IN THE YEAR 2525

Just a quick link without much commentary today, to something I wrote for a-n last summer but had completely forgotten about. It was a response to Lee Cavaliere’s Visions of the Future in the same magazine previously, so you might want to read that first.

While I understand that any manifesto is to some extent a provocation or a utopian document and while I do agree with some of Cavaliere’s points- perhaps even the majority of them- I also couldn’t resist taking the piss out of adolescent melodrama like “I will be allowed to paint” (yes, it is brutal and unjust the way those anti-paint squads come around every single time you pick up a brush, to kick in your door and defecate on your canvases. I mean, how do they even know?) or bourgeois, lefty drivel about the supposed truth that every human being is a unique and beautiful potential blossom with the nectar of creativity at their heart, e.g. “everyone will be allowed to sing and dance in public” (No thanks. That would be extremely inconvenient and annoying, or it would be like living in an episode of Glee that lasted your entire life, with no respite ever. In either case, a thousand times no. Not if I have any say in the matter or the  strength to resist such a ghastly development.)

“[1] Contrary to Cavaliere continuum, advertising and art became 
strictly separated, forming a particular contrast with the early 21st 
century’s rampant and mostly unpunished exploitation and plagiarism of 
the ideas and work of artists. The name for a person who creates art 
is “artist”. The name for a person who carries out the obsolete 
profession of “engineering improved sales for a product” is 
“advertiser”, not “creative” or “artist”. Artists never make work that 
resembles or could be mistaken for advertising, and vice versa. NB: 
advertising became extinct several centuries ago.

”

Read the rest at a-n.

But before you go, please note that I also love the standfirst saying

Artist, writer and ‘time traveller’, Alistair Gentry, responds to Lee Cavaliere’s Visions of the future.

with time traveller in those scare quotes, as if some of their readers might otherwise think I really was from the 26th century, or that the first Earth-Proxima Summit and the Deideation of the Eight Art Forms were real events. Indignant letter to the editor: “Dear a-n, I must complain in the strongest possible terms about your recent publication of work by an artist from the 26th century. Many artists born in the 20th century are struggling to make ends meet, find studio space and get their work exhibited, but now you are adding insult to injury by choosing to support a time traveller who works in a medium that doesn’t even exist yet. As a painter of seafront scenes and nice bunches of flowers who has not set foot in a contemporary art gallery for thirty years I already feel undervalued and marginalised by a-n’s constant coverage of contemporary art I don’t understand…”

Tags: a-n, art magazines, artist statements, future art, myself, nonsense, philosophy, writing

COMMITTING A MASTERPIECE

“Is it art? Well, how is it valued? The value depends upon opinion, opinion depends on the experts, a faker like Elmyr makes fools of the experts, so who’s the expert? Who’s the faker?” Orson Welles in F for Fake.

F for Fake* is Orson Welles’ experimental 1974 documentary “about trickery and fraud, about lies… and any story is almost certainly some kind of lie.” It focuses on three fakers with deep conceptual connections, as seen through the lens of Welles’ own admitted penchant for telling self-aggrandizing lies in real life. Of course he can’t avoid mentioning in particular the huge trouble he got into as a result of drawing reality into his fiction (or vice versa) with Citizen Kane and his notorious War of the Worlds radio broadcast. “I didn’t go to jail,” he says sardonically, “I went to Hollywood!”

This is by way of contrast with one of the film’s other subjects, the art forger Elmyr de Hory, who did go to jail several times for his efforts. He was wanted by Interpol and various other law enforcement agencies for most of his life. It’s hard not to suggest that Interpol perhaps needed to sort out their priorities and do something more important instead of hounding an elderly man who painted unauthorised copies of expensive paintings and apparently did no harm to anybody who wasn’t a greedy, ignorant fool, especially if we also bear in mind that de Hory was driven to suicide two years after this film was released because he was about to be extradited to France (and probably given a long prison sentence) for some of his “art crimes”.

Tags: APPROVED, art market, art museums, art world, Career Suicide, contemporary art, Curator Error, doing it right, experts, failures, film, forgery, galleries, myself, Orson Welles, performance art, status anxiety, writing

THE WORST OF ALL POSSIBLE WORDS

Thanks to the reliably cringe-inducing Rhizome mailing list, some PR material for an exhibition in Milan called ‘~hieromesh~trance`scribr~~>’, which in itself is incredibly annoying in its preciousness and its extremely dated enthusiasm for titles that look a bit like computer code, or actually are computer code. Anyway, the puff itself contains several fine examples of art world cant:

“In both her physical work and vibrating Web page pieces, [Brenna] Murphy organizes collected everyday detritus into grids of repeating patterns. In the large, undulating, web-based grids, the assembled images vary in depth and perspective. Some frames vibrate while others contain short looped gif animations. Rendered shadows and contours add texture and dimension to these compositions, which could not exist outside of the confines of the computer screen. Each element retains an incredible level of detail while also blurring, even literally, real source imagery with digital alterations and truncated environments.”

Investigation of the artist’s website reveals that this is a florid description of what looks like a cross between a multistorey car park made of vomit and a bunch of Magic Eye pictures from the Nineties. At least if you stared at that crap for long enough you’d see a wobbly dolphin or get a migraine or something and you’d know your brain was still capable of functioning. Better that than the braindead, flatline non-experience of looking at something you don’t even care enough about to dislike.

Tags: art speak, artbollocks, artist statements, Curator Error, DISAPPROVED, doing it wrong, GTFO, idiots, Italy, lazy, nonsense, philosophy, press releases, pretentious

I LIKE YOUR WORK

(ART AND ETIQUETTE)

While going through my books and trying to find some background information for a looming proposal deadline, I naturally encountered numerous opportunities for displacement activities, dithering and procrastination. One of these distractions was a slim book called ‘I like your work: art and etiquette’, which was published in 2009 by New York’s Paper Monument, who seem like fairly decent coves. The book itself was given to me by somebody (thanks, Ruth!) who said it reminded her of my book.

Like pretty much anything that comes out of New York, it’s sometimes New York-centric to the point of absurdity, but both publications definitely have in common a distinct exasperation and frustration that arty people so often act like complete tools. And there’s no art world tool like a New York art world tool.

Anyway, it’s worth buying and checking out in full- support indie artists and small publishers, etc.- but I thought I’d pull a few gems out from it, if only as a way of putting off the actual work I’m supposed to be doing right now.

“If you’re a skinny artist, be clean and neat. If you’re a fat artist, be crazy looking and dishevelled. Not sure why, but this seems to work best. Negative comments about an artist’s work at their opening is the equivalent of taking a shit on someone’s birthday cake at their fortieth birthday party. The proper thing to do is to save your negative comments as an anonymous blog post!” Ryan Steadman.

Tags: APPROVED, artist statements, book, contemporary art, galleries, myself, New York, philosophy, status anxiety, USA

“OUTRIGHT BARBAROUS”

OR: WHY ARE YOU WRITING?

“If thought corrupts language, language can also corrupt thought.”

“Political language… is designed to make lies sound truthful and murder respectable, and to give the appearance of solidity to pure wind”

George Orwell, Why I Write

Orwell was giving some background on the concepts and thinking behind his most famous works, most obviously the deployment of language by the ruling classes as a weapon to divide and exploit workers in Animal Farm, and the totalitarian Newspeak engineered by the Big Brother state of 1984. The application to literary and art criticism should also be obvious, however, especially if you’ve read some of my other demolitions of artbollocks on this site. For the especially dense, though- the writers of this press release, this curator’s gloss and this artist’s statement, for example- I’ll try rephrasing it: art world language is designed to make artists sound authentic and stupidity intelligent, and to give the appearance of solidity to pure wind.

Tags: artist statements, book, doing it right, George Orwell, philosophy, press releases, status anxiety, writing

“CRITICAL POWER LOSS”: THE SAMSUNG ART+ PRIZE

18TH-29TH JANUARY 2012, BRITISH FILM INSTITUTE, LONDON

The exhibition space at the BFI on London’s south bank, like a Samsung TV showroom, is a black box full of streaming, uncredited content. I can’t remember when I last saw such shoddy, lazy staging of video work by a major institution. I often castigate superfluous, anxious over-explanation of art exhibitions that leaves absolutely nothing to the imagination. Unfortunately at the BFI they’ve gone to the equally unproductive opposite extreme. Unless a credit or title is embedded in the work itself (which is rare), there is absolutely nothing to tell visitors what they’re looking at or who the artists are. The black box is the star here; Samsung gets all the credit, the artists get little or none.

Even the printed schedule taped to a wall outside was completely out of whack with what was actually being shown… and it was physically impossible to see the schedule and the exhibition at the same time. Both of the invigilators appeared to be asleep for the entire duration of my visit, which was about two hours long. One of the tablets used in Erika Tan’s installation was bleeping in a very annoying, disruptive manner and showing an error message about a “critical power loss” for about fifteen minutes before finally despairing of attention and switching itself off. Only by a lengthy, patient process of Holmesian analysis, deduction and elimination does one begin to understand what is being shown and by whom. The accompanying website is extremely basic as well, and I had to scour elsewhere on the internet for the names and authors of some films that were being shown but are not credited anywhere, not even on Samsung’s site and certainly not on the BFI’s. In short, the staging of this show is crap and there’s no excuse for it.

And again, what the hell is wrong with some video and new media curators? Have they ever actually tried watching video art in a gallery? Even experiencing two or three from the selection of videos available is a matter of perhaps half an hour or more and yet there are just two small, narrow benches to sit on. Again the scratchy, grimy carpet is the only alternative if you don’t want to (or physically can’t for reasons of age or disability, for example) be on your feet for long periods. Remember that we’re in the BFI, a complex full of cinema auditoria and dedicated to the cinematic arts, a place where one would imagine it would be blindingly obvious that people can’t watch long form moving image work properly when they have to squat on the floor. Come on, this is really basic stuff.

Tags: APPROVED, art speak, artbollocks, artist statements, baffling, BFI, contemporary art, Curator Error, DISAPPROVED, doing it right, doing it wrong, galleries, group exhibition, GTFO, lazy, London, new media, nonsense, prize, repeat offender, Samsung, science, video art

LONDON ART FAIR: OH WELL, AT LEAST I DIDN’T PAY FOR THE TICKET

“Felix, darling, try not to whine when we get inside because this is daddy’s work, OK?”[Islingtonista dragging her son against his will into the London Art Fair. Daddy, grim faced, trails behind.]

I can certainly sympathise with Felix’s determination to have a little tantrum at the London Art Fair. Perhaps Felix already knew he’d be compelled to commit a homicide if he saw another frigging art work with skulls, butterflies and/or cut-outs from old books, maps and prints. Seriously, everybody knock that shit off. I wish I was exaggerating when I say that every third or fourth gallery was showing something involving butterflies. I think we could also usefully impose a ten year moratorium on white box frames, anything involving birds or feathers, and figurative painting with a few token smears, runs or drips to denote that it’s “contemporary” or “gestural” or whatever because being able to paint without making drips or smudging somebody’s face is boring and square, apparently.

Tags: contemporary art, DISAPPROVED, doing it wrong, galleries, GTFO, lazy, London, London Art Fair, painting, selling, status anxiety, YBAs