Art is pretty & expensive. Diamonds are pretty & expensive. Art has form. Diamond dust has no form. Art is aesthetic. Diamond dust is pure aesthetic.

Technorati Tags: aesthetics, satire

“Distress Signals V”, 2006, by Art & Language (A&L) is where looking at a photographs of an artwork rather than the work itself breaks down if it hasn’t already. It consists of a paintings mounted inside a shallow wooden box that looks like a bespoke packing crate of the kind that paintings are shipped in. Into the front of this box large holes have been cut, allowing the viewer to see some of the painting’s surface. This frustrates the viewer’s gaze and tantalises them with the prospect of recovering the image.

This scheme refers back to the most deliberately frustrating work in the series “Index: Incident In The Museum”, Incident XIV, the work that A&L exhibited when they were entered for the Turner Prize. The standard painting of a view of a museum was covered with wooden cladding into which random holes were drilled and onto which a simple schematic diagram of a perspective view of a room was drawn. This referred to the literal outside of the museum used as the model for the paintings, the Whitney Museum of American Art.

The holes in the wood of “Distress Signals” are much wider relative to the size of the painting than those of Incident XIV. They give the viewer greater hope of simply recovering the concealed image. Unless they are the (re)viewer of a photograph of the work, in which case they can only guess. Is the painting coloured plaid of the kind that “No Secret Painting” refers to?

This is a work that quite literally reveals the inner workings of the global art market’s distribution networks, and that quite literally penetrates its obfuscations and representations. This is art quite literally as middle-sized dry goods ready for shipping. We can see through this its content, but this is not the view of the audience that such art is made for.

Technorati Tags: aesthetics, art, critique, Art & Language

Index 01 (1972) by Art & Language consists of a set of filing cabinets filled with texts written by the extended Art & Language collective of the time, with printed indexes of the texts indicating their compatibility with each other in the collective’s discourse placed on the wall. It is a piece of art that is open to a possible audience of readers. It seems unprecedented and isolated in the history of art, belonging more to the office furniture of bureaucratic management or of libraries than to painting or sculpture.

Index 01 is radical, but it doesn’t exist in a complete vacuum. There are three examples I would contrast with Index 01, the latter two of which are contemporary with it.

Marcel Duchamp’s “The Bride Stripped Bare By Her Batchelors, Even (The Large Glass)” predates Index 01 by some sixty years. It is a free-standing painting in metal and oil paint on glass, about as painterly as a set of filing cabinets. The forms in it were determined by Duchamp’s writings and were produced in a series of studies before being assembled in The Large Glass. Like Index 01 is a combination of forms determined by writing. It is a form of index, an assemblage of forms whose relations embody conceptual concerns. The Large Glass is the embodiment of its index rather than the indexical relations of the work being explained by texts placed on the wall, and the texts are elsewhere.

Sol LeWitt’s drawings have a similar concern with platonic form, although they are more immediately aesthetic than Index 01. LeWitt’s drawings constructed from verbal descriptions, whether colours or coloured shapes or geometric shapes constructed according to constraints, are conceptually determined forms. They are more aesthetic than Index 01, but they do construct form conceptually. Like Index 01 and The Large Glass the text precedes and creates the form of “the work”. The platonism of this is critical, it is a line of resistance.

Gilbert and George’s work as living sculptures is arch- (and arch) romanticism rather than analytical philosophy and politics or sociology, but it has commonalities with Index 01. Gilbert and George substituted social form for sculptural form, declaring themselves sculpture. Body rather than text, and romantic conservatism rather than materialist radicalism, but non-aesthetic form expressed socially. The “singing sculptures” are the negative of Index 01, the defensible and resistant production of form in an ironically conservative mode.

I don’t expect that Art & Language would find these comparisons flattering or interesting. But I believe that they provide at least an interesting contrast, and that they may be instructive.

Technorati Tags: aesthetics, art, critique

The idea of a monadic taxonomy of knowledge raises the spectre of structurelessness with its hidden power structures. But it also opens the possibility of shaking up taxonomies and even ontology, which is good as long as it doesn’t result in mere eclecticism.

Technorati Tags: aesthetics, philosophy

Also at KIAD was David Platt:

http://www.davidplattartist.co.uk/

David’s an astonishingly good painter and philosopher.

His heptalectical logic is a “supplementary world view”, very ‘pataphysical:

Heptalectical Logic

And he was the first person I met who was big on Adorno:

Dialectic

Take a look.

Technorati Tags: ‘pataphysics, aesthetics, art, philosophy

Wendy Smith was my history of art (OK, OK, cultural studies) tutor at KIAD. She’s cool. She has a web site that has some of her art on it:

http://www.wesmith.co.uk/
Take a look.

Technorati Tags: aesthetics, art

The dialectical possibilities presented by BLAHY [i.e. Young British Art] and its others are highly fugitive. British sculpture in the grand manner confers necessity on the Chapman brothers, just as the post-structuralist academy compels the existence of Practical Uses for Theoretical Essays. The necessity disappears as soon as it is identified. The artistic matter of BLAHY is marked with the philistine and the everyday all over. It is simultaneously inflected with the rebarbative aesthetics of adolescence and public relations. The useful stuff is swallowed by its empty self-description and by the barbarities of its distribution. BANK is almost alone in recognising the practical significance of the contradictions involved.

– Art & Language, “BLAHY”.

It is universally recognised that the Chapmans are quite serious. So is the average teenage poet. They are the twin Adrian Moles of art.

When I was working at the ICA they were putting up Chapmanworld. Out of politeness I declined to talk to an American camera crew. I didn’t say “It’s trying to pretend that it’s not trying to shock, and it’s failing. It’s tired, academic, adolescent bollocks of the lowest order. It will go far.”

Look out honey ’cause I’m using technology
Ain’t got time to make no apology

– Iggy Pop, “Search And Destroy”, sample used on Utah Saints, “Techknowlegy.”

The market, like copyright and art theory, is an ontology of art, or at least some kind of substitute for one.
Conceptualism dematerialized the art object in favour of its theoretical description, an ontology.
The market has similarly dematerialized the artwork in favour of the entities and relationships that it posits, an ontology. How much? When? Who? Where? Who else?
This is an impoverished ontology, the reliance on simple tags, numbers and data from outside of the artwork creates an ontological proxy for the artwork that has very little to do with the artwork qua artwork.
But in any system of relations figures and grounds emerge and gain proportion and composition. And the physical artwork (even for relational works) remains as the grit in the pearl. Either is a point of friction and a possible point of critique. It’s just not clear what of.

Viewer A looks at artworks as more or less competent illustrations of theory. They are expert in the latest translated French theory and understand the semiotic and technical content of the work. The economics and social relations of an artworks production are admissable only inasmuchas they excuse theoretical failings.

Viewer B looks at artworks as more or less valuable assets. They are expert in the work’s provenance and the artist’s personal history and social standing. The theoretical and aesthetic content of an artwork is admissable only inasmuchas they excuse any aesthetic interiority on the part of the artwork.