30 Thots on Modernism:
1. I grew up hating Edmonton, hating the art in Edmonton and hating the city itself. It felt dead, exhausting, like it was trying to beat down what I considered interesting.
2. The work I wanted to do, minimal work or interventions or photo work, work dealing with bodies, or sex or gender, work that was human scale or barely there, or not really about art. I v. rarely saw what I was interested in galleries. I became a fan of quilting, graffiti, found drawings, film, and bookworks. Comics, pornography, the photos in real estate companies, ads, language, furniture stores, needle point, buildings, because they were able to be smuggled. I felt like I was in hostile territory.
3. When I started working, on something I still have trouble calling art, being in Edmonton, it was rare that I saw work that followed what I was doing, that gave me permission to follow my foundling tastes or aesthetics. I started liking hard edge abstraction painting, because it was close to the shiny plastic 60s stuff that ended up in my aunts home, it was also the last place my grandma would go, and she had exquisite, solid, middle class taste. Some Kelly work reminded me of the boomerang shapes of her chairs and the blue serge of her suites were like the blue of Newman.
4. It was scale though---I think growing up on the prairies, one can go two ways, one can either try to fight against the sheer massive sky, and t he people who I saw that, were loud, they were convinced that they were not only artists, but ARTISTS, they were conquering the sky. When I eventually saw a Clifford Still outside of Arnson, it was in the Tate modern, and the institutional hugeness of that lost to the expansiveness of his growing up in Nodak. When I finally saw a Pollock, in MOMA, the same thing happened. The other thing you can do, is realize that you are invisible, and try to make yr work, as tiny as possible, hoping that no one will notice, that the pieces will be safe against it.
5. I connect this wanting to be safe against the landscape (a v. Canadian attitude, N.B. Atwood Survival), with wanting to be safe against people. The scale of paintings and sculptures 10 feet tall towering over me, seemed so jockish, so cocksure, so phallocentric. It seemed to be the same attitude of people that kicked the shit out of me in highschool. (and Ryan McCourt calling me a fag on my blog, or saying comment verification was for fags doesn’t do much to change my opinion)
6. Exceptions to the size question: the machine glint of Judd, who I kind of put into the building camp, because they don’t seem to be made by men; the big Twombiles, because they seem to be one life’s work, these tiny scribbles containing small things, Newman because they are about the mysteries of g-d and g-d is supposed to terrify you, Andre because of their small scale components, Noland because his best work reminds me of wall paper, or paintings made from scrolls, or something human and decorative.
7. Looking at these huge scale things, looking at the sky, looking at jockbodies, none of them include me. Modernism I think tries to make it about the object: WCW was so wise about so many things, but when he said no ideas but things, he gave birth to this way of looking at the world (he being an pediatrician, he must have known that ideas and things grow much like people, and I kept thinking about that, when I grew up in Edmonton learning about modernism, having modernism thrust upon me. When I discovered artists who talked like me, thot like me, when I discovered theory and thinking that dovetailed with how I viewed things, I came out of the closet…my post structuralism then is a way of saying, no things but ideas. Does it work or does it look good are different questions then is it good.
8. So I stopped looking at modernism. There were other things. I found an art history that included me. I went off and looked at Joyce Weiland's caribou, installations (Cady Noland, Felix Gonzales Torres), paintings of deep Zen rigour (Martin made me hypnotized in London), work made by machines (minimalism) or people who wanted to be machines (Warhol’s films), obscene work, (Sue Williams, my lonesome cowboy) funny work (prince’s joke paintings), work that wasn’t work (Ruscha’s photo books). Work I found in thrift stores, in junkyards (the biggest of these, the new topographers told me how I wanted to shoot was all right), on the street and on street corners. Work who’s ambition was no more then tourist post cards. I said things like, I want my photos to look like the kind of things you see in real estate windows, or I like to be bored, or I would fuck that. I clattered about for people whose work was ignored, or wasn’t talked about. I developed my own tautologies, my own prejudices, and pretended I had none. LA was better than New York, Craft outside a trangressive feminist context was suspect, professionalism didn’t matter, carefully not to exoticise, but work done by the other, or in non traditional contexts was more interesting, we were living in a post studio age, the most interesting questions happen with bodies and language, and most importantly, and the least examined, the work of 20th century sculpture. (There were other prejudices, shit that looked like shit, and it took an artist I loved, to sit me down, and point out what realism meant, and where it was going, for to me understands easel painting again.)
9. I wrote a bit about what I thought of 20th century sculpture, on my blog. That essay with pictures became my first attempt at reworking my prejudices, sorting out what it meant to look at sculpture in a 20th century. It became a metonymy for my general tastes, and how those tastes became blocks. This is my attempt to work thru the blocks. I will quote a bit of it here. “The problem is that it wasn’t a 2D vs. 3D thing, just that the most impt or interesting 3D objects in the 20th century were something else”—and then I make the usual post modern list: Duchamp, Picasso, Andre, Koons, Hirst, Oppenhiemer, Johns, Warhol, Cornell, Arte Povera, Hesse.
10. Look at the narrative there—it is about the body, or narrative, or meta-concerns, or about saying fuck you, or talking about how much you like commerce or pussy or the way the space works or little girls in pigtails. About how much you are scared of the work itself. None of those work in that list could be discussed formally. The formal creation or absorption of work is something that I have a very hard time processing. Edmonton loves Clement Greenberg, so I have a hard time not mentioning him here. He kept saying that his life and his work were different things. But they weren’t. Who he fucked, how much he drank, his mental illness were all part of how he wrote. When I write about Kurelek, I am writing about my faith and my prarieness and my sadness. When I curate a Ed Ruscha show, I talk about how ambiguous the command function in language makes me feel. When I take photos of pretty boys I will never fuck, it is as much about my aspieness as it is about my queerness. The narratives I construct about 20th century sculpture are similar. They are about the central isolation I feel daily.
11. Or something else. I ended up saying in the comments that I thot the goal of art in the 21st century, was to stand up to life magazine or the national Enquirer, just as I have said in conversation that the best photos being published today were done by Us Magazine. It’s a cheap shock tactic, no matter how much I agree with it. When I talk about formal things, in criticism, it is a way to step back, and make people consider the art w/o context. When people talk about the formalism of Serrano’s lovely gold colour and don’t talk about piss, they are playing a shell game. When people mention classical ideals of beauty in the photos of Mappelthorpe, but don’t talk about how delicious the cock emerging from those polyester trousers looks, they are being disingenuous. (Here is an essay to be written: Mapplethorpe and Food Stagers: A Formalist Critique) When I wrote about triangles and colour, when placing a McGinley photo of someone pissing in 2006, I was both parodying and calling attention to the formalist desire to geld eros from art history.
12. Bullshit, actually—deep bullshit, because the minute you look at my photos, you see both abstract and colour shots. Formalist work is deeply impt to my practice. Even my abstracting language, my making the formal object as part of language, is about the object, and not about anything else. Even if I am not painting, even if I am making the formalist imagery, via an intercessory device, even if the discourse of my photos quotes Don Williams or Barthes Camera Lucida more then it quotes Greenberg there is an element of his life omnipresent in my work. Pater Familias, in a way—oedipal desires are hard to kill
13. I have written about abstract art, on the blog, for the gateway, I have written about formal concerns in paintings that are representational. I can talk about how a line works, or how two colours interact. I have learnt this skill since childhood, where I got books called Art for Young People, one volume for each artist. The Rembrandt one had a cartographic map of Rembrandt’s Polish Rider; one of them spent a page talking about use of colour in one of Picasso’s harlequin paintings. I remember Christmas in my grandmother’s place, where she would tell me how to work thru an image, and I remember the books she got me. A big coffee table on the impressionists, where I learnt both about how colour and tone worked (in Degas, Vauiilard, Bonnard, Manet and Gaugian, esp.), and what happens when a schoolyard of 4th graders sees tits in any variation. I can talk to Scott Cumberland while looking at half of a Graham Peacock show, and say which colours work, why the work, which lines don’t work, why they don’t work. Texture is difficult for me, sculpture is nearly impossible.
14. I cannot tell you why one steel sculpture works, and one doesn’t. I cannot tell you why sculpture works and one doesn’t. The old joke is sculpture is what you back into when looking at a painting. But I can talk about the holes in Moore, who I kind of like, or the grain of wood in Hepworth (actually I love Hepworth deeply, for a whole bunch of reasons, the way absence becomes presence, the tension of some of the strings, the human scale). Its kind of like how, no matter how large it is, I can really get into Nevelson, because I can take the way the elements work together out of my head, and play around with them. So much of the work that could be considered sculptural in the 20th century, escape both my formalist skillset, and become intimidating. I keep thinking though, if I wanted to be, as intellectually honest as possible, I should spend more time with the formal. If I wanted to be as open to discourses as I claim to be, I should spend time wrestling and sorting out what it means for me, to have worked that is so formal.
15. Let’s Drop all pretense for a while though. Let’s summarize my objections. Abstract Steel Sculpture is a dead narrative. Abstract Steel Sculpture is too large. Abstract Steel Sculpture foreground formalism in a way that is unhelpful. Abstract Steel Sculpture is ugly. Abstract Steel Sculpture is monontous. Abstract Steel Sculpture is enough of a closed set that it prevents people from riffing on it. Abstract Steel Sculpture is intimidating. Abstract Steel Sculpture doesn’t care about colour. Abstract Steel Sculpture thrusts. Abstract Steel Sculpture is kind of silly. Abstract Steel Sculpture is monumental. Abstract Steel Sculpture requires a studio. Abstract Steel Sculpture is not open to other meanings. Abstract Steel Sculpture is all about Art for Arts Sake. Abstract Steel Sculpture demands its own discourse, even in public space.
16. Dead Narratives often require someone interested in reviving them. The Daguerreotype w3as a dead medium until Close found it useful. The idea then, that narratives can be killed, is one that is dangerous to the narrotology of ideas. I do not find that Steel Sculpture fits my needs. But that doesn’t mean it is not with out its virtues. And maybe, thinking about it, looking at it, actually following someone who knows about how it is made, and what it means, might mean the narrative will be revived in my head. Steph Jonsson tried to do that, but it was dark, and Ceaser Avaria’s work right now near the University LRT, is gorgeous. He might do it.
17. When I say too large, I am talking about Serra, I think. Who is the one person who is famous enough to make an impact? Serra scares the shit out of me, when looking at it, my dick turtles into my belly. I find it arrogant, and explicitly about his own ego. The tilted arc controversy was never about audience, and all about Serra. But I am being arrogant here. I have no problem with content being isolating, with Burden being crucified on a Volkswagen or with Accocini masturbating in a gallery, and I have no problem with artists having huge egos. I think the argument about Burden or Accocini is an argument about private versus public space, but the general thrust that artists should confront audiences and public spaces is one that I hold dear. Also, it’s not all Serra. The desktop sized or even palm sized experiments in form that sometime happen w. Caro or Smith, or even the epic marble odalisques of Moore, mean that I can handle large sizes.
18. Foregrounding formalism. If I was going to be truly postmodern about this, I would say that any narrative can be helpful or not, it is what you do with it that matters. Maybe I could find a use for formal ways of seeing. Formalism makes you look. It means that you have to pay attention not to politics or theory or history or identity or desire or the body or anything else, and actually see what the artist is trying to present visually. Also, with sculpture, it means you have to use your body. For someone who’s body is so unruly, maybe we can take the intersection between walking and the looking, that is vital to large scale sculpture, and use it as a kind of meditation. How my eyes work, how my body works, how you want my eyes to work, how you want my body to work, like the dancer relationship to a choreographer?
19. Ugly isn’t a kind word, and its not a descriptive word. I am thinking here, of corten steel, which much local sculptors, and Serra, both smiths, and Caro used extensively. I don’t like the look of it, as an art material, I kind of like the look of it, in relation to the high level bridge (someone can tell me that isn’t corten). I wish that someone could write about it or tell me about it in a way I find valuable or interesting. Its not even jarring in a way that I can appreciate, and the patina turns into a rusty orange, I think the decay of machines can do interesting things, I like the way Chamberlain worked with cars, and I think one of reasons that Hepworth, Marini, Nevelson, etc appeal to me, is that their use of material is different. (I don’t find Ryan McCourt’s Ganesh ugly,but I like Ganesh, his story, and his narratives, I don’t look at it formally)
20. It isn’t. Im wrong. Hide and Caro and McCourt and Alvarez look different. I am being lazy and intellectually dishonest by claiming otherwise.
21. One of the things that I talk about when I talk about steel sculptors to people, is that I mention it is the only non religious institution that I know of that talks about apostolic succession as much as the Catholics. Caro blessed Hide, who blessed Edmonton. Amen. One of the things that I value, deeply, is a cross-historical, trans-national, polysemic discourse. As trans-national the discourse is, it isn’t polysemic. But then neither do the lace makers of northern Belgium, or the icon makers of Russia. I really love Belgian lace and Russian iconmakers. Something’s don’t need to be riffed on.
22. I still find it intimidating, but that might be my own fucked up nature.
23. No one who quotes Greenberg to me, as talked about Kraus’ finding of him stripping the colour off of those Smith works. I love colour, I love paint and decoration, gilding the lilly or painting the roses red. It connects to the monotonous element, and also maybe the monumental element. I think one of the things you have to choose is what color things have to be—clothes or painting a room or making a work of art. One of the reasons I can read new new painting, and am slowly starting to slowly even like it, is that it is deeply colorful. Some of the sculptors I am talking about now how to use colour, and if you look at the sculpture gallery, here in Edmonton, you can see painted work. But the stripping pisses me off, not only because it is a critic using his power to move beyond where he should, but also because it makes it all looks the same. Sometimes the natural variation of the steel, or the industr4ial markings or something likes that, show up, but more often they are disguised. One of the things artists have been working on since the death of modernism, is the reclaiming of decoration, that is a task I am on board for, and one that requires colour.
24. For someone who loves cock as much as I do, I should be used to thrusting.
25. Calling it silly is as dismissive as someone calling photography a hobby is is. I think tht that is unforgivable. I apologize for that.
26. When I was in London, there were thousands of sculptures, mostly from the 19th century, of men. Mostly heroes of long forgotten colonial wars, I kept wondering, who these men where, what did they do, why is there a monument here? I went to Hyde Park, and saw Prince Albert’s Monument. I made sure that I was photographed in each corner, the animals the only difference between Africa, Asia, America and Europe. I knew that the monument was about the crimes of imperialism, but it was so well designed and constructed, the narratives so clear, and the variations both prominent and subtle, that I kind of fell in love with it. The work was as camp as Christmas. When I was in Washington, and saw the monuments there, the politics were central. Lincoln provided a way for the citizens to gather, Jefferson provided a way for them to think, and Maya Lin for the Citizens to mourn…they provided a public space, a third space. The most monumental abstract steel sculptures here (Caro at the U, Ledbetters Northern Lights) do none of these things. They become a monument to their own vanity.
27. Not requiring a studio has become a pride thing; an ideological call to work that can be put into yr pocket. Sometimes shit needs to be big.
28. Being about the thing itself is a call to awareness, a meditative relationship to objecthood. I don’t think we do that enough in current practice, and I know that I don’t do that enough in my practice. I am reminded of Rachel’s obsession with surface, and how important the exactitude is of her, that the object is as impt s the thing itself, or Judd’s constant presence, through drawings and contact with machines, or the millions of dollars Koons spends on his studios. Rachel and Koons attach other narrative, after the surface is taken care of. But Judd doesn’t. Judd is only about the thing itself, and I love Judd.
29. I don’t know why I find Art for Arts Sake so frightening. It’s a dark alley, that if I go down, I am afraid I will not emerge from the other side of. The other people, who are at the end of that alley, seem so sure, and so boisterous, I am sure I won’t fit in anyway.
30. Demanding to be heard. What is wrong with that?
I ended this, after 3500 words, with a discussion of abstract steel sculpture, because it began as an argument with the North Edmonton Sculpture Workshop. I wanted to tell them that I had been thinking about them, that they attitudes and beliefs about art were transformative, that they had forced to confront me about how I felt. I wanted to apologize to them, because I don’t think I have been just or fair, honest about where I came from, and the narratives that I was engaging with were disingenuous. I don’t expect them to respond at all, but I wanted them to know.
