Timothy Van Laar and Leonard Diepeveen’s Artworld Prestige: Arguing Cultural Value, 2013.

Jay DeFeo, The Rose, 1958-66. The Whitney Museum of American Art.

 


Prestige is a dirty word.

The almost total failure of contemporary art criticism to talk about prestige, or even admit it exists, is an oversight with profound implications. Art history simply cannot be understood without knowing how prestige actually works, and Timothy Van Laar and Leonard Diepeveen’s latest book Artworld Prestige: Arguing Cultural Value brings some of these particularly important ideas to the fore, many of them admittedly a little too honest, even.

Prestige is a dirty word because every first year curator, MFA student, or gallerist learns to use other ‘terms of art’ to privilege certain works. Far better for an artist or work to be considered “serious” or “important” or historically “significant” than merely just prestigious.

For in the artworld, the mention of prestige’s mere existence is a danger and a threat to power. This is precisely because prestige is a term of nuance. It is perhaps just a bit too honest, because it teases out the subtle distinctions between something meaningful? and perhaps something just successful, a distinction many self-interested parties may just like to avoid.

Prestige allows for the dark possibility that success might not necessarily rely on benevolent cultural barometers like historical significance, but rather, on more shallow principles, like perhaps market success, or just powerful connections. Could an Andy Warhol or a Jeff Koons, or a Damian Hirst be somehow prestigious, but meaningless? Prestigious, but culturally insignificant? Absolute heresy.

Damian Hirst, For the Love of God, 2007. Human skull with 8,601 diamonds.

No artist wants to be considered “prestigious.” For it allows for two dangerous possibilities:  1) that important artists might somehow get ignored by the market, or 2) that the prestigious artist of today may not be considered so years later (heaven forbid). Consider for example the frequent unfashionability of some of history’s greatest artists, from Louis Comfort Tiffany, to Vincent Van Gogh, to William Blake, even to Turner or Rembrandt, all whose work at different times was ignored, misunderstood or even discarded. For a more recent example, go look at Jay DeFeo’s masterpiece The Rose, now properly installed at The Whitney, and reflect on how it had been hidden behind a false wall to rot away at the S.F. Art Institute for 20 years, finally restored only some 50 years later. Consider also how it was The Whitney in New York that finally purchased it, not the much closer SFMoMA.

What makes a work of art prestigious?

Frank Gallo’s Raquel Welch, Time Magazine, 1969.

Exhibit A:

Examine the case of artist Frank Gallo, considered in the 60′s to be the future of American art. He wins a Guggenheim. He is collected by all the important institutions: MoMA, The Met, LACMA, Hirschorn. He is in the Smithsonian’s worldwide exhibition “Alliance on Art,” he is in the Venice Biennale. In 1969, his Raquel Welch figure is on the cover of Time Magazine.

Does anyone remember him? Today, he seems lost to history. Gallo’s art didn’t change, but something else did. He lost prestige. The last major review of his work is in The New York Times from 1972, where already the postmodern critiques of his work are bubbling to the surface. Figuration is out. Minimalism eclipses Pop Art. Formalism is now inadequate. Feminist critique soon abounds, and Gallo’s “girls” seem hopelessly sexist, offensive, juvenile. The artworld no longer confers value on him. Gallo and his work has lost all prestige. It no longer matters that Hugh Hefner collected him. His work no longer “fits” the trajectory of what contemporary art is about. Fifty years later, the authors go looking for his “The Swimmer” in the cavernous storage rooms of the Whitney Museum, purchased back in 1965. It hasn’t been moved or seen since 1984, the last time it went into storage. Gallo is no longer a “serious” artist.

Is this what contemporary art is ‘supposed’ to look like? Zina Saro-Wiwa. Mourning Class: Nollywood, 2010. Video installation on monitors at The Pulitzer Foundation for the Arts.

Dan Peterman, Accessories to an Event, 1998. Reprocessed plastic. Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago.

Rule & Levine’s brilliant takedown of artspeak gobbledygook: International Art English

Dialogue, Dialogue, More Dialogue: Sophia Wallace’s CLITERACY: 100 Natural Laws at Baang + Burne’s booth at Scope Art Fair, 2013.

Answer: the arguments around them. The discourse itself is now rarefied. People have to do or know certain things to understand the discourse, to “get” the discourse. They need degrees. They need to do homework. Often the art viewer must have the work explained to them. And thus we need these professionals – behind the work – more now than ever before.

Today, the professional narrative defines the work of art. Art has become not about new objects, but new narratives – that must be theorized, professionalized, systematized. Participating in a rarefied professional discourse is what defines the work of art, whether it is made up of Brillo boxes or refuse. A painting can still be serious, yes, but it must do a little more heavy lifting now to explain itself, to justify why it was made. Better to be “about” painting than just “be” a painting. In this example, Wade Guyton’s work succeeds brilliantly.

The more “difficult” the professional discourse? the better. (See the wonderful text on International Art English for the ultimate description). As Van Laar’s book argues, Dan Peterman’s objects of recycled plastics are not made of rare materials, nor are they made with rare skill, but rather, the rarity and prestige of his work is in the discourse that accompanies it and deems it ‘important’ art. A Murakami in a Walmart is nothing but a commodity, but a Murakami with an institutional critique? is something else. Personally, I find these frank examples from the book troubling, for they seem to suggest that these kinds of works are not ‘works’ – without their discourse. They seem to ‘need’ this discourse like an astronaut needs his oxygen.

However, for me, the real white elephant in the room that comes to mind is corruption. For the reality of prestige must in the final analysis account for at least some level of corruption in the artworld, because it teases out the differences between worth and value, merit and success, meaning and fame. Granted, maybe Mr. Gallo was a bit overrated in the 1960′s, but what does that portend for today’s superstar artists in 50 years time?

Has dialogue become the new Kingmaker? The ‘knighting’ device that marks some refuse as ‘art’ and other refuse just refuse? Today’s Readymades and High Kitsch, indistinguishable from their more common counterparts, seem so omnipresent now it would seem that dialogue is their prerequisite.

And dialogue is very corruptible in my book. And especially more so when a privileged art-industrial complex sits above the fray with a clear conflict of interest, ready to stand behind works that need their dialogue.

Today’s contemporary art resonates with ideas. And all the more better for it, I say. The public now has the ability to expose itself to a whole host of fascinating theoretical discussions on the nature of art, and its effect on our world.

But if Van Laar and Diepeveen are right, and prestige now lies no longer in the work itself, but only in its professional discourse, we must re-learn how to be skeptical and vigilant in today’s boilerplate marketplace. Especially when in front of institutionally powerful work, backed up by all that impressive, serious discourse. All being made by savvy professionals who know that their existence is only as necessary as the mediation they provide to “translate” that obscure discourse for the ordinary masses. Is discourse the new path of salvation?

Eric Halfvarson as the Grand Inquisitor in Verdi’s Don Carlo, the original inspiration for Dostoyevsky.

In Fyodor Dostoyevsky’s The Brothers Karamazov, the Grand Inquisitor is the high priest who “protects” humanity in blissful ignorance from the awful truths of the Church. But in today’s world, perhaps the real Grand Inquisitors who protect that secret knowledge from the masses are the curators, or the gallerists, or the public art installators.

For discourse, by its nature, is mutable. Inherently contentious, transient, amorphous. It has little substance: it can change literally at the drop of a time. It is as vulnerable to manipulation, deception and illusion as any political dialogue is. When it is used to solely serve power, as in the case of propaganda, it can be insidious and dangerous.

And it is perhaps even more insidious when it is has its cake and eats it too: when an institution can claim to be championing “institutional critique” from below, by cloaking money, power and real estate from above in supposed left-wing or “critical” dialogue. I am reminded here of a particularly fascinating critique of American conservative thought, who some theorists have argued is in fact a Rightwing idea wrapped in an ingenious Leftwing narrative, that an essentially Aristocratic agenda can never be openly so, that it must necessarily pretend to be one of the common man. That is how you get grass roots organizers fighting for corporate tax breaks. Or consider some of the followers of Leo Strauss’s political philosophy, which could be argued is literally a philosophy of deception. The Iraq War proves this notion beautifully, as the justification for the war over the years seamlessly morphs from one reason to another, to another, to another . . .  Any will really do, as long as folks buy it.

For, as much as I enjoy the discourse, and as much as I myself participate in this discourse, I still find it somewhat troubling. The notion that a work of art could sort of be “substance-free” – and defined solely by the quality of the professional commentariat behind it or not – is incredibly cynical to me. Some part of me I guess still wants to believe, perhaps naively, that there is some intrinsic quality to the work itself, one that needs no discourse, needs no explanation, needs no PhD. Can the work ever transcend the discourse?

Seward Johnson’s Forever Marilyn statue, Chicago. What is its discourse? High Kitsch would seem to have it mastered its own art of self-defense.

Too-Big-To-Fail-Artwork, Fifty feet high, costing 1 million dollars, installed in an institutional setting, with the proper professional narrative behind it, seems unquestionable today. They are the derivatives of our artworld, and much like Wall Street’s version, as long as we don’t look too carefully inside, they may make us Insiders all a lot of money. As the classic Wall Street trader joke goes, keep trading those tins of sardines, over and over, just whatever you do! Don’t ever actually open them. Whatever you do, don’t eat the contents, because everyone knows the fish rotted out long ago. The sardines are for trading, not for eating.

I think we must start to ask some dirty questions, and to start using some dirty words. For starters: Is the prestige deserved? And second, why do we assume so? Who wants us to assume so?

If we want artwork in the future to be something more than just a tradeable commodity, we may just have to start opening some of those cans of worms.   •

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Wade Guyton, Untitled, 2008. Epson UltraChrome inkjet on linen.

Wade Guyton, Untitled, 2006. Inkjet on canvas.

An old saying goes:

If it looks like a duck, and walks like a duck, and quacks like a duck . . .  well then . . .  it might just be a DUCK.

Today, we live in a postmedium age. A hybrid age. There are no more easy categories or rote definitions to live up to. Perhaps more than ever before, we are confronted by very strange, hybrid works of art. Works of unidentifiable mediums. And we do not know what to call them.

Many artworks nowadays look, act and feel like paintings, and are  certainly easily mistaken for such, even very close up. But they are technically not paintings at all.

Case in point is the work of artist Wade Guyton. His ‘paintings’ are in fact prints on linen canvas, made with an Epson printer.

The accidents and mishaps that occur in his printer, as he folds, drags, squashes and intentionally jams the canvas through the printer result in a fascinating series of mis-registrations, streaks, and degradations of chance and accident.

It is not Guyton – but rather his machine – that causes these pattern overruns, glitches and aberrations that repeat throughout his canvas. In true Warholian tradition, Guyton claims he is similarly too “lazy” to actually paint, much as Warhol once claimed he too would rather be a machine.

Installation of Wade Guyton’s ‘OS’ at The Whitney Museum of Art, October 2012 – January 2013.

WORDS BY:  John D’Agostino

Wade Guyton, Untitled,
2008. Epson UltraChrome inkjet on linen.

It is high time to call for a re-framing of just what painting is in the 21st century, and what is really all about. Painting is not about paint. Let me say that again: painting is not about paint, nor does it have to be made with paint.

Whether or not a painting is actually made with paint is perhaps the least interesting thing about it. And artists have been painting without paint for centuries now, from Francesco di Giorgio’s Studiolo from the Ducal Palace at The Metropolitan Museum (using shades of wood) to Louis Comfort Tiffany’s Favrile glass, which is perhaps the ultimate examplar, because the few sections of his stained glass windows that are actually painted over (such as faces or hands) are much less effective compared to the flowing use of layers of glass to suggest everything else.

I hope we can now move past these exhausted ideologies and old world categories. As professor Lance Winn and others have called for, it is time to discuss what Mr. Guyton’s paintings actually mean, and whether their study and reflection is worthwhile or not. As Marshall McLuhan once likened, as one medium becomes re-mediated and hybridized into the next, sometimes the new medium may actually fulfill the promises of the old.

Wade Guyton is represented by Petzel Gallery in NY and Galerie Chantal Crousel in Paris. Wade Guyton OS exhibited at The Whitney Museum in January 2013.

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“Color: humiliated, defeated, prepares its revenge over the long years.”

Yves Klein

WORDS BY: John D’Agostino
WORKS: www.EmpireofGlass.com

Devil’s Dyes

Since 1903, the Crayola crayon company has had an evolving array of nomenclatures, from Granny Smith Apple, Asparagus and Cerulean, to Apricot, Pink Sherbert and Canary. In 1962, Crayola’s apt but disturbing color ‘Flesh’ was renamed into ‘Peach’ – in response to horrified complaints.

Today, in a world full of plentiful artificial dyes, it is harder to truly appreciate the mysterious business that once was the world of color. But, back in the day, color was full of great secrets, prohibitions and tragic histories. The ghosts of pigments past are a lurid expose of suffering, murder and tragedy. A few examples for each hue will suffice.

John D’Agostino, Euclydian Abyss, 2010.

In 1609, Henry IV of France imposed the death penalty on the use of Indigo, the “deceitful and injurious dye.” Of course, many colors were originally made from crops in the colonies that relied on forced human labor and slavery. Protestant Black, the well known color of the Puritans, was banned when the British did not have access to the Spanish’s colonies of logwood dyeing plantations. Perhaps the cruelest of the colors was the incredibly poisonous Lead White, whose notorious toxicity did not sway artists from use. Carmine Red, used for cardinal’s frocks and young ladies’ lips, was literally made of blood – from the crushing of the white insect the Cochineal beetle, a secret which the Spanish jealously guarded for years. Stradivari, the master violin maker – made a special orange varnish – Tiger Varnish – that to this day is still unknown, perhaps the reason why his instruments play so beautifully.

Scheele’s Green, invented in the late 18th century, replaced all older green pigments. It became popular for use with wallpaper, brightening the rooms of many schoolchildren. Unfortunately, it was made from arsenic. In the 19th century it was used as a food dye for sweets, by the 1930′s, it was recognized as a poison and insecticide. Many speculate that Napolean himself may have been sickened by it when in exile in the luxurious green rooms of St. Helena.

Tyrian (Royal) Purple suggested the height of luxury, wealth and prestige. To extract this color, every toga required the deaths of thousands of shellfish, leading to the extinction of certain species of the murex. Eventually the Byzantine emperors banned the common people from wearing purple, and so the saying goes, “born in purple.” Bone Black was made from the scraps of the slaughterhouse – cattle or lamb thighs mostly. And what was really in Egyptian Brown or ‘Mummy Brown’ one must wonder, although we do know the Egyptians wrapped their mummies in canvas. It’s not a terrible leap to imagine that at some time in human history remains may have provided for an excellent hue. And so perhaps we should all be giving our pigments a proper burial, just in case.

“Space, outside ourselves, invades and ravishes things.”

– Rilke

John D’Agostino, Lunar Synthesis, 2010.

 

When the straight line tells the truth, color tells beautiful lies. So thought Yves Klein: dreamer, alchemist, performance artist and painter. A self-described proprietor of color, Klein claimed that his first work of art was made when he ‘appropriated’ blue straight out of the sky. As an artist who worked in intense color fields for years, Yves felt that color was unappreciated – forgotten, ignored, and rarely used to its fullest powers. Whereas the line, on the other hand, got too much credit. The line, he said, cuts through space as a ‘tourist’ – it is always in transit. The line ‘expresses’ itself by dividing and separating, making limits. But color, Klein thought, is open, a true inhabitant of space. If the line cuts space, then color impregnates space. It is space. And so this was Yves’ revenge, the domain of color. To make works where color predominated, and reigned supreme. As he said:

“Through color, I experience a feeling of complete identification with space, I am truly free…”

Jean Luc Marion described this kind of experience, this “rising of invus,” as a saturated phenomenon: an extra-dimensional kind of space. By overwhelming our ability to represent or categorize what we are seeing, a saturated phenomena has the ability to create atmosphere and presence. As he describes, “the artwork becomes a unique locus in which time, space, and the horizontal field of vision are compressed into a confined arena.” Scientifically speaking, the eye can only distinguish the wavelengths between 0.00038 and 0.00075 millimeters, barely scratching the surface. And yet, these little differences are everything. With a myriad of nuances, color calls attention to surface while also colliding with deep space. Its being is in infinity. Colors overwhelm us, envelop us, invade us.

In the dark – when it is even more strange – is when color really gets interesting. Many a color is re-discovered in the dark. Colors on the verge are particularly dangerous, for they are not quite the same. Never one color, but many. Colors at the ends of the spectrum move and shift. They are on the threshold of existence. Perhaps this is why many of Yves Klein’s colors, including the one he named for himself – International Klein Blue, verge occasionally just towards the dark of the spectrum. They confound, confuse – and delight. The mystery and power of color – as he reminds us – is to be marginalized, ignored, and forgotten at our own peril.

Close your eyes. Now rub them. Even with no light whatsoever – strange colors appear out of the darkness. No wonder then a child might ask his mother: “What is it that I see when my eyes are closed?” In the dark lies the forgotten colors of the crayola box. What names we must invent for the impossible colors to come, still remains to be discovered.   • This text first appeared as part of the paper The Abyss Gazes Also: The Pains and Pleasures of Seeing in the Dark by John D’Agostino, 2012.
View the full paper online here.
Purchase Hardcopy here.

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-Walt Whitman, Leaves of Grass.

Death & renewal are integral parts of a fascinating creative process. In a cycle of making, new styles are Re/Mixed from the old: appropriated, cannibalized & re-mediated into hybrids and new forms.

A favorite pastime of modernity is The Grave Dance: a seductive rhythm of destruction whereby the demode & traditional movement is buried, and a new style, celebrated. Sometimes the new medium fulfills the promises of the old, in uncanny ways. Sometimes it disappoints. Either way, the old is dead. Long live the new.

And yet, despite the demise of our dead styles, they continue to haunt. Ancestral spirits are insidious; the old forms live on as ghosts. In an era of perpetual invention, perhaps the greatest of all traditions is our legacy of the haunted mechanisms of innovation that challenge and re-articulate our past, present & future.

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Hans Memling, Tommaso di Folco Portinari, Maria Portinari, 1470.

Kasimir Malevich, Room for the last Futurist Exhibition, 1915.

Installation View of Wolfgang Tillmans at The Museum of Modern Art, Winter 2013.

Installation view of Summit & Flower and Skeleton & Flesh, new diptych works by John D’Agostino from Empire of Glass.

As any sommelier (wine expert), fromager (cheese), itamae (sushi), curator, poet, or even DJ will tell you, the art of complement & contrast – or, rather, the pairing of independent component parts – is a delicate and demanding one.

For the past few years I have been especially intrigued in this art of pairing. Particularly in the realm of the fine arts, the art of sequencing and installation is perhaps in a bit of a Renaissance right now, as novel and unique installation concepts come to the fore. One of the best contemporary practitioners is perhaps Wolfgang Tillmans, and his novel use of floating space and form (see left).

Installation view of new works by John D’Agostino from Empire of Glass.

Although perhaps a little less common or as dynamic in the past, many different artists through the years have sought to enhance the power of their works by installing them in sequence, such as Kasimir Malevich’s Room for the Last Futurist Exhibition from 1915. Some of Malevich’s works have been re-installed in sequence at MoMA, currently in the Inventing Abstraction exhibition, on view through April 15, 2013.

The history of the diptych is a compelling one. Originally, many paired works were religious, and hinged together like a book. The 15th and 16th centuries in the Netherlands were perhaps a high point in classic diptych works. This pair of masterful Hans Memling portraits above which look so enticing together, were in fact originally part of a Triptych.

Of Coral Bones, 2012. Triptych: 24×30″ + 77×60″ + 44×44″

The art of pairing brings dynamic and unsuspected combinations into action. Symbiosis, harmony & conflict occur. Works now engage in multivalent and multi-layered fashion.

John D’Agostino, Thunderclap of Halt, 2012. Triptych: 44×44” + 77×60” + 30×30”

John D’Agostino, The Hammer of Los, 2012. Ink on canvas: 4 panels of 112×60″

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