Art Questions
All the questions asked in one month by five art magazines.
How do you preserve urine? Who's boss? Are we intended to empathise with these inadequate communications? And should the artist have been more candid about the nature of his source material? There is humour here but it is ambiguous and I am left wondering how powerful this exhibition might have been if the humour had been pushed - actually used to say something? A crude analysis has involved Western generalisations about the potential of Confucian thought, is this touched on in your work? Either way the Concordia is now available, any takers? The contemporary interjection is made most noticeable by the inclusion of male artists who form a mere fifth of the exhibitors - what does this mean apart from reaffirming Mike Kelly's observation that "whether or not it is men or women who are supposed to knit is totally random"? Or Joey felt knowing that Shirley was cheating on him? Does presenting the Holocaust as it were, run the risk of somehow trivialising it? Does MALE/27/GUNSHOT mean it, or is this a final irony? Is it news that men have been liberated to "dismantle traditional notions of masculinity", to make art as women have crafted clothes and embroidered samplers for centuries? Your work includes many various formal elements, but how important is absence? Do you like cinema? Someone once wrote that your work is "introspective", what do you think about this? Used sanitary towels scattered in a spotless white bathroom, patchwork quilts made from hankies, crotched installations or plaited-rugs? And how could we have possibly known what Pete felt at failing his exam? Did the snappy caption have to be in brightly coloured Letraset? How should we re-present the unthinkable? Think of feminism and what springs to mind? But what is it then? How can the artist avoid the contradiction inherent in any such representation which might exalt by its very manifestation what (the art) intended to condemn? Burning bras, Germaine Greer's The Female Eunuch, butch, shaven-headed dykes in D.M.s'? Is there a danger that images of the death camps might elicit a prurient response? Are you a writer? How long before a blockbuster Constable/Turner show travels to New York? Can we follow the emotions which led one woman to be known only as "woman who wrote to her dog"? A more relevant question might be does cinema like you? Snail on your mail? Do you make calorie calculations? You have talked about joining a Western conceptual and minimal rigour with a softer Eastern sensibility, could you explain what you meant? Can we, or should we, talk of a British art anymore? Think of feminist art and now what? Were these particular notes chosen for their entertainment value? Have you seen the Goddard film Alphaville? What does it mean to ask a question to which one does not know the answer, but would ìílikeìí to know? Does such a confession mean I don't stand by what I say? Do you think that elements of your work are contradictory? Is it necessary to smear headlines and feminist quotes from Virginnia Woolf to Lucy Lippard with red paint like menstrual blood? Does this preclude women? Does anyone want to know the answer to this one? Do you feel your work is articulate?
In any case, is the social surface any less real than the bundle of needs we sense underneath it? Who are you to play in the face of such sadness? Is he attacking or holding destruction at bay? Are there 300 prints? Which fulfils Baudelaire's dictum better: a Simon Callery or an Alex Landrum? Were they hysterical? I mean Steven Rea wasn't really Steven, was he? Or a Thomas Ruff portrait? Would an editor get down on her knees? Were they homosexual? Why should they speak French? Where was the hat? Are we witnessing a real drama, or the recording session of an enacted story? The question rebounds everywhere - what does a man want? By what cultural authority does an assistant at a gallery in Paris gain the capacity to administer my affairs, my timetable, my ability to communicate, my ability even to write promotional text and mount shows - confining me to the production of maps and flags so that Peter Fend will be placed safely in a small box? A gesture against all forms of establishment? How could he continue to function as a friend or lover, or as a husband or father? And where was the Anna character? How should we end this interview? Or a hairy pole by Claire Barclay? Was Pret-Porter realistic? Were they hysterical? What else was unrealistic?
Is this a metaphor of an unsuccessful attempt to stand firm on shaky ground, or of an image of a giant, slavering maw, spitting its food out time after time? What to make of this pair, were they stark raving mad or merely evil? Sounds like a beautiful end, doesn't it? Why was he there? But who can blame them? Why 300 prints? But what kind of evidence? Are Crewson's model houses really doll houses, strictly feminine toys that propagate domesticity? Why was Saatchi, of all people, unable to find a suitable corporate identity for his artworks? What connects the false teeth and the museum? Does she ask if her work can speak to women whose relationship with feminity is at its best tenuous? They point out that a lace printer is a very large and expensive machine capable of responding to a very complex set of instructions, so why when you ask for an A, should it print out the same form each time? Does it matter? But which is more modern: a Frank Auerbach painted by Frank Auerbach or a Frank Auerbach painted by Glenn Brown? Yet the most enduring and compelling image in Western Art remains that of ourselves; the question is, how did we get into this dreadful state? One thinks how did he do it? rather than why? Instead she went over to you, do you remember that Joe? Whose pistol was it? Dark Space? Does the top of a lavatory cistern by Michael Joo deserve a knighthood? Admittedly, Saatchi Collection artists Gary Hume and Fiona Rae were Hirst's contemporaries on the Goldsmiths B.A. course and were among his choices for his first exhibition Freeze, but why were they included in Saatchi's '90s collection while other contemporaries were not? Why? A relic is a relic, Starling seems to imply, but what makes it art? Anyway, surely the idea of having access to anything REAL and TRUE in a series of images was dispensed with years ago? In his state of mind, and given the regime he was in, did the soldier willingly agree to being filmed? And why wasn't Karl in it? But what of this female body in perpetual pain? Who was behind the camera, eager to consign his condition to film? While the value of this exercise might be debated - just what kind of layer of meaning are you adding to your typed communications by using this type of font? Why are they there? I mean, how can you not like a Sophia Loren/Marcello Mastroanni film?
Why not three? What do we do? Look, the woman who was killed, was it your sister? And the ethnic conflicts? Can we credit this? Where is it? Or are we stuck in the age-old context or contest between iconophiles and iconoclasts that right from the start of our mans culture has mixed up the sense of "mass" as a group, and as a metonym for the media, with the word's destinal meaning of Christian Communion? Who killed her? Has the time come to give Morris Louis his due? What changes are you introducing? Is this a piece of ironic commentary on the state-sponsered art of former East Germany? Who owns the channel? Where, oh where are those muscly, well-nigh edible male nudes? Would you have filmed her? And the Christian solution was the beginning of the serialisation of murder? Do you never feel like a critic who has immuned himself to another era, or perhaps like the little boy at the end of the Bullwinkle credits who sweeps up the droppings? Why do you compose? What do these intermediaries do? In this "information age" where so much "doing" is just sitting, pointing and clicking is the continuum between "feeling" and "doing" seamless enough that the activist artist is entitled to risk merely prodding the artist to "feel"? Are there any intermediaries in the image? Are butch dykes subverting the status quo or are they just wild women looking for a good time? How could you offer your moist lips with a light smile while your intestines where being torn out of your body? Why have you discounted the art of identity politics? What's the Biennale's public? What "passage" exists between one and the other? Have you never fallen in love with a film star? Who enforces them? Where's my "Bruce Nauman World Tour 1995" bomber jacket? Surely there could be no more graphic comment on the weight of the male burden? WHO KILLED THIS WOMAN? But what is the new in art? Is it possible to tongue machismo without tasting patriarchy? What is the relation between the fantasy of a pure body and the ideas of monstrosity or degeneracy? Do computers or digital imagining systems play a role or is the end result a product of basic camera to dark room manipulation?
Is there anything new about the rep or rap given murder in our most current , media contexts of serial repetitions? Why was I so happy? When you negate everything, why not negate careerism too? If threshold abounds these series what divides the animate from the inanimate? Who's Afraid of the Big Bad Wolf? What drew Salle to this enveloping script, an adaptation of a play by Howard Korder? Have you ever heard two wine tasters argue? Once seen can any image approximate truth? How does this work? Why do things get in a muddle? Could it be that in identifying Still/Here as a narcissistic art of victimage, Croce may be missing the show's spectacular performance of survival - the attempt , as in Plath's poem, to counter the privacy and primacy of the individual self with the collective historical message? Can you really be that ignorant of the historical ambitions that have motivated the most influential criticism of our time? Where better to pay tribute to Ray Johnson than on the Internet? And this grotesque combination you propose as a program for art criticism at the turn of the millennium? Yet you are a quick man with a mean line, no? What would they look like if similarly cast? Is Raymond Hain's art the "art of coincidence" or "a rebus of esthetic dimensions" as Alan Weiss contends in the exhibition catalogue? The "lure of the mannish lesbian"? Anthropometry, X rays, ethnology, Charlot and psychiatry, eugenics, D.N.A., then computer imaging, the genome and the mapping of the human brain: is the thread the exact sciences or what the French would call the human sciences? Why did you smile when your heart was broken? Is TV the safetyìí ìícatch or is the catch (like the catch in the throat) in our recent turns to computer technology for supersavings in and through the wide-open-spacing of information access and excess? A rock star? What sin to me unknown, dipt me in picture, my parents or my own? Felitiously intertextual - or should I say interpictorial? Who killed her? What's the relationship between anthropomorphism and video images, which merely translate a form for the cathodic screen? What is the "inner" and where does it stop? Is there any particular significance in the Biennale's naming a French director to the visual arts section? What is Bruce Weber? You intend to treat the veil's interdiction of the face? Universal esthetic categories? So what Freud called transference is just another channel? If somebody in the artist's audience goes off and writes an essay urging the same course of action as the artist urges, is that just passing the buck or is it doing something? Who knows where the hell it'll lead? Can it truly be that someone is proposing pure esthetic experience as a goal for art criticism? From who do you, uh, borrow? What is the point? Hegemonic patriarchal taste repackaged as instinct? Why is it that so much of the contemporary work that pointedly departs from conventional painting and sculpture looks like it slid off the desk of some dutiful county social-services bureaucrat? But where does the haunting, the essence of Freud's take on transference, go? Do we hear the beating of Jungian wings on the horizon? Why not pervert genre and rhetoric? So television's division and confusion between advertising and information can somehow be overcome? Baby doll, isn't it high time for the femmeìí ìíto be the spotlit star? Why does one of the most ancient living forms, which repulses and frightens us, also appear sublime? Does that seem strange? Why not "give offence to critical conventions"? You're referring to my inability to identify any new generation of artists to whom I can give alliance (and publicity)? What is it then to make the world and/or the word into an image? .. How are you going to approach this? How are you going to handle fiercely anti-anthropomorphic art? So it's not your sister? So which is the Salle standin, Martin or Movie? Beneath its ready irony lurks an alarmingly honest question - what , in fact, should artists do? Where is the fuel for the onanistic fires? But who is the third Cartier? If it is possible to broadcast music, some reasoned, why not refined sensations of taste? What do you mean when you describe the body, above all the face, as metaphysical? Does anybody care but me? Deep structure of beauty? Do you want to go to Helen Keller's and get blind? Why give up now? Why do you still compose? Feminine? It's 1995, and if Roseanne is the Laura Petire of the T.V. world, do I really care if people see me in the bath tub?