2
A Conversation
Ed Suman
MS: Production of meaning is a procedure that has cause and effect, that has implied use value, and yet it's applied to things like stacked Tupperware.
Maybe it's an even more depersonalized version of what Steve Prina and Chris Willliams do. A more absurd and detached version of taking something and doing a Lane Relyea to it. Through interpretative prowess arriving at something that is more like "Doing a Derrida on Kiss and the Sex Pistols."
I suppose Matthew Barney is a good example of an artist whose production is not presented with a pre-formulated discourse. The discourse isn't attached at its inception. It isn't as dependent on discourse. And because there won't be one person, the artist, controlling the initial discourse, the discourse is more organic and variable. In the case of Chris Williams and Steve Prina, by personalizing arcane and language-based codes in their work they seem to make their own reading central to interpretations made by anyone else. It seems that they are trying to establish a discourse before someone else establishes it for them.
In that type of project, the closer to the initial presentation of the work, the more control the artist has. As you get further and further away from the initial presentation, the possibility increases that the work will be reinterpreted and re-evaluated.
MS: That's almost built into the project, kind of as a design feature, to allow that kind of deterioration, or let's call it dissolution.
MM: What would indicate that it was part of the process?
MS: The initial tenuousness of it, the absurdity of it. It's winking.
Although it will probably be reevaluated down the road, I don't think that's by design. I think it's just inevitable. It's a type of entropy.
MS: As work gets disseminated over time and its deliberately structured meaning deteriorates, the places where it retains that structure become progressively more and more rarefied and more and more exoticized and therefore of more value. It becomes this reverse idea about authentication. More and more it comes down to a thing of origination being the thing of the highest value. It becomes a kind of monastic practice, like maintaining a manuscript orally.
It sounds like there has to be considerable investment on the part of an audience for that to work.
MS: It is structured to be inherently parochial, in terms of something that you talked about that cordons itself off from other endeavors. It's a real estate game.
Prina uses systems in the same way Williams used those extremely large book format objects and those huge vitrines in which that work was presented...as a way to give the work some weight, but in an extra-textual sense. The textual reinforcement is another part of the work. In the case of Prina's work I'm not talking about the text "We represent ourselves to the world," but rather the reading of the codes. In his work or Chris's, neither just presents an empty brown paper bag. There's a lot of material reinforcement going on. In the case of Prina's work, it's the evident systems that are in place, with their implied rationality and analysis. And in the case of Chris Williams--I'm thinking about the books in the vitrines--it's the facture: the beautiful vitrines, the ridiculously scaled books, the high end production values...all for the sake of these pretty mundane photographs of birds. It's different from the Tupperware and pencil erasers.
MS: Well, Tupperware and erasers take a certain canniness in the assumption that there is a discourse to support it. That by simply putting it out there, there will be a magnetic or gravitational pull of one thing to another. Maybe it's a way of playing a liability as an asset.
So, back to my original question, what's desirable and what's necessary?
I'd say that what is desirable is a forum for serious consideration of issues related to contemporary art making, but one that's different from those that already exist. One that is hopefully neither academic nor predictable. It seems as though the patterns of movement within the academic world have well established precedents, and that there is a definite lineage of thought and activity.
MS: Why wouldn't predictability be desirable?
Well, if you can easily predict something, why bother doing it? It seems that most production is so incrementally evolved from what has preceded it that there's little reason for it to exist, little reason to give it serious consideration anyway.
MS: You don't give in to the thrill of incremental change?
One disappointing aspect of the academic world is that it all seems to be so much on a track, so conformist, basically. The academic world should be a place in which idealism and independent thinking are rewarded but because it's so political people conform for job security.
I'd prefer to see points of view that are counter to what prevails in the art world. So much art production is based on prevailing models. I mean, there's a whole school of artists in Los Angeles following in Mike Kelley's footsteps. What they're doing is so directly related to what Mike Kelley does that it's hard to take an interest in it. I'd like to see what else is going on. A lot of the art world is occupied with making minute dissections of points of minute significance. The collective activity is on a path that gets narrower and narrower and there are finer and finer distinctions being made within the breadth of contemporary practice, especially within academic practice. It seems that things are pretty well outlined and that people hew pretty closely to the outline.
MS: Isn't the weight of the academy on the art world just sort of an economic reality? Now that the plug has been pulled out of the tub on capital, they're sort of the last source of reliable jobs.
At least that's the perception. Perhaps through the type of electronic distribution that we're talking about some other lines of support could be realized. Basically, the art world is a place in which there is relatively little economic support and it's a very top-heavy system of distribution. That makes for a lot of competition, and it also makes the artworld a very political place. The academic world accounts for a sizable share of that support, and as everyone knows, the academic world is an extremely political environment. Artmaking can easily become secondary to career considerations.
Another reason that the artworld is political is that the most relevant criteria for aesthetic production are purely subjective. Determinations of quality tend to be based on social consensus. Consequently, success can be determined by the same dynamics that are a factor in public relations and marketing, and in the democratic political process.
MM: Can the system continue to exist as it is now? Can it perpetuate itself without redefining itself?
I don't think we can answer that. Perhaps we should ask whether or not the system as it exists now can maintain our interest over a long time period. It seems that most people participate in the art world for a relatively short period in their life. Obviously, there are many people who maintain a long-term interest but the majority of people seem to pass through the artworld and on to something else. I don't know why exactly. A lot of things that happen in the art world are hard to take seriously.
MM: Can you offer any thoughts as to what could alter the system and take it somewhere else?
Money. Some interesting things happened in the nineteen-eighties when there was more money in the art world. A lot of people, especially in the academic world, talk about how horrible the eighties were. If you have a secure position in the academic world you can always pooh-pooh the commercial world, but I think the infusion of money into the art world during the eighties produced some interesting work, actually. It created opportunities for development and expression that, whether you liked what happened or not, resulted in a vitality and diversity of activity that hasn't been maintained in the 90's. I think it was good to have more of a balance between the academic and the commercial within the art world. Disproportionate academic influence seems to have a stifling effect. There needs to be some kind of tension between commercial and academic interests, some kind of parity.
MM: So you think some kind of reliance on the marketplace...
Or an expansion of the marketplace. Perhaps it would be possible to develop another market parallel to the one that exists now. The electronic distribution of information could be a part of that. If artists could "exhibit" and sell their work on the internet without having to pay the overhead of an art gallery they could afford to sell work at lower prices. And I think it might be worth considering lowering prices on artworks and selling more of them...what kind of a crazy idea is that!? I mean, as long an artist can still net at least as much as the fifty percent of a gallery sale. Obviously, this would only work for artists at certain points in their careers, and artists whose work is well represented in photographs. But if artworks were less expensive you could open up collecting to more people.
You wouldn't have to go to a gallery and listen to someone tell you what the artwork means and why it's important. I can imagine that a lot of people are offended by that scenario...going into a gallery and having someone impose their interpretation on them.
MM: What about the argument that people actually like the system? They like being attended to when they walk into a gallery since there's always the potential that they're going to spend money?
Let's say someone was interested in work by an emerging artist who had shown at Acme last year. And say that instead of having to go to Acme and talk with Randy or Bob, at length--probably kill most of an afternoon there trying to find out what this artist is doing currently-- this person could run a search using the artist's name on a computer and pull up images of recent work, find out what's available, how much it costs and even make a purchase?
But I think one thing that might happen, if all of these artworks were available at lower prices through the net, is that there'd be movement towards portions of the market that had a lot of activity. There wouldn't be nearly as much originality. In other words, say Shoshana and Wayne are showing an artist who has been making minimal paintings in a back studio in New York for the last thirty years, selling only a few pieces here and there. But he's been around for a long time and because of that his prices are in the neighborhood of say, ten or fifteen thousand dollars for a modestly sized minimal painting. And say there is no real physical difference between what he's doing and what somebody who just graduated from Otis last year is doing. And if the person from Otis is selling work for five hundred dollars, there are people out there who will probably buy the five hundred dollar artwork and not really care about the investment that this other artist has made. So I think you would end up with a lot of artworks in the market that had the correct physical characteristics...
MS: I think that it's pretty unlikely that people are going to buy minimalism at anything short of Aaron Brothers prices without some kind of pedigree, just by the nature of the beast.
MM: I don't know how many people have the confidence to buy art simply because they like it and happen to be able to afford it...
It would be interesting to find out, wouldn't it?
Ed Suman is a native Angeleno. He does not own a computer.
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