For me the question is: does progress occur inside of an art context? or more importantly, but also more tenuous and impossible, can it? and if not, then what?
There is something in the introduction to the text that reads, “Subversive positions are fragile and context-dependent. They are always at risk of turning into legitimations.”
This seems like a very good summary of what I see occurring. So little art is made in the subversive space because the market leaves artist’s and viewers in such a tenuous place that seeking legitimation is often as good as it gets.
Both Charles_esche and anton:
The moment I think was the most significant in Marchel Duchamp’s career (if you will) is when he invented the Rotoreliefs. He took them to an inventor’s convention (arguably a more progressive community, at least in mission) and none of them sold. Duchamp was pretty progressive as an artist, but this really seems like the place where his ideas were the most vulnerable. I don’t think this solves the problem, but it does allow you to maybe circumvent it a bit?? Raivo Puusemp left the art world, but before doing so he composed a list of people (former artists) who had also left and the alternatives that they were replacing their art practices with. A lot of the items on the list are kind of artisan and craft-based practices, but an almost equal number of them are social and political practices, or at philosphical/ideological kinds of movements.
I was talking to a curator last night. He’s someone with whom I also have a personal relationship, which I do think altered our conversation. But he said something that I feel is nevertheless interesting, and very discouraging.
In response to my lack-luster demeanor when asked about the current show of paintings in his galley, he told me that he was recently at dinner with a very well known artist, and another artist friend. Matthew Barney’s work came up and the lesser known artist started to say something about how he liked some of his projects, and not others. As my curator-friend told it, the canonized contemporary artist then cut the lesser known artist’s speech off by asking him,
“Well, what have you done.”
My friend then repeatedly explained that the paintings in question had critical acclaim in LA and that the painter was attached to some significant galleries in LA, and had shown with artist’s who are well-known and who he knew I respect.
Because of these circumstances, he felt that it was incumbent on us to come to understand why the work is good, rather that to attempt to judge it’s merits. The economic and critical/ academic/ conceptual markets would decide for us. I objected, but primarily on the assumption that progressive thinking is still the thing of value. His attitude is one that subverts and squashes progressive thinking, but reifies the system.
I am not sure if his response to me was a kind of aggressive response to a critic of his curatorial programming or if it is really the way things are going, but I definitely don’t think legitimization as commodity (material or intellectual) is enough. And I think we can even begin to discuss the commodification of progress (or progressive thinking). The art community in the states is still very much focused on capitol and prestige.
I guess all of this is to ask about the impulse to contemporary art. I still think it is an impulse toward more progressive language and thinking, but the more these things become assimilated into the pre-digested rubric, the less they seem to actually occur. The thing that I am most concerned about is the idea of an intellectual elitism that disenfranchises a lot of people, but satisfies those at its center. A lot of the projects that I consider to be most progressive and inventive are difficult to engage with because of that kind of avant-garde-new-thing-violence that accompanies them, so it is easy to believe that people are disinterested in progressive things because they are hard, rather than recognizing that what you are producing is not particularly progressive anyway. It’s incredibly easy for projects to become super saturated, and loose their effectiveness in the process. Its always a return to the problem of all utterance, which we seem to have somehow overcome without really digesting it. Deconstruction might be over, but I don’t thing that we have even begun to see its real consequences. Counterintuitively, maybe the more we ignore these consequences, in the name of moving forward, the less progress we will actually make.
