“AN EXPERIMENTAL, RAREFIED FIELD FOR THE ART EXHIBITION”

OR: MORE ADVENTURES IN PRESS RELEASE ARTBOLLOCKS

“An art exhibition which collapses form (the collectivity requisite of the Chain and any performative work) and content (collective consciousness).”

While Lewisham Arthouse seems like a fine place, a press release about a day of performances there has once again brought out my inner English professor. I assume curator/perpetrator Candida Powell-Williams also wrote the press release, in which case she’s evidently not averse to blowing smoke up her own arse in the third person. All grammatical errors, faulty reasoning and bad writing are in the original text. I’m not making this shit up. I wish that was the case.

“Chain is a seven hour series of multi-disciplinary performances by artists, musicians and poets at Lewisham Art House, brought together by artist Candida Powell-Williams to investigate collective consciousness. Each participant, prior to the event, has provided the following with a word/ object/ sound or image stimulus to be integrated into their performance creating the Chain. By engaging the practitioners through this arbitrary relation the event will mirror our everyday encounters with one another in the city, it will drive the practitioners’ responses together in a stream of collective consciousness as we interact as individuals within the collective of the city.”

“Investigate collective consciousness”? Please artists, stop saying you’re investigating or questioning things. Questions are what you used to get on your exam papers, but you’re not at school doing your GCSEs now. Most of the supposedly vexing so-called investigations or questions of dim, pretentious artists have already been answered decades (or centuries) ago in an entirely satisfactory and conclusive manner by other artists, by writers, scientists, sociologists and philosophers, by womens’ magazines and by the manufacturers of fortune cookies. Artists have subject matter or areas of interest or aesthetic concerns, they’re not just ticking off a series of answers on some list. How is a day of performance art investigating collective consciousness, anyway, even if it were possible to investigate consciousness?

The second and third sentences are a grammatical, semantic and conceptual bramble that may or may not have some coherent thought process underneath. Engaging the practitioners through what arbitrary relation? What is arbitrary and what is the relation? Each participant has provided the following what? Saying “prior to the event” is redundant because of the past tense “provided”: one cannot “provided an object” after an event that has not yet taken place.

I think the rest of this gibberish is just an extremely puffed-up and pretentious way of saying “we will do stuff and people will look at us.”

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.

A REJOINDER ON THE VALUE OF PERSEVERANCE

“Con tanta pazienza e un po’ de vaselina, anche l’elefante se fa la formichina.”

["With a lot of patience and a bit of Vaseline, even the elephant fucked the ant*."]

A pseudonymous sock puppet account emailed me this afternoon, saying that attacking artists or galleries for their use of language was unfair, because “not every artist is intellectual or a good writer” and asking “what do you hope to achieve by being so mean? You could just ignore it.” I’m not sure if this was occasioned by what I posted today about Karla Black’s pathetic appeal to psychoanalysis and quantum physics in the service of stinky soap chunks; it could have been related to a number of other occasions when I’ve castigated the barely literate, preening gobbledygook that contemporary galleries spew out incessantly like a mental patient who thinks he’s Michel Foucault.

Note that this isn’t the first time somebody has lacked the guts or the good grace to leave a comment publicly and under their own name, where everyone can see it and my response to it. Be warned that in future I will make greater efforts to unmask the perpetrators and repost these cowardly communications in full. That’s assuming it isn’t blindingly obvious who they are already: it usually is. So leave a comment instead. I’d be a hypocritical shitbag if I didn’t approve comments that opposed or questioned me.

CENTRAL PAVILION: ILLUMINATIONS AND PLASTICINE

The official gloss on Maurizio Cattelan’s contribution is worth quoting almost in full: “[He] has surprised Biennale organisers by re-creating ‘Turisti’, the work he produced for the 1997 show featuring 200 stuffed pigeons and fake pigeon shit on the floor.”

Either that or he’s twigged that the curator is a dimwit with no sense of quality control whatsoever, and Maurizio thought he could get away with just handing over some old thing that was only clogging up his studio anyway. So, thanks to him there are stuffed pigeons everywhere. These ‘turisti’ are certainly an apt dig at the actual turisti who perch in pestilential flocks all over the Giardini and whose presence seems hard to fathom given that they don’t seem the slightest bit interested in art. Most of them sound as if they couldn’t think about one thing at a time, let alone operate on any kind of complex intellectual level. Or maybe these people know exactly what they’re doing and they’ve found in the Biennale the perfect place in which they’ll go entirely unchallenged by art or ideas.

ARSENALE I: POST QUALITY CONTROL

As its name suggests the Arsenale is part of the former naval yards where La Serenissima built and sustained its seagoing dominance from the 13th century onwards. Now, with the inclusion of the Corderie (formerly used for rope making), the buildings form an exceedingly long, thin gallery. Somehow I missed the notoriously ghastly and universally castigated work offered this year in the Italian pavilion that is part of the complex, but by all accounts I did myself a favour.

IN WHICH THE CURATOR STARTS AS SHE MEANS TO GO ON (RANDOMLY AND NOT VERY COMPETENTLY)

At the part of the Arsenale I did access, Song Dong’s installation is a discouraging omen to put at the building’s entrance. It’s the first of several “parapavilions” supposedly intended for “mutual exchange” between artists but with results that more closely resemble mutual and incestuous masturbation. This parapavilion comes from the Steptoe’s Yard/Load of Old Junk school of art that enjoys a perennial and baffling popularity with certain artists and curators.

It’s big, if that counts as a merit. The fact that it’s made from reclaimed bits of old building lends the thing its only vaguely interesting trait: that musty, stifling smell of old wood irreversibly permeated with the odours of work or life. Unfortunately this aspect seems too poetic and Proustian for somebody so apparently unimaginative to have done it on purpose. I think I probably laid that on the work myself so I didn’t just turn around and walk straight out again. This could be the lazy work of a huge swathe of artists from anywhere in the world.