Avant-Garde, My Derrič²„
By Jacob
Weisberg
(posted Thursday, July
23, 1998)
Walking
into the SoHo branch of the Guggenheim Museum, you are received by an enormous
inflatable dominatrix lying on her back. She wears fishnet stockings and a
teddy festooned with baby doll heads and holds a whip. In other respects, the
image is that of an Asian kewpie doll--powdered face, braids, tassels, and a
silk gown. The irregularly shaped dirigible on which the photograph of this
amalgamated woman is superimposed is connected to foot pumps. From the balcony
at entrance level, you can step down on these pumps, blowing air into the
sculpture below.
Hydra
(Monument) is a self-portrait by the South Korea-born Lee Bul, one of
six finalists for the Hugo Boss Prize--a biennial competition for cutting-edge
artists sponsored by the German menswear manufacturer that takes place at the
Guggenheim Museum's SoHo branch. Lee is the most in-your-face of the group. Her
previous works include Abortion , a 1989 performance piece in which she
hung upside down and naked from the gallery ceiling, talking about her abortion
and reciting song lyrics. In another series, , she exhibited rotting fish
decorated with beads and sequins, supposedly to "create a biting satire on
women's servitude in a male-dominated culture," according to the exhibition
catalog.
Lee's approach and preoccupations are characteristic not
only of the Boss prize finalists but of contemporary conceptual art in general.
Her work is theory driven and eschews traditional technique. It is based on the
manipulation of pre-existing images rather than the coinage of new ones. By
appropriating and commenting on them, Lee, like the other artists in the Boss
show, aims at a critique of the dominant culture. The key buzzword echoing
through the catalog is "otherness," a term borrowed from formerly trendy French
literary criticism. Minus the obscurantism, the idea is that cultural
difference--racial, sexual, and national (though never religious)--is the
fundamental and brutal truth of modern existence.
Elsewhere on the left,
this view is at least subject to argument and criticism. Only in the art world
is radical multiculturalism an unquestionable dogma. There is not even a flash
of recognition of the irony that this philosophy manifests itself in a big
international art show where brings together artists of every race,
nationality, and sexual orientation to proclaim that they are despised and
ignored. But whatever the merits of essentialism as an outlook on life, its art
world fruits, as displayed in the Boss exhibition, are flavorless and
repetitive. By the end, what you have learned is that in contemporary art, "the
other" is always pretty much the same.
The Guggenheim has essentially ruled out conventional forms
such as painting, drawing, print-making, or sculpture, preferring art that is
"process-oriented" to art that is static. Four of the other five finalists
present video installations. The wonderfully named Pipilotti Rist, a Swiss who
used to be in a rock band, makes--in the guise of commenting on racy music
videos--what are essentially dull racy music videos. Her chief submission to the Boss
prize is an installation titled , an underwater sequence set to her own version
of Chris Isaak's song "Wicked Games," which Rist sings and then shrieks.
Projected in mirror image on two screens joined at right angles, it turns
images of the artist cavorting underwater along with various objects such as a
cheese grater and a TV set into a kind of giant vaginascope. Of the artists
represented, Rist is the only one who approximates a sense of humor, and it's a
fairly distant approximation.
Levity is not part of
the repertoire of the African-American artist Lorna Simpson. Simpson has
previously exhibited photographs of black women accompanied by bits of cryptic
text. For example, a print of in a dilapidated apartment, one in sunglasses
with a drink, the other peering across the room, bears the legend "forecasting
visibility from the office." According to the catalog, Simpson's pictures of
women staring blankly underscore that they are "unheard in a racist,
patriarchal society." Lately, she has moved into film. Her entry in the Boss
prize competition is a nine minute black-and-white piece titled
Recollection , in which several women conduct disjointed conversations on
the theme of forgetfulness.
Arguably the most banal work in the show comes from the
Scottish artist Douglas Gordon. Gordon is a Glaswegian previously known for
having one of his forefingers tattooed completely black and taking , and
another in which he slowed down the film Psycho to a speed at which it
took 24 hours to watch. One Gordon contribution is a piece of insipid text
titled , lettered in white on a blue wall. Statements such as "hot is cold"
form a kind of word palindrome that makes Jenny Holzer seem deep. Gordon's
other work is archival footage projected on two free-standing video screens.
Hysterical uses film from 1908 of two Italian men putting a
masked woman through some sort of psychological treatment.
More inventive than
Gordon is the Chinese artist Huang Yong Ping, who was caught abroad during the
Tiananmen Square uprising and now lives in Paris. Huang is also interested in
the conflict between Western and Eastern cultures but seems less enraged on the
topic than Lee. His previous work has involved putting books through a washing
machine cycle and collecting live animals, such as scorpions, snakes, and
insects, and setting them to battle in enclosures filled with Chinese art
objects. Huang's installation for the Boss prize, the largest work in the show,
is called The Saint Learns From the Spider to Weave a Cobweb . It's a
lattice of copper pipes from which hang a chair and a dozen mesh cages. Inside
each cage is a hairy, live tarantula. The title refers to the Taoist Ge Hong,
who wrote that "animals are superior to human beings." Reminiscent of the
room-filling iron spiders cast by Louise Bourgeois, it conveys the feeling of
being trapped in a philosophical cage--and in so doing perfectly captures the
spirit of the exhibition as whole.
Because the $50,000 prize to be announced July 29 is for
the artist's whole oeuvre and not the work submitted for the show, I
would award it, if forced to choose, to South African William Kentridge, who is
known for powerful , many with anti-apartheid themes. Unfortunately, following
the vogue of conceptualism, Kentridge has entered a film in the show, , which
uses animation of sketches much cruder than the ones he usually does
interspersed with documentary footage from the apartheid era. Set against the
solipsistic identity politics of the rest of the show, Kentridge's old-school
agitprop is nearly refreshing.
It is perhaps unsurprising
that a prize endowed by Hugo Boss should end up being less about craft than
about fashion. What makes the exhibition truly dreary, however, is the pretense
that it's daring, when really it's an exercise in intellectual conformity. All
the avant-garde artists included are actually academic, both in the sense of
deriving their ideas about cultural difference from French literary critics and
in the sense that they follow the dictates of others about what art should be.
Subtract the shock value, and what you have here is the salon painting of the
1990s.
If you
missed the link about the irony of Hugo Boss' sponsorship of the prize, click
.
