Sculpture

Sculpturepomo

Sunday, 7 October 2012

• European and American Sculpture in the 80’s responded to the changing nature of society.

• What the writer David Harvey has called the financialisation of everything, the increasing commodification and commercialization of society and culture.

• The neoliberal ideology, Thatcherism...privatisation, entrepreneurialism, meritocracy...

• A society and culture increasing dominated by consumerism.. an age where everything has its price.

The 1980’S“A zeitgeist of cynicism”

British and .........American sculpture...

Two distinct responses to this...

A betrayal of arts avant gardism / radicalism?

HAUNTED BY THE PAST

Key Features of the Modernist Avant Garde

• Avant Garde art should be above, beyond, distinct from the academy and market. The symbolic embodiment of arts freedom. An alternative and antidote to the commercial, managerial ‘spirit’ of capitalism.

The power of the ‘new’. Permanent revolution. Overthrowing the tyranny of tradition.

Marcel Duchamp, Fountain, 1917

Key Features of the Modernist Avant Garde Transgression and Critique

• Socially, morally, sexually transgressive

• (Politically) critical of the status quo

• Avant gardist work expresses a sense of alienation from the norms of society - explicitly and implicitly advocating a social, political revolution as well as an artistic one.

• The avant garde artist is viewed as an outsider, a rebel, a martyr – at a distance from the ‘norm’.

Key Features of the Modernist Avant Garde

• Questions what is permissible as art

• Focuses on subject matter and material previously ignored as ignoble, base, vulgar or banal

• Asserts that this trash or kitsch possesses aesthetic and intellectual value

• The Readymade • Key points about the readymade:

• The choice of object is itself a creative act.

• By cancelling the 'useful' function of an object it becomes art.

• The presentation and addition of a title to the object have given it 'a new thoughtʼ.

• Duchamp's readymades also asserted the principle that what is art is defined by the artist (and the institution?).

• The readymade also raises questions about how important skill (technique) is, and how the value of an art object is determined, and by whom.

• Source: Tate Gallery Website, Definitions. The ultimate avant garde gesture(?)

Marcel Duchamp, Fountain, 1917

Changes to the Avant GardeThe birth of the culture industry - the start of a cultural cold war

• The old enemies and old certainties of avant gardist work were threatened by the rapid growth of popular culture post 45.

• For many self professed avant gardists popular, mass or kitsch was the new enemy

“Our culture, on its lower and popular levels, has plumbed abysses of vulgarity and falsehood unknown in the discoverable past; not in Rome, not in the Far east or anywhere has daily life undergone such rapid and radical change as it has in the West in the last century and half”

Clement Greenberg ‘The Plight of Culture’

The cultural apocalypse

Retreat?Advance? or

Anthony Caro “Early One Morning”

“Silence is assent” Carl Andre

Jules Olitski “Instant Loveland” 1968

Visual Muzak?

Avant Gardism and Political Radicalism

Avant garde practice 60’s + 70’s

• Performance• Video• Installation• Feminist• Conceptual

Dematerialisation of the art object. Political, anti aesthetic, anti commercial in form and content.

Key Problem for the Modernist Avant Garde

• Opposition and absorption.

• The radical is domesticated.

1980’s • THE RETURN OF THE

OBJECT• THE RETURN OF

AESTHETICS

Bill Woodrow Blue Monkey 1984

Allan McCollum.1987

New British Sculpture 80’s• Tony Cragg, Richard Deacon,

Edward Allington, Bill Woodrow.

• Transformation of found, ‘low’ objects from the urban environment.

• Focused on issues around production and consumption, surplus and waste.

• “Simple domestic objects were taken to pieces, dysfunctionally altered” (B, Taylor, Art Today)

22Bill WoodrowTwin-Tub with Guitar 1981

Tony CraggKahzernarbeit 1985

“What does itmean to us ona conscious, orperhaps more important, unconscious level, to live amongstthese and manyother completelynew materials?”

Tony Cragg

24Tony CraggSunday, 7 October 2012

25Bill Woodrow, Car Door, Armchair and Incident 1981

Edward AllingtonOblivion Penetrated', 1982, mixed media. Collection Tate,

“..their (New British Sculptors) attempts to render galvanised iron or commonplace washing machines aesthetically relevant could be registered as critical of 1980’s economic and social policy that was obsessed with encouraging consumerist attitudes to every object and service. Assigning status to derelict plywood or Formica could be taken as a sort of mischievous play in territory that the new social policy tended to ignore: the forlorn surfaces of public institutions , rubbish heaps, and the neglected spaces of the inner city street”

Brandon Taylor, Art of Today

NEW YORK ART NOWSAATCHI GALLERY1988

Jeff Koons, Robert Gober, Peter Halley, Haim Steinbach, Philip Taaffe and Caroll Dunham

• Timely contemporary response to ‘new times’. Engaged with an increasingly consumerist culture.

• Sign of decadence and complicity of American artistic culture, its selling out to the values of mammon.

The Great Divider

Jeff KoonsBasketball tank:1985

“The subjects of commodity sculpture are advertising’s language of signs, desire, purchase , and making collections. It is clean and shiny art because it is protected from touch and use and available only to sight [..] it belongs to the world of ownership and exchange”

Andrew Causey, Sculpture Since 1945

Ashley Bickerton‘Le Art’ 1987

“Referring to the tendency of avant garde art to end up “above a sofa”, Bickerton wrotethat his wall mountedart ‘imitates the posture of its own corruption...attempting to forward the question of precisely where conflict exists in this morass of ideal, compromise and duplicity”

B, Taylor, Art Today

Appropriation

• Duchampian ‘tradition’• Pictures Group• Sampling, stealing...• Questions notions of

skill, authorship and artistic value.

From resistance to complicity -the neo avant garde“Shopping Sculpture”

Haim Steinbachpink accent 2, 1987.Two “schizoid” rubber masks, two chrome trash receptacles, and four “Alessi” tea kettles on chrome, aluminum and wood shelf.

Allan McCollum

Death of the avant garde?All art was reduced to the level of a

commodity. There was no distance or alternative space for the kind of critical, oppositional ‘alternative’ position modernist avant gardist’s had adopted.

The modernist idea of radical art being aligned with the ‘left’, seemed here to be dispensed with.

“the cynical inversion of the old avant garde device of the readymade”

Foster, H, Art since 1900

Haim SteinbachUntitled (3 drinking containers), 1992plastic, laminated wood shelf with objects21 x 23 x 7 cm

Cometh the hour, cometh the man

(devil?)

The Anti Avant Gardist? - Reasons to be Cheerful Part 1Bravo Bravo - baiting the art world

An ex wall street brokerKoons actively sought toprovoke a kind of moralqueasiness and repulsionamongst the art worldintelligentsia. In his personae, hisunapologetic embrace of selfpromotion, his relaxed attitude toopenly discussing money (theelephant in the room for the liberal,politically correct component of theart world) and his dedication toopening up the Pandora’s box oftaste and class, he ‘succeeded’ inprovoking the kind of shock,irritation and disgust typical of the‘modernist’ avant gardist.

• ‘Pop culture figures are vicariously alluring, and this is why they are so affectively charged. They can only be grasped through a series of paradoxes’

• Steven Shavirio, Post Cinematic Affect, Zero books 2010.

Koons’ celebrity• I have basic point of

differentiation here, between Koons and all those ‘celebrity’ artists who have followed him(Tracey Emin, Damien Hirst) , namely that for my perspective Koons presence, his personae , his performances within the mass media, within celebrity culture were always ‘unstable’.

• To be critically gone in the mainstream......

The Anti Avant Gardist?Reasons to be Cheerful part 2No Irony (?)

• While the majority of his contemporaries used or appropriated objects from consumer culture in an ironic, critical reflection of the soullessness of consumer culture, Koons openly stated he picked figures like Popples because he had a deep affection for them -because he responded to them -because he ‘loved them’.

"I like the things that I like, I like colour, and I like materialism and I like seductiveness. And to me these things are absolutely beautiful. And if I didn't think these things were beautiful and they weren't spiritual to me I wouldn't work with them".

Jeff Koons

Reasons to be cheerful (?) part 3- Collapsing Critical Distance

“The regimentation of human movement, activity and perception accompanies the geometric division of space/ It is governed by the use of time-keeping devices, the application of standards of normalcy, and the police apparatus. In the factory, human movement is made to conform to rigorous spatial and temporal geometries.”

Peter Halley

I find art's ability to guide, direct, and manipulate to be exciting. The only direction I see for art is as a tool for manipulating it public on every level - a political tool. I don't know if this places art above, below or parallel with advertising. [...] The techniques are the same. The audience is the same. I can never tell the difference between them and us. We are them. I am mass as much as I am I.

Jeff Koons

Reasons to be Cheerful Part 4Crafty anti modernism“my god it actually looks like he loves these…things!”

• In 1986/7 the material execution of Koons work radically changed. While artists such as Haim Steinbach continued to use readymade’s, Koons went to extraordinary lengths and costs to have everyday toys and trinkets remade and enlarged by American and Northern European craftsmen .

Up until this point the choice had seemed straightforward enough for an artist appropriating popular culture: either you brought suspicion on yourself or you brought suspicion on popular culture. In all appropriationist work suspicion fell squarely on the culture outside art. Despite the talk of postmodern art existing in a transformed position in the culture, there was still the old prejudice that art was a superior form of culture, and therefore the only cultural form in a privileged enough position to criticise.

The unacceptability of being a Fan -’illegitimate pleasure’

Reasons to be cheerful part 5Talking pleasure in learning to love

• For Koons his love of popular forms was a form of submission, for sure, but a submission that casts him/you neither as victim nor victimiser, but in some way both. To think of Koons' relationship to popular culture, as a form of love is to have him entangled in the operations of power, exploitation and seduction to which he is not blind but submits nonetheless. This is the case, anyway, so long as it isn't assumed that love is always sweet, never critical, and can stomach no tension. Koons' love for Popples, in this view, needn't mean that he was utterly naive, nor that consumer culture is innocent, presents no danger, or has no unctuous effects. Rather, Koons 'falls for' popular culture despite himself, and despite its subjection of him.

Judith Williamson in her book “Consuming Passions” in 1985 wrote about one of the limitations of critical engagement with the products of consumer culture. Williamson noted, that while it was more than common to discuss how commodities channel our desires for ‘the need for change, the sense that there must be something else’ into ‘the need for a new purchase, a new hairstyle, a new coat of paint’ what was always lacking in this discussion was any sense of how ‘consuming products does give a thrill, a sense of both belonging and being different’. In essence, there’s no obvious understanding of why the products are successful as products. Why there are attractive, entertaining - pleasurable. Williamson regarded this as something of a major handicap to unraveling and examining the global success of the entertainment industry.

Made in HeavenDisappearing of the Map

Criticisms• Complicity with the

market.• Betrayal of arts radical,

oppositional potential. • Sentimental, ‘frivolous’,

celebration of vacuous, banal, ‘kitschy’ culture

• “Koons is not exploiting the media for avant garde purposes. He is in cahoots with the media. He has no message . It’s self advertisement, and I find that repulsive. ‘

• Rosalind Krauss quoted in Pop LIfe, Tate Gallery.

• Koons re-imagined or rethought some central ideas about what it might mean to be an artist in the 1980’s.

• He thoroughly dispensed with the idea that artists could or should operate outside the entertainment or culture industry. For Koons arts absorption into entertainment was inevitable and they might as well seize the opportunities that would arise for making art more popular, accessible and visible.

• While he rejected what he saw as outmoded ideas about how art should be made (i.e solely by one artist) his use of other craftsmen to fabricate his work created art works where the technical and material quality of the finished work was central. We could say his postmodernism was anti-modernist in this respect.

• His aesthetic and moral ‘transgressions’, his ‘shocks’ weren’t always typically avant gardist in tone or content. The shocks that accompanied his work arose from his assertion of loving popular

Koons as Futurologist

Affective labour

• One of the ways Koons’ succeeded’ was by being good at communicating (cynics might say operating).

• In this respect he was a very good at ‘affective labour’ or ‘emotional labour’.

Emotional Labour• According to Hochschild, jobs

involving emotional labor are defined as those that:

• 1 Require face-to-face or voice-to-voice contact with the public;

• 2. Require the worker to produce an emotional state in another person;

• 3. Allow the employees to exercise a degree of control over their emotional activities.

• Display rules refer to the organizational rules about what kind of emotion to express on the job.

• Forms of emotional labour

• Surface acting, involves "painting on" affective displays, or faking; Surface acting involves employee's presenting emotions on his or her "surface", without actually feeling them. The employee in this case puts on a facade as if the emotions are felt, like a "persona".

• Deep acting wherein they modify their inner feelings to match the emotion expressions the organization requires.

Affective emotional labour• ‘the management of feeling

to create a publicly observable facial and bodily display the emotional labourer is required to ‘induce or suppress feeling in order to sustain the outward countenance that produces the proper state of mind in others’

• Ivor Southwood, Non Stop Inertia, pg. 23 Sunday, 7 October 2012

• ‘In these ways the worker performer manufacturers the final product: the desired emotional state in the customer. A large part of the effort of emotional labour is taken up with creating the impression that the act is itself natural and effortless because to show that it is contrived would invalidate the exchange and spoil the product”

• Ivor Southwood,Non Stop Inertia, pg24

• ‘Whilst early on in his career there was some acknowledgement of the strategies behind the work, in interviews and statements made in the years since, Koons has persistently stayed in character with an a-critical tone...’

• Capitalist Realness Catherine Wood quoted in Pop LIfe, Tate Gallery.

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