Piero Golia, Part Two

The circumstances by which I took down my post on Piero Golia will remain between me and Piero. Some of my closer acquaintances know the story, but I am sure it is not very important. However, it is important that the post go back up in its entirely, which you can find by this link. The post records my honest impressions of Piero's show as I encountered it, and it is my freedom, especially in a free forum like a blog, to write whatever I want, as long as what I want is an honest, earnest inquiry done with an open heart.

I will take more of that freedom now.

I met Piero at Gagosian Gallery last Saturday and spoke with him for just under three hours. Piero had wanted to meet me on the roof, but the gallery was closed so we located our conversation in the shadowed corner of Gagosian's fire escape. I sat on the landing and Piero up on the steps. We were there with a purpose. I wanted to understand Piero's show and Piero wanted me to understand it as well.

We both felt like we were cheating. The critic should understand with the equipment of their mind and details of their experience. The artist's work should have already been done before the critic arrives, the hand of friendship already extended or the line in the sand drawn for all to see. In this case, however, Piero was certain he had done the work, and I was certain that I couldn't understand. Therefore, we were at an impasse.

The meeting, however, was fruitful. Perhaps it did not bring me to the point where I can appreciate Piero's show, actually I still have problems with it, but I was happy to have the conversation nonetheless. The difference between my expectations and initial reading of the show, and how Piero considers the show in the life of his work is definitely worth going into and giving a full critical airing. Piero did not like the terms I used initially, so now I seek to use his terms. The point of this new article is to distinguish Piero's terms from how I usually see art, to go out and meet his show at Gagosian according to those terms, and ultimately since I am a critic after all, to make a judgment on the efficacy of of how those terms were conveyed.

First the terms.

The most important thing that Piero and I discussed was the difference between what Piero calls “mannerism” and what is called “Scale 1.” Mannerism, so we came to agree, is using traditional forms of art, painting, sculpture, photography, film to create objects. One can approach perfection in Mannerism, a perfection that is astonishing. In thinking about this form of perfection, this ability to approach god through the perfection of a form, I admit I was delighted that Piero and I had the same favorites in Los Angeles, agreeing that in this form of approaching the perfection of a god, that Mark Grotjahn and Charles Ray were our best examples. We agreed that the work of both these artists struck us with awe and wonderment that human beings could take form to such a height. Piero did not come across as a death of painting type of person, though he acknowledged that the type of art he was interested in could not be achieved in the traditional forms, that its limitations held him at arms length from what he wanted. “When I see a Grotjahn,” Piero said, “there is just something about it that makes me want it.” In a great, well deserved tribute of Grotjahn's work, Piero said “It would take me 300 years to paint like Mark.”

Piero's idea of Mannerism begs refinement. When Piero says that it would take him 300 years to paint like Grotjahn, that is how long it would take him to get inside of the rich, deep layers of the form of painting, tease out a voice, establish ground in an area that is densely populated, and eventually go on to achieve greatness. Since everyone loves New York, we'll use it as a metaphor. I bet Piero would agree that to make ground in painting, sculpture, and in something like writing would be like starting as a squatter in a condemned building and working your way up to a penthouse in New York. You're still on Manhattan Island, you can't escape, but we can marvel at what you've done and what you've done is impressive.

Dave Hickey has a similar argument about painting, thinking that the form is all refinements and built edifices on top of things that have already been done. Many in arts share his view. I don't share the view, but I hope you see my point in laying it out. According to Piero, my original blog piece argued as if he were trying to make “good paintings” and “good sculptures,” and he is exactly right. I was arguing in just such a manner, my judgments fell accordingly, and you can read it for yourself. In the world of compositional and historical painting, the resin paintings do not work and according to Piero, they are not trying to work. In talking to people about the show, I found it comic that people read the resin paintings as paintings and still liked them. To me, after having a conversation with Piero, the fact that they liked them as paintings is akin to people that love that, from a certain viewpoint, a cloud looks like a Griffin. Piero was not trying to “compose” anything in the traditional manner. The aesthetics of the works, if you want to go there, is a happy accident.

What Piero wants, I came to find out, is instead, Scale 1, something he talks about a great deal with artists that he considers kindred spirits, namely Rirkrit Tiravanija and Pierre Huyghe. Art at Scale 1 exists in reality, at the scale of life itself. Please don't conjure the term “relational aesthetics,” for it simply misleading. Instead, what Piero talks about is a certain gesture inside of life that makes reality itself do something (the something is determined by the artist). The gesture would have a certain snowball effect, reality would contract, expand, be enriched, be any qualifier you would like to imagine. This is the stuff of Piero's art. “I'm not interested anymore if it's art or film or law or whatever,” as Piero related in his Desert Interviews to Pierre Huyghe, “as long as it's astonishing.”

To go back to our New York metaphor, Scale 1 could not be measured inside the systems and conditions that determine success inside the real estate cage match of Manhattan, but would rather be something that changes those games entirely. I thought of immediately of Rem Koolhaus and OMA, architecture that proposes tectonic changes of reality. Don't squat and move up. Instead, turn Manhattan's grid 45 degrees. Don't triumph by achieving your brownstone, instead put a roof over the entire island and heat it and cool it by solar panels. In other words, think big, If you don't have the money to think big, think of the little pressure points that achieve maximum momentum through small applications of force. This, I think, is Piero Golia. These are what I consider to be, in the wake of my conversation with him, his terms. “What I am interested in is the equation that is so exponentially high that a butterfly flapping its wings creates a tornado,” Piero says again in the Desert Interviews, “Just a little change can expand so much. I believe all art is in that gap between the starting point and the end point.”

In other words, Piero is in the business of the gods. Scale 1 is the vantage point of divinity. You don't go by the usual terms because the terms themselves are what is being dictated. There is a reason in the mythological universe that the god Hephaestus has a lame leg. He is the god of craft, of mannerist art, of the tools of man. His works, though godly and amazing, are, in the end, lame in the face of the business of the Olympus, from which he is kicked off. He is strapped to the physical and the physical is only deformity.

I asked Piero whether, in the face of Hephaestus, he was doing the business of Zeus with his show at Gagosian. His answer was no, that he was instead in the business of Mars (I loved that Piero uses the Roman names, though Mars will always be Ares to me).

“The god of war,” I said in reaction.

“Yes,” Piero said, “and the god of cows.”
(Correction: Piero is misquoted here. He actually said "Chaos" instead of cows. Since Mars is the god of agriculture in the Roman canon, I did not catch my mishearing. For this I apologize.) 

More importantly, I'd say, the god of strategy. As in war and in farming, Piero's terms are about thinking ahead, moving pieces of reality, to produce something in the present that opens into the future. Even more so, it about something small becoming powerful in its poignancy. I think of the Bible and the incident where Jesus comes upon a boy inhabited by a demon and the disciples wonder why they are not successful in driving out the demons themselves. “Because you have little faith,” Jesus says, “if you have faith the size of mustard seed, you will say to this mountain, 'Move from here to there,' and it will move.'” Piero, to me, seems to say that art needs get back to its mountain moving roots.

Piero believes in the power of the artistic gesture and he sees this power inside of real life as Duchamp's ultimate lesson. It is not a matter of moving the pieces of reality into different configurations that makes art Scale 1, but instead knowing the forces by which the pieces move and get involved with those forces. This is art as its most ambitious and also at its most dangerous. Failure, in the face of attempting godliness, is expected. Success should be treasured.

So what are some of these forces, if I am to believe Piero's terms, in the show at Gagosian? We see the resin paintings, we see the cake molds filling up the center space. You've already read what I thought of these works according to the usual terms, but now let's think about the show according to Piero's terms.

One problem that Piero had with my initial review were the things that it didn't know. For instance, the review did not know that Piero issued an announcement for the show on Facebook before he had a venue, that Piero had set a date for the show, June 23^rd, before any gallerist agreed to show the work. Also, the review didn't know that Gagosian did not give Piero the back gallery to relegate him to a small space, but because Piero asked for the space. Piero chose the gallery. To add up another failing, the review did not know that the personal nature of the molds and the pieces of the taxi wreckage inside the resin paintings are less about something personal, in other words not precious as a matter of biography, but instead are simply the stuff of Piero's life, the stuff which art uses to make a gesture. Furthermore, the review did not give an account of the opening, which apparently was a large part of the piece itself.

From Piero's vantage point and the vantage point of Andrew Berardini's review in the L.A. Weekly, which gives a good overview of Piero's career and how this work fits into it, Piero gave us a gesture at Gagosian that needed all of those details. He quite literally filled the “mold” of an “art show.” This is not art show as ready made, but instead Piero inside the forces which control how art is made. A show, for instance, was not “bestowed” by a gallery and then the artist makes the work. Instead, the conditions of the show are set, without any of the gallery's market dictates, and the conditions are then played out in a real setting, set by the artist.

The show has objects, but it is the reality of the artist/gallery relationship, the dynamics of power inside that system, that Piero is re-orienting and challenging. To clarify, Piero said that if he ever made another resin painting in that manner or another cake mold to sell, that I could immediately call him a fraud (I'm watching closely, and you better believe I will). The objects are only part of a larger artwork and they cannot be placed in isolation for the larger artwork. Piero, in the manner of Sol Lewitt, (as Berardini wrote and Piero told me) set conditions as a machine for art, but the machine for art is not about objects but about the entire system by which art is made, displayed, and through which value is conferred.

I pray that I finally have Piero's terms. If I do not, nothing can be done, and I am sorry, I am simply confused then and cannot be helped. Set me out to pasture and let Ares deal with me. I hope that I now know the terms because I mentioned that making art in Scale 1 is dangerous, and it certainly is, and I really want to get to the serious part of the discussion, why such things are dangerous and whether or not Piero's show is satisfying in a Scale 1 manner.

First of all, I do not apologize for missing Piero's terms on my first viewing. The business of gods should make itself known and I did the amount of work I usually do in reviewing a show. For one need not believe in God, know anything about God, to know you are in an earthquake. Furthermore, you need not believe in a creator, or know any back story, to be charmed by a falling leaf. One should not have to be a friend of Piero or in a small facebook community to see the fullness of a gesture. One should simply be astonished, and to be honest, I just wasn't.

I think the reason I was not astonished is I don't find the artist/gallery relationship, the system and terms by which value is conferred and the usual trinity of artist,art,gallery to be interesting at all. If Piero's gesture is aimed at opening an fissure of infinity inside of the infuriating, alienating system of the artworld, then it fails in ambition. It fails in ambition not because of its lack of execution or intelligence or even the efficacy of its abilities, but because the artworld, in and of itself, is a small matter. The whole enterprise reminds me of a conversation I once had with a collector about how much money a Sotheby's auction made. She was impressed, astonished even. I, however, was not astonished. I was instead trapped inside a scale of my own life, having read just that day in Bob Woodward's “Bush at War” that the same amount of money is spent in Afganistan to keep a special ops team, at work, for only six weeks. In the face of real power, the artworld is a self-contained parlor game.

Perhaps the people at the opening would have been astonished by the achievement that Piero realized in the artworld, that he changed the terms of the game, Mars blessing a harvest, leading the cows into a different field, or changing the battleground for artists. Believe me, it is an achievement. If you think it is easy to announce a show on Facebook and then have Gagosian fill it, you are wrong. Piero did do an impressive thing inside of the small system of the artworld.

For a person that is not an artist, however, that cares little for those systems, that has seen Piero using Scale 1 in more global ways, it comes across as a gesture re-orienting a system that is far, far too full of itself and almost paltry in relation to the wider world (to clarify, I mean the artworld is too full of itself and not Piero). It almost seems beneath Piero to mess with the artworld, to have to do an “art show” at all. He's been in bigger territory, planted more expansive gardens. I guess what I am saying is that when you start messing with scale, start making distinctions between mannerism and Scale 1, that to then turn and do a piece inside of system of the artworld is a bit of deflation. The question remains and I've racked my brain about it, simply Why did Piero Golia do an art show? Why attempt Scale 1 inside the gallery system when the gallery system is so small and so disappointing in every way? (if you are reading this and insert a cynical answer here, shame on you).

It could, however, be argued that perhaps this show was his goodbye to such small things, that this show was meant for the insular community of the artworld to show the absurdity of its smallness, that the gesture of posting his invite on Facebook was the punchline to the joke that Facebook is perhaps proper metaphor for how the artworld works, that the artworld is a place arrogant enough to see Jerry Saltz's wall as proper discourse or arrogant enough to think that a gesture on Piero's wall (for his limited number of friends) could have the reach to lead a person in the present or the future to be astonished by the gesture he makes in a gallery. From this angle, I can almost see it. If that was the purpose, well, you've got to do what you've got to do, swat the fly if it is in your face.

I am grateful for my conversation with Piero. I am not a god. I have no place on Olympus. I am not on the list at the magic castle. When Piero says, jokingly, to Pierre Huyghe, “To me, it's like a magician – only another magician knows how good you are at making a ball hover on its own. For the normal public, it's just a ball hovering,” I am glad I had the opportunity to ask the magician a few questions. The only problem with the Gagosian show for me was that for me the ball doesn't hover. Though I may be surrounded by people all saying the ball is hovering (though some, in private, say that they too do not see the ball hovering), I have to square with the fact that the ball is not hovering for me. It is possible that I just don't get it (very possible), but it is also possible that there is something weak going on here, a game of shadows, a shell game that doesn't need me, the viewer, to be played.

Piero Golia

Piero Golia: Concrete Cakes and Constellation Paintings
Gagosian, Beverly Hills
Through August 5^th

I want to hold Piero Golia to his word, if not for any other reason than he says dazzling things. I had the pleasure of sitting with him on a panel once. The crowd was in a bad mood. We had a number of very bitter folks present, complaining about the artmarket, about artists that have the money for monumental studios, about the funding that bad artists get for unimpressive public projects, about the cool kid clubs that exist in every art community.

Golia's response to these complaints was blunt, solid, and memorable. Basically, to paraphrase, he said for these people to stop complaining -- great artists make great art, he said, whether they have one square foot and three dollars or 20,000 square foot and a million. It is not the conditions stacked against these artists that made them mediocre, they were mediocre by essence.

I loved the answer, and it was one of many things I heard from Golia that afternoon. Another gem was in relation to the people complaining about public art. “There's a difference,” Golia said,” between public art and art in public.” He was exactly right. Every obscure billboard you see with an artist's work on it, every lame sculpture propped up in a park -- this is art in public and not public art. The art is made for somewhere else (galleries, museums), and its current location doesn't matter and neither does the public.

The final Golia thought from that day I remember was to the question: “Why do you live in Los Angeles?.” His response, simply, “Because it is close to Las Vegas and Los Alamos.” Now, for me, that response is the right mix of zany and smart to make me perk up and notice this small in stature but long in ideas Italian.

Others have noticed as well. Golia has taken on a sort of darling status. He is talked about at parties, he is slowly turned in a legend in private, I am confident that he could take on the status of myth at some point. Here is a man that, having nothing to do with Hollywood or the glamour machine, placed a light on the top of the Standard Hotel. In one of the vainest towns in the world, there's a light on top of one of the most beloved hotels not telling us when Britney or Lindsey or Brad are in town, but instead, when Golia is present. Here is a man who proposed, along with Halliburton, a border fence proposal to the U.S. Government trying to solve the problem of illegal crossings with an interlocking fence of Richard Serra sculptures complete with doors opening at random times.

Epic ideas require epic payoffs, and Golia has us all tuned to expect greatness from him. It is a necessary condition after his compressed bus piece, his attempts to get funding to build an actual barrier between Los Angeles and Orange County, after his service as, apparently from all accounts, a great teacher at the unconventional Mountain School. We expect quite a bit from Golia.

Now if you've read my criticism before, you probably know what's coming. When I start off praising, there is usually a catch, and about that, you are quite right. With all that I've said about Golia, all my expectations for him and all my faith in his abilities, I absolutely must call out and describe my disappointment with his Gagosian Beverly Hills show, a presentation that is smart, perhaps even slightly above average, but in the end the type of safe, innocuous, and forgettable work that we usually get from artists not named Golia.

The exhibition can be divided in two. First, there are rows of pedestals, arranged in a rigorous grid, with multiple concrete casts of cake pans (all different) sitting on top of them. Second, there are a number of black poured paintings, locking in the remains of an incident where a cab crashed into Golia's house, destroying many of his belongings and some of his art.

Both of these works are smart. The concrete cakes are fascinating from several angles. The pedestals are high enough and the concrete white enough to allude to busts of ancient cultures, the brooding visages of great men that lined the halls of Rome. At the same time, the diversity of the cake pans and their pre-fabricated forms recall the arrangements of Donald Judd. The cake pans, we learn, are gifts to Golia from his friends. They have all of the good features of Judd – changing vistas, interesting configurations, solid practical existences – but they also have what Judd lacks – personal history, memory, biographical details. It is a solid piece, smart straightforward conceptualism that has something to say about life and about art history.

The second piece attempts a similar thing, except this time not quite so elegantly. Recalling more than anything Mike Kelley's Memory Ware project, Golia's constellation paintings rebuild and retool as art the unexpected and completely odd event of the cab crash. Like Kelley dragged the Detroit River looking for mementos tossed into the depths both strange and ordinary to use in resin paintings, Golia too embeds the detritus of history, his personal history, into a two dimensional platform. As paintings, they are unremarkable, sort of bad Alberto Burris or Tom Friedmans that don't wink at you. As a concept, they are not quite as strong as the concrete cakes. They less sure of themselves, a bit forced.

Throughout viewing Golia's exhibition, I kept thinking of all the reasons that I was disappointed, of the fine line between expectations and the financial and physical ability (according to conditions) of an artist to live up to their dreams. I thought perhaps it was a Gagosian problem. Golia had the smallest gallery in the house and was limited in what he could do. Perhaps it was a money problem. Perhaps it was a Golia problem, perhaps the myth outgrows the man at the moment. It is difficult to know.

What I do know, however, is that I agree with Golia that great artists make great art whether they have one square foot and three dollars or 20,000 square foot and a million. I also think that in terms of the Gagosian show that Golia can probably do better, as smart as aspects of the work may be. Ultimately, this presentation is an artist still struggling for a voice. I love Golia's public voice, I love his quips, his whit, and his excitement. Here's to a long future that is still, at this point, in the future.

Paul Thek

Paul Thek
Hammer Museum
Through August 28, 2011

(Reprinted from ArtSlant.com)

Paul Thek believed in a soul. More essentially to his particular pain, he believed in its transience. Part of the brutality and genuine emotion of Thek’s work was that the soul’s peril, its ability to lose a handle on itself, was often more palpable for Thek than soul’s ability to transcend its condition. There are glimpses, premonitions, flourishes, passing brushes of air which tempt hope, but Thek’s soul (his animus, his central compelling force) most often appears as something under attack, something fragile and buffeted by the forces of Thek’s age, the wages of mortality, and the contradictions of his own heart.

While on one hand, his soul seemed to take losses through the popular art around him, namely Pop and Minimalism, more critically his soul was divided against itself, lost in its own contradictions. He may have truly lived, this Paul Thek, but he certainly suffered. That is the lesson of his soul and his exhibit. There are few causes to rejoice during a viewing of it, not because it is bad (actually, aspects are quite arresting) but because it is a mirror for a troubled spirit, a beautiful and wispy lost boy. It is hard to look at, and letting it inside is even more painful.

In explaining myself, in getting into the details of those last loaded paragraphs, it is best to start with the beautiful boy. That’s where the exhibition starts. Thek is fetishized, both for his outsider status (apparently he was in the right crowds but didn’t want to play) and his appearance. In recent exhibitions, for instance, of other marginalized but important figures like Lynda Benglis or Dan Graham, for instance, there was no need to flood viewers with their visage, but that is exactly what we get with Thek. Peter Hujar’s documentation is very present. The first art we encounter is not Thek, but Warhol focused on Thek, his beautiful blond hair not yet long, full of wonder and dewily beautiful. The exhibition flyers have Thek on Fire Island strumming a guitar offering the camera a crushing glare, bent and vulnerable, as if the shack around him was about to fall around him while he plays one last ballad to his lover. Thek’s image is so pervasive, I began to suspect that it might actually be the curatorial point (very sad, I think).

These images seem both important and slightly misleading, tempting one to do what we shouldn’t with an artist, to romanticize them for things about them we think we know about them rather than things that are real and firm. The Thek exhibit is full of all sorts of traps of this nature, and one is inclined to wonder whether Thek’s beauty, his fundamental gift of body and face, partially led to the bombardment of that soul he believed in. It certainly won him some advantages, advantages that he mostly spurned from most accounts, but his face lingering above the exhibition definitely threatens to misplace the seriousness of his work, a work decidedly below the surface, so firm in its belief in an inner reality of the soul as to make something like a beautiful face nothing more than a mask, a false signifier.  

I don’t know where I heard it, but it was said that Warhol ranked Thek among the top 13 most beautiful boys in New York. This is typical Warhol, in his horrid world of celebrities and rankings, his efforts to delineate and separate his superstars, a circus of attribution of which he was the ringmaster. Pop is a quantifier, a packager, it worships the new and there is little place for the old. While Warhol was a tortured Catholic like Thek, he was at least early on a believer in essences and spirit, pop as a culture engine does not allow for such things. For the fairest in the land (for someone like Thek, someone like Edie Sedgwick), it is a two-headed beast bringing glory and destruction, a consumability that has to be sought through simplification.

Pop doesn’t know. Pop enlarges, projects, assumes, and eats. No wonder one of the earliest, most heartening of Thek gestures is tipping a Warhol Brillo Box and stuffing it with a wax effigy of rotting meat (not included at the Hammer). It is an angry, resistant act (much Thek’s work has at least one foot in either anger, frustration, or confusion and sometimes all three), perhaps aimed at Pop’s original sin—its reliance on surface, its avoidance of what’s hidden, that it lives in the shallow end of the pool. Most hatefully, Pop turns spirit into something cheap.

If the soul is buried, if it is deep, then Thek was under attack from forces like Pop. Thek, the “Diver,” was fighting like hell to avoid a monumental loss, the loss of depth to surface. You’ll find not one clean, processed, or tight image in Thek’s work. How could he? Those images were an enemy.

Then, there is the issue of Minimalism, also very present in the show. I am not convinced Thek interpreted Minimalism correctly, but he believed that it too brought monumental losses in the Humanistic war for the survival of the old soul. I got the impression at the Hammer, for instance, that Thek may have thought of something like industrialism or even corporate culture when thinking of the reductive art of his time (he may even have conflated Pop with Minimalism, seeing one as a function of the other). It was the corporation, the glass pyramids of the capitalist global shredder that seemed to oppress Thek. I can’t help but think the corporate, for instance, may be a cause for his thoughts of Egypt—kings on the backs of slaves, great achievements built on the imposed squalor of lesser mortals. Is it the corporate that locks a rotting, pulsing corpse inside clean lines and fabricated levity? While someone like Judd or Flavin thought they were trying to ground the idea of the human in something straightforward, practical, and potentially beautiful, Thek seemed to see a number of cube and ruler-wielding, theory-driven, Joshuas surrounding the crumbling wall of his romantic, spiritual, and mystical self.

So naturally, I don’t agree with Christopher Knight’s assessment: “So the sculptures don't make a reactionary case for ‘interior authenticity’ as a missing ingredient in new and supposedly soulless '60s art. Instead they embody the fraudulence of the concept of essential spirit, however much it's extolled in popular conceptions of art.” In my mind, any person with even the remote desire (not to mention to ability to apply several times in an earnestness attempt) to join a contemplative monastery has to believe in the concept of essential spirit. Thek, its true, expressed a hope that monks would eventually leave their cells and join the world as preachers, but that does not nullify what I think was his true belief in his own interior integrity and status as bearer of some sort of spirit. That perceived integrity made him an odd man out, a bitter pill, the type of artist that is respected by artists but not understood by collectors. 

However, the art of Thek’s time, those items and ideas floating around the galleries of New York and Europe of Thek’s age, can easily be overstated in their importance, as they so often are in the stories of artist’s lives and in the fraudulence and hyperbole of art historical writing. It was not Warhol and Judd that was oppressing Thek. It was Thek, the fishman tethered and caught in a tree like the maidens with the golden hair in Segantini paintings. There was something fundamentally philosophically strapped and burdened in Thek and this something is way past art into something deeper, into the Catholicism of his upbringing, a Catholicism that he wanted to embrace.

Why, for instance, do his childlike and somewhat naïve paintings threaten to float away, barely clinging to high art at all, as if jotted in the notebook over a creative, suffering child? Susan lecturing on Neitzsche, 1987, holds none of the authority of the lecture, none of the didacticism of Sontag—it is a painting perhaps by someone too tired to listen or even more probable, someone that knew Susan’s flaws too well to see her lecture for anything more than earnestness, as human effort playing against a obscure and turbulent backdrop. One writer put it really well in thinking the painting was “I’m still here and ready to reconcile letter” to Sontag, a note in paint.

The most poignant painting for me occurs in the Hammer’s final gallery, a quickly sketched jail cell, bars bent and occupant presumably released into the sky. A fantasy, a wish, a gesture towards the divine, this painting finds a complement in the work of Robert Gober, a practice with much of the same troubles as Thek’s work. Both artists find transcendence caught up in the physical, a bodily and mortal state encumbering the spirit or soul. Mixed with morality, this can lead to guilt. Mixed with science, it can lead to doubt. However, this fact is painfully present in Thek’s work. The fact that the spirit-matter split matters, that is something still worthy of facing, is something I find in Thek.  The Word becoming flesh becoming spirit becoming flesh, the mystery of a Catholic union between the human and divine, seems dream worth having to Thek, even if it is a dream difficult to believe in.

Beauty CULTure

Beauty CULTure
Annenberg Space for Photography
Through November 27, 2011

(Reprinted fromArtSlant.com)

A couple of years back, the New Yorker ran a profile of a person who is usually hidden from the public but who perhaps has a wider handle and power on how we see than any artist or optometrist. He is the best in the world, sought after by both artists like Philip-Lorca DiCorcia as well as almost every high profile magazine, and his job is a simple one, to make people look “better,” more beautiful by tweaking the tragedy of the image that was actually captured by the camera.

It is Pascal Dangin’s job to airbrush, tweak, and often rebuild photographs according to what society needs at the moment, whatever its current idea of beauty is. If society trends toward slender slips like Kate Moss as it did in parts of the 90s, Dangin can do it. If it wants curvy and robust like Kim Kardashian, Dangin can do that too. Most shocking to me, however, was that Dangin even caught on to the point a few years ago that society was critiquing its images and that critique itself was the vogue. Remember the Dove Real Women campaign -- well Dangin did one as well; “It was a great job, a challenge,” Dangin said, “to keep everyone’s skin and faces showing the mileage but not looking unattractive.”

Dangin is the instrument and perfect of embodiment of what Susan Sontag called The Image World, which is notably the idea that real social change is masked by the illusion of its changing images. Essentially, we watch the little amendments and slight shifts in the ethics of our images and this gives us simulation and release from boredom. Sontag, ever intent to get political, goes on to say that The Image World naturally facilitates and augments the harsher realities of Capitalism, photographs “a spectacle (for masses) and as an object of surveillance (for rulers). The production of images also furnishes a ruling ideology.”

The loose and hard-to-define concept of Beauty is, of course, a central part of The Image World. Beauty is able to be chased, but unable to be grasped. Beauty is open to as many subjective definitions than there are subjects, but more often, is rote and predictable in hands of unimaginative minds and limited vision. Beauty as a concept is perfect for the world of the photograph. Dangin, for instance, seems to sense what society wants from Beauty at a given time according to archetypes which constantly emerge and fade from view. The truism “Beauty is in the eye of the beholder” is incorrect according to Sontag. Instead, Beauty is in the eye of people like Dangin, in the eye of the ruling class, in the eye of what the ruling class wants to look like and wants to sell. “At one end of the spectrum, photographs are objective data; at the other end, they are items of psychological science fiction,” is how Sontag put it. 

Now when I encounter a show in Los Angeles, that engine of beauty and glamour and all things painted and polished, called Beauty Culture, I would expect a show that gets into some of these issues of constructed beauty. I would expect the show to analyze and critique, to get into the ethics of this culture. I would expect the show to even have the ambition to suggest, as Sontag goes on to, that images are not the whole story, that humans have the freedom -- should they recognize their dilemma and choose to do so -- to rebel from images. These, for me quite reasonable, expectations were the reason I was so disappointed and even saddened by Beauty Culture at The Annenberg Center of Photography.

Beauty Culture, on view for the entirety of the summer, would have been an opportunity to get some real work done for Los Angeles in terms of photography, but the show seems to have wandered into pretty vapid territory instead, basically prints arranged in the following categories – What color is beauty?, the Pinup, The Marilyn Syndrome, The Hollywood Glamour Machine, Beauty Incorporated (don’t really see the difference between this and the glamour machine), and finally a solid wall of fashion magazine covers. If the intention was to examine the role of photography in the presentation and often construction of beauty, to expose it as it does in its title as rooted in “Cult” thinking, then what we have here is the very narrow and facile idea of beauty that we find pretty much everywhere. Thumb through an issue of W or Vanity Fair, and you have most of what you will find at the Annenberg.

Basically what I mean by “narrow and facile idea of beauty” is beauty as an image, as a surface built by a culture that has a large, often financial, stake in what those images look like. We often have the experience, especially in Los Angeles, of hearing in regard to celebrities and others that “they look just like their picture” if they are beautiful, or the opposite if we think they are not living up to our expectations, “they are much less pretty in person.” The world of the constructed image is a fascinating but dangerous place, prone to the whims and impulses of a schizoid and distracted culture, but most of the images shown at the Annenberg are simply the polished, final, unflinching, and dangerous images that are so destructive to culture. We only have people looking good in their photographs and most often (almost two thirds of the time) women photographed and interpreted by men.    

It is not enough to throw in diversity of skin color, a few images of plastic surgery, and a Martin Schoeller image of Tammy Faye Baker, of constructed beauty falling off the deep end. These images, though showing some of the darker avenues of constructed beauty, still show the engine pumping and unable to be stopped. They are greatly outweighed by the hundreds of straight ahead fashion photos of Marilyn, Kirsten Dunst (who, I would say from experience in L.A., does not look like her photos), Sofia Loren, and Angelina Jolie. The Annenberg’s main role with this exhibition is to show the same unapologetic falsities that are built by CAA in the same building, and this is a real shame.

Instead, what of that freedom that Sontag talked about, about the choice one can enact for themselves to resist the image world and see it for what it is, an illusion? Are there not any routes we can take in photography to see its ruses? How about at least one instance of a retouched photo next to an untouched one, a sort of Highlights Magazine, can-you-see-what’s-different moment? Are there ways to include photographers that have perhaps unconventional visions of beauty? Is there a way to show that beauty is not entirely in the hands of the image? Are there limitations to beauty as given by photography? At bare minimum, how about bringing some of the famous critiques of fashion body image as offered by feminist psychology, sociology, and art history over last forty years? Eleanor Antin? Naomi Wolf? These would be the questions that a serious exhibition on the cult of beauty must ask.

The Annenberg Center of Photography has great potential, having the luxury of focusing specifically on the photo medium when most museums put photography in the basement, in a remote wing, or in side altar gallery spaces. Institutions dedicated solely to photography can add depth to an art community. One thinks immediately of the International Center of Photography and the Aperture Foundation in New York as well as the Museum of Contemporary Photography in Chicago as serious places dedicated to the theory, presentation, and history of photography. Not only that, they do great jobs, have interesting shows, and really push the envelope, able to, at times, even to push forward questions about the often shaky moral ground photography stands on.

Los Angeles needs a place like these, and The Annenberg seems to have this interest in mind, but this show is not a good route. They can do better than this. During a time when Los Angeles is collectively making a claim as not only a world class art city but as the world class art city, we need them to do better than this.   

Cy Twombly, R.I.P

Cy Twombly died today at the age of 83 in Rome. I call it ORANGES obit forthcoming.

http://artsbeat.blogs.nytimes.com/2011/07/05/cy-twombly-idiosyncratic-painter-dies-at-83/