Titus O.

Dallas-ites and friends David and Amanda Hanson were up in Chicago this weekend. David used to work for Disney, and later Paul McCarthy. Now he designs robots, recently collaborated with David Byrne, and once again was just featured at Chicago’s Wired-magazine sponsored Nextfest . Nextfest is the preeminent US “see the future – today!” expo, and I took advantage of David and Amanda’s invitation to attend a preview before the public was allowed in.

Though this was the first time I’d been, I can’t say there were many surprises, and once again I’m reminded why I remain so skeptical of the futurists and techno-wizardry in general, especially when it pretends to be art. It brought to mind a great passage from Albert Oehlen I was reading on the L train just this week. Talking about why he chose to paint rather than other options he explored as a younger artist he says “[content in art can] be overshadowed by technical issues…you have to realize that these discoveries, made at the forefront of technological science, are basically achievements of the military and the powers that be. So if you rush out to provide some corresponding form of literature or, like today, computer art, you…renounce art’s option of doing something different, and end up panting along behind. The only real possibility is to use precisely what has been weakened, like the novel or painting…to use the second-most-modern medium, the second-most-modern means…and continue working from there.”

Panting along behind, no doubt thinking you’re way ahead – such appears to be the case with the “paintings” of Eric Natzke, the sole featured 2-D artist. He creates them using Flash algorithms somehow, and the results resemble really sexy teched out 14th generation abstract hotel art. I loved looking at some of them (for 15-20 seconds), but mostly they end up revealing a fundamental vacuity, initially obscured by the shimmer of technical novelty. They are very nice, pleasant, swirl-y and futuristic, with some of the undertones of soul-loss that lineage implies. While infinitely tasteful, there’s no meat; I sensed no depth behind the ink-jet printed façade.

Nearly everything else suffered from similar gaps in concept or development. Walking around became an exercise in seeing what wasn’t really working properly – robots, games, displays, demos, one after another clunking, gasping and collapsing, humming in some kind of static state of melt-down; or just dumb. The biggest dud of all had to be the big Toyota pavilion star attraction, the dubiously named i-REAL. It’s just a suped-up wheelchair, that reclines at increasing speeds, I guess to just moderate your chances of dying by hitting a pebble and rolling over. Videos and demos indicated they expect this thing to begin to compete with cars, showing it on the road in traffic. A big group of us just stood there gaping at each other with “They can’t be serious?” looks on our faces. It’s the perfect solution if you feel actually standing up on a Segway takes too much effort, or you have a hankering to imitate Dr. X, Dr. Evil, or some Dr.Who interstellar baddie circa 1973. It even has senseless throbbing light show displays in its plastic shell.

The Immersadome artlessly simulates multi-sensory experience, with a vibrating chair, wrap-around curved video screen, and a fan in your face that blows headache-inducing, questionable simulations of oranges, flowers, cherry pie, and the wind in your face on a rollercoaster. None of it was anything more than a silly, somewhat annoying diversion. One day I suppose artists might get their hands on something like this, and actually create an experience that is something more than an ineffectual imitation of reality. Realism’s dead end is endlessly seductive to the techies. Hanson hopes to create robots realistic enough that they can develop humanistic values so that they don’t end up eating us. Ambitious, noble, and probably prophetic. But I wouldn’t call them art.

The thing I did like: Brain Ball! “Win by relaxing!” the booth banner proclaimed. You sit at an air-hockey resembling orange table, with a small ball in the middle and two small circular goals at each end. Each player straps on a black head band studded with sensors. These detect brain wave activity, and the player who can shift most effectively from typical daily stress-revealing beta waves to alpha, and then theta (reflective of relaxation and sleep respectively) are able to mentally push the ball toward their opponents side and into their circle. Aware of my years of Zen training, Amanda was excited to see how I’d do.

I’d had some trouble finding the place and had just gotten there, feeling fairly well bombarded by lights, noises, whizzes, and bells, and I promptly lost to her other meditatively inclined friend 4 times, then Amanda herself twice. We watched others play for a few minutes before taking another shot. The first round I had tried to change my breathing, think relaxing thoughts, circulate my chi, etc. I lost, over and over.

So sitting down again, I shifted into proper “shikantaza” posture, meaning sitting on my sit bones at the edge of the chair, lengthening my spine, and breathing deeply into my abdomen. I closed my eyes, cleared my head, and a few seconds later, someone said “Titus, you won.” This was against the same guy who’d beaten me four times in a row. I proceeded to “win” four more times against him, three against Amanda, and a dozen more against everyone else who sat down opposite over the next few minutes. The last was the tall, rail thin but pneumatically enhanced date of a wealthy looking gentleman; she was barely contained by a short bright magenta dress, looking as if ready for the Playboy Mansion prom. She seriously had the biggest tits I have ever seen, proportionally speaking – they were like basketballs wrapped in pink satin. A living Murakami fetish. The ball veritably shot toward her each game. I felt sorry for her. She looked really disappointed – so what else does any red-blooded heterosexual guy do? I tried to be chivalrous and lose. I thought of traffic, dead Iraqi children, Sarah Palin, and a McCain presidency. I succeeded in slowing the inevitable, but it was such hard work, I eventually had to let go, and the ball plopped into her goal. As I got up to walk away, she said to the gathered crowd “This thing must be broken. I’m, like, so totally relaxed!”

I’ve been reading an early text by Victor Burgin , the conceptual artist, theorist, writer, and one time Turner Prize short-lister (’86). The work from the 80’s that I had cut teeth on has the advertising-critique gloss and airless neo-Marxist flavor that sort of made it blend into the 80’s woodwork, and fail to get much of my attention. But like most artists who persist, neat boxes and polemics melt down, the Freud and Feminism fade into the background, and you even see latent romantic inclinations, once utterly taboo, find expression in his later work.

(Office at Night, 1986 (one of seven sections))

Here’s the quote that struck me, from an essay around 1984. He’s decrying the backslide from conceptualism into marketably expressionistic painting:

“What we can see happening in art today is a return to the symbolic underwriting of the patriarchal principle by means of the reaffirmation of the primacy of presence. The function of insistence upon presence is to eradicate the threat to narcissistic self-integrity…which comes from taking account of difference, division.”

[That could actually apply to my father’s irrational fear of Barrack Obama, come to think of it – when I called Sunday, he had just gotten home from the gun range, and after a while of pleasantries he asks me what I think of Sarah Palin. Oh, god, here we go, I thought. Yes, he thinks Obama is a closet Muslim, waiting to reveal his friendship with Osama Bin Laden after the election; and even scarier, all those new taxes (Dad! You’ve lived like a pauper on Social Security for 15 years! Roosevelt was not the devil! You’re taxes won’t go up!) And oh, how he loves Sarah Palin...]

I found an interview from a few years later where Burgin makes some predictions and expresses his art-world wish list:

“Burgin: If you’d asked me that question twenty or more years ago I would have found it much easier to answer. Back then, I wanted to see a dissolution of the hegemony of modernism and an expansion of art-making to include considerations of content that, you may remember, Greenberg defined as “something to be avoided like a plague.” I wanted content to be defined not solely in terms of “personal expression” but in terms of critical social and political issues — considerations that Greenbergian modernism defined as improper to art. I wanted an end to the definition of visual art in terms of the traditional media alone. I wanted to see a use of contemporary technologies and forms that would make a link between what was on the gallery walls and what was in the world outside. Today most of that seems to have happened. But what didn’t happen, or at least didn’t happen very widely, was the element of critique. What took over was a sort of sixties pop art celebration of the eighties, a period of Reaganomics and junk bonds, when a speculation-fed art market had expanded to the point where it could economically support those “alternative” sorts of activities — but only to the extent that they could be commodified. It will be interesting now to see whether what emerged in the late eighties in an expansionist economy will develop, or even survive, across the nineties, which seems almost certain to be a period of recession and retrenchment in the U.S. What I would like to see now, though, is going to be much harder to get. I would like to see the creation of a critical and curatorial climate in which long-term critical projects in art can be sustained and flourish. I would like to see novelty and “mediability” displaced from their present positions as paramount aesthetic values. I would like to see just a little less of museums being led by the nose by fashion. This is even more politically important now that being “right on” is becoming chic. I would very much like to see “critique” take forms other than simple accusation. There’s a great belief among self-defining “political artists” that the other guy did it. It’s never our own fault, is it? So I would like to see an end to “the oversimplification of everything.”

Well, so much for his wish list (novelty unfashionable? It’s only ever more so…) And for the 90’s being cashless. What I like in the earlier quote is the bit about the insistence on presence as applicable for our moment, when it seems that the market drive is fueled by a death-defying impulse to purchase/commodify the products of a supposed (mostly latent if not dormant) critical apparatus whose entire social/political trajectory had historically been to undermine the very consumers who now rabidly fund it (don’t lose the image of the millionaires sprinting to booths at art fair previews – they may have stopped the running of the bulls , but we’ll always have Armory). Reinforcing “narcissistic self-integrity”? What on earth else is a new Hirst supposed to do? Art by narcissists for narcissists. A match made in heaven.

What’s perpetually sort of hinches my shorts is the conundrum of how art as critique has been thoroughly disemboweled, so you have the vacuous-seeming products that just baldly capitulate to being baubles for a new aristocracy (Liz Peyton, Koons, et al); or you have the need for pure spectacle to garner any attention whatsoever, making less likely precisely the kind of space where art (vs. mass media) can actually function (with new buildings built to house art only reinforcing this); and you have the art that pretends to any sort of critique already co-opted on arrival, or so ill informed of precedent and intellectually graceless that you just end up wanting to agree with Kuspit despite yourself and hate everything (which I don’t, and don’t). Hirst kind of illustrates all manner of nonsense. His apologists would claim that there is some kind of wink-nudge democratizing critique built in, and that he’s opening doors for everyone else. Who are they kidding? He’s just getting what he can while he can, and seeding more of that (so-called) free-market “narcissistic self-integrity.” Such is the deadly nightshade garden that he grows.

But the existence of figures like Burgin are signs of hope, and the reason to keep at it. Exhibitions and books like his won’t pack them in or dominate the best seller lists, but the sort of critical/poetical space-between-genres he and the many artists like him open up are often the last refuge for those seeking a fresh take. That’s all we ever really need. A fresh take.

(NIETZSCHE`S PARIS, STILL #2)

The discussions around this whole Hirst auction thing already seem passé, even before the auction has happened, as if it was all years ago and you’re just rereading the coverage, having stumbled across it accidentally. And that in itself indicates something. A glitch in the matrix. So unremarkably inevitable. It’s like that story about United Airlines troubles from 2002 that recently got re-circulated online and caused a massive stock sell-off when everyone failed to notice the dateline. We live in bubbles and collective fantasies.

Ivan used the word nihilism to describe Hirst in his post. That seems fair. He looks to be the icon maker for a culture of death and greed. You could make the five-minute effort to discuss the meaning of his tropes, or figure out if this or that arrangement of butterfly or bovine corpses really works, but why bother? That obviously isn’t his point – they don’t bear that kind of scrutiny, and that’s not why anyone buys them.

Duchamp had a secretly Catholic mysticism at work, and wanted you to work a little for it (he was smarter than you, after all.) He spent a lot more time playing chess than making art, the former being much purer and unmarketable (his stated criteria, not mine). Warhol (devoutly, stubbornly Catholic) was a secret visual sensualist, and wanted to transmogrify the profane into the sacred, or at least substitute it. Hirst, all empty Church of England, devoid of meaningful ritual and hierarchy to rail against, takes sacred images to the disco morgue to drain their blood. Like the melodramatic protagonist in an Anne Rice novel, he seems to be secretly furious that he keeps getting so well rewarded for his apparent immortality, like he’s bitterly asking “Why do you keep buying? Don’t you fuckers get that I actually hate you? Let’s just see what you’ll shell out for this pile of shit I paid to have cast in solid gold.” It’s all downright Faustian…