Vitriolic anti intellectual trolling do right establishment art bureaucrats.
Much more insidious than a punchline for a piquant political joke, the violence of this work is nevertheless tinged with a predatory spirit of a lifetime ago. The artist is both the creative agent and the stultifying femme fatale, so the contortions of the artist are the complex maneuverings of a sociopathic status that seeks to distance her from the work of art. The same sly, self-mocking tone of the poetry was evident in the exhibition as well. Yet a great deal of that work has been lost. And in the end, the artists ambivalence about the work as art seems to have lost its sting. Gegos work is a powerful response to our complicity with and our respect for the appropriation of what is socially taboo.
You can stop at this, or you can go on, to the next, or to the big box of paint.
Vitriolic anti intellectual trolling do right establishment art bureaucrats. One can only hope that the book, which was recently published in a different edition by the Museum of Modern Art in New York, will also be in the public domain. For now, however, if only the artworld know just how to handle a blurb of aphorism about the importance of the 'emotional connection between subject and artwork, the prices of the T-shirts have risen to $750,000. Considering that it was originally produced for a museum, this might seem an odd statement to post on a gallery, but it is not to the point. The site of T-shirts, which isnt a standard gesture of engagement, is a good thing for an artist, and its time for art to consider that. These are, in fact, T-shirts that artists usually wear, in a fashion that makes them, by virtue of their familiarness, not so different from ones that would normally be worn. The question is not whether T-shirts are good or bad art—a quite separate question—but whether, as a marketing ploy, they should be seen as such, as opposed to, as such, a T-shirt. Any art, no matter how, is merchandise; it doesnt have to be great. Rather than getting famous, you become famous. The same applies to T-shirts. For this show, several T-shirts were lined up in a line that seemed to flow from the main room into the back room. The line was constructed of T-shirts from American companies, and some were broken, as if the line were a message of recognition. A real T-shirt might be a T-shirt. Who cares if an image of a t-shirt is made to look like a well-crafted product? In fact, many T-shirts are made of cotton fabric, and some of these companies have been showing their work for years. The implication here is that, like the T-shirts, there is nothing to lose.
The upshot is that the labor of the art worlds self-congratulatory, political function is rendered in a kind of cloying, pretentiousness. All of the objects in the installation are created with artisanship in mind, and are raised to the status of art—that is, to the status of a commodity, a commodity that is the system of production of art. As with other art, the scene of the absurd is a perilous place, and art seems to be like a childs sandbox, a cribbage park, with all its seemingly ironic and deeply subversive implications.Bogosian is not interested in any sort of deadpan curating; on the contrary, his aim is to create an art context that is simultaneously both deadpan and wide-open. The works in the show were arranged in a gridlike fashion, with three sculptures and a group of paintings. They have a sort of loose, anarchic, almost architectural quality that reminds one of the lines of the letters T and A, the formal keys of which are not necessarily the key to the work. The sculptures, which look like craft projects from the late 60s, are made from blocks of wood painted black and hung with heavy chains. The paintings, which are all rendered in the same materials, are constructed of the same materials: paper and linen. These works are all of a piece with the paintings, and the result is a sense of entrapment, a sense of not quite knowing what is being protected.Bogosians work is the expression of a process that is constantly being disrupted, and it is this disruption that is his point. He is, in a sense, a hero of the work of art; this is his message to us. As the work of art is seen to be, so is his life. He is a serious person whose work is not only serious but also a little eccentric.
Vitriolic anti intellectual trolling do right establishment art bureaucrats. And at the same time, the very documentary method undercuts the art-historical value it usually seems to attain. The exhibition was based on a 1982 exhibition in Dresden, Germany, of the work of artist and art critic Wilhelm Spillmann, who died in 1986 at the age of 72. The Dresden installation was less an event than an account of the artists life, and was thus the perfect vehicle for a text. The text, which Spillmann had dictated to his sister as well as to himself, was, of course, autobiographical, and thus also open to the text itself. Spillmann had, for example, taken a driving test in order to form an image of himself. In this way, the artist was an artist who could form an image of himself, as in the case of his self-portrait, from images of himself, as well as from images of his wife.In the catalogue for this show, historian Thomas Krens quotes Spillmann as saying: I dont know how to do any more than paint. I couldnt. The pictures were all quite chaotic. They didnt have the way to be organized. Their imagery was very sporadic. One couldnt figure out how to read the pictures. They were too messy. . . . I dont want to be one of those artists who does the work of organizing chaos. That is not my goal. I want to organize chaos, to make chaos.Spillmann was also a revolutionary in the sense of the word, which means to be the vanguard in a society. He wasnt just a revolutionary in the sense of the word, he was a radical in the sense of the word. The biggest mistake the audience could make was to think that Spillmann was really an anti-artist. But the fact that he was a realist artist whose work is just messy makes this all look very much like the right point.
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