review of 2 London
shows: The 2009 Turner Prize winner Richard Wright (Tate Britain) and Pop
Life: Art in a Material World (Tate Modern)
Richard Wright no
title 2009
(tight view)
an example of
pareidolia as seen in a slice of wood
Richard Wright no title 2009 (room view)
*
Viewing 2009 Turner
Prize winner Richard Wrights pareidolia-laced no title 2009 and Pop Life: Art
in a Material World set in motion for me a set of considerations about the
contemporary condition of art. Something prime is shifting.
I think I can sum it
up by saying that the success of Wrights large, but delicate, wall mural
signaled to me the return of magical immersive thinking into mainstream art.
This at the expense of the pop icon/logo celebrated in the Pop Life: Art in
a Material World
exhibit. Its gold, monochromatic (but kaleidoscopic) ground dominates over
configuration. As a consequence, this visionary art produces an exciting
all-over full fervor that needs to be interacted with imaginatively.
One feels immediately
a sense of languor in the room. People are in no hurry to move along. Rather
they seem immersed in their own mirrored filigreed realms. And one hears the
word beauty repeated over and over again. Clearly here we are in the presence
of an invitation to reverie.
Joseph Nechvatal, Upload, 1991. photoshop
file
That said, initially
I was a bit nonplussed when encountering it, as the composition has a distinct
resemblance to the kind of work I was doing in 1991-2 when I first uploaded my
drawings into a computer and began mirroring them with photoshop. My companion
at the museum also pointed out the similar structure Wrights mural shares with
pioneers of algorithmic art, such as Roman Verostko, particularly evident in
his series Epigenesis: The Growth of Form from 1997 - pen and
ink drawings that are executed with a multi-pen plotter coupled to a PC. So
yes, the work has a kind of cute computer retro quality about it as it reminds
one of the obsessive-compulsive mirroring rituals that algorithmic processes
made so tantalizing in the early 1990s. Another example being the mirroring
manipulations in the early 90s work of the British artist Carl Fudge based on
the Durer etchings Resurrection.
Roman Verostko, Epigenesis:
The Growth of Form 1997
In addition I was
slightly annoyed at the uneven lighting that produced distinct hot spots on
what felt like what should have been a unified undifferentiated field.
But nevertheless, I
shall not quibble. This golden work (not at all typical of Wrights other
temporary murals) made opportune a re-appropriation of our finer senses in a
way similar to that experience of listening to the prepared piano Sonatas and Interludes of John Cage. It is
more affective than discursive. More enigmatic than dogmatic. Its intricate
patterning seems to contain many possibilities of interpretation - and thus
seems magical, as magic does not conform to modern canons of causality.
The work
is full of complex inter-relational transitions and rhythmic overlapping
perceptions that interlace. It displays elasticity through the principle of
sameness with difference. There are forms emerging from other forms, both up
and down in scale. Possible elegant figures are nested within larger units, so
things become component parts of other things. Here we are calling up
image-formations from the depths of our mind. And this experience cannot but
remind us that the primary feature that distinguishes aesthetic consciousness
is imagination and that imagination entails visioning and symbolizing areas
of practice useful in heightening perception and intuition. Indecision,
ambiguity and conflict become dynamic and useful values here. Because apparent
secrets and angelic visual pleasures are concealed in the florid ground,
apparent flaws like the all-over ambivalence of the superficial illusory
groundlessness become affirmative values.
That is
the interfering shift I detected in what I think of as the responsibility of
looking a shift towards (and into) visual noise. Here we
can re-appropriate our senses and our fragile capacity to visualize on a
difficult personal basis. Here is an inner reverberating resonance that cannot
be appropriated by capital. Here one feels oneself feeling as a first person
singular. This is an art to self, in self and for
self.
However,
the result is empathetic - as one experiences ones own
powers of imaginatively projecting feelings and perceptions into the vaguely
apprehended forms that result from the balanced and mirrored symmetry. So a
shift suggestive for efforts towards an anti-pop no-logo emancipatory labor
indicative of social relationships outside of passive pop consumption. Here we
can take back our head.
Caught in
the cognitive interactions of its florid web, I drifted off into the permanent
collection and was rewarded by a similar mirrored and webbed enticement in the nearby lace collar depicted in Marcus Gheeraerts the Youngers
painting Mary Rogers, Lady Harington. So Richard
Wrights no title 2009 seems to be
pointing at a reevaluation of high art, and to the necessity of our
re-conceiving it in our time, per se.
Marcus Gheeraerts the
Younger. Mary Rogers, Lady Harington, 1592 (detail)
Marcus Gheeraerts the
Younger. Mary Rogers, Lady Harington, 1592 Tate Britain.
*
This consideration is
only reinforced when contrasting this work with that seen in the Pop Life:
Art in a Material World that was co-curated by Jack
Bankowsky, Artforums Editor at Large, Alison M. Gingeras, Chief Curator of the
Franois Pinault Collection and Catherine Wood, Tate Modern Curator of
Contemporary Art and Performance, assisted by Nicholas Cullinan, Curator,
International Modern Art, Tate Modern. Here it is cynical configuration
that dominates over ground.
The
accustomed platitudes of the corporate logo model for art (immediate and
bright) is supposedly submitted to a re-reading here. But absent any
juxtaposition that might allow for a re-reading, the exhibition reads more as a
celebration (if I was to be uncharitable) or (more charitably) an 80s data
dump. All the typical suspects are gathered together here, anyone that
succeeded in copying Andy Warhols notorious provocation that good business is
the best art: Takashi Murakami, Keith Haring, Jeff Koons, Damien Hirst, Martin
Kippenberger, Tracey Emin and Richard Prince, among others. Still, I wondered:
why no Mark Kostabi?
The
Baudrillardian idea of subversive conformity is given a small aperture here in
the shallow art-market-only treatment that the East Village receives. This
pained me considerably. But my spirit was lifted by the restaging of Hirsts performance/wall-painting from 1992, as two very
cute identical twins sat beneath two identical spot wall-paintings. I had seen
the original piece at Colognes Unfair art fair in 1992 and then it kind of
irked me. But the two dark skinned middle-aged twins sitting there this time
beaming, charmed me a good deal. It also was good to see again in a smallish
room Jeff Koons's reunited Made in Heaven
show that he made in collaboration with La Cicciolina in 1990 just as it was
depressing to have to cross before a functioning Keith Harings Pop Shop in the middle of the show. Is this to be considered as a
re-reading of the conflation of culture and commerce? It is more of an
uncritical representation of it, to me.
Lamely
cute in referencing Madonnas 80s pop chart hit Material Girl, the subtitle Art
in a Material World should more precisely have been Art in an Infotainment
World - as
the focus here is on artists that advanced their careers by playing to the mass media creating a persona (like Salvador Dali did)
and signature 'brands'. But the feeling here is that this corporate
model only tightens the tourniquet of powerlessness about us. Here we are
caught in a profitable (for them) web of methodical manipulation that exploits our attention based on the vulgar vagueness
of self-mythologizing fame.
That is why I sense a
sea change with the social recognition of Richard Wrights no title 2009 as it rewards the
fabulous inner privateness of the human condition in lieu of the constructed
social spectacle that tries to encompass us. And for that I thank the Turner
Prize judges: Charles Esche, Mariella Frostrup, Andrea Schlieker and Jonathan
Jones. Their re-conceptualization of what is valuable in
contemporary art in terms of inner excess is to restore to art a property
of unbridled field based on freedom of thought. Perhaps a certain regime
of seeing is in the process of coming to an end.
*
Joseph Nechvatal
12/12/09