Just Kick It Till It Biennials

Hott off the press: Fia Backström, Carol Bove, Bozidar Brazda, Gardar Eide Einarsson, Roe Ethridge, Corey McCorkle, and Seth Price.

Still Kicking It Till It Breaks

Karen Rosenberg, Art in Review, New York Times, November 9, 2007
“[Bozidar] Brazda’s work has looked sharp in group shows, including one at this gallery last summer and another at the Kitchen last spring, but he seems to have trouble sustaining focus on his own.”

Roberta Smith, Art in Review, New York Times, October 5, 2007
“Gardar Eide Einarsson’s work continues to be a little too thin on the outside and a little too hollow on the inside; it is more impressive in group shows than on its own.”

Other reviews

New York Times

Artforum

Shelve it

It wasn’t until after I wrote about Dave McKenzie’s (B)lack that I realized how much work in Just Kick It Till It Breaks presents shelves or tables as a primary element. (B)lack is not a literal shelf, of course, but Carol Bove and Josephine Meckseper use real shelves in their work in the exhibition. Bozidar Brazda and Fia Backström use tables as a key part of their installations. (Tables are to sculpture as shelves are to reliefs.) Uses of flags and banners have been common in contemporary art—witness Michael Phelan’s and Garder Eide Einarsson’s work in the exhibition—but I haven’t yet noticed shelves. Haim Steinbach (above) is an obvious precedent, but I am sure there are others.

Back in (B)LACK

I am interested in Dave McKenzie’s (B)LACK (2006), a work of colored pencil on paper in the collection of Anthony Elms and Jacqueline Terrassa of Chicago. McKenzie draws on an instruction manual for an Ikea shelf, coloring in a warm, medium-brown skin tone onto the man sizing up the shelf on the wall. There are also coffee-cup stains, folds, and other signs of distress on the paper. I think some holes have been cut out too.

In a handout/checklist now available for the exhibition, the author writes, “This collage transforms generic directions … into a document more specific to [the artist’s] needs and identity, underscoring how one’s concept of self in contemporary society is often produced by consumer culture and the media rather than the other way around.” Sure. But I wonder if an artist would need to alter such instructions in order to make such a critique. Or even if such a critique is necessary.

One only has to look at advertising circulars from stores such as Macy’s or Kmart, the kind you find in the Sunday newspaper. Since the 1990s, or maybe even the 1980s, department stores and discount retail chains have increasing included nonwhites as models. Seeing a black man modeling an expensive suit in mainstream advertising might have been rare twenty, thirty, forty years ago. Now it’s commonplace—though of course, like in prime-time television, parity may not yet be reached.

Back to McKenzie’s work. Is the creative, artistic act of drawing or defacing the Ikea shelf instructions an act of rebellion? If, as I posit, representations of nonwhite people have become common in this type of consumer publication, what is the meaning of McKenzie’s gesture? The “lack” that McKenzie points to isn’t as big an issue as the artwork (and the accompanying text from the Kitchen) indicates. The interpretation offered by the exhibition handout doesn’t go far enough—it’s too obvious. And boring. A careful analysis—visual or textual—of this kind of imagery or these type of publications might uncover something else, something more crucial, about representation. Including more blacks and Latinos, for example, in the JC Penney catalogue is a calculated move on that company’s part: it wants to depict a more culturally diverse society while at the same time bring in more African American and Latino consumers by portraying these groups wearing JC Penney clothes and sleeping on JC Penney bedspreads. Progressive politics becomes a capitalist tool. Companies make previously undersought consumers welcome, make them feel good, in order to sell them stuff. Let’s talk about political candidates pandering to the “black vote.” This larger, more important idea relates to the theme of Just Kick It Till It Breaks, but I don’t quite see it addressed in McKenzie’s work.

While on the subject of advertising circulars, I remember that in the mid-1990s, Wal-Mart began using store managers and employees and their children as models in their product photography. It was certainly a populist move, a novelty pleasing both workers and shoppers, but I assume it also saved the company a lot of money. I imagine Wal-Mart didn’t pay these people the same rate as they would for professional models—if they were paid at all. It reminds me of what some art magazines and related publications do for art critics: give them the pleasure of seeing their names in print while not having to actually pay for the writing. Few art critics make money writing about art, and few Wal-Mart employees earn a living wage working for that company.

Back to (B)lack. Or rather those Ikea shelves. Full disclosure: I bought two of them maybe six years ago and installed them in my living room. I’ve stacked several hundred CDs on them, and the sturdy shelves have held up just fine.

Josephine Meckseper

On her Saatchi Gallery page (a lingering element of her participation in the show USA Today) it states that Josephine Meckseper’s work “[often uses] department store display cases and sales ephemera.” Commentary on her work of this kind, and, perhaps, her show % at Elizabeth Dee, has clearly established that Meckseper’s formal vocabulary is on some level taken from the visual vocabulary of the way stores display their products. But, the thing is, questions still remain. I say this because I find it difficult to imagine myself mistaking one of Meckseper’s pieces with an authentic instance store display. So, I then wonder, what exactly is Meckseper’s relationship to this? Meckseper’s relationship to it is very different than Haim Steinach’s and Fia Backström’s because with them, I could, in fact, imagine myself mistaking their work with the thing they are imitating. Their work is a very literal imitation of the way products are displayed in stores at present. Steinbach and Backström mime different versions of it but they overlap in terms of the literalness of their attack. Meckseper’s approach is, rather, a more metaphorical one. It merely suggests the idea of store display without literally imitating it. But, a sound argument could nonetheless be made that all three artists reference store display for a similar reason: in order to call attention to the fact that galleries are stores, the kind that sell art (yawn). However, that aside, what distinguishes Meckseper’s work from Steinbach’s or Backstrom’s is a quality that she has in common with David Altmejd’s: the poetry filter. In other words, Meckseper like Altmejd takes the idea of product display from the store and filters it through something else. For example, with Altmejd’s work we get what looks like store display systems, the sort found in upscale clothing stores, boutiques and department stores, but filtered through a fantasy of zombie apocalypse, Dawn of the Dead (or maybe, rather, Dungeons and Dragons). He takes the product plinth and converts it into a stage for some romantic fantasy of disaster and decay. Meckseper does something similar but with different filters. She takes the shelves and vitrines of boutiques and departments stores and filters them through the covers of a couple of early Brian Eno albums: No Pussyfooting (Eno’s 1973 collaboration with Robert Fripp) and Here Comes The Warm Jets (1974). No Pussyfooting is there in larger proportions than Here Come the Warm Jets but there are elements of both. The effect this kind of filter creates is a kind of temporal confusion, an anachronistic collision of styles, a look that might be described as dystopian glam. Another way of saying the same thing, and, by the way, it is mostly only in evidence in Just Kick It Till It Breaks in Meckseper’s only shelf piece in the show, Untitled (Only A Monster Can Allow Himself the Luxury of Seeing Things As They Are), 2005, is that she is doing a rendition of the shop windows of old Paris photographed by Eugene Atget—but in the manner of someone obsessed with the A Clockwork Orange and/or, possibly, Brazil. (I suppose I ought to acknowledge that in all of this are some submerged allusions to Minimalism.)

Setting the pop culture register aside, and focusing on what we might call the professional register, that is art history, Meckseper’s shelves, vitrines, and plinths make me think of two projects and one artist. The first project is the ‘Exhibition of Surrealist Objects’ at the Galerie Charles Ratton, Paris, May 1936. It's documented in a recent book, Surrealism and the Politics of Eros: 1938–1968 by Alice Mahon, a book which, by the way, relates in an interesting way to Just Kick It Till It Breaks (a relationship that one ought to elaborate on at some point). And the other project is Duchamp’s La Boîte-en-valise, 1935–41. Meckseper formally and conceptually borrows heavily from both projects. However, what probably intrigues me most about her work is what I am reading as a couple of weird coded references to La Boîte-en-valise. The more prominent one (at least for me) is to Air de Paris, one of the works in La Boîte-en-valise. What I am talking about, my hunch, is that this is what those clear glass objects are alluding to. You know, they look like little flower vases and Meckseper typically presents them upside down. In Untitled (Only A Monster Can Allow Himself the Luxury of Seeing Things As They Are) there are two arrangements of this sort and one of them also looks like a clear glass dildo. Der Umkerhrbare Lauf der Dinge, 2005 (one of the three works Meckseper exhibits in Just Kick It Till It Breaks), a work which is, by the way, not a shelf, vitrine, or a plinth and, arguably, makes no references to all that store display stuff, also features these clear glass objects. Arguing that it too alludes to Air de Paris may be a bit of a stretch but I think it still makes sense. The object probably looks more like, on the one hand, some sort of weird fountain, those weird fountain-like thingies in Hieronymous Bosch’s Garden of Earthly Delights, and, on the other, glass bongs and hookahs. An intriguing thought is generated if you parse this, the hookah part in particular, with the idea that it is alluding to Air de Paris (but perhaps I digress). And, the other weird coded reference to La Boîte-en-valise, one that Meckseper also regularly seems to make, is to Duchamp’s miniature reproduction of Fountain (which in the context of La Boîte-en-valise is, perhaps significantly, right side up). Meckseper’s coded allusion, in this case, occurs in terms of her rolls of toilet paper and her toilet brushes. However, it must be said that, despite all my talk of Duchamp, he is not the artist to whom Meckseper owes her greatest debt. It is, rather, the American Joseph Cornell (who was sort of a Surrealist (this “sort of…” part is important)). And I would argue this despite her sly protestations to the contrary in Modern Painters (March 2006). Perhaps we might put it this way: Cornell is Meckseper’s artistic father (and thus a proxy for her real father?)...

Teen Age Riot

Sonic Youth in the “mid-eighties” is a very different band than Sonic Youth in the late eighties.

Bad Cover Version

Only a monster can allow himself the luxury of seeing things as they are.

E.M. Cioran, History and Utopia, translated by Richard Howard (Chicago: Chicago University Press, 1998)

Chronophobia

Pamela M. Lee, Chronophobia: On Time In the Art of 1960s
(Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 2004), xi-xii

"Kill This Hippie Shit"

The “target” of Michael Phelan’s tie-dye painting in Just Kick It Till It Breaks is twofold—hippies and high modernism. It’s a hilarious picture of everything political revolutionaries and avant-garde artists mock: pacifist, stoner lifestyles and Greenbergian formalism. I don’t think the Beatles ever wore tie-dye. Or Lou Reed. Or the Red Army Faction and the Angry Brigade.

Sparks’s and Richter’s source image.

To the left is the primary image that Meredyth Sparks and Gerhard Richter uses for their work. This is a fairly well-known image to people familiar with the Red Army Faction. According to Richard Huffman, the author of the forthcoming book This is Baader-Meinhof (publisher unknown), “The images come from full-body images taken when Ensslin was in police custody. I believe that they are from photos taken of Ensslin as she is entering the courthouse built on the the grounds of Stammheim prison, especially for the Baader-Meinhof trial.” What’s not known is if this image is an official West German police photograph or a newspaper photograph. I am curious to know how the image was circulated in the late 1970s. (Robert Storr’s monograph on Richter probably has the answer, but I do not own a copy of it.)

Meredyth Sparks and the Red Army Faction

The single contribution to Just Kick It Till It Breaks by Meredith Sparks is a pair of digital prints, defaced with black glitter and pieces of aluminum foil and presented adjacently to form one work. Called Untitled (Gudrun with record player) (2007), it depicts Gudrun Ensslin, a member of the revolutionary/terrorist group the Red Army Faction, also known as the Baader-Meinhof Gang, who died with several comrades under mysterious circumstances on October 18, 1977, in a West German prison. The smaller work depicts a turntable owned by Andreas Baader. Baader was a leader of the Red Army Faction and Ensslin’s boyfriend. Glitter and foil covers portions of the images; this takes on some geometric forms and straight lines but are mostly irregular shapes, acting as both a decorative element and an intervention. The word FOUND in all caps crosses the scan of the record player. The end result looks like a mix of Bauhaus design and Russian Constructivist photography collaged by a teenager.

Importantly, the linking of a portrait (Ensslin) and an object (turntable), that is, media personality and musical device/consumer product, dovetails with the choice of subject matter in Sparks’s other recent work. She performs similar arts-and-craftsy interventions with scanned photos of bands, musicians, and performers such as the Ramones, Ian Curtis, the Velvet Underground, Talking Heads, Kraftwerk, Elvis Presley, Abba, Roxy Music, Blondie, and so on. Like the Red Army Faction, these bands were active during the 1970s and beyond. The well-known and formerly underground bands are ones that, presumably, the artist admires or has some affinity toward; they also have a built-in audience of fans, which easily works in Sparks’s favor regarding the publicity of her work. Her subject matter reminds me of work by Elizabeth Peyton, who chooses more mainstream subjects (Prince William, Kurt Cobain, Eminem) for her paintings. While Peyton lovingly admires her subjects, Sparks graphically cuts and scratches her images—an aggressive attack—but she also decorates them like a devoted fan with a weird sense of reverence. This kind of respect reminds me of punk shows where the audience constantly tries to upstage the band onstage, transcending their role of passive observer but not quite reaching the level of the performers.

Taking the curatorial theme into consideration, Untitled (Gudrun with record player) obviously romanticizes a member of the West German terrorist group in the same way she does with her images of musicians and rock stars. She also, I think, recognizes that images themselves have the power to do this. Sparks is aware of this seduction, but such an awareness falls short of “questioning” or making a critical commentary. While thinking about Sparks’s work I am reminded of those t-shirts with Alberto Korda’s photograph of Che Guevara sold at shopping malls across the country and in “punk” shops on Saint Mark’s Place here in New York. In both cases, the image is severed from its revolutionary potential and meaning to simply presents superficial, truncated knowledge and empty gesture. This is a pose, and is not a critique, of revolutionary chic. Sparks writes that the manipulations to her source image “establishes a stuttering or skipping effect; this effect disrupts the image’s cultural circulation, a circulation in which images continually replay events and circumstances, where meaning is prescribed, shaped and enacted repeatedly for the viewer.” I am still trying to see how this works.

One last note: the German artist Gerhard Richter painted both the record player and a cropped version of the Ensslin photograph, showing her from the waist up, in his renowned painting series October 18, 1977 (1988), now in the collection of the Museum of Modern Art. I believe that most people in the art world are familiar with the Red Army Faction through these paintings more than any other source (news, books, being there, etc.) Scholars have persuasively argued for the importance of memory and history in Richter’s work; I don’t think revolutionary chic ever figured into their interpretations.

Buying In or Selling Out

We know the title of Just Kick It Till It Breaks comes from the Angry Brigade’s 8th Communique or, if not that, the back of Tom Vague’s book about the Angry Brigade (or some other book like it). (The back of Vague’s book, by the way, is also reproduced with the 8th Communique at the above link.) We get all that. But what I am wondering now is whether the title was suggested by Josephine Meckseper? Or, if not suggested by Meckseper herself then by one of her pieces: Selling Out? Notice the copy of a book about the Angry Brigade in Meckseper’s piece? You can read the “wall label” about this Meckseper piece on her Saatchi Gallery page. It sure is interesting that this particular piece is also used to “illustrate” Meckseper’s page. Of course, the connection between Selling Out and (the title of) Just Kick It Till It Breaks is by no means obvious. It is completely indirect. And I think it’s something that, to use the title of Bozidar Brazda’s work (also in the show), only “Insiders” would get. It is something of a nod or a wink. I say this because how many people in the world have the Angry Brigade’s 8th Communique in the forefront of their minds? The Angry Brigade in and of itself is a difficult reference to get (unless, maybe, you are from the U.K.) or a punk who read Vague (back in the day). I would even contend the reference may even be a bit oblique for your average American Situationist-head too (because they tend to dwell on Debord’s writing). So, after putting all this out on the table, what I am beginning to wonder is whether Selling Out is a footnote pointing to Just Kick It Till It Breaks? Or is Just Kick It Till It Breaks a footnote pointing to Selling Out?

What I am talking about here is like the concept of the index explored by Rosalind Krauss in her famous essay “Notes on the Index” (in The Originality of the Avant-Garde and other Modernist Myths) but it’s different. It functions in a more peculiar and particular way, and I think the concept of a footnote actually captures it better. Footnotes have an indexical function, but they also have a parenthetical one. I would argue that it is this parenthetical function that is relevant here. The footnote used in this way formally exemplifies Jacques Derrida’s concept of the supplement, the engine (or rather monkey wrench) behind a deconstructive reading. But, I would add that what formally distinguishes Just Kick It Till It Breaks (the show and the work in it) from Derrida is in the way these deconstructive elements are built-in. Perhaps a better way of saying this is that the deconstruction is written into the work. At first it seems as though this is an anti-Derridean effect because it privileges the one who is doing the writing. Derrida’s ideas, I would argue, privilege the reader—not the writer. But, the truth is Just Kick It Till It Breaks is merely anti-Derridean in the same way that Derrida (the cryptic and impossible to understand writer) is also anti-Derridean.

Who wants Yesterday’s Newspaper?

One of Dave McKenzie’s two contributions to Just Kick It Till It Breaks is called Yesterday’s Newspaper. The set-up is simple: a gallery assistant places a folded copy of the New York Times—straight from the newsstand—on a low wooden base every day the gallery is open. As the work’s title indicates, the issue is not that particular day’s edition but the one before.

The press release for McKenzie’s last solo exhibition, held January 5–February 10, 2007, at Small A Projects in Portland, Oregon, says that Yesterday’s Newspaper “is an object that is at once useless and historical, disposable and archived. It is also a sculpture that amplifies the disappointments of the present while anticipating the brighter possibilities of the future. Yesterday’s Newspaper relies on a caretaker (in this case, the gallery) for its maintenance.” The press release’s author compares this activity to the replenishing of ephemeral work by Felix Gonzalez-Torres; Robert Gober also worked with newspapers in the early 1990s with a different purpose. But I digress.

As the major theme of the Kitchen exhibition is reappropriation using a wide nexus of quotes and source material—more on that later—Yesterday’s Newspaper references an earlier moment and another artist, Dan Graham. McKenzie’s work is a literal manifestation of Graham’s idea of the “just-past,” which in turn was borrowed from Walter Benjamin (who cribs from Marx and the Surrealists). Graham articulated this theory in a short talk that was published in the first Discussions in Contemporary Culture (New York: Dia Art Foundation, 1987). He writes:

I believe now that the task of the artist is in part to resuscitate the just-past—that period in time made amnesiac by commodity culture—and apply it as “anti-aphrodisiac” (Walter Benjamin’s phrase). The Rolling Stones’s song “Yesterday’s Papers”—“Who wants yesterday’s papers? Who wants yesterday’s girl? No one in the world”—make this anti-aphrodisiac aspect of the just-past clear.

According to Benjamin, “progress,” the 19th-century scientific and ultimately capitalistic myth, is expressed in commodities, fashion goods which “produce a sense of eternal newness.” This makes progress a mythical goal, never to be reached, for there is always the new and it is always superceded by the next new. For Benjamin, then, progress is actually a state of stasis. And yet it is this very stasis that makes the recovery of the just-past potentially subversive.

It’s amusing to see an artist make a work of art based directly on Graham’s theory, whether intentional or not. The Graham essay is scanned and posted below—it’s only three pages long, four with the footnotes and well worth the read. Everything in the text illuminates a lot of what’s going on in Just Kick It Till It Breaks. The essay could also potentially work against the exhibition, much of which focuses on the revolutionary sixties, and make McKenzie’s Yesterday’s Newspaper surprisingly stronger than the other works because it focuses on the importance of what’s happening now without a whiff of nostalgia. Consider Graham again, this time in conversation with the video artist Michael Smith in the May 2004 Artforum:

DG: I thought Outstanding Young Men was hilarious. You were reviving ‘80s disco culture, but it was a ridiculous revival. I think it’s very important to look at how ridiculous the “just past” is.

MS: The what?

DG: The just past: Walter Benjamin said the just past is very important—it’s a little like “Yesterday’s Papers” by the Rolling Stones. They ask, “Who wants yesterday’s papers?” Nobody. Nobody wants to look at the just past. People almost always look to a few decades before instead. And every time you have a neo-’60s or a neo-’70s, like we’re seeing now among artists, you’re canceling out the just past. I was trying to get at the just past in the Dia Art Foundation roof piece, for example, combining the corporate atrium of the ‘80s and the alternative space of the ‘70s.

MS: I’m thinking that the “just past” is always Mike’s present. It’s fresh for him, since he’s always behind the times. Everything has been absorbed and digested before Mike even considers a taste.

The Anti-Aphrodisiac

Cultural Mapping: An Incomplete List

Below is a catalogue of the artists in Just Kick It Till It Breaks, a group exhibition on view at the Kitchen in New York, March 8–April 28, 2007, and their recent involvement in other group exhibitions in New York (and London) during the past two years. As indicated toward the bottom, all fourteen artists with work or performance in Just Kick It Till It Breaks have been written about in the world’s leading art magazine. The participating artists are: Fia Backström, Carol Bove, Bozidar Brazda, Gardar Eide Einarsson, Roe Etheridge, Adam Helms, Scott Hug, Corey McCorkle, Dave McKenzie, Josephine Meckseper, Michael Phelan, Seth Price, Meredyth Sparks, and Kelley Walker.

In Practice Projects, Winter 07, SculptureCenter, 2007
Fia Backström
Gardar Eide Einarsson

The Gold Standard, P.S.1 Contemporary Art Center, 2006–7
Gardar Eide Einarsson
Seth Price
Kelley Walker

Whitney Biennial 2006: Day for Night, Whitney Museum of American Art, 2006
Josephine Meckseper
Kelley Walker

Bringing the War Home, Elizabeth Dee, 2006
Fia Backström
Carol Bove
Scott Hug
Michael Phelan

Grey Flags, SculptureCenter, 2006
Seth Price
Kelley Walker

USA Today: Works from the Saatchi Collection, Royal Academy of Arts, 2006
Josephine Meckseper
Kelley Walker

Greater New York 2005, P.S.1 Contemporary Art Center, 2005
Carol Bove
Bozidar Brazda
Gardar Eide Einarsson
Adam Helms
Corey McCorkle
Michael Phelan (?)
Seth Price
Kelley Walker

Lesser New York, Fia Backström’s house in Brooklyn, 2005
Gardar Eide Einarsson
Seth Price

Artforum (cover)
Carol Bove
Kelley Walker

Artforum (articles, reviews, writings, gossip column)
Fia Backström
Carol Bove
Bozidar Brazda
Gardar Eide Einarsson
Roe Etheridge
Adam Helms
Scott Hug
Corey McCorkle
Dave McKenzie
Josephine Meckseper
Michael Phelan
Seth Price
Meredyth Sparks
Kelley Walker

Affiliations
Elizabeth Dee
Reena Spaulings
Maccarone
John Connelly Presents
Marianne Boesky
Team
Continuous Project
North Drive Press

Just Kick It Till It Breaks

The title of the Kitchen show Just Kick It Till It Breaks is taken from the Angry Brigade's 8th communique. It's reproduced above as it appears in Tom Vague's book Anarchy In the UK: The Angry Brigade. The Hanger-On, by the way, is the one who deserves credit for initially catching this reference.

Fia Backström and Kelley Walker