“To work on language, to labour in the materiality of that which society regards as a means of contact and understanding, isn’t that at one stroke to declare oneself a stranger (étranger) to language?”*—Julia Kristeva
*translated by Toril Moi in her book Sexual/Textual Politics
Paul Butler. Fundraising Edition, 2009
As timely a work as ever was…
Merlin Carpenter is an artist who knows well the importance of artist statements, press releases, etc…
“The last The Opening exhibition was at Simon Lee Gallery in London. After doing my paintings at the opening I left and went home. Apparently right at the end of the event three anarchist graffiti kids turned up and wanted to make an intervention in the exhibition. The gallery director would not let them in, and an argument ensued. They were claiming to have the right to enter as my work was bogus graffiti and this was a posh boss class hellhole. The Police were called and the three guys walked off. That’s what I heard, I do not know what really happened or why, but this was all in the context of anger on the eve of the London G20 demonstrations, and with Bernie Madoff’s London operation located above Simon Lee Gallery. The Opening shows since 2007 seem to produce the impression that they are participatory happenings, and then produce rage when they turn out not to be. The audience seem to feel compelled to add to the paintings with their fingers, trainers etc. This has happened almost every time, even in the secure atmosphere of Mercedes-Benz in Berlin. Arrival of anarchists to tag the show seems like the next step, and though out of my hands I do acknowledge this as primary meaning production. It is starting to make me look like Adorno in ‘68 so it’s a good thing that no one will find out about it as no one reads this far into press releases.” Read more.
Mierle Laderman Ukeles, “Maintenance Art Performance Series”, 1973-74
Photograph of performance at the Wadsworth Atheneum.
Courtesy of the Ronald Feldman Gallery, New York.
This and many other works arose directly from Ukeles’s “Manifesto for Maintenance Art, 1969! Proposal for an Exhibition ‘Care’” a pdf of which is available through her gallery here. This text, written as a proposal for an exhibition, marked the naming of Maintenance Art, a word for Ukeles’s soon-to-emerge art practice after a frustrating period of trying to reconcile being both an artist and a mother.
As I wrote, with the artist’s close collaboration and consultation, in the catalogue for “WACK!: Art and the Feminist Revolution”:
Written in Philadelphia in October 1968 “in a near rage and at the same time with eerie calm, in one sitting” the manifesto calls for the integration of feminism, environmentalism, and labor activism with personal experience.”
- WACK! Art and the Feminist Revolution (Los Angeles: The Museum of Contemporary Art; and Cambridge, Massachusetts: The MIT Press, 2004), 311. (Quote from Ukeles, “25 Years Later,” Ukeles/Matrix 137, exhibition brochure published by Wadsworth Atheneum, Hartford, Connecticutt, 2002.)
As I was chatting with an artist friend yesterday, I had one of those “Aha!” moments regarding this blog and its contents. (Even as I post, as often and as broadly as possible, I am constantly asking myself why. Why do this?) Back when I was a young art writer, I used the word “ineffable” a lot to describe thinking about/perceiving/being in the presence of certain works of art. (The best works seemed to elicit this response.) My fall-back position was often to lament the limitations of language to talk about art and adopt a rather melancholic attitude overall, regarding the entire enterprise of writing about art with some degree of hopelessness — even as I was consistently (and professionally) engaged with it.
Yes, it was lazy. But I could not think my way out of it for some time.
I read Julia Kristeva and was drawn to her ideas about the Semiotic, as that which exists “pre-language” — pre-Oedipal state, pre-Mirror Stage, pre-awareness of differentiation prompting the need for communication. I still believe that such a state exists (even moreso since I have had the opportunity to spend time with infants), but it is difficult for one within language to conceive of something that exists without language.
Getting back to my conversation with my friend…I was finally able to articulate for myself how I have somehow been able to reconcile my conviction regarding the Semiotic with my (no longer melancholic) interest in language, especially within the realm of art. It is simply this: nowhere is it more evident to me that language is an adaptive, mutating, and dynamic system than in (some) writing about art. Art regularly confronts us with experiences that leave us struggling to find the words to describe them. Or even questioning what relationship language can hope to have to art. We are acutely aware of being at the threshold of language while deeply engaged with its most primary informing impulses: the need and/or desire to communicate. (“I want to tell you about this thing.”)
Some artists recogize the need to create a discourse, a foundation in language, into which their work can be received. That discourse does not necessarily exist until they make it. And so these artists write. And they make art out of language.
So, through this blog (a word that was itself born only recently), I write, and I present what these artists write. And I learn why I do it through talking with friends.
John Baldessari, I Will Not Make Any More Boring Art, 1971
“In 1971, Baldessari was commissioned by the Nova Scotia College of Art and Design in Canada to create an original, on-site work. Unable to make the journey himself, he suggested that the students voluntarily write the phrase “I will not make any more boring art” on the gallery walls. Inspired by the work’s completion – the students covered the walls with the phrase – Baldessari committed his own version of the piece to videotape. Like an errant schoolboy, he dutifully writes, “I will not make any more boring art” over and over again in a notebook for the duration of the tape. In an ironic disjunction of form and content, Baldessari’s methodical, repetitive exercise deliberately contradicts the point of the lesson – to refrain from creating “boring” art.” (text courtesy Ubuweb)
John Baldessari, I Will Not Make Any More Boring Art, 1971. Video (black and white, sound), 13:06 min. Gift of the artist. © 2009 John Baldessari. Courtesy Electronic Arts Intermix (EAI), New York (image courtesy MoMA)
View the video on Ubuweb
Dan Graham, Figurative, 1965
as it appeared in the March 1968 edition of Harper’s Bazaar
Ceal Floyer, Monochrome Till Receipt (White), 1999
Ink on paper
240 x 60 mm
on paper, print
Collection Tate, purchased 2009
At first glance, this work seems directly related to Dan Graham’s Figurative, 1965. (See above.) However, unlike Graham’s magazine-based work, which plays on multiple meanings of the word “figure,” Floyer conceptually evokes something else, something that may or may not exist in the world outside the frame: the assemblage of all-white products as denoted by the grocery receipt—the “monochrome” referred to in the title.
Conjuring an old chestnut of Conceptualism—”if something exists in language, does it need to exist in another form to be a legitimate work of art?”—Floyer’s work is also deeply connected to the history of painting, gesturing to the monochrome paintings of Ryman, Rauschenberg, Reinhardt, and Klein (not to mention the “achrome” paintings of Manzoni). The “still life” suggested by the objects listed in the receipt also conjures Morandi.
Graham’s word-play mash-up brings together the discourses of accounting (where numbers are “figures”), art history (where a form positioned in relation to a ground is said to be “figurative” and the term “figure” also refers to the body), literature (in which we have “figures” of speech), and places them in the context of print media, which can be said to engage all three, albeit with “populist” or commercial intentions. In another nod to the intellectual concerns of Conceptualism, even the generalized act of thinking is denoted by the word “figure”—as in, “I figure this thing that looks like an ad in a magazine might be a work of art!”
Podcast of “Flarf vs. Conceptual,” a reading organized by Kenneth Goldsmith at the Whitney Museum of American Art in conjunction with the recent Jenny Holzer exhibition “PROTECT PROTECT”
Especially memorable is the reading by Christian Bök
“It comes to this: the use of a man, by himself and thus by others, lies in how he conceives his relation to nature… . If he is contained within his nature as he is participant in the larger force, he will be able to listen, and his hearing through himself will give him secrets objects share. And by an inverse law his shapes will make their own way… . This is not easy. Nature works from reverence, even in her destructions (species go down with a crash). But breath is man’s special qualification as animal. Sound is a dimension he has extended. Language is one of his proudest acts… . I keep thinking, it comes to this: culture displacing the state.” —Charles Olson
