May 1, 2008
Artforum, April and May 2008
As the May issue of Artforum, which seeks to take stock of our own moment through the lens of May 1968, goes online, I want to point out one last time an article from the April issue by artist Joe Scanlan. Titled, "Modest Proposals," here is the paragraph that caught my attention when I re-read it last Sunday:
Like the struggle between entrenched power and grassroots change that epitomizes this year’s presidential campaign, the violent emergence and stealth occlusion of class in art was nascent in 1968. The various revolutions of that fateful year institutionalized a kind of critical contempt for any artist openly seeking to earn a living from his or her work. In the reification of that politic, many artists who, for economic reasons, work on a small scale, use consumable materials, attempt alternative distribution strategies, or move to marginal locales have fallen prey to an insidious strain of art criticism that can see their production only in negative terms, that is, as a critique of the mainstream commodity makers and of money in general—the pursuit of it, and the capitulations to both consumption and spectacle that invariably follow. From this point of view, all portable, ephemeral, or otherwise modest artworks, by the likes of Rashawn Griffin and Mitzi Pederson or Trisha Donnelly and Tino Sehgal, are to be understood solely in relation to the big commodity makers and only as a reaction against them, as de rigueur dematerialization. Of the original generation of critical revolutionaries, only Lucy Lippard has recanted (and thirty years ago, at that), writing, “Some of the blame for this situation must fall on those who, like myself, had exaggerated illusions about the ability of a ‘dematerialization of the art object’ to subvert the commodity status and political uses to which successful American art has been subjected since the late 1950s. It has become obvious over the last few years that temporary, cheap, invisible or reproducible art has made little difference in the way art and artists are economically and ideologically exploited and that it can hardly be distinguished in that sense from Cor-Ten steel sculptures and twenty-foot canvases.”
Many critical artists (myself included) would agree. They understand that they could never exist outside or above the market but that their only viable option is to try to shape the kind of market they want to inhabit.
Scanlan's point about criticism is an important one, one writers would do well to bear in mind as they discuss artworks.
I should add that two of my contributions to the magazine's May issue are now available on my website: my review of Matthew Buckingham's recent exhibition at Murray Guy and my discussion of the new curatorial programming at the Contemporary Art Museum St. Louis.