Arts It’s A Class Issue, Like Everything Else
Warning: This post is going to mention Dale Chihuly, so if you’re allergic to anything I have now or ever will say about him, step aside and keep up the blind loathing/loving/dismissal/avoidance.
In the last column I wrote for The Stranger, called Things Don’t Make Themselves, I called out some holes in a recent New York Times story that blithely described a division in the art world between thinkers and makers as intellectually grounded in something “post-conceptual.” I highlighted an artist who “omitted from publicity materials that she hired 20 poor Zulu women to glue glass beads to the barbed-wire cage she showed at White Cube Gallery in London. She wanted the piece to be aesthetic, not social, not tainted by the rags that came before the riches.”
The blogger Art Powerlines covered this in a piece I just saw this morning but that was posted several weeks ago (now that I know he’s out there, I’ll check him/her every day, I know!). A good little discussion took off about this on the comments, between Megan V. and Art Powerlines:
Megan V: It seems to me that there is a big difference between what the 1960’s conceptualists and minimalists did in telephoning in the dimensions of their sculptures to a fabrication company, and what Lou does. I think the difference is partially this: those early minimalist sculptures acknoweldged the anonymous nature of their production, they didn’t try to hide it. Like in your LeWitt quote, the materials are part of the concept. So, you have a concept behind the works that is at least partially in coherence with the anonymity of their production, the mechanized, assembly-line aesthetic, the industrial materials, etc.A steel cube is one thing, a million hand-attached beads is another. The concept behind Lou’s work depends on the viewer looking at and marvelling over the millions of tiny beads, and being aware of that labor. Not given any indication otherwise, one assumes that she did it herself…. and her one pair of hands attaching the millions of tiny beads is a very different thing than dozens of anonymous hands attaching them. It’s like if you found out that Janine Antoni didn’t chew away her own chocolate cubes… it would change the interpretation of the work. Wouldn’t it?
Art Powerlines: What has struck me most about Liza Lou is how she didn’t want to “call attention” to the process of the work, rather the finished product. No one wants to call attention to how the latest air jordans are being made either.
The first line of the press release for Liza Lou’s exhibition at White Cube: “Combining visionary, conceptual and craft approaches, Lou makes mixed-media sculptures and room-size installations that are suggestive of a transcendental reality.”
Transcendental reality? It is so interesting. I don’t see how you can operate your studio like NAFTA and say it’s transcending reality. Do you?
I post this in contrast to an early response I got from a powerful person in contemporary art locally, who told me after reading my first Chihuly piece that by questioning his production methods, I was shirking my duty to educate the masses that art is not handicraft. Class divide, indeed.
postmodern conceptualism is a morally and aesthetically bankrupt evolutionary dead end.