In Terms Of

Category: Lectures

  • Make American Art Great Again

    Make American Art Great Again

    “The Lack of Constructive Analytical Criticism and the Proliferation of Descriptive Analysis in Contemporary Art” with James Little
    Wednesday, November 15, 2017
    Lunchtime Lecture Series, Art Students League, Phyllis Harriman Mason Gallery, New York

    James Little (photograph by Christopher Howard)

    The audience gathered in the Phyllis Harriman Mason Gallery of the Art Students League, a midtown Manhattan art school founded in 1875, was mostly middle-aged folks and senior citizens, with a scattering of younger people who were probably students. They arrived to see and hear James Little, an abstract painter and professor, give a lunchtime talk. I was unaware of him prior to the event—I did not know if he was a critic, an artist, or some other art professional before showing up. Born in Tennessee in 1952, Little earned his BFA from the Memphis Academy of Art in 1974 and two years later received an MFA from Syracuse University. June Kelly Gallery has shown his work since the late 1980s.

    Today’s wordily titled topic, “The Lack of Constructive Analytical Criticism and the Proliferation of Descriptive Analysis in Contemporary Art,” felt like a time warp—meaning Little’s complaint was decades old. He characterized the current situation of contemporary art critics as a decline of quality that he likened to an “unedited book.” Critical debate, he claimed, has diminished since Clement Greenberg (1909–1994), Hilton Kramer (1928–2012), and Robert Hughes (1938–2012) were actively writing. An attitude of confusion was manifest in the most recent Whitney Biennial, he said, which included a 2016 artwork by Dana Schutz, whom he referred to as “Schultz,” that caused a controversy. Protesters accused Schutz, a white woman, of playing around with—and profiting from—the suffering of African Americans. “There was a big uproar about the fact that she did a painting of Emmett Till, Open Casket,” Little said. “The whole time, nobody said anything about the quality of the work. It was never mentioned…. What I recognized was that the critics weren’t stepping up, the artists weren’t stepping up, and we were just accepting this, accepting what they were feeding us, with no debate, with no criticism.” Little’s speaking style avoided complete sentences or thoughts. The supporting arguments behind his statements lacked substance.

    Dana Schutz, Open Casket, 2016, oil on canvas, 39 x 53 in. (artwork © Dana Schutz)

    I was puzzled and wondered how much reading Little had done on the controversy. Coco Fusco avoided the topic of quality in a Hyperallergic essay, focusing instead on censorship. Calvin Tomkins, though, noted the “deftly bro9in painterly ways that, to me, make it seem more tragic than the photograph, because the viewer is drawn in, not repelled.” A New Republic piece by Josephine Livingstone and Lovia Gyarkye compared the painting’s formalism with its subject matter; it also contextualized Open Casket within Schutz’s oeuvre, noting the artist is not known for her solemnity. These three examples are the first ones I read while writing this review. If I had followed up with dozens more articles on the subject, I’d surely uncover further discussion of the painting’s formal qualities. Little declared that criticism is essential, that it improves art, provides direction for artists, and even offers them something to resist. Criticism can only do these things if a person reads it, which Little seems not to have done. I wondered if he actually saw Schutz’s painting in person instead of online.

    Chris Ofili’s painting Holy Virgin Mary (1996), in the traveling exhibition Sensation: Young British Artists from the Saatchi Collection at the Brooklyn Museum in 1999, provoked New York’s mayor Rudolph Giuliani to call for censorship and defunding. “Nobody talked about the quality of that painting,” Little exclaimed. “Nobody said whether it was a good painting or a bad painting. Or if it was despicable. They didn’t say that. He made the guy famous. And that’s my point.” Later during the Q&A, Little agreed with an audience member that if Schutz had the skills, fewer people would have complained. “Dana Schultz was one of shock value. And she got it. She was in the right place to get shock value, and she got it in the Whitney. If she was a better painter, it could have been different. If it had been something, a personal experience of hers, it could have been different.”

    The matter of a white woman painting a lynched black boy had little to do with the work. For Little, closeness to the subject matter is important. That an artist needs to experience his or her subject matter firsthand is an odd stance to take, considering that few painters in the Italian Renaissance witnessed the crucifixion of Jesus Christ or the beheading of John the Baptist. Maybe Little meant that an artist depicting current or recent events should bear witness to them, implicating an early text-based work by the artist Glenn Ligon, who riffed on the “I am a man” posters created in the wake of the 1968 sanitation workers’ strike in Memphis, which Little lived through as a teenager—though his recollection of basic facts of the event were faulty in several important ways. Nevertheless, Little was there but the appropriator was not, and therefore Ligon trivialized the situation.

    Edouard Manet, The Dead Toreador, probably 1864, oil on canvas, 29 7/8 x 60 3/8 in. (artwork in the public domain)

    Little paired a slide of Open Casket with a work by Mary Cassatt—the first in a series of comparisons of art influenced by pop culture, the media, consumerism, and novelty (which was bad) with art connected to tradition (definitely a good thing). Contrasted here next were Paul Cézanne’s apples and Carl Andre’s bricks, then Marcel Duchamp’s Fountain (1917) and Édouard Manet’s The Dead Toreador (1864). Little showed an installation of rocks by Joseph Beuys called The End of the Twentieth Century (1983–85) and a painting from Claude Monet’s Haystacks series (1890–91). Little wondered how we got from one to the other without any critical debate, positive or negative. Once again, I was perplexed about this alleged dearth of debate. Hundreds if not thousands of books have been written on the evolution modern art. Bringing this specific painting by Manet was confusing. The artist had painted a bull in the picture, but critics wrote that it looked like a rat. Manet cut down the canvas and saved only the bullfighter. Does Little support critics having the power to force an artist drastically alter even a finished and exhibited painting?

    Little periodically read passages from the writings of Greenberg, Kramer, and Hughes—critics whom the art world generally recognizes as having conservative views. The quotes were meant to buttress the artist’s “I am not a Duchampian” stance. Fair enough. Not every artist should embrace the readymade. Little further articulated his position: “I don’t think idea is enough to constitute art. I think art has to have vision, content—emotive content. It has to serve a purpose to humanity. It’s essential for our spiritual and mental health.” For Little, Andre is minor art, and “minor art is not major art.” Minor art that proliferates today is evidence of a cultural decline. “When art gets better, everything else gets better.” In other words, the relationship of art to life is a matter of trickle-up economics.

    Little said he felt nothing upon seeing Duchamp’s urinal or Beuys’s Felt Suit in a museum, but he marveled at Manet’s fallen bullfighter. “I had an aesthetic experience,” he said of his episode. “What I mean by aesthetic experience is the experience that you have when you see a great piece of art. It’s a life-changing thing.” Little’s definition of the aesthetic experience was wholly subjective, even tautological. You not only know it when you see it, but it’s completely explains itself. “Rembrandt is Rembrandt” was what Little stated to demonstrate the self-evidence of greatness. Art “has to offer something,” he continued. “It has to enrich my life and my experience in order for it to be art. It has to give me something I didn’t have in the first place. It has to take me further along in this journey.”

    Jacob Lawrence, panel 35 of The Migration Series: They left the South in great numbers. They arrived in the North in great numbers, 1940–41, casein tempera on hardboard, 12 x 18 in. (artwork © Jacob and Gwendolyn Knight Lawrence Foundation)

    The three photographs comprising Ai Weiwei’s action Dropping a Han Dynasty Urn (1995) fail to meet his criteria for art, but paintings in Jacob Lawrence’s Migration Series (1941) do. Lawrence’s paintings speak for themselves as art, Little said, through a connection to the past, their color and composition, and their narrative. “An idea alone does not create an aesthetic experience,” Little reiterated. “An idea alone does not create art.” Little was agog at why Ai would drop a two-thousand-year-old Chinese vase, when a quick Google search would have turned up the answer. Sometimes an artwork doesn’t reveal itself immediately. Don’t we check the museum wall label to see who the subject of a portrait is? Does the iconography of ancient sculpture of Egypt or the Americas reveal itself to a nonspecialist? It needs interpretation.

    I sympathize with Little’s disbelief that a destructive act can be creative. I agree that rigorous formal training is a necessary precursor for a certain kind of artist—but not all artists. What puzzles me is how Little started the lecture by lamenting critical discourse, but then began condemning art he doesn’t like and pleading for a return to reason. I understood where he was coming from but failed to grasp a coherent argument. A photograph of Cady Noland’s Industry Park (1991), which consists of an unaltered chain-linked fence displayed in a gallery, was projected onto the screen beside him. People don’t see their lives improved by this art, he said. Art needs rigor to make. “We can no longer allow for the public to feed us stuff that we don’t understand, or don’t really matter to us in our daily lives.” Description, novelty, and consumerism has infiltrated criticism, and Little finds the writing of Robert C. Morgan, Karen Wilkin, Mario Naves, and James Panero to alleviate this. Is it because they praise art he likes and denounce art he hates?

    A chain-linked fence does not reach the masses, Little remarked during the Q&A. Noland’s work does not provide an aesthetic experience. It’s only utilitarian. The Art Students League has provided traditional artistic training for decades, he reminded the audience, educating Jackson Pollock, Louis Nevelson, Roy Lichtenstein, and Robert Rauschenberg. “We can’t throw this [tradition] out the window, you know, because somebody decides they want to go out here and take a chain-linked fence and put it up in the Museum of Modern Art. And we look at it like it’s some, you know, revelation. No, it’s not a revelation! That’s what I’m saying! I’m gonna go get me a chain-linked fence when I leave here, and I’m gonna put it in my backyard. Is there any difference? Well maybe it’s Earth art.” Little has seen art exhibitions of trash swept into a corner—a clichéd insult that is ironically based on real life—and a room full of grocery carts. (Could the latter show be Josh Kline’s recent solo outing at 47 Canal?) Little admitted he was a conservative formalist, which he confidently understands as meaning “I know what I’m doing.” He obviously demands high craft and skill from artists, who make their work by hand, with a vision, and a sense of history. Further, Little feels he belongs more to the late nineteenth and twentieth centuries than to the twenty-first. He does not make art for himself but rather is concerned what others think and feel about it, including his fellow artists.

    An audience member speaks during the Q&A (photograph by Christopher Howard)

    During the Q&A an audience member asked about the connection between Rembrandt and Pollock. Thomas Hart Benton, Little replied, served as the lineage of formal training, which includes studying classical art and knowing the figure. “Where [Pollock] took it was another place.” Pollock had “developed a relationship with the medium” of paint and expressed himself through paint. Rembrandt was connected to Titian, El Greco, and Leonardo. “Look, if you gonna built a house, would you build it without a foundation? I guess not.” Someone else argued that Duchamp and Beuys attempted a dialogue with the past. “What you just said is right on,” replied Little. “They were trying to do that. I’m saying that they didn’t do it…. The others, they weren’t trying to do it—they did it.” Little returned to Beuys’s Felt Suit. “When I walk past this suit, at the Walker Art Center, it did not do anything for me. That’s just the way it is. It just didn’t do anything for me.” The work presented a conundrum. “Why is this here?” he wondered. “Why is there not an outcry against this art? Critics have failed us. I pray for another Clement Greenberg, and Hilton Kramer and Robert Hughes. I pray for it because we don’t get that.” Little contented that we have failed to uphold standards. That “we” includes artists, scholars, curators, museum professionals, and the public. Little was not surprised that art mocking middle-class values has found an audience among the wealthy elite who fund art museums and serve on their boards. One attendee remarked, “Whose interest does that serve?” The lecture thankfully ended before a discussion of collecting practices began.

    Earlier this year Bomb interviewed Little for the magazine’s Oral History Project. “His paintings are guided by intuitive responses to form, color, and feeling,” LeRonn P. Brooks wrote in his introduction to the piece. “This approach is not overly calculated, though its complexity may suggest so.” Little was interviewed by the Brooklyn Rail in 2009 and profiled by ARTnews in 2011. In the latter, he described his process in detail, describing how he applies layers of paint (made from powdered pigment and mixed with varnish and beeswax) to his surfaces to produce a high sheen. Though I disagree with most of what he said, Little’s views did not put me off. In fact, I am curious to see his paintings in person, to understand why he believes the things he does and how his vision for art manifests itself in his own production. I don’t wish to persuade him of accepting the value of Duchamp, Beuys, and Noland. How he feels about his own art is of greater interest and importance.

    In Terms Of count: coming soon.

  • The Still Life

    Eric Banks
    Wednesday, December 2, 2015
    Creative Writing Program
    New School, Klein Conference Room, Alvin Johnson/J. M. Kaplan Hall, New York

    Eric Banks (photograph by Christopher Howard)

    In academic art history, the single-author, single-subject monograph—an extended study on an individual artist, a group of artists, or a chronological or geographic range—is typically considered the pinnacle of scholarly achievement. A parallel to it in the hierarchy of subject matter in Western art would be history painting, a large work that addresses a biblical, historical, or mythological subject. To continue the analogy, a coauthored or edited book is comparable to a portrait, and an essay in a book is a genre scene. The article published in a peer-reviewed journal would be the landscape. The lowest form is the book review—the still life of academic writing.

    “I’m a book reviewer,” said Eric Banks, director of the New York Institute of the Humanities at New York University since 2013, to about thirty attendees of a talk at the New School. No kidding—he has assessed hundreds of books on a wide range of subjects (art, literature, nonfiction) over the last twenty years for the New York Times Book Review, New York Review of Books, Chicago Tribune, Slate, Chronicle of Higher Education, and Financial Times, to name a few. Despite this hierarchy established in the opening, the book review and its parent form, the critical essay, allow for a high amount of creative liberty for its author, as demonstrated every week in “The Critics” section of the New Yorker. “Writing about books,” Banks said, is “a springboard to talk about so many other things in culture.”

    The critical essay is the hardest thing to write, said Honor Moore, nonfiction coordinator of the Creative Writing Program at the New School, who introduced the speaker. Where do you begin? Who are you when you write one? How do you manage a voice that is neither an encyclopedia entry nor a bad sermon? All good questions. What seemed to concern Banks the most, when reviewing books, is to avoid writing that’s too “plotty.”

    Banks admitted that he misunderstood the initial invitation to speak and became preoccupied with preparing a talk on the autodidact as critic, or on what it means to be self-taught in the internet age. Another possible topic could have contrasted the work of a critic with that of an academic scholar or a writer of personal interest. (Is that a semiprofessional blogger or a contributor to Amazon or Yelp?) He could have kicked around a “praise of digression” but instead read his work and talked about it—a strategy Moore had suggested.

    The cover of Artforum in October 1997

    Before reading three of his own short critical essays from the past few years, Banks gave us a brief professional biography. In the mid-1990s, he found himself in a senior-editor seat at Artforum, his first real job out of graduate school. At the time, he said, voices in the magazine came from the belletristic tradition of poets and novelists, from people interested in film, photography, and fashion (“fashion was an extremely important thing around 1995”), and from art historians and graduate students. Art criticism is always tied to higher education, Banks remarked, but book reviewers for the types of publications in which he publishes (journalistic and cultural outlets covering literature and nonfiction) don’t interact with the academy. A good essay on art achieves good formal description, which Banks said comprises 90 percent of the text. “Students are really trained—and they’re trained very well by their professors—to be able to look at something and describe it. You can’t write a critical essay unless you really describe in form[al] terms, in descriptive terms, the object you’re writing about.”

    I beg to differ. First, I would put that figure at no more than 50 percent, because subject matter, biography, history, and cultural context are crucial topics. And this rigorous training of graduate students? A few years ago, while editing the first sixty pages of a doctoral student’s dissertation, I was astonished by the inability of the author to describe works of art: her words hardly corresponded with the accompanying illustrations. Then again Banks, as an editor for Artforum and Bookforum—two of the top publications of criticism of any kind—probably saw only the best stuff from the brightest academics.

    Twenty years ago, Banks observed, writers on art didn’t need to explain a lot in their criticism because their readership was small and dedicated. Now the art world has a wider audience that may not share the same knowledge base. When he took over the editorship of Bookforum from Andrew Hultkrans in 2003, and with the publication’s relaunch later that year, Banks said he wanted swagger from his writers.1 He led the bimonthly journal for five years before replacing Lawrence Weschler at the New York Institute of the Humanities.

    The covers of three books on horse racing from the collection of Eric Banks

    The first text Banks that read tonight, “Pony Up,” came from the April/May 2012 issue of Bookforum. The piece grew, he disclosed, from evolved from avoiding a book review (Patricia Meyer Spacks’s On Rereading from 2011) to a musing on his longtime obsession, horse racing, and in particular, his collection of “ridiculous books” on the subject (from pulp novels to betting tips). Banks eventually shoehorned the book review into the piece, in the fourth of seven paragraphs, but the essay was truly his own thoughts—delightfully self-indulgent, if not somewhat neglectful of the author.

    Banks said his stuff is good when it hits both high and low culture. He also identified the pitfalls of the middle-ranged piece, which plagues many writers of short-form criticism:

    People have written a lot of short reviews, reviews in the fifteen-hundred-word range, which are just long enough to take you forever [to write], and to involve a lot of work and … thought about how to structure an essay, but just short enough that you really can’t get into great depth into the kinds of things you’d like to get into. It’s eye opening, because you frequently will go back and read something you’ve written and think, “I have no idea what I was trying to say with this sentence. I have no idea why I reviewed this book. I don’t even remember reviewing this book.”

    Some reviewers, he said, don’t even remember reading the book.

    Banks apologized in advance for the scatological passages from the Franz West catalogue essay he read, saying he is uncomfortable with colorful language.2 The piece was structured into three sections: Twinkies, roses, and sausages. Banks read from the sausages passage, telling us how the artist’s studio often ate at a Chinese restaurant nearby and sourced their own lentils to accompany the brown rice, and how West’s body was deteriorating because of illness, looking not unlike Ichabod Crane, bad teeth, still smoking cigarettes and marijuana. In West’s work on paper, “sausage equals dick equals turd equals sausage.” Banks described a handful of sculptures and drawings, how the artist’s work was autobiographical despite the collaborators in his studio, and how his audience-engaged pieces differ from that of Relational Aesthetics (they are private).

    Eric Banks reads from three review essays (photograph by Christopher Howard)

    “Public Anomie,” his review of Michel Houellebecq’s novel Submission, recently translated from French to English, was freshly published by Bookforum. It was difficult to avoid thinking about the November terrorist attacks in Paris, Banks mentioned, which took place after he wrote the review. Banks remarked how both his essay and a New York Times review of Submission compared Houellebecq to Lars von Trier, which Banks thought was his observation was a special discovery. Sometimes things are in the air. The plague of modern life, Banks said, borrowing a term from Benedict Anderson, is short-lived communities we form. Those which surround books (and their reviews) still engender “magic conversation.”

    Moore moderated the event’s Q&A, first addressing the solitude of book reviewing. Banks thinks about voice a lot, and he writes, rewrites, and rewrites. Moore concurred, “One has to keep rewriting to find out what you think.” Banks replied, “You’re always writing criticism in your head. You’re constantly taking notes in your head for essays that will never be written.” Yet “When you finally arrive at something, it’s almost like the smelling salts have been broken open, and you’re really alert to what you’re thinking about, reading about, what you’ve read [already].” Critical writing, he implied, sharpens your perception of the world. “There’s something about the critical essay, it makes you more attuned to … a lot of things. Somehow your senses are shot into another level of awareness. It’s the cocaine of writing, or something.” Yet he worries if a piece be embarrassing in a year—not unlike many people’s regret, the next day, about their behavior on the illegal stimulant.

    Banks wished he was more daring in certain areas. Born and raised in Louisiana, he feels he needs a weird Southern high-brow persona yet cannot write a history of the South. Nor could he write a book on smoking cigarettes (he once was a smoker) and the invention of obscenity in the Middle Ages. The questions I didn’t ask were: Is it harder to write about art than about books? How important is the editor, and what is it like writing and publishing without one?

    In Terms Of count: 3.

    1 Banks’s career path was chronicled in Cynthia Cotts, “Banks Knows His Books,” Village Voice, July 1, 2003.

    2 Rachel Harrison and Eric Banks, “Hostess with the Mostess,” in Darsie Alexander, ed., Franz West: To Build a House You Start with the Roof (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2008).

  • The Most Bleed Possible

    This essay was largely written during a November 2015 residency at the Luminary in Saint Louis, Missouri.

    Brody Condon
    Tuesday, November 3, 2015
    School of Visual Arts, 133/141 West 21st Street, Room 101C, New York

    Brody Condon in Miami Beach in 2010 (photograph and GIF by David Toro)

    Though the outrageous antics of Jim Jones and Charles Manson reverberate through the American public consciousness, a broad history of less-sensational activities from the 1960s and 1970s probably had a larger if surreptitious impact on US culture. Encounter groups, the human potential movement, large-group awareness training: these cultic approaches to self-actualization came shortly after mind expansion through psychedelic drugs in the sixties and just before business motivational seminars and self-help gurus of the eighties (followed by the deliriums of late-night religious programming and inspirational infomercials). Today, soccer moms practice yoga and mindfulness is all the rage, but once upon a time, New Age ideas were a serious threat to mainstream Judeo-Christian values. The objectors were partly correct, but I digress.

    Born in Mexico, Brody Condon is an American artist working in Berlin who has recently been mining the New Age practices of the Esalen Institute and Erhard Seminars Training, among other groups, cults, and otherwise strange organizations, through an aesthetic lens. Using live action role play (LARP) as an artistic form, Condon creates scenarios of psychic strain through what he calls performance engines, described during a lecture at the School of Visual Arts as “creative performative systems that drive action … that drive social choreography.” Through these events—typically documented on video—he produces not only an “emotional significant group encounter but also a psychologically charged art critique.”

    Brody Condon talks about performance engines (photograph by Christopher Howard)

    Crucial to Condon’s practice is gestalt practice, which he described as a conception of the physical body, the environment, and the mental state of the individual as an integrated, organic whole. Conversation gestalt therapy, he said, focuses on an individual’s expression and experience of the present moment—there is neither past nor future. Condon is not interested in actual healing and trauma. Likewise, there is no crossover with drama therapy or art therapy. Participants are supposed to maintain some critical distance when in the moment. The artist emphasized that performance engines are an alternative to, not a replacement for, real political dialogue. He also framed his work as an “experiential essay.”

    Some works come across as simple. For Circles of Focus (2015), one project from a four-year collaboration with the Scottish artist Christine Borland, people were encouraged to free-associate about museum objects they handled. Other pieces are just plain weird. Extracurricular Anatomy (2015) took place at the Laboratory of Human Anatomy at the University of Glasgow, where Condon and Borland devised a performance for five fourth-year anatomy students, three cadavers (two real, one played by a living person), and a carnivorous plant. One participant uttered sounds when touching parts of the cadaver, which the plant positioned above the body’s head “interpreted.” A second person “psychically communicated” with the plant and told a third where to dissect a geometric section from the body. “Yeah … that happened,” Condon said.

    The finished version of Future Gestalt (2012) consists of video of the fifth and final session of a performance that took place under a Tony Smith sculpture Smoke (1967), installed at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art—a building designed by the architect William Pereira that, for Condon, represents an “antiquated version of the future.” Smith’s sculpture embodied the “facilitator,” intended to be an artificial intelligence or “interdimensional entity” that, like a cult leader or psychotherapist, guided the four performers. Wearing colorful, loose-fitting robes and “playing fictional versions of themselves in the future,” the performers spoke to the sculpture, sometimes in shrills, clicks, and whispers; it also talked to them. The audio of Condon’s instructions and commands (such as “focus,” “responsibility,” “empathy,” an “control”) was split, with a clear signal sent to the performers’ earpieces and garbled distorted audio filled the room at LACMA. Watch the clip below for a taste of the work.

    Brody Condon, sample from Future Gestalt (2012) on Vimeo.

    LARP communities throughout the world volunteer to participate in Condon’s works. He also posts open casting calls, which convene both professional actors and regular folks, but the artist’s approach that contrasts the feel-good nature of most audience-involved art. Before screening footage from Zeigarnik Effect (2015), commissioned by Momentum 8: The Nordic Biennial, Condon explained, “I’m not casting, and they’re not performers. I’m providing a service for them. I’m providing an event for them to immerse themselves in, for a day to five days at a time. And often they pay me to participate.” This low “token fee” gives him more power as an artist and “changes the power dynamic of participatory work.” In museums, artists typically treat visitors as material. Condon perceives himself as a service provider. A live feed of Zeigarnik Effect was presented in a split screen. Condon said this was a nod to the psychiatrist Ian Alger, who in the 1970s introduced the two-camera technique in therapy. Alger would simultaneously record both sides of a patient’s face; the patient would choose the preferred side—or something like that.

    Brody Condon, sample from Ziegarnik Effect (2015) on Vimeo.

    The concept and script for Level Five (2010–11), the earliest and most historically grounded work, drew from elements of Erhard Seminars Training, Alcoholics Anonymous, Scientology, and gestalt therapy. Level Five was Condon’s reconceptualization of self-actualization seminars, using two actors with years of LARP experience to keep the psychological flow going (what he called “run-time game management”) during the two-day event. The performers—a mix of LARPers, actors, and volunteers—arrived as characters, emoted as them, and stayed in character for the duration of the piece. Filmed with three cameras, Level Five was streamed live next door, at the Hammer Museum’s theater. Perhaps not coincidentally, the Hammer has been offering weekly Mindful Awareness sessions since 2012.

    “In role playing,” Condon said, “bleed happens when the thoughts and feelings of the character start affecting the player, or vice versa.” Coming from a background in performance art, he wants “the most bleed possible.” Back in the day—Condon played Dungeons and Dragons as a kid—it was off limits for role-playing games to affect your real life. Today there are levels of bleed. “Rather than forgetting the existence of an original self,” the artist said about Level Five participants, “the character becomes a tool for projection, self-exploration, and experimentation.” Sometimes performers intentionally try to puncture the illusion; sometimes they experience a minor schizophrenic break. For each work trained professionals are on hand, Condon revealed, to pull a person aside in either case. “We can’t stop these events,” he said. “Once they start, they run…. If they hate what’s going on, they leave.”

    Brody Condon, sample from Level Five (2010–11) on Vimeo.

    One wonders exactly what Condon gets out of the whole thing—he is the one instructing people to inhabit a fictional character whose personality is subsequently gutted. Getting to the core self of a fictional person is “the funnest part to me, it’s the most twisted part.” He explained: “You’re attending a seminar that’s meant to push you, to get you to the core of your being, to strip layers of your socially constructed personality—but you’re doing that as a fictional personality.” The idea is twisted indeed, and you wouldn’t get the same results with a film or stage play. At the time of conceiving Level Five, Condon said, “I was interested in the genealogy of New Age culture in the United States.” After thriving in the 1970s, he told us, the human-potential movement was depoliticized and sold it back to the masses via motivational seminars for businesspeople, Silicon Valley entrepreneurial philosophy, and life coaching.

    A work looking beyond the West, Four Sessions (2014), was executed in Seoul, South Korea, for the fourth Anyang Public Arts Project. Condon found four traditional craftspeople—an instrument maker, a mother of pearl inlay master, a mudang shaman, and a slack-line performer (a.k.a. a tightrope walker)—that are Intangible Cultural Treasures in Korea and identified by a number. He instructed them to pick an object from their studio or to collaborate with him to make an object. Number 24 (the lacquer craftsman), for example, brought a bowl he was never able to finish because it was tied to a past trauma, and Condon made a drum with Number 30 (the instrument maker). Again borrowing from gestalt therapy, the artist ordered the participants to converse with these objects, which spoke back. What’s more, the Intangible Cultural Treasures pretended to be an inanimate object themselves that their objects, now alive, talked to. The piece of rope that belonged to Number 58 (the slack-line man) chastised him for failing to practice.

    Brody Condon, sample from Intangible Cultural Treasure No. 58: Traditional Slackline Performance (2014) on Vimeo.

    Four Sessions felt like the weakest of the projects Condon presented, but that’s probably because the video clips he showed lacked English subtitles. (The excerpts on Vimeo are now translated.) I also got the impression that Condon struggled to maintain order—the participants seemed to battle with him directly and indirectly. Though they were instructed to come alone, they brought family members and apprentices. One man’s daughter and her friends played with their cell phones while the sessions took place. The stubborn shaman resisted the academically trained mediator for Four Sessions, a Korean psychotherapist who did PhD research on the history of shamanism. The psychotherapist, in turn, did not bow to Condon’s authority. There was also a certain amount of bickering. Common trait among the four Intangible Cultural Treasures, the artist said, were peer jealousy, worries about money, and complaints about corruption within the Intangible Cultural Treasure system. Perhaps the difficulty was that the four participants did not adopt a persona or role. They were playing themselves going through a somewhat experimental therapy session that was too much like garden-variety psychotherapy.

    In Terms Of count: 6.

  • Say It Together, Unmonumentally

    This essay was completed and published during a November 2015 residency at the Luminary in Saint Louis, Missouri.

    Say You, Say Me: Art Is a Song in Your Head—Rachel Harrison in Conversation with Greil Marcus
    Thursday, October 29, 2015
    Center for the Humanities, Graduate Center, City University of New York, Martin E. Segal Theatre, New York

    Rachel Harrison, Cindy (Green), 2004, mixed media, 72 x 37 x 31 in. (artwork © Rachel Harrison; photograph provided by Greene Naftali, New York)

    “Language is forced on art,” quipped the artist Rachel Harrison to an audience member during the Q&A session of this event. “We’re just throwing words at art all the time. Is that really best for art? Is that really good for art? Does that make art happy? It might. It employs a lot of people.” Such is Harrison’s self-consciously funny and cynicism-free outlook for giving titles to her works. That outlook is also a good way to understand her art practice over the last twenty years. I lost track of how many times I chuckled to myself during this hour-long talk.

    Harrison attached funny stories to a few of her works. A gallery goer stole a Baby Phat handbag fastened to one sculpture, and friends told her that someone had ruffled the blonde wig topping another. “What is that desire, not to mess with hair but to mess with artworks?” Harrison asked during her lecture. “Because I get that sometimes.” The way Harrison recounted taking the photograph she uses for Marilyn with Wall (2004–ongoing) characterized an Andy Warhol museum archivist as a sketchy street drug dealer.1 Yet irony plays no role in her practice: “I work too hard to be ironic,” she told another attendee.

    Harrison’s art practice is varied: mostly sculpture and installation but also photography, drawing, and writing. (Artforum has published a few great articles by her, on Andy Warhol’s Empire, Jeff Koons’s Bob Hope, and a parade organized by Paul McCarthy.) She isn’t yet known for a singular masterpiece, for which she could be inextricably linked, but her style is recognizable a mile away. A typical work is larger-than-life-sized, built from construction materials or polystyrene and slathered with cement and paint, with an extra prop or two—a bottle of Mr. Clean, a plastic figurine, or a framed photograph of a celebrity—fastened to it. Sometimes a sculpture rests on a plinth, a pair of milk crates, or a shipping dolly.

    Rachel Harrison, Zombie Rothko, 2011, wood, polystyrene, acrylic, and plastic doll, 70 x 23 x 31 in. (artwork © Rachel Harrison)

    Tonight’s event paired Harrison with the music critic Greil Marcus, best known for writing the books Mystery Train (1975) and Lipstick Traces (1989). Marcus was funny, too, in his own way, as he read aloud a short introductory essay peppered with off-the-cuff observations. While in Paris, he visited an art exhibition at the Fondation Louis Vuitton, a Frank Gehry–designed building in Paris that “from the outside looks like a spaceship just about to take off.” Marcus circled Harrison’s Zombie Rothko (2011) round and round, taking in the bright orange hair of a plastic doll torso placed on the top of a craggy, painted blocky form. “What first might bring a laugh might turn disturbing,” he surmised. “What first might just throw you and not seem to hit is going to end up being the governing principle of the work.” And considering the ways she infuses pop culture—in particular a series of twenty colored-pencil drawings of the British singer Amy Winehouse carousing with characters from paintings by Pablo Picasso, Willem de Kooning, and Martin Kippenberger—he argued, “Not enough has been made of the way that Rachel’s work engages with the world that people actually live in…. That when you see it you’re seeing a distorted, funnier, more gripping version of the life that you actually lead.”

    I am embarrassingly late to the Rachel Harrison party. My longstanding impression of her work was that the criticality vibe overpowers all other interpretations, including humor, which I certainly noticed but didn’t take seriously. After all, Greene Naftali, her gallery of eighteen years, shows Very Serious Art by Paul Chan, Michael Krebber, Bernadette Corporation, and others. Over the years I have dutifully seen Harrison’s head-scratching exhibitions—at Greene Naftali, in the Whitney Biennial, at the New Museum—but never considered it in depth, despite my editing an exhibition review of her work in 2005. For years I recognized the work’s shock value—you could never call it beautiful—but never acknowledged its smart value and its terrific sense of humor. To get a better sense of what her work is all about—this is the primary reason why I attended tonight’s event.

    Rachel Harrison introduced the front side of Buddha with Wall (2004) as “Buddha Descending a Staircase” (photograph by Christopher Howard)

    In a chronological artist’s talk, Harrison presented two principle themes in her work—walls and frames—and how her thinking has has shifted from the former to the latter. Indeed, since the early 1990s she has made use of Sheetrock and metal studs brought into the gallery or taken down existing gallery walls (but never removing them from the exhibition space). The title of Harrison’s first solo exhibition—Should home windows or shutters be required to withstand a direct hit from an eight-foot-long two-by-four shot from a cannon at 34 miles an hour, without creating a hole big enough to let through a three-inch sphere?—came from a New York Times article on building codes after Hurricane Andrew; the show took place in an apartment in Carroll Gardens, Brooklyn.

    Developing this interest in modular and provisional work, the artist filled a gallery with a maze constructed with rectangular sheets of cardboard (Perth Amboy, 2001). “People call this a labyrinth, but you’re not going to get lost,” she joked. For Marilyn with Wall, Harrison took down nonstructural gallery walls and set them aside. “You make more space by cutting up a wall, and you make more space for a body,” she explained, sort of. “And by having more bodies you can have more spaces.” She metaphorically attributes physical space to mental space and to thinking. Harrison notices how people walk through rooms and on the subway—she may be watching you.

    Installation view of Perth Amboy (2001) at Bard College in 2009 (artwork © Rachel Harrison)

    After discussing a handful of museum and gallery exhibitions across Europe, Harrison tackled Three Young Framers, a solo outing at Regen Projects in Los Angeles this past summer. With wall studs leftover from shows by Glenn Ligon and Raymond Pettibon, which the gallery saved for her, she demarcated rooms within the hangerlike building, not unlike Michael Asher’s 2008 show at the Santa Monica Museum of Art. Although her initial idea came from drawing outlines of the gallery’s floor plan on paper, using a ruler, Harrison confessed that she wanted to see the Asher exhibition again, and this was a way to do it. She finds sophisticated humor in his work, from the George Washington statue to the Santa Monica show.

    During the conversation, Marcus saw “a scary, lifeless, maximum-security prison” in Three Young Framers, not a reference to Asher (who he may not know). No reviews of the show mentioned the prison angle, which Harrison chalked up to the herd mentality of art criticism. If the press release had mentioned jail, she noted, everyone would have zeroed in on that instead of Asher. There is no single meaning in your work, Marcus continued, adding something about how taking selfies imprisons actually imprisons the vain photographers. “Where they are,” he said, “is much less important than the fact that they are there.” Or maybe people just like documenting their life in photographs, like they’ve done for decades.

    Harrison’s 2012 exhibition The Help comprised a handful of sculptures and the Amy Winehouse drawings, which Marcus found to be upsetting and nihilistic, distorted and angry, bitter and self-destructive. Seeing the pictures changed the way he perceives the British singer, who died of drug and alcohol–related causes in 2011. Harrison appreciates her music but did not previously follow her career. The subject of the drawings was chosen randomly, she said, from a magazine cover spotted in a supermarket checkout line—though celebrities certainly play an important role in her work. Harrison admires the way Winehouse turned herself into sculpture, into a pop icon, purely through invention: her hair, singing soul music, and having working-class origins. What if someone looking at the drawings knows very little about Winehouse? If one puts the singer in the wrong place, Harrison and Marcus concluded, we can rethink her career and how she got there instead of repeating platitudes.

    Rachel Harrison, Untitled, 2012, colored pencil on paper, 22⅜ x 27⅞ (artwork © Rachel Harrison; photograph provided by Greene Naftali, New York)

    Marcus saw the “scrapbook” exhibition Amy Winehouse: A Family Portrait at the Contemporary Jewish Museum of San Francisco, which he did not find terribly interesting. Three artists (Harrison, Jennie Ottinger, and Jason Jägel) had work at the same museum in a separate exhibition, called You Know I’m No Good. That presentation, which included Harrison’s Winehouse drawings, was overwrought, disturbing, violent, and mutilated, according to Marcus, not unlike the disturbing images in Robert Mapplethorpe’s X Portfolio. There is agency in creative acts, Harrison avowed. Marcus agreed, arguing that pain is an expressive force.

    Another audience member—it was the art historian Hal Foster—stated that most people understand Harrison’s work as collage and assemblage. He articulated a different perspective: “You don’t collage things; you collage views, viewpoints. It’s about putting subjects together, not objects together.” Although the same could be said for many artists, his observation is spot on. Harrison seemed pleased with it. She mentioned another description about her work, made by Foster, that she likes: “You take a bad thing and make it worse.”

    In Terms Of count: 13.

    1 Rachel Harrison said: “They’ll let you make an appointment, and you can go to Andy Warhol’s archives. And you just wear gloves, and they’ll let you touch everything. And there’s a can of hairspray, chewing gum, all the things you know about—fabulous things. And then I was about to leave and the guy was like, ‘Well, don’t you want to see it?’ And I said, ‘What?’ And he said ‘Everyone wants to see it.’ I’m like, ‘What do you mean?’ ‘Don’t you want to see the source material for Marilyn?’ And I’m like, ‘I don’t care.’” She ending up taking a 35mm photograph of the publicity still, partially veiled by a glassine sleeve. The image is a key part of a sculpture called Marilyn with Wall, which she has created several times since 2004.