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Who is right?As with cir­cum­stan­tial evi­dence, you see what you want to see.  To this day, despite the alleged proof that the pho­to was staged, some remain unmoved.  Accord­ing to Rohther, “even as experts at the Inter­na­tion­al Cen­ter of Pho­tog­ra­phy in Man­hat­tan, where Capa’s archive is stored, said they found some aspects of Mr. Sus­per­regui’s inves­ti­ga­tion intrigu­ing or even con­vinc­ing… they con­tin­ue to believe that the image seen in Falling Sol­dier is gen­uine, and cau­tion against jump­ing to con­clu­sions.” Why should it be any dif­fer­ent?  Peo­ple have no prob­lem believ­ing that the earth is 5,000 years old, dinosaurs did not exist, or mir­a­cles selec­tive­ly hap­pened in the Mid­dle East dur­ing the 1st Cen­tu­ry AD.

To get it off my chest: I sense a bit of geopo­lit­i­cal rival­ry (but it’s more com­pli­cat­ed than that).

Sur­pris­ing­ly, after vis­it­ing Sus­per­regui’s exhi­bi­tion, the Span­ish Min­is­ter of Cul­ture Ánge­les González-Sinde asserts: Art is always manip­u­la­tion, from the moment you point a cam­era in one direc­tion and not anoth­er.
If art is ‑always- a manip­u­la­tion, what’s all the fuss about?

Alex Ker­shaw’s biog­ra­phy of Robert Capa enti­tled Blood and Cham­pagne: The Life and Times of Robert Capa for The New Repub­lic. Thom­son pro­duces a “so-what?” rebut­tal. What is the big deal if Capa was cheat­ing? “Are we just very sen­ti­men­tal about the kind of ‘truth’ that pho­tog­ra­phy alleged­ly leads to?” To but­tress his argu­ment he fol­lows a sort of aes­thet­ic thread. What if Capa was a painter paint­ing “Falling Sol­dier”?

A painter at the front lines could eas­i­ly and legit­i­mate­ly paint a pic­ture of a falling sol­dier. No one would object, if the paint­ing was as strong as Capa’s pho­to­graph. Nobody would cry deceit. Paint­ing, after all, implies mea­sured deci­sions regard­ing sub­ject, size, com­po­si­tion, col­or­ing, and so on.  Why must pho­tog­ra­phy be dif­fer­ent? Is it so reliant on absolute fideli­ty to the moment?

One could argue that Capa is not paint­ing but shoot­ing a pic­ture. A cam­er­a’s duty is to take a “quick shot” and so on. The real issue here is the blow to epis­te­mo­log­i­cal objec­tiv­i­ty that is con­comi­tant with pho­to­graph­ic jour­nal­ism at a cru­cial moment, that is to say, the most impor­tant civ­il war of the Twen­ti­eth Cen­tu­ry. Let’s recall that ‑before Pho­to­shop- the cam­era is the fact-pro­duc­ing instru­ment par excel­lence. “Falling Sol­dier” is right in the mid­dle of the link between epis­te­mol­o­gy and the social order, between “what is” and “what should be.”

“What is”
 
Unfor­tu­nate­ly, the his­to­ry of pho­tog­ra­phy seems more like a mish­mash of ten­den­cies, reflect­ing our diverse inter­ests more than some neu­tral non-sub­jec­tive domain of human endeav­or. Just to show the hand of manip­u­la­tion in ear­ly pho­tog­ra­phy, take a look at Pic­to­ri­al­ism. As ear­ly as 1880, pho­tog­ra­phers began col­or­ing their pho­tos to achieve an Impres­sion­ist-like effect, which was, even then, a con­tro­ver­sial medi­um manip­u­la­tion.⁴
 

In Pond-Moon­light, bove, Ste­ichen cre­at­ed the impres­sion of col­or by man­u­al­ly apply­ing lay­ers of light-sen­si­tive gums to the paper. Pho­tog­ra­phy was an ide­al medi­um for evi­dence and the sci­ence of foren­sics, the same dis­ci­pline that now chal­lenges Capa’s shot by using the evi­dence pro­vid­ed by Capa’s own sup­posed fake pho­to! What can be more “evi­den­tial” than a mug shot? No won­der pho­tog­ra­phy has always been close to the field of crim­i­nol­o­gy. In the late nine­teenth Cen­tu­ry, the medi­um was used to sup­port the pseu­do­sci­en­tif­ic the­o­ries of Cesare Lom­broso, 5 a bizarre moment in the his­to­ry of crim­i­nol­o­gy, which prompt­ed Alphonse Bertillon and Fran­cis Gal­ton’s “com­pos­ite types”.

The “com­pos­ite process” was sup­posed to achieve “pho­to­graph­ic aver­age”:

In the pho­to of Mar­lene Diet­rich by Nicholas Mur­ray (1930), below, the pho­tog­ra­ph­er explores the pub­lic­i­ty “glam­our shot.”

“An Uneven Floor” seen from the outside gallery window (left-hand side elevation)

What are these people doing (in the photo above)? Is this a private party, a carpet show, a recreational space for children, a conference, or a reunion of sorts?  “An Uneven Floor” was installed last Saturday at Locust Projects in the Design District. The title of the exhibit is conveyed so literally as to elicit bafflement. Artist Leyden Rodriguez-Casanova has built two promontories inside the gallery space and carpeted the whole thing in bright pink. That’s it.

(Right-hand side elevation)

To under­stand the direct cor­re­spon­dence between title —-> art-work, we have to do a lit­tle his­to­ry: For a good part of the last decade, Rodriguez-Casano­va has pro­duced a kind of auto-bio­graph­i­cal œuvre that exhibits very lit­tle inter­ven­tion. Let’s address the lat­ter first. The idea is to present objects as they appear in every­day life, as they relate to the artist’s per­son­al his­to­ry. To put it sim­ply: If the paint­ed sun­set is art, why not bring the sun­set and show it as art?¹

This is pre­cise­ly the point of Three Lamps with Dif­fer­ent Lights (2007):

Or see Over­turned Pink Chair (2006, below). Both pieces refer exact­ly to what their titles state.

One obvi­ous con­clu­sion is that Rodriguez-Casano­va has removed one step from tra­di­tion­al art rep­re­sen­ta­tion. He “presents.“² Sure­ly, this pre­sen­ta­tion requires plan­ning (and a slight­ly dif­fer­ent craft).³

 A Mirroed-Wall (2006)

Walls divide and sup­port. Mir­rors reflect. The mir­ror­ing in the instal­la­tion’s title brings forth a con­cep­tu­al redun­dan­cy, which, instead of “numb­ing mean­ing” (as when one repeats a word indef­i­nite­ly), actu­al­ly opens up a semi­otic hori­zon where the art­work can be per­ceived more openly—and not with­out baf­fle­ment.

Back to “Uneven Floor,” Rodriguez-Casano­va wants us to think about things oth­er than floor/geodesics. In fact, one could pon­der the show’s title as a case of met­alep­sis. What I’m get­ting at is that the most inter­est­ing point about the exhib­it is not its uneven­ness. Rodriguez-Casanova’s “as is” fur­ni­ture and the gen­tly-sloped pink-car­pet­ed gallery floor bring forth passed-over aspects of our dai­ly prac­tices as they go on amidst fur­ni­ture and floors. How come?

The issue of “even­ness” is sud­den­ly brought to the fore, but as a “dis­tance,” as we come to per­ceive the floor in the absence of a “nor­mal,” lev­eled floor. More than think­ing about it, Rodriguez-Casano­va wants us to “feel it.” This pas­sage by Jacques Der­ri­da in his Par­ages (p. 36) may help put this in per­spec­tive:

The more one is tempt­ed to come near the prox­im­i­ty of that which is approach­ing, the more whol­ly oth­er ‑and thus infi­nite­ly dis­tanced- of prox­im­i­ty buries or emp­ties itself. 

If Rodriguez-Casanova’s art can “present” at a par with real­i­ty, it must change mood from immer­sion to aware­ness. Said dif­fer­ent­ly, even as one checks out Rodriguez-Casanova’s exhib­it, one can still miss the “uneven­ness” of the floor.

And yet, the artist’s “pre­sen­ta­tion” is not with­out risks: As art and real­i­ty are inter­pen­e­trat­ed, art risks becom­ing as banal as real­i­ty itself. Then, some­thing as authen­tic as one’s own nar­ra­tive can end up sti­fled, by the seduc­tion of nos­tal­gia, which makes the dis­tanc­ing from one­self the more dif­fi­cult.

That said, the pub­lic at the show could­n’t stop talk­ing about the pink-all-over phe­nom­e­non. Momen­tar­i­ly, I looked for psy­cho­log­i­cal asso­ci­a­tions. These dis­parate quotes belong in a book about the psy­chol­o­gy of col­or, pub­lished in 1961:⁴

*Pink and tints of blue and vio­let are decid­ed­ly “sweet.”
*The babies stared longest at yel­low, then white, pink, and red. The least atten­tion was paid to black, green, blue, and vio­let.
*Bath­rooms should be pink to give the skin a lumi­nous glow through reflec­tion.
*Pink and yel­low mos­qui­to cur­tains do not har­bor insects.

Accord­ing to Michael Ham­phill, women respond to pink more overt­ly than men (which is to be expect­ed giv­en that girls are con­di­tioned to this col­or since they are infants).⁵  In addi­tion, Lucretius described dawn as “pink” in his famous poem On the Nature of Things. Oscar Wilde’s favorite col­or was… Yet, these facts are total­ly irrel­e­vant.

The choice of pink has to do with Rodriguez-Casanova’s own expe­ri­ence grow­ing up in a house of Cuban immi­grants whose idea of inte­ri­or dec­o­ra­tion was rather peculiar—and which was not that far from the norm of oth­er Cuban exiles in Mia­mi dur­ing the late 1960s and ear­ly 1970s. This fact explains The Light Behind Pink Blinds (2007).

It’s worth men­tion­ing that the show is a lot of fun: I saw chil­dren climb­ing up, slid­ing down, and rolling all over the car­pet. Adults were less adept, but nonethe­less walked up and down the slopes ‑as if test­ing the firm­ness of the props beneath them. Every­body looked around (at the envi­ron­ment con­tain­ing them­selves?). Many were puz­zled.

The direc­tor of Locust Projects told me how dif­fer­ent the space looked with­out peo­ple in it. But then, would it be “uneven,” or “pink”?

___________
¹ This brings a cru­cial dis­tinc­tion between Nature and art. Art is, by def­i­n­i­tion, man-made. ² A sort of Wildean twist where “Life imi­tates art.” See Oscar Wilde’s The Decay of Lay­ing (Harp­er and Row, 1989, p. 982). ³ This new craft can def­i­nite­ly make stuff, but being more con­cep­tu­al­ly-dri­ven, it gen­er­al­ly plans and pro­duces. ⁴ Faber Bir­ren’s Col­or Psy­chol­o­gy and Col­or Ther­a­py: A Fac­tu­al Study of the Influ­ence of Col­or on Human Life (Uni­ver­si­ty Books, 1961). ⁵ Note on Adults’ Col­or-Emo­tion Asso­ci­a­tions—arti­cle by Michael Hemphill, Jour­nal of Genet­ic Psy­chol­o­gy, (Vol. 157, 1996).

The image showing irreversibility in a quantum system

For the Pythagoreans, time is the devil

absence of time in mathematics (for artistic minds).

Then Par­menides advis­es:

“what is is” “what is not is not” 

He adds an impor­tant point:

…it is nec­es­sary that you will learn both the unmov­ing heart of well-cir­cled truth and the false notions of mor­tals, in which there is no true faith.

So, truth has guis­es. Do not con­fuse the spokes for the wheel.

I pro­pose the via neg­a­ti­va of Hin­du phi­los­o­phy. The chal­lenge is to try to for­mu­late such a con­cept math­e­mat­i­cal­ly,

Posit your uni­verse U, don’t just rep­re­sent it* (if you do, you fall back into the lim­it­ed uni­verse para­dox).

Let’s imag­ine Par­menides in 4 dimen­sions: time now does­n’t flow, just IS.

So, the… now… is not an event in space/time.

Events {ë} are ordered by “ear­li­er than” or “lat­er than,” but no event is sin­gled out as “present,” except by con­ven­tion.  think about it, what makes {ë} simul­ta­ne­ous across the uni­verse?

it can­not be an intrin­sic prop­er­ty of {ë}, because you pre­sup­pose an observ­er, i.e., a con­scious­ness.

The aim of physics (not that of math) is to be inher­ent to phe­nom­e­na.

Why is this impor­tant?

Because cau­sa­tion is a form of event-gen­er­a­tion, i.e., it’s event-depen­dent.

Come back to Par­menides: we live in a time-cage.

There’s no escape.  

dS/dt ≥ 0 **

Yep: time is irre­versible.

** Boltz­man­n’s for­mu­la for 2nd law of ther­mo­dy­nam­ics.

 View of Manitoba Museum of Find Arts, via MMOFA

A Tara McDow­ell reviews Man­i­to­ba Muse­um of Find arts @ Will Brown Gallery for Art­fo­rum:

The col­lec­tion grew organ­i­cal­ly over the years, most­ly through gifts from artists, and is accre­tive, idio­syn­crat­ic, and mnemon­ic in the way that the pin­board aes­thet­ic of a per­son­al archive is, even one on the cubi­cle wall. Here, Hen­ry Hopkins’s Rolodex­es share space with Stephen Kornhauser’s glass jar of cot­ton balls used to clean the museum’s Jean Arp sculp­ture, a pot hold­er print­ed with a mush­room cloud, and all man­ner of moose-themed col­lectibles (a favorite of Mayo’s). Ephemera for MMo­FA exhi­bi­tions fea­tur­ing George Herms, Lynn Her­sh­man Lee­son, Sol LeWitt, and many oth­ers appear through­out the gallery, which also fea­tures an exten­sive gift shop. One notable event was the Bruce Con­ner look-alike con­test and bake sale, the judges for which, the fly­er tells us, have seen Con­ner many times.

 Stephen Kornhauser’s glass jar of cotton balls used to clean the museum’s Jean Arp sculpture

McDow­ell goes over the exhibit’s details like a pro, but miss­es a sig­nif­i­cant point obscured by her own descrip­tion. “Finds art” is art, right? A sym­bol­ic leap from “found object” with­out prop­er sub­mer­sion? Artju­di­ca­tion advances!

The museum’s col­lec­tion and ephemera are now on view at Will Brown gallery, a new exhi­bi­tion space oper­at­ing in the vein of Philadelphia’s Triple Can­die, if the venture’s first three projects are any indi­ca­tion.

“Ephemera” by def­i­n­i­tion refers to col­lec­table items not intend­ed to be pre­served for more than a short time. But this is quite the oppo­site. These art­sy objects belong in a muse­um’s grow­ing col­lec­tion under the denom­i­na­tion “finds art.” As such, McDow­ell’s assump­tion rests on a para­dox. How can it be solved? One quick fix is to assume collection/autonomy, i.e., “the col­lec­tion grew organ­i­cal­ly over the years,” as if “col­lec­tion” is, like in phys­i­cal process­es, caused by a non-human self-pro­duc­ing enti­ty.

Or, “col­lec­tion” and “ephemera” rest on an art/axiom:

Since the con­cep­tu­al rev­o­lu­tion, infor­ma­tion sub­sti­tutes rep­re­sen­ta­tion (as this blurb of an inter­view with Seth Siege­laub in 1969 proves):

When art does not any longer depends upon its phys­i­cal pres­ence, when it has become an abstrac­tion, it is not dis­tort­ed and altered by rep­re­sen­ta­tion in books and cat­a­logs. It becomes PRIMARY infor­ma­tion… when infor­ma­tion if PRIMARY, the cat­a­log can become the exhi­bi­tion.¹

Fast-for­ward about 50 years. Con­cep­tu­al art is very much col­lect­ed and pub­li­cized by a glob­al mar­ket that digests & pro­duces rep­re­sen­ta­tion. So, McDow­ell men­tions these his­toric factlets (in blue above) to but­tress the very cat­e­go­ry she assumes, a prob­lem­at­ic sign of sys­temic redun­dan­cy. She takes the ele­va­tion of object­hood-to-art­hood for grant­ed. That is to say:

How about prob­lema­tiz­ing “how” art hap­pens? Unless “how” is cut off as a banal con­cern, polit­i­cal­ly speak­ing. Art ques­tions, con­cepts, are processed by the art sys­tem via insti­tu­tion­al infra­struc­ture (i.e., Art­fo­rum’s “crit­ic’s pick” sec­tion, a rep­utable web­site with experts in the field).

What’s the strat­e­gy? Cura­tors and crit­ics enthuse the pub­lic into con­sum­ing art. Art is cul­ture. Cul­ture is good for you. But cul­ture, as Don­na Har­away sug­gests, can be a log­ic of “dom­i­na­tion of a nec­es­sary but dan­ger­ous instinc­tu­al nature.“² Unfor­tu­nate­ly, artists (the oth­er vest­ed par­ty in this game), are too con­cerned mim­ic­k­ing & nego­ti­at­ing with what’s already sanc­tioned out there in their Weltan­schau­ung (inci­den­tal­ly, a sys­temic organ­ism digest­ing sym­bols in the same redun­dant man­ner).

The jar exhibits a cat­e­gor­i­cal prob­lem. How to explain its uncan­ny pas­sage from object­hood-to-art­hood unless it under­goes a process of artju­di­ca­tion? Is it real­ly about a mag­ic-fric­tion-fac­tor? Is it prox­im­i­ty, or q‑entanglement, where­by the cot­ton balls and Jean Arp’s muse­um sculp­ture become a part of the same phe­nom­e­non?).³

The same goes for this art­sy glow-in-the-dark-MMO­FA-key chain:

Glow in the dark MMOFA key chain.

Or this art­sy tree-bark piece with carved ini­tials,

Tree bark with carved initials

)Art crit­i­cism is an artju­di­ca­tion pub­lic­i­ty machine(

The pub­lic (includ­ing many crit­ics & art experts) regard art­hood as an intrin­sic prop­er­ty of, well, art/objects. Cul­ture is asso­ci­at­ed to an aes­thet­ics of plea­sure which par­takes of a glob­al con­sen­sus. All the while, artju­di­ca­tion remains con­cealed.

Despite these prob­lems, McDow­ell ploughs ahead to an unre­solved con­clu­sion (the same that plagued Con­cep­tu­al Art’s project of art eman­ci­pa­tion):⁵

Mayo’s inten­tion was to show artists not includ­ed in that “oth­er muse­um.” “I’m not offi­cial,” she once said, “I’m unof­fi­cial. Unof­fi­cial­ly, they let me indulge myself.” Not only does this unof­fi­cial endeav­or inflect cur­rent calls to occu­py muse­ums and prob­lema­tize stan­dard def­i­n­i­tions of insti­tu­tion­al cri­tique in one fell swoop, but it also demon­strates the impor­tance and affect of alter­na­tive archives, par­tic­u­lar­ly when so close­ly aligned with insti­tu­tion­al ones.

“Unof­fi­cial endeav­or,” “Insti­tu­tion­al cri­tique?” Not so fast. The crit­ic unprob­lem­at­i­cal­ly echoes Alber­ta May­o’s wish­ful think­ing that she is “unof­fi­cial,” as the lat­ter fig­ures as direc­tor of a muse­um that hous­es her own “accre­tive, idio­syn­crat­ic, and mnemon­ic” col­lec­tion; it gets exhib­it­ed at a gallery and fig­ures in a crit­ics’ pick @ Art­fo­rum!

Are you kid­ding me? McDow­ell’s “insti­tu­tion­al cri­tique” is a trav­es­ty, a pseu­do-insti­tu­tion­al appa­ra­tus stub­born­ly con­ceal­ing (and dis­con­nect­ing) art­hood from artju­di­ca­tion.

____________________
¹ Alexan­der Alber­ro, Con­cep­tu­al Art and The Pol­i­tics of Pub­lic­i­ty, p. 155. ²Simi­ans, Cyborgs and Women: The Rein­ven­tion of Nature, p. 22. ³ What makes Man­zoni’s Mer­da d’artista art? Man­zoni’s shit, his celebri­ty name, or both? Check Man­i­to­ba Muse­um’s name drop­ping:

High­lights include: mir­ror sub­mit­ted by Bruce Con­ner for the first ever Bruce Con­ner Look Alike Con­test and Bake Sale; atom­ic bomb hot­pad; glass jar of cot­ton balls used to clean Jean Arp sculp­ture; glow in the dark MMOFA key chain; pen­cil used by Sol Lewitt to make MMOFA wall draw­ing; tree bark with carved ini­tials; Hen­ry Hop­kins’ rolodex­es; fake but­ter; fake teeth; small flocked moose; burnt pack­age for Hen­ry Hop­kins (nev­er opened); mature dis­cre­tion sign; Clyf­ford Still draw­ing; diplo­ma; Lynn Her­sh­man’s “game”; 4th Annu­al Chloe Foot­star Potluck Memo­r­i­al Pic­nic Announce­ment; spe­cial mem­bers gift; fash­ion adver­tise­ment pho­tographed in Rauschen­berg ret­ro­spec­tive with Tyrone Brue, secu­ri­ty guard, signed by Tyrone.

⁴ This is the descrip­tion for a piece @ a recent show at a rel­a­tive­ly known gallery in New York City:

Appro­pri­at­ed street organ with cart, 3.5x5x4. Wood, wire, melamine, epoxy, wheels. The instru­ment may have been used to calm down men­tal patients at Kings Park Psy­chi­atric Hos­pi­tal dur­ing the 1940’s (Kings Park closed in the ear­ly 1990’s). Giv­en to the artist by an Ital­ian ex-patient & low-rank mem­ber of the Pro­faci Fam­i­ly with whom the artist estab­lished a friend­ship.

⁵ The major para­dox of Con­cep­tu­al Art (as oth­er forms, such as Earth Art, Per­for­mance etc, to come out of the ear­ly 1960’s) is that its project of artis­tic auton­o­my & eman­ci­pa­tion mim­ic­ked the instru­men­tal log­ic of the mar­ket. In lib­er­al eco­nom­ics, “FOR SALE” is seen as a sign of socio-polit­i­cal inde­pen­dence. Did you ever won­der how come the art mar­ket is the most unreg­u­lat­ed of all mar­kets? See Lucy Lip­pard’s “Post­face,” in Six Years: The Dema­te­ri­al­iza­tion of the Art Object from 1966 to 1972, p. 263.

Damien Hirst’s Demon With Bowl, 2017 (59 feet tall)

 Above, see Damien Hirst’s grand Demon with Bowl (2017) at the inner patio of the Palazzo Grassi for the Venice Biennale (click here for the assembling of the headless behemoth inside the patio). One is impressed by the work’s majesty. The 59 feet tall bronze sculpture is a grandiose spectacle. Keep in mind that Demon is six meters taller than Phidias’ masterpiece, Statute of Zeus at Olympia. Standing next to Hirst’s colossus elicits aesthetic awe  —what some scholars call the “symbolic.”

In The Psychological Structure of Fascism Georges Bataille presents “the heterogeneous,” a deep psychological response, quite resistant to assimilation, which is caused by certain presentations:

… het­ero­ge­neous ele­ments will pro­voke affec­tive reac­tions of vary­ing inten­si­ty (…) There is some­times attrac­tion, some­times repul­sion, and in cer­tain cir­cum­stance, any object of repul­sion can become an object of attrac­tion and vice ver­sa… (p. 69)

In addition,

Het­ero­ge­neous … is that of a force or shock. It presents itself as a charge, as a val­ue, pass­ing from one object to anoth­er in a more or less abstract fash­ion, almost as if the change were tak­ing place not in the world of objects but only in the judg­ments of the sub­ject. (p. 70)

Here’s Bataille’s point: ” the het­ero­ge­neous” has a poten­tial for mass-brain­wash­ing, as “sacred,” it assumes uncon­trol­lable and poten­tial­ly cat­a­stroph­ic forms. A sur­plus ener­gy, once unleashed, it’s often spent exter­nal­ly, pro­duc­ing shock, lead­ing to destruc­tive vio­lence.

Mass hypnosis at Nuremberg, 1936

From the sym­bol­ic to the polit­i­cal:

Opposed to demo­c­ra­t­ic politi­cians (…) Mus­soli­ni and Hitler imme­di­ate­ly stand out as some­thing oth­er (…) Con­sid­ered not with regard to its exter­nal action but with regard to its source, the force of a leader is anal­o­gous to that exert­ed in hyp­no­sis. (p. 70)

Think for a moment of hyp­no­sis as/­so­cio-aes­thet­ic phe­nom­e­non. Being hyp­no­tized by sym­bols is not out of the ques­tion. Any feel­ing of awe in the pres­ence of Demon should fiz­zle when one is hit with this fact:

The art of “not mak­ing”

In The Art of Not Mak­ing, artist/curator Michael Petry makes the fol­low­ing obser­va­tion:

In recent years there has been a return to a high­ly draft­ed aes­thet­ic in art (…) But when the artist does not make his or her own work, what does it mean for the nature of art, and for the sta­tus of the artist? How can we dis­tin­guish between the artist and the arti­san? Do we even need to?  (Intro, p. 6)

Petry is not equat­ing “craft” with “fine arts.” He has a dif­fer­ent agen­da.

If the inten­tions of con­text of the actu­al mak­er are irrel­e­vant to a work’s mean­ing, then why get your hands dirty with the mak­ing? Any­one can pro­duce the work for you; its author­ship lies else­where. Jeff Koons, Damien Hirst and Takashi Muraka­mi clear­ly fit this cat­e­go­ry, with their hun­dreds of assis­tants pro­duc­ing the work of “the artist” in fac­to­ry-like con­di­tions. (Intro, p. 11)

Petry is enthused with the prospect of “hun­dreds of assis­tants.” As if “not mak­ing” was some kind of cul­mi­na­tion of the Renais­sance and Baro­que’s arts and crafts rela­tions of pro­duc­tion. But we’re not in the Baroque era. This is a Post Fordist assem­bly-line pro­duc­tion with a star artist pro­duc­ing art­works made by hun­dreds of (anony­mous) assis­tants in glo­ri­fied art­sy sweat­shops.

If pri­or devel­op­ments with­in the avant-garde (Futur­ism, Dada, Sur­re­al­ism, etc.) pre­sup­posed a bat­tle of ideas, in the sense of win­ning hearts and minds, Petry’s “nam­ing” glows a solip­sis­tic decree pro­duced in a social vacuum.To put it in sim­ple terms, Petry’s “not mak­ing” is name arro­ga­tion.

Ah, the demo­tion of craftPetry implodes arts and crafts as a plau­si­ble expla­na­tion of his “return to craft.” But he does­n’t offer a con­vinc­ing argu­ment. Not many artists real­ize that fine art emerges from craft. Accord­ing to social his­to­ri­an Arnold Hauser, in ancient Greece, there is lit­tle dif­fer­ence between the craftsper­son and the artist/artisan.

Art was still looked upon as a mere hand­i­craft, and the artist as an ordi­nary arti­san with no part or lot in the spir­i­tu­al val­ue of knowl­edge or edu­ca­tion. He was still ill-paid, with­out secure abode, and led a wan­der­ing life, and so was a stranger and for­eign­er in the city that employed him. (SHA, Vol. I, p. 55)

The dif­fer­ence between com­men­ta­tors like Petry and Hauser is that the lat­ter is care­ful to present a socio-eco­nom­ic back­drop against which struc­tur­al devel­op­ments occur. One can­not prop­er­ly address the fine art/craft split dur­ing the Renais­sance with­out under­stand­ing the eco­nom­ic inno­va­tions in bank­ing, archi­tec­ture, com­merce and the agrar­i­an rev­o­lu­tion, which dri­ves Human­ism and the fine arts. For exam­ple, Gior­gio Vasari no longer con­sid­ers the accep­tance of hand­i­craft work com­pat­i­ble with the self-respect of an artist. This stage coin­cides with the end of the eco­nom­ic depen­dence of artists on the guilds. (SHA, Vol. II, p 49).

Accord­ing to Hauser, the eman­ci­pa­tion of the fine arts from the spir­it of pure crafts­man­ship has to do with a new con­cep­tion of fine arts as a sci­ence, which Leon Bat­tista Alber­ti defends as a pro­gram of instruc­tion for the art acad­e­mies. The already pro­nounced fine arts/craft split becomes insol­u­ble dur­ing the Baroque era, with the “genius” artist embod­ied by the fig­ure of Michelan­ge­lo.

This is more than the artist’s inborn pride, more than the con­scious­ness of being supe­ri­or to the crafts­man, the mere mechan­ic, the philis­tine (…) Michelan­ge­lo is the first exam­ple of the mod­ern, lone­ly, demon­i­cal­ly impelled artist —the first to be com­plete­ly pos­sessed by his idea and for whom noth­ing exists but his idea— who feels a deep sense of respon­si­bil­i­ty towards his gifts and sees a high­er and super­hu­man pow­er in his own artis­tic genius. (SHA, Vol­ume II, p. 56).

Toward the end of mid-Nine­teenth Cen­tu­ry fine art & craft con­verge again, dur­ing the Arts and Crafts rev­o­lu­tion in Eng­land. But by now it’s too late. The down-top push for a return to Quat­tro­cen­to ideals of crafts­man­ship espoused by Ruskin and Mor­ris can­not counter the top-down pro­duc­tive forces unleashed by the Indus­tri­al Rev­o­lu­tion. Hauser puts it ele­gant­ly:

In oth­er words, those ele­ments which might have trans­ferred the tra­di­tion of crafts­man­ship to mechan­i­cal pro­duc­tion, the inde­pen­dent mas­ters and their appren­tices, were elim­i­nat­ed from eco­nom­ic life before they had had any chance of adapt­ing them­selves and the tra­di­tions of their craft to the new meth­ods of pro­duc­tion. (SHA, Vol­ume III, p.68)

When the indus­tri­al machine takes over so much of the func­tion of man­u­fac­ture, the craftsper­son is reduced to a part of a total­ly mech­a­nized cul­ture. Tech­no­log­i­cal changes con­tribute to a tran­si­tion from home-based craft pro­duc­tion of goods to mass man­u­fac­ture in urban fac­to­ries, and as a result, trade replaces craft. This is why William Mor­ris took the Mid­dle Ages as the crafts’ mod­el era: The craftsper­son pro­duces beau­ty because he/she is the mas­ter of his/her mate­r­i­al, tools, and time.

This brief Hauser­ian his­to­ry shows the bad faith of the fine arts. Bad faith because while cov­et­ing the excel­lence, ide­al­ism and prac­ti­cal­i­ty of craft, fine arts pre­tends self-suf­fi­cien­cy and aes­thet­ic dis­dain. With­out the excel­lence of craft, the fine arts are emp­ty.

Fast for­ward to the present. Con­tem­po­rary art’s soar­ing prices and the con­stant demand for con­tem­po­rary art­works has changed the rela­tions of pro­duc­tion, spurring the use of appren­tices by more artists. “The Art Assem­bly Line” in The Wall Street Jour­nal takes the con­tem­po­rary-art-mar­ket side of the argu­ment:

At the oth­er end of the spec­trum is Mr. Koons, who runs his vast, high-ceilinged stu­dio with an effi­cien­cy that dis­cour­ages per­son­al inter­ac­tions. Every­one has an assigned task, from paint­ing a sec­tion of a can­vas by fol­low­ing elab­o­rate dia­grams to mix­ing dozens of paints to pro­duce exact­ly the right col­or. Large paint­ings are lift­ed up a wall by elec­tric hoists; in one room on a recent after­noon, two painters worked silent­ly on a can­vas at floor lev­el while two oth­ers paint­ed the upper part from a scaf­fold. There’s a hier­ar­chy of super­vi­sors, includ­ing a stu­dio man­ag­er, a paint­ing super­vi­sor and sev­er­al assis­tant man­agers. It brings to mind an assem­bly line.

As per the divi­sion of labor:

Mr. Koons says he has 150 peo­ple on his pay­roll and that he him­self nev­er wields a paint­brush. “If I had to be doing this myself, I would­n’t even be able to fin­ish one paint­ing a year,” he says. Every year his stu­dio aver­ages 10 paint­ings and 10 sculp­tures. In the last four years, six of his works offered at auc­tion have sold for prices between $11 mil­lion and $25 mil­lion each.

At this point we need to make a dis­tinc­tion: Koons’ is not an “assem­bly line” in the tra­di­tion­al Fordist sense. Koons keeps a Fordist skele­ton with Post-Fordist tis­sue and nerves.

From assem­bly-line Fordism to Post-Fordism

Fordism refers to the econ­o­my par­a­digm under mod­ern indus­tri­al Cap­i­tal­ism dur­ing 1930s-1960s, which brought a sus­tained cycle of eco­nom­ic growth based on mass pro­duc­tion and con­sump­tion along with rais­ing income and labor rights. Though far from per­fect, Fordism was being con­stant­ly tweaked and ensured a sta­ble wage rela­tion (with the orga­ni­za­tion of labor mar­kets and wage-effort bar­gain­ing). Since the 1970s on, a new phase of finan­cial Cap­i­tal­ism has emerged. Post Fordism amounts to the Wal­mar­ti­za­tion of the econ­o­my, i.e., bet­ter con­sumer prices, increased flex­i­bil­i­ty, along with the van­ish­ing of mom-and-pop busi­ness­es, unem­ploy­ment, reduc­tion in wages, dis­so­lu­tion of the work­ing day and de-union­iza­tion of labor. The shift from Fordism to Post-Fordism has brought a pro­found change in the social expe­ri­ence of labor.

Why is all this rel­e­vant? Because “not mak­ing” art has mor­phed into full fledged Post-Fordist ven­ture cap­i­tal­ism. Petry and oth­ers’ defense of “not mak­ing” as a his­toric prac­tice in the ate­liers of Renais­sance and Baroque mas­ters naive­ly ignores the fun­da­men­tal eco­nom­ic dif­fer­ences between pre-indus­tri­al and indus­tri­al Cap­i­tal­ism.

Why “not mak­ing” exploits craft (Koons’ Cracked Egg, 1995)

Jeff Koons’ Cracked Egg, 1995

Koons’ Cracked Egg sold for $501,933 in 2003, but he nev­er touched the paint­ing. What you see above is the paint­ing of an anony­mous craftsper­son. And yet, Cracked Egg has Koons’ sig­na­ture.

“I Was Jeff Koon’s Stu­dio Serf,” tells John Pow­ers’ (the anony­mous craftsper­son) side of the sto­ry:

I was assigned a new work, a paint­ing called “Cracked Egg.” (…) My job was sim­ple: Paint by num­bers. The most intri­cate sec­tions required minia­ture brush­es, sizes 0 and 00, their bris­tles no longer than an eye­lash. The goal was to hand-fash­ion a flat, seam­less sur­face that appeared to have been man­u­fac­tured by machine, which meant there could be no vis­i­ble brush strokes, no blend­ing, no mis­takes. After five long months, the paint­ing —my paint­ing— was near­ly com­plete.

Here is a true state­ment: “Cracked Egg was paint­ed by an anony­mous craftsper­son, not by Jeff Koons.”

You bet the actu­al own­er of Cracked Egg could care less about the sen­tence above being true. They would glad­ly use Petry’s mar­ket friend­ly argu­ment to add that though Koons did­n’t paint it, the paint­ing is still his.

Grant­ed, but author­ship? “All I care is that it has Koons’ sig­na­ture.” Let the mar­ket talk: Koons has been the top-sell­ing Amer­i­can artist for years.

Yes, the mar­ket can favor and fos­ter false­hoods.

Con­trac­tu­al­ly speak­ing, Pow­ers entered the stu­dio agree­ing to Koons’ you paint, I own terms (a con­tract does­n’t have to be fair to com­pel ful­fill­ment still). “I own” means the usurpa­tion of Pow­ers’ name (which will not appear any­where). Koons’ bar­gain is more than unfair: First, the con­tract pre­sup­pos­es a deceit­ful maneu­ver where­by a prin­ci­pal aes­thet­ic prop­er­ty of the art­work (that is to say, the craft) becomes now sub­servient to brand/name spec­ta­cle. Pre­dictably, the wages earned by the anony­mous craftsper­son reflect his sub­servient aes­thet­ic role.
Accord­ing to his account, Pow­ers got paid $14 an hour. He worked three nights a week and every Sat­ur­day for five months. Sup­pose he did 4 hrs per night and 8 hrs on Sat­ur­days. In five months, Pow­ers worked 400 hours for $5,600. “Cracked Egg” sold for $501,933, 100 times what Pow­ers paid for paint­ing it. Petry may retort that Pow­ers is lucky to sell his paint­ing for $5,600 with­out Koons’ sig­na­ture. And by “sig­na­ture,” one under­stands enter­prise, pro­mo­tion­al abil­i­ty, know-how, and Koons’ brand name.

Let’s revise this con­tem­po­rary art “return to craft,”

“not mak­ing” is the brand name spec­ta­cle: it owns the show.
“mak­ing” amounts to mere­ly craft and the anony­mous (under­paid) craftsper­son.

 

Takashi Murakami, Of Chinese Lions, Ponies, Skulls and Fountains (2011)

Why is the sig­na­ture so impor­tant?

Because with the scaf­fold­ing of craft, art spec­ta­cle becomes an acces­si­ble form of aes­thet­ic hyp­no­sis.

Mean­while, “not mak­ing” per­pet­u­ates the oppres­sion of craft.

Is there a social cli­mate for a bottom/up craft-dri­ven Lud­dite insur­gency to counter the trav­es­ty of “not mak­ing”?

Guido Reni, La masacre de los inocentes, detalle (1611)

¿Qué significa “contemporáneo” en la historia del arte?

No puede ser el “ahora” instantáneo; ¿habrá 60 lajas contemporáneas en una hora contemporánea?

Misterio de densidad coagulada, especie de inmanencia cronológica.

¿Cuánto dura lo “contemporáneo”? A solo 50 años de la estación contemporánea acotada e inmediatamente después de ese corto período llamado “posmodernismo” (si juzgamos por el librito de Venturi), el presente “contemporáneo” parece… un tiento en la oscuridad.

Por lo tanto, lo posmoderno queda acotado por lo “moderno”, que cubre parte del siglo XIX y las primeras cinco décadas del siglo XX. Observe que las edades se acortan: La Edad Media duró 10 siglos, la Moderna 5, la Posmoderna 50 años.

El “hombre moderno es consciente del tiempo”, decía Arnold Hauser. Desde el presente siempre queremos acotar la cota. Luego, el post-algo es, por esencia, neurótico. El síntoma es estar tan consciente del tiempo que tal parece que no pasa. Haz un experimento. Pon algo en el microondas por 1 minuto y observa el plato dar vueltas. Parece interminable. Es tu conciencia pegada al tiempo, porque el tiempo es “conciencia de”.

¿Qué indica esto?

(…) su mente sigue no una sola línea sino varias a la vez (…) esco­gien­do ref­er­en­cias, pero sus pun­tos de par­ti­da por el con­trario pertenecen a un reper­to­rio inmen­so de esti­los, sin que por eso se trate de com­pon­er una ima­gen lóg­i­ca del asun­to más allá de la inspiración que estos le pro­por­cio­nan. (…) no se lanzó a una aven­tu­ra con una meta especí­fi­ca. No se pro­pu­so un camino especí­fi­co. Por eso dijo: “no bus­co, encuen­tro”. Nun­ca vuelve atrás, nun­ca rete­je lo teji­do. siem­pre ade­lante, a lo próx­i­mo que viene. cada una de sus inspira­ciones: Toulouse-Lautrec o Ingres, o lo negro, es puro chance. De esas com­bi­na­ciones alquími­cas salen resul­ta­dos. Es así es como el cubis­mo, que no es más que un hecho arbi­trario lle­va­do al sumo de sus posi­bil­i­dades, fue luego deja­do atrás. 

Demoiselles d’Avignon, (1907)

Para la con­fig­u­ración lin­eal y con­tin­ua de la his­to­ria *con­ven­cional* del arte, “cam­bio” y “rec­ha­zo” son pri­mos her­manos. ¿A dónde con­duce el cam­bio?

Gido Reni, Lucrecia (1640)

¿Qué obser­va­mos en la pin­tu­ra arri­ba?