http://www.enterstillhouse.com/miles-huston/#imgs
Recentness of Sculpture 2017
By Miles Huston
The world is flat...but there is a sphere passing through it
Right now, previously painted Benjamin Moore Super Hide Flat White walls are being blasted with 5000 lumens of cold fluorescent ‘German Style’ light, then photographed, with all layers merged visible. The colors have been corrected. Context and GPS location of this economic playing field have all been ‘leveled’, apparently. There are a myriad of ways to upload your personal content, but some more prominent sites require specific viewing standards for proper vetting. Others format your unique information into a strict designed structure to maintain a cohesive nonhierarchical viewing or listening experience. For Artists, we have been duped into thinking we have agency over our image creation and distribution. Instead, we relinquish the sculpture-ness of our Sculpture in order for it to become flat, to enter it into the website supply chain, geared in one direction, towards the collector’s plate—often flanked with advertisements, the alternator in this driverless car.
Sculpture, installation art, and performance art have flattened—to the perspectival populist square grid much like the Minimalism Clement Greenberg described this mirrored essay(Recentness of Sculpture 1967). In Greenberg’s opinion, aspects of Minimalism were being reduced to a set of mannerisms of safe taste, a “realm of Good Design, where Pop, Op, Assemblage, and the rest of Novelty art live”. It would seem that our new ‘Image-object’ is performing a similar demise within the current imposed standard of documentation of the sculpture in situ. The carefully constructed image has taken the place of the atheistic surprise and discovery that might exists beyond the screen. Not only has it taken its place, it has become a way to reverse-engineer the work itself, to be experienced exclusively as ‘ideation’, just as Greenberg described. On the other hand, this ‘leveled’ landscape does allow for anyone to enter into the process of value making anywhere in the world: as long as you fit the criteria of the board. If not, you will need to find a way to change the game, effectively creating the next Contemporary Art Daily, Pinterest or Instagram.
The imagification of the Artworld allows for forms of value outsourcing to operate as well. Different locations and spaces act as gallery proxies for the New York centric transaction, which can be completed without seeing the work in person. It would seem that Thomas Friedman’s book The World is Flat was correct in foreseeing the democratization of software and interface that allowed this deluge of supply to be “done by you, if not to you”. But it failed to tell the story of how users of this Flatland would have to develop new obscuring design strategies in order to hold onto our most base modes of experiencing power and value through mystery, myth, manipulation, desire, seduction, and romance. Unfortunately, this set of terms is forever in wedlock to another set: misery, horror, servitude, revenge, destruction, and deceit. This is the dark side of the mirror: what the utopic ideals of individual cyber network navigation hoped to curtail through transparency and access.
So I am not surprised that within this flatted overexposed Expanded (professional) Field it is becoming more apparent that the Production of Obscurity has been co-opted into nuanced forms of marketing. This is not dissimilar to a bar-with-no-name or a menu without price. I am not concerned with writing an essay about the history of the disappearance of the Artist or art in age of post-mechanical reproduction post-production. In my mind, Lee Lozano + Stephen Kaltenbach, David Hammonds, Cady Nolan, Trisha Donnelly and Reena Spaulings have all proved that these strategies were effective in creating historically valuable artworks with the intention of creating distance as part of the work. K-Hole, the artist trendforcasting group, sold Norm-Core to the advertising agencies as way to identify people who were attempting to “seem like a clone” or acting basic, so we will need to focus on something else. My main concern now in this Post-Obama twilight zone is that we make ourselves aware of the different uses of obfuscation, to understand when it is productive and when you should call bullshit. As the moral of the story goes in Vonnegut’s ‘Mother Night’: Be careful who you appear to be, because you will be who you appear to be.
So with that, it is also my intention to think about the Production of Obscurity in relationship to the production (denial or removal) of images of the work as the work itself. Again, this is quite the opposite of what or who you might think is ‘obscure’ now. Those from the pre-internet world became obscure, mainly due to a lack of access to distribution, not always by choice. Today our reality is that everyone has the ability to share and distribute content democratically. The choice to encrypt content/information as a filtering mechanism to generate interest and curiosity must be looked at simply as that, a choice. And I am sympathetic to it. However, it is important, in this struggle between the powers that try to co-opt Sculpture and the reactive obfuscation of it, that we don’t conflate the Artwork with the qualities of simply being a good human. Being private, harmless, reserved, concerned, empathetic, quiet, listening, and less forceful are all great attributes to embody. It’s just not appropriate for them to be absorbed into lofty mythic rumblings in clique based value circles to garnish the plate. Because there is also a stench of privilege in the Artist that chooses to be hidden from the day-to-day aspects of this ‘professional career’ because they have money and the representation to do so. In the same manner, there are galleries who have the financial stability to maintain an image of provenance and certainty. The gallery’s program may exude that sense of pureness, but every gallery has to pay the rent and there is nothing sexy about that.
Much of what I am speaking about is a result of the distribution of artwork, where it goes, where it is seen, who speaks about it and what they choose to tell. There is another level of the obfuscation game that is even harder to discern or to navigate. What I know about the Artworld is that I am naïve (or choose to be) to its inner workings. I have no idea how many dealers operate in the secondary market, but I bet that most of them do. The market that I participate in, as a living Artist, seems equally unfair, for better or for worse. I decode no logic to why Artworks sell when they do: a gift of the Potlatch, the watershed of manipulation, or the marriage of white male privilege and minority exploitation. Ideally, people just like the work and want to own it. From where I stand as a participant, I see an experiment filled with the hearsay of tax loop holes, email art consulting services like Baer Faxt, secret Trump supporters and their relationships to our institutions; accrued cultural and Art historical power fortified by Manhattan real estate backed security—a theme park with rides—Designed, Rendered, Flattened. It all exemplifies a two faced-society that does not want a government to support its Museums or the Artist making the Art, but wholeheartedly believes in privatizing its power and grandeur to transfer wealth as a model for its makers.
It is known that fish bred as ‘bait-fish’ for carnivorous livestock’s consumption have mutated their own biology to attack the hierarchy of the food-chain they’ve been bred for. The mutation results in an increase of acidity found in their urine that when released is so acidic it immediately begins to burn their own flesh. In the volume they are stocked, bait-fish create an exponential rise in toxicity to their environment.
Back to Art and to Greenberg: “Minimal works are readable as art, as almost anything is today—including a door, a table, or blank sheet of paper… Yet it would seem that a kind of art nearer the condition of non-art could not be envisaged or ideated at this moment.” Whether or not Greenberg simply did not like or understand Minimalism is beside the point. He saw past the pretense, straight to the failure where culture would ditch the ideals and ‘far-outness’ to re-inscribe the forms as luxury kitchens, furniture, gallery design, and corporate logos of universal rule. Art would remain Art and pose as life through its compositions, its degradation, its scattering, and splattering affects to simply hang on flat walls or sit in Freeport crates. The brutality of Taste, thank you Julian Schnabel. That is much of what we get, flattened framed central subject images of these mimicked forms and not an elusive presentation of a constellation of layers that produced the idea of the central serving object in the first place.
As the sphere dips through this Flatland you only see a line expanding and shrinking, never the circle.
Allow me, once more, to indulge. As Sculpture dematerialized itself over and over throughout history, the viewer has become more aware of everyday life and their solipsistic relationship to it. To me, it is a sign of progress that someone might look at a pile of trash on a corner outside a home and call it Art. You can call anything art from 9/11 to Sponge Bob. So, it’s great, they see a pile of big black raisins plastic skin slumped with a bent Ikea lamp holding a leaking container of milk like a limp wrist. The bags are wet with spotted oil drops that have rainbows inside them. The pile leans into an angle of repose to the right. On the left side, a blunt force trauma inflicted by the fire hydrant holds the pile up like you had to hold up your drunk cousin who came to stay with you last weekend. Oh yeah, and it’s summer and it smells like shit.
I could go on and on about the formal qualities that this pile of trash holds. I am sure you see pile in your mind, so why must we constantly show the pile? Could we make an exhibition and compose a series of layers that would produce the pile in your mind, without ever showing anything related to that form? How did the pile get there? Is the form of the pile its own geometric and material qualities or is its form an elusive network of materials and the histories of them? This kind of sculpture is very hard to do and to document no less. Striving to be closer to ‘life’ in the quest for this Expanded Field has become entangled with a leveled landscape of image production, that in turn is used by the same forces of power that tempt you to fake it and to collapse it into a photo. Even sculpture that has dematerialized itself in the past is torpedoed by the documentation, creating another discrete centralized framed subject that gets retrofitted with meaning and value. Greenberg speaks through the mirror: “That’s precisely the trouble. Minimal art remains too much a feat of ideation, and not enough of anything else. Its idea remains an idea, something deduced instead of felt and discovered. The geometric and modular simplicity may announce and signify the artistically, furthest-out, but the fact that the signals are understood for what they want to mean betrays them artistically”.
As the most loved-to-hate BBC journalist Adam Curtis says, “We are at a point where the truly radical thing you could do right now is stop what you are doing, get your wallet and passport, buy a plane ticket to the middle east and don’t tell anyone, no photos”…But you are not Lee Lozano and you only just saw her work on Karma’s Instagram feed. As the ART-ifact mining persists, everything to the bottom of the flat file, I wonder if it was her plan all along or if she will be doing some haunting soon.
The world is flat...but there is a sphere passing through it
Right now, previously painted Benjamin Moore Super Hide Flat White walls are being blasted with 5000 lumens of cold fluorescent ‘German Style’ light, then photographed, with all layers merged visible. The colors have been corrected. Context and GPS location of this economic playing field have all been ‘leveled’, apparently. There are a myriad of ways to upload your personal content, but some more prominent sites require specific viewing standards for proper vetting. Others format your unique information into a strict designed structure to maintain a cohesive nonhierarchical viewing or listening experience. For Artists, we have been duped into thinking we have agency over our image creation and distribution. Instead, we relinquish the sculpture-ness of our Sculpture in order for it to become flat, to enter it into the website supply chain, geared in one direction, towards the collector’s plate—often flanked with advertisements, the alternator in this driverless car.
Sculpture, installation art, and performance art have flattened—to the perspectival populist square grid much like the Minimalism Clement Greenberg described this mirrored essay(Recentness of Sculpture 1967). In Greenberg’s opinion, aspects of Minimalism were being reduced to a set of mannerisms of safe taste, a “realm of Good Design, where Pop, Op, Assemblage, and the rest of Novelty art live”. It would seem that our new ‘Image-object’ is performing a similar demise within the current imposed standard of documentation of the sculpture in situ. The carefully constructed image has taken the place of the atheistic surprise and discovery that might exists beyond the screen. Not only has it taken its place, it has become a way to reverse-engineer the work itself, to be experienced exclusively as ‘ideation’, just as Greenberg described. On the other hand, this ‘leveled’ landscape does allow for anyone to enter into the process of value making anywhere in the world: as long as you fit the criteria of the board. If not, you will need to find a way to change the game, effectively creating the next Contemporary Art Daily, Pinterest or Instagram.
The imagification of the Artworld allows for forms of value outsourcing to operate as well. Different locations and spaces act as gallery proxies for the New York centric transaction, which can be completed without seeing the work in person. It would seem that Thomas Friedman’s book The World is Flat was correct in foreseeing the democratization of software and interface that allowed this deluge of supply to be “done by you, if not to you”. But it failed to tell the story of how users of this Flatland would have to develop new obscuring design strategies in order to hold onto our most base modes of experiencing power and value through mystery, myth, manipulation, desire, seduction, and romance. Unfortunately, this set of terms is forever in wedlock to another set: misery, horror, servitude, revenge, destruction, and deceit. This is the dark side of the mirror: what the utopic ideals of individual cyber network navigation hoped to curtail through transparency and access.
So I am not surprised that within this flatted overexposed Expanded (professional) Field it is becoming more apparent that the Production of Obscurity has been co-opted into nuanced forms of marketing. This is not dissimilar to a bar-with-no-name or a menu without price. I am not concerned with writing an essay about the history of the disappearance of the Artist or art in age of post-mechanical reproduction post-production. In my mind, Lee Lozano + Stephen Kaltenbach, David Hammonds, Cady Nolan, Trisha Donnelly and Reena Spaulings have all proved that these strategies were effective in creating historically valuable artworks with the intention of creating distance as part of the work. K-Hole, the artist trendforcasting group, sold Norm-Core to the advertising agencies as way to identify people who were attempting to “seem like a clone” or acting basic, so we will need to focus on something else. My main concern now in this Post-Obama twilight zone is that we make ourselves aware of the different uses of obfuscation, to understand when it is productive and when you should call bullshit. As the moral of the story goes in Vonnegut’s ‘Mother Night’: Be careful who you appear to be, because you will be who you appear to be.
So with that, it is also my intention to think about the Production of Obscurity in relationship to the production (denial or removal) of images of the work as the work itself. Again, this is quite the opposite of what or who you might think is ‘obscure’ now. Those from the pre-internet world became obscure, mainly due to a lack of access to distribution, not always by choice. Today our reality is that everyone has the ability to share and distribute content democratically. The choice to encrypt content/information as a filtering mechanism to generate interest and curiosity must be looked at simply as that, a choice. And I am sympathetic to it. However, it is important, in this struggle between the powers that try to co-opt Sculpture and the reactive obfuscation of it, that we don’t conflate the Artwork with the qualities of simply being a good human. Being private, harmless, reserved, concerned, empathetic, quiet, listening, and less forceful are all great attributes to embody. It’s just not appropriate for them to be absorbed into lofty mythic rumblings in clique based value circles to garnish the plate. Because there is also a stench of privilege in the Artist that chooses to be hidden from the day-to-day aspects of this ‘professional career’ because they have money and the representation to do so. In the same manner, there are galleries who have the financial stability to maintain an image of provenance and certainty. The gallery’s program may exude that sense of pureness, but every gallery has to pay the rent and there is nothing sexy about that.
Much of what I am speaking about is a result of the distribution of artwork, where it goes, where it is seen, who speaks about it and what they choose to tell. There is another level of the obfuscation game that is even harder to discern or to navigate. What I know about the Artworld is that I am naïve (or choose to be) to its inner workings. I have no idea how many dealers operate in the secondary market, but I bet that most of them do. The market that I participate in, as a living Artist, seems equally unfair, for better or for worse. I decode no logic to why Artworks sell when they do: a gift of the Potlatch, the watershed of manipulation, or the marriage of white male privilege and minority exploitation. Ideally, people just like the work and want to own it. From where I stand as a participant, I see an experiment filled with the hearsay of tax loop holes, email art consulting services like Baer Faxt, secret Trump supporters and their relationships to our institutions; accrued cultural and Art historical power fortified by Manhattan real estate backed security—a theme park with rides—Designed, Rendered, Flattened. It all exemplifies a two faced-society that does not want a government to support its Museums or the Artist making the Art, but wholeheartedly believes in privatizing its power and grandeur to transfer wealth as a model for its makers.
It is known that fish bred as ‘bait-fish’ for carnivorous livestock’s consumption have mutated their own biology to attack the hierarchy of the food-chain they’ve been bred for. The mutation results in an increase of acidity found in their urine that when released is so acidic it immediately begins to burn their own flesh. In the volume they are stocked, bait-fish create an exponential rise in toxicity to their environment.
Back to Art and to Greenberg: “Minimal works are readable as art, as almost anything is today—including a door, a table, or blank sheet of paper… Yet it would seem that a kind of art nearer the condition of non-art could not be envisaged or ideated at this moment.” Whether or not Greenberg simply did not like or understand Minimalism is beside the point. He saw past the pretense, straight to the failure where culture would ditch the ideals and ‘far-outness’ to re-inscribe the forms as luxury kitchens, furniture, gallery design, and corporate logos of universal rule. Art would remain Art and pose as life through its compositions, its degradation, its scattering, and splattering affects to simply hang on flat walls or sit in Freeport crates. The brutality of Taste, thank you Julian Schnabel. That is much of what we get, flattened framed central subject images of these mimicked forms and not an elusive presentation of a constellation of layers that produced the idea of the central serving object in the first place.
As the sphere dips through this Flatland you only see a line expanding and shrinking, never the circle.
Allow me, once more, to indulge. As Sculpture dematerialized itself over and over throughout history, the viewer has become more aware of everyday life and their solipsistic relationship to it. To me, it is a sign of progress that someone might look at a pile of trash on a corner outside a home and call it Art. You can call anything art from 9/11 to Sponge Bob. So, it’s great, they see a pile of big black raisins plastic skin slumped with a bent Ikea lamp holding a leaking container of milk like a limp wrist. The bags are wet with spotted oil drops that have rainbows inside them. The pile leans into an angle of repose to the right. On the left side, a blunt force trauma inflicted by the fire hydrant holds the pile up like you had to hold up your drunk cousin who came to stay with you last weekend. Oh yeah, and it’s summer and it smells like shit.
I could go on and on about the formal qualities that this pile of trash holds. I am sure you see pile in your mind, so why must we constantly show the pile? Could we make an exhibition and compose a series of layers that would produce the pile in your mind, without ever showing anything related to that form? How did the pile get there? Is the form of the pile its own geometric and material qualities or is its form an elusive network of materials and the histories of them? This kind of sculpture is very hard to do and to document no less. Striving to be closer to ‘life’ in the quest for this Expanded Field has become entangled with a leveled landscape of image production, that in turn is used by the same forces of power that tempt you to fake it and to collapse it into a photo. Even sculpture that has dematerialized itself in the past is torpedoed by the documentation, creating another discrete centralized framed subject that gets retrofitted with meaning and value. Greenberg speaks through the mirror: “That’s precisely the trouble. Minimal art remains too much a feat of ideation, and not enough of anything else. Its idea remains an idea, something deduced instead of felt and discovered. The geometric and modular simplicity may announce and signify the artistically, furthest-out, but the fact that the signals are understood for what they want to mean betrays them artistically”.
As the most loved-to-hate BBC journalist Adam Curtis says, “We are at a point where the truly radical thing you could do right now is stop what you are doing, get your wallet and passport, buy a plane ticket to the middle east and don’t tell anyone, no photos”…But you are not Lee Lozano and you only just saw her work on Karma’s Instagram feed. As the ART-ifact mining persists, everything to the bottom of the flat file, I wonder if it was her plan all along or if she will be doing some haunting soon.
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