I go to chelsea quite often - I just don't talk about it. I look at it as a guilty undertaking - like watching re-runs or eating frozen snickers bars. But I feel the need to speak - I need to clear the air. Postmodernism is RAMPANT and now, 40 years past its inception, it's time to let it go. I know it's hard to turn your back on careers and money, but it's OVER. There is just no point to this endless parade of endless commentary and text. I saw show after show of stylization and decoration. 2 shows stuck with me - not because of the greatness, but because they are endemic of the low we have reached. If ever there was a moment when change was going to happen to the big, flabby, lazy, corpulent world of corporate art this is it.
First a show of giant advertisements culled from the art magazines. I do not know if the artist is commenting on the specific shows or on the general advertising of art shows, but this kind of art has been going on UNABATED for the last 20 years- easy- if not long before. The "difference" is that these works are the size of time square billboards and presented upside down. Giant. Much like Ron Mueck, Disney and South of the Border, we are subjected to the most favorite strategy of the artistically bereft - make it big - buildings, airplanes, space stations, burgers and fries - bigger always means better to this crowd. My thoughts came back to the history of this gallery and the program it insituted to try to reinvigorate it. This was the premier space in the 1980's. Everyone followed what was going on. The 90s were harder for the gallery with artists leaving, a dissheveled curatorial stance and an insistance on finding younger artists that worked in the style of the more established and famous artists. The progeny of these artists have been prominently featured - without the hoped for resurgence. Since the new century the gallery has leaned heavily on the old garde for stock and they've been experimenting with a bevy of flash-in-the-pan hipsters. Yesterday was the day the shark not only jumped itself, but wound up on the back of Quint's boat chomping on aqua lungs and preparing for the big explosion to come.
The other gallery showed paintings where the death of irony screamed into the long night only to be cut short by the sound of hedge fund collections puckering. POMO irony used to be a fun thing - it defined a decade. But the problem with irony today is that no one is capable of practicing it - and that is ironic. For a painter it means that he must be skilled at his craft so that ANY viewer understands that the "bad" painting being witnessed is being done on purpose. Somewhere, anywhere in the painting - skill or deftness must be evident in order that we - the viewers - catch the idea. Ross Bleckner was king of POMO irony with his hazy stripes, goofy birds and fuzzy lights.
However, today, painting need only be an illustration of someone's idea of irony - it is ironic because the painter or the gallery says so, not because the artist actually shows us. The press release states..."casual anti-art aesthetic intentionally defies the rules of artistic convention in an ironic and informed manner." This makes no sense because the anti-art aesthetic is what is being taught at every major institution in the land and it is the artistic convention - irony is the academy. The press release itself is a check list of academic postmodern techniques used by artists to critique both reproduction and originality and remains the hackneyed, middle brow, tried and true formula of every painting professor and student to stroll down the halls of academia since 1975.
As I thought about irony I kept remembering Steve Martin's movie Roxanne :
[Roxanne Kowalski is walking behind a hedge because she is nude]
Roxanne Kowalski: Nobody had a coat?
C.D. Bales: I thought you said you didn't want a coat...
Roxanne Kowalski: Why would I not want a coat?
C.D. Bales: You said you didn't want a coat!
Roxanne Kowalski: I was being ironic.
C.D. Bales: Oh, ho, ho, irony! Oh, no, no, we don't get that here. See, uh, people ski topless here while smoking dope, so irony's not really a, a high priority. We haven't had any irony here since about, uh, '83, when I was the only practitioner of it. And I stopped because I was tired of being stared at.
The only claim to irony is found in their context - where they are shown. The paintings are only ironic because they are in a "Major Gallery" that says they are ironic. In order for them to maintain this tone and view - rather than being just bad - is that they must be transferred and displayed among the power structures built around the system. These paintings are ironic in major collections, auction houses, museums etc. For those in the system it's gaming played at our expense. But on the wall next to Velazquez, Titian, Matisse, Picasso, Pollack , Warhol or even Bleckner these works will be nothing but really bad painting - unable to form enough visual gusto to mount an inkling of an intellectual challenge to the grand history of Modern art - or even the recent POMO status quo. Context in relation to cultural systems is one thing - context in relation to powerful art is quite another.
How did we arrive at such a sorry state of affairs? Again it is the system, the corporatization and the academies. There are all kinds of hipster jobs available for those that come from these systems - and these folks now inhabit the gallery curating world like bats in rafters. Directors, assistants and professors all with the same ideas and visions, cribbing artists from expensive collections, slowly copying and assimilating tired academic forms until they disappear into a mushy paste, like xeroxed infinity documents. Those choosing the work to be shown are as intellectually lazy and visually bereft as those making the work, and that, my friends, is irony - without the corporate muscle.
