This article hits on a number of the things we've talked about already. If you forgive the often cheesy writing, I think it's really quite something - at least something to talk about.
I think it's interesting that this was approached as a journalistic "experiment" rather than a performance or some other expression of an art event.
Any thoughts, in terms of the social interaction (or lack thereof), as well as context and site specificity?
Friday, April 13, 2007
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The Washington Post article is interesting in relation to "site-specific" art, although here the artwork insistently refuses to adapt to and integrate with its immediate specific environment (the article mentions that the music chosen is classical and not popular, it's "art without a frame"). But it's also interesting in relation to studies of everyday urban life as being beset by a psychological whiplashing from numbing routine on the one hand to trauma on the other ("a guy died right there," says one of the unsuspecting subway denizens).
This is something Walter Benjamin among others is famous for writing about, especially in his essay "On Some Motifs in Baudelaire." Baudelaire argued that negotiating between the ephemeral nature of urban experience and the enduring quality of true aesthetic achievement is the defining preoccupation of modern art. "Modernity is the transient, the fleeting, the contingent," is how he wrote out the equation; "it is one half of art, the other being the eternal and the immovable."
In a sense, then, maybe a lot of modern art has tried to measure itself against something more like the bustle of the urban subway, of the bureaucrat rushing to work. Better than Johann Sebastian Bach, why not level the playing field some and see how an Andy Warhol painting stands up to morning rushhour traffic? In Baudelaire's terms, Warhol could be thought of as a generalist who moved effortlessly between the realms of art, commerce and subculture, who made work for galleries and also worked on a magazine. With the help of silkscreening he developed a use of photography that spanned from celebrity portraits to photojournalism. But in many ways Warhol was a dark counter-figure to the Baudelairian flaneur, more the shell-shocked urban denizen who, in Walter Benjamin's famous description, is only capable of experiencing either modernity's standardized and predictable banalities or its traumatically unpredictable flux, but who lacks the flaneur's prowess in dialectically negotiating the two in search of larger, more lasting meanings.
At the other end from Bach, Warhol then is perhaps too well conformed to the downtown subway. He studiously avoided any transformations of mute materials into meaningful pictures, of fleeting events into enduring art. Especially in his first two years of silkscreening on canvas, he separated the two out and exhibited them in alternation, mounting canvases bedecked with assembly-line commodities and celebrities alongside other canvases stuttering with repetitions of wreckage and riots and death. Excerpts of spectacle on the one hand, shocking reality on the other, that which only ever exists as pictures next to that which was never meant to be a picture. The capaciousness of photography, its unbiased welcoming of both the commercial and the journalistic, the prepackaged and the raw, Warhol translated as not democracy but utter indifference. The surplus of images available to the medium was revealed to be a deficit; not only was photography unable to reconcile harsh reality with the creations of culture, it was blind and impassive to the very distinction.
How Warhol updated the Baudelairian equation of art's relation to modern life was to replace art with culture industry fetishes and life with trauma. Only a medium as indifferent as a machine, an industrialized rather than artisanal medium like photography, could cope with an irreconcilable whiplashing between the two. The view of photography as just such a machine was canonized within the art world of the early 1980s, supported by art and criticism that figured and theorized photographs as either passive handmaidens to hulking corporate media interests or as utterly raw documents so objectively indexical that they bequeathed to culture only alien skidmarks left by an otherwise inaccessible reality. However, the art we're studying in this class, much of which flies under the banner of Relational Aesthetics, doesn't belong to that period. This is art that comes out of do-it-yourself culture, that tries to acknowledge and assimilate the connections between market commodities, reproduction and media but also see them as empowering rather than alienating. This newer art rehearses many of Warhol's moves only to reverse their effects and redirect their consequences. That is, it works through and breaks down Warhol's stark dividing out of the photographed world into spectacle and trauma, the forever new versus the incurably damaged, by reintroducing the excluded middle, the realm of everyday life and common material exchange. Mystifying images of high fashion are secularized by the material practices of street fashion, the hands-on bricolage of thriftstore shopping; worn clothes, cooked food and casual friends now fill the space between celebrities and dead bodies.
Whether these artists use as their medium xerox machines or thriftstores or Home Depot, they approach market culture not as virtual and pacifying but plastic and malleable, something inviting creative manipulation. Here the artistic medium is no longer Warhol's machine, but neither is it entirely the artisanal trade worked by more traditional painters and sculptors. Present in this new work is the feeling of industry and technology, large-scale distribution and circulation. That the work also feels individually created, handmade, gestural and ultimately romantic is a large part of its ambition, its effort to keep open negotiations between personal emotion and agency and a set of artistic materials that has grown to such a massive scale.
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