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YOKO ONO’S EARTH PEACE | MAPPING | BERT BENALLY AND AI WEIWEI IN THE DESERT
ART VS. OIL | MARY JANE JACOB ON CURATION | LEXINGTON TATTOOS ITSELF
Public Art Review
Public Art Review
Issue 51 • Fall/Winter 2014 • publicartreview.org
Barbara Grygutis
Issue 51 • JR’s Big Vision • Art vs. Oil • Artists & Fabricators • Nantes • Mapping
South Park Bridge Entry Monuments and Pedestrian Railing
Seattle, Washington
Repurposed steel rocker arms from the historic 1930 drawbridge flank the approach.
3200 ft. of artist-designed railing is inset with original gears and other salvaged components.
Commissioned by 4Culture, King County Public Art Collection
Fabrication: Jesse Engineering, Tacoma, WA Photo:Spike Mafford
51
T:
M:
520.882.5572
520.907.9443
[email protected]
barbaragrygutis.com
$16.00 USD
BIG VISION
JR talks about boundaries, limits, seeing
people, and being bold
BOOKS
BOOKS & MEDIA
Publications and reviews
Fiery Passion
Why do 70,000 people trek into the desert
for Burning Man? It’s the art.
BY SHAUNA DEE
BURNING MAN: ART ON FIRE
BOOKS
Much of the focus of Burning
Man coverage in the media of
late has been the influx of highend trailers with extravagant
catered meals for the Silicon
Valley elite. But the art at Burning Man, still the focal point of the
weeklong annual festival, deserves documentation in a hardcover
art book filled with large, beautiful photos and compelling stories.
Burning Man: Art on Fire, by Jennifer Raiser, is just that book.
Covering more than 200 works of art created by Burners in one
of the most inhospitable of locations in the United States, the book
provides an experience second only to being there. Through interviews, stories, and photography, readers will witness the effort it
takes to create work in this singular setting and gain a greater understanding of artists’ motivations.
In a sense, the art at Burning Man is the very essence of the festival, where individual works are pieces of the whole. The context of
each piece is a pop-up city in the middle of Black Rock Desert in
Nevada, a city with a gift economy and utopian ideals, which fosters
collaboration and true participatory art. There is no clear distinction
between audience and artwork here. In September 2013, the year
Raiser wrote about in her book, 68,000 people attended the festival,
each one a participant in the grand creation, and ultimate destruction, of the Burning Man. Whether you are one of the 68,000 or not,
you will appreciate the illuminating perspectives presented in Burning Man: Art on Fire.
Also included in the book is an artist’s perspective from Leo Villareal, an introduction from Burning Man founder Larry Harvey, and a
forward by Will Chase.
SHAUNA DEE is the information and communications coordinator at
Forecast Public Art.
TOP: Duane Flatmo’s El Pulpo Mecanico (2011) was a crowd favorite. Ingeniously
fashioned from reclaimed scrap metal and salvaged items, this charming cephalopod
spewed 200 gallons of propane flame—on a good night—from its eight articulated
trashcan tentacles. MIDDLE: The UK–based architectural design collective
Warmbaby created The Wet Dream (2011) to bring a whimsical representation
of cooling English rain to heat-soaked Black Rock City. The structure housed
a canopy of umbrellas to protect from the heat of the sun during the day and a
24-hour background audio of thunder and lightning, illuminated at night with LED
rope lights. BOTTOM: Over 40 feet tall and made from powder-coated steel and
steel cable, Kate Raudenbush’s vision for Star Seed (2012) came almost fully
formed. “I imagined it falling from the sky and taking root, or as little rockets, filled
with Burners.”
All photos by Scott London.
PUBLIC ART REVIEW | VOL. 26 | NO. 1 | ISSUE 51 | PUBLICARTREVIEW.ORG
86
Jennifer Raiser
Photography by Sidney Erthal
and Scott London
Introduction by Larry Harvey
New York: Race Point Publishing,
September 2014
BOOKS
That ’70s Art
A glimpse into the world of Los Angeles art
and artists during a turbulent decade
BY CATHY MADISON
CREATING THE FUTURE:
Art and Los Angeles in the 1970s
TOP: At Burning Man, the suits Dadara’s “bankers” wore for the installation
Transformoney Tree (2012) gradually shifted from dark blue pinstripe into
painter’s overalls. BOTTOM: The Flaming Lotus Girls’ Serpent Mother (2006)
was a 168-foot-long sculpture of a skeletal dragon-like serpent coiled around
her steel egg, creating a protective circle inside which 100 people could gather.
Most of Serpent Mother’s 50 vertebrae spouted six-foot-high propane-fueled
jets of flame that could be activated in various patterns by participants at four
separate locations, or activated at once by the artists using the “Wow” button.
CATHY MADISON is a writer who lives in Minneapolis and Los Angeles.
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BOOKS
Seldom does a book about
art so fully capture not only
the ways in which history,
culture, geography, and personality intersect to create art,
but also insight into how art
both defines and influences
our society. In this well-researched, deftly told story of
a single decade in a singular
city, Michael Fallon reflects on
far more than what happened
in Los Angeles in the 1970s.
He sets the stage—the ebullient ’60s, when the sunny promise of
the California Dream colored an era of modernism, pop art, and
abstract expressionism—then escorts us through the turbulence of
the next decade, scarred by events such as the Manson murders, the
Kent State shootings, and Watergate, but enhanced by revolutionary
art that presages the future.
Los Angeles, long considered a remote art outpost by New York
insiders, “had a penchant for merging and connecting diverse
culture influences” and became “home to advancing pockets of
cultural activity, many of which were connected to the churning
local streets and its indigenous street-based cultures,” Fallon writes.
Highway underpasses and bridge pylons inspired Chicano artists to
embrace their muralist forebears. Women united in the feminist art
movement. Happenings and performance art made news. Desolate
industrial stretches became art parks; graffiti, surfboards, and hot
rods became art.
Fallon depicts the scene by profiling its artists, most of whom
came from somewhere else. We see how their art sprang not only
from their diverse backgrounds, but also from the unique, sprawling amalgam of L.A. itself. Time and place can’t be divorced from
their art; neither can their art be overlooked as a significant influence on both.
PUBLIC ART REVIEW | FALL / WINTER 2014 | PUBLICARTREVIEW.ORG
Michael Fallon
Berkeley, CA: Counterpoint,
September 2014
BOOKS
Painting the Town
A Brazilian film explores street-art
conflicts in São Paolo
GREY CITY
(CIDADE CINZA)
Sala12 Filmes
Directed by Marcelo Mesquita and Guilherme Valiengo
Photos © Marcelo Mesquita and Guilherme Valiengo.
PUBLIC ART REVIEW | VOL. 26 | NO. 1 | ISSUE 51 | PUBLICARTREVIEW.ORG
In São Paulo, Brazil, large-scale murals have a formidable presence around the city, where
thousands of artists display their artistic talent in public spaces. Grey City gives viewers
a close-up look at one influential street-art crew (including OSGEMEOS, Nunca, Nina, Ise,
Finok, and Zefix) as they worked in 2007 to re-create a large work that had been painted
over by the city. The Clean City Law was in effect, with a small team deployed to determine which graffiti works were aesthetically pleasing and to paint over the rest with grey.
The film succeeds in addressing the tension that exists in cities with active street-art scenes
about who determines what is art, and what should be erased, while exhibiting the process
of immensely talented artists following their passion of creating art for their community.
—Shauna Dee
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BOOKS
TOP LEFT: DVD cover of Grey City. BOTTOM LEFT: Scene from the movie. ABOVE: Scene from the movie.
PUBLIC ART
thrives in
KANSAS CITY,
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EGAWA + ZBRYK,
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BOOKS
Crossing Boundaries
Though the artist is forbidden to leave China, Ai Weiwei’s
works transcend international (and artistic) lines
BY JESSICA FIALA
AI WEIWEI, SPATIAL MATTERS:
Art, Architecture, and Activism
Ai Weiwei and Anthony Pins, eds.
Photos © Ai Weiwei Studio.
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BOOKS
Ai Weiwei, Spatial Matters:
Art,
Architecture,
and
Activism approaches the work
of contemporary artist Ai
Weiwei through broadening
levels of scale. The essays
begin by investigating single
gallery installations, then
expand outward to explore
Ai’s architectural projects,
video works that document
and map Beijing, and the global reach of his Internet-based activism.
As the scope of projects grows, the collection becomes increasingly
intimate, resting finally in the online comingling of personal
and public.
Ai has become known internationally for ambitious projects
and defiant gestures—installing 100 million handcrafted porcelain
sunflower seeds at the Tate Modern, dipping Neolithic vases in
vibrant industrial paint, and photographing himself flipping the
bird at monuments around the world. He has designed dozens of
architecture projects and consulted on the “Bird’s Nest” stadium
for the Beijing Olympic Games. Since 2006, Ai has cultivated a
considerable online following, drawing the attention of the Chinese
government, who shut down his blog in 2009 and imprisoned him
for 81 days in 2011. Although restricted from leaving the country,
his reach continues to expand online and through exhibitions
organized remotely. His current exhibition, for example, which is
not included in the book, is @Large: Ai Weiwei on Alcatraz, which
runs through April 2015.
This collection is not a standard chronology or overview,
but rather collages, with interviews, photographs, essays, and
republished blog entries—a portrait of the artist, his work, and his
ongoing struggles with surveillance and censorship. Akin to a spatial
encounter, the essays lean in, back up, retrace steps, and forge new
paths, with the range of Ai’s work emerging and unfolding en route.
The primary focus is material and spatial, emphasizing, for instance,
Ai’s incorporation of handcrafted materials and techniques into
his projects. But the human element arises as well, especially the
personal component of Ai’s activism which emerges through actions
such has his compiling of the names of school children who died in
the 2008 Sichuan earthquake, or his call for his Twitter followers to
announce their real names. Time also intersects the spatial. Antique
materials are reworked into new installations while Ai’s recently
built Shanghai studio is torn down by the Chinese government.
PUBLIC ART REVIEW | FALL / WINTER 2014 | PUBLICARTREVIEW.ORG
Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2014
TOP: Ai Weiwei’s Red No. 1 Art Galleries (2008).
BOTTOM: Ai Weiwei’s Study of Perspective—Tiananmen Square (1995).
The story told is one of emergence in public spheres from
architecture to online communities, and simultaneous government
attempts to silence and restrict the amorphous strategies of a
contemporary artist. Viewed through a public art lens, the collection
offers a range of vignettes featuring distinct modes of working in the
public realm, while also getting at the impetus for such work—“the
search to satisfy the demands of human survival and…the desire to
transform people’s conditions of existence.”
JESSICA FIALA is a company member of Ragamala Dance and a
program and project associate at Forecast Public Art.
BOOKS
PEOPLE
PUBLIC ART REVIEW | VOL. 26 | NO. 1 | ISSUE 51 | PUBLICARTREVIEW.ORG
90
ARCHITECTURE
ELMGREEN & DRAGSET:
Biography
ROCK THE SHACK: The Architecture
of Cabins, Cocoons and Hide-Outs
Edited by Studio Elmgreen & Dragset
Berlin: Hatje Cantz, 2014
Sven Ehmann, Robert Klanten,
and Sofia Borges, eds.
Berlin: Gestalten, 2014
An artistic duo for nearly 20 years, Michael
Elmgreen and Ingar Dragset invite
audiences into their history and private
life with this 600-page visual diary. Each
full-page photograph tells the artists’
collaborative story since 1995. Previously
unpublished pictures share behind-thescenes views of artworks, as well as
portraits of Danish-Norwegian artists
and colleagues.
PROJECTS
Embracing the appeal of peace through minimalism, Rock the Shack offers refuge for the
individual burdened by too much space. Covering structures built in as few as 12 days—some
handmade, some inspired by sixteenth-century
Japanese teahouses, others built with renewable
and local materials, still more featuring surrealist
influences, and most built with careful attention to
landscape, light, and sky—this collection soothes
with clean design and large color photographs.
TSCHUMI PARC DE LA VILLETTE
NICK CAVE: Epitome
Andrew Bolton, Elvira Dyangani Ose,
and Nato Thompson
New York: Prestel, 2014
BOOKS
Nick Cave: Epitome compiles the artist’s
famous Soundsuits with his sculptures
and related performances. From the first
suit—an array of twigs forming body armor
in response to racial unrest—to the most
recent, his works are captured in arresting
photographs, essays, and quotes. Cave’s
evolution along the intersection of public
and private, constraints and escape, is
described in his own words: “I’m working
toward what I’m leaving behind.”
THOMAS HIRSCHHORN:
Deleuze Monument
Anna Dezeuze
London: Afterall, 2014
Anna Dezeuze’s book examines Thomas
Hirschhorn’s Deleuze Monument (2000),
a sculpture, altar, and library dedicated to
philosopher Gilles Deleuze. Designed as
an artwork that never closes to visitors, the
controversial monument was vandalized
and dismantled early. The author examines
the project’s timeline and reveals its vulnerabilities, along with larger, related artistic
theory and practices.
Bernard Tschumi, with texts by Jacques Derrida
and Anthony Vidler
London: Artifice books on architecture, 2014
Bernard Tschumi’s first project, The Parc de la
Villette in Paris (1982–1998)—an “urban park for
the twenty-first century”—is presented with nearly
4,000 archival drawings, as well as photographs,
models, and other project documentation. These,
along with essays by Jacques Derrida, Anthony Vidler, and Tschumi, provide the reader of
Tschumi Parc de la Villette with a solid, broad
understanding of the project throughout its developmental stages.
VACANCY STUDIES: Experiments and
Strategic Interventions in Architecture
Ronald Rietveld and Erik Rietveld, eds.
Rotterdam: nai010 publishers, 2014
Churches, castles, hospitals, airports, prisons,
post offices—empty buildings are everywhere.
Vacancy Studies views these lonely sites and
structures from an optimistic angle: as rich
resources with potential for innovation and temporary reuse. The Rietveld Architecture-Art-Affordances (RAAAF) studio mines the intersection
of architecture, art, and science to articulate
possibilities within the international phenomenon
of empty spaces.
WILLI DORNER:
Bodies in Urban Spaces
Willi Dorner
Germany: Hatje Cantze, 2014
Dorner’s colorful, locally cast dancers
twist, move, pose, and repose around
courses through dozens of cities worldwide. Strong photographs by Lisa Rastl,
an appendix of participant names, maps,
and “codes” of positions (flying, chimney,
chaos bench, steps to heaven, and more)
illustrate the story of these body-sculpture
interventions.
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BOOKS
ENVIRONMENTS
MISCELLANY
ART & ECOLOGY NOW
Andrew Brown
New York: Thames & Hudson, 2014
ECOLOGIES, ENVIRONMENTS, AND
ENERGY SYSTEMS IN ART OF THE
1960s AND 1970s
James Nisbet
Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2014
Exhibition Histories
EXHIBITION AS SOCIAL INTERVENTION:
‘Culture in Action’ 1993
Joshua Decter, Helmut Draxler, and other authors
London: Afterall, 2014
Begun in the early 1990s and developed with
community residents, eight projects formed
Chicago’s “Culture in Action,” a collective
challenge to the conventional understanding of
public art and disengaged plop art. From the Exhibition Histories series, which explores contemporary art that shapes the way art is perceived,
Exhibition as Social Intervention documents
and critically assesses “Culture in Action”; a
new introduction and recent interviews are complemented by archived and contemporary texts.
NETWORKS:
Documents of Contemporary Art
Lars Bang Larsen, ed.
Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2014
The latest installment in the Documents of
Contemporary Art series on contemporary
art issues, Networks aims at art and network
theory from the 1960s forward. This volume
unravels creative threads before the origins of the
Internet and reaches beyond the Net’s current
central status as dominant social connector.
91
BOOKS
More than an overview of earthworks, James
Nisbet’s book explores the connections of ecology and art in the 1960s and 1970s. Focusing
on land art, minimalism, and interconnected energies, Nisbet features a reconceptualization of
environmental art with work by artists such as
Allan Kaprow, Michael Heizer, Robert Smithson,
Robert Barry, Simone Forti, and Walter De Maria.
Joshua Decter, Helmut Draxler
and other authors
PUBLIC ART REVIEW | FALL / WINTER 2014 | PUBLICARTREVIEW.ORG
Through thoughtful prose and placement of
more than 300 powerful color illustrations, Art
& Ecology Now describes the expanding trend
of artists to explore nature and climate change.
The featured art offers a wide range of responses
that include documentation, reflection, activism,
and the use of the environment as raw material.
Nearly 100 artists and collectives are included,
all confronting current social, political, economic,
scientific, technological, and ethical issues.
Exhibition as Social Intervention
‘Culture in Action’ 1993
SCALE
BIG ART / SMALL ART
Tristan Manco
New York: Thames & Hudson, 2014.
Maintaining a sense of wonder and a wide
aesthetic, this survey reveals a meaningful
exploration of art ranging from monumental to
tiny. After an opening essay devoted to scale and
separate introductions, half the volume is dedicated to grand works, while the other focuses on
diminutive pieces. With each section organized
alphabetically by artist, clever and whimsical
pieces are presented via 288 illustrations and
extensive text.
XXL ART: When Artists Think Big
XXL Art: When Artists Think Big shares stunning visuals and texts on almost 50 artists
whose work embraces the adage “Go big or
go home.” Featured artists include well-known
names like Robert Smithson, Christo and
Jeanne-Claude, Richard Serra, and James Turrell, as well as emerging artists like Mehmet Ali
Uysal, Florentijn Hofman, Aram Bartholl, JR, and
OSGEMEOS. All tackle size and scale across
countrysides and cityscapes with spectacular,
boundary-pushing results.
Photo by Alain Fletias
Elea Baucheron, Diane Routex
New York: Prestel, 2014
V is for Veterans by Stephanie Jaffe Werner
Town Hall of Miami Lakes, Florida
mosaic and concrete 10' 7"h x 5'w
www.stephaniejaffewerner.com
BOOKS
Totally Plugged In
REVIEW BY PETER PLAGENS
Originally published in Art in America, September 2014,
pp. 71–73. Courtesy BMP Media Holdings, LLC.
YOUR EVERYDAY ART WORLD
Lane Relyea
Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2013
PUBLIC ART REVIEW | VOL. 26 | NO. 1 | ISSUE 51 | PUBLICARTREVIEW.ORG
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BOOKS
In the “everyday art world,”
artists are always on the move,
disdaining not only art objects
but any kind of artistic finality
whatsoever, making putative
works out of mere schmoozing, and turning the art world
into a string of floating cocktail
parties disguised as seminars
(and vice versa). This EAW (as
I’ll call it for short) has been
creeping up on us for the last 20 years or so. Now, according to Lane
Relyea, an associate professor of art theory and practice at Northwestern University, it’s here in its full networking glory.
Once, most artists made art objects in their individual studios
and sold them through retail shops known as galleries. More
recently, many executed commissions for created-on-site physical
works (with re-creation licenses that could still be sold by dealers). But today a large number of key figures—Rirkrit Tiravanija,
Tobias Rehberger et al.—perform cloyingly mundane public
services as, in the current argot, their artistic practice. French
curator Nicolas Bourriaud, in his 1998 book Relational Aesthetics, essentially wrote the script for a thousand—for a hundred
thousand—social exchanges rechristened as artworks. “Artists
cook and serve meals or re-create bars and lounges in galleries
and museums,” Relyea writes, “in an effort to conjure an environment without marked-off frames or stages, only diffuse conviviality and atmosphere.” The work of others, such as Jorge Pardo and
the late Martin Kippenberger, tends to envelop viewers in installations so pervasive as to be indistinguishable from “everyday”
nonart experience.
A possible first, proto-EAW salvo against the old, product
oriented, hierarchical, “fine arts” paradigm may have been inadvertently fired—Relyea cites Thierry de Duve as noting—by the
Museum of Modern Art’s 1959 show “Sixteen Americans,” which
included several of Frank Stella’s Black Paintings along with work
by Jasper Johns, Robert Rauschenberg and others. That exhibition
gave artists the go-ahead to start thinking in terms of a show as a
kind of meta-artwork. The next dominoes to tilt, if not fall—slowly,
over a couple of decades—were such “totalizing stereotypes” as
Finish Fetish and Light and Space in Los Angeles. Identifiable
movements of this sort gave way, as the semi-closed system of the
art world frayed into open, porous networks of itinerant artists
cobbling together ad hoc events as works of art. And while the
nearly universal white cube (artists’ studios, commercial galleries
and modern museum rooms) wasn’t entirely destroyed, big cracks
started to run through it. For example, Relyea cites a 1997 exhibition by Sharon Lockhart, Laura Owens and Frances Stark as a kind
of mutual help arrangement that boosted the international mobility
of all three.
With the advent of global networks, a different cultural role—
that of the glamorous slacker, akin to conventional showbiz celebrities slumming on reality TV—began to appeal to some artists. At
the behest of organizers Maurizio Cattelan and Jens Hoffmann, for
instance, Elizabeth Peyton, Olafur Eliasson, Pipilotti Rist and other
well-known artists famously sent up the convention of the big international invitational show by turning the tongue-in-cheek 6th Caribbean Biennial (1999) into a group vacation on St. Kitts. Critic, curator and now gallerist Carl Freedman (one of Relyea’s many quotees)
wrote of a similar but more straight-faced event called “Traffic”:
Pleasure and enjoyment were not to be found in the exhibition
itself but in the week-long gathering of the 30 artists involved.
Under the auspices of an “exchange of ideas,” the artists talked,
drank, dined and danced together whilst creating, preparing and
installing their different works. . . . The gathering was central to
[Bourriaud’s] theme, awkwardly formulated as “the interhuman
space of relationality.”
Such intellectual and touristic indulgence is part and parcel of
the EAW, often (wishfully) conceived as liberation from—even
opposition to—old-fashioned cultural institutions and hierarchies.
Travel and talk, Relyea says, are replacing rooted, isolated artmaking,
as artists use the pub and the street (in both their literal and figurative senses) to construct “platforms” from which they “offer up
their projects or shows as participatory architecture for other artists
to operate within.” Whatever solitary creative musing artists still
require can be got in transit: “Travel provides sanctuary, a prolonged
interval to collect one’s thoughts, summarize, piece together an overview,” Relyea says. (To tweak the great photography curator John
Szarkowski’s remark about lectures, this would have been a better
work of art had it been a longer flight.)
Traveling in the EAW is even more useful for networking. An
EAW participant must have not only someplace to go, but someone
to see when he or she gets there—preferably someone who can help
with career advancement by connecting the participant with other
people who can help with . . . and so on, into the night. That, in
turn, nudges the EAW toward the kind of faculty/former-student
old-boy cohorts informally operated by Ivy League law schools, and
turns the primary purpose of graduate school into mapping out
BOOKS
These days, an MFA
degree might as well stand for
“My Fat Address-Book.”
But an art world in which “to go where the action is means to be
always on the go” turns out to be just as economically demanding as
one based on staying put in spacious studios, slick galleries and pristine museum offices. Simply put, travel costs money. Another guest
expert—Marc Bousquet, the Emory University writing professor and
crusader for academe’s exploited part-timers—describes the unsalutary life of the poor adjunct faculty member:
Such, too, Relyea implies, is the predicament of a struggling, peripatetic neophyte in the Everyday Art World.
The consolation prize for the EAW’s frenetically nomadic artists
is a revived romanticism, centered on the idea of just what, or who,
artists are: “No longer did their specialness need to be named as
such, declared out loud and up front. . . . It could just be, accepted
as some incontestable fact or mystery, a divine gift with which only
a lucky few are endowed.” No wonder, then, that at the art schools
where Relyea is invited to give critiques, “the painting students,
all of them, across the board, don’t say they’re painters.” Moreover, “they also don’t call themselves artists. ‘I do stuff’ is the most
frequent response. Or, ‘I make stuff.’ . . . All open-ended adaptability and responsiveness, no set vocation.” Artists still make objects,
of course, tons of them—some selling for startling prices. But there
are also, more and more, signs and markers of conceptual projects,
or tokens of unfolding careers, rather than visual treasures that one
would want to live with and value, in and of themselves.
But only piecemeal, and seemingly reluctantly, does Relyea
declare how smoothly—yea, creepily—the EAW fits into an entrepreneurial world stuffed with social media, smartphone apps, digital startups, on-demand streaming entertainment, blogs and MOOCs
(massive open online courses), yet populated by Dilbertish office
workers who sift through endless streams of business data, as
they labor without unions, without job security, without pensions
and without bargaining power. Granted, right up front on page
nine, Relyea writes, “The [Everyday Art World] network begins to
appear less like defiance and more like the latest answer to capital-
Today’s claims of romantic defiance too often look past the fact
that our sense of expanded agency has been purchased largely
through an aggressive shattering and collapse of the larger social
structure. Falling progressively into ruin, this is a scene that
belongs not to romance but to tragedy.
He said it. I didn’t.
PETER PLAGENS is a painter and writer living in New York.
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BOOKS
The network or flex-timer is in constant motion, driving from
workplace to workplace, from training seminar to daycare,
grocery store and gym, maintaining an ever more strenuous
existence in order to present the working body required by
capital: healthy, childless, trained and alert, displaying an affect
of pride in representing zero drain on the corporation’s resources.
ism’s constant need to overcome and reinvent itself.” But he then
sheaths his sword and proceeds to speak of his disinterested interest
in “how [post-studio art procedures] align with and articulate new
social and organizational norms and positions.”
As chair of a prestigious art department with “theory” in its name,
Relyea is understandably careful to avoid a blanket condemnation
of the new EAW. Although he seems to want to make a felony case
concerning the ravages the EAW has wrought on the contemporary
art scene, he writes—like a doubting medieval philosopher in a kingdom of belief—for two very different audiences.
One group comprises academic colleagues and younger artists
who might like to see an art world of finished products (whether
objects in inventory or custom-built for exhibition) largely deconstructed, perhaps even replaced with an anybody-can-be-everything,
DIY network. For those readers, Relyea provides a narrative thread
running from MoMA’s “Sixteen Americans” and 1971 Mel Bochner
“Projects” exhibitions through the evolution of the big biennials into
avant-garde versions of old TV variety shows, Andrea Fraser’s videotaped sex with a collector, talky artists’ cooperatives in Glasgow, L.A.
and Cologne, and the “new bricolage” of such artists as Lara Schnitger and Rachel Harrison (where, ironically, a ramshackle physicality
might be turning things back just a bit toward objets d’art).
Relyea’s second audience consists of skeptics like me (and,
maybe, the author of Your Everyday Art World himself). For them,
Relyea occasionally shines a prosecutorial floodlight on the wider
consequences of the advent of the EAW:
PUBLIC ART REVIEW | FALL / WINTER 2014 | PUBLICARTREVIEW.ORG
potential networks. These days, an MFA degree might as well stand
for “My Fat Address-Book.”