November 2008

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Marcel Duchamp tossed a grain of sand into the art world that, depending on your point of view, has grown into either a lacerating vision of truth or an enormous drag. He was the first artist to see that the thing itself could be a work of art if someone claimed it to be so. Since he gave the artist this permission, his trope has been endlessly re-enacted: eloquently by John Cage, efficiently by Andy Warhol, and on and on by a
parade of artist/commentators of varying interest. Importing a pre-existing object into art runs the risk of re-inventing the wheel, whereas in painting or drawing or sculpture or printmaking, the artist always has a shot at doing something different.

The thing itself has become a tradition by now, and there is no denying its longevity. In recent years, it has made a strong resurgence. Exhibitions at the New Museum in New York and this year’s Whitney Biennial gave copious examples of the thing as art
and associated non-art approaches of collectivism, documentarianism and life-as-art. A handful of artists are able to make poetry from the thing, but that is rare. Most of the time, the thing itself looks like the thing itself. It is not a question of ephemerality; even the most ephemeral work can seem substantial – think of Richard Tuttle – but a lot of work that is currently being encouraged by curators, dealers and collectors has no dimension to it. I would argue that the time is right to reject the allure of the thing and to pursue even more radical rediscoveries of traditional techniques than we have seen in recent years.

This year’s edition of the prestigious Carnegie International exhibition provides an opportunity to gauge the current state of contemporary art; in it, the thing itself shares equal footing with painting, drawing, sculpture, photography, installation and
film. Or perhaps it is more accurate to say that the thing itself was sometimes worked into the textures of works of art, sometimes not. It can be a theoretical element, which can enter into any medium. Film and photography are often content to show a thing with minimal psychological modulation. But aren’t textural and technical modulation necessary for psychological modulation to occur, and isn’t psychological modulation the goal of art?

This year’s Carnegie International is the 55th edition of the exhibition and the first to have a title: ‘Life On Mars’. Curator Douglas Fogle believes the title is pertinent to the question of what it means to be a human being in today’s world. Global events threaten our everyday existence: how do we respond to that threat? Over 200 works in diverse media grapple with this question. Fogle states, ‘The thematic premise behind the show has to do with the idea of the intimate moments in our daily life that we miss by walking through our worlds and not seeing what is right in front of us.’ One theme in the exhibition, which features works by 40 artists from 17 countries, might be called ‘highlighting the inconsequential’. Masters of this tack, Fischli and Weiss, present one
of their typical rooms where a random collection of objects is carefully recreated out of polyurethane (Fig. 1). Their displays can be arresting for their apparent casualness; ultimately nothing is gained or lost in their work since nothing is at risk. Another theme in the show is the trance-inducing effect of repetition. A mesmerizing suspension of beeswax balls by Ranjani Shettar attains a spiritual depth in its subtle variations, whereas Richard Wright’s wall painting composed of tiny hand-painted marks seems merely decorative. Both works relate to Vija Celmins’ small paintings of photographs of night skies, which, in this context, masterfully toe the line between being the thing itself (the photograph) and an active visual response (her painted interpretation).

Thomas Hirschhorn is an artist who has gotten a lot of street cred for the scale of his ambitions and the righteousness of his political beliefs, as postered in his installations. His subterranean cave-like piece in Pittsburgh, however, looks déjà vu. Far more successful are the installations by Mike Kelley and Bruce Connor on the main floor and mezzanine, respectively, of the museum’s neo-classical Hall of Sculpture. Connor, who died this July at the age of 74, was associated with the Beat movement; his work in installation and film has been difficult to categorise. His pieces in ‘Life On Mars’ are photograms, whose impressive technical precision is used for a higher graphic end, their stark images seeming to transcribe souls or spirits of life-size human beings (Fig. 2). Down below, Kelley has contributed a series of imaginative ‘scale-models’ of Superman’s home town, Kandor, made of brightly coloured resins (Fig. 5). A departure from his earlier work, it shows a continued grappling with the forms of sculpture and unexpected use of tonality.

There are resonances across generations and geographies, and the exhibition allows all the artists the space to make coherent statements with their work. This makes for a pleasing experience for the viewer, but it can be detrimental for the artists, in the sense that, if their work is being given ample space, then the judgement of it may be considered fairly based. Rivane Neuenschwander, Mark Bradford, Barry McGee and Wolfgang Tillmans appear to be treading water here. Works of film often feel out of place in large-scale surveys, as they require a different sense of time in which to be properly viewed. Sharon Lockhart’s photos of young people in Pine Flat, California, and her feature-length 16-mm film of similar subject matter, create sympathetic portraits, but her severe cropping of environment in the photographs and setting in the film makes it difficult for the viewer to move beyond a simple identification. Lockhart’s work, like Fischli and Weiss’s, and Celmins’, wants the viewer to accept the trivial equation A=A as interesting. Maybe that is interesting to some; I myself am looking for a transformative element that will hopefully be non-narrative.

I found the transformative in the paintings of Friedrich Kunath, Wilhelm Sasnal and Daniel Guzmán, and in the sculpture of David Shrigley and Haegue Yang (Figs 3 and 4). The painters created works whose graphic means encourage viewers to question how they were made, leading to surprising technical observations, simultaneously presenting inventive, non-traditional imagery. Shrigley’s installation questions basic human impulses, while Yang’s evokes hallucinatory experiences that are intensely visual yet blithely evanescent.

To its credit, the slackerism associated with non-art art practices is a distanced approach, worlds away from the romantic modernist vision of the artist as isolated, misunderstood genius. However, artists’ technical and psychological investments are ultimately what excite and educate viewers; we learn when artists take risks – as opposed to offering safe, but stale, ideas, with the materials only there to flesh them out.

The Carnegie International is at Carnegie Museum of Art, Pittsburgh, until 11 January 2009. For more information, visit www.cmoa.org

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