In Terms Of

Tag: Peter Halley

  • Running in Circles

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

    Olivier Mosset in Conversation with Marie Heilich
    Wednesday, November 18, 2015
    Parapet/Real Humans, Saint Louis, MO

    The speakers, from left: Marie Heilich, Olivier Mosset, and Amy Granat (photograph by Christopher Howard)

    Olivier Mosset was in town for the opening of his exhibition at Parapet/Real Humans, a project space run by Amy Granat in a storefront in the Fox Park neighborhood of Saint Louis. On view was a framed set of four lithographs of two thick black stripes on a square of white paper. The set, it turns out, was made for a Swiss Institute benefit in 2004. Granat said the work reminded her of September 11—I suppose any two vertical lines will do that. The artist compared them to an optometrist’s vision test. As someone who can’t see six inches past his nose without glasses or contacts (and who never skips his annual eye-doctor visit), that made more sense.

    With long gray hair and a long gray beard, Mosset easily looked the part of a sixties Euroactivist and biker outlaw—he has lived in Tucson, Arizona, since the mid-1990s. His interviewer was Marie Heilich, assistant director of White Flag Projects in Saint Louis, a slender brunette with bangs, dressed in all black and armed with an MA in curatorial studies from Bard College. Mosset’s talk—a rare speaking engagement for him, we were told—was largely a monologue. Heilich made intermittent comments and Granat, who was operating a smartphone that projected slides of the artist’s work on the wall beside the speakers, jumped in every so often.

    Heilich encouraged Mosset to revisit his early years, so he gave a brief history of BMPT, a group of four European artists (Mosset with Daniel Buren, Michel Parmentier, and Niele Toroni) that came together in 1966. “The idea was to question what gives value to painting,” Mosset said, targeting uniqueness, personal expression, and color as culprits. His conception of art, however, began changing a few years earlier, when Mosset had been floored by Jasper Johns and Robert Rauschenberg, whose work he saw at Kunsthalle Bern in 1962. “This was in,” he recalled his excitement, “This was happening.” Rauschenberg’s Monogram (1955–59), the sculpture of a shaggy taxidermied goat stuck in a car tire, “was quite a shock—is this art?” But Mosset still had classical modernism on the brain, as he twice emphasized the painted nature of Piet Mondrian’s work, declaring that reproductions of it are nothing like the real things. Though he wasn’t familiar with Russian Constructivism and Swiss Concrete art at the time, he acknowledged an affinity with them. I got the sense that Mosset is unburdened by tradition, not antagonistic toward it. Give painting autonomy, he even said at one point.

    Olivier Mosset, Sans titre, 2004, suite of four lithographs on Rives, 200 x 200 cm (artwork © Olivier Mosset; photograph by Christopher Howard)

    For Mosset, Rauschenberg taking home the Golden Lion, the top prize at the 1964 Venice Biennale, marked the end of the importance of Paris, where he had moved two years before, at age eighteen. Previously the French avant-garde consisted of the Nouveau Réalisme movement: Yves Klein, Jean Tinguely, Piero Manzoni, and others. BMPT reacted against that group’s preferred materials: found objects and rubbish. Earning notoriety after its first event, BMPT was invited to participate in the Salon de la Jeune Peinture, where the artists painted their works—Buren’s stripe, Mosset’s circle, Parmentier’s fold, and Toroni’s brush mark—during the opening, not in advance. (They subsequently withdrew from the exhibition the next day.) At that and other events they projected slides, played audiotapes announcing “art is the enemy of freedom” and “art is the enemy of presence,” among other statements, and handed out their propaganda pamphlets. “Ideas are the art, not the paintings,” Mosset declared. Audiences soon came to recognize each member’s signature style, so the four agreed to do each other’s work.1 Mosset began painting stripes and later introduced color: gray stripes on white, then green on white, then white on color, and so on. After that he made monochromes (more specifically, they are single-hued paintings).

    Mosset continued his monologue, which by this point felt like someone reading a Wikipedia article—it was all factual recollection in a dry tone. Even in Paris, he said, people were talking about New York, so he traveled there in 1967, where he met Andy Warhol. After moving to the city ten years later, he sought out the painter Marcia Hafif after she wrote an essay on contemporary painting called “Beginning Again,” published in Artforum in 1978. With her and Joseph Marioni, he formed the New York Radical Painting group, which had exhibitions at Sidney Janis Gallery in New York in 1983 (New Abstraction) and at Williams College in Massachusetts in 1984 (Radical Painting). Mosset also got hip to a newer scene of artists, including Peter Halley, Philip Taaffe, and Jeff Koons. In the 1990s, Mosset worked with John Armleder, Sylvie Fleury, Steven Parrino, and Cady Noland, but the artist barely mentioned these collaborations during tonight’s talk.

    BMPT, Manifestation 1, January 3, 1967, 18th Salon de la Jeune Peinture, Musée d’art moderne de la Ville de Paris. From right to left: Michel Parmentier, Daniel Buren, Olivier Mosset, Niele Toroni (photograph ©Bernard Boyer)

    Mosset affably stated that he has no strategy, does what he wants, and cannot control trends. “I’m basically interested in abstract painting,” he said, and somehow people are attracted to what he does. Heilich questioned him about his social and flexible practice, in which he diminishes his own authorship (evident, for example, in his work with BMPT), but Mosset construed the question differently. “The art practice is very selfish,” he responded, and exhibitions involve a community. “It’s personal when you do it; it’s social when you show it.” Mosset believes the gallery gives you the distance to see your work differently.

    During the Q&A, an audience member inquired about the meditative nature of his circle paintings that, she conjectured, might signify emptiness or completeness. Mosset deflected this impression and said he was thinking of the shapes found in works by Johns and Kenneth Noland, which have formalist, not symbolic, meanings. (He also recognized that he did invent the circle.) The questioner asked him if the circles got better and better as he made more of them. Yes, he replied with a smile, but they were still the same.

    Heilich asked, “Do you see any contemporary approaches that stand out to you, for better or worse?” He didn’t identify any artists or styles but instead considered the differences between then and now. “At the time in Paris, we could react against what was happening, whereas today, I don’t know exactly what you can react against. It’s a different era.” And who else to blame but the internet. A younger audience member argued that “artists will always respond to each other, and to each other’s work, but that kind of clear dialogue [from the sixties], I don’t think it’s actually possible now.” Today everyone has a voice and a platform, she continued, but with equity that voice is minimized. Mosset agreed—there are now more artists and more information. I feel sorry for them, overwhelmed by online communications, and am sure artists from forty to fifty years ago probably had the same anxieties about their own ballooning art world. The audience member was relieved that artists are becoming activists again. Culture is important, Mosset chimed in, especially after the recent terrorist attack in Paris.

    The audience at Parapet/Real Humans (photograph by Christopher Howard)

    Earlier Heilich had observed that Mosset’s practice—producing circles, stripes, and singular colors—united painting and the readymade in the same object. This idea made sense at the moment but unraveled the more I thought about it. His practice is actually artisanal and small batch, not mass production, and analogous to someone like Gilbert Stuart, whose cranked out 130 versions of the Athenaeum Portrait of George Washington in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. “A second painting might be a repetition,” Mosset said in a recent interview, “but it can never be a replica.”2 You can’t help but admire the audacity of painting the same type of picture for years, if not decades, while at the same time pity the paucity of ideas.

    Trying to vary the topics, Granat asked about Mosset’s interest in motorcycles, which he collects, rides, and occasionally exhibits with his paintings. While such lines of inquiry did not lead to interesting discussion, the effort was appreciated. And while I enjoyed hearing from an artist whom I have not previously studied, I was disappointed with the light moderation—Mosset did not get into much detail about the meaning of his work and with art itself. It seemed as if Heilich was too timid (or just too polite) to cross-examine this art-historical figure about any radical ideas he has or might have had, or to find out what makes him produce what appears to be redundant or complacent work.

    In Terms Of count: 1.

    1 Olivier Mosset made circle paintings from 1966 to 1974. Daniel Buren obviously never stopped with the stripes.

    2 Sara Stephenson, “Collaborative Reduction: Q+A with Olivier Mosset,” Art in America, February 10, 2011.

  • The Air That I Breathe

    This essay is the fourth of four that reviews “The Koons Effect,” a recent symposium at the Whitney Museum of American Art and the Institute of Fine Arts, New York University. Read the first, second, and third texts.

    Jeff Koons in the 1980s: Pop Culture Turns Up Late
    The Koons Effect Part 2
    Friday, September 12, 2014
    Institute of Fine Arts, New York University, New York

    Jeff Koons, one of four Art Magazine Ads, 1988–89, offset lithograph on Simpson Ragcote paper, 38 x 29¼ in. (artwork © Jeff Koons)

    Concluding the two-day symposium on the work of Jeff Koons was a keynote address by the art historian Thomas Crow, Rosalie Solow Professor of Modern Art at the Institute of Fine Arts at New York University. By choosing a single decade—Crow’s talk was titled “Jeff Koons in the 1980s: Pop Culture Turns Up Late”—the scholar conveniently avoided discussing the artist’s work since the early 1990s, typically considered the divisive break between those who respect and loathe the artist, in particular when Koons exhibited his Made in Heaven series (1989–91). Indeed, in a review of the Whitney Museum of American Art’s exhibition Jeff Koons: A Retrospective, one critic wrote, “Watching Koons between 1985 and 1992 was like being on a roller coaster, beholding the readymade crossed with greed, money, creepy beauty, and the ugliness of our culture.”1 Even the exhibition’s curator, Scott Rothkopf, skirted the later work in his catalogue essay “No Limits,” which analyzes Koons’s work up to Made in Heaven before defending the artist against the art market for the last half.2

    Crow’s delivery was slow, calm, assured, and never overbearing; his modest confidence was almost fatherly. He began his talk by discussing three artworks typically understood as “distant from Koons” but with “corresponding and congruent” ideas. Hans Haacke’s Condensation Cube (1963–65), a sculpture comprising water inside a Plexiglas cube that responds to an exhibition’s environment, becoming “a living organism that reacts in a flexible manner to its surroundings.” Condensation Cube, Crow noted, can exist in the three chemical phases of matter—solid, liquid, and gas—depending on its physical conditions. Crow returned to the notion of phases, and to elements such as air and water, and also to conceptual, representational, and literal phases of imagery, several times during his talk.

    The second predecessor work was Andy Warhol and Billy Klüver’s Silver Clouds (1966), consisting of helium- and oxygen-filled balloons made from Mylar film, “a still very novel DuPont product,” Crow said, that was used by NASA for the first communication satellite, Echo 1, launched in 1960. The third work was unfinished: Gordon Matta-Clark’s made drawings for an airborne structure of his own; he even corresponded with the American businessman Gilmore Schjeldahl, the inventor of Mylar film and the creator of Echo 1, circa 1977, during his research. Matta-Clark’s project was concurrent with Koons’s earliest works, The Inflatables (1978–79). “These two projects,” Crow said, “while coincidental in time, manifest vastly different scales of endeavor and intended effects on their audiences.” Unlike Matta-Clark, Koons avoided engineering problems by purchasing his materials—mirrored squares and plastic toys—off the shelf.

    Thomas Crow speaks right on time (photograph by Christopher Howard)

    Moving to Koons’s series The New (ca. 1980–83), for which Koons entombed out-of-the-box vacuum cleaners in upright Plexiglas coffins, Crow asked, “Why choose vacuums in the first place?” While many would offer “commodity fetishism” as an answer, he argued that these machines signify “tiresome, disagreeable, and never-ending work.” With a design basically unchanged since World War II, Crow said, vacuum cleaners are simply not seductive. When the machine’s power is switched on and off, its bag inflates and deflates, just like a pair of lungs. “The mental enterprise of reconciling the fantasy of immortality—being forever new—with the fragility of actual life is not something that Jeff Koons invented,” he explained. “To the massive contrary, it comes close to a core definition of the whole symbolic dimension of human culture.” For Crow, Koons’s work is about mobility and stasis and the contradiction between the mortality of humanity and the idea of perfection that people over the centuries have attributed to gods and demigods. “Needing a tool,” Crow remarked, “doesn’t make you a commodity fetishist.”

    Crow argued that Koons’s populist touch surfaced in the three distinct bodies of work in the Equilibrium series (1985), which included the cast bronzes of the inflatable lifeboat and snorkel, the floating basketballs in glass tanks, and the appropriated Nike posters. The bronze works are hollow—the air is trapped inside. The poster of Darrell Griffith (a.k.a. Dr. Dunkenstein) featured dry ice (a carbon dioxide that skips the liquid phase) rising from bisected basketballs, and the poster of Moses Malone boasted a dry seabed. Crow noted the racial tension inherent/embedded in professional basketball, in which white fans deify the unfathomably natural talent of black players. These revelations arrived relatively late in the artist’s career, the scholar said, but he seized them. The posters in particular, Crow stated, “must have confirmed the artist even more deeply in his sense of the rightness of his sculptural intuitions.”

    Thomas Hoepker, 1989. Jeff Koons with collection of his sculptures in New York, 1989, archival pigment print, 18 x 24 in. (photograph © Thomas Hoepker)

    Crow briefly discussed works from the Luxury and Degradation series (1986), which showcased “anonymous drinking artifacts” used in “suburban Bacchic rites,” and from Banality (1988), for which vernacular and religious images were enlarged to ridiculous proportions using the means of Old World craft. Entering the 1990s, the critical tide, which had been on Koons’s side until then, turned against him. It was acceptable, art historically speaking, for Koons to employ bronze casting and fabricate Minimalesque cases Koons used for The New and Equilibrium. But, it seems, the pornography of Made in Heaven was rejected. In 1994, Koons turned to air and matter again in the Celebration series (1994–2014), whose works featured thin, liquid membranes such as balloons. Unlike a heat-sealed plastic rabbit, a balloon is expansive, and its surface becomes thinner when blown with more air

    From the audience, the artist Josiah McElheny asked Crow how today’s Koons squares against 1980s Koons. During a Flash Art panel in 1986, Crow replied, Koons was a twentysomething artist who wanted to be taken seriously at the time.3 Is that just as much an act, McElheny wanted to know, as the self-help affirmation guy that Koons has become? During the symposium, McElheny noted, panelists perceived the fun in Koons’s act as a portal into dark, uncomfortable places—and, like many other thinkers, one should not take Koons’s words at face value. “He’s speaking through his art in a way that’s quite transparent,” argued Crow, “and that goes against the grain of the things he generally says.” Topics such as the quest, danger, and allegory, as well as supernatural personification, were historically the domain of fine art, Crow said, but have since been suppressed in modern times. Now we find these ideas in astrology columns and young-adult fiction. Echoing the artist Carol Bove’s position from last night’s panel, Crow wondered aloud, “Where myth has gone to live now that we don’t feel we believe in this anymore?”

    Buster Keaton on Palm Sunday (photograph by Christopher Howard)

    Another audience member asked, “Where is Mike Kelley in this?” After a moment of flabbergast at the momentous nature of the question, Crow responded, “Kelley is honest. He’s always honest.” Kelley and his admirers, the scholar continued, share an intellectual ambition and an educational influence, as well as a desire for mythic, emotional expressions but not in a high-minded way. According to Crow, Kelley “had to debase to get to affirmation.” The artist Stephen Prina recalled that Kelley worried about the psychoanalytical aspect of stuffed animals: because people understood these objects to reference the artist’s own past, Kelley became scientific and conceptual about their display, putting them on tables like specimens. Prina concluded the digression: “I’ve only become worried about infantilism as an adult.”

    In Terms Of count: 7.

    1 Jerry Saltz, “Taking in Jeff Koons, Creator and Destroyer of Worlds,” New York, June 25, 2014.

    2 Scott Rothkopf, “No Limits,” Jeff Koons: A Retrospective (New York: Whitney Museum of American Art, 2014), 15–35.

    3 The panel discussion was moderated by Peter Nagy and comprised Jeff Koons, Haim Steinbach, Sherrie Levine, Philip Taaffe, Peter Halley, and Ashley Bickerton. See David Robbins, ed., “From Criticism to Complicity,” Flash Art 129 (Summer 1986): 46–49.

    Read

    Elizabeth Buhe, “Blowing Up the Koons Effect,” IFA Contemporary, September 25, 2014.

    Watch