Art Power
Boris Groys
MIT Press, 2008

By Eric Zimmerman

Art Power by Boris Groys, MIT Press, 2008.

How will history look back at the past decade or so of contemporary art production? It seems inevitable that exhaustive pluralism and the once mighty market will play some role in the report, as the increasing forces of capitalism and radical secularization continue to march their way around the globe. Pluralism renders everything relative, making judgment impossible and, as Boris Groys argues in his latest book of essays Art Power, making discourse “ultimately futile.” “This fact alone,” he claims, “is enough to put the dogma of pluralism in question.”

Art Power is a diverse collection of essays that span a wide range of topics from curatorship and criticism to social realist and cultural studies. Nonetheless, Groys allows a few central themes to thread through the topically diverse texts. “On the Curatorship” tackles the rising role of the curator in contemporary art and the iconoclastic strategies that he claims lies at the heart of what it means to curate, or to use the authors word, “abuse” art objects. “The curator,” he writes, “is an agent of art’s profanation, its secularization, its abuse.” Placing the curator in direct league with the art market, Groys deftly connects the curator’s interdependence with or codependence on the market, to the abuse of images and the preservation of the dominant iconophilia. Placing contemporary art within the context of urbanism, Post-communism, new technologies, and the Modernist revolution, Groys skillfully develops this concept of modern and contemporary art production as a form of iconoclasm throughout the book.

Grappling with art criticism, he proclaims that critics might instead be called “art commentators,” as they effectively prepare “protective text-clothes” for works of art. Echoing the ideas of James Elkins in his 2003 text, What Happened To Art Criticism? Groys admits that art criticism is perhaps, from the start, “texts that are not necessarily written to be read,” “…at once indispensable and superfluous.” The line between artist and critic has disappeared, he concludes, and the increasingly blurry lines between artists, critics and curators are headed in the same direction. The result of the former for arts writers is a freedom unmatched by writers in any other field: freedom to pair personal narratives with scholarly knowledge, while combining multiple theories and stylistic devices within the same text.

For Groys, art is inseparable from the engines that drive it, be they economic, political, or cultural. Art is powerful and always political, as it exists in a world that is becoming increasingly visual. Our pluralist contemporary art world is a product of our capitalist economic system; a world in which difference and paradox is celebrated, often at the expense of discourse and judgment. This call for renewed discourse and decisive judgment is refreshing and vital, especially as we move forward and begin to ask the questions about what it means to make, exhibit, and write about visual art in contemporary culture. If, as Groys suggests, every thesis is continually met by its anti-thesis, than the groundwork for such questions still remains uncertain, but his willingness to make engaging arguments and judgments himself is a step towards finding more stable platforms for discourse.

Eric Zimmerman is an artist living and working in Austin.

Jeff Elrod
The Modern Art Museum, Fort Worth
Closed March 29

By Katie Anania

Jeff Elrod, Endgame, 1994, Acrylic on canvas, 79 x 97 inches. Collection of Mark Rosman and Jacqueline Corcoran, Washington, D. C. Courtesy The Modern Art Museum of Fort Worth.

Focus: Jeff Elrod at the Modern Art Museum of Fort Worth left me divided. One part of me became the art history apologist concerned with materials and process. Elrod begins each work with drawings that he creates on a computer using a mouse; he then fractures them with simple graphic programs (such as Illustrator, Freehand and, more recently, Photoshop) into shuddering, seismic compositions heavily indebted to the behemoths of abstraction. Finally, he projects the compositions onto canvases and carves them out with acrylic paint and an X-Acto knife. In short, Elrod explores ways in which computers retard the hand. His work manifests an obstruction of gesture within the painted image. [great] (2003) is an example par excellence; white letters, starting with the word great, cascade against a black ground, descending into total unreadability because of the awkwardness of the computer mouse.

Enter the second half of my divided critical self. This other half is a cynic, a litigator, a naysayer nursing skepticism about what I believe to be an inflated public delight about Elrod’s work. Passages appear cheeky and sophomoric, and this body of work seems annoyingly devoid of anything but the most empty of concessions to the history of painting. The Out Door (2005), rather than adhering to Elrod’s layered dance of computer-drawn lines and awkward hooky loops, positions a vaguely figural white passage near a pink parallelogram on a black ground. These bright forms float inside a mocking black ooze like Cy Twombly’s stepchildren, bearing the “authentic” traces of the artist’s hand and refuting that authenticity through digital means. It’s brooding, a tad adolescent, but not unpleasant. Maybe this is why I think too much has been made of these things: their re-play of abstract drawing goes no further than affected teen artifice. They contain an archive of a digital practice now long obsolete, and it’s too much like stumbling upon my own bad Paint drawings or first emails from tweenhood.

Works like Endgame (1994), a mostly turquoise work that combines a Barnett Newman-esque zip with dancing characters from the video game Space Invaders, confound both halves of me as well. Here Elrod better marries the historical freightedness of painting with the simultaneously embodied and alienating (ha!) qualities of human-computer interaction, but the present-past overlay seems too pat: behold the specters of the 40s and the 80s! Both sides of this “divided critic” suspect that viewers like Elrod’s work for the same reason they like Christopher Wool’s: it feels masculine but also effete, embedded in art historical narrative but also not at all timeless (in fact, pleasingly “retro”). Their seeming spontaneity and go-anywhereness (Elrod often produces some of the paintings when they arrive for installation) makes everyone happy: history and ephemerality, reverence and cheekiness, meet in a single package. I, however, choose in the end to side with my jaundiced double. Elrod’s play with history intentionally mocks it, but the retarded fun leaves me cold.

Katie Anania is a curatorial researcher at Fluent~Collaborative and an assistant editor of ...might be good.

Phantom Sightings
Museo Alameda, San Antonio
Through June 14

By Laura Lindenberger Wellen

Adrian Esparza, One and the Same, 2005, Serape, plastic trim, and nails, 60 x 144 inches. El Paso Museum of Art, purchase with funds provided by Robert U. and Mabel O. Lipscomb Foundation Endowment. © Adrian Esparza, photo © El Paso Museum of Art.

Only a few angry apparitions here, the phantoms in Phantom Sightings are invoked by artists who prod presence and absence to conceptualize what it means to live in an urban space, to be young, to have a complicated relationship to one’s identity in the United States, on the border, in connections to the past. Sharing an ability to play with historical precedents and categories, these artists tease the seriousness of the art world, drawing from the work of artists in the Chicano Movement while often walking away from overtly political models. Punk is at play, but with space for works about border trauma and violence to resonate with heartbreaking pathos.

On the front cover of the Phantom Sightings catalogue, Christina Fernandez’s photograph of a Laundromat, part of her series Lavandería, shows no trace of human presence—lending itself to an assumption of emptiness. As the photograph wraps around the book, though, a partially-obscured figure appears. Throughout the Lavandería series, in corners, behind pillars, always faceless, people are captured in mundane moments. I am sure there is a poetic metaphor to connect this anonymous person to the systematized marginalization and economic exploitation of Mexican Americans in the United States, but there’s no need to burden these moments with this trope. Fernandez doesn’t seem to expect you to make this jump either: the photos are as much about enjoying the graffiti covering the Laundromat windows as they are about the night, the brightly lit washing machines, and the partially obscured people who are living their lives and doing their laundry in these urban, ubiquitous non-places.

Ken Gonzales-Day’s work is also about who is present and who is absent. Drawn to his old postcards and photographs, I initially saw them as articles of nostalgia, perhaps treasures culled from antique shops. Pulled in, I wondered what these crowds of people were doing. And then, in a gut-felt instant, I realized. In Erased Lynchings, Gonzales-Day’s removal of the violated bodies of lynching victims left my eye to roam, searching through the crowds and looking for some evidence of monstrousness. And yet, the images also disallow such simplistic readings of evil. In looking, I became a spectator of the crowd—a witness to its ugliness, cloaked, as it was, in community entertainment, vigilante “justice” and summer picnics. The combination of absence and presence is profoundly unnerving.

Other works irreverently send up art’s canon. Photographs of Juan Capistran break-dancing on a Carl Andre floor sculpture, for instance, draw on guerilla performance art and urban dance, literally on top of the cold heart of minimalism. In One and the Same (2005), Adrian Esparza pulls a loose thread from a serape, fashioning the string into a wall composition. The string outlines the forms from an Audley Dean Nichols painting of 1922, View of El Paso at Sunset, using the colors of the serape to refashion the landscape of El Paso. (Remember those school projects of stretching strands of fabric across a pegboard? Yes, string sculpture abstraction via serape!)

The 1970s and 1980s linger with the curators’ inclusion of Asco, an L.A.-based conceptual and performance art group that emerged from the student movements, race riots, and Chicano civil rights movement of the 1960s and 1970s. Asco became a Chicano avant-garde of sorts and a precursor and influence for many of the other works in the show. Patssi Valdez’s film Hot Pink (c. 1974), saturated with pink tones, also acts to historicize youth culture in L.A., with its shots of young, heavily made-up men and women, hugging, touching, kissing with Warholesque disinterest.

Many of these artists are grappling with the ghosts of the Chicano past and the problems implicit in identity-themed shows. Cruz Ortiz reportedly expressed reluctance to be included in “another Chicano show.” But this is not just “another Chicano show.” This is a show that notes its indebtedness to Chicano artists of el Movimiento and then moves lyrically, wickedly, laughingly away from any expected imagery, instead getting at the fantastic complexity of a group of people united as much by their urban and artistic contexts in the 2000s as by their complex relationships to the categories of Mexican-American or Chicano. The ghosts of the Chicano Movement and of Mexican American history in the United States linger in the galleries, definitely; Phantom Sightings makes it clear, though, that those phantoms not only leave an important legacy, but also inform a complex and exciting future.

Laura Lindenberger Wellen is a Ph.D. student in the Department of Art and Art History at The University of Texas at Austin. She is currently writing about Southern artistic debates and communities during the 1930s.

Kehinde Wiley
Artpace, San Antonio
Through May 3

By Dan Boehl

Kehinde Wiley, Three Wise Men Greeting Entry Into Lagos, 2008, Oil on canvas, 72 x 96 inches. Courtesy the artist and Deitch Projects.

In Roberta Smith’s New York Times review of Kehinde Wiley, the World Stage: Africa, Lagos~Dakar at the Studio Museum in Harlem, she points out that Wiley’s conceptualism may have driven his career farther than his skills can carry him. In some ways I agree. I think part of Wiley’s success is couched in the fact that he tries to reinvent American racial stereotypes, blending the “high” tropes of “Old Master” paintings with the “low” culture of Stateside street life, making depictions of black males appealing and marketable to collectors and museum curators. Think of it as kids with tapes of radio edit NWA. Wiley’s art is safe for white people.

The World Stage: Africa, Lagos~Dakar is now on the walls of the Artpace San Antonio showroom. For the series, Wiley set up temporary studios in Lagos and Dakar. He immersed himself in the culture of Africa, met the subjects he later painted, and got a feel for the style, music, and culture of the locals. To create the portraits, instead of copying the poses of “Old Masters” as he has done in the past, Wiley allowed his African subjects to choose poses based on public sculptures that celebrate the two African countries’ independence from colonial rule.

As with other Wiley portraits, the depictions of the African men are monumental in scale. The canvases are clean and flat. There are no visible brushstrokes or signs of the maker's hand, which may be a product of Wiley's workshop rather than a reflection of his own painting prowess. “Traditional” African designs and patterns float behind the sitters, overwhelming any individuality he might have bestowed upon them. Even their clothing, whether a traditional dashiki or a Warhol camouflage print hoody, is rendered, like everything else, mute, inconsequential by the engulfing patterns.

Race, of course, isn’t just an issue of black and white. Issues of race in Africa go far beyond Wiley’s portrayal of African-American Blackness, yet, when painting African subjects he in no way updates his central trope. Longtime colonial rule, tribal identifications, abject poverty and the intersection of tribal, Christian and Muslim beliefs are only some of the issues that inform race in Africa. For example, the clash of ethnic tribes in Southern Sudan caused the massacre of over two hundred thousand people in Darfur. Wiley seems unwilling to recognize the complexities of “blackness” in order to deal with subjects from differing countries facing different racial obstacles.

Wiley is undertaking similar projects in China and India. The World Stage: Brazil is currently on display at Roberts & Tilton Gallery in California. I imagine from there he can travel to Ukraine or Venezuela. His system is infinitely repeatable. Wiley’s trope of “Old Master” reinvention of Africa-American males once seemed poignant, even if it was shallow. His paintings expressed the nobility and integrity of African-Americans while poking fun at the Western forces that subjugated them in the first place. But in much the same manner that commercial rap and hip-hop stars allowed market forces to stagnate their music, Wiley’s growth as an artist has been trumped by his gallery sales. This may be less of an issue when he sticks to American subjects and themes. But Wiley’s subjects and immersion techniques in the World Stage: Africa, Lagos~Dakar walks the line between Orientalism and exploitation.

Dan Boehl lives in Austin, where he is working on a post-petroleum children's novel.