Artists Into The Fray !

Artists Into the Fray!MAXENCE ALCADE’s take on art world strategies.The art world has the particularity of appraising a work commensurate with the reputation of the person who produced it or those in his or her outer circle. That explains why an Oceanic statuette that once belonged to André Breton has a greater value than an identical statuette without “pedigree.” From the artists point of view, it’s that particular dynamic that leads to the winner-take-all effect — the fact that a small handful of artists run off with all the profits — which is the topic of a book by Robert H. Frank and Philip J. Cook1. In this small world, everyone plays his role — artists produce more or less material objects, gallery owners and dealers come up with forms of exchange for those objects, and art critics produce writings intended to divert the gaze from the verbal shortcomings of artists or the sometimes too obvious greed of dealers. From this point of view, the art world begins to look a little like a Marx Brothers’ farce in which each role is judiciously cast in order to assure that the plot unfolds appropriately. Namely, to determine who will be in the Top Ten of the next Kunst Kompass. This system also allows for plots, quid pro quos and other, more or less improvised, tightrope acts to take shape around it.Art GuruCanvases under his arm, a young man exits a building, the words “Beaux-Arts” clearly inscribed on the pediment over his head. Ten men in dark suits bow before him, displaying open briefcases full of cash. High above them — naturally — floats an apparition of the Virgin. Then there’s an inscription at the bottom of the drawing, borrowing the codes of Mexican ex-votos, a kind of Raw Art very much in vogue in the United States. It reads, “December 15, 2004, I graduated from the Beaux-Arts in Paris. I had lots of gallery offers. Eternal gratitude to Mary. Wishes granted. Thanks.” With his series of ex-votos, Pablo Cots plays with art-world codes, the tools of the trade, the vagaries of the life of an artist ceaselessly vacillating between celebrity and decline. Cots also makes pastiche witch doctor cards intended to guarantee gallery owners “a resolution to all problems, even the most hopeless” — winning back a woman, a female intern or an artist, and even commercial success.  Absolutely guaranteed. Dr. Cotsou claims to have “saved a thousand gallery owners in the Americas.” Because as the wheels of success and the evaluation of esthetic qualities become increasingly more complex, all you can do is devote yourself to the saints, even if that devotion seems naïve and old-fashioned.The art world is also guys in anthracite suits and girls in ultra-chic dresses. It’s all about looking artsy with an appropriate ironic detachment. For Ulla von Brandenburg, that’s all a question of scenery, stagecraft, set dressing.Clothes and the ManIn Quilt I (2008), she lays out eight dark suits and ties so as to form a geometric pattern in the shape of a wheel. A flower motif appears at the center of Quilt I, as if to overplay the naïveté of the piece.  In this case, it’s impossible to know if these suits belong to a café waiter or a Wall Street trader.  All that’s certain is their ornamental features.  The suit-and-tie goes from serious to grotesque, and winds up obliterating the social differences it traditionally is evidence of.We find that same scenery, stagecraft and set dressing idea in her film Ein Zaubertrickfilm (2002).  Here, von Brandenburg asks her friends to do a magic act for her, with all the amateurishness implicit in such an undertaking.  It spotlights a pleasant game of deception. Because for von Brandenburg, “You never really know if it’s real or not. Yet magic acts exist, so we always ask the question.”2The all too familiar Flemish identity rubs Harald Thys and Jos de Gruyter the wrong way. It’s already been so ridiculed by their compatriots Marcel Broodthaers and, more recently, Luc Tuymans. So the two cronies leap at the chance to compare their artistic irony to what Vlaams Blok3 does in all seriousness. “The reports Vlaams Blok films are very similar to what we do — showing a Party member made up to look Moroccan and wearing a wig.”  What amuses Thys and de Gruyter is the exploration of bestiality paradoxically generated by civilization.Worthy heirs to the Dadaists, Thys and de Gruyter did a performance enacting the bizarre (to say the least) rites of furry communities4. The 48 Hours of Kwik and Kwak (2004) presents the two artists, dressed as monsters, locked in a gallery for two days and fed on a fixed schedule, in a kind of hodgepodge of their own making. Along similar lines, they’ve also presented a skinny acrobat rehearsing a circus act, who never manages to totally carry it off. The acrobat stumbles, falls, hurts himself, as the audience comes to realize how completely uninteresting the nonsensical act is. Yet the poor guy seems determined to polish it up.The Artist’s DialecticAll this leads us to realize that Thys and de Gruyter are more interested in playing idiots, not to denounce what society considers to be absurd, but simply for the regressive pleasure inherent in it. Is stupidity more a case of perseverance than a natural gift? Sometimes even their “intention” rings out like a definition of the artist’s craft. “We create characters who are very idiotic, yet persevering and stubborn, who always do the same thing.” In that way, Harald Thys and Jos de Gruyter construct a zany universe in which nothing seems to attempt to be serious for more than three seconds. Sad clown? I don’t know what you’re talking about!Jana Sterbak’s Proto-Sisyphus gives the performer a contraption that transforms her into a kind of wobbly toy. Like a tightrope walker, balance is always precarious. Only movement keeps the performer from falling. Like Sterbak’s entire body of work, Proto-Sisyphus examines the conditions of our freedom — as much in our potential for movement as in the social representations that make us feel alternately free and constricted.But contrary to the devices used by feminist artists in the 1960s, Sterbak’s sculptures/performances don’t confine themselves to playing with the suffering body. When all is said and done, that’s a slightly simplistic way of defining a condition. Once you get past the impression of strangeness in the device, Proto-Sisyphus seems like a playful sculpture in which the hampered body of the female performer winds up finding an elegance in the same way that a corset — another instrument of torture for the female body — might generate.On another level, Eric Duyckaerts takes on an esthetic debate that artists are traditionally excluded from. Composing a grotesque rap song, he begins to knock Immanuel Kant, one of the fathers of Western esthetics, off his pedestal. The artist repeats his carefully considered words about the inventor of transcendental idealism in various tones of voice and in a dubious flow. “I fuck you, Immanuel Kant.5” A ludicrous gap builds between the relatively meager rap vocabulary Duyckaerts uses and the subject of his piece. So the speech is reduced to the simple scanning of Kant’s name accompanied by a flurry of dirty words that seem as though they can be repeated ad infinitum. Beyond the jokey aspect of this work, Duyckaerts shows how the least circular of esthetic theories works. In the end, his puerile “I fuck you” seduces us as much as the thousands of pages of Critiques by the thinker from Königsberg.Art BattleThis quasi tautological circularity and the improvisation doomed to failure used by numerous contemporary artists allows us to rethink our modes of existence and the survival of art and its ecosystem. Presented like a fable, the moral of this story is probably to be found in the work of Tom Wolfe.In The Painted Word6, Wolfe relates the ruthless “gang war” on 10th Street in New York City that was played out in the 1960s between the preceding generation of Abstract Expressionists (Pollock, Rothko, De Kooning, etc., supported by Clement Greenberg and Harold Rosenberg) and the Pop Artists of the time (Jasper Johns, Lichtenstein, Warhol, etc., supported by Leo Steinberg, William Rubin and Lawrence Alloway). The artistic clans confront one another by way of intervening critics and exhibitions, like some cheesy remake of West Side Story. With Wolfe, the circus takes on all its glory — a postmodern human comedy in which nothing is really serious despite double dealing and nosedives. Because what remains, in the end, is the audience’s applause.Worthy heirs to the Dadaists, Thys and de Gruyter did a performance enacting the bizarre (to say the least) rites of furry communities.1 Robert H. Frank and Philip J. Cook, The Winner-Take-All Society: Why the Few at the Top Get So Much More Than the Rest of Us, Penguin Books, 1995.2 An interview with Daria Joubert, Edit, issue 5, “Trouble Boredom / L’Ennui,” 2007.3 Flemish extreme right, nationalist party.4 A practice initiated in North America in which individuals, in animal costumes, assemble to abandon themselves in orgiastic celebrations.5 Eric Duyckaerts, Kant, 2000, video DVD, 6 minutes.6 Tom Wolfe, The Painted Word, Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1975.