DANIEL KUNITZ:
TEXTING: THE ARTIST AS WRITER AS ARTIST
1.
Reading this, you are probably unfazed. Likewise, you don’t find
it strange to see written texts in a bookshop, on a computer screen, or in a
journal or newspaper. Yet a shelf of books or even a poem presented as art in a
museum seems bizarre. When Seth Price displayed « Essay with Knots, » a set of
molded plastic panels on which his text « Dispersion » was printed,
at the New Museum’s 2010 exhibition « Free, » he acknowledged that
doing so constituted a « perverse » gesture because « no one
will read it! Text doesn’t really work on the wall, not an essay like
this. » Perhaps even more perverse was another work in that exhibition, Jill
Magid’s « Becoming
Tarden, » 2009, which consisted of copies of a spy novel she wrote with
the same title that was eventually redacted by a real spy agency, the Dutch
Secret Service; visitors were invited to pluck one of the volumes from the
shelf and read it on the spot, or else buy a copy in the museum store.
2.
Price and Magid are just two among a host of artists who employ
writing in a way that, whether they intend it or not, acts as a solvent eating
into established notions of what visual art is. Others include Simon Fujiwara, Mai-Thu
Perret, Liam Gillick, Doug Fishbone, Matthew Brannon, and such collectives as
the International Necronautical Society, Bernadette Corporation, and Slavs and
Tatars. For all
of them writing is part of their artistic practice. By writing I mean either
discursive essays, like Price’s, or original narratives, although not
necessarily textual ones. I am not concerned with works that incorporate
appropriated text or that use text as image, rather than as something to be
read or listened to, or as an object standing literally for an idea, as in the
creations of the Conceptual artists of the 1960s and ’70s, where texts tended
to function either as documentation — Richard Serra’s sets of instructions, for
instance — or as analogues of sculptural objects. As Robert
Smithson said in an
essay, « Here language is built, not written. »
3.
For the artists I’m discussing, writing is key and the line
delimiting literary from visual art virtually nonexistent. Crucially, all these
artists were born after 1964, which means they came of age and continue to live
— as we all do — in the Blur. The Blur is our dispensation. It’s a place where
the visual or retinal is not necessarily privileged over other modes; where the
boundaries between the arts — music, literature, theater, sculpture, and so on
— are nearly erased; where those between media are porous; where genres blend
into one another; where the notion of the autonomous art object has gone fuzzy;
and where that of art itself has been smeared, as it were. Artists of the Blur
tend to reject modernist purity in all its forms but most particularly the sort
of purity that demands that each art develop what is most intrinsic to it. They
freely bring narrative — what was once known as literary content — into
painting; they mix dance and sculpture or performance and drawing. They have been diagnosed by
the critic Rosalind Krauss as suffering from a postmedium condition. And
artists of the Blur embrace what the modernist critic Michael Fried calls
« theatricality, » by which he means the exhibition event becoming as
important as the objects within it. These artists take as axiomatic that
context creates art.
4.
In « Dispersion, » Price says of this dispensation:
« It does not necessarily stand against objects or painting, or for
language as art; it does not need to stand against retinal art; it does not
stand for anything certain, instead privileging framing and context, and
constantly renegotiating its relationship to its audience. » Price’s essay
is notable for enacting what it describes: As a way of « constantly
renegotiating its relationship to its audience, » he distributes it
through a number of platforms. In addition to existing as the art object
« Essay with Knots, » it is a PDF, available for free on his Web site
and on that of Reena Spaulings (which is both a New York gallery and the character in a novel
by the Bernadette Corporation), and a book. Indeed creating works in multiple
versions on varied platforms is common to a number of these artists. The reason
for such an open-ended approach, Price suggests in « Dispersion, » is
that making works that are, as Duchamp puts it, not « of art » — works outside the usual
parameters of art — is for his generation a permanent directive. The problem
with most work that is not « of art » is that it is easily co-opted
by the institutions that define art as art and that have traditionally
distributed it. The context transforms what was not « of art » into
art. Work from the 1960s that challenged the art context, such as performance
and site-specific sculpture, was eventually absorbed into institutions through
photographic documentation. What began as the visceral experience of a
performance that seemed out of context in, say, a gallery ended up as another
bunch of pictures on a wall.
5.
The lesson of those earlier efforts is that if you want to
disrupt the understanding of what art is, you need to alter how it gets to its
audience. « The definition of artistic activity occurs, first of all, in
the field of distribution, » the Belgian artist Marcel Broodthaers wrote. That sentence serves
as the epigraph to « Dispersion, » in which Price imagines a way to
escape institutions: « Suppose an artist were to release the work directly
into a system that depends on reproduction and distribution for its sustenance,
a model that encourages contamination, borrowing, stealing, and horizontal
blur. The art system usually corrals errant works, but how could it recoup
thousands of freely circulating paperbacks? »
6.
The answer is it can’t. Yet because context defines art,
operating outside of, or in a way inappropriate to, the normal venues for
distribution — the gallery, museum, or Kunsthalle — tends to de-define art.
When Magid, for example, began showing « Evidence Locker, » a
multimedia work that includes video as well as a novella, curators resisted
incorporating a reading room into the installation. « You can’t set up a
whole room around a book. No one will read it, » they told her. Magid
insisted, and people did read « One Cycle of Memory in the City of
L. » The epistolary novella, consisting of love letters addressed to an
enigmatic Observer, was so popular, in fact, that it recently went out of
print. No institution has been willing to put up the $7,000 to reprint it,
despite the fact that Magid is associated with top-tier galleries as well as
with such museums as the Whitney and Tate Modern and that in this stratum of
the art world, dispensing tens of thousands of dollars to fabricate an artwork
is routine. (By signing up on Magid’s Web site you can have each of the book’s
letters e-mailed to you.) One suspects that the collective Slavs and Tatars
faces similar difficulties convincing galleries and museums that « Dear
1979, Meet 1989, » 2011, the tabloid-style newsprint version of a
lecture-performance, is actually an artwork. And it’s not hard to imagine the
dismay of those trying to sell Doug Fishbone’s efforts when they found out that
he’d decided to distribute « Everybody Loves a Winner, » 2004, a
video of a lecture-performance in which the artist reads a written text, for free
on YouTube.
7.
Price concedes that in their text-based work the first
Conceptualists, like the artists of the Blur, also sought new ways of
distributing, and thus defining, art. What distinguishes the current
practitioners, aside from access to new technology, is their aims. Much of the
text-based work of the 1960s, Price says, « was primarily concerned with
finding exhibition alternatives to the gallery wall and in any case often used
these sites to demonstrate dryly theoretical propositions rather than address
issues of, say, desire. » In fact the differences go considerably deeper,
to the level of form. In addressing « issues of desire, » the younger
artists consistently resort to narrative and often to elaborate fictions. The
Bernadette Corporation has exhibited its collective novel « Reena
Spaulings » in art contexts. And in his 2010 videos « The Rolling
Skull » and « Fire and Smoke, » Price reads, over an on-screen
montage of appropriated imagery, folktale-like stories he has written in the
style of the German Romantic writer Ludwig Tieck.
8.
The history of modernism can be understood, in part, as a
progressive leaching of narrative from visual art, be it literary content
excised from painting or story lines from film. The Blur generation of artists
uses text as a means of restoring this spurned aspect to visual art. Altering the way art is
distributed can be seen as a byproduct of that endeavor. These artists are thus
the aesthetic children not of the 1960s text-based Conceptualists but of those
artists of the ’70s and ’80s — from Michael Smith and Martha
Rosler to Cindy
Sherman and, above
all, Sophie Calle — who began reintroducing narrative into cutting-edge works.
9.
As the Price videos demonstrate, narrative doesn’t always entail
the display of text. Fishbone, Slavs and Tatars, and Simon Fujiwara all present
performance-lectures of written works. The latter’s « Museum of
Incest, » for instance, begins, in his words, as a PowerPoint
« guided tour » of a fictional architectural complex that « ends
up as a wildly personal portrait of a father-son relationship. » Magid, in
collaboration with the actor Ed Vassallo, has been performing live versions of the written
components of all her pieces, at least one of which, « Lincoln Ocean
Victor Eddy » (the New York police call-sign for spelling love), is being
turned into a feature film. Creating film scripts — as opposed to reading
written text as a performance — takes us to the outer edge, as it were, of
writing as an art practice. Not all films are scripted. Some are improvised; some
bear little relationship to their scenarios. Yet in that realm the examples
multiply: Fishbone has written, directed, and acted in the feature-length film
« Elmina »; the artist Nathaniel Mellors has recently begun filming
episodes of a television serial — as an artwork — based on stories he’s penned,
and numerous other artists have recently created features. The crucial point is
that writing is the distinctive characteristic of these artists’ practice, not
text per se.
10.
That writing should enter the arena of visual art when it did,
in the first decade of the 21st century, is intriguing because in the early
aughts the dominant paradigm of the Blur was what the theorist Nicholas
Bourriaud calls
« postproduction » in an essay bearing that word as its title. The
model for postproduction is sampling: the DJ’s mixing other people’s beats, the
programmer’s altering preexisting code, and the collage artist’s cutting and
pasting images produced by others. Postproduction artists, Bourriaud writes,
« contribute to the eradication of the traditional distinction between
production and consumption, creation and copy, readymade and original
work. » Of course, this process is the culmination of a much older assault
on notions of authorship and originality that can be traced back through the
relational aesthetics of the 1990s to the appropriation art of the ’70s and
early ’80s, and through a half-century of fascination with Duchamp and John
Cage that
introduced chance, as well as other methods of removing the hand, into the
production of artworks.
11.
I see the emergence of artists’ writing, displaying books, and
aggressively adopting literary modes as an effort to protect or recapture
originality both from the maelstrom of postproduction that has remade the
aesthetic landscape and from the attack on it launched ironically enough by the
text-based Conceptualism of the 1960s. In contrast to other modes of asserting originality, authoring
has the advantage of being novel, if you can excuse the pun, in a visual art
context. In an interview, Mellors speaks of « feeling critical of a
prevalent commitment to cultural recycling, » a commitment he satirized in
the 2008 installation « Giantbum, » which allegorizes cultural
recycling as cannibalism and coprophagy. What better way to critique sampling
and the endless recycling of images, sounds, and texts than through an
original, authored work? That is not, however, to argue that these artists are
completely against postproduction. Like hip-hop groups that augment a DJ’s
sampling with live instrumental music, all the while maintaining other
conventions of rap, these artists tend to combine their authored texts into
multimedia collages. Magid juxtaposes CCTV footage with her texts; Price
marries spoken tales to montages of appropriated video; Fishbone interlaces
monologues with sampled images.
12.
Original as these strategies are, a few artists put written
narrative to an even more inventive use. If stories operate through seduction,
finding compelling ways to maintain intercourse with the reader, then the
result of such couplings is, inevitably, the production of offspring. Several
of the artists mentioned literalize this trope. For them the story is a means
of generating new art objects. Mellors’s Rabelaisian tale
« Giantbum » was written to provide the scenario for various video
scripts he subsequently made and also as a vehicle for the creation of
animatronic sculptures. For the past decade or so, everything produced by the
artist Mai-Thu Perret has sprung from « The Crystal Frontier, » her
ongoing written tale of a utopian, all-female feminist community in the
southwestern U.S. desert. Composed of discrete fictional texts in various
genres — expository prose, diary entries, letters, daily schedules, and so on,
parts of which she sometimes displays and sometimes publishes — the narrative
creates a world that Perret then fills with objects. « The story was
imagined at the beginning, » Perret says in a 2009 interview, « as a
kind of machine that makes the art. »
13.
The story as generator of objects is a reversal. For Magid,
Price, and the others, it was the art world context, filled with objects, that
opened to admit their narratives. In a sense, the objects — whether shelves of
books, neon words, video screens, or vitrines — were the soft spots in the gallery
context that allowed it to expand. Now Perret is importing objects into the
world of her stories. And it’s only within the context of the story that the
objects she creates, such as dresses for nonexistent commune dwellers, will be
seen as art.
BY Daniel
Kunitz | June 03, 2011
« Texting »
originally appeared in the Summer 2011 issue of Modern Painters.
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