Fake protest signs found in an unnamed faction's subterranean bunker, November, 1962, East Berlin.
ART OR IDIOCY?
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Fake protest signs found in an unnamed faction's subterranean bunker, November, 1962, East Berlin. |
'Artists against anything:' In the art world at the moment, the theme to adopt, if you want to seem a bit out there, is protest. It might be rural pagans against modern cities, miners against Thatcher, or Cubans against U.S. imperialism -- you just temporarily take over an already established political rhetoric and try and restage it in terms of a contemporary art installation."
-- Matthew Collings, Art Crazy Nation, 2002
I've been seeing a lot of dead animals in art lately. Mainly they are used as attempts to express impotent rage at the thought of animals slaughtered for fat, evil, meat-eating Americans who support the president and the war. That's the stupid kind, and if you are successful at it, you only end up as good as Sue Coe, who equates the death of a helpless chicken with the Holocaust. I saw a painting at the BFA show of a dead beaver washed ashore, a trail of blood coming from its poor, little mouth. Man, that beaver's had it. And then I went to an opening in Pilsen and someone else had a sculpture of a dead beaver bleeding from his mouth, laying on a bed in the same compositional arrangement. Man, that beaver's had it, as well. These aren't particularly amazing pieces, I just think they're funny, especially since they aren't saying anything more than the fact that a beaver is over and done with. One was extremely inane and the other had this weird attempted participation with the tradition of Alaskan folk art going on.
Other than dead beavers, it seems the two big things going on now are what you typically have when artists don't know what to do: politics, and resurrecting old ideas. You either drop what you're doing to make war-related stuff, which is a relief because you weren't doing anything anyway. Or you decide to start talking about the recent past. Plus that whole "is painting dead or not?" thing is always a good time-filler.
As for the '80s, maybe Chicago is also into the retro thing running through pop culture and art now, or maybe it's just because it's 20 years behind and what seems like hot new painting is really just that. Neo Geo is finally getting round to us. Neo Geo is a style of '80s art by famous guys including Jeff Koons, Ashley Bickerton, Jonathan Lasker, and Peter Halley. The new show at Betty Rymer has a lot of Neo Geo aping in it and everyone is going to see it and think it's marvelous because the only Neo Geo they might have seen is in Artforum's recent two-part masturbation about the '80s.
Politics in art is a naive idealism, and the "painting is dead" dispute is just boring. Political artists are mainly kids with privileged backgrounds, like those going to the nation's top art school, who want to feel genuine and substantive, or they are oldsters wanting to tap into youthful energy. No generalization is true, but most artist/activists involved in politics care less about the world or saving lives than they do about themselves and their friends and whatever sort of immature delusions of grandeur they have wrapped themselves up in. It's not about being a humanitarian; it's about taking the moral high ground and feeling a sense of superiority. Real humanitarians are the people who run ramshackle hospitals in depressed villages only to get killed. That's sacrifice, not giving up red meat or getting arrested in front of the post office. If you really were in a police state you would be dragged in an alley and shot in the back of the head or thrown in jail and tortured, with no bail, trial, or phone call. If that were the environment that protests were taking place in, then it might be heroic and admirable. But as it stands, it's just annoying and misguided. Which leads to the question: What the fuck does any of this have to do with art, anyway? Nothing. The only piece of art I can think of that has had any sort of political resonance is Picasso's "Guernica." But that is a unique case, leading to many ideas beyond "war is bad."
"Nothing but absolutely nothing is changed by whatever type of painting, or sculpture, or happening you produce. All the shows of Angry Arts will not prevent a single napalm bomb from being dropped. We must face the fact that art is unsuited as a political tool." -- Hans Haacke, Artforum, April 1968
Illustration by Erik Wenzel