>Who was that famous no-talent painter who hung his paintings upside
>down? I saw one of his shows at the Hirschorn. Utter and complete garbage.
Baselitz.
>I thought art sucked more in the 80s when the mainstream art
>world was dominated by assclowns like Stella, Schnabel, and other idiots
>whose names I fortunately can't recall.
Don't you love the way Schnabel flattered himself with the way Gary Oldman played him in Basquiat?
I've been reading Video Green: Los Angeles Art and the Triumph of Nothingness. It's a good look into the 90's art world and you get the bonus of some wonderful explications of S/m.
http://www.findarticles.com/p/articles/mi_m2479/is_5_32/ai_n13479558/print
Video Green: Los Angeles Art and the Triumph of Nothingness Emily Kuenstler
VIDEO GREEN: LOS ANGELES ART AND THE TRIUMPH OF NOTHINGNESS
BY CHRIS KRAUS NEW YORK: SEMIOTEXT(E), 2004. 160 PP./$14.95 (SB)
S/m radically preempts romantic love because it is a practice of it. To see this fact as cold or cynical is as naive as thinking writing ought to be 'original' or that speaking in the first person necessarily connotes any kind of truth, sincerity.
From "Emotional Technologies," in Video Green by Chris Kraus
Video Green: Los Angeles Art and the Triumph of Nothingness is comprised of 23 ficto-critical essays--a form for which author Chris Kraus has become well known--dedicated to ideas and art. While the art world is the topic of many of the essays, it is depicted as an institution where ideas and art may or may not actually thrive. While much of the book is a morphology of cultural organisms, she allows her subjects to inspire personal reveries which are offered up with tight detail, with specific names and places. Nostalgia vies with a taste for an even colder mediated present. Kraus' use of metaphor is startling and satisfying: it folds in, it takes flight. While the book respects the human need for truth, her honest descriptions (erudite and radically subjective) provoke howls of laughter and, occasionally, true sadness.
Kraus tests her perceptions of institutions, people, art and cities against the larger matrix of income, politics, race and history. The outcome is an encyclopedically random fable, set in foreign train stations, marshlands, museums and cluttered apartments, with a dozen or so main characters supported by their many acquaintances.
The first piece, "Art Collection," begins with a story about her father's rare book collecting. Her discussion of old type-faces expands to include the germ of meaning that they carry, and what this implies about books as artifacts. She writes:
Collecting, in its most primitive form, implies a deep belief in the primacy of the object, as if the object itself was a wild thing.... Clearly this kind of primitive collecting is totally irrelevant to the object's pre-emptive emptiness and the infinite exchangeability of meaning in the contemporary art world.
Furthermore, she responds to the art world of Dave Hickey, Jeremy Gilbert-Rolfe, and David Pagel and their (circa mid-1990s) backlash against critical studies' influence on the visual arts: "Together, the three function as a Homeland Security force to keep aestheticism, as they have come to define it, safe and clean." One of Kraus' favorite topics is American MFA programs, without which: "... who would know which cibachrome photos of urban signage, which videotapes of socks tossing around in a dryer, which neominimalist monochrome paintings are negligible and which are destined to be art?"
Like Hickey, Gilbert-Rolfe and Pagel, Kraus is also employed by MFA programs, thus her critique from within the university shows some measure of bravery, and allows us to make what we will of her "complicity." Perhaps it is self-criticality itself that keeps real creativity fertile. One of her keenest observations appears in "Art Collection" and concerns the sociological shift wherein an artist's emergence was professionalized "congruent with specialization in other post-capitalist industries":
There's very little margin in the contemporary art world for fucking up with accidents or unforeseen surprises.... It is best, of course, for the artist to be heterosexual and better to be monogamously settled in a couple. This guards against messy leaks of subjectivity which might compromise the work and throw it back into the realm of the "abject," which, we all supposedly agree, was a 1980s excess that has long since been discredited.
"Pay Attention" describes vigilance and truth in another way, set as it is alternately in the stillness of a Zen-style meditation retreat in a beautiful marshland that Kraus experienced in Sagaponack, New York in 1999, and at UCLA's MFA program. As is Kraus' wont, the retreat story folds into that of an art school student's (Jennifer Schlosberg) trials at a well-known art school. It is a fantastic drama in which name-brand, once-radical artists sound like royal asses, as they chastise the next generation for their lack of art school etiquette like playground bullies. Schlosberg's journal, like Zen mindfulness practice, maintains Truth in this unapologetically dishonest environment. The reign of "cool" gets thawed and the tale of creepy "faux paternalistic concern" reads like a suspense story.
"Posthumous Lives" interweaves the legacies of several performance artists who made New York's Lower East Side their home, particularly in its 1980s heyday--with special attention paid to performance artist Penny Arcade, and her practice of maintaining the elaborate archive of "camp artiste and theorist" Jack Smith. Written in a particularly "short story" voice, in which Penny's personality is kept mysterious, Kraus narrates afternoons with Penny, as she is led to other artist archives Penny maintains, each oeuvre safely stored behind improbable doorways; and finally, Kraus supplies the reader with an art historical context in which to fully appreciate the work. "Pussy Orphanage" (so titled because the sexually explicit works are "abandoned") provides examples of work by Hannah Wilke, Ana Medieta, Robert Mapplethorpe and Lisette Model that were rediscovered a generation or longer after each artist died.
[ILLUSTRATION OMITTED]
Kraus also talks at length about less well-known artists, as in "Deep Chaos" where she discusses two young Los Angeles artists who were her students: Christiana Glidden, in the context of her 1999 show at China Art Objects, and Julie Becker, in the context of her piece "Residents and Researchers (1993-1996)." (She also addresses Becker in an essay in the form of a letter called "Whole.") "Emotional Technologies" includes a chronicle of her arrival in LA in the late 1990s, with a bit about the New York she left behind--a comparison of geographic/demographic vistas of cities. All in all, "Emotional Technologies" is the most ennui-saturated, journalistic piece in the book. Kraus offers the reader the metaphor of her newly disembodied self, required to jet efficiently around LA: "No references, associations, promises and so your own reality expands to fill the day...." as opposed to the salient grit of New York, where she describes finding envy on the streets, face-to-face with other peoples' money, children, etc. Her description appears to happen naturally and effortlessly, "since it is more advisable to be everywhere than somewhere ..." and places us intimately inside this interloper's head.
Kraus' nerve is breathtaking, as she lacerates, observes or cajoles out of hiding reactionary art school faculty and self-congratulatory administrators. Most of the "characters" in Video Green belong to a category of America's privileged elite. Maybe that's you and I, with our neuroses and overdetermined ambitions. Then there are the underdog heroes who are taken out of anonymity in stories about border crossings and the immigrant American dream. Seeing my culture through her eyes relieved me of so many expectations: instead, I allowed myself to be shocked at the mall, laughing in a garden, depressed amid plenty, uninspired in art school.
EMILY KUENSTLER was raised in New York City and received an MFA from the San Francisco Art Institute in 2004.