My Notes on: ‘Unmonumental the object in the 21st century’

A book produced by the New Museum in New York to mark an inaugural exhibition at its new home. The aim of exhibition and the book is to try and detect a global trend towards the ‘fragmentary and contingent’ in some of the stronger sculpture being made in the 1st decade of 21st-century.

“Making art in the 21st-century is just the same as making art in any other century, except for the money the coats everything like ash. It is accompanied by the creation of artist hierarchies where vanity and insecurity go hand-in-hand like the opposing strains of a Labradoodle.” So says Richard Flood in his introduction. Apart from his obvious comments on money and a deep sense of stratification in the art world, Flood believes that contemporary artists are clinging to nostalgia as if it were an antidote to some terrible disease. Other artists cling to technique, which has become “the varnished mausoleum for masterpieces.” He continues, “nowadays there are masterpieces everywhere, racing into the marketplace like sperm to the womb. Paintings are, of course, where the masterpieces are most frequently identified, they are also found in highly produced moving image works digitised photography, drawings and the lately rehabilitated art of collage and occasionally sculpture, particularly if there are high fabrication costs.”

Gedi Sibony

Flood is pretty damning of the art world especially the part responsible for the canonisation of so-called masterpieces. He believes in the current age that no time is wasted waiting for an art work to be awarded the connoisseurial status of masterpiece. He just believes that are crowned when some art-world guru pronounces a work so and that’s that. In his words “the appellation has replaced the reality.”

He believes the masterpiece syndrome is neither a reaction to the instability of our times but just the marketplace. He believes the time is right for the anti-masterpiece–things that are cobbled together, or pushed and prodded into a state of suspended animation–stubbly, brutish forms that “know something of the world in which they may are made.”

He believes that is anti-masterpiece can be identified in the work’s materials–those materials are ones redeemed from the rubbish heap and are Franciscan in their simplicity. Extravagant gestures have given way to a handshake or a hug (maybe even a shrug). Sculpture, he believes, is one of the final frontiers for the artist who truly wants to tempt fate. Outside of the white box, today’s most innovative, essential sculpture is testing the limits. One of its strongest characteristics is the inherent ability to camouflage itself from any formal hierarchy. Traditional sculptural materials that were long approved by the market are not the favoured materials of the contemporary sculptor.   There isn’t enough time or distance to perpetuate monuments because we live in a world of half gestures but there’s no definitive stance because the sands shift incessantly over a desert of evidential truth. Sculpture is now that thing that jams its foot in the door and scurries around looking for a comfortable corner from where the new becomes inevitable. No absolutes are reliable and no hierarchies are consistent to that which seems most part of the world and its freshness, rawness and anxiety trumps the autopsies of acceptable in the negotiable. Sculpture is the medium that knows best how to live in the present and find the past.

The book features the work of a number of artists. Most notable for me and my interests are Isa Genzken – the German artist who lives and works in Berlin.. Genzken’s play with scale and montage produces assemblages which combine lost and unlikely combinations of objects which are coloured themselves and/or have colour drizzled over them.

Other artists whose work I found interesting were Aaron Curry- retro fifties feel to the pieces, and Tom Burr – interiors and flat plains like Jesse’s work and Carol Bove, which must have inspired Benedict’s work.

Gedi Sibony

 For me personally, the work of Gedi Sibony’s is most inspiring. He uses construction materials, carpet, plywood, cardboard etc. there’s more than a hint of Jessica Stockholder here – an interest of mine since year 1.

Jessica Stockholder

Further thoughts on Public & Private Spheres in fine art

I have been thinking about private and public spheres and want to raise some questions which I have been unable to discuss or indeed to answer, but to which I might like to come back to at a later date:

Global and local, Public and Private and Material and immaterial, are a selection of seeming binary opposite ways that artists and their works can be examined, categorised and analysed. The first two sets of these apparent opposing opposites are ways of looking at the contexts and issues and the ways that personal biographies and situation, may influence an artist’s work. The pairing of material and immaterial looks at the possible symbolism that may manifest itself in an artist’s output.

I would like to consider whether these pairings or dichotomies are both at the same time truisms or whether they are false dichotomies which seek to explain and render observable some ultimate truth about an artist.  

It seems to me, that this is part of a wider movement since the enlightenment, which seeks to categorise and label the world. I want to question the value of seeking to look at artists and their work in terms of categories or labels. These labels in the liberal tradition, in many ways look at a choice of labels which as Foucault described as ‘a will to power’, which seek through the confessional, to uncover some hidden or ultimate truth. The one category that is overlooked now is the one which looks at the artist and their relation to ‘the means of production’. The question might be pertinent here as to why it is necessary to apply these or any other labels. To consider what is going on with these categories could be a perceived need to describe and define various taxonomies. Whilst this process is understandable, I wonder whether or not this process obfuscates notions of the ‘really real’ or whether this idea of ‘the real’ is itself an attempt to mystify.

I have a wider question which is whether the work of Jessica Stockholder, Balka and Hicks can be fitted into one or other, some or all of these three binary groupings. Whilst I believe that some of their work appears to conform to one or other category, it provides only a partial and incomplete understanding of the artist’s work. It may also be another way of marking out the discourses of those who are truly initiated into the realm of art as opposed to those who are not. I say this because there appears to be a reaction to an appreciation of art which some might argue is becoming too democratic. This has happened through the rise in popularity of the gallery visit which has meant that the art cognoscente have had to find new ways of discussing and appreciating art – what one might call a moving of the artistic goal posts so as to preserve a mystique.