Aesthetic or Inarticulate Form

Stephen James Newton, a painter and a writer, notes a stylistic inertia that characterizes psychotic art. In tandem a lack of development psychotic art also shows an obsession with intricate patterns and the decorative (like drawing a frame around an image). Both of these things he sees as evidence that psychotic artists use their aesthetic as a buffer against deep emotional substructures of the unconscious mind.

The intricate, decorative patterns characteristic of so much Outsider Art as well as its use of obscure religious symbolism constitute an obsession with surface style. Surface pattern is used as an “elaborate defensive network” designed to suppress unconscious inarticulate form, which he writes, is integral to true creative healing as it risks displaying unconscious fears and threats.

Inarticulate form, so pivotal to the work of the abstract Expressionists and the modern abstract painters of Europe, bring to consciousness the accidental, indefinite, distorted properties commonly repressed in perception to insure a good gestalt and a relatively stabile world view. Abstraction in the mid 20th century collectively lent inarticulate form symbolic and emotional resonance.

“Aesthetics” Newton writes are a “bulwark against the chaotic disruption of surface consciousness and rationality…(48)” To see a form aesthetically is to mark the moment it looses unconscious potency and becomes mere surface decoration. The modern use of chance and chaos are a threat to notions of beauty, balance, and stability. However Newton goes on to suggest that the threat of inarticulate form only works to increase the experience of aesthetic catharsis by eliciting a stronger and stronger amount of repression on behalf of the beholder until such repression becomes impossible. “…any increase in the depth of horror and ugliness of the depressive content will evoke a corresponding increase in formal harmony and beauty to contain it (51).”

Newton’s interpretation is part of a general, modernist unease with beauty and pleasure. Dubufett’s constitutes a large part of this reaction against a notion of the beautiful primarily by creating a new aesthetics of ugly. Taking ugly as a significant and useful tool Dubufett would make muddy, gray crusty paintings. His intention was to use vulgarity in order to offer a total alternative to dominating trends in western painting, like perspective, and the illusion of volume, as well as pleasureable uses of color and line.

His figures are flattened and devoid of the soft volume that characterized the common depiction of the female. Dubufett painted legs splayed with an angular grotesquery of sharp lines drawn into thick muddy paint. Dubufett would interpret “outsider” artist’s rawness, their disproportionate figures, and their an inability to create illusionist, space as ugly. For in a skilled and cultured artist like Dubufett such disproportion was a reaction against European art culture, an element lacking from the outsider’s work that he was influenced by. His work adopted signifiers of ugly, ugly not being one of the intended meanings of the mentally ill.

Newton, Stephen James Painting, Psychoanalysis, and Spirituality.New York: Cambridge University Press, 2001

Dubuffet’s Reception

In 1946 at the second major exhibition of Dubuffet’s work the critics and public’s reaction was one of hostility and alarm. A critic wrote, “These 48 paintings alarmed the public by their imagery of cruel irony (few people realized how funny they were) and by their use of crude materials. In the best Dada tradition, paintings were slashed by infuriated spectators. Many of the critics were wildly antagonistic…(Hall and Metcalf 174)” Neither the public nor the critics could accept or take seriously the child’s scrawl and the raw unrefined imagery that informed Dubufett’s work. They could not conceive of the brutish and the raw aesthetically. Isn’t this proof that the Paris public understood Dubufett’s art work, recognizing the critique such art set against their small, upper class, Eurocentric world. It recalls the Nazi’s reaction against modern art in their attempts to undermine it by their Degenerate Art show. Both reactions act as a sign that Art Brut and modern art lived up, in someway, to its radical rhetoric.

 

Dubuffet sought an art that was free of tradition and fashion. An art that opposed the system of official culture that ‘asphyxiates’ creativity. Art Brut took the “common” man’s art seriously. Dubufett saw it as radically democratic and opposed to high art that was used as a “weapon of caste” and imperialism ( 85).

 

In light of Cubb’s critique that Outsider Art has is not democratic but inflates an obsolete mythology that characterized modernity what new interpretive framework must take its place? She reminds us that perhaps outsider art was never taken on its own terms but only when it entered into high art practice, therefore already contaminated with those things Dubufett sought to avoid. Art Brut becoming nothing more than a sign, a hollow shell whose authenticity we can no longer be believed in and never should have.

 

Dubuffet himself would seem to romanticize the marginalized. “Madness is a positive value” he said. Such phrases would seem implicate Dubufett in this process of misuse and misinterpretation where originality and psychosis is grotesquely combined.

 

Hall, Michael D. and Metcalf, Eugene W.

The Artist Outsider: Creativity and the Boundaries of Culture.

Washington: Smithsonian Institution Press, 1994

The Outsider Myth

 The rhetoric of Outsider is full of fiction and myth. It constitutes part of the outside, marginalized people and styles of the Philosophical and Social discourse called the Other. The discourse of the Other, like the Outsider, is made up of the marginalized and the socially disempowered. It consists of art made by non-western societies (unfairly labeled Primitive art), art made through out history by women, as well as childrens art, and art of the mentally ill.

This myth mirrors the myth of the modern artist as a heroic, nonconformist who asserts his autonomous individuality against a conformist and authoritative society. Structuralist and poststructuralist thought (an intellectual movement coming out of the 50 and 60’s and constituting a wide range of thinkers) with its emphasis on semiotics and the death of authenticity sought to discredit this myth. It was recognized that the originality of both the modern artist and the outsider is conditioned by the collective “text” of the culture. Postmodern thought would bring a damning critique over the category of the Other. It would suggest that to label an art form “Other”(or “Primitive,” or “Outsider”) tells us more about the labeler than the object itself. The terms Primitivism, Outsider Art, and the discourse surrounding female artists were all severely critiqued as male, Eurocentric extensions of chauvinism, imperialism, and colonialism.

 Yet this often ignored the process of absorption and appreciation that was saddled with the system of domination and control. This Other was not exclusively exploited but also recognized as a possible means of a critique on western culture. The critical position adopted by the modern artist was largely due in part to an appreciation and inspiration by this Other (notably Picasso’s appropriation of African art as well as Gauguin, also Paul Klee’s interest in children’s art, and the surrealists and, as mentioned, Dubufett’s interest in the art of the mentally ill). Appreciation happened together with the systematic pillaging of foreign objects (as well as people).

 Joanne Cubbs in her essay “Rebels, Mystics, and Outcastes: the Romantic Artist Outsider” takes a stance against the misuse and misinterpretation of outsider art. She writes, “the discourse of Outsider Art imposes a false intentionality upon some makers, obscures the original subversive meaning of others, and finally asserts it own hegemony of meaning over those it views as culturally disempowered in a way that is similar to the system it protests…the category of Outsider Art is itself the invention of an elite coterie…(Hall and Metcalf 86)”

 She notes that Dubufett’s work was devoted to extending the notion of avant-garde. Dubufett is creator of the term Art Brut (raw art); an artist who was integral in securing a discourse beyond a medical and psychoanalytic framework for Outsider Art. The untutored and untrained unknowingly became the newest inspiration for the modern artist and his/her attempt to undermine high art practices.   

 Outsider Art extends the false myth of romanticized individualism that plagued modernity. “Outsider Art is the most extreme example of the Romantic tendency to conflate social and artistic nonconformity, to re-encode social marginality as a willful act of creative individualism (85).”

 Though offering a sharp critique Cubb’s never explains how this should change the way we deal with the discourse of Outsider Art.

 Hall, Michael D. and Metcalf, Eugene W

The Artist Outsider: Creativity and the Boundaries of Culture.

Washington: Smithsonian Institution Press, 1994

The Modern Artist and The Outsider

Modern art is and modern artist helped create a culture of individualism. But intellectual currents in the 60’s became suspect of the cult of individuality and an artist’s desire for subjective expression. Afterwards in a backlash against the rhetoric of subjectivity and the expression of the unconscious artists sought to avoid subjective expression. But the discourse of individualism survived in the Outsider artist.

 Outsider art is one of the many terms given to art created outside the mainstream art world. It therefore includes a diverse amount of artists. The terms given to these unconventional artists are often misleading and are not adequate descriptions. An artist may be grouped as an outsider simply because there is nowhere else to put them. Other terms used beside outsider art is self-taught and naïve art. This category comes out of Art Brut, meaning “raw art.” Art Brut was a term created by a French artist, Jean Dubufett, in the 40’s and was meant to describe the art of the untrained and marginalized. Dubufett was largely interested in art made by the mentally ill. Outsider art then can mean art made by schizophrenics, children, and the insane, but it also includes self taught artists or any artists outside of the official mainstream.  

As the label suggests the art world found it difficult to place Outsider artists in any of the convenient categories available to established and academically trained fine artists. The Outsider appeared to be irreducibly individual and so inherited the individuality that was glamorized and celebrated by the modern artist.

 The modern artist profited from the, often romanticized, stereotype of the individual artist genius as well as contributed to its persistence with bull-nosed and reclusive behavior. For the modern artist individuality became an end in itself. Where did the modern artist seek inspiration for this maverick, nonconformist expression of individuality? Outside the realm of the institutionalized and official cannons of high culture. Modern art looked to folk art and art made by children or the institutionalized because it sought signifiers outside of what was considered aesthetic, which it saw as stifling. An Outsider artist uses a privately cultivated technique and ignores (or is unaware of) the concerns of the officially sanctioned art world. They often have a highly personal, idiosyncratic style that lacks the refinement of the schooled artist. Many modern artists adopted the unfinished and raw look of a child’s drawing or a psychotic’s disproportion. This process would come to modify how we looked at these works and change what we mean by finished as well as changing notions of value and skill.

However, the distinctions between outsider and insider have become obscured and are no longer useful categories in finding the insider from the outsider. Modernity has created a condition in which all styles are readily appropriated. As Arthur Danto writes in an article on Outsider Art, there is “no obvious way to tell whether the artist is a former short-order cook who took up painting or someone who graduated with highest honors from Cal Arts (64).” Yet the distinction does remain useful on another level. The short order cook and the student may use the exact same signifier with dissimilar intentions and meanings. 

Skill in Modern Art

In James Elkin’s Master Narrative and Their Discontent he suggests the possibility of reincorporating skill into the art historical discourse (specifically the history of painting). He notes the common gap between art academics and the rest of the world who still insist, “my six year old could do that.” Outside the art world a common standard used to judge all art is a 17th century academic aesthetic, that primarily includes the ability to render as the eye sees. Modern art is judged against photographic standards of realism. Thus the discomfort with modern art that often snubs its nose at craft in the traditional sense.

Skill signifies the triumph of culture in the culture/nature division. Jeff Koons comes to mind as the artist who epitomizes an artist who totally accepts his industrialized commodity driven culture. Koons does not build anything but is a director who hires his objects and images out to be made by professional craftsmen. A Koons piece is icily finished, polished and perfect, as good as the finish on any new automobile or plastic toy. Koons makes craft a weapon of alienation and tension, where kitschy, banal, sentimental objects are made car size with laser-crafted precision. Hence, Koons brings to light one use of craft in art. The machine has long trumped man’s handmade ability.

If skill signifies this triumph of culture over nature then the modern art’s cultivation of naïve craft, taken from folk art, children’s art, and the art of the mentally ill, would come to signify the acceptance of organicity and the animal state of nature. It also assumes an antagonistic posture towards culture. The raw and unfinished signifies an emotional release, the expulsion of tension, out of sync with the restraints and repression implied by skill and craft. Craft, from this point of view, rings emotionally hollow.

Skill became an embarrassment to the modern artist who sought to avoid it if s\he had it or to intentionally oppose it. Yet however fashionable this turn away from skill became the wide spread abandonment constitutes part of the mournful tone of modernity. Despite its rhetoric of progress and utopia, the cultivation of naiveté was a form of rebellion against high European culture. Notables are Gauguin’s famous abandonment of his upper middle class life to live in Tahiti, Picasso who curbed some of his own skills as a draftsman to draw like the adept child, Klee as well, Nolde, Dubbeffett, and Guston.

Skill in the production of artists like Koons and Hirst (one might add Peter Halley and many others) signifies the triumph of the mechanistic commercial world and our alienation from a world of computerized images and assembly line things, from all those things the artist who adopt intentionally “poor” signifiers think of as integral to humanity and to their experience of the world.

Skill necessarily concludes in the loss of the artist’s hand/body- and by extension it’s individuality. Perhaps concluding in the mobility of the film, capable of photography’s cold and seamless mimesis and of perfecting time and the real movement of the eye and the chronology of an action. The machine of course beats the eye, the mind, and the hand.

In the history of modern art, craft is made into a conservative position that reinforces passé, artistic tradition. While an art that intentionally courts the improvisational and the aleatory believes itself to be outside of the any standardized aesthetic. A contradiction, it always succumbs to the expansion of the aesthetic and the canonization of the rawness of expression, thus its rebelliousness is weakened and the artist necessarily moves on to something new.

Staging Photography

Jenna Maurice’s senior exhibition in the Watkins College Brownlee O. Currie gallery was a group of large format photographs of her family. With the collaboration of her three sisters and her parents Jenna elaborately staged a series of common domestic spaces, laboriously constructing each family photo. Calling her project So Successfully Disguised To Ourselves, Jenna’s images make a public stage of intensely personal people and places. The crystal, commercial clarity of the images recall the elaborately staged photos of Jeff Wall and Gregory Crewdson. The images are carefully lit and carefully arranged, and the actors, her family and herself, have exaggerated facial expressions and poses and are often captured in the midst of a domestic narrative.

The images are a product of family discussions. The project required that Jenna and her family negotiate the details of each image. In one set of photographs the sisters came together as a collective to discuss each others’ personality traits and from there decide upon an image to represent that sister. Giving creative control to her sisters, then Jenna collaborated with each separately to create a self-portrait.

The show culminated in family portraita standing knee and ankle deep in a river; the family, often posed in front of an artificial backdrop, are placed antagonistically and literally inside the placid landscape. The disjunction is highlighted by the domestic props each figure holds. The highly posed image is at odds with the natural surroundings. They look at the camera with stoic resignation. In the middle sits the father in his armchair framed on his right by the mother and the two younger sisters. Too his left stands Jenna and to the left of her the oldest sister. The horizontal line of heads is reinforced by the horizon of the bank. The vertical full-length figures are placed parallel to the picture plane. The family is gridded across the surface making the image stabile and rigid. The hands, which lead through the image like a ribbon, tell the narrative of familial relationships: the youngest sister wraps an arm around her sister, who rest her hand on the mother’s shoulder, who rests her hand on the father’s shoulder. The prop that each carries represents and embodies the person and their position within the family unit, as in the father’s throne\arm chair. They are dramatic overstatements, the mother with a domestic water pale, and Jenna with a shepherd’s crook. All the posing is undermined by the fact that they stand almost knee deep in a river. Everything makes the pose explicit. The image is about posing. The stabile conventions of family portraiture are made ludicrous by the over extension of the pose. The mediated and the constructed experience is wholly not the truthful, lived moment that the photograph, by its nature, must show. Jenna finds the place where the intimacy of the family is denied by the pressures of social posturing, where the casual and private is judged within a public framework and the family takes on the role of a social institution.

Family portraiture seeks to freeze experience, to make a convention out of the raw and unique chaos of experience. Portrait photography still retains the residue of its grandfather, portrait painting; its still clarity, its pageantry and authoritative grandiosity. Conventional family portraiture is arranged to remove particularity, the family’s oddities. The family portrait regurgitates conventions. It is a theater of memories in which the symbol of a stabile and conventional family is acted out. Jenna disrupts the portrait’s conventions by revealing the artifice of the image and by introducing a theatrical element.

Jenna’s project was to break the social postures in the ironic double play of acting out the postures, posing poses. The family becomes unique and specific only by consciously mimicking another family and another image; their individuality is forced into an ironic posture. The posturing required of social life disguises mother from daughter and sister from sister. The representation of Jenna’s intimate family is negotiated by the public theater.

visit Jenna’s website, it’s slick.

Construct Destruct Construct Destruct

Low on a pedestal sits the burnt and bronze remains of a book. The act of casting, a traditional form of creating meant to stabilize and beautify, is also an act of destruction. The books are erased yet preserved, ash and bronze. Through the charcoal one can still see the remnants of thin paper pages where the heat from the bronze stopped burning. Left to chance the thin layers of bronze made a hard metal ephemeral and highlight the tenderness of the paper. The book is muffled, silenced, but its presence as an object is increased.

The book is a piece by Will ClenDening and is included in Watkins College of Art and Design last fall in 2006. It was a wonderful and grave reminder of why Will ClenDening is missed so deeply by the arts community. The show began along the outskirts of the gallery hall with his early experiments in painting and moved into the more recentconceptual work that included photo documentation of performance and impermanent installations.

The idea that creation is always coupled with destruction first crops up in the early paintings where layer after layer of paint is obsessively poured and smeared across previous layer, the two-face marriage between destruction and creation. From the playing cards, details from a larger piece called “Distillation of Chance”, where will placed a deck of cards under erasure and collected its remains to the sad, funny machines he made. In one a pen records the mindless chatter of an electric fan on an endless supply of ticker tape.

On the back wall of the gallery is a projected video of Will interviewing himself in the vein of a late night television show. In this self-investigation Will constantly questions the validity of his own wholly narcissistic work of art. He creates a space where the ego, fully unrepressed and able to unabashedly reference itself, can give voice to its dreams of grandeur as well as its self-accusations. In ‘I’m masturbating Right Now’ Will sardonically mentions ‘The Death of the Author,’ an essay by Roland Barthes that Will tells himself he needs to be aware of before he can understand his work. The space Will creates is similar to the way Roland Barthes describes the space of the text as an “oblique space,” a place “where all identity is lost (Barthes 142).” Through language a culture asserts itself and displaces the originating self. Personal identity gets subsumed, where the purely narcissistic self gives way to the coding of the ego. At the end of “I’m Masturbating Right Now” Will repeats the phrase “Everybody loves Raymond,” as if his thoughts had been totally subsumed and have given way to the nature of the medium and the culture, stuck like a skipping record or those brief, broadcast glitches when the same commercial will appear back to back.

Through his wonderful banter Will keeps an ironic stance towards himself. He knows his game to be, as he says, both “genius” and “bullshit,” of the most personal nature and the most distance and suprapersonal. Will as interviewer keeps slipping into Will as interviewed; he is his own special guest. In mirroring himself Will deals with his self-estrangement. Isolated on video and mirrored (as when editing and watching the author is again pluralized and mirrored) the self is seen as a other, objectified and projected from the subject. The estrangement is manifold for the author (and then for us) both intrinsic in the making of the piece and in the medium.

There are wonderful moments of speechlessness and hesitation where Will cuts between long open mouthed “ums” from one Will to the other. Here the “I” tries to locate itself as a platform from which it can ask and answer itself, but the “I” is a shifter. Like an empty glass it is up to context and content to give it meaning and definition. Will experiences the same trouble children have with “I” preferring the absolute of a proper noun. When one Will says “I” another Will says “I.” The self shifts and slides from itself. It references itself while locating itself only in its experiences, its memories, never in a proper noun, singular and stabile. The self plurals and falters even in its own conversations, where it is capable of high profundity and low vulgarity. Will captures the way the mind wonders, meanders, refuses to stick to a topic.

At the end of ‘The Death of the Author’ Barthes writes“…[T]he birth of the reader must be at the cost of the death of the Author (148 Barthes).” The death of the author opens the text up to a multiplicity of interpretations where meaning is constantly deferred and rediscovered. The reader is empowered, given both the burden and joy of finding meaning.

The ultra coded, clever nature of Will’s work also seeks to undermine the codes, to negate the over intellectualization of the art and of its irony. It tries to wrestle through the textual maze of the culture to
find our guts and our laughter. The videos and the machines are funny, sensually enjoyable as objects and as narrative. This negation is a process of putting the self under erasure, of denying singularity and stability. In the video Will is preserved and pluraled, simultaneously
frozen and yet ambiguously unresolved. He keeps circling around in our heads.

The Nashville critic David Maddex also has a piece about Will on his blog.

Also see some of Will’s work on the Secret Show Series website.

Barthes, Roland. Image Music Text. New York: Hill and Wang, 1977.

x-tra ordinary

The Frist Center’s exhibition Xtra Ordinary in the Everyday is a good survey of the beginnings of pop art. The title is an ironic take on the artist as visionary, as seeing an unseen dimension in the ordinary. Pop art wanted to break down the distinctions between high and low culture. It wanted to tear down the estrangement integral to art. It repackaged the ordinary.

Warhol has several works in the show. He makes art as banal as possible. He makes the gallery is made into a convenient store. Three of his brillo boxes sit on a shelf. They are painted plywood with silkscreen logos and mimic the real brillo boxes as closely as possible. Warhol regurgitates the ordinary of the ordinary.

Warhol could not ignore the total commodification of all aspects of life.These cultural conditions produced an art of negative, unredeemed mimesis that mirrors the conditions of capitalism on a microcosmic scale in the art world. However, one should not presume that it is time to move beyond the redundancy of the commodification of art. To do so is to risk becoming dead to the deadening process. It needs to be framed in our galleries even if it makes for a seamless integration between our shopping centers and our museums.

The exhibition reflects the total naturalization of the commodity object and the advertised image. The billboard, the slick uninflected image is now the ordinary. It is the “goes without saying” that must be resaid. The conditions that birthed this art are ingrained, and the art is canonized and the coke screen prints made harmless by the ironic gesture of its continual reproduction. The ordinary is the total commodification of the everyday, the absolute alienation of the average Joe from the average object.

The show begs a comparison between Tony Feher’s Suture and Warhol’s Coke a Cola screen print. Suture is a sculpture made of coke shaped plastic bottles whose labels are removed. They hang on a white rope tied two the corners of the gallery wall. The bottles collect together in a bunch where the rope sags with their weight. Some of the bottle tops are red, some white. The bottles have been casually filled about one third full of water dyed red. The bottles each hang from the rope by a loop of wire. The red against the wires and plastic supposedly reminded Feher of the appearance of a sutured wound after a surgery he had and thus the title presented itself. But one has the feeling that the title was an after thought, that the work came out of a process of moving things around, trying to get a clear sculptural statement, without excessive consideration over a meaning. The work never relents to the mimetic intentions of its title; the viewer simply experiences the possibility of a suture as a reference, going through the process of interpretation with the artist.

This is very different from the cool, detachment experienced in the Warhol screen print.The green coke bottle prints are gridded and contained on the canvas. A faint pencil line marks the grid. Warhol stamped the iconic illustration of the coke bottle over green paint. Where the stamp ran out of ink or was only partially inked the stamp leaves an incomplete or faint impression of the bottle, like a hiccup in the mechanistic repition.Warhol’s image expresses the full integration of the artifice of culture in the personal, private sphere.When mimetic art succeeds in branching art and life it fails. Rauschenberg’s “gap” is necessary. When art achieves seamless mimesis it falls into utter banality, invisible in the gallery as it is in life.

Warhol’s paradox is that he claims artistic ownership of an object and image that refuses personal ownership and proliferates anonymity. He reiterates the anonymity of commercial production and of the advertisement.In Feher’s oeuvre the anonymity of the coke bottle has become part of a personal idiom, a part of Feher’s own idiosyncratic language, used with a certain subtle consideration.

Although the same cool detachment remains as an echo in the materials, in Feher it is the “goes without saying”that does not necessarily need to be said. Feher may point in a new direction, back to the artist as the extraordinary individual, as rediscovering the personal and private in the everyday amongst a collage of anonymous consumerism. To see some images from the show click here. 

a necessary frame

Cynicism is a constant danger for the art community. Its criticality automatically places it at a distance from the mainstream. Yet many artists see their work as postured towards the common mass, “the people,” and oppossed to an elitist class. In Russia Malevich thought of his pure geometry as a universal language, a totally egalitarian language. In Germany Joe Beuys said that everyone was an artist; he thought of his work as a total democratization of art. Yet for their work to retain potentail as revolutionary form and to avoid easy assimiliation, it spoke to a small part of an elitist intelligencia within the arts community. Their work was ideologically egalitarian but refused to illustrate this ideology. It was necessary for the form of the art to be revolutionary and this revolution is initially refused by “the people”.

An artist becomes cynical when their work seems to lack an audience. When the audience seems not to exist, the art’s potential for revolution can seem laughable. But to attempt wide spread, easy assimiliation is to negate the art’s potential as a disruption within the image machine.

The art community too has its own tropes. It has economic motivations. And it is isolated. Art history is full of the rebel cry to avoid or destroy the isolating, elitist framework. The cry is to look in the streets, look at the vulgar and no longer to the alienation of the art system: museums, galleries, or colleges. The cry is to make art that avoids convention, that disrupts and refuses any hegemonic condition. The white space of the gallery removes the object, estranges it from “the people” and can undermine it of its connection with reality. The isolation within the art system can suffocate the art.

Yet the opposite is to rid art of a frame, of its estrangement, a necessary part of its disruptive potential. The paradoxical role of art is clarified by the dual nature of the frame.

The frame creates bounds that allows for clarity of experience. It allows for a necessary estrangement that places art outside of everyday experience. It creates a space of fictitious potential where the ills of reality can be re-imagined and subverted. But the frame must also be broken, so that the art can keep its hold on the common, vulgar, material situation of the everyday. It avoids elitism and touches the present.

To frame is a conceptual gesture. A frame is a context. It functions for the image on a micro scale the way a museum theoretically frames and defines art on a macro scale. In like manner the museum building frames a space, and a city frames the building, a state frames a city, and a nation frames a state, ect. Frames isolate, limit, demarcate. They draw a box around a concept.

If one is to hold onto the paradoxical nature of the frame then one must also let go of an absolute audience. Neither the idealized, non-existent “the people” nor the equally fictitious intelligentsia. Art for “the people” if it is to assume a critical attitude towards the world and itself will be opposed to the seamless integration of art that is made for “the people.” The ideal audience is a person full of the common and vulgar and full of intelligence, not hyper critical to the point of cynicism, nor the uninterested, assured pleasure seeker. This risks the necessary narrowing of the art towards an elusive, unseen minority that can respond.

To damn the frame is to damn the whole art tradition, which includes galleries, museums, and art education. This damning denies art as discipline; it is the dissolution of art and its absorption into another discipline: politics, science, psychology, etc. The institutionalization of the gallery and college can create a stifling tradition, a coded right way of creating, but it can also create the possibility of mentally disrupting this stifling frame.

In modern art an overwhelming amount of attention is given to cultural frames. Artists focused on the way language frames a discussion, creating cultural propriety, and politically correct discourse, or the way our bodies frame an experience, or, in a Marxian sense, the way production frames the material condition of a culture. As a result modern art led away from image (painting) towards object (sculpture). The frame became the object of art and critique; it became the object of distrust.

A cynicism pervades theory now in light of the critique of the frame, a realization of the vast waste that capitalisms necessitates, the notion of a system based on cut throat competition, and built on a foundation of slavery, violence, and patriarchy. The frame, as a metaphor for the administrative powers, now is in crisis, it functions despite itself. The overwhelming power of the frame, reflecting its sublime administrative power, looks haphazardly, unmoored. It does not know what to look at. Its uncontrollable power consumes even as it gazes; it dominates and ravages whatever it looks at despite its good intentions.

Interview with Lauren Kalman: the Ideal Body

Lauren Kalman’s Interview12\136The Ideal BodyLauren Kalman’s branches the gap between sculpture and jewelry. Using a wide range of mediums Kalman’s installations resemble sterile jewelry store displays with sheek reflective pedestals and slick photography. Sometimes made from casts of her own body Kalman’s sculpture can be worn as jewelry, becoming performances that she then documents with photography and video. Kalman’s puts herself through pain and discomfort as she interacts and wears her own work, highlighting the painful, cultural mannerisms that are involved in attaining the ideal body.

Matt Christy- A lot of contemporary work seems to be a hybrid between drawing and sculpture, for instance, or drawing and performance. I’m wondering if that applies to your work.

Lauren Kalman-I think I have my hand in a lot of cookie jars. Recently I’ve been thinking of myself as working in hybrid materials, sort of having a hybrid practice.

M- Also between jewelry and sculpture.

L-I think that was the initial jump for me. Being able to think about things made on the jewelry scale and things that were worn as sculpture. Then I started to take images, which I was really resistant to initially. But it seemed to be the right solution to “how do I present this work?” Because off the body it’s pretty dead, it’s much more active when its being worn. That segued into video and instead of documentation this is now a medium that’s part of my vocabulary. It’s been a process of having a problem and needing to find a solution and letting that be a window for whatever materials seem to work.

M- Because you work in such a vast array of mediums. When you display there’s not just an object, so I was wondering if that was a real conscious decision, to avoid being an object maker?

L-I don’t think so because I feel strongly rooted as an object maker. Even the way I approach videos, I think of them very much as objects. They are things, physical things; they relate to objects in the world like the tv or the movie theater

M- Which is one reason you’re exposing the guts, the jewelry of the electronics.

L-Right, that is part of the interpretation of the entire piece. Exposing interiors.

M- There is a relationship to wounding too, so that a wound becomes a jewel and a rupture in the skin becomes beautiful.L-That’s certainly a layer to it.

M-The way I was interpreting the material diversity was that you were keeping the work conceptual so that I’m not thinking about the object. I’m thinking about the objects use. An object maker has commodity appeal, especially a jewelry maker so, “how can I get away from just being a maker of jewelry or a sculptor?”

L- I start with the object. Well…that’s not true, I do start with the idea, but the vocabulary of object making is one I’m really familiar with. That is where I feel at home, as opposed to repetition in imagery and video. It talks about commodity, and advertisement, the way we are bombarded with information, but it is also always open to different reactions.

M- There is a real sterility to the display.

L-Somewhere between medical, health and beauty, the spa, a place where being beautiful and healthy collided, that language of beauty and sterility. An aesthetics of the kitchen, all of a sudden we have really sterile kitchens. But also the isolation of the object; the focus is on the thing and the image. I think it pulls from a lot of different places.

M-That line between health and beauty, really I guess, it’s the line between beauty and sickness that you’re really treading.

L-Right. For instance, I’m really interested in anorexia and how being unhealthy is almost…its been reversed. Not only is it this image of beauty, it’s the image of the ideal body which is also a healthy body, and its sort of been flipped on its head. I just saw an ad last night which was for aesthetic medicine instead of plastic surgery.

M-Can you talk about the pain and discomfort that you go through.

L- It’s a direct link to female beauty and the things we go through to be beautiful. Foot binding, corsets all fall under the same line. I think this is a little more subtle. It’s not quite so body altering. I hope it’s just enough to push it over the edge and have people go “Ugh. What a minute that kind of looks like a grill or that kind of looks like my earring.” It’s close enough to home but foreign enough to make you aware of it.

M- Do you think of the pain and discomfort as a real integral part or just a by product?L-It’s become more important because it highlights this absurdity. A lot of people look at the work and will say, “I wouldn’t do that.”

M-But they’re doing it.

L-But they’re doing it.

M-It’s these aesthetic social pressures that are being placed on the body.

L-It’s a rich place to pull from because it’s so ingrained in the culture.

M- It’s invisible except when it becomes painful in anorexia or something.

L- Even body modification. My mom will see someone with big earrings or stretched ears and she’ll make this face. And I’ll say mom you’ve had your ears pierced since you were a baby! There is this social disconnect.

M-Do you think about transgressing materials?

L-I’m interested in boundaries. I’m interested in the point when objects or fluids or whatever it is, when that transgresses a boundary, and how that can be either sacred or taboo. And how it can easily oscillate back and forth between taboo and sacred. Jewelry dances between precious and grotesque. When I talk about transgressing that’s what I’m thinking about.

M- So you’re not thinking about transgressing a material value system, like gold.

L-That’s certainly a part of it. Especially with the piece with the drooling tongue…The gold and the saliva become mixed. The saliva has transgressed its boundary as inside the body where it’s functional and makes sense and when it gets out it’s disgusting. Like hair, when its on your head its beautiful and you take it off and it’s gross. The gold is mixed with that and so you can’t easily separate them. So what is the value of that gold? Is the saliva elevated? Is the value of the gold decreased? It just stays at that point of no value or questionable value.

M- In advertisement beauty gets sterilized. The female gets sterilized. Beauty gets sterilized. Beauty becomes assumed. I think of you as disrupting that.

L- When you say that I think of the body as image instead of the actual physical body. The body that’s imaged is clean and complete. Nothing goes in and nothing goes out. That becomes the icon of the body and that’s imprinted. Which isn’t possible in this real physical body that bleeds and sweats and excretes. In that way images in advertisement sterilize the body. It makes it an object.

M-It denies the body. It denies aging and dying and rupturing.

L-Right, and I think you come to see yourself as an image rather than as a body.

M-One thing I like about your work is that beauty seems to pervade everything, adornment flows out of the diseased or healthy body and right into everything we touch or make. Electronic guts feel like pearls and teeth feel like pearls and tumors feel like pearls.Are you beautifying the abnormality or are you disfiguring the jewel? Do you want me to look at the rupture in the skin as if it was a jewel, or the jewel as if it was a rupture in the skin?

L-I hate to not answer your question but its both. Some days I approach it from one end and some days I approach it from the other. Jewelry functions as an extension of the body so in that way its fetishizeing the wound. Then on the other hand I’m making an object that is like the thing that is grotesque. So it’s always both.

M- You have a lot of writing on your site. Is that a byproduct of having already made it? Is it an important part of your practice?L-I think that it’s reflective, but also a way of organizing ideas when the process of making seems very intuitive or impulsive. It’s a way of sitting down and saying what am I really thinking about. I know these things I’ve read are coming out in the work, I know they’re there, what is it that’s happening really? It’s a way of clarifying and editing. It makes decision making easier. What’s the fluff, and what can I get rid of? What’s not really working for me? Sometimes it’s good, sometimes it can be overly analytical. It’s part of the reason the work ends up being very sterile. I’ve been trying to hone it down to what is absolutely necessary.