INCHOATE THOUGHTS
Mass MoCA,
North Adams, Massachusetts
May 23, 2009 – March 31, 2010
Comprising work by eight American artists, this is a youthful
show organized by Diana Nawi while a Clark-Williams Graduate Program in History
of Art student intern at Mass MoCA. Unsurprisingly, it is about trying to make
it in an artworld in which few do. Celebrity is their goal, but just getting
noticed would be a start. This is so for curators as well as for artists, so
Nawi is in the same boat as those she has chosen. Nawi, the arbiter of the
artists’ fates during the selection process, is the youngest of those involved.
Among the artists, Shana Lutker and Marco Rios, date from 1978, whereas the
oldest, Sean Landers, was born in 1962.
Solipsism in art takes many forms. Let us get a flavor of the
artists’ approaches in descending age order.
Sean Landers presents canvases painted with phrases
encapsulating his anxieties as an artist. Le’Go
My Ego (2007) does anything but what its title urges, being a flow chart of
interconnected notions, such as “I’M NOT SURE OF ANYTHING”—“BUT I HAVE A LOT OF
HOPE FOR SOMETHING”—“which means next to nothing.” One could spend a lot of
time wandering this often amusing stream of consciousness with its many rapids
and eddies.
Joe Zane has a serious case of the wannabes. He inserts himself
and his work into convincingly falsified copies of contemporary art
publications. Faked issues of Artforum
and Parkett, and books such as Ursula
Meyer’s Conceptual Art (1972) are
arrayed in a counter case under the title I
wished I was a Giant (2006). He does not belong in this company if only
because he was a mere infant when several of them appeared. Yet the brilliance
of the conception and its faultless execution earn him the place he covets—or
does it? The double irony turns out to be triple, for knowing that few artists
get so much attention, he registers the futility of success by applying a layer
of dust to the surface of the case, which he has inscribed with idle finger
scribbles. The evidence of fame, whether real or faked, is sure to be
neglected—a final twist.
If within the vainglory of Zane’s work there is at least a scrap
of amusement, Whitney Bedford’s paintings lack so much as a trace of humor. She
presents her anxieties through large painted depictions of mutilated, bloodied
and partly bandaged hands with unambiguous titles such as Broken Hand 26 (2005). Perhaps anticipating the condition in which
she could not work has an apotropaic effect, or at least intent.
Karl Haendel has arranged a group of thirteen of his own large,
highly realistic pencil drawings in overlapping stacks against the gallery
wall. Some are representational, such as Studio
Still Life #3 (2004), depicting studio tools and various odds-and-ends.
Others are textual, such as ANOTHER
FUCKING MITVAH (2007), comprising that phrase repeated in a single column
again and again. Weltschmertz? Ennui? Perhaps, but at least if the adolescence
is arrested the technique is arresting.
Andrew Kuo constructs diagrams including pie and bar graphs to
illustrate topics such as My Relationship
to Art as of May 10, 2008 [Crooked-Mouth Face] (2008), which includes a bar
graph setting out, in descending order of his admiration, “Twelve artists that
I wish I was (solely based on their stuff).” The tallest bar represents Sophie
Calle, the shortest Andrew Jeffrey Wright, both pranksters in their different
ways.
The most hilarious exposition of artist’s angst in the show is a
video by Kuo’s exact contemporary Kalup Linzy. In Conversations wit de Churen V: As da Art World Might Turn (2006),
Linzy, a strapping African American, plays Katonya in tight and skimpy women’s
clothes and a ridiculous blonde wig. Katonya is an aspiring artist searching
for a gallery show, critical attention, and a meaningful relationship. Drenched
in the irony of an improbably happy ending, all her dreams come true.
Shana Lutker is one of the two youngest artists in the show. Her
dreams are the raw material of her art. Her typescript books, presented for
inspection, Dream Book 2003 (Word
Version) (2004), and Dream Book 2004
(Word Version) (2005) are, frankly, unreadable. They come to life in House (1986-1996) with Art That I Dreamt
That I Made (2005-2009), an open maquette of a building—her childhood
home—containing small-scale models of artworks from her dreams, among them a
concentration camp tower, and a bulging black garbage bag on a fluted pedestal.
Here we seem to have strayed from the worlds of Jacques Lacan and Melanie Kline
into those of René Magritte and Susan Stewart, earnestness giving way to humor.
In a video set in a gym, with cheerleaders, two musicians
thrashing drum kits, and a referee, Marcos Rios, clad like a weightlifter,
struggles to lift a giant spirit level onto his shoulders, and to hold it
perfectly horizontal. Like all art-making, this is an impossible task to
achieve perfectly. His efforts are futile yet heroic.
The critical theory of an earlier generation, presumably
absorbed by these artists and their curator, sanctioned the deconstruction of
artistic endeavor, encouraging meditation on method and motive masquerading as
unmasking. In considering their predicament—getting noticed, then sustaining
that notice—few aspiring artists seek to define accurately where self-irony
ends and self-pity begins, where pathos gives way to bathos. By exposing the
mask behind the mask, and the mask behind that again, Andy Warhol constructed a
viable alternative to sincerity, a version of fame and success that made an
apparent virtue of solipsism, yet was profoundly private and self-concealing.
No wonder it is difficult to be an artist in his wake. Others artists and
curators succeed in avoiding faux profundity, but sometimes an avuncular
chuckle soothes the soul.