Starting over, again.

“I’m starting over,” the artist said, when everything had been exhausted.

In the contemporary attention, network & project economy of cultural production we are always beginning anew. Our lives, especially in terms of career & progress, are in a continuous process of starting over against a technological backdrop that is continually starting over. This is how we regenerate as artists, by starting over, staying relevant while growing old. Virtual virality is the new biological order.

Starting over contrasts with consistency in the marketplace of value. The artist’s artist is always starting over. Yet, over time, the artist’s artist or the sell-out strive to arrive at an artistic identity that is not only commercially viable but also less destructive. An identity that we find peace in, avoiding the constant dismantling of our identity and, with it, our market value. Starting over is akin to adolescence, when we repeatedly find ourselves in other people to become a Frankenstein of fraternal bits & pieces of others.

Starting over knocks on the door every few years. I’ve been a painter, an artist, an art critic, only to renounce it all, working under pseudonyms, like “iamnotapainter”, repeatedly splitting off into two identities so as to feel free to make art & write critically under the gaze of strangers not family or friends. It’s like Stewart Lee’s stagecraft, who adopts the persona of “Stewart Lee the comedian” who views the audience as the problem, not the joke. The other is the blame in the give & take of cultural production. The artist can’t put themselves on the line. They make objects to take their place.

Starting over happens to those artists who are not under contract but are striving for contracts. Such uncontracted artists break things until they find something more consistent, more them without being them. The original fetishist needed a contract to get his trills by way of the other’s punishment & withholding of love. Yet the fetishist wrote the script for the other to follow under contract. In this moment of extreme narcissism & individualism, the other is the trace of footsteps in the white remainder of the avalanche of the virtual.

📷Victor Man, Certain Way To Fade Away (detail), 2006.

Becoming Zombie

“Beware the zombies ”

— Melanie Gillgan, 2006

“Nothing is more real than nothing. ”

— Samuel Beckett, Malone Dies, 1951

I've been thinking about the moment in which I emerged as an artist and, following that, an art critic. Officially, I would say it was 2008—the moment when the global financial crisis hit Europe from the banks of America. I had just graduated from NCAD with an MFA. I was making work that was reflective of the current theoretical and physical landscape: empty galleries, empty construction sites, surviving artist-run spaces, successive reductions in public funding for the arts, the deletion of Circa Magazine, a mainstay of contemporary Irish art discourse and review for over 20 years. All this against the overall feeling that the end was on the horizon for the local art scene. It all seemed very dark, especially as a new graduate who had all these hopes and aspirations for pursuing gallery representation, reviews in Circa, and just an artist's life, which I had signed up for long before.

James Merrigan, Could We Talk Before & After (MFA installation), 2008.

Then, a good painter friend of mine and fellow MFA student, was—what felt like—head-hunted by two galleries in Dublin, Oonagh Young and Green on Red. I thought it would be me; even though I was making work that was completely anti-commercial. In my MFA show, I turned off what were yellow work lights, so it felt like you arrived at a space in which discarded bits and pieces of the installations by other artists remained—remainders were somehow radical in my mind. Yet somehow those bits and pieces formed into unintentional furniture with no utility, only mood. Thankfully, one artist, Alan Phelan, writing for Circa Magazine, caught my gesture on his second pass through the ware that housed the MFA . He wrote in Circa about the installation in the terms I just outlined—something discarded, something nearly missed, not nihilistic, hopeful maybe. I was very happy. But then the IMF arrived on our shores with empty coffers and eviction notices, and the future became subsumed by an uncertain economic present.

Thomas Ruff, Portrait (Isabelle Graw), 1989, C-Print, Edition of 150 + 20, signed and numbered on the back: Price: 290.00 € Excl. shipping. This edition is sold out

During my MFA I was supervised by Joan Fowler, a brilliant lecturer and theorist who introduced me to European art criticism, from Nicolas Bourriaud, the curator who named art movements against the societal and social shifts within and without the art world, to Text Zur Kunst and Sternberg Press’ serial efforts to resuscitate art criticism in a climate of crises, financial, critical and cultural. Joan asked me to frame a limited edition portrait of the founding editor of Text Zur Kunst Isabelle Graw by Thomas Ruff (I don’t know where she got the idea I was a framer but I went along with the role play by getting a professional to frame it). The 1989 photograph by Thomas Ruff captures the twenty-seven year old Graw as a two-piece jigsaw puzzle, wedged into a world null and void of emotion or personality or future. At the same time I didn’t frame Graw, I decided to make the “art world” less of a puzzle. I got rid of the finger space or the hyphen used by art magazines and art books and made it into an island — “artworld”. This seemed right and just to reflect its isolation combined with exclusivity.

Note: Lapsed painters (like me) are the worst kinds of cynic, like lapsed psychologists after they have read Foucault. Lapsed painters end up resenting the object. They become destructive; they internalise everything they hate about the artworld and its desire for objects because they once were object makers. Continue.

Merlin Carpenter (pictured alongside his text “The Tail that Wags the Dog”), from Canvases and Careers: Criticism and its Markets, 2008, Sternberg Press

Melanie Gilligan (pictured alongside her text “The Contemporary Social Market”), from Canvases and Careers: Criticism and its Markets, 2008, Sternberg Press

Among the Text Zur Kunst posse I was most excited by were critic-artist tag-team Isabelle Graw and Merlin Carpenter. Yet it was the adoption of Melanie Gilligan by Graw, an artist and critic who had one foot in finance and another in the artworld, that I referenced with a kind of voracious excitement. It was Gilligan’s avowal of the market’s influence on contemporary art, and artists like Merlin Carpenter’s critical collusion with the market, that ignited my curiosity around the art market at a time when the financial world was collapsing in on itself.

The environment of Text Zur Kunst and Sternberg Press seemed to incubate a network that levelled the playing field between art and critical writing, friend and frenemy. In 2003 Merlin Carpenter and Melanie Gilligan emerged as another TZK tag team when the later wrote a farcical tale on the former that tragically split the painter into a commodity or a romantic. Gilligan’s tale of two types of painter cells—political romantics versus apolitical realists—becomes a tale of three groups, the third being a splinter group of painter assistants. Over time, the painter assistants—a privilege of the established elite—had become disenchanted because of labour conditions and ego, breaking off to become a kind of monad cell inspired by Pop Art. This cultural fragmentation, one group resisting the other’s formal ideology, plays out in Gilligan’s essay as a kind of art form, whereby what the painters in all three groups are painting really doesn’t matter. It’s arbitrary; it’s just self-reflexive negation in opposition to what the other is doing and promoting. In Gilligan’s farce-cum-tragedy—to invert Marx’s maxim—painting is only possible in spite of the other. Contrary to the old idea that painting is invoked or summoned from the belly of the needy or the traumatised (ie Edvard Munch), painting, in Gilligan’s tale, is a social expression that rebounds off the other with a competitive spirit, while also paying the artworld’s bills. Yet that was then. Today the other has lost its appeal to the self. As Byung-Chul Han says in an off-the-cuff Interview remark: I think that we are highly stuck within ourselves today, and that we are not aimed towards the Other. The only hope, for Han, is Eros, which rips us out of ourselves via the love of the other.

As midlife crises unconsciously prescribe, I have been rereading texts by Gilligan and Carpenter with a lot of nostalgia. The present artworld is a space where public positions are not possible or viable because everything is so “great” in public, and “shit” in private (I receive so many DMs in response to my texts it’s vulgar). The other has become a mirror that scrolls back upon itself. Whatever happened to revolving doors that are dangerous to enter?

At a conference at the Irish Museum of Modern Art, I was asked to describe the type of art made during the early years of the financial crisis (2008-2011). I couldn’t answer it clearly because I was either too close to it, or had no real frame of reference for what went before the crisis. Art was definitely fugitive—on the run. The artworld had’t migrated from the real world to Instagram just yet. There were a lot of emerging artist groups trying to make a physical stamp on a real world that wasn’t really paying attention with eyes or pockets. Everything had been turned inward; the rain localised. Yet out of the dark and wet artists were making work that was, for me at that time, radical. Temporary and critical gestures that were not conditioned by object-making, reputation or the virtual desiring factory. Artists were surviving, heaving their art into spaces that were also surviving. There was a sense of need and freedom with no institutional pillars to hold up the leaking roof of culture. There was, in essence, an underground in plain sight. And amidst the pile of beautiful shit curators were found monitoring said shit pile, well dressed, or at least wearing black to hide the grime.

At this time, reading texts like Nicolas Bourriaud’s “The Radicant”, or mixed-tape critical compilations like Sternberg Press’ “Canvases and Careers”, there was a real sense that art and finance were interconnected, almost dependent on one another for good or ill. The housing market had gone bust at the same time the art market had gone boom. Art and finance had always been friends, but now there could be a number put on the relationship.

Reading some of Gilligan’s texts today like “Hedge Fund” or “The Contemporary Social Market”—all written in 2007 and 2008, right when the word “billion”, a numerical abstraction for even the 1%, became ubiquitous on news media, I can understand my fascination at the time with the artworld vis-a-vis the art market. “Billion” had become so ubiquitous that I named my first blog +billion-journal, not really knowing or caring why. I thought it felt brash, wrong, transforming the brass art scene into metaphorical gold. I see now why Gilligan’s writing was so important to my formation as an art critic. Especially for someone who was very naive to the “conspicuous consumption” and “pecuniary canons of taste” of the artworld. (The Market, 2013)

Andreas Gursky, Singapore Stock Exchange, 1997, C-Print, 169.9 x 269.9 cm.

Wall Street, opening credits, 1985.

In a 2020 text, a brilliantly meandering micro and macro analysis of the representation of capital in film — Treating the Abstract of Capital Concretely: Films Against Capitalism — Gilligan opines that the zoomed-in minutiae of social relations are a better way to represent capitalism than the grand mise en scène of let’s say an Andreas Gursky photograph of an Amazon warehouse, or an aerial panning shot of Wall Street in an Adam Curtis documentary.

In 2013, after the dust had settled following the implosion of the housing market, Whitechapel Gallery & MIT Press published THE MARKET as part of the Documents of Contemporary Art series. Edited by Natasha Degen, the introductory essay opens with this by Degen:

“The market — that network of interdependent actors and institutions that produce, circulate and consume art — has never before been so prominent or expansive. In the decade from 1998 to 2008, worldwide auction sales of contemporary art ballooned from $48 million to over $1.3 billion, constituting a more than eightfold rise in the sector’s market share, from 1.8 percent to 15.9 percent of the global fine art trade. By 2012, post-war and contemporary art represented 33 percent of the auction market with just over $3 billion in sales. Whereas the Impressionist and modern art sector was once the cornerstone of the art market (just think of the ebullient 1980s), it is now ceding its prominence to contemporary art, which, unlike work of earlier periods, boasts a theoretically infinite supply.”

— Natasha Degen, The Market, 2013

1998-2008 was before my time. But what Degen uncovers in the next breath does coincide with my watch:

“When Damien Hirst bypassed his dealers and auctioned 223 pieces of new work directly at Sotheby’s in 2008, 39 percent of the buyers had never bought contemporary art before and 24 percent of them were new to Sotheby’s. It was a cross-branding triumph.”

— Natasha Degen, The Market, 2013

That same year, 2008, I graduated from NCAD with Sternberg Press’ art market invective ringing in my ears. I was invigorated by it all. I remember artist and educator Mick Wilson opening a conference with the words “big bad art world” while I sat beside Joan Fowler in the audience. The art world, spelt “artworld”, was a place that seemed abstract to me, a place far, far away as the credits rolled to become stars. I have remained a local artist and critic in a world where the local has lost its locus to the global gaze of the network and attention economy. The time of resistance to such a global gaze has glazed over if not entirely frosted, even if all along it was what Merlin Carpenter calls a “cover story”, and Gilligan refers to as “commodified dissent”.

As early as 2006 Melanie Gilligan warned “Beware the zombies” long before “zombie formalism” was coined by Walter Robinson. Now that the transformation has taken place in the conflation of art and market, art and world, without a radical remainder, becoming zombie is what we can look forward to or look back upon becoming.—James Merrigan

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Why are painters thinking again? Because they think it's a good joke.

“Why Are Conceptual Artists Painting Again?

Because They Think It’s a Good Idea.”

— Jan Verwoert

Last week a painter friend shared a link to an Instagram post by blackbird_rook. “Blackbird Rook” (aka Greg Rook) is an art advisor, who provides advice & services to individuals & institutions for collecting art by both emerging & established artists, ranging in price from the thousands to the millions. In other words, a transient art dealer, best personified by his Substack newsletter “The Diary of an Art Advisor” & latest post named “Journeys Through the Meatspace.”

Redirecting to the original Instagram post by Blackbird Rook, it advertises the paintings of Stuart Cumberland in a new online exhibition (“viewing room” on Artsy) with the curious caption that rhetorically repatriates the artwork by its still living maker under the fantasy totem of an “estate”.*

“Blackbird Rook presents,

The “Estate’ of Stuart Cumberland

30th July - 29th October 2024

In 2016, following a one-person show at the Approach gallery in London, Stuart Cumberland put a collection of his own paintings into storage and stopped work as an artist. In making his motivations certain he then completed a PhD addressing the question, what is post-conceptual painting? Reaching conclusions (in short, post-conceptual painting is fake painting) that verified his three decades of practice, he hit a target - a landmark providing solid ground and a stepping off point. He currently trains in Lacanian psychoanalysis. With such an unusual mid-life shift, from artist to shrink, (the living) Cumberland now holds responsibility for his own artist’s estate.”

— @blackbird-rook, Instagram

Stuart Cumberland was represented by the Approach Gallery up to 2016, with four solo exhibitions at the London gallery. Approach represents such artists as Phillip Allen, Magali Reus & John Stezaker. As the Instagram post outlines, following the one-person show at Approach, Cumberland put “a collection of his paintings into storage & stopped work as an artist” to pursue a PhD that self-reflexively questioned the merits of “post-conceptual painting”, a term that places a point of no return for the painter, as the painter falls into language following the lexical tenets of the Conceptual Artists of the 1960s. 

On first glance, Cumberland’s Duchampian move is more pawn than checkmate. It seems tentative. Especially where it has ended up eight years later, Blackbird Rook, a website that links from what amounts to an empty placeholder website analogous to window display, to an Artsy viewing room. Curiosity turned to rabbit-hole regret when I learn that Cumberland’s PhD thesis would also be available to read as part of the “exhibition”. 

And yet, there is a lot to unpack with this curious gesture, one that exists somewhere between slapstick & desperation, especially what the Instagram post describes disavowedly as a “mid-life crisis” (sorry “mid-life shift”) from painting into training in Lacanian psychoanalysis. 

Merlin Carpenter, TATE CAFÉ 3, 2011, acrylic on linen

In a less provincial sense, this move by Cumberland reminds me of Merlin Carpenter, the German artist who takes up provocative positions in relation to painting (what he calls a “cover story” because painting pays the bills) & more conceptual motivations to radicalise painting by killing it off in performative parody. Blackbird Rook however is a far cry & forever echo from the cool & collected networks of Sternberg Press, Texte zur Kunst or Reena Spaulings Gallery New York, where Merlin Carpenter disseminates his brand of marketplace criticality.

The Blackbird Rook Instagram post piqued my curiosity at a time when I myself have been questioning what Milton Resnick called the “soul-beating” of the painter, defined as the difficulty to change painting style, especially in mid-life (see most recent text linked below). Soul-beating becomes more interesting with age & responsibility. Cumberland was 46 when he drew up his self-named estate & stopped painting for psychoanalysis & a PhD. Christopher Wool, whom Cumberland mentions as an influence, stopped painting his blue-chip words in mid-life, not to mention the most famous of all soul-beaters, Phillip Guston.

The Blackbird Rook post also came on the foot of another Instagram post by Irish curator, Eamonn Maxwell, who, in the facilitation of a workshop for artists on “Pricing your artwork”, crosses the divide (if there is a divide) between curation & capital. Filtered through Instagram, these commercially driven ventures crystallise art into a capitalist endgame without irony or criticality. The cover story of painting is uncovered without any aesthetic or conceptual risk in the speculative game of monetary reward in the marketplace. Money helps the artist to live, but it only helps to domesticate their art.

Stuart Cumberland was interviewed online by Jake Hawkey (a close friend of the artist) for Queen's University Belfast in 2022. What amounts to a fascinating discussion helped along by Hawkey’s surgical reading of Cumberland’s PhD, Cumberland reveals a distrust of romanticism with respect to the painter’s biography, even though he mines myths from the biographies of Picasso in the same conversation. This is in keeping with his detached methodology in his use of stencils & rollers. To paint with a paintbrush is to give away a signature. The motive behind Cumberland’s methodology is to give away nothing, especially a subject who feels or emotes. Cumberland’s “pictures” are objects that think, not feel.

Cumberland speaks of the mechanical & the slapstick, or how the slapstick comes out of the mechanical act. The artist confesses that when he realised he was making paintings that twinned what Walther Robinson coined “zombie formalism”, he had to change technical tact. This is a strange admission with respect to a post-conceptual artist. Especially considering Robinson uses the metaphor of the “joke” — something that Cumberland also mentions as a motive — in his definition of zombie formalism:

“With their simple & direct manufacture, these artworks are elegant and elemental, & can be said to say something basic about what painting is—about its ontology, if you think of abstraction as a philosophical venture. Like a figure of speech or, perhaps, like a joke, this kind of painting is easy to understand, yet suggestive of multiple meanings.”

— Walther Robinson

Cumberland’s “estate” is an exit strategy, where the door is signed PULL but the painter pushes: slapstick! The idea is somehow formalised by really not existing at all. It's just there, the idea, hanging over the work. Like the artist statement, which Jake Hawkey spends a lot of time extolling in terms of Cumberland’s predilection for literary analogy, such as the studio as a wet room where the artist pisses & has sex. 

Stuart Cumberland, Five Shapes, 2012, Oil on linen, 130 × 97 cm

In psychoanalytic terminology, which Cumberland is drawing from here, the libidinal & the desirous are always elsewhere. This is especially the case with the fetish. The fetish being a kind of distraction or coping object or process that breaks down or shatters the whole into cropped parts, like a foot. The fetishist desires or depends on the part not the whole to cope with desire, fear or loss. Beyond sex, even though sex is made explicit in Cumberland’s wet room analogy, the artist statement or the “Stuart Cumberland estate” becomes the fetish. If you turn your eyes away from the painting to the artist statement or artist’s estate, the painting becomes more desirous because it's attached to this remote thing outside of the object of desire. The libidinal is not within the painting as such; it is what frames it. If we put it in more grounded terminology, it is the context, the setting. 

Cumberland is a painter interested in the setting. He talks about how psychoanalysis is about becoming more aware of your unconscious. He outlines this definition in relation to social settings, where passive & reactionary speech acts take place. He infers that the psychoanalytically trained individual makes great efforts to subdue the voice of the unconscious. They are not too eager to react in conversational settings. They sit back, as the psychoanalyst does in the clinical setting, & wait. They wait their turn or await the babel of voices to quieten. Then they respond with all that information rather than emotion. Yet Slavoj Žižek’s interpretation of Jacques Lacan’s definition of the psychoanalytic process has less potential of control or escape (or PUSH/PULL exits): “The psychoanalyst's objective is to convince the unconscious, not to convince you.”

Philippe Thomas, readymades belong to everyone®, advertising, advertising, 1988
black & white photograph, framed, 157 x 123 cm

There's something interesting here in relation to Cumberland, psychoanalysis, the marketplace, & the positioning of painting within that Venn diagram. As an artist from that generation, as a young postmodern, & having hangovers from all the pluralism that erupted in the 1970s through ‘80s, from the pseudo-expressionist Julian Schnabel to The Pictures Generation organised by Douglas Crimp who called time on painting, Cumberland, with his disavowal of the depressive artist, is swimming in a shallow pond of mimicry & history. To name your paintings “pictures” not paintings is a language game that lacks depth. A deeper conceptual gesture was made by Italian conceptual artist Philippe Thomas, who transferred his title of author onto his collectors. And by doing so, becoming visible while also disappearing, like the fetish. 

There's a kind of manipulation or a magic trick at play in these conceptual gestures that hinge on a lie, negation or disappearance. In the language & aftermath of Conceptual Art & Rosalind Krauss’ post-medium condition, painting, as an idea not trauma, always struggles to sustain itself in the painter. Objectivity is a shallow stream. Today we are in a social media space that presents painting as a commodity & nothing more, domesticated by workshops for pricing your artwork, or ultimately empty gestures like Cumberland’s meta estate. 

Screenshot from Art Space article on “The Pictures Generation”

Jacques Rancière, whom Jake Hawkey cites from Cumberland’s PhD thesis, adamantly claims in one lecture that aesthetics was borne upon politics before it was commandeered by the visual arts. Cumberland wants to level the playing field between painting & its conception, between the sensible & the sign. Yet Rancière’s aesthetics is the moment when the worker in the field notices the sunset &, for a split moment, stops toiling to become aware of their position in the world. The aesthetic here creates a temporary rupture in routine, in habit, in society & culture. The aesthetic creates the potential for soul-beating that can be rhetorical or revolutionary. Most artists choose rhetoric. —James Merrigan

*Stuart Cumberland made a body of obituary-inspired paintings named after still living people (eg: Leslie Nielsen & Steve Jobs), paintings that became complete when the “named” passed away.

RECENT TEXTS

Driver or Parker? The Future of the forty-something Artist

I've been thinking about what Donald Kuspit coined the “lifeworld” of the artist. One that generally starts as a teenager, spanning their 20s, 30s, 40s, and onwards. I'm in my 40s, so I have a particular perspective on this as both an artist and critic. I'm trying to see it subjectively and objectively from different viewpoints, one personal and one more general.

The personal aspect is difficult to discuss, because there's an element of loss in it. Loss being: my generation began their lives as artists with all this energy and naivety fuelled by irresponsibility and freedom. We pushed through that energy and naivety with irresponsibility and freedom, making work without much reflection or nostalgia. We pushed through, or over, never looking back. We moved with momentum and speed and, if we were lucky, generosity and validation from our peers for what we were doing, even though we didn’t really know what we were doing.

We built upon that momentum, 20s through 30s, before life started to get in the way. By life I mean responsibility for what accumulates as the necessary and the selfless. Especially if you become a parent, a homeowner, a car owner, an animal owner. We became more conscious of the other people around us—those we love and those we feel responsible for. Artists make work within a life that disavows them as being artists in the lifeworld. That's where the personal comes in; as time persists you feel you have to fit into a world that rejected you, or you rejected, or resisted until you couldn’t anymore.

This personal perspective, one I've experienced as a husband, a parent, a homeowner, a greyhound owner, becomes pivotal on the ball and shift of the artist’s feet through time and space. An artist is an artist in relation to the lifeworld, not just the artist themselves, and the choices the artist makes in life and art that allow them to continue on as artists in one pure or diluted form or another. Some artists are lucky in life, and unlucky in art and vice versa. Never the twain shall meet if the twain of life and art fail to incorporate one another.

And yet the artist continues to be an artist no matter what the lifeworld throws in their way of being an artist. Artists have to remain artists because, as artist Miranda July says, there's an element of self-help in art, the same way as in philosophy. An artist can't separate themselves from the need to make art.

Art objects are just a bi-product or bi-proxy of this need. Artists are umbilically tied to the making of art, not its bi-products, which are for strangers they will probably never meet. They need art yet they produce art for institutions whose cultural value is based on the bi-products of process they present to the world of strangers. Artists have to produce things and become things for the world, not for themselves; they never wanted that responsibility, deadline or disappointment. Yet that is what artists have become or always were, orphaned objects. Orphans are objects without a subject.

So what does cultural production mean to me as a forty-something artist when nostalgia for the past is more present than the hopes for the future. What next?

I'm in the middle of reading artist Miranda July’s 2024 novel All Fours. At the time of writing the novel, 2022, July announced that she and her husband were separated romantically, although they continued to co-parent and, till recently, shared the same residence, each with their respective girlfriend. All Fours is a fictional autobiography that mirrors July’s family triad of husband and lone child, with an implicit feeling of emotional tolerance, assumably inherited with respect to her marital relationship, and agitated by an emotional intensity for her child amidst the fracture and fantasy of the burgeoning detachment with her husband, which in real life became divorce. But beyond those echoes of life, which echo with less and less fidelity like a shout into the dark of a dream invariably does, All Fours reflects the artist at the threshold of a past and future about to collide in the throes of a midlife crisis.

July’s decision to take a road trip alone in the novel is made on the back of her husband’s insight about “Parkers and Drivers”:

“Well, in life there are Parkers and there are Drivers… Drivers are able to maintain awareness and engagement even when life is boring. They don't need applause for every little thing—they can get joy from petting a dog or hanging out with their kid and that's enough… Parkers, on the other hand … need a discrete task that seems impossible, something that takes every bit of focus and for which they might receive applause. “Bravo,” someone might say after they fit the car into an especially tight spot. “Amazing.” The rest of the time they're bored and fundamentally kind of… disappointed. A Parker can't drive across the country. But Parkers are good in emergencies… They like to save the day.” Miranda July, All Fours, 2024.

I watched ART 21 documentation of Miranda July performing at a gas station (Episode: Friends and Strangers). Dressed in a chequered pencil skirt and ivory blouse, July steps from her L.A. home in the L.A. sunlight equipped with a roll of ribbon. She ties the ribbon off to a gas station fence, and traverses the forecourt and pumps, handing it to people in cars queuing, with the plea and directive: “Can you hold this please and let go whenever you feel like it?” which forms a web, pillar to pump, risk to reward. It’s a beautiful and brave artwork — if we can call it an artwork or a gesture…

This performance came after July started to think about the work relationship between audience and artist, and how the artist has to put in all the work, while the viewer passively consumes. In Friends and Strangers and other works July invites the audience to put more work into the making of the artwork. In some ways, or its best way, contemporary art is about getting the viewer to work more than the artist, so the artist becomes a kind of slacker, challenging the viewer to become an artist in their thinking if not making. There is a natural handover between artist and audience in the public sphere, if not the private one of process, which the artist needs, not wants.

Among other things, July’s All Fours parallel parks Friends and Strangers in its handing over responsibility to the audience, while the artist lets go of the strings, or ribbon in July’s case. Miranda July, now 50, wrote All Fours in her late 40s. She's asking these questions of what an artist becomes in their 40s after all the energy and naivety of youth dissolves into experience and reflection. What is an artist in their 40s? Do they retreat into research, or try to engage the LIVE present, even if it is not their temporality anymore?

What artist Andrea Fraser calls the “artist myth” questions the very existence of the artist as fact or fiction. The art object is all that matters to culture. Further, the lie of biography is the ribbon that binds and brings vitality to the art object in the artist’s absence. Biography makes a subject out of the orphaned object. Fraser and July ask questions about the artist and their relationship to the world, artworld and lifeworld respectively. Through the thoroughfare of being an artist in the lifeworld, sacrifice, choice, opportunity, loss and love determines and defeats the artist’s trajectory, transformation and survival in the long run of career and the lottery of legacy. 

As a male artist and stay-at-home dad, I became a critic in the early years of entrenched parenthood. I became, weirdly enough, a viewer, an audience member, who worked more than the general audience as an art critic reviewing exhibitions as a subjective outsider. When I went on an American road trip in an RV with my family last month while reading All Fours, I started to think a lot about this stuff more deeply— being a slacker, being an artist on the road, being an artist in the world without producing objects. Being a Driver not a Parker anymore. What would that look like? What would that feel like?

With these thoughts in mind I looked at the art objects in my studio the other day and how a lot of my work, if I can call it work, is about process not the epilogue of art objects or eulogy of exhibitions. What if the making of art could become a gesture? To do the work without the pursuit of objects, their production values, Arts Council logos, Instagram promo. To opt out of objects while opting for something more with less.

Personally, I don’t know what is next for the forty-something artist, for me. As with all these things, there is a future for the middle-aged artist. Miranda July’s work is usually described as “quirky”, which, in your 40s, July retorts: …”is to say I’m a little girl”. In the end I think artists become Drivers no matter how much they try to fend off the inevitability of the lifeworld which runs parallel to their cultural production. That Jack Kerouac could not Park after being On The Road says something about the fate of the artist—not tied to an institution—as a cultural producer, a Parker whose endeavour is to become a Driver...—James Merrigan

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GOMA Waterford is an artist-led space. Ciara Rodgers’ work suits GOMA’s utilitarian aesthetic. 

It’s all very dialectic: Rodgers’ forms say one thing, the titles sing another, like — Oh Bondage! Up Yours!

Who do we believe? Image? Text? It doesn’t matter. The modernist’s purity of form is as culturally radical as the aesthetic of Wimbledon. Or is the new word not radical but “Radicant”? An old & academic word by now. Yet not as Daz-white clean as Wimbledon. If you discount tennis racket technology & Hawkeye as cultural progress. 

In fact, GOMA plus Rodgers as an accidental collaboration is all very 2009, when serial squatter NAMA evicted the Irish populace en masse, & Nicolas Bourriaud claimed a new fate for modernism in two words that set the scene for the next decade (“Altermodernity”) & its antihero protagonist (the “Radicant”):

To be radicant: it means setting one’s roots in motion, staging them in heterogeneous contexts and formats, denying them any value as origins, translating ideas, transcoding images, transplanting behaviours, exchanging rather than imposing.

Bourriaud’s Radicant is then, now & forever. It shows its two-faces again in Rogers’ bedraggled formalist curlicues, made from building materials or inferring the built urban environment in a dreamy palette of lemon, pink & cerulean. The opposition or collaboration between ideas & forms in Rodgers’ work gives the insight that ideas float & materials are just apples that drop from trees.

The artist's paper-cast bricks are not political brickbats, they are the chewing gum found under the classroom desk or urban handrail. They are radical in their interiority & navel gazing; a private revolution that makes you go ugh or gag when you reach too far with your naked fingers under the crotch of the institution. 

This is all aesthetically in keeping with GOMA’s voyeuristic & vulgar architecture, with its electrical sockets, wall scars & paint-spitted floors. Reminiscent of the injection of Aleana Egan’s formalism into Temple Bar Gallery Dublin in the Autumn of 2009. A few years before the Spring of the empyrean cleanliness of Egan’s commercial gallery career at Kerlin Gallery Dublin. 

The dance of holding form & withholding content is Rodgers’ rhetorical dance between the dinge, dirt, debris & decay at GOMA. Materials float & folly like marshmallow speech bubbles in a pink & silent “rosy-fingered dawn” as gum-chewing Homer put it in The Odyssey.

Rodgers’ scattershot analogue Polaroids (ala Sophie Calle) & softly-softly staging of colour (ala Franz West) without much tone, except as half (ala Sigmar Polke) is a joy to see, & a sadness to reflect upon regarding what has been lost in the shuffle of history. 

Ciara Rodgers’ installation at GOMA reflects a time when artists truly experimented & broke the frame of art under the shelter & support of an efflorescent artist-led DIY culture. With risk comes apples.

Through 13 July 2024

THE BEST OF GOOD HATERS

“He was a good hater. God knows what was at the very bottom of that animosity. ”

— From Best of Enemies: Buckley vs. Vidal 

“Real argument, in front of the public, is who is the better person.

”

— From Best of Enemies: Buckley vs. Vidal 

Before I begin, I want to distinguish between bad hate and good hate in the context of cultural production. Of course, bad and good are not mutually exclusive or binary; like love and hate they invoke and elicit each other in unequal measures. They come from both places; they are born from and borne upon one another. But what if good hate was seen as sometimes necessary for the artist to invoke for the sake of a cultural production that upturns the status quo? Hate as a source for revolutionary art. Even though in its delivery under the gaze of the public it may well leave a trail of destruction and hurt in its wake.

I picked up the phrase “good hater” from the documentary Best of Enemies: Buckley vs. Vidal. The 2015 film explores the intellectually and  ideologically combative relationship between right-wing conservative William F. Buckley Jr. & Democratic liberal Gore Vidal. Viewed through the 4:3 lens of the 1968 televised political debates in the race to the Whitehouse and the race riots in Chicago, “good hater” is used by a friend of Buckley to describe Vidal with reference to some of the imaginative things he wrote later as a novelist that metaphorically targeted Buckley, like this: 

“William de la Touche Clancy’s voice is like that of a furious goose, all honks and hisses. He detests our democracy. He fills the pages of his magazine America with libalist comments on all things American. Despite a rich wife and five children, he is a compulsive sodomite, forever preying on country boys new to the city.”

“William de la Touche Clancy” is Buckley in Vidal’s imagination. Vidal himself was gay. In 1948 he wrote The City and the Pillar, the story of a young man discovering his own homosexuality. He was just 19. Twenty years later, the year of the televised debates, Vidal pens Myra Breckinridge, a proto-trans revolutionary novel, wherein a man becomes a woman becomes a man. Vidal’s “good hate” in the ridiculous figure of William de la Touche Clancy was perhaps the way Vidal believed Buckley imagined Vidal. He was making Buckley into a repugnant satire of his queer self, “queer” being the very slur Buckley regretfully expressed in the heat of the moment on the live broadcasted debates in 1968. We can look at Vidal’s passage above as an offensive, ad hominem attack on Buckley, or we can look at it as a piece of cultural production made on the back of what Buckley’s friend called good hate – “Vidal was a good hater.”

Is good hate real hate when remixed as a form of cultural production? Buckley and Vidal spoke the same patrician,  elitist language. Vidal’s barb that Buckley's speech was “jumbled by the strangest syntax” is fighting words concerned with how something is delivered, not what is delivered. They understood each other more than the audience that tuned into the TV debates in 1968. 10 debates in total performed in cities across America, against the tidal wave of political tensions and public unrest invoked by the presidential race, they represented something unreal, what some call charisma and others call pretentious. “The Whole World Is Watching” the anti-Vietnam War demonstrators heralded aloft as they were beaten and arrested by police outside the Conrad Hilton Hotel in Chicago during the same 1968 Democratic National Convention where Vidal and Buckley fenced with words that didn’t reflect the bruises and blood spilt in Chicago or Vietnam. 

Does hate as cultural production leave a wound on the one that it is addressed to, or does that matter if it creates a space in which cultural production of a revolutionary kind can take place? In  Best of Enemies we are given a portrait of Buckley in old age, when he still hasn’t let go of the debates with Vidal. He writes a 10,000-word critical reflection in Esquire Magazine, a deeply personal and confessional account of how he reacted in the debates with Vidal, when, in a heated moment, Buckley called Vidal “queer” after Vidal calling Buckley a “crypto-Nazi”. Nazism and fascism were words that were often employed exclusively in slogans volleyed at right-wing conservative republicans like Buckley. It seemed he had had enough.

Is cultural production spurred on by hate worth the wounds that it may inflict on an individual? I am asking this today in the wake of the cultural production delivered in recent weeks by hip-hop gods, Drake & Kendrick Lamar, when each rapper released successive diss tracks which explicitly refer to each other personally, with wounding shots that suggest pedophilia, spousal abuse, child parentage and parental neglect. 

After being exposed to this rap diss battle through the YouTube algorithm, I immediately became more invested in what was being said, but especially how it was being said by Drake versus Kendrick Lamar. Of course, I've heard the names Drake and Kendrick Lamar, especially Drake, who is a cultural movement unto himself—the richest rapper alive. But I didn't know to the degree to which those in the cultural sphere of hip hop, the purists versus the populists, believe in their respective icons—Kendrick Lamar on the side of the purists, Drake on the side of the populists, what Dave Hickey called the “Looky-Loos”.

So where does this hate come from, good or bad, in respect to cultural production? Drake has been a commercial gateway for rappers over the last decade, including Kendrick Lamar. But Drake’s commercial success has also provoked a lot of hate among his peer group. Childish Gambino (aka Donald Glover) first started writing THIS IS AMERICA as a Drake diss track. But as the song developed he felt it was “too hard” a track to remain a Drake diss, inferring Drake is too soft a target to take seriously with respect to cultural production that is valued both lyrically and conceptually. The sense I've got from listening carefully to the form of the music and the commentary by those in the know, is that Drake represents the disintegration of hip-hop culture into something that is more, broadly speaking, mainstream. He has sold out the culture of hip hop according to the purists, while also bringing a larger audience to the culture in an albeit diluted, catchy form. Further, Drake is accused of using ghost writers; it seems ready-made music can be resampled, reshaped, truncated, expanded and recycled in the rap economy, but words by ghosts are off limits.

Kendrick Lamar represents something very different within the purist community of hip hop, something that is about artistry, lyricism, complexity, double entendres, word play and word smithery, everything that is in the arena of art, not enterprise. His tracks are sometimes difficult to dance to or enter into intellectually or emotionally. So when the purity of Lemar and the populism of Drake collide what is the outcome in terms of cultural production? What can be said is Kendrick Lamar is motivated. His first diss track Euphoria — one of many Lemarian tracks reverberating with double entendres that infer teenage sexuality (Drake being a producer of the sexually charged teenage HBO series Euphoria) — sets the table for the forthcoming courses, sweet and sour. But what good — hate or otherwise — can come from labelling another person a “paedophile” both in lyrics and image — (Lemar’s “Not Like Us” is accompanied by an aerial shot of the Drake mansion off Park Lane pinned by a host of symbols that designate registered sexual offenders). For 50-million plus listeners on YouTube to hear that message, whether in disavowal or agreement, is a big moment culturally. Lemar has been in offence from the outset. Drake on the other hand has been on the back foot in a catalogue of diss tracks that have always been on the defensive, the always losing side of the argument. 

In the aftermath of the Drake/Kendrik Lemar divide with respect to audience reception, rappers have been discussing how this is a cultural moment, how hip hop has been reborn through this battle, and how Kendrick Lamar, from the perspective of the OG hip-hop purist, has rebirthed hip-hop. That good music has been made, that kids are reading again, even deciphering the Lemarian if not Drakeian coded disses. Hip hop has been reborn through the destructive force of the rap diss paraded under the black flag of good-hate.

Returning to William F. Buckley and  Gore Vidal, a debate performed in a very different time, cultural moment, involving very different protagonists, emerging from very different backgrounds (although Drake’s upbringing is middle-class Canadian resulting in his so-called culture-vulture approach to recruitment and appropriation of other territories, purist and popular), I have come to realise the staking of territory, whether California, New York, Atlanta or Toronto in the Drake and Kendrick Lamar diss tourney, or in the staking of political territory in the Buckley and Vidal debates, is very important factor in the critical legitimacy of your argument, your legacy and your cultural production versus profiteering. “Not Like Us” is not rhetorical. It is a manifesto of them versus us, parasitic everywhere versus pure Cali-Compton. 

This territorial angle also brings to mind the idea that hate in the context of cultural production is not always personal. The land grabber’s desire for Empire is always broader in scope and ambition than the homebird’s: “No you not a colleague, you a fucking coloniser” — Kendrick Lamar’s line in “Not Like Us”. The motivational factors behind such cultural production is based on what the other protagonist in the debate represents in the culture, rather than a personal deep-seated hate of the individual. More broadly the hater hates the culture and community that has facilitated the visibility and power of the hated. Drake has been in the FIRING LINE (The name of William F. Buckley’s popular public affairs programme) for a decade, as he represents the commodification and deterritorialization of hip hop culture away from its originary roots and providence. 

I think in both debates, Buckley v Vidal/Drake v Lemar there exists better haters. Kendrick Lamar even refers to himself in Euphoria as “the biggest hater”, to then list his Drake hates. But what does it mean to be the “biggest hater” for cultural production, for the music? Vidal hated Buckley like Lemar hates Drake. So is the better hater a better artist? There's a freeform playfulness in both Lemar and Vidal’s words. In 1968 Buckley refers to Vidal as “feline”, and there's something of that in Kendrick Lamar's words: he's playing with his food.

In Kendrick Lemar’s tracks “Meet the Grahams” and “Not Like Us” there's real feline play, scope and range in terms of how the artist is delivering his message, his diss. For “Meet the Grahams” Lamar had created a structure in which he is a kind of Grim Reaper or ghost of Christmas future. Door to door he addresses the mother, son and daughter of Drake's family, the Grahams, relaying a message to all about how Aubrey Graham (aka Drake) has betrayed himself, betrayed the culture, betrayed them. It’s bad and good hate told with a tryst in the tale. 

Then you have the follow-up track, dropped 24 hours later, “Not Like Us," where Lemar changes the tone from something gothic and unrelenting, to something to dance to, something to enjoy, the pleasure principle running riot on the reality principle. Yet underneath this pleasure, this relinquishment of the body to the beat, the YouTube reaction posse bobbing their heads to the beat, the words tell a different story. If “Meet the Grahams” is Drake’s eulogy, “Not Like Us” is the dance upon the freshly laid soil of the grave. Kendrick Lemar is dancing upon Drake’s grave, dressed in Drake’s clothes, his words not Lemarian deep but Drake “petty”.

But what of the damage? Everyone talks about how Drake can never be taken down off his commercial pedestal. He is just too big, has too much of a fan base. There is too much belief, almost religious fervour surrounding Drake. No matter what he does, it will be celebrated, it will be danced to. Whereas Kendrick Lemar doesn't have the same looky-loo following relative to Drake. 

These rap battles were very targeted and explicit, naming the alleged abusers, perpetrator, predators in a public sphere that gains hundreds of millions of listeners in days across a panoply of social media platforms. French philosopher Jack Derrida says the enemy is always public, while the friend stays private. I wonder, privately, would Vidal and Buckley have been friends? And the same for Kendrick Lamar and Drake. Is there any potential for friendship in the earlier image of Drake with his arms around Kendrick Lemar? Is one just tolerating the other to get along?  Or have the seeds of hate not been placed yet in the sod that would one day become the grave and dance floor of hip hop to be reborn…

Privately, after the debate with Gore Vidal, William F. Buckley recounts that while they were still sitting in their seats getting ready to leave the studio, Vidal leaned over and whispered, “Well, we gave them a show anyway.”—James Merrigan

Recent Texts

PAINTERS DON’T DREAM

To sleep or not sleep on a painting? Imagine a room full of paintings. It can be any room: a white cube, a cellar, with a bed. Paintings pack the walls. Every bit of wall space is squeezed to an inch of its life. If a wall is part of the world, then what is a wall full of paintings? Is a painting just playing pretend? A cover up? In more ways than one! What we know is, a painting is a thing made up of its becoming a thing. To assume a painting is unfinished is missing the point of its intrinsic and existential becoming. A painting is composed, constructed, built, layered to become a thing that is becoming a thing. A painting’s end is arbitrary and necessary. A #wip is a tautology. A painting is always becoming. How far it becomes is up to the painter. The way in which it becomes is also up to the painter. The becoming always starts slow, a struggle to become the thing it is becoming. Colour here, tone there, heavy, light, transparent, a drip caught dropping. Painting becomes its becoming. A good painting is information dispensed in different directions, thicknesses, tones, colours, awkward adjustments towards a thing becoming without ever becoming the thing. A painting is not a wall; a painting conceals a wall; a wall being the world, a painting being… temporary. The painter stops. Why? Who knows. The painter could have kept going. Maybe painting is the transformation of time into H x W x L. Why is a novel the length it becomes? Culture has a length, a limit, a breadth. Words & music could go on forever, but culture has to become a thing that never becomes. Paintings are becoming things. That’s their thing. Becoming. Upon waking Forrest Bess painted his visions without gratuitous flourishes. He was a pragmatic visionary. He was not a dreamer. Luc Tuymans never sleeps on a painting. His paintings become a thing infinitely becoming in a day — no more, no less. 8 hours of interposed sleep would only torment the real time it took for his paintings to become something that is becoming. This seems reasonable, realistic, real. In the end painting becomes its becoming. But what is a painting that ends in the pursuit of becoming? Are Tuymans’s paintings still becoming when the painter sleeps? Does he wake to see them anew, perfect? Or does the painter merely tolerate them, like other people that can’t be moulded to our liking? Paintings are subjects not objects no matter what the cover story of the art market says. We could pass the buck & say the viewer finishes off the painting; the painting’s elan vital is the viewer jerking off in front of the painting after all the edging towards becoming has been done by the painter. Painting is maturbation. Painting is durational. Paintings are not like Michael Heizer’s City or Marcel Proust’s In Search of Lost Time. Paintings, in their becoming, have a lifespan. What we are presented with in a painting is something that represents time & becoming. Paintings are small fires, small lives. Some of Frank Auerbach and Howard Hodgkin’s paintings may span the lifespan of an adolescent in numbers, but they took the time it takes a paint-leaden brush to swipe across a canvas. Painters don’t dream.

📸Luc Tuymans in his studio, not sleeping, or dreaming.

SALTBURN: LOVE & HATE MISDIRECTED

“Saltburn… was mostly based on a family I murdered. ”

— Emerald Fennel, interview, 2023

“The details are the stories; stories in miniature. ”

— James Wood, Serious Noticing, 2014

Saltburn is a film that everyone has been talking about without really talking about it. To talk about Saltlburn would involve a certain amount of dirty talk, or an unspoken suppression of content — the spilling of deets. This is what Saltburn has become infamous for in the mere months since its cinematic & Prime releases. This has resulted in the social face-off of knowing looks but don’t-tell nods & smirks from those who have seen it, & those who have partly seen it through the online viral mill. Everyone knows but doesn’t know. Saltburn is like a dream in bad translation, repressed & unconscious. Wake up!

It’s 2006. Before iPhones & social media. Saltburn opens with working-class scholarship student Oliver Quick entering Oxford's college campus. At first glance Oliver — played by Barry Keoghan — looks like a buff Harry Potter. Yet first glances can be deceiving when it comes to the psychological fluid that plumps up the face & arse cheeks of this little boy-man, cheeks which are repeatedly presented, creased & prancing, in occasional 4:3 aspect.

In a predictable twist, “more-please” Oliver ends up not being working class at all, or anything else he shares with deep sincerity to the ones he plots to deceive. The reason for this deception is still unclear after watching. Perhaps there doesn’t have to be a deeper reason for unreasonable behaviour. Maybe prancing around a castle naked, alone — if you ignore the director’s clutching of Oliver’s glutes with her camera — is enough of a reason. That said, Oliver Quick is at least quick in intellect; truths & lies, projected & introjected, are at the aesthetic heart & missing head of Saltburn.

Dumb & quick youth comes in all colours & shades. In Saltburn the camera beams down upon summer-sweaty bodies draped in transparent & loose threads. Oliver Quick is an empty & drenched narcissist, looking for the black pool of the self at the end of the rainbow. Oliver wants to be them by erasing them. He loves them & hates them all at once. The pronoun them creates a distance, “thus” — a word Oliver is accused of overusing — a desire to want & need. Them is over there. And over there is always better than thus.

This story has been told countless times. Someone, usually a male narcissist — psychopath, genius, obsessive — infiltrates a social group above their social status. The infiltrator lies as much to others as to themselves, because they in fact don't have a self. Their modus operandi is to explore selfhood through their own negation of self. To be possessed by their obsession. Their ability to introject & parrot the other is so they can adopt what is not them. 

We are immediately given a perception of how the there & them — yet inner-world — of the elite first perceive Oliver Quick via a sniggering “Hey, cool jacket” slight by Fareligh, a complicated boy aristocrat, who makes several exits & entrances in Saltburn. However, dress is also a funny thing with regard the hidden psychological makeup of an individual’s identity, making clowns — in this case victims — out of the clowns who guess wrong. 

And there are a lot of clowns & clowning around in Saltburn. Not least the structure, which slowly & suggestively builds its fractured & freestyle narrative in the self-conscious slaying & stereotyping of cultural norms regarding class, sexuality, race & film genre itself. It’s comedy. It’s cringe. It’s cliche. Every detached emotion is included under the fetishistic & cultured gaze of its director Emerald Fennell (pronounced Fen-nell), Oxford-educated & featured in Tatler Magazine for her high-society-attended 18th birthday in 2003. 

Following the release of Saltburn Fennell’s omnipresence online in the form of podcast & fashion magazine features is surprising, especially when the algorithm kicks in. Bloggers & YouTube video essayists, hungry for clicks, have used Fennell’s talking-head ubiquity to unravel the intentions of the very intentional & open auteur that is Emerald Fennell. The director’s viral oversharing breaks the fourth wall for those who want to get lost in film. But for those who want more than losing themselves for two hours, it is difficult to resist the access we have to a director who has written & parodied what she knows after rubbing shoulders with a class of people so out of reach for the majority.

But what percentage of Fennell’s class knowledge & experience are translated into the filmic “real” — a word repeated ad nauseum in Saltburn, & the ultimate plaything for the cast of cazh-cosplay aristocrats? No doubt Fennell enjoys transgressing mainstream cinematic norms via an aesthetic filter that wallows in the gothic & macabre. But why the transgression? And why now?

Is Saltburn a post-pandemic film, as suggested by its director, a black hole in time when a backlog of desire to touch & get close was withheld? Is it — in D.H. Lawrence’s estimation of Cézanne — “[Her] rage with the cliche made [her] distort the cliche sometimes into parody”? Is the cliche of Saltburn Fennell’s hydra-headed rage monster lopped off, squirming & besmirching the floor of her own class, or own secret history, with shock & glittering awe (her dad is a jewellery designer, called “the king of bling”)?

Although seduced by Fennell’s aesthetic attention to detail, I wasn’t shocked by the cum-licking bath-juice scene, the pun-intended ‘period sex’, or the humping-of-the-grave. Fennell’s beauty filter is definitely always switched on to max. Everything is suggestive, not hardcore forced. Truth be told, I willed Saltburn on, celebrating the licky & lavish transgressions from the comfort & remote control of my couch. The arousal of art & desire is always dependent & provoked by its setting. (If Saltburn was presented in a contemporary art gallery it would be experienced & conceptualised in a very different way.)

Saltburn could be viewed as a product of the internal voyeurism the director Emerald Fennell has with her own class. That is what makes this film so perverse & fun, the director’s fetishistic detail & intimacy with regard to the characters & their elite settings. Yet love doesn’t enter the Saltburn equation; the look always subjugates love in the gaze of the fetishist, who makes objects out of subjects. Fennell makes bold claims about being on the side of her objectified characters. I felt neutral all the way through. Fennell may have known the upper-class girls, the boys, the families & their settings, wherein eccentric social cues could only cue parody to a thirty-something looking back on her twenty-something years, but from a seemingly great distance.

Like the genesis of Stephenie Meyer’s Twilight Saga, which was built upon the author’s dream-fantasy of blood & death mixed with love, Fennell’s Saltburn is gothic-romanticism at its bodily fluid core (Gothic Romcore?). On a quick search, Saltburn is listed as a “Mystery/Comedy” with the following blurb: “Troubled by his classmate's unfortunate living situation, wealthy Oxford student Felix invites Oliver to stay at his estate, but a series of horrifying events soon engulf his eccentric family.” Just below on Wikipedia the same movie is described as a “black comedy”. On watching the movie, Saltburn falls between the cracks of black & comedy; the “mystery” aspect being a mere add on to create a kind of structural semblance to a narrative that is always breaking down into the aestheticisation of bodily fluids, what Julia Kristeva most famously named “abjection” under the poetic title for her essay Powers of Horror. 

Most criticism volleyed at Saltburn is structural, especially the last 10 minutes, when one too many explanatory monologues & montages tie the burlesque narrative into a mainstream straight-jacket. James Wood writes that, “Stories are dynamic combinations of surplus & lack: disappointing because they must end, & disappointing because they can’t really end”. Saltburn’s end is disappointing because it feels forced, to appease a mainstream audience & the box office return. It is a better film than its ending.

One of Saltburn’s endings celebrates Oliver’s empty attainment of material wealth & liberation from the other in naked & rhythmic abandon to Sophie Ellis-Bextor’s Murder on the Dance Floor. There are no pawns left on the board, except for stone & puppet-box representations. But what happens after the dance? Like a dream, the motivation for such a dance is not borne upon any narrative coherence or logic or desire, but on the surplus & lack inherent in desire. Like in Fortnite, there is no game-advantage in “emoting”. To dance just is, not was or will be. This episode surely illustrates Fennell’s intention (or unconcious desire) for instinct to circumvent plot, & even meaning. Saltburn is desire caught, the most empty of desires.

The Talented Mr. Ripley creator, Patricia Highsmith, with her cat

There have been better told & ended stories in the Saltburn vein, such as The Talented Mr. Ripley, something that Fennell has unfathomably denied as an influence in interviews. You can understand Fennell’s reluctance, what a psychoanalyst might call disavowal, to concede to such an influence so close to Saltburn’s vein & bone.

Especially if you dig deeper into the creator of Mr. Ripley, Patricia Highsmith, who, according to Edmund White, was a “vicious anti-Semite… an equal opportunity offender …disliked almost every minority… & Like Ripley, a social climber & intensely aware of status; most of her girlfriends were upper middle-class, rich, well-connected, preferably married. Like Ripley, she constantly fantasised; even in her journals she seemed incapable of distinguishing between reality and her inventions.” 

Emerald Fennel, Vanity Fair feature, 2023

It is this “distinguishing” between reality & her inventions that is so intriguing about Saltburn & its creator. In a Vanity Fair feature on “Breaking Down the Arrival Scene” from Saltburn, we are presented with a portrait of the gothic sensibilities of the artist & her creation, from Brideshead Revisited to Hammer Horror. But what sticks out, what the VF editors are very aware of with respect to click bait, is Fennel’s ironic disclosure on being “not nice”:

I don’t think any of us are nice. I just don’t know anyone nice. Not really. Not anyone I know well. I don’t think I’m nice. I think we are all in complete denial about our own characters.

Further, on being asked by an interviewer where Saltburn came from, especially concerning the more controversially abject scenarios written by Fennell & performed by Barry Keoghan, the director uses sarcasm to fend off accusations of psychopathology on her part: “Saltburn… was mostly based on a family I murdered.” In the abundance of online interviews with Fennell concerning Saltburn, the director is consistent in her jolly yet defensive posturing when any —mostly awkward jokingly — accusation of psychopathology on her part or on the part of her written characters is brought up. She digs up Heathcliff digging up Catherine’s grave in Wuthering Heights as a literary precedent for Oliver humping Felix’s grave. She reasons out the unreasonable actions of her protagonists through the speculative notion of exaggerated & misdirected love, desire or want. Perversion & psychopathology don’t always have to go hand in twisted hand. Moreover, artists should never defend the naked exposure of self & body in their work. Art has the capacity & capriciousness to shed the world of its protective skin. And beyond such seriousness, sometimes it can be just fucking fun to transgress.

Janet Malcom writes in relation to Anton Chekhov’s distinction between reality & fiction in the novel: “A character is a being who has no privacy, who stands before the reader with his ‘real, most interesting life’ nakedly exposed.” And towards this realism of being nakedly exposed Chekhov himself writes in a letter: “The artist is not meant to be a judge of his characters & what they say; his job is to be an impartial witness.”

Naked exposure & judgement converge in the performative in Saltburn & the critical reception that has followed. The film has received a lot of critical flack & viral lust, but for the wrong & right reasons respectively. There has been critical stress placed on the film in conservative narrative structural terms, & the director’s explicit burrowing from other films. Saltburn is a magpie. It borrows & steals the glittery stuff to dress up its empty core. This is not a criticism of the film. In fact, the burlesque of surface, beauty & its abject defacement peels back our contemporary reality to its empty core. The virality of Saltburn on TikTok is testament to this fact. Saltburn is indicative &, for some, an indictment of the contemporary culture we now reboot & remake in our own image. We are gods of content. Saltburn is, not was.—JAMES MERRIGAN

Dorje de Burgh’s Chop Shop

🏴Amidst the self-promotion, self-righteousness & performed self-effacement on social media, what is it about a particular image that it can solicit your attention in the ocean of images that doomily scroll past your gaze? The deck of images is stacked against the possibility of such an image pushing through the surface of Instagram, to breathe on its own, separated from the never-ending reproductive organs of technology.

But there it is, an image that, through the ambiguous aerodynamics of line & form, seamlessly sfumatos from lipstick red to oily shadow to SMEG white. Yet this is not a line of refrigerators or toasters, but two cars captured on camera from above. Maybe from an apartment — dated 2021, a year into the pandemic, when we were still looking from an isolated frame, or at least still conditioned by the memories of a physically cropped world.

The title “the coombe (I)” has a roundness to it (with its self-conscious lowercase “c”) that slipstreams into the chop-shop of sight, to then sink back into black rectangles pooling here & there. It’s like that scene from Hitchcock’s Psycho, when Norman Bates pushes & rolls the car into a twilight swamp. Like Norman, we must have something already in the trunk for an image to rise from the depths of its unavoidable submergence. The Coombe (with a capital C), a word, a place, a hospital, is not sexy. Neither are facemasks. But Dorje de Burgh’s image is — that’s saying something in the image bank of now.

📸Dorje de Burgh, the coombe (i) c-type 260 x 340 mm (2021); Still from Alfred Hitchcock’s Psycho (1960)

AWARD CULTURE

One lunchtime last week, before the awardees were announced, I wandered accidentally & contextually unaware through the exhibition of shortlisted paintings for the Hennessy Craig Award & Homan Potterton Award at the RHA. I learnt later that the 10 painters shortlisted for the award were sourced from the 2022 and 2023 Annual Exhibitions at the RHA. Hence, it is very much an in-house & slow-burn selection process, that winds up & down over a couple of years. 

My visit was the opposite of slow-burn. On the day of visiting I hadn’t much time on my side; art & words were not on the agenda; & the clamour of drills & hammers during the installation of exhibitions opening that same week at the RHA was all around. I didn’t even know it was the shortlist exhibition, until an artist friend shared the news of the two winners over coffee a few days later. Only then did I join the dots & the noughts —4 noughts preceded by a 2. A sizeable sum of money for one art award, not to mention two, in any cultural context, here or abroad. 

It is no surprise that the Hennessy Craig & Homan Potterton Awards are specifically & exclusively dedicated to supporting painting, as bequeaths of estates of painters & the once director of the National Gallery of Ireland respectively. Such a painting legacy also says something about the painting establishment in this country, a culture that is still very conservative when it comes to placing market & mainstream value on other art processes & mediums besides painting. 

Yet painters might argue that, even though painting has more commercial outlets — including zombie galleries & doom-scrolling Instagram — the Arts Council is more art project-oriented than art object-oriented in its public funding preferences. Painting may be the capitalist cogs upon which other art mediums are tolerated & exist, but can painting be radical anymore when its theoretical death didn’t come to pass after the high-flying art market tucked it under its wing? A question for another day…

Two of the shortlisted artists, Ciara Roche & Casey Walshe, whose work I had experienced relatively recently in the commercial space of the RHA, the Ashford Gallery, makes it all feel very groomed & in-house. And yet it is these two artists in particular, who, on my grapevine anyway, have been talked about above & beyond the confines of the RHA in the last 5 to 10 years. 

Further, they are two artists who I believe are confronting & overcoming the doubts that painting can still transform painting anew, if not the world. And for that reason, stand out in the shortlist, especially considering the claim that the shortlist is based “on the overall practice of the artist”.

But what does “overall practice” really mean beyond the other rigid award criteria: “under 35 years of age”; “studied at a recognised art college on the island of Ireland”; and — for the Homan Potterton — “style acknowledges the tradition of painting figurative or landscape subjects”?

I say this with no disrespect to the winners Stephanie Deady (Hennessy Craig Award 2024) & Fiach McGuinness (Homan Potterton Award, 2024). Everyone will have their favourites & opinion; I’m just writing mine down. My favourites & opinion is contextually coloured (like the judges) by so many moments, not to mention the fleeting experience I had of the exhibition last week. However, I still hold Willem de Kooning’s comment about the experience of painting in relation to content: “Content is the glimpse of something, an encounter like a flash. It’s very tiny—very tiny, content.”

Ciara Roche, The Waiting Room, Oil on canvas, 110 x 150cm, 2023

So what makes Ciara Roche’s & Casey Walshe’s paintings so talked about these last few years in the Irish arts scene? Visually, they are antithetical to one another, except for the cold blue-red spectrum through which both painters look through the mirror of culture & self, darkly. Roche is a figurative painter, well suited to the context of the RHA (& the award criteria); Walshe is an abstract-figurative painter, more recently leaning into minimalist abstraction in her limited choice of colour & form. 

There is a haunting polyfold mirroring & temporality in Roche’s paintings of furnished interiors, wherein we are brought back & forward in time to collapse nostalgia & the future, romance & desire, real & surreal, in one fell swoop of the brush. Roche’s The Waiting Room, her big statement in the shortlist, is an uncanny juxtaposition of an aquarium with goldfish & wet-on-wet office chairs waiting for someone, something, to enter, exit, or maybe for memory to return. 

We can theoretically pigeonhole Waiting Room in 1990’s Marc Augé’s “non-place”, where identity, desire & the social is depleted of all energy. But Roche’s painting oozes all those things. In that sense I would call the artist a conceptual painter, ignoring the fact that light is the genesis of her work. Intellectually, it is how, what & where light alights upon the modern world that makes all the conceptual & formalist difference in her paintings.

Casey Walshe, Kisses from Paris, Oil on canvas, 183 × 183cm, 2024

While Roche’s paintings attract, Casey Walshe’s paintings “retract” at the moment of desire, by proffering melancholic vignettes in the bruised colour field of red, dark blue & white, recalling Jasper John’s radical paintings of the American flag. The unusual word “retract”, which Walshe uses in their artist statement, means to “draw back” — she retracted her hand as if she'd been burnt. 

Similar to Roche, whose paintings invoke an event that hasn’t yet happened & never will happen in the stilted universe of painting, Walshe’s use of “retract” could suggest a defensive structuring of content with regard to the formalist gestures of their abstractions; one where desire is boxed off or in; or kept secret — a secret about a secret as Diane Arbus put it — in an architecture where desire peeks out but is not solicited. Walshe’s melancholic & voyeuristic Kisses from Paris, measuring a physical 183 × 183 cms, pushes you back with abstraction while pulling you forward with flowers; whereas Roche’s Waiting Room invites you to sit.

But these are just words, albeit words that come with a critical compulsion to respond — the award results just brought my opinion & words regarding Roche & Walshe’s paintings into focus.

Beside my own physical experiences, both at the RHA & Mother’s Tankstation Limited in solo presentations of her work, no painter has been mentioned more in my classroom than Ciara Roche. Art students recognise something in Roche’s paintings that is influential & permissive. There is something compulsive, twisted & dark in the artist’s painted meditations on display in commercial, domestic, filmic & transitional spaces, that reflects the consumerist & imagistic culture we continue to sleep with as enemies & lovers. 

Walshe, on the other hand, elicits questions, ones that perturb appreciation & produce vex talk. There is something primordially direct, especially in the artist’s recent adoption of a blue, red & white palette, that goes against painted representation, to speak of something painted on the surface of a secret, of ritual, of religion, of temples that were once painted & distinct from the earth upon which they stood, until entropy erased their identity to sand, to dust.

Both artists speak of desire. You can love a Ciara Roche for obvious reasons, & desire a Casey Walshe from the seat of the unconscious. But beyond this personal take on their paintings, I have viewed their work from afar through the eyes & voices & debate about their influence with other artists in the art scene. They are two painters who have consistently evolved their perspectives on the world & their painted psyche. Not winning the award only serves to make my memories & opinion more reified in the aquarium that is their paintings, where goldfish loop, temples effloresce, & an interior world manifests memory & meaning that eventually dies with the deceased & forgotten🏴

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Ciara Roche: Mother's Tankstation Limited, Dublin

THE SOCIAL IMAGINARY

📸AI images prompted with “Alice in Wonderland rabbit hole, photographic”; and “The Social Imaginary, photographic”

🏴In a lecture on the “public sphere”, Canadian philosopher Charles Taylor briefly veers off topic to mention the “social imaginary”. It’s a beautiful phrase, one that incorporates & emphasises the ‘image’ within the social imagination. 

Taylor is of the mind that something radical in technology needs to take place before the social imaginary can be altered, claiming eighteenth-century printing technology as an example of how knowledge & communication is radically peddled from person to person without need for the ‘in-person’. This reflects Taylor’s compatriot Marshall MacLuhan’s dictum that “the medium is the message”, the medium being fundamental in how we read & experience the message personally or impersonally. 

The social imaginary is imagined by Taylor as based on not meeting in person, but somehow creating a commons through images, images that are imagined ‘common’ without face-to face physical interaction. So we end up imagining a commons through an image of the commons, one that is sometimes idealised in the detached personal & idealised “I”, what Jacques Lacan calls the singular & narcissistic “Imaginary”.

But is this a mere advertisement for an event (or reality) that will never come into being in reality? Perhaps reality is surplus to requirements (NFTs). And anyway, are the real & the virtual mutually exclusive anymore? Especially in today’s social imaginary, one that is hypermediated, vigilant, virtual, mobile & common as never before? 

Can we imagine, if this has not already indeed occurred, that the images we disseminate throughout the world have not only changed our relationship with the world, but have become the world. And the world is flat but deep with rabbit holes that extrude our heads inwards until we cease to exist as physical bodies above the horizon… 

ART AS METAPHOR

What does it mean for the artist & their artwork when we liken their work to others? This is what we call simile, a figure of speech meant to emphasise one present thing with one absent thing. 

What are we doing when we use simile in the presence of art? We are definitely doing something that involves a transformation from one thing to another, that cannot be simplified down to relation or emphasis, lucidity or poetics.

In an art education setting it could be said that to refer to another artwork or artist is a way to provide historical examples, precedent & permission for the artist to digest, recycle & move in a new artistic direction, one that has been taken before, but a beaten path lined with trees that, beyond the shade, proffers lush & long grasses to trample anew. 

And yet simile is a reification of the present moment, of making something fleeting, like ideas or time or art more “concrete”, as poet Friedrich Schiller put it in a letter to a fellow poet: “I will make my idea more concrete by a simile.” 

It is uncanny how metaphor is defined sometimes as suggesting a “likeness” to another thing, while simile, in its coy dissimilarity, hinges on being “like” another thing. Being like a thing in respect to difference, & being or becoming a thing outside of the thing being referenced, is the difference (& sameness) between simile & metaphor, dependency & independence, concrete & air. 

Susan Sontag’s book ‘Illness as Metaphor’ (written when she herself was sick) is a critical offensive against the cultural suspicion that illness is a metaphor for repression, lack of passion, moral failings or punishment, what we call “victim blaming” today. In this instance illness is not like repression, but is manifestly ‘repression’ itself. Whereas illness as simile could only result in making illness — something we invariably repress because of its emotional & physical gravity — to something more concrete, something more manageable, something more liveable. 

Thing is (if we are speaking of things) metaphor can become more than the thing itself, whereas simile is always less. Simile is a detached exemplar to elucidate an impression of something in the world that lacks reality or lucidity. 

Leonard Bernstein — culturally resurrected (as simile or metaphor?) in Bradley Cooper’s Maestro — says that music & poetry want to attain the level of metaphor, not simile. This is nothing new. Since Aristotle’s belittling of art as mere mimesis of reality, the artist’s objective is to make art that both becomes & goes beyond reality, beyond simile, which is not a given.

Simile or metaphor. Is the artist to blame for invoking simile (not metaphor) in their art? Or is the viewer at blame for invoking simile because they cannot deal with metaphor in themselves, or in the case of artists, in metaphor that is not their own, metaphor being the thing & not the thing…

📸Leonard Bernstein as Leonard Bernstein & Bradley Cooper as Leonard Bernstein

ART BUREAU

The bureaucracy (what Slavoj Žižek names “false transparency”) that has creeped into every Kafka crevice & circle of the art institution — artist-led, educational, funding — especially evidenced in the sweeping efficiency of rejection feedback for public funding or open submission, has become so bullet-pointed that all meaning is lost in the dotted i’s & crossed t’s. There is always going to be more artists disappointed than artists swinging from the chandeliers. But giving generic reasons for not being successful in your application or submission, no matter how succinct or long-form the feedback is, will never alleviate the disappointment. Especially when such rejection feedback is issued weeks later, when the artist has moved on. This only helps to relive not relieve the disappointment. Artists get over things quickly. They have to. YES or NO will do. Anything else is bureaucratic lip-service, a cover story, a tick-the-box exercise that just pisses artists off. Art doesn’t owe anyone anything.🏴

📸Thomas Demand, Büro (Office), 1996

WAVE

🌊The sky is blue, sunset long, blind spots eternal. It’s nice here, sitting on the shore, looking at artists paddling into position to catch the next wave. Individual artists catch them from time to time. Groups less so. We can look at this one of many ways: curators are suggestible; lazy; or the artist has somehow — against the odds — broken through the surface & productive flows of consumer-capitalist culture (what some name democracy & others equality), to emerge, wearing a Hawaiian jungle bird shirt for all to see. On my watch artists have caught, surfed, bailed & sometimes rode away from shore into the sunset. Waves, usually, are followed by withdrawals, sell-outs, hanger-ons, crashes. Why does curator consensus form around a given artist, at a given moment, for a given duration of time? Such consensus swells out of the blue, with unnatural heft. Every curator on board, knife at the ready, for a piece of the catch. Like the surfer, the artist either chooses to catch the wave with all their core being, or let it pass, to watch it crest & crash with someone else riding it. But how did that first wave come into being? What was the impetus, the motivation, the horsepower, what Bruno Latour calls the network or alliance, to put all that water in motion, all at once, in one big movement? Was it the surfer that willed it into existence, or something underneath? Waves come and go; artists too. Right now an artist is cresting a wave, while other artists look on from the paddling pool, enviously. Yet, within that wave of froth, salt, & spit, a barrel forms around the artist. We can’t see them from the shore; they can’t see us from within the wave. A braided wave, parted in the middle, to form pigtails on either side; & out there, beyond the waterfalls, a tunnel, a vision, white.

📸Raymond Pettibon (from the Royal Book Lodge archive); Magnum wearing Hawaiian jungle bird shirt

ENTER TUMBLEWEEDS

As Warhol exits the Hugh Lane Gallery Dublin & tumbleweeds enter, what does the art critic mean by “Not to be missed”, or the Instagrammer by “Sorry my bad photographs don’t do the artwork justice”? The critic’s line “Not to be missed” (yuk) follows a Babel’s tower of words vacillating between the work & its context, obviously made by someone who experienced the exhibition ‘in-person’, that orphaned phrase adopted from the pandemic. But can ‘in-person’ exist on your phone in this world that forms a flat ontology of real & virtual? My first experience of art was in a book. So, is the copy enough, or do we need the real thing? Maybe the physical can just exist in homes & mandalorian domes, mediated into our hands as images. If I were to claim that the words of the art critic do the artwork justice, that the words (or grams) are not secondary or fugitive, but equal & even better than the real thing, is that crossing the line? I remember I had a habit of redescribing episodes of a weekly TV series to friends & family. I enjoyed being an unreliable narrator because, as Adam Phillips puts it: “redescription is analysis” (perhaps self-analysis). Freud’s Interpretation of Dreams is not the what or why of your dreams, but the how. Sometimes my redescriptions would be remembered as being better than the real thing after the person got around to watching the real thing. I return to my Instagrammer & their weak apology, “Sorry my bad photography doesn’t do the artwork justice”. Does the Instagrammer believe their photographs are really that bad, or are they just vacuously reciting what they think is expected without thinking about what they really mean? Is their self-criticism based on the sense that their photographs don’t live up to the real experience? There is the explicit apology of the ‘bad’ photograph, but there is also an implicit apology, one hidden under the explicit one, the apology of taking & then posting a photograph on Instagram, knowing that the photograph will condition the future real-life experience implied in the “Don’t miss it” hashtag, or failing that, convince the public of not going at all. To be, or not to be…missed…

📸The Last Picture Show (1971)

WATCH, WARHOL, WORK!

Note: The following text was presented first at the SO WHAT seminar hosted by the Hugh Lane Gallery Dublin on January 19 2024.

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There remains art as production, as production—Marcel Broodthaers

Although the object is crucial, it is not important—Sturtevant

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The original is so passé; the copy is what we want, what we want. As children this is not the case. Being found tracing an image is a kind of shame for those who are found tracing, & a disappointment for those who discover the tracer. What we want as would-be artists, & as viewers, is to be original, to pull creativity from a place deep down, not from others. From our arses will do. 

It follows that creativity comes naturally to some & not to others. It emerges from the Carrara marble, fully formed. Art is genius, god-given, a process of what American painter Milton Resnick called “soul-beating”, defined as the difficulty of changing one’s work after finding one’s work. 

The word work here is key, not just as a destination, but as a decree. Artists know that art comes from a place more banal than the soul or god: work! 

People who view art want to both see the presence of work & its absence in the work of art. The labour, not the labouring pains. 

Here, at the Hugh Lane Gallery, displayed at the foot of a stairs, & high against a large window with a view of plants, a film documents Andy Warhol working.

Warhol seems to enjoy the work, what artists now call the process, & other romantics call the journey. But is work something you get lost in? Something you enjoy? Is that the work? And if so, what is the thing left over from the work, what we call the artwork? Can we separate the art from the work, the way we cannot separate the artist from their art? 

I think it is important to repeat Sturtevant‘s claim that Although the object is crucial, it is not important—

Truth be told, I get lost in art all the time. Is that work? Getting lost in the work without any physical or thinking effort? 

I wonder why this documentary film of Warhol working has been deployed here at the Hugh Lane Gallery? Is it important to see Warhol working among the passé silk & silver screens? Are the curators aware of how work is something that is repeated ad nauseum in respect to the myth of Warhol. He worked night & day. On Speed. Off Speed. His mother helped him to work more when they became housemates. Work was the thing because work was not so evident (or valued) in the tooling of his work.

I have got closer to Warhol over the last four years after taking up screen-printing (DIY). In the last six months I have screen-printed over 1000 pages in the production of a publication, which was launched last month in these very halls as part of Padraic E. Moore’s curated event I’ll Be Your Mirror, a publication that features John Giorno’s text-based works, the same artist who features in Andy Warhol’s Sleep.

From my experiences as first a painter & then a screen-printer, the later activity chosen based on utility over love, I view Warhol as a screen-printer in painter’s drag. Yet beneath the drag of painting, screen-printing, as I have learned through experience not theory, is a surprisingly seductive medium in & of itself. 

Unlike the painter, who wants to be surprised through the grind & destruction of working an image via the additive & subtractive & cumulative process of painting, screen-printing separates the artist from their own subjectivity in the matter of making an image. There is a distance & detachment in the process.

Picture this: Warhol chooses an image: A Marilyn, A Jackie, A Mao. He dabs (or traces) on paint with painted effects to make a positive image, which then goes through (shorthand) a chemical process. He then pours a glob of ink above the head of the screen image of a face, who looks back at the artist through a mix of mesh & photo emulsion, positive & negative. Warhol picks up a squeegee, places the rubber blade on the bead of ink, tilts at a 45 degree angle, applies pressure, & pulls the bead of ink across the screen image, to scoop, shovel & dispense the ink back where the process began. Repeat.

This is the action of the screen-printer. No matter how much painted face you put on a screen-printed image, the result is a silkscreen not a painting. Warhol never gave up painting, because he never was a painter.

Warhol worked. That’s the myth & the material evidence anyway. He worked & worked & worked. He had The Factory, which infers a particularly repetitive & productive kind of work. Working was a way of not thinking about the work. The artist’s job was to do the work. Ideas came from elsewhere.

On hands & knees, Warhol sure does look like Caravaggio’s young Narcissus gazing into his own reflection. Narcissus, like Warhol, is a subject that has become an object, & an object that has become a subject, & so on.

The French psychoanalyst Jacques Lacan says, in so many words, that when the shitty & shouty infant sees itself in the mirror, it is overjoyed & complete. Then it falls into language & the trouble begins. What did Warhol fall into when confronted with the doubles of capitalism & communism, celebrity & death, subject & object, him with & without shades looking back at him, looking back at us…

Thing is, Warhol not only worked but he watched & witnessed, like Caravaggio’s Narcissus. He made the look into an object — another Lacanian formula for the gaze. A Marilyn. A Jackie. A Mao. They all look while being looked at.

Scopophobia is an exaggerated fear of being looked at or being watched. Looking at Warhol working is kinda peep show, especially if working is something you get lost in, wherein you lose all subjectivity, to become an object in the eye of the subject. To watch & to be watched is what Freud calls the scopic drive. Is watching work or a drive? 

Andy filmed John Giorno when he was sleeping, so it was all a bit one-sided in respect to work-life balance. Andy was doing the working & watching; John was doing the sleeping, eyes closed. John an object. Andy a subject. John woke up & Andy was gone, forever. The work done. The relationship dusted.

Is the artwork at the end of the work always a disappointment?  

Much has been written about the invisible & incestuous relationship between life & work in our neoliberal economy in which, as Isabelle Graw names it in her essay for the special Warhol edition of October Journal: Life Goes to Work…

Graw writes: According to eyewitness Bob Colacello, Warhol could not relax and hated vacations. Even having fun meant working, since he used every social occasion (such as parties) in order to “get more portraits” or “more ideas” or to “sell more ads for Interview.” Colacello's description is of course partly tainted by his own frustrations; it is as though he needed to retroactively justify why he was compelled to stop working for Warhol.

Yet, it would be critically remiss of me to not mention that Graw wrote Life Goes to Work… at a time when she herself had become a mother. Her child at the time of writing (2010) was just four years old. If you are a parent, this is a moment in a child’s life when they have looked in the mirror & an object has looked back. So it is no wonder that Graw would focus on a neoliberal reading of Warhol at a time she herself was in the trenches of parenthood. She responds in a later interview for Spike Magazine: 

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.

But when we talk about Warhol & work, we are also talking about America, where desire is production, where life & work go hand in hand. Just think of the current myths surrounding the creativity & productivity & insomnia of Elon Musk regarding work, sleeping on the factory floor, all for the good of humanity. “This is America”, as Childish Gambino put it in 2018.

Warhol leaned into & embraced American culture & all its synonyms of desire, production, entrepreneurship & consumerism to produce a product that called into the question the difference between taste & desire, artist & artwork, art & commerce. I’m not saying this was intentional. It was probably more social circumstance, psychological temperament, timing, naïveté, the great elixir of becoming your culture & it becoming you. It just all fell into place, for good & ill. A devilish neutrality. Yes there was drive & ambition, like in all of us, but there was also an openness to not solicit culture, but to be solicited by America, to be taken in by it, to be seduced one time only in order to produce forever.

Warhol was a good consumer, but better producer. He prompted with “What will I produce?” rather than “Why I ought to produce?” By being reactionary & repetitive rather than reflective of his choices, he became a factory of production, propelled & propagated by a JUST DO IT philosophy (the same philosophy Sol Lewitt handed down to Eva Hesse as friendly advice when she had replaced producing art with thinking too much about producing art). DO!

And still, “It was the United States of America” as Joan Dideon put it in her brilliantly visceral & critical essay Slouching Towards Bethlehem in 1967 (I read this opening passage in full because.. it’s Joan Dideon): 

The centre was not holding. It was a country of bankruptcy notices and public-auction announcements and commonplace reports of casual killings and misplaced children and abandoned homes and vandals who misspelled even the four-letter words they scrawled.

It was a country in which families routinely disappeared, trailing bad checks and repossession papers. Adolescents drifted from city to torn city, sloughing off both the past and the future as snakes shed their skins, children who were never taught and would never now learn the games that had held the society together. People were missing. Children were missing. Parents were missing. Those left behind filed desultory missing-persons reports, then moved on themselves.

It was not a country in open revolution. It was not a country under enemy siege. It was the United States of America in the cold late spring of 1967, and the market was steady and the G.N.P. high and a great many articulate people seemed to have a sense of high social purpose and it might have been a spring of brave hopes and national promise, but it was not, and more and more people had the uneasy apprehension that it was not. All that seemed clear was that at some point we had aborted ourselves and butchered the job…

Hans Bellmer, Les Jeux de la Poupée VII, 1939, Hand colored gelatin silver print, printed 1949.14 x 14 cm.

But let us tabula rasa, clean the slate, start again. Hans Belmer, the abject & Art Brut artist of the Surrealist period, said, All dreams return again to the only remaining instinct... to escape from the outline of the self. Do we lose the outline of ourselves when we are working?

Disappearing is what most artists do best, especially within the work of working, what Martin Heidegger called transparency, which is when the tool involved in the skilful, physical & unthinking making of a thing, or in the doing of a thing, becomes transparent. As workers, as a working class, we become disembodied, in some instances disenfranchised. Jacques Rancière’s The Philosophy of the Poor is an oxymoron for those who work, & a paradox for those who have the time & privilege outside of work to philosophise.

Escaping oneself, or the prostitution of self, is the I CAN BE WHATEVER OR WHOMEVER YOU WANT ME TO BE attitude of the then & now moment, when & where seduction apropos production creates a conveyor belt of selves slavishly pole dancing. 

Warhol is authentic only when he is working. He is like any other artist in their studio, working out ideas while working through the banality of working, to think & not think while working is the artist's m.o. Work is work is work.

Picture this: Polish artist Miroslaw Balka sweeping his studio floor is also a work of art, & seems more authentic than the always terminal art object after the sweeping is done & the dusting dusted [Fun fact: In 2001, Miroslaw Balka titled one of his first shows at Gladstone Gallery New York “sweep, swept, swept”.]

What is the difference between Balka sweeping a floor, a plasterer skimming a wall, or Warhol screen-printing a Marilyn, A Jackie, a Mao? Nothing!

As a teenager I left school early to mix plaster & sometimes skim walls when given the opportunity. So I say there is nothing different in the work. Work is work is work. But some say that another form of work is taking place as the artist does the same work as the plasterer or the sweeper, the work of ideas… & as Sol Lewitt wrote somewhere in his Sentences for Conceptual Art (1969), All ideas need to be made physical. But do they? I repeat again Sturtevant’s claim: Although the object is crucial, it is not important—

I bet they discuss work (as in some of my fellow panellists) in the catalogue for this Warhol exhibition. Why is work important to glorifying or pathologising Warhol’s genius, addiction, narcissism, or all the above? A question AI might ask us in future might go like this: Is work something humans do to get paid or to live? 

Andy Warhol was a worker; well that’s what we are told. The evidence is there in the restless editioning & variations on a theme, the black & white video tapes of him working into the small night with heavy shades on. 

The myth goes a bit like this: He took an idea, made it, exhausted it. Copy. Cut. Paste. He didn’t waste the product. The proverb Waste not, want not is defined as follows: If you use a commodity or resource carefully & without extravagance you will never be in need.

As an art critic, I am a bit of a cold fish when it comes to Loving art. There is always a speculative & suspicious distance in my gaze. Perhaps it is the potential of being seduced, seduction, in Jean Baudrillard’s terminology being the opposite of production. Baudrillard writes:

Let everything be produced, be read, become real, visible, and marked with the sign of effectiveness; let everything be transcribed into force relations, into conceptual systems or into calculable energy; let everything be said, gathered, indexed and registered: this is how sex appears in pornography, but this is more generally the project of our whole culture, whose natural condition is “obscenity.”

It is my personal experience of feeling apprehension in the face of art, to not fall under the power of its seductive gaze, that creates a productive gap. To not be seduced in order for production to be possible, to write these words that don’t glorify but question not just Warhol, but the artist. As a screen-printer, the peekaboo method & means of realising an image fits my cold-fish temperament. I enjoy screen-printing’s aerodynamic mode of making an image: lift; drag, thrust, weight. There is no hum & haw in screen-printing. There is just the work & the production line. The Done without the Dusted. 

Warhol ended up making ideas first & art second. It’s okay though, because he could draw, if not paint. At Hugh Lane Gallery it is his back catalogue of horny 1950’s drawings, before the advent of the silkscreens, that audiences appreciate most & lament latter in apprehension of what came next. In other words: the drawings excuse what comes next. Bruce Hainley seems to sum up Andy Warhol in his summing of the artist Sturtevant, who literally followed Warhol in every way but name & legacy:

When self-expression is demonstrably not the m.o., what is expressed and who is made vulnerable? 

Sturtevant. Warhol Black Marilyn. 2004. Synthetic polymer silkscreen and acrylic on canvas. 15 15/16 x 13 7/8 in. (40.5 x 35.2 cm)

Sometimes the best way to see an artist in their work, especially an artist like Warhol, who professed his own absence from his work in the before & afters of its realisation as image, an image that he didn’t conceive (most of the time), is to view the absent artist through the work of another artist, who also deals in their own absence. This can be done with Warhol by looking at Sturtevant’s “Studies of Warhol”, which were contemporary & almost exact repetitions of Warhol’s Flowers & Marilyn’s. Sturtevant was adamant that these were not appropriations or copies. Patricia Lee proffers two words in her essay on Sturtevant that might help or hinder us to see Warhol more clearly: decoy & placebo.

The strange thing about Sturtevant was, she was more absent than Warhol, not just in respect to fame & legacy, but in body & soul, so there was no possibility of soul-beating. What Warhol was doing in respect to his own erasure, Sturtevant was doing on top of Warhol’s failure to disappear, to do a Kaiser Soze on the conception & its production.

Gerard Byrne presenting at I’ll Be Your Mirror at the Hugh Lane Gallery Dublin, December 2, 2023

Perry Ogden presenting at I’ll Be Your Mirror at the Hugh Lane Gallery Dublin, December 2, 2023

Last month, right here, & without sleep (unlike sleeping John Giorno), Irish artist Gerard Byrne presented a selection of his video works made some 15 years ago as part of Padraic E. Moore’s curated event, I’ll Be Your Mirror. Gerard Byrne looked up at his work, almost lovingly. He wasn’t disappointed. I don’t think he was delirious.. from sleeplessness…

At the same event I witnessed the same self-admiring glint in Perry Ogden’s eyes, 40-odd years after he shot Polaroids of Warhol & Warholian-like epigones in London. 

Witnessing this I fell in love alongside Byrne & Ogden via their loving gaze. Memory, emotion, form coalescing at a safe distance. There was something about an artist seeing their work, in essence themselves, from a great distance, that somehow was transformed into love. Love is the thing. I wonder if Warhol — from an even greater distance — would love what surrounds us here…

Yet, The work never ends. 

Dina from Egypt performing at I’ll Be Your Mirror at the Hugh Lane Gallery Dublin, December 2, 2023

Dina from Egypt, a “lip-syncing band” who performed here last month as part of I’ll Be Your Mirror strive to (in their own words) achieve maximum celebrity with minimum effort.

Yet minimum effort (minimum work) takes a lot of work these days. There’s the curatorial correspondence, the social media promo, the hashtags, & in Dina from Egypt’s case, even rehearsals involved in realising minimum effort, rehearsals which I witnessed myself on the night.

Minimum effort means going against the wave of maximum effort. It’s a rhetorical device needing maximum effort to pull off. And to make a manifesto out of maximum celebrity out of minimum effort, says more about the culture we live to work in, especially when it is delivered ironically, irony being a nod of criticism to the status quo, while participating & contributing to the status quo.

When John Giorno awoke from his sleep The next morning (he writes) he saw the apartment lights were still on, & the floor was littered with dozens of crushed yellow Kodak boxes & scraps of film. Andy & the equipment were gone. And John had a hangover.

Tiredness kills. Artists are inspired part of the time, tired the rest. Most people who work, view this as a privilege. Yet artists are always working: working towards, & working back, like sleep-full John Giorno, & sleepless Gerard Byrne & Andy Warhol◼️

—JAMES MERRIGAN

P.S. I want to thank the people who signed up to the reading group, & stayed the course from October to today. Without those reading group discussions, offset by readings by Hal Foster, Isabelle Graw, John Giorno, & Joan Didion, the ideas that make up the text I am reading from today would have not been possible.

• Those reading group texts were: Hal Foster The Distressed Image, or Andy Warhol; Isabelle Graw Life Goes to Work: Andy Warhol; John Giorno Sleeping with Andy Warhol. Further reading included: Jean Baudrillard’s Forget Foucault; Bruce Hainley & Patricia Lee on (Elaine) Sturtevant; & Craig Owens & Wayne Koestenbaum for every single word.

• Congratulations fellow panellists for writing on Warhol. To write today on Warhol takes a lot of invention, along with the theme of my discussion today: work. To write on Warhol today following my failed efforts to write a review on this very show is too much work. Artist monographs are territories outlined by the inflated self of the artist, an outline difficult to circumvent with criticism. I have always felt that when commissioned to write on art, a reflective not spontaneous response, we can only fall into mythology.

  That said, to write critically on Warhol sounds like work too… and what’s the point amidst all the superlatives, what Isabelle Graw calls the “glorification”. 

• Finally, before the burden of reading this text aloud, I am here to unburden myself of Warhol, who has been on my mind way too long. Yet what other individual artist has the capacity to ask so many questions of the why’s & what’s of cultural production. Perhaps an artist who reflected America so perfectly that he himself was unburdened of a self to become a vampire of culture.

ENDS

First published in 1992, Francis Fukuyama’s “The End of History and the Last Man” became more of a phrase than a thesis in my fleeting encounters with it. Never elaborated upon by students & their academic supervisors, The End of History was served up mid-sentence, as if history & the future had all played out. The hope was that the Hansels & Gretels of the world would take the breadcrumbs to lead them out of the forest without trees & trees without a forest. The End of History was meant as the endgame in a string of phases of civilisation, from feudalism to capitalism to communism-kind of, leaving us with liberal democracy (in the West anyway). Liberal democracy is our best guess & bet for the present & future generations. We can’t see beyond its all-encompassing horizon, because we are presently drowning in it. We can’t escape capitalism’s lifebuoy, which forever hugs us to death & shapeshifts via technological developments as soon as we try to resist. We protest from time to time, but this is just catharsis disguised as criticism. Today, with more history in the rear-view mirror, the question of ‘End’s’ seems closer, more intimately entwined with the present. Can we say that social media is The End of Art? as we once knew it. Is this all there is, this virtual territory that doesn’t need any more deterritorialization, just acceptance, what we call the democratisation of art on Instagram? Is this just capitalism shapeshifting again? As liberal democrats we definitely like ways to totalise the world in representations, images & ideology. Artists are producers. If we are not producing, we are losers. Being an artist is about filling up what we insecurely perceive as a lack. Yet production subjugates seduction. I get now why Jean Baudrillard liked Warhol so much, & why he thought seduction is the opposite of production. As seducers we periodically produce & withdraw, whereas production alone, everything becomes—as Baudrillard puts it—“visible, & marked with the sign of effectiveness… this is how sex appears in pornography, but this is more generally the project of our whole culture, whose natural condition is obscenity”.

PAINTING BY PROXY

”Painting in the expanded field” is a tautology. Especially in an age when painting, an uploaded digital survivor that dodged the bullet of its theoretical death (you wish you were a zombie, Painting!), has become more physically truncated, compressed & objectified on our smartphones than ever before. Painting is the artworld’s commodity fetish par excellence. Painters sell-out or framers die. Julian Schnabel is proud. Christie’s is preparing its walls for paintings we will never get to see IRL. Painting exists by proxy — the real thing being a duller, uglier, bigger hick cousin of its digitally incandescent standin. No matter how white & polished those white walls, floors & patent shoes get in the expanded field of the gallery & the art market setting, painting is ugly AF IRL. Here, online, painting is perfect. So perfect that I think painting did die back then. It stripped off its decomposing skin & uploaded itself into the backlit & botoxed fantastic. It’s just that no one noticed when painting transitioned from real to unreal, ugly to beautiful, paint to png. The same way art criticism transitioned to lullaby art writing…Zzz. Painting online is prettier, pocket size & glossy; painting IRL is a ravaged dinner plate with spilt gravy flooding the edges. Who wants to look at that! Back in the dishwasher! Painting doesn’t exist anymore; it doesn’t need to. It always existed elsewhere anyway — in books, on Instagram. That’s okay; for the better. Its physical substitute, what Lacan named the “objet petit a” (object cause of & obstacle to desire) has taken its place. Painters are in a much happier place in the truncated thoroughfare of the glassy-eyed expanded fantasy of reality, where tumbleweeds tumble & painters mumble: “I paint therefore I am?” We can tout Laura Owens as the exemplar of painting today in the expanded field, the same way Jessica Stockholder was “Unbound” in my art school days, but it’s just words standing in for reality. Painting was physically more alive when it was theoretically dead. The threat of pluralism & Warhol & installation art was not a threat because painting wanted to be popular all along. And today it is, but as a simulation.

📸Christopher Williams, ErratumAGFA Color (oversaturated), 2000, Chromogenic print, 66 x 76.2 cm

ARTSICK: THE MUSEUM OF EVERYONE

“We are not a partisan organisation, we are not a political organisation, so we don’t have a litmus test for whom we take gifts from based on policies or politics. If there are people who want to support us, for the most part we are delighted. ”

— Daniel Weiss, president of the Metropolitan Museum of Art New York

“The claim of neutrality, effectively insists that nothing critical or politically challenging can be expressed without the onus of “both-sideism.” Neutrality, then, not only creates an artificial antagonism between the institution and its critics, but it also neuters political action, or at minimum does its best to defang its impact. ”

— Laura Raicovich, author of Culture Strike: Art and Museums in the Age of Protest, 2021

“Think of it, ye millionaires of many markets, what glory may yet be yours, if you only listen to our advice, to convert pork into porcelain, grain and produce into priceless pottery, the rude ores of commerce into sculptured marble. ”

— Joseph Choate, lawyer and original trustee of the Metropolitan Museum of Art New York, 1880 

I have a glass-half-empty perspective when it comes to culture’s relationship with the art institution. This also comes with not trusting those who don’t have a measure of scepticism included in their daily cocktail of culture. When I think of the museum l see history, civilisation and its discontents. I don’t see inclusiveness, diversity and community, the tick-the-box triad of contemporary cultural propaganda. I see culture mapped out by human desires and disavowals.

Culture, at its most spontaneous and critical best, is inherently temporary. From time to time culture clings to the reified pillars of the museum as acanthus leaves, ossified against the rubble and ruin of civilisation’s historical heft. Yet within these vaulted halls, no amount of desire or disavowal can deny or redirect the knowledge of culture’s patronage from time immemorial by the 1% elite, especially within the colonial-filled halls of the museum. 

It is with this glass-half-empty perspective that I will try to answer Aruna D'Souza’s question posed in Art in America magazine in 2019: “What Can We Learn from Institutional Critique?” However, my answer is coloured by composer Leonard Bernstein’s definition of the work of art: “A work of art does not answer questions, it provokes them; and its essential meaning is in the tension between the contradictory answers.”

D'Souza posed the question on the occasion of the Hans Haacke retrospective ‘All Connected’ at the New Museum New York. The godfather of institutional critique, Haacke took a journalistic approach to exposing the big money that undergirds art institutions. One of Haacke’s most infamous artworks details — through rigorous and unrelenting photographic and textual documentation —“business dealings conducted over the course of twenty years by Harry Shapolsky – one of the city’s largest slumlords.” 

Installation view of Haacke’s ‘Shapolsky et al Manhattan Real Estate Holdings, A Real-Time Social System as of May 1, 1971’ (1971), Photo: Hans Haacke

Haacke’s 1971 artwork, named Shapolsky et al. Manhattan Real Estate Holdings, A Real-Time Social System as of May 1, 1971, was made in anticipation of a planned solo exhibition at the Guggenheim Museum in New York. However, the then director Thomas Messer, objected to the work (and two other works), resulting in the cancellation of the exhibition six weeks before its scheduled opening. 

“The aggressiveness of Messer’s response fuelled rumours that Guggenheim trustees were implicated in Shapolsky’s transactions, though Haacke’s research produced no evidence of such a connection.” Aruna D'Souza cites the Guggenheim policy of the time to hammer home the institutionalised perspective from which those within the walls of the museum viewed their relationship to the outside world in respect to the art they selected and rejected for exhibition: “[We show art that excludes] active engagement toward social and political ends”. D'Souza adds: “Thomas Messer believed that by rejecting Haacke’s work he was purging ‘an alien substance that had entered the art museum organism’.” So, “What Can We Learn from Institutional Critique?” And, as D'Souza rhetorically asks: “In the end, does institutional critique even have a politics and theory of change?”

What I have learned from artists like Hans Haacke and Andrea Fraser, is that institutional critique shows how our subjectivity is always determined by present gains and future ambitions to exist. In the same way there is no outside text in a Derridean sense, there is no place for the artist outside of the institution. Further, institutional critique teaches us that there are no museum walls high or thick enough to prevent us from exposing the levels of institutional affiliation with big money in the artworld. The only walls that exist are self constructed through existential disavowal. As Noam Chomsky says, “The minute we receive our first paycheck, we are institutionalised”. 

From a psychoanalytical perspective, this institutional and instrumental denial is called ‘disavowal’. Disavowal per se is the acknowledgement of an ethical or moral conflict within a reward structure, such as a job or relationship, but a subsequent disregard or denial of any conflicts in conscience that may arise inspired by the monetary or emotional rewards one receives from such a structure. Disavowal is self-preservation at its most pernicious. It is borne upon the fear of confronting the clash of conflicting and inconsistent information (cognitive dissonance) for fear of losing out on what one has achieved and earned socially, emotionally or economically. We turn a blind eye when our existence is threatened.

Dopesick – The Slacker family meet to discuss business in “THE SACKLER WING” of the Metropolitan Museum of Art New York.

In the TV series Dopesick (2021) – where the artworld and its pharmaceutical donor Purdue Pharma makes a series of appearances through the lie of cultural philanthropy — the devastating impact of the OxyContin opioid crisis in the United States plays out through the deceptive actions of the Slacker family, who invent and propagate lies to sustain the drug’s widespread distribution to the detriment and suffering of the people who ignorantly swallow said lies and drug.

Two acts of disavowal take place in Dopesick: one, OxyContin daddy Richard Sackler repeats the aria “We are about to cure the world of its pain” every time he is presented with the growing list of the drug’s side-effects and the government’s antagonism towards his drug baby, OxyContin; and two, the narrative of the Virginia praise-the-lord coal miner family, who, after repeated efforts by their daughter Betsy Mallum (including her doctor) to disclose that she is gay, pull down the shutters to parental sympatico.

Disavowal is the psychic process wherein we turn a blind eye towards something we don’t want to acknowledge as true, for fear of losing out on what we have achieved or are working towards. In the Betsy Mallum family’s case – the promise of eternal salvation propagandised by the church. Because, as every god-fearing person knows, gays go to hell. Whereas disavowal in Richard Sackler’s case is built upon the most convenient and violent of expressions “the greater good”, a cover story for his individual ambition within the Sackler family’s regime of sibling rivalry and competition fostered by the originary Slacker patriarch, Arthur.

Dopesick – Betsy Mallum and girlfriend, Grace.

Ironically, the blind eye is the most cloudy and crystalline in the artworld. Institutional critique pulled up the shutters of disavowal to reveal an artworld fully integrated and intractable from the elite. Yet artists like Hans Haacke and Andrea Fraser critiqued the art institution within the walls and the applause of the institution, to have their institutional cake and eat it too, leaving artists and institutions satisfied in their respective radicality and progressiveness to give and take critique on their own terms.

On the back of this institutional meta critique that shits where it eats in the art institution, D'Souza outlines the phenomenon of “musical Haackes”, whereby museums purchase Hans Haacke’s institutional critiques of other museums, i.e., Whitney Museum of Modern Art purchased Haacke’s Shapolsky, et al. in 2007, the same artwork that was cancelled over three decades earlier by Thomas Messer of the Guggenheim Museum. 

Along with bingeing on Dopesick and any articles I could find on OxyContin and the Slacker family legacy, I was also gifted the book Culture Strike: Art and Museums in the Age of Protest by Laura Raicovich, the former director of Queens Museum New York. The opening line on the back-cover blurb reads as follows: “A leading activist museum director on why museums are in the middle of a political storm.” 

Raicovich’s “political storm” is set within the age of protest and cancel culture, through the eyes of an “activist museum director”, who resigned after just three years (2015-2018) due to museum board politics. The fallout between the board and its director was over the question of museum “neutrality” (a key word in the book, but a word I would define differently in respect to art — more on this later). 

These events coincide with then American president Donald Trump’s right-wing immigration policies, and Queens Museum’s decision to decline the Mission of Israel’s proposed event to celebrate the anniversary of the creation of the State of Israel at the museum. Raicovich found herself, and her ideologies, butting heads with the museum board, including online accusations of antisemitism, following the cancellation of the Mission of Israel’s proposed event.

Sam Durant, Scaffold (2017), Walker Art Center

Dana Schutz, Open Casket (2016), oil on canvas, 99 cm × 130 cm, Whitney Museum of American Art

Philip Guston, Cornered, 1971, oil paint on paper on board, 79 × 101 cm.

Two storms play out simultaneously in Raicovich’s book: one, the storm, or successive storms, of protests that have taken place primarily at American museums over the last decade, including the protests surrounding Dana Schutz’s controversial Open Casket (2016) painting after the photograph of lynched 14 year old black boy Emmet Till for the Whitney Biennial in 2017; Sam Durant’s public installation Scaffold (2017) exhibited at the Walker Art Center, which reawakened traumas inflicted by the US government on local Dakota indigenous peoples; the postponement of Philip Guston’s KKK hooded paintings at US museums and the Tate Modern London following the murder of George Floyd in Minneapolis in 2020; and Nan Goldin’s founding of P.A.I.N. (Prescription Addiction Intervention Now), an advocacy organisation responding to the American opioid crisis, specifically targeting the Sackler Family for manufacturing, promoting, and distributing the drug OxyContin through their corporation Purdue Pharma, which has deep financial ties with the artworld in what those in power call “philanthropy”, one of the Slacker siblings calls “social entrepreneurship”, and what realists deem “artwashing”. 

However, it is the second storm, the more personal storm imbricating Laura Raicovich and the museum mechanism and subsequent fallout leading to her resignation, that is not sufficiently fleshed out for the reader. All we are given by way of introduction, is the narrative of the heartbroken director, forced to resign from a job she loved, due to personal ideological beliefs of inclusiveness and community not being advocated by the museum in the heated moment of racial and feminist protest. Was Raicovich an “activist museum director” when she was hired as museum director? Or was the activist museum director born within the institution — like Hans Haacke and Andrea Fraser — after being exposed to a museum board on high alert when forced to react to the heightened political and social tensions taking place outside the museum walls? What we learn by way of institutional critique is the museum can never by what Laura Raicovich, as an activist museum director, believes it ought to be, especially in America, where public funding for the arts is essentially null. 

Later in the book, Raicovich broaches the subject of private versus public funding in the arts, but this is where she lost me as a reader. Based in a country where the promise of public funding for the arts is a dream for the many and a dependency for the few, this dream and dependency also conditions the way art-making is proposed and made with the public interest in mind.

Although we should be thankful that we can receive financial support from time to time to sustain our art making and its exhibition in Ireland via public funding, the same way art museum boards should be thankful for their elite donors, artists do have to become adept at proposal writing for Arts Council funding. The language used for such applications for funding is very much like the ideological language Raicovich uses in her book. Words like “inclusiveness”, “diversity”, “community” and “public” are the pillars and posts upon which such linguistic parkour leaps and tumbles through institutional hoops. But this is not just word games, the likes of which Arthur Slacker was famed for in his drug marketing, what New Yorker magazine journalist Patrick Radden Keene described as a “Don Draper-style intuition for the alchemy of marketing”. Artists have to commit to a public that is, generally speaking, apathetic to the visual arts, especially art that challenges the status quo.

In this environment of public funding and language games, the artist prescribes to and aligns with the social and political status quo of the mainstream. In this arena of eyes primed for offence, artists have to be continually cognisant of their politics, and how their expressions, especially expressions that are less abstract in form, align with contemporary values and beliefs espoused by bureaucratic institutions. The artist cannot, as Aruna D'Souza paraphrases Andrea Fraser “exist in an antagonistic relationship to the institutions of art because artists are integral to the institutions of art. Art does not exist as a social concept outside its institutionalisation. And so it follows that even protesting a museum exhibition is still a form of participation since the gesture takes meaning from its relation to the art world.”

It is this last line that haunts: “protesting a museum exhibition is still a form of participation since the gesture takes meaning from its relation to the art world.” Hans Haacke, Andrea Fraser and Laura Raicovich have created cultural capital based on their antagonism towards the institution of art. Contra Raicovich’s position, it is my contention that artists and institutions should remain neutral, and that the public should bring their desires and disavowals to bear upon the artwork. Let me repeat Leonard Bernstein here: “A work of art does not answer questions, it provokes them; and its essential meaning is in the tension between the contradictory answers.”

Artists should not be concerned with the political and social status quo. They should be able to express their desires and disavowals without the public in mind, so art remains a raw expression, one that is formed and beset by the foibles and failings of being human. Especially within the white and vaulted walls of the art institution, where art is backed by those who have the capital means, financial motives and luxury of time.

Artists Dana Schutz, Philip Guston and Sam Durant (and many others) may have unintentionally reopened racial wounds with their art, but they and the institution that exhibited the work should not apologise for contextual shortsightedness. Good art erupts into existence; it’s thrown into the world, a die with a dictionary pasted on its infinite faces. Artists and institutions who try to achieve 20-20 foresight after a process of totting up potential ways in which an artwork might offend the public, means art will only mirror the bureaucratic status quo rather than challenging it via an aesthetics of risk. If artists become overtly political, right or left, then their art will become political in the worst way possible. A political art made and exhibited in the eye and storm of public desire and disavowal ends up being a lie, like all politics in the public sphere. If art is indeed a vehicle for diversity, then EVERYONE ought to be invited, including the wheels of commerce, if truth is to be reflected from within & without art.

PFO

For 17 years I have been writing proposals for open & cold-call submissions. The summer after my MFA I wrote 26 proposals, a time when artist-run spaces were more plentiful.

I was good at them. Through proposal writing alone I secured a string of solo exhibitions in a wave of recycled installations that I generated new work on the back of. I knew my work & what it was saying apropos the current art moment in form & content. I had it down.

Today I got confirmation that I didn’t have it down, when I received yet another open-submission PFO. The best way to describe my reaction to this most recent of rejections was best expressed by my fellow artist-collaborator — “ugh”.

Rejection is obvs part of the process of being an artist in the highly competitive & yocal art scene. You have to put in the work, knowing that work is still not enough, especially when it comes to the vicissitudes of taste & influence… You can also wear out your yocal welcome.

Yet, what this latest rejection letter brings to the surface is the amount of work artists put into the game of crafting proposals for such fleeting events. Invisible work that will keep the institutional conveyor belt of amnesiac & Instagramable cultural production going, but not necessarily for the good of the artist. Cultural production: what & for whom is it good for?

I say this not as an artist rejected, which numbers 250 or so today for this particular open submission, but in the more objective roleplay of curator, which took a lot of work if not emotion.

I will personally redirect this rejection towards other proposed projects to keep the circus on the road. I have conditioned myself to do this on the breadcrumbs of cultural production.

That said, there is something good about such creative — albeit delusional — conditioning, which involves perennially & precariously working towards uncertain outcomes. It keeps the artist on their toes; the parkour of proposal writing.