagerness and curiosity I headed to IMMA where a reiteration of several of Sarah Pierce’s projects, exhibitions, and performative gestures are formalised within the conceptual framework (or conceit) of a 20 years solo exhibition, what some might shorthand as “retrospective”. What is tricky about this in respect to the nature of Sarah Pierce's work, the nature of which I have just been discussing here as an art practice that doesn’t come to fruition, but continues to conceptually posit and critically poke within the framework of its own dissemination, is that the artist is figuratively cornered in rooms with mirrored walls and ceilings of her own making. Sarah Pierce’s practice packaged as a retrospective within the grand Georgian domesticity of IMMA, reads as a museum show in the old not new sense. The originary exhibitions, presented as scenes within scenes, are displaced from their specificity, their original motivations and movements within the previous architectures of their conception. They lose their ‘where’ and ‘when’.
The artist’s hope for their art to be reanimated and not succumb to its deathly collision with its own history is, most of the time, a lost hope. The archive, unlike myth, was. And anyway, I am very suspicious of the importance that artists and especially curators place on the archive. The curator is more attuned and dependent on history, who archives the present before the present has even begun. Whereas the artist is dependent on history for allies and permission to push the envelope of art from the past into the present. The archive seldom reanimates the present. The artwork is, most of the time, mortal.
To ‘redescribe’ — a word most commonly used within reach of the psychoanalytic couch — Sarah Pierce’s exhibitions as they are presented here at IMMA would be the worst tautology. The video installations, with supplementary museological texts and artefacts, need to be patiently perused, so you get a sense of the scenarios orchestrated, or mythologised, by the artist. Beyond the indescribable, more abstract gestures and materiality reorientate me into a space where text and meaning is jettisoned for more formally quizzical conversations between this readymade and that slice of fabrication. These outside-the-crop Thomas Demand sites of residual and littered double-entendre fabrications manifest as the Freudian dream, a Germanic Brechtian-Beckettian theatre, where form and content are found to be two sides of the same coin, or möbius strip.
Unlike Andrea Fraser, whose work critically channels the art institution via Andrea Fraser herself (or whom we have come to know as the “welcome” persona non grata apropos the art institution, Sarah Pierce is mostly absent in this series of reiterative presentations of her work at IMMA. This absenteeism, or objective omnipotence, is best signified in the series of interviews with individual or paired artists presented on a stepped stage. Before putting on the headphones, the landscape of TV-screened talking heads emphasises the body language of the artists. The kind of body language an artist holds when confronted with the why’s and what for’s of their art. Sarah Pierce’s questions to the artists are substituted with intertitles and a backing-track accompaniment of the punk persuasion. It is all very familiar territory, at once performed and seemingly sincere. These are artists who have been in the game and know the game. They know that when questions about art are posited in the name of art, there is always something meta in their delivery. Their shrugs and pauses and smiles say it all without saying anything deterministic or insightful. The last question in a line of questioning, is the same last and obligatory job interview question, the Do you have any questions for me kind of question. Sarah Pierce’s answer is edited from the cut.
This is a meta-critique of the art institution I am familiar with, where the exhibition is presented within the exhibition, where a self-referentiality with respect to the mechanisations of the exhibition in the context of the public sphere are presented and portrayed in the stationary and museology of the exhibition, where questions of censorship and the ambivalences that come with the translation and manifestation of the artist’s emotional and cerebral world into rooms within rooms within the exhibition, within the institution, within the fantasy and ideology of art being more, or the same as the institution that controls and conditions its place in the world, form a paradoxical architecture where EXITS become ENTRANCES.
There is always a coldness to the aestheticisation of the art institution, when the artist takes off the blinkers and cognitive dissonance to confront the politics and market context of their art in the public sphere. Represented as art, institutions are spaces where love and sensuality are erased. And yet, three quarters of the way through Sarah Pierce’s exhibition, just past the Brecthian debris, an alcove, an archive, presents both a possibility and quandary. The quandary being: I was unable to engage with the remainder of the exhibition after experiencing and reading what Sarah Pierce has displayed in vinyl text on an alcove wall:
Dear…
I've been thinking about what we do, what it means, how, for whom and why it happens. Much of this includes personal exchanges that surround cultural work.
My attachment to your work, for example.
Our relationships are a form of dissemination. They are our shared condition. I'd like to ask you to take part in a simple project I'm planning in my studio in Dublin.
Please send me something that describes the conditions surrounding your work, something collected, constructed, written or sourced, a work-in-progress, invitation, article, book, photograph, sketch, letter, poem, object, manifesto, video, or CD. Relay an experience or a conversation, something anecdotal, informal and attached.
Other people will see what you've given and if they want to they can add something too.
This is how we'll build an Affinity Archive.
Love,
Sarah
This gesture turns my criticism of the archive as a dusty sacrifice to the mausoleum of civilisation on its head. The simple display of objects sent by artists to Sarah Pierce based on her request above, is a beautiful and lively thing. And yet I had no desire to look through the note pads or books placed on the bockety wooden shelves, even if the warmth of the display lessened the threat of the invigilator’s shout “Don’t touch the artwork”. Nor did I have any desire to take a seat amongst the relational dissemination. The gesture, as defined by the French philosopher Tristan Garcia, in the context of the exhibition and the artwork, is made in the presence of the artist. Here, for the first time, Sarah Pierce is present, explicitly, as “Love, Sarah.” Myth is always attached to a protagonist or character, or what Jung would call an archetype.
Sarah Pierce’s display of other artists’ studio paraphernalia enlivens and unsettles the idea I have of the archive, in the way that Jacques Derrida’s deconstruction enlivens and unsettles the idea of the institution. Contra its more popular definition, Derrida’s deconstruction is more Freudian than Freud is given credit for, especially in its uncanny register. Deconstruction, for Derrida, is already happening within the text or institution in some uncanny corner, perhaps in the archive. Derrida doesn’t deconstruct, he just unpicks the locks and unblinkers the blind spots where deconstruction is already always occurring. Sarah Pierce’s gesture towards artists whom she is attached to personally inserts a hot thermometer in the glacial landscape of this exhibition. And although the artist up to this juncture strikes several matches via the re-setting of institutional narratives and forms, a fire didn’t light in my stomach. Until here, in this alcove, where a fire burned and still burns. So much so that I disengaged from the remainder of the exhibition, returning repeatedly to the alcove to stir the coals.
There’s something about the use of the word “Love” followed by “Sarah” here that destroys the ironical posturing of institutional critique (or reflection), or at least opens it up to new meanings and emotions. Love, for Slavoj Žižek, is destructive, as it is based on selecting someone to love from the crowd or the community. In the proferring of love you risk yourself and the community. In the press release someone writes that “Sarah Pierce: Scene of the Myth asks what it means to gather, reflect, and act in community.” It is the acting “in community” that is significant here, as if it is not a natural instinct or inclination to be communal. We have to perform community to enact community. If we think of community in the context of what Roberto Esposito calls “the misery of new individualisms”, community promises love for the other, even though the other is not always open, willing, or able to love. Jean Luc Nancy and Maurice Blanchot are insightful in respect to love and community, Blanchot writes,
“The community of the lovers [...] has as its essential aim the destruction of society. Wherever a temporary community arises between two beings, who are or are not made for each other, a war machine is constructed, or rather, the possibility of a disaster which, albeit only in infinitely small dosage, carries the threat of universal annihilation.”
All the words that precede “community” in the French philosophical avant-garde, from Maurice Blanchot’s Unavowable Community to Jean Luc Nancy’s The Disavowed Community, negate the possibility of community. And even when community does take on a cohesive cultural form, it either destroys, or inevitably “dissolves… leaving the impression that it could never have existed, even if it existed”. — Maurice Blanchot.
Sarah Pierce’s solo exhibition at IMMA posits the dialectic between the past and the present, history and myth, civilisation and culture, and the archive as a possible repository of presence. Personally, my experience of this panorama of abutting scenes spanning 20 years within the east wing of IMMA is powerful and generous, yet lacking spontaneity. That is until one moment, a moment that suspends my critical judgement that the archive is for the grave. Sarah Pierce remains a myth that is, not was.—James Merrigan
Sarah Pierce’s Scene of the Myth through 3 September 2023
TEXT LAUNCH TEXT
Launch of Issue 3 TEXT at Douglas Hyde Gallery Dublin, featuring artists ORLA BARRY, TONY COKES, ERIK VAN LIESHOUT, ADRIAN PIPER, PAUL ROY, CESAR VAN PINSETT.
“Talk is dirty, writing is clean. ”
We, the editors, have been working on this text-based art project for 18 months. During that time, a time of conversation, correspondence and production, we have performed an ambivalence as to what this project is, as if it was so present-tense or prescient we have yet to confront its essence formally or conceptually. We have embraced this ambivalence, even tried to hang on to it a little, in an effort to retain the spirit and energy of what first-issue contributor Mark Verabioff calls the “first wave”.
Our launch at the Douglas Hyde Gallery Dublin heralds a trilogy of publications, TONE, TOLD & TEXT. What has emerged during this time of production, discussion and sometimes debate, is the question of language-use in culture, culture being defined here in philosopher Gilles Deleuze’s terminology as “resistance”.
In our small art scene there have been text-as-art moments that have been ancillary and provisional. But this is what is important about text as art, it erupts and disappears like every speech act. Text as art works differently than the art object. There is something subversive about its literalism, brazenness and dumbness that seems antagonistic to what we call “visual art”, which works with meaning covertly through image or form.
Text as art is efficiently defined by text-based artist Larry Johnson in an interview with David Rimanelli,
“My job as an editor is to cram a big story into a small space: to forego the short story, to forego anything but the blurb. The idea is to maximise the attention span the reader/viewer has for the work of art, which I imagine to be equal, say, to that of a daily horoscope or beauty tip.”
Text is somehow read as empty in an art context, fugitive, always referring to something full, object or experience of objecthood, or what we might conjugate as object-experience. If we take this line, that text is empty and dependent on some object-experience, then what is an art object?
Today we could claim the art object is not resisting its online reification, but leaning into it. Bruce Hainley writes: “Whether abstract or seemingly not, today’s art is not produced to complicate, disrupt, intensify or question what anything (the world, existence, etc.), is taken to be; nor to move anyone (risking vulnerability, soul); nor even to float new trippy kinds of meaning or meaningfulness or meaningful meaninglessness: it is produced only to have been produced. Reification, I’m pretty sure Uncle Georg warned, isn’t critique, but, you know, whatevs.”
This view could be put down to a hardening of veins on Bruce’s part, through years of breaking down art experience with words, which is another form of reification, like these words written (or spoken) right here, right now. In a sense we reify with words to make sense of a world and a fate that is outside of words. The stranglehold of identity politics and political correctness via the labelling of things and experience feels like it comes out of a desperation to name the unnamable.
In 1976, in his novel Ratner’s Star, the American writer Don DeLillo writes how:
“To bear a name is both terrible and necessary. The child, emerging from the space-filling chaos of names, comes eventually to see that an escape from verbal designation is never complete, never more than a delay in meeting one's substitute, that alphabetic shadow abstracted from its physical source”
In 1989, Slavoj Žižek writes something similar in The Sublime Object of Ideology via Hegel, that “the word is a death, a murder of a thing”. If the word is the murder of a thing, in how a thing named no longer exists as a thing or experience in the world, but as a word, what are the 18 artists who have contributed to TONE, TOLD & TEXT expressing or resisting in the name of the lonely and fetishistic word?
The answer is something antagonistic. Text as art is antagonistic to what we call, inadequately, “visual art”. And yet text is visual, and there is a lot of visuality taking place in all three issues we have produced over the last year: typed, handwritten, colour, font, scale, format and so on. In a sense we experience the form and the content (what is being said) at the same time, which is always a kind of intentional dumb, or what co-editor Alan Phelan described as “silly” in relation to his recent text and stripe-based paintings presented at Molesworth Gallery Dublin. We have come to learn that dumb or silly are the most important things for the artist who is considering text as part of their tool bag.
We are told in art school to not be literal. Artists who use text in their art are going against this dictate, to the point of cliché. They are embracing cliché, believing in cliché, or making cliché more real. These are sentiments or statements that speak the name of art with force and farce. They are essentially dumb, unlike the jargonistic catalogue essays that follow as afterthoughts. Text as art is about puncturing the present, while at the same time vanishing from view. Text as art is about time and timing.
It is an attitude, an attitude tested by the current policing of language. Distilling art into text at this moment of verbal self-consciousness and correctness seems like the worst time (in respect to the mainstream), but best time (in respect to art as something distinct from the mainstream). Language is complicated. Artists are complicated. When art and language come together it is really complicated. But when artists become conflicted, not complicated, art is lost.
From the outset we have asked our contributors to try to avoid, at all costs, the use of images as a backdrop to text, to avoid memes in essence. This editorial directive has not always landed: images, or rather the residual effect of images, have survived the editorial process. This is a symptom of the hold images have on us as artists.
So why adopt pure text as art? Has the image failed us? Is text as art a recognition of the image’s failure to speak for the artist. If so, text as art is a device that gives permission to the artist to express with words, words that are otherwise read or unread in the side-show of gallery literature. Whatever way we take on text as artists, viewers and readers, whether rhetorically, poetically, politically, formally or ironically, text as art poses a particular type of resistance in the visual field of art, especially at a moment when AI language models (GPT) are beginning to do the textual work for us, minus the awkward subjectivities and opinions of what it means to be human.🏴
We invite you to come find out more on May 3rd, 6pm, at Douglas Hyde Gallery Dublin, where a launch will take place with the co-editors and some of the contributing artists.
The third issue TEXT (and a limited number of first and second issues) will be for sale at the launch night. It will NOT be available online as a pdf, or by post, but will be distributed only in-person. 50 copies will be available on the launch night at €20 each, strictly one copy per person. Cash only.
A limited number of copies of Issue 1 *TONE* & Issue 2 *TOLD* will be available for purchase at the launch.
TONE features artists: LAURA FITZGERALD, ALAN PHELAN, JACK PIERSON, LAURE PROUVOST, MARK VERABIOFF, ISOBEL WOHL.
TOLD features artists: FIONA BANNER, GARDAR EIDE EINARSSON, CLAIRE FONTAINE, JAKI IRVINE, DARRAN MCGLYNN, WALKER & WALKER.
Funded by The Arts Council of Ireland and Dublin City Council
REVIEW: ISABELLE GRAW‘S ‘ON THE BENEFITS OF FRIENDSHIP’
“I have now made you, the reader of these pages, an involuntary accomplice in my strategic considerations. And yet by subjecting the text to my stylistic and compositional ideals, I also attempt to place my secrets at a distance. ”
“Just a lonely boy… Would you be my enemy? ”
“Human After All ”
“o philoi, oudeis philos (“O my friends, there is no friend”) ”
Isabelle Graw? Do you know her? Have you read her?
I’ve read her. And yet I know her only insofar as you can know a writer through the verbal repetitions and idée fixes of their prose – verbal idiosyncrasies presently being exorcised via ChatGPT.
I know Isabelle Graw as the co-founding editor of Texte Zur Kunst (which I subscribe to) and her editorials and authored books published by Sternberg Press, whose editions on art criticism and painting I collect without hesitation. I know her through her critical discussions on institutional critique and conceptual painting, and the indivisible interrelationship between artwork and art market. I know her for her practise and advocacy of art criticism. Even though the artists whom Graw is in critical dialogue with, artist who hold a torch to the big, bad artworld in their work (e.g. Merlin Carpenter and Andrea Fraser et al), practise a form of a meta-criticism, being institutionalised and commodified by the very institution they critique, what Fraser laments as the “zombie argument”, something that “comes back and comes back and comes back…”
“To me, the idea of wearing other people’s clothes carries the danger of opening myself up to attack, of no longer being myself, of losing myself. ”
Knowing Isabelle Graw personally might mean feeling resentment towards her. She represents the ideal for an art critic. She is someone who founded an art magazine, and developed a networked community that continues to generate much-needed criticism on the arborescent nature of the artworld, a hierarchical root-branch ecology and economy structured around the relationship between artists and money (“money”, in Martin Amis’ words, being “against culture”). And all this, if that is not enough, against the backdrop of the public and private institutions that warehouse art and the art administration, from curators to collectors. The artworld (spelt one word) is a complicated and competitive lifeworld, full of zombies.
Jacques Derrida, with son.
In all the years I have read her, Graw’s prose has had a measure of distance and transparency in the texts she has written and the interviews she has conducted. I would even call her a young Derridean, in the same way Jacques Derrida, early in his philosophical career, upturned the foundations of contemporary philosophy by showing us that a deconstructive kernel already exists in the institutions of language, and thus the institutions of power. And yet it is not the critical moments of “analytical insight into the power relations and consensus-building processes of the art world” that strikes a nerve in Graw's writings, but the moments when she comes clean in respect to when her personal lifeworld vies with her artworld alliance. These moments are when I feel a human life living behind the text.
“Friendship was [Derrida’s] first criterion of choice. ”
The first time I read Graw getting personal about her lifeworld was in a Spike Magazine interview with Timo Feldhaus entitled “Isabelle Graw On Kids in the Artworld” (the interview title intimating the artworld and lifeworld are separate). In the interview she discusses her personal split in devotion to art after becoming a “so-called older mother” in 2006, explaining: “I had, after all, devoted myself passionately to writing or, more precisely, to theorising about artistic practices and I subordinated everything to this primacy. One consequence of this focus on work was that my social relationships were largely instrumental: I would scarcely have concerned myself with anyone who didn’t interest me in relation to my work.” It is this word “instrumental” apropos “friendship” that is the zombie that returns again and again in her latest book On The Benefits of Friendship.
Writing this review, I feel myself being pulled into the fantasy of the project, which is as much about the giving and receiving of criticism (self-inflicted or not), as it is about friendship in relation to enmity. Firstly, this is a pandemic book. It is composed of diaristic notes based on real experience and fantasy. Dated 20.7.2020 to 20.3.2021, one entry folds into another, close enough in terms of daily or every-other-day writing to be episodic without the spectacle — gossip is not on Graw’s confessional menu. The entries can be quite ruminating, rumination the sign of a depressive, something we were all experiencing during the pandemic. This rumination on instrumental friendships versus true friendships is the conflict that perpetuates what is a searching project, one without binary answers to what is a “dysfunctional family portrait of the contemporary art world” with Graw as its protagonist, documentarian and fantasist.
And yet this is one story by one individual, and for that reason, alone. It is a lonely project. This singular perspective is not relieved by the friends who either heighten the feelings of loneliness through their antagonism (“Peter”), or exacerbate the feelings of loneliness through their sympatico (“Solange”). There is no escape from the loneliness, as both true friend and useful friend inflate an ego that turns inward and outward by burdening herself with the fantasy of enmity, or unburdening herself with the reality of friendship. In some respects this project could have been named On the Benefits of Enmity.
Isabelle Graw & Merlin Carpenter (artblogcologne.com)
Graw uses the word “coquettish” to describe the self-reflective literary turn she is performing here or forever adopting in her future writings. Graw admits that the use of the pronoun “I” was once an anathema to her. She uses the word “coquettish” defensively to ward against the suggestion of such a lexical transformation. “Coquette” is defined as “a flirtatious woman”, one example reads, “her transformation from an ice maiden warrior into a winsome coquette.” This book is indeed flirtatious with regard to the filtering of information through fantasy and reality, and not knowing where you stand in relation to either, except for absurd narratives about a corpse image of Graw being circulated on social media; or the torrent of criticism Graw receives following the publication of a book entitled The Dark Years: Cologne 1988-1999 (which I searched for online hoping it existed, but doesn’t, in English anyway).
This fantasy versus reality pendulum is hard to focus on, and also hypnotic for that same reason, especially in instances when biography is introduced through the lens of parental separation and motherhood apropos the brutality and narcissism of the agents of the artworld. Graw discusses her father in terms of money and her mother in respect of love; and her life partner in relation to separate living conditions, Graw choosing to live alone in an apartment. Consensual loneliness permeates. She also shares how her now teenage daughter decided to offload one dark day that her mother is not the “significant person” in her life, rather her friends are. Graw is yet another parent to lose friends (reputation and respect) by becoming a parent, and then to discover her teenage daughter considers her neither a friend nor a significant person in her life. Graw is quick to psychoanalyse the ruptures in relationships that are memorialised or occur during the writing of the project in fantasy or reality. This almost becomes a predictable post-mortem of the psychological ruptures, and a predicament for the writing project as a whole, as the analysis becomes fisheye in its self-reflexive POV.
These biographical moments are punctuated by the ‘Isabelle Graw’ I have come to know and respect as a reader and fellow art critic, theoretical vignettes that bring critique to bear on her lifeworld vis-a-vis artworld, including insights into feminism, class, right-left wing politics in their liberal and libertarian manifestations (the latter being adopted disapprovingly by some of Graw’s ex-artist friends), and image.
Thomas Ruff, Portrait (Isabelle Graw), 1989
It is the question of image, Graw’s image as an attractive young women in Cologne, which, early in her career, was a magnet for unwanted sexual advances, even the locking and throwing away of a key in a hotel room by a pre #MeeToo predator, from whom she fortunately escaped.
Graw’s double image creates an uncanny presence in the book via two protagonists, Carla (as her gallerist self) and Madelaine, a Lynchian lookalike, who appears across the road in the same fake-fur jacket (from the Acne collection no less!?). It’s a weird moment that builds on its weirdness as the lookalikes become friends through the medium of mediated fashion, not art. Graw, or her fantasy double, writes: “To me, the idea of wearing other people’s clothes carries the danger of opening myself up to attack, of no longer being myself, of losing myself.” What Graw calls “mimetic rivalry” is something that is felt, not just in the ridiculous episode of the gallerist snatching a leather jacket that Graw had put on hold until she could afford to purchase it (class critique is alwalys relative), but throughout the book.
The selected image for the cover of the book continues this presence of doppelgangers. At first glance it reads as an Alex Katz painting, but it’s a Warhol. But not exactly Warhol Flowers, even though he supplied the original screen to the artist who copied it: Sturtevant.
Sturtevant, Warhol Flowers, 1970, Synthetic polymer silk screen on canvas, 56 × 56 × 2 cm. © Estate Sturtevant, Paris
If you didn’t know, Sturtevant was born four years before Warhol. She was an artist that brought mimesis to its limit through her carefully inexact repetitions of other artists’ work. In an interview with Bruce Hainley, Sturtevant responded to the idea of the “copy”:
'“But who is the here-and-now Warhol? All his greatness is being grabbed and tossed away by his being shoved into the rhetoric of copy. He was not making copies, and definitely not repetitions, but rather he was repeating a crucial difference. Although to repeat is the ‘same,’ the work of Warhol holds the contradiction that the powerful dynamics lie not in the interior but in a galvanised surface, and it is this surface that pushes the work. And there lies his radical brilliance.”
The “repetition” of Sturtevant on the cover, both Warhol and not Warhol, both Sturtevant and not Sturtevant, makes me think of Graw and the quote she selects to open the book following the dedication “To my friends”: “If you ask me who here speaks, which I, then it is my own and yet again not; from whom would only the own I ever speak.”—Marie Luise Kaschnitz. Like Sturtevant, who edited her name from Elaine Frances Sturtevant, Graw presents herself as a double negative, one who is forever inventing another self to cope with the zombie arguments and utility selves that populate the artworld. Truth is beside the point if utility.
I am not sure if Graw is drawing from a deep emotional well in terms of experience versus fantasy. There is a lot of conflict in this book, a lot of disenchantment with friendship as a whole, whether fantasy or not. And even though friendship is split (unequally) between a lament and hymn to instrumental and true friendship, the enemy is not in Graw’s critical vernacular. This is contra Derrida, for whom the enemy is a public antagonist, therefore a political protagonist, like the critic, like Graw in her less literary adventures. Or, if you read behind the lines, this is Graw’s most critical book on the artworld, because of the necessity to be veiled in fantasy.
The anticipation and anxiety over the enemy is the hidden entity most present in this book, or what Derrida might better describe as ‘prescient’, meaning friendship, like democracy, is always preceded by the preposition towards. That is why this is an insular project or projection, one inward rather than outward looking, and thus not political. While reading I longed for the “capital-T Truth” as David Foster Wallace put it. Even though the capital-T Truth is the thing we will never have. From time to time Graw reminds the reader, especially in the closing pages with references to other auto-fiction writers, that this is not the intent or ambition of this project. Gossip is out! Graw’s utilisation of the literary device of a diaristic auto-fiction imbued with real experience is a way to express what is not expressible, even among true friends, while retaining consideration for the other and self-protection for the self, to remain capital “I” Insulated.
Elaine Sturtevant, Duchamp Man Ray Portrait, 1966, photography, 21 x 20 cm
Once again, this is a project of its time, its trauma, its trepidations vis-a-vis the pandemic. And yet there are small truths regarding left-right wing tribalism and polarisation, channelled through Graw’s PC aversive libertarian friends, through which there feels like there’s no longer any room or common ground for a dialogue between the extremes of entrenched left and right. What we are left with are friendships on the line, about to break or already broken. And it is this split in politics and the self as an image projected inward and outward, online and offline, that is the real lament that has no future prospect of a hymn.
Or can we look at this splitting of self in the private and public sphere as something necessary to exist alongside the other. The self, in the end, is not known to ourselves. The self is made and conditioned in the presence of others. The self responds to stimuli outside itself. The self is permeable, allowing stimuli to pass through and react with its reactive nature and core. Without the other, the self dries up, becomes barren and repetitive, reliving the memories of old exterior stimuli that dissipate and perish with every invocation, every rumination, to end in madness. It has been said before, but it needs saying again, we are social beings. We are stimulated by others, for good or ill.
The thing is, if you come upon Graw’s On the Benefits of Friendship without any experience of reading her academic and critical writings on the artworld, this book by itself will lack the split and tension it had for me as an admirer of her writing thus far. Here, I am split as a reader. I worry that she is yet another art critic who has succumbed to the seduction of the literary, foregoing what has gone before for something that is less fugitive and more pronounced in its singular ambition to be an autonomous artwork, not dependent on the image-for-words reciprocity of being a cultural critic. Graw’s invocation of Roland Barthes who, in later life, was to abandon academic writing for a more literary approach, is telling. We all need allies, past or present, to give us permission and precedent for change.
The artworld is not a give and take ecology, it is a take and take economy. Once you have used up your use-value, you are not needed. And of course there are exceptions to self-interest in the artworld, which Graw is at pains to highlight and list throughout this book, albeit with the use of only one hand to count. In January 2022 I wrote a response to Dan Fox’s essay “April to July 2020” in the essay collection Art Writing in Crisis. The durational essay title is interesting, as the dates chime uncannily with Graw’s pandemic project, which started a month later in August 2020 after Fox’s reflections on his time in the artworld ended. I wrote:
“Dan Fox’s essay in Art Writing In Crisis is the best of a bad bunch. It’s truly great. It runs through decades of artworld malcontent with a soupçon of reward. It’s great because he’s telling our story. He definitely stayed too long. Ground it out. Took the hits. The artist egos. The power brokers. Meta-institutional critiques. Curator messianism. Problem is Dan Fox mistook and misplaced desire for need. Like us all.”
Like Dan Fox’s essay, Graw’s On the Benefits of Friendship is a pandemic project, but also a philosophical one. Like Derrida, who theorised crablike between friendship and the enemy in The Politics of Friendship, Graw leaves the question of friendship – in the context of the artworld – wide open in terms of theory, but closed off IRL. I cannot add much to Graw’s discussion as a fellow cultural critic. That said, the “backing up” of the critic in instances when the critic puts their opinions on the line did strike an emotional chord. In my experience it is not artists who have criticised my words in public, but other… let’s call them in the context of the Irish art scene, academics and art writers. Derrida opines that the political enemy only exists publicly not privately. Artists have mostly come to my defence privately. As the late Dave Hickey wrote, critics have to disagree or they become irrelevant, whereas curators have to create consensus to be relevant.
In a conversation between Graw and the New York Times senior art critic Roberta Smith at the American Academy Berlin in 2014, Smith spoke of how veins harden over time in respect to art appreciation. What Isabelle Graw further shows us in On the Benefits of Friendship, is the heart softens under the repetitive and recycling nature of the artworld, where ideas and production for production sake become reified zombies, who come back and come back and come back…
P.S. Thank you for the words, Isabelle — continued safe passage through the artworld.
—James Merrigan
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Yasmine Robinson, QE 1 Trojan Coins, 2022. New Exits: The MAC Belfast, photo: Simon Mills
NORTH - PAINTING
The MAC Belfast is the house that M.C. Escher drew and Gregor Schneider built. Grey concrete cascades and spills from a forever height to form a delta of anti-social rooms — Upper/ Tall/ Common/ Sunken — that somehow manage to not look into one another. Narcissists. A stairs appears amidst a cul de sac of seating areas, and climbs this disarticulated edifice to bring you to the top, kind of, where the exhibition begins or ends in the Tall Gallery, the penthouse of the exhibition spaces in terms of grandeur if not top-down position and scale. *Remember: the setting is important.
NEW EXITS, The MAC BELFAST, 2023, photo: Simon Mills
The painting exhibition that fills these rooms currently (through March 26th — my birthday) is heralded as “end of the 10th Year Anniversary Celebrations” of The MAC. To curate a painting exhibition under the auspices of celebrating an institution becoming an institution in the city of Belfast, is perfectly in keeping with painting’s position as the user-friendliest kind of contemporary art. Painting is not going to offend the passer-by, or what art people call lay people. The only offence painting causes these days is among painters competing over the same premium white walls of the far and few commercial gallery spaces in the South and especially North of Ireland.
Beside the context of The MAC’s 10th anniversary, and the interesting fact that the work is by graduates of the BA and MFA Fine Art courses at Belfast School of Art since 2012, the press release further contextualises the exhibition with an essay written at the turn of the1970s, when No-Wave New York turned silly-money tidal, and the art market became a glimmer of hope and ambition in the painter’s eyes.
Thomas Lawson’s essay Last Exit: Painting was published in Artforum in1981, a seminal year for painting discourse, including Douglas Crimp’s The End of Painting/ Gilles Deleuze’s The Painting Before the Painting/ and Rene Ricard’s The Radiant Child. As art, painting was in crisis — what’s new! — but as a commodity the 1980s represented the emergence and continuance of the New York art market in the painting royalty of the “pseudo-expressionists” Julian Schnabel et al. Against this green flutter of money for art and art for money, a panoply of group-painting exhibitions became a marketplace for dealers to source individual painters, a time when Wall Street and Graffiti Street coalesced in the figure of Jean-Michel Basquiat, the radiant child.
In a conversation with experimental novelist Katy Acker, French theorist Sylvère Lotringer, co-founding editor of Semiotext(e) with Kris Kraus, gives us a glimpse into the New York art scene at the time: “It was a great time. Artists were showing their work to other artists, the outside world wasn't really involved… Painters were subsidising the art world.”
Lotringer’s casual remark — Painters were subsidising the art world — obviously places painting closer to money. Who knew! Painters became necessary proxies for other artists not suited to the art market, but dependent on painters accruing value, no matter how pseudo or surplus or zombie their paintings had become, under the inflated and accelerated art market demand for paintings to decorate the elevator shaft of Trump’s growing giant golden dildo of real estate for the rich.
Photo: author
At The MAC things are less hedonistic and vulgar. I exit a grey, close, cold Belfast day, into a greyer, closer, yet warmer building. The Tall Gallery, one of two galleries containing cater-corned rooms within rooms, is the gallery where particular paintings make the biggest impact individually, but also act as visual anchors for the whole setting. It’s the setting see that makes the difference here, which I’ll get back to later.
Gallery to gallery, room to room, painters begin to reveal themselves through their idée fixes. Some of those obsessions are merely repetitive and formal, others are searching. It’s the searching ones that stick on the day, and haunt much, much later. Dougal McKenzie and Hugh Mulholland have curated the paintings, not the painters. Meaning, the 11 painters’ work are not segregated but shuffled between rooms. All painters are generously represented, so you get to know them inchmeal, room to room. It’s not packed. The MAC’s high altitude architecture lets the paintings breathe overhead, while they hold their breath face to face. And there are intense face-offs here, formalist moments where a low-level, low-lit tonal atmosphere wriggles against the concrete biceps and deltoids of The MAC.
Patrick Hickey, Dreamboat, 2022, oil on canvas, 140 x 210cm, photo: Simon Mills
Painting titles catch my eyes from time to time, but don’t inform the paintings much, except for one, named Dreamboat. Patrick Hickey’s three naked boy-men with superman jet and cut hair, sit-stand in a pink long-boat of Peter Doig phallic ergonomics. One boy-man tosses a net into the grey atmosphere. One looks at me. One looks away with an erect black oar. Cock. They are not fishermen, of the Hemingway kind or any other kind for that matter. They are an imaginary scenario, dreamboat by day, wet dream by night. The boat and a slender bicep cover their modesty. Desire is something hidden or out of reach here. And yet everything is out in the open , like a filleted fish. How everything is delicately and naively posed and painted adds to the painting’s authenticity and sincerity. A dream that topples on waking. Hickey’s painting manifests the Freudian dream, wherein content and form become two sides of the möbius strip of dreaming.
Juste Bernotaite, Our Heros, 2022, oil on canvas, 170 x 130cm, photo: Simon Mills
If Patrick Hickey proffers a window to the red heart of form and pale soul of content, Juste Bernotaite paints what painter Phillip Allen describes as “slab paintings”, paintings that are not windows, but all surface. Auerbach heavy with paint, the large ones, which gesture with more drawn elements in a concerted effort to overcome scale with the span of the body — shoulder to elbow to fingertip — belie the smaller ones, which feel more thumb to index to wrist. The scale and physicality of the former is coloured and knitted by an undergrowth of ochres and oranges, that release the paintings from abstracted landscape to a more playful urban or domestic playground, eliciting crayon over oil stick.
Cameron Stewart, The Old Arcade, 2022, oil on linen, 182 × 152cm, photo: Simon Mills
The same warm pallet inhabits Cameron Stewart’s paintings. And yet, if Juste Bernotaite is all surface, all slab, Stewart’s tenebristic glow comes from within, like time-machine neon transported into the period past of saloons, gun fights and the workaday Wild West or lazy tropics. His The Old Arcade is majestic and mystic, the orange glow enriched by cardinal red, viridian green and a pool of black with a starry night up high. This is the place where Stewart’s coterie of workers, actors, painters, whatever come to play under night skies. Stewart’s paintings remind me that painting feels old, older than photography, older than technology as we know it today. It’s what sets it apart. It has nothing to do with the weight of history. It’s just old. Old the minute you put paint on paint. Painting contains time and the vicissitudes of this or that.
Daniel Coleman, The House Down the Lane, 2022, oil on canvas, 270 × 200cm, photo: Simon Mills
Daniel Coleman, whose paintings I’ve been aware of for a few years now, stumped me with the scale and dark of The House Down the Lane, standing at 270 cm. The painting is a dark wall of paint, that vies Phillip Allen’s slab paintings against window paintings. Its darkness shouldn't work, as it nears a black-mirror abstraction that could subjugate the narrativity that the painting infers in the bat-cave architecture of its shelved recesses. I’m 6.6ft, and needed to stand on tippy toes to get closer to the pockets of cobalt blue and green candescence that highlight but fail to warm this icy interior, where an old rotary dial phone, a sacred-heart-Madonna and tea cups propped here and there and nowhere between a threesome of prostrate and crestfallen figures coloured by their own cold breath. The black slick of the surface reads as condensation. But Coleman has somehow pulled it from the cold embers of abstraction, if not the existential ashes. Which is okay with me.
Tim Millen, Monstera II, 2022, oil on canvas, 160 x 120cm, photo: Simon Mills
Tim Millen’s Monstera II, a strange somnolent Arcadia, not unlike the atmosphere of Peter Doig’s Blotter, slides itself into view in the transitional space between the large expanse of the Upper Gallery, where paintings become a little lost to the scale of the room, and a small back room, where Patrick Hickey’s jaundiced Jesus and lissome boy continue the trend of bare-backed bodies. Two more bare-backed figures foot Millen’s painting. They skinny-dip on a shelf of water — one humorously revealing butt cleavage cupped by water — overlooking a galloping herd of deer that range a white landscape. Millen’s paintings throughout have a quirky and direct sensibility, narrative and painting forming totems of playful and humorous relationships, both in what is painted and how it is painted.
Yasmine Robinson, Warhol's Wig, 2022, oil, acrylic, emulsion, spray paint, on recycled gillet and canvas, 50 × 40cm, photo: author
Yasmine Robinson’s Warhol's Wig, a weird little furry animal of a painting, breaks the consistency of canvas, panel and painting proper in this tribe at The MAC. It reads as bloody and oily, scalp or roadkill, Warhol dirtied and dead under the spinning tyres of art history. Robinson, more than anyone else here, questions what painting is and how it is made and essentially feels. Her paintings still hang on the wall here, and retain a perimeter, albeit broken by a pin-cushion love heart in one instance. There’s a softness to her canvases of raspberry red and pool table green, and a reckless abandon to form and colour, that feels DIY and anti-commodity and fun.
L to R: Megan Burns, Cameron Stewart, photo: Simon Mills
Slavka Sverakova wrote a piece on this very exhibition. She took the piecemeal, individuated approach, skirting over the context and setting, focusing directly and separately on the 11 artists selected by McKenzie and Mulholland through a 30-artists/10 month studio crawl. Sverakova has been a long-time and lone art critic in the north. I don’t pretend to know the Belfast scene as an infrequent visitor, but I viewed Slavka as an ally in the early days of adopting the orphan of art criticism in 2008, when a new agent was born out of its ashes, the art writer. That said, Sverakova’s approach is something I disbanded years ago. Although generous, and probably necessary for an insider to name not exclude, it is an obligatory approach to art criticism. It’s systematic. A framework that treats the whole cast equally with reference and word count.19-odd artists whom McKenzie and Mulholland visited in their studios didn’t make the cut, not to mention the many more who weren’t considered. This is a sample, an introduction to painting practice in the north. And although the 11 painters here form a haphazard organism — like The MAC — with one painted skin, there’s depth found in a few that ulcerate and acne the surface of my eyes. Jacques Lacan writes:
“...an interpretation can only be an interpretation by being...an interpretation...nor is it a way of getting rid of depth, for it is on the surface that depth is seen, as when one's face breaks out in pimples on holidays.”
L to R: Hannah Casey-Brogan, Jane Rainey, Cameron Stewart, photo: Simon Mills
As someone who has experienced and written on several exhibitions dedicated to Irish painting during and post pandemic, including DUBLINERS: Zagreb, 2021/ GENERATIONS: NEW IRISH PAINTING, Butler Gallery, 2022/ and IN AND OF ITSELF: ABSTRACTION IN THE AGE OF IMAGES, RHA Dublin, 2022/23, what I can say days later after exiting The MAC, is the painters selected for NEW EXITS, and presented as they are in the setting of The MAC, have a commonality that was absent from the other exhibitions listed above, except for the RHA, where commonality was unavoidable under the exclusive approach of abstraction.
L to R: Juste Bernotaite, Cameron Stewart, photo: Simon Mills
This commonality, in mood and tenor, is hard to define. It could be the curators, the selection, the Belfast School of Art connection. It could be put down to a kind of hard-border provincialism, and what I guess is a close-knit art scene, still dependent on an artist-run grass-roots foundations. I have been promulgating for years that painters should form a cult.
Relatively speaking, down south the paintings have the tone (both in medium and message) of saccharine Raphael, whereas up here gnarly Grünewald is in the house. It definitely has something to do with tonal values of the paintings, and the pushing of those tonal values beyond what is comfortable and looks good on Instagram. It also has something to do with scale and the setting of the exhibition.
L to R: Kwok Tsui, Jane Rainey, photo: Simon Mills
Psychoanalysts Jean Laplanche and Jean-Bertrand Pontalis state that “fantasy is not the object of desire, but its setting.” I find this fascinating in relation to painting, and how the settings for art are so fundamental to the experience of art, the fantasy of art. Artists cannot think about this phenomenon, as they have to believe in their objects in and of themselves as the conductors of emotion and meaning and method, not an arbitrary and often-times compromised setting.
L to R: Aimee Melaugh, Tim Millen, photo: Simon Mills
I remember a painter friend of mine getting on to me about how I experience painting in relation to its setting, in a way that determines its success and failure, rather than experiencing painting in and of itself, as an object, or commodity, or digital image on Instagram. That is perhaps why the loss of the setting on social media is so great (to my mind) — the real object of desire has been replaced by a fantasy, a fantasy that will always win the day in the mind of the one who depends on fantasy to live, and not life, physical life, to fantasise. Painting has become not only commodified on Instagram, and physically disembodied, but its physical setting has also been cropped from existence. I am including the Artists Support Pledge in this commodification.
Patrick Hickey, photo: Simon Mills
Although I have exhibited, lecturered, and launched a publication in the North, Belfast is an odd Lacanian holiday away from home; home being a place that induces sickness when far away from it, but boredom when in it. The residual effect of nausea and boredom is the best way to approach an exhibition of paintings. Painting is not a consumable thing, but an awkward and ungainly thing, like humans, like Warhol’s Wig. Painting is the antithesis of Instagram. It neither fits the eyes nor mouth. It has a dentist’s approach. And it is with all these disjunctions, between place, between paintings, that I wander out of The MAC’s warren of anti-chambers with my hand in my mouth🏴—James Merrigan
New Exits through 26 March
GENERATION PAINTING
GENERTIONS, BUTLER GALLERY KILKENNY, 2022
READ HERE
FOREVER NOW KITSCH PAINTING
In and of Itself — Abstraction in the Age of Images, RHA Dublin, December 2023
PAINTER, PAINTER
Commissioned essay on the occasion of Dubliners: Zagreb Biennial of Painting 2021
HANNAH FITZ: EZ LIVING
If I had the money or desire, I wouldn’t buy Hannah Fitz’s gallery furniture. But I sure can look at it, and, at times, peer through & into it, when granted access that is.
The exhibition title says it all & more: “Lookieloos”. In the late Dave Hickey’s terminology “Looky-Loos” (spelt with a hyphen & y) is someone who looks but doesn’t participate. Hickey, former Rolling Stone gonzo-journalist turned artworld philosopher-critic, uses the country & western singer Waylon Jennings’ transitional experience of gigging local bars to big stadiums, as a way to define the looky-loo in his essay Romancing the Looky-Loos. Told against the lie of nostalgia, Waylon confesses to Hickey that when he played local bars the audience understood & felt — in a deep-seated way — what the lyrics & music meant, because they had lived it all, with Waylon as a friend, enemy, lover, neighbour. Contra the local bar coterie, the stadium audience is more separate & detached, not just in scale & architecture, but in every way. The stadium audience looks but doesn't participate. That said, there is an obvious distinction here between looking & listening to music versus the weird experience of visual art.
My experience of Hannah Fitz’s work has gone from local bar (artist-run) to relative stadium (Kerlin Gallery Dublin) over a ten-year period. There has always been a quirksome & wonky quality to the way Hannah Fitz sees, makes & presents things. At Kerlin we are presented with a setting straight out of an EZ LIVING warehouse. Lit lamp shades stand tall & slender & funereal against metal railings with run-of-the-mill curlicue tracery. Fat timber cabinets & closets bully in on this quaint & melancholic Journey's End. At first glance the furniture doors & drawers seem partly open. An effort to peek in a closet is met by a skin of timber. No access. The only points of access are bored holes a la Pinocchio’s nostrils, which glare back like stars.
There’s other stuff here too, like the meandering figurines that visually narrate through fishing rods, kite, tree stump & so on. These are more objects than gestures. It all reminds me of John Boskovich’s ‘Psycho Salon’, “the living room inside the artist’s fabled, hyper-designed digs in West Hollywood… a place that made no distinctions between sculpture & furniture, curation & decor, art & everyday life”. While Boskovich’s was “schlock apocalypse”, Fitz’s formal homogeneity, upset by a tasteful quirk here & there, makes this into one monster bound by the bind of the commodity versus experience of the commercial gallery. Through one veil this is a showroom, through another a salesroom, and yet another a window display. I know we are supposed to forget all this, but this makes me remember. And yet I have no fantasy to buy. The rub of art is enough.
Liam Gillick, Wie würden Sie sich verhalten? Eine Küchenkatze spricht (How are you going to behave? A Kitchen Cat Speaks), 2009, German Pavilion, Giardini.
PAINTING: QUASI-PERSON
Paintings are as socially awkward as their makers. Paintings are human, not sentient; adolescent, not adult. Which might mean painting is a young person’s game, before self-awareness and the past kicks in. It’s not. It’s an innocent, dumb, ignorant person’s game, at its best. That’s what Gerard Richter meant when he said “Painting is dumb”, or Picasso called “innocence”, or Martin Amis “the wound”, or Jacques Lacan “the symptom”, all of which you have to be ignorant of in order to enact. We first experience paintings (and painters) from afar, then at an angle. They have no profile. Closer they become a mess of surface acne and grease, porous with loose hairs, a teratoma twin of ugly malformations. They are awkward. Adolescent again. Not much to “like” up close — the good ones anyway. They involve you in their shit like the worst narcissistic friend. They take you in, introject you, imbibe you to leave you empty. Paintings are nothing but need. From wet to dry, juicy grape to raisin death, sometimes they blink back. When Isabelle Graw calls paintings “quasi-persons” against the setting of the art market, I think of vampiric collectors trafficking and flipping, not just paintings, but the vitalism of the painter themselves measured in time, spit, sweat and a loose eyelash or two. What if Schrödinger put a painting in a box?
Ed Ruscha, The Los Angeles County Museum on Fire, paint, 1965–68
ART, FOR MYSELF
Every time I’m asked for a bio for some thing or other, I begin to question what this 300 words or so signifies via its evolutionary history. Performative Instagram profiles tell a lot with little. Mine currently stands with a dEUS lyric “Just a lonely boy… Would you be my enemy?” from a song named “Pocket Revolution”. In art college, when first confronted with the artist statement, which gets conflated with the bio when you venture out into the real world later on, you fill the lone paragraph with context & theory. You feel, or are told, that you need to be verbally situated in the present, the now, but to also exhibit & reference the past, so you are not floating without a leash or standing on thin ice. Over time you erase most sentences & retain the few that sound good rather than mean anything really. The words exhibit what is relevant today & what won’t be relevant tomorrow. You will change & the world will change too. And yet words have a tendency to typecast the artist when institutional recognition comes your way. When you stop writing your artist statement it means you have settled in, become the 300 words you had written 5,10, more years ago, embalmed in the letters of other people’s appreciation. The artist’s bio, in which the professional artist largely lists their institutional achievements & attachments, is more machine than meaning. When, or if, you catch that wave of institutional recognition, which happens all at once rather than incrementally, the list of awards & institutions will amass hedonistically to leave no room for the artist. You will be more institution than words. As the years pass, & the wave crashes to shore, petrified achievements will be replaced with new lively ones over time. And when your footsteps inevitably disappear from view or withdraw, replaced by the new, words won’t matter anymore, except for “archive”. I was asked to submit a bio the other day. So I rewrote it. I began the steady process of institutional erasure. It felt good. Freeing. As one artist said to me recently after deciding to withdraw: “I’ve decided to take art back for myself.”
TEXT ZUR KUNST, December 2022
MAN SOLLTE
In the current issue of Text Zur Kunst, the writer identified most with the German art magazine, as its cofounding editor & perennial contributor, Isabelle Graw, asks “How Much Person is in the Product? On the Metonymic Interrelationship Between Works of Art and their Authors.” Graw uses Balthus’ paedophilia (the article image shows Balthus gazing from a distance at his young niece draped over a chair in his studio) & Georg Baselitz’s misogyny (“women cannot paint”) to discuss the difficulty of separating artist from the artwork in the face of biographical scandal or comment. Graw proffers two art historical approaches to this quandary: formalist & biographical. In other words, the observer either severs the relationship between artwork & artist, what the literary theorists called the “autonomous artwork”, or sees them as conjoined. The latter approach gets tricky when a monster emerges in the biography of the artist. Graw’s use of the word “metonymic” is interesting here, in respect to a theorist like Jacques Lacan, who uses it in terms of the Freudian dream. Lacan equates metaphor & metonymy with “condensation” & “displacement” in dream work. Condensation is a unifying structure, when images come together in the dream, like when vapour surrounds a boiling kettle. Whereas displacement is the juxtaposition or placement of images in conflict or tension a la Magritte. Like the metaphoric view through a morning window bearing a veil of condensation, Graw doesn’t land on either side of the binary argument. This is a proffering; like Balthus’ niece in the article photograph, who is closer to us than Baltus. With feminist brio, we can say her pose is powerful and Balthus’ weak, but the abusive puppet master always seems pathetic until they aren’t (Humbert Humbert in Lolita). And then there is the question of the separation of artist & product, and Graw’s contention with Baselitz’s misogyny (“women cannot paint”), whose presence & product placement — in what I am sure is another form of meta-critical condensation — appears on the back cover of the same issue. MAN SOLLTE🏴
TEXT ZUR KUNST, December 2022
FOREVER NOW KITSCH PAINTING
There’s something odd about the exhibition “In and of Itself — Abstraction in the Age of Images” at the RHA that I can’t quite shake. It could be a survey of twentieth-century abstraction, but here we are in 2022 with more of the same, which sounds harsh, but I’ll explain what I mean. Although intergenerational, artists ranging in age from their 20s to 70s, the paintings sit in that pocket of avant garde space that is no more. “Make it new” the modernists said, until postmodernism said “make it new by recycling the old as new”. The end of the manifesto. It's the shift in time that torments me as a viewer. It brings up the problem of postmodernism itself, as a moment that regurgitates the past in the present with kitsch results. The same way Freud’s uncanny is the dusty and repressed past resurfacing in the present. And yet this exhibition is more kitsch than uncanny. Painted abstraction in its heyday, from Malevich to Mondrian, could be described as the avant garde’s last stand before the leggy and promiscuous advent of postmodernism from the 1980s onwards. Abstraction, in its most image and content repressed states, was indeed revolutionary (in an artworld sense), the same way Impressionism was before Monet’s Waterlilies became the most popular kitsch postcard gift at museums. The days in which form was one thing and content was another are long gone. Žižek tells us that Freud came up with a clever but paradoxical idea about form and content in relation to the dream. He said that the parts that the dreamer cannot fully recollect are part of the form of the dream. This is a very agreeable perspective for the visual artists, where form becomes content and vice versa. Weirdly, this exhibition does not read as an intergenerational exhibition in terms of form, nor as an exhibition that is timeless, but rather one leaden down with time with no content to save it from itself. That said, an object-oriented ontologist might say the thing in itself doesn’t need a subject to save it. It just is🏴