Becoming Zombie
“Beware the zombies ”
“Nothing is more real than nothing. ”
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.”
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.”
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
Recent Texts
