Making It New?
After enjoying Annie Proulx's gentle evisceration of the Academy Awards in the Guardian, I hopped over to the Arts section and found this feature on Tom Hunter, a hip and institutionally validated British photographer, and his recent exhibition, "Living in Hell and Other Stories" at the National Gallery--the first exhibit at the venerable gallery ever to be devoted to a photographer. The Guardian slideshow gives us a glimpse and an earful of how Hunter composed his photographs, and his thoughts on the paintings (and only paintings) that inspired the photographs most recently on display.
Looking through Hunter's photographs, I wanted to only be captivated by their British ordinariness. But my overwhelming instinct was to wonder if the artist was getting so much attention for being so art historical. It was not just that the work reminded me of Sam Taylor-Wood, laced with a good bit of Richard Billingsworth, and maybe some Nan Goldin for good measure (in the group scenes), it was that Hunter had perpetrated a direct usurption of art history and its canonical images and artists. This made me suspicious. But, then again, perhaps usurption is too cruel a word; a better phrase would be excessive veneration. So, to get it right: Hunter is engaged with an excessive love for the old masters -- not that I blame him -- but one that requires his practice to be intimately, almost dealthly close, to theirs. It also means that Hunter can be celebrated straight-off with art historical panache... but does that mean that art history is, for him, a crutch?
There was something that broke with tradition when I looked up Hunter's CV. The photographs from "Living in Hell...", unlike the original masterpieces (at the time when they were first revealed and as they hang now), were displayed, in tact, in series, all around the globe at the same time (or around the same time between the end of 2005 and the beginning of 2006); in London, Sheffield, New York and Durham, NC. Perhaps this infectious spread is not particular to Hunter's oeuvre, but it is certainly a sign of our times: the ease of display -- really, the immediacy and duplication of display -- is something artists must contend with fiercely, and with some degree of awareness. But his work still left me wondering: Where exactly will he go from there? Is he really so avant-garde or innovative? How can he break new ground with his photography--for his own sake in art history, and for the sake of art history as a whole?
The larger question of how one can make things new has been heavy on my mind lately. I don't simply mean twists and turns of the aesthetic language that's established and persists, or short detours from one art historical style to the next. Rather, how can -- or can -- one make something as startling, disruptive, and insane as "Mademoiselles d'Avignon" or "Le Dejeuner sur l'Herb" now, in the 21st century? Taking the question to task, Daniel Birnbaum, in February's Artforum, writes about Michel Majerus, whom he describes as "the key contribution--to what one might call painting in the expanded field." Majerus goes on: "His art had a specific kind of newness--not the lofty, if contested, 'originality of the avant-garde,' but the prepackaged newness of the latest cell-phone graphic or just-released sneaker from Nike." And he weaves a supple trio of final sentences: "The temporality of Majerus's work, I claimed a decade ago, is that of a floating, all-encompassing now, analogous perhaps to that of the World Wide Web. Both phenomena--Majerus's art and the Internet--were new to me then. Now, that now seems a long time ago."
Majerus, before his tragically early end, was undoubtedly making new things that included a new 21st century stylistic language, one that was steeped in an entirely new set of references--the Internet, cell phones, anime, sleek sneakers from Nike, etc. But--yes, but--even in Birnbaum's insistence on Majerus's newness (in all its many forms beyond painting), he includes a paragraph stuffed with artists who had clearly influenced Majerus--Rauschenberg, Rosenquist, Polke, Koons, Kippenberger--and the visual references were certainly not hard to guess. The contents of Majerus's combinations are themselves signs of our times, and they rendered exquistely, but the idea of such combination is not entirely Majerus's alone. It seems to rely on the work of the past. It is informed and set up by what past artists have pioneered and left wide open for play and use.
Both Majerus and Hunter's work is primarily in traditional media, photography and painting, where the invisible hand of art history is rampant, overpowering, nearly inescapable. Thus, the questions both artists' work leave me with are these: Can an entirely new artform, or way of seeing, be made within these traditional forms? And can we, as viewers, be shocked and startled by a contemporary art object that the way we see the world changes? Or is it best to leave this to increments, and slow-going change? How has the art market changed the way art is made? How have art schools altered it too? Indeed, not just art schools, but how does the contemporary culture of visual inundation effect the way art is processed? And, on a more personal note, when was the last time a work of art simply floored you?
----
Tom Hunter at Yancey Richardson Gallery; James Lomax on "Living in Hell and Other Stories." More Michel Majerus at Manifesta 2; on Wikipedia; and at Deichtorhallen Hamburg.
Looking through Hunter's photographs, I wanted to only be captivated by their British ordinariness. But my overwhelming instinct was to wonder if the artist was getting so much attention for being so art historical. It was not just that the work reminded me of Sam Taylor-Wood, laced with a good bit of Richard Billingsworth, and maybe some Nan Goldin for good measure (in the group scenes), it was that Hunter had perpetrated a direct usurption of art history and its canonical images and artists. This made me suspicious. But, then again, perhaps usurption is too cruel a word; a better phrase would be excessive veneration. So, to get it right: Hunter is engaged with an excessive love for the old masters -- not that I blame him -- but one that requires his practice to be intimately, almost dealthly close, to theirs. It also means that Hunter can be celebrated straight-off with art historical panache... but does that mean that art history is, for him, a crutch? There was something that broke with tradition when I looked up Hunter's CV. The photographs from "Living in Hell...", unlike the original masterpieces (at the time when they were first revealed and as they hang now), were displayed, in tact, in series, all around the globe at the same time (or around the same time between the end of 2005 and the beginning of 2006); in London, Sheffield, New York and Durham, NC. Perhaps this infectious spread is not particular to Hunter's oeuvre, but it is certainly a sign of our times: the ease of display -- really, the immediacy and duplication of display -- is something artists must contend with fiercely, and with some degree of awareness. But his work still left me wondering: Where exactly will he go from there? Is he really so avant-garde or innovative? How can he break new ground with his photography--for his own sake in art history, and for the sake of art history as a whole?
The larger question of how one can make things new has been heavy on my mind lately. I don't simply mean twists and turns of the aesthetic language that's established and persists, or short detours from one art historical style to the next. Rather, how can -- or can -- one make something as startling, disruptive, and insane as "Mademoiselles d'Avignon" or "Le Dejeuner sur l'Herb" now, in the 21st century? Taking the question to task, Daniel Birnbaum, in February's Artforum, writes about Michel Majerus, whom he describes as "the key contribution--to what one might call painting in the expanded field." Majerus goes on: "His art had a specific kind of newness--not the lofty, if contested, 'originality of the avant-garde,' but the prepackaged newness of the latest cell-phone graphic or just-released sneaker from Nike." And he weaves a supple trio of final sentences: "The temporality of Majerus's work, I claimed a decade ago, is that of a floating, all-encompassing now, analogous perhaps to that of the World Wide Web. Both phenomena--Majerus's art and the Internet--were new to me then. Now, that now seems a long time ago."
Majerus, before his tragically early end, was undoubtedly making new things that included a new 21st century stylistic language, one that was steeped in an entirely new set of references--the Internet, cell phones, anime, sleek sneakers from Nike, etc. But--yes, but--even in Birnbaum's insistence on Majerus's newness (in all its many forms beyond painting), he includes a paragraph stuffed with artists who had clearly influenced Majerus--Rauschenberg, Rosenquist, Polke, Koons, Kippenberger--and the visual references were certainly not hard to guess. The contents of Majerus's combinations are themselves signs of our times, and they rendered exquistely, but the idea of such combination is not entirely Majerus's alone. It seems to rely on the work of the past. It is informed and set up by what past artists have pioneered and left wide open for play and use.Both Majerus and Hunter's work is primarily in traditional media, photography and painting, where the invisible hand of art history is rampant, overpowering, nearly inescapable. Thus, the questions both artists' work leave me with are these: Can an entirely new artform, or way of seeing, be made within these traditional forms? And can we, as viewers, be shocked and startled by a contemporary art object that the way we see the world changes? Or is it best to leave this to increments, and slow-going change? How has the art market changed the way art is made? How have art schools altered it too? Indeed, not just art schools, but how does the contemporary culture of visual inundation effect the way art is processed? And, on a more personal note, when was the last time a work of art simply floored you?
----
Tom Hunter at Yancey Richardson Gallery; James Lomax on "Living in Hell and Other Stories." More Michel Majerus at Manifesta 2; on Wikipedia; and at Deichtorhallen Hamburg.
posted by Melissa at 6:14 PM
1 Comments:
Can an entirely new artform, or way of seeing, be made within these traditional forms? And can we, as viewers, be shocked and startled by a contemporary art object that the way we see the world changes?
Yep, that's the question.
I watched the documentary on the dirtiest joke ever told. Aristocrats it's called. It was a free form joke where the comedians could try to gross out or offend the listeners. In listening to a number of them give a try at the joke it became apparent that there was little left that could actually shock the public of our culture. George Carlin did a decent rendition, and I think a couple of the guys from the Man show were telling the joke to their one year olds, which got close. Everybody else failed miserably.
The last piece of painting/drawing that actually shocked me or surprised me was by Joseph McVetty III. It was through the content of the piece. I think there is still territory within the realm of content that will always be able to create a sense of that surprise or shock. I was in a drawing show with him in boston. His piece: 5 or 6 cowboy sherriff types surrounding a bound dog. One of the men was cutting off the paw of the dog as a trophy. The others also had their trophies and were now pissing on the dog. Title was "to the victor goes the spoils" There weren't necessarily any formal breakthroughs but the visciousness of the subject matter definitely surprised me.
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