Tuesday talks: Jerry Saltz and Paul Chan

De Selby: Did you get into the Paul Chan lecture? Someone at SVA said they called Columbia and were told only Columbia grad students can attend those lectures.

I forgot that Jerry Saltz was also giving a talk last night. I arrived at the studios just as some fellow students were headed over there. So I went with them. It was good in Jerry’s “I’m-not-gonna-beat-around-the-bush-with-you” way. His thing is this down-to-earth, no bullshit thing. There was nothing revelatory in his talk. He said many of the same things one finds in his writing and that he regularly seems to mention. For example, he said that everyone has a relationship to the art market, and if you are anti-market then that’s your relationship to the market. You can’t escape it. Interestingly Saltz and Tino Sehgal seem to have similar takes on this topic. However, I would be willing to bet Saltz has nothing to say about Sehgal—unless he has actually seen his work (not just read or heard about it). So, Saltz, it seems to me, is all about common sense and trying to maintain a bit of integrity. I think his position is that it’s the dialogue that matters most. He spent much of the lecture just telling us, the artists, what we can expect from him, the critic. He doesn’t write about his friends. He doesn’t collect art. He doesn’t have sex with artists. And, he doesn’t do drugs with them either. Saltz did say he knows critics who do all of these things but he does not judge them for it. His tone was very conversational and, from the outset of his talk, he demanded audience responses. More than once Saltz said he was going to stop talking if he did not soon get a response to whatever question he had thrown at the audience. I took this to be symptomatic of his interest in dialogue. I apologize for forgetting to mention this to you. I am not sure whether the lecture was open to the public or not. The security guards asked to see my student ID when I entered. It was in the same lecture hall as the Donald Kuspit talk.

The Hanger-On: I really got into the Chan talk. It was interesting, and I liked the Q&A at the end, which is always the best part of these kinds of talks. One Columbia grad student called Chan on this lawsuit—I’m not sure if that’s the right word—against him for stealing a Northwestern University grad student’s work and making it his own (and exhibiting it at least twice, including the Serpentine Gallery in London). Of course MFA students with impending studio visits should be worried. I can explain this in detail later.

The Jerry Saltz Experience sometimes runs on autopilot. His reviews are great to read—I try not to miss them. But he tends to repeat himself about the market, about criticism, etc. It’s good to stick to your guns, but if you read or hear him talk more than once, you’ll end up hearing the same thing. At the same time, though, it’s important for him to keep saying what needs to be said, for example, about women artists being vastly underrepresented. The fact is—as has been the case for decades—the work of women artists is just as good as that of men. Isn’t this a no-brainer? The power structures of the art world are still holding onto (implicit) sexist views.

In the recent CAA News interview, Saltz talks about artists and friends differently. He’s not as harsh. In the interview, he says that it’s difficult to maintain a friendship after he writes (sometimes negatively) about that artist, but it’s usually the artist who gets upset. Which is understandable. If someone trashes you in print, do you want to still be friends with that person? Can you? It’s awkward. But it’s not personal. About not getting responses: yes, it’s hard to get the Q&A session started, but it always happens. Remember João Ribas’s talk in the fall, the one that lasted three-and-a-half hours? By not doing drugs at the after party with artists, Saltz establishes himself as an independent, interesting character who is cool because he isn’t trying to be cool—it’s an act in the same way everyone poses. But at the same time it’s not an act: his passion for art is totally genuine.

De Selby: Yeah, I mentioned Saltz’s market comments as an example of one of his usual routines. Not having seen him talk before, I find it refreshing. But, you are right, he does have a consistent position on certain issues. This is different than what we are talking about, but I noticed recently that Saltz used the same Charline von Heyl quote he had used in one of his November 2006 columns. It caught my attention not because of the repetition but because the first column I saw it in was of special interest to me. My sense about Saltz as a person is that he simply likes people, finds all sorts of people interesting, and really enjoys conversation and dialogue. Many of the things he said at the talk (and says regularly) seem to have to do with the perils of being a critic. I like his openness about this sort of stuff. One of Saltz’s big messages, which is probably common sense, but nonetheless seems to require regularly repeating, is that we can rise above. We can certainly imagine a situation in which a person, say, a critic, might very much like another person, say an artist, enjoy their intelligence and conversation and yet dislike their art. And let us not forget the corollary fact that one body of work or a single show is not normally what constitutes an entire career. I think it bothers Saltz that people, and not just the artists, often take his criticisms so personally (see pieces such as “Looking Back” and “Learning on the Job” which are both in Seeing Out Loud). I think he would like it to be a part of the larger dialogue.

I do not know about the Chan lawsuit. I want to hear more about it.

The Hanger-On: I am not knocking Saltz: I hope I don’t sound negative. I am in agreement with him in many ways. His point of view is refreshing and needs to be said, which is perhaps why he says and writes the same things time and again. I particularly like his idea that people in the art world need to be willing to embarrass themselves in public. Though it isn’t necessary to go see him everytime he speaks in town, I’m glad he does, because he gets a new audience each time. I know his point of view, and I feel the same. And I’ll keep reading his columns—they’re refreshing, insightful, challenging, and usually spot-on, even if I disagree.

The theme of the artist’s-talk portion of the night was about change. For Chan, artistic breakthroughs aren’t eureka moments that come charging through the door. Instead, shifts in his work come in small moments. Also, he uses drawing (often charcoal on paper) to free his mind from his more detail-oriented work, and also when he’s stuck. He talked about how a series of drawings of flesh-eating birds, drawn from Leviticus, turned into My Birds ... Trash ... The Future, which was shown in LA as well as in Greater New York 2005. And drawings and collages of shadows turned into his recent Light series. His hellish experience installing My Birds in LA got him interested in low-tech projection. People, especially in Germany, are building video projectors with three basic elements: a light source, an LED screen, and a lens. An overhead projector with a transparency has the same basic components as a video projector. Chan said his construction, which looked very sculptural, didn’t really work too well. The images were fuzzy. I think he said that that’s what led him to the shadow drawings and the new work.

Some of what Chan said at Columbia—his experience in Iraq before the war, religion and politics, his art and activist work—has been previously discussed in a 2005 interview in Bomb. The highlight of the night, however, was the legal struggle brought up by the Columbia student, who seemed to know the Northwestern student artist or know someone who does. Chan handled the charge gracefully, saying that his lawyers are working with lawyers at Northwestern. That’s taking care of the legal issues on copyright, intellectual property, appropriation, etc. The ethical matter, however, was being worked out between the student and him. He was mum about that.

I guess I need to tell the story now: as a visiting artist at Northwestern in spring 2006, Chan saw a work by one student in her studio that he really liked: a banner with the words “mission accomplished” on them. He told her that she should really do something with the work, which she was unsure about. The matter dropped, at least until the summer, when a Hong Kong arts center asked him to contribute a work to a benefit. He also had a solo show there. For the benefit, he re-created that same banner. But it didn’t sell. A couple months later, in the fall, Chan was asked to participate in a group show at Serpentine Gallery in London. He made an edition of twenty, again, none of which sold. (Perhaps it was the edition in China—my memory is fuzzy.) When the work was in London, he e-mailed the student artist in order to share credit (and income, if there would be any). Responding a couple weeks later, she totally freaked out. A few weeks after that, Chan was contacted by lawyers at Northwestern.

Like I said, Chan separated the legal aspect of the situation from the ethical part. But he was unwilling to say—at least to this audience—that he was in the wrong, and that it was a mistake to directly take (steal) this other artist’s work and present it as his own. He did say that the first thing he should have thought of when first making the banner (contacting or involving the student) became the last thing he thought of. This professional blunder has come back to bite him in the ass.

Overall, Chan was amicable and articulate and seemed well read, quoting Adorno and talking about Freud and Christianity; he has really looked into and seems to understands this writing. This made me think of a concern that I’ve overheard art-history professors talk about: that today’s students lack a basic knowledge of religion, namely Christianity and Catholicism. Identifying people and themes in Western European art is a true stretch for these students, because we now live in a pluralized and secular world, much more than ten and twenty years ago or more. Parents don’t take their kids to Sunday School anymore; no one knows their Bible stories. Art history is, some say, directly suffering as a result. When Chan mentioned that he was taking a class at the Columbia Seminary School on the Apostle Paul, he got blank stares from most of the audience. It makes me want to revisit that New Testament figure.

I reskimmed the review of the London show. Chan’s banner is mentioned right in the first paragraph! The exhibition was The Uncertain States of America. That was a major show, covered by all the art magazines.

De Selby: Chan’s move is puzzling to me. But I am willing to bet that much of it had to do with being under the gun to come up with a project and get it completed in time. It was probably too much trouble to contact the student artist and simply collaborate with her. But, now that I think about it, why would the student artist want to collaborate with Chan? I would think she would rather simply want to show the piece on her own (especially if someone expressed interest in exhibiting the piece). Ah, but there is the rub: the curators in Hong Kong care more about Chan’s name than whatever piece he submits for their show. And genuine collaboration with the student would mean that Chan would have to involve himself with someone he did not really know. The fact the Hong Kong show is a benefit makes Chan’s move seem even more lame. He didn’t want to give away one of his own works?

This instance of corruption may be more interesting to watch because Paul Chan seems to make a point of putting his idealism on display. If a Kelley Walker or a Seth Price did something similar, because there is so much cynicism in their work, it would probably be less interesting to observe (and seem like less of a surprise).

The Hanger-On: Chan did say he was under the gun about making a work for the Hong Kong benefit. I think he said he was asked to contribute the same banner to Serpentine. He should have declined inclusion in that last show—knowing eventually he would be found out, facing a compromising situation. Despite the blurry lines between stealing and appropriation (Koons won a court case recently, and I know about a handful of others involving Barbara Kruger, Robert Rauschenberg, and other lesser-known artists), he still made a really bad call.

Aside from that, Chan did say some interesting things, namely that he has a conservative view of art, that is to say, that art is a realm of absolute freedom—whatever form that takes and whatever it means—where artists represent not necessarily what is but what can be. He recognizes that his “activist” work is a part of the larger struggle for power, be that antiglobalism or war protesters, established political parties, etc. Activist work is about power (e.g., for disenfranchised groups) in the same way that people in power try to maintain their power. Art—his art—hopefully operates outside this, establishing that space for dialogue that Saltz and Ribas long for. I think his view is old fashioned, not necessarily conservative, but still relevant.

De Selby: I am inclined to agree with the notion that art ought to be a realm of absolute freedom. However, problems perhaps arise when people start signing their names to things. Benefits often accrue to the signatures.

Chan might separate his art making from his political activism and view them as different activities but I don't think this holds up for me. I read about them both in Artforum. I view it all as one big ball of stuff that Chan does.

The Hanger-On: The freedom in the act of creating something, of making the art, of making the unseeable seeable, or the unknown known, can be separated, however precariously, from the other part: display, sale, collecting, etc. That’s where issues of power come in, that is, the art world. Henry Darger was able to make amazing art apart from that entire world. He had his own freedom, perhaps only in his own head. I mention Darger because Chan has used his stuff in earlier works.

Chan separates his art from his activism. He makes this clear in the Bomb interview, the Artforum profile last summer, and last night at Columbia. While some overlap is inevitable, it seems he divides his creative energies well.

De Selby: I think this separation in the end is an artificial ideal. Why do we know so much about his political activism? Is it necessary that he share this information with his art audience? I think this is a calculated move on his part. It is his way of letting his audience know what type of person he his. It frames, in some small way, my reading of his art. I think the claim that they are separate is, perhaps, clever PR. It’s the kind of PR we can all feel good about.

Darger is an interesting example. All his work ended up being owned by his landlord. Darger spent his last days living in a hospital for the aged and infirm. He took nothing with him. He left all his belongings behind which, of course, includes all of his art. He told his landlord to throw it all away.

The more I discuss Paul Chan’s intellectual-property theft (or whatever it is) with you, the more his behavior pisses me off. If Chan felt so strongly about the piece, he should have helped connect the artist with an opportunity of her own. Isn’t that supposed to be the way it works? Isn’t this a part of what studio visits are about? And it is really the only truly defensible thing Chan could have done. If I were this artist, I would be pissed. I find Chan’s behavior very disillusioning. It is a pathetic or passive abuse of power. And to even consider that collaboration with the student artist would have been the most appropriate thing to do is also suspect. Why should the student artist be required to make this sort of compromise? Why should Chan get to put his name on the project? For discovering her? The scenario sounds like something from the world of advertising. Senior art directors and creative directors can always claim, at least in part, authorship of ideas generated by those beneath them (in the same firm, of course). They may try to smudge their thumbprint onto an idea in order to justify or rationalize their claim to it, but that, if they do it, is a mere courtesy.

The Hanger-On: I think he’s completely irresponsible for doing it. He made it clear that the lawyers are figuring out the legal stuff, which is fine. Can he make a copy or parody of the famous George Bush flight-suit banner aboard that aircraft carrier, whether or not the student artist did? Appropriation is iffy territory, but it’s obvious—and I remember Chan saying as much—that he got the idea specifically from the student. The ethical issue remains, and Chan totally fucked up. Being held in such high esteem in the art world, he’s desperately trying to save face. But—perhaps like Clinton with Lewinsky—he just can’t come out and say, “I was wrong,” at least not at the outset. He’ll should lose his credibility, at least for now. But I can imagine the art world rallying behind him and supporting him. Insiders have no concern for the outsiders, the little guys. It’s also a shame because his video in the 2006 Whitney Biennial was my favorite work in that show.

De Selby: Jerry Saltz’s comment on Chan’s work (in his review of the biennial) takes on a slightly different meaning in the shadow of our discussion. Saltz: “Paul Chan’s floor piece is evocative but unoriginal.”

Non-Miami Fun

The Hanger-On will be in Miami for a long weekend, but if I were in New York I would attend both of these exciting exhibition related talks. I have not yet seen the shows under consideration but will in the next couple weeks.

Storefront for Art and Architecture
Saturday, December 9, 6:30 PM
In conjunction with the exhibition Clip/Stamp/Fold: The Radical Architecture of Little Magazines 196x to 197x, the Storefront for Art and Architecture is pleased to present the second event in the series Little Magazines/Small Talks. Speakers include Yve-Alain Bois, founder and coeditor of Macula (1976–79) and coeditor of October (1991–present); Hal Foster, coeditor of October (1991–present); and Rosalind Krauss, founder and coeditor of October (1976–present).

One of the influential legacies of several magazines that appeared during the 1970s was the introduction of new theoretical models (drawn from structuralist semiotics, psychoanalysis, and film theory, among other fields) for reconsidering art and architectural practice as well as its histories. The magazines October and Macula played a key role in giving shape to this discourse and this evening will consider the beginnings of these magazines in relation to parallel developments in architectural theory and publication. Several of the editors will respond to the exhibition Clip/Stamp/Fold at the Storefront, reflecting on their experiences and the role of publications during this pivotal moment.

P.S.1 Contemporary Art Center
Sunday, December 10, 3:00 PM
The curator Bob Nickas will give a gallery talk on the current P.S.1 exhibitions Music is a Better Noise, The Gold Standard, and Sam Samore: The Suicidist.

Museum of Modern Art
Celeste Bartos Theater
Monday, December 11, 6:00 PM
“Experimental Magazines and the International Avant-Gardes, 1945–1975” considers various aspects of the avant-garde magazine such as the nature and history of artist-run journals whose founding principles originated in early modernism, developed through the twentieth century, and remain important to many artists and writers today. The panel looks at journals that were conceived as ongoing platforms for new works of art, for graphic experiment, and for simultaneous expression in the arts, literature, philosophy, politics, and other fields. It examines the ways in which magazines represented ideas of particular artistic and intellectual communities, even as they responded to and disseminated ideas internationally. Participants include: Liza Bear, writer, filmmaker, and contributing editor at Bomb Magazine, and former editor and cofounder, with Willoughby Sharp, of Avalanche magazine (1970–76); Benjamin Buchloh, professor of modern art at Harvard University and former editor of Interfunktionen (1968–1975); Edward Sullivan, dean for the humanities and professor of fine arts at New York University; and Willoughby Sharp, independent curator, artist, and former publisher and cofounder of Avalanche. The panel is moderated by David Little, director of adult and academic programs, Museum of Modern Art.

Tickets ($10; members $8; students and seniors $5) can be purchased at the lobby information desk and the Film desk or at www.ticketweb.com.

Chrissie Iles and video-art distribution

At her lecture at Hunter College, Chrissie Iles, curator of film and video at the Whitney Museum of American Art, gave a basic overview of projection art (film, video, slides) from the 1960s to the present. It was an engaging talk with a lot of images to look at. I asked a question during the postlecture session (though not as articulately as I would have liked). I queried her on why artists haven’t explored—or appropriated—modes of distribution through Netflix (for rentals) or Amazon (for sales). Commercial DVDs of films, they say, always make more money than theatrical releases. Still, through either implementing institutional critique or exploring alternative practices, why haven’t artists moved beyond limited-edition (and expensive) releases through galleries to make their work available to a wider public?

The answer for Iles is a no-brainer. She said that, well, a DVD can sell for $20 for $50,000—which would you choose? I pressed her on this, saying that then video and projection art is really parallel to painting and sculpture, that they’re more or less luxury objects. she agreed with this and seemed satisfied. She surprisingly wasn’t interested in these alternative and potentially radical modes of distribution.

A $30,000 video is on view at, say, Barbara Gladstone Gallery, is shown for five weeks, and disappears into a private collection. It will probably only be screened during the next ten years at a group exhibition or two in a prestigious museum or kunsthalle. Conversely, a thousand people buying a $30 DVD of a video work would make that same $30,000 and be seen by thousands more who couldn’t attend the gallery screening. I realize there’s a wide range of factors to consider: printing and distributing a thousand packages ups the costs considerably. And artists do want to control how their work is displayed: a room-sized projected does look better than on a television monitor in many cases. But, I imagine, a home-theater set-up is probably of higher quality than a gallery’s set-up. And then there’s that preciousness issue….

A number of artists have successfully used commercial forms of distribution: William Wegman recently released a DVD of his video work from the 1970s to today, for only $35.99! (But then again, with those posters and calendars, he’s such “commercial” artist anyway, right?) But others too sell their work in masses: Peter Fischli and David Weiss sell The Way Things Go on video and DVD, and Richard Kern’s classic films from the 1980s are available too, and in the Whitney gift shop no less. Kalup Linzy posts his videos to his own website through YouTube in addition to showing them in galleries and museums. These examples are just off the top of my head.

Chrissie Iles says she rents films from the Anthology Film Archives for exhibitions and screenings at the Whitney for thirty bucks! Inexpensive forms of distribution are not new at all. I just can’t believe artists haven’t done it already, on a massive scale. I’d love to hit up the neighborhood video store for an evening with Pipiloiti Rist, Matthew Barney, and Shirin Neshat.

Robert Storr discussed this same issue in a recent column in Frieze; he also wants that $20 DVD. Speaking of bootlegging, I remember that Kims on St. Marks was busted selling copies of Cremaster 3 when that movie was at Film Forum in 2003.

The Left Is Still Right

We at Global Warming Your Cold Heart attended—as a crew, a team, a gang, a mass, a tumor—a talk and discussion with Tariq Ali, the editor of New Left Review, at 16 Beaver Group (located at 16 Beaver Street in lower Manhattan), a reading and discussion group. The occasion for this talk is the publication of Ali’s book Pirates of the Caribbean: Axis of Hope.

Ali stated at the beginning of his talk that he wrote this book to call our attention to some positive events taking place in Latin America, events that the current crises in the Middle East, and the Islamist resistance to Western Imperialism, the Washington Consensus, or simply, Empire have distracted us from. The problem with the Islamic Radicals, despite their resistance to Empire, is that they, as Ali more or less put it, offer no acceptable or genuine alternative to Empire. The positive events in Latin America, minor miracles it seems in Ali’s view, are Hugo Chavez’s continuing electoral triumphs in Venezuela, Ivo Morales’s election in Bolivia, and Fidel Castro’s ongoing revolutionary triumph in Cuba. These are his "pirates of the Caribbean." And they represent an "Axis of Hope." They also grace the cover of Ali’s book.

I was interested in attending the talk because of an interview with Fred Halliday that appeared in the journal Salmagundi. Halliday is a former contributor to the New Left Review who split some years back with the journal and his comrades there. I was interested in seeing if Ali might confront some of the accusations Halliday made in this particular interview about Ali, personally, and about the Left, in general. Halliday’s accusation about Ali is that his position on global affairs is, if we view it objectively, a conservative one. Halliday’s accusation about the Left is that it is like Rip Van Winkle. It has fallen asleep and woken up fifty years later, blissfully ignorant of everything that’s happened during its slumber. The rift between Halliday and Ali revolves primarily around the issue of imperialism. For Ali imperialism is always bad and his overriding commitment is to the resistance of U.S. imperialism. Halliday, on the other hand, seems to think that at times the Empire, despite itself, now and then does some good. Halliday, despite his rift with Ali and the New Left Review, still considers himself both a Leftist and an anticapitalist. He, it seems, believes that he is the one who has remained true to his core values. Ali, however, without it seems even knowing it, has drifted to the Right—or, in the very least, a conservative position.

I was disapointed that Ali addressed none of this directly. At the beginning of his talk he did state that he wrote Pirates of the Caribbean, in part, to address what he perceived to be a shift to the Right by many of his formerly radical peers. But beyond this, disappointingly, he never really got into it. It seemed to me Ali’s central point was, and I presume his book is also about this as well, is that Chavez just might be the guy, the icon, the Left has been looking for. In fact, it seemed to me what Ali was suggesting, but he would not come right out and say it, at least not directly, was that Chavez might just be to the twenty-first century what Che Guevera was to the twentieth. I took all his talk about Castro to imply this. In other words, what the Left needs is a twenty-first-century man, a leader, an icon.

In the end, however, I thought Tariq Ali came across as an equivocating propagandist.

Ali mentioned that Chavez had been democratically elected to office five times. It seems that he wanted to make sure everyone in the room caught wind of this "fact." And despite what I’ve read here, within the borders of Empire, I’m willing give Ali the benefit of the doubt. I’m also willing to entertain Ali’s iconization (as one audience member called it in criticism of Ali) of Chavez.

Critiquing the critics

On Tuesday night, the art historian and critic Donald Kuspit spoke at the School of Visual Arts. Tonight, Ken Johnson gave a talk at the New York Studio School. A prolific writer of articles and reviews and the author of dozens of books, Kuspit spoke on “Why Artists Hate Critics,” which was a provocative title for a pedestrian talk. I’ve never been a fan of Kuspit’s writing, which general cries out for an assertive editorial hand, and his often curmudgeon points of view. In a catalogue essay on the painter April Gornik, for example, he used the words “irony” or “ironical” throughout the text and seven times in one paragraph—and never ironically!

Kuspit’s talk was a total historiographic overload, filled with tissues of quotations and droppings of names that ranged from the usual suspects—Charles Baudelaire, Paul Gauguin, Wassily Kandinsky—to the more obscure, art historically speaking. Kuspit has a strong interest in psychoanalysis, so he brought up a number of psychologists. This is a grand oversimplification, but I came away with the knowledge that artists like to be told their work is great, and critics are the last bastion of free thought in art.

The Q&A session brought up the expected question about artists who write criticism, to which Kuspit said that the twentieth century, with its lack of common iconography (e.g., Christian) or style (e.g., Classical or Romantic), forced artists to defend their work in their own terms. Modernity was also, he noted, the grand age of manifestos. Kuspit did say that later generations of artists, Donald Judd in particular, boxed themselves into corners for negating the work of others in reviews instead of positioning their own work via print. I don’t think this point is as extreme as Kuspit makes it, as Judd, Dan Graham, Robert Morris, Mel Bochner, Robert Smithson, and many, many others—why stop at the 1960s?—were the ones who established the critical parameters for their production because hardly anyone else could.

Ken Johnson, a freelance writer for the New York Times and now art critic for the Boston Globe, came across as the aging ex-hippie. To him, art is to society as—in classic SAT form—dreaming is to the individual. He admitted in his talk, titled “Art, Criticism, and a Theory of Dreams,” that a critic is the interpreter of dreams, a person who searches for the transcendent and reconciles the irreconcilable. The artist, of course, does this too. Johnson favors modernist works of unity (e.g., from Pablo Picasso through John Chamberlain) in which the parts create an even greater whole, as well as works with richly metaphorical images that touch the heart and soul. Which, I think, is fine position to have but one that can’t deal with a lot of contemporary art, including the stuff that intrigues and often bugs me.

Johnson talked about pluralism in the art world, which he likened to an uninhibited creative psychic totality in which no type of art can really cancel another kind out. (He’s big into Carl Jung.) This point of view disagrees with Hal Foster’s notion of pluralism as the ostentatious presentation of commodities all appealing to different audiences or buyers, as well as a Foucauldian idea about power and sexuality. (I zoned out and can’t remember exactly what he said.)

Johnson then described a third strain of pluralism regarding images themselves—a Debordian notion, perhaps—in which images are so connected to products, and not to individuals, that the totality of imagination has been preempted. This pluralism he found in recent work by Kelley Walker and Seth Price. Johnson said he does not like this work but recognizes one of its aims, which is iconoclasm—a fear of images and the act of destroying them. Johnson rightly understands that this younger generation of artists sees total confusion in media today, in addition to an emptying of meaning in images, hence the artists’ iconoclastic attitude toward pictures and their pose of irony. This attitude, of course, goes beyond contemporary art. Walker’s recycling symbols demonstrate the redundancy of visual junk and image culture that have lost their meaning. Through incessant overuse, even secondary meanings get lost.

Johnson sees Walker and Price as trying to “imagine” their way out of a spectacular culture machinery that has so completely co-opted imagination. The only thing they can do is to destroy images and the control they exert over us. Unlike Johnson’s generation, ours doesn’t believe in escapism—tune in, turn on, drop out—although this fails to keep us from wanting to figure stuff out. Nihilistic? Certainly. What’s most interesting is that Johnson says this destruction brings back clear thinking. I really identify with this. Johnson still draws a line between the art he likes, which embodies metaphor, et al., and that which he respects but opposes: an art of critique. Two interesting points here: first he said the first postmodern artists, the Pictures generation, were both skeptical and romantic. Second, he noted that artists since then are more sympathetic to their elders—to those who taught theory and semiotics in the academy—than his sixties generation, which proverbially didn’t trust anyone over thirty. The audience at the New York Studio School, which I presume was art-conservative, was glad to hear this. They, too, are the bastions of freethinker about art and not slaves to theory.

I sat with my friend, the artist Jennifer Sullivan, whom Johnson wrote about in a review from a year ago. Her body of work—either thematically or content-wise—is probably the kind of art he would like: personal, searching, and earnest. But her materials and style are very much of this generation: not the criticality of Walker and Price, but rather slacker in appearance. This aesthetic, however, belies her boundless curiosity and wide-eyed enthusiasm.

Tino Sehgal versus a world full of objects

At his talk at the Guggenheim Museum last night, the artist Tino Sehgal did not say much that was all that different from the interview and article last year in Artforum, but he did clarify his position and give it more depth. The major point I got from his talk was that his art takes place on the macro level of institution and medium more than on the micro level of an individual work. He referred to this as his “set up” at one point and said that the subject of any particular piece was secondary to it.

The event was a conversation between Sehgal and one of the senior Guggenheim curators. She began by asking him how he decided to abandon the object, which was rather interesting because he said he never dealt with the object. He explained that before entering the field of visual art (he referred to it this way several times—as visual art) he had been involved in political activism. I would like to know more about this because he referred to it as lobbying legislations. Anyway, he said his art project evolved from this work and that he decided to enter the field of visual art because it was—and I thought this was an astute formulation—about the relationship between people and things. Sehgal said again that he was not interested in adding more things to the world and that he was interested in figuring out an alternative form of production and exchange. So his art project is in part a social experiment (he did not use this language), and he said that he turned to the social institutions of art deliberately because its character and structure lent itself to this sort of experiment. Institutional critique, of course, came to mind, but Sehgal’s aims and assumptions seem radically different. And he did not mention institutional critique at all. No one during the Q&A session did either. (The questions were quite shallow).

Sehgal made a few provocative remarks, but his manner was mild and thoughtful. He looked like an art nerd. One of these remarks addressed the market. He argued that if we do anything at all specialized we have to participate in the market—whether we like it or not. The only way avoid the market is to do everything yourself: farm your own food, make your own clothes, and so on. He also argued that the material wealth of Western societies in fact empowers individuals. This is because material surplus gives many choices and decisions over to individual consumers. They can choose between this material product or that one, and producers compete for these choices. In contrast to this, societies that are not producing a surplus give choice over to the producers: the producer chooses to make this or that product, and the consumer is stuck with the producers’ choices. His most caustic remark, though—and he apologized for possibly being reductive—was about the antimarket attitude of many twentieth-century avant-garde artists. He said he thought they were misguided and naïve.

I left the event wanting to ask him a bunch of questions and with a thirst to know more about him. I chickened out and did not ask the question I really, really wanted to ask him, which was this: “What political label would you apply to your self?” I also wanted to ask him if he would comment on the Benjamin Buchloh review of the 51st Venice Bienale in Artforum. Earlier Sehgal had argued (in criticism of documenta 11) that all art is political, whether the artist is aware of their politics or not. I hope Sehgal wins the Hugo Boss Prize in December, so he finally exhibits in New York, but somehow I doubt he will.

The audience turnout was odd. There were about thirty people there. The auditorium was less than half full. And it looked like mostly students. I thought maybe I’d run into some of the newer New York critics and curators, but I was wrong. I looked around for them. There were really no professorial types there either, although they are sometimes hard to spot.