Trash White: Rudolf Stingel "PC" at Paula Cooper Gallery.
"Culture (science) is the form of religion; Religion is the substance of culture (science)."
Paul Tillich
Following from yesterday's commentary on Gavin Turk, I thought of presenting
this new work by Rudolf Stingel, just seen at gallery Paula Cooper, and which to me constitute another of these "last nails" of conceptual art, like we've seen popping out in recent years: Art that questions its own value, and questions the market and art system in the meantime.
If you are reading such book as "The End Of Art" by Donald Kuspit, you may think this should have been all over since the 60's, but it seems they were a couple "last" proposals that needed to be made, and that hopefully in their dry appeal hide the potential of finally providing some light for change. I've said since a few years already, that the new major tendencies of art are trying desparately to get rid of the conceptual and embrace the decorative, what art yet succeeds to do only at a perfect meeting point between both design and concept.
You could argue that art never truly escaped from design and that is an impossible reality to wish this to happen, but I do believe the new "post"-concept art is more attracted by aesthetic presentation than it ever was when it only insisted on promoting ideas. Or rather, these new ideas attack the
staging of art itself, or what it represents to formulate an aesthetic form.
In this sense, without realizing it, minimalist art and conceptual art had a great influence on design put in the context of art, since the popular idea that art is only presented on its optimus ideal stage when it is presented in pristine white spaces: what has been referred to as the "White Cube", a concept of the exhibition space that thoroughly expanded since the second World War, and that is peculiar for being an affect of design that was influenced by new ways and considerations in the perspectivism of art.
If the minimalists were simply trying to convey ideas that already existed in the design activities of their era: functionalism, simplified architecture, new industrial materials, etc..all affects of a
technological
industrialization that led philosophers to start thinking like complex compartmental machines, resulting in the schools of structuralism and deconstructionism, than minimalism, which was already a meeting point between art and design, while influenced thoroughly by these new movement of thoughts, probably had a strong impact on this general conception that only a space devoid of the most forms, lines and meaning possible can really serve optimally the presentation of an artistic artefact.
Thus, the white gallery, or white cube, became the new "frame" for art.
The new spatial canvases on which anything could be thrown, and be considered art, as the elimination of any extraneous element from "reality" served the new conceptual aptitude very well.
The art, more and more dependant on this new frame, rapidly became no longer the art itself but rather its dialogue with any space that it found itself in. Not surprisingly, theory argues that as soon as it escapes the white cube, the art object starts to dialogue with its environment. But put it back in the "sterilized aesthetic cell", and the white cube functions like a
psychological seal. We automatically address it as a frame able to abstract any object from everyday reality, like if the gallery was a laboratory, a lense enticing the exploration and scrutinization of this same reality. The absolute spatio-temporal canvas, which Walter De Maria and Dia Foundation are so desparately trying to turn into intemporal somewhere in Soho since the late 70's.
Well, in these present tense of digital dialectics, the white cube days are probably over.
Finally we are able to switch it around and observe the gallery space as the work of art itself, questioning how a peculiar object it has become with age (it is still quite young), and what is with all the heavy charge that we have imposed unto it: all tricks of the mind, in the end.
Someone thought of directly attacking the topic.
Rudolf Stingel, here, presents at Paula Cooper a work that should not be mistaken
as being so original as they are a good number of artists that worked with
empty gallery spaces before him, changing them in spots to have a conversation, or replacing art by a paper statement, or a
subtle sound. What Stingel does that sounds strikingly new to my ears, is objectifying a whole precise context of a commercial gallery stuck in an art system, and using both minimalism and concept to actually dismantle the prescience of these schools of ideas within the arts.
Here is the situation:
When you enter Paula Cooper's space, it seems totally empty. You walk around and
find no art. After a couple contours, you finally face a gigantic realistic canvases that reads on the checklist as being the portrait of "Paula Cooper" (2004) (replicating with
definite skill a photograph by Robert Mapplethorpe, if there was ever one name whose corpus of portraits consisted really in a who's who of art of New York during the 80's).
If you're like me, you are looking around for the second "Untitled" piece, that is listed on the checklist. The curiosity becomes sensible enough that you need to ask for it. I did realize there was a new floor at the gallery, and had a reaction of thinking Paula Cooper simply wanted to flash (something I'd expect from being in Chelsea where every vernissage look more like fashion parade), but I was enlightened to learn that the second piece was the floor itself. Just a serie of pristine white rectangle boards (about 6 per 11 pieces in the main room) covering every surfaces of the gallery's ground.
Nothwithstanding the fact that the Paula Cooper shot actually looks like
coming from a fashion magazine, and you end up with an exaggerated artificial exhibit outlook that seems like the most superficial ever.
"Too good to be true", seems to be the artist's motto, as his intention
from the start was to show how people would normally dirt his flamboyant
floor... They are NO SUCH THING as a perfect white cube!! ah-ha ! What a kick in the ass ! I felt somewhat rejoiced, and "relieved", as I tried my best to imprint the
dirtiest traces possible in a left corner of the room that was still left too untouched for my taste.
Don't you like art that you're able to touch?
I was reminded of the famous walking painting by Yoko Ono, that she so wished Marcel Duchamps would have walked on.
I also thought about a piece by Jochen Gerz, called "Leben" (1974), and which consisted of the words "to live" (or here the french, "vivre" ) spelled many times on a gallery floor with chalk for people to erase them by walking over. Stingel is probably simply doing the opposite by creating his Pollock
out of ordinary living hazards. Afterall, who is this gallery's for? Why does it
exist? We never see any inhabitants when we are shown photographs of works of art,
be it on artnet or in catalogues. By letting life activity being recorded orimprinted in the gallery as the piece itself, somehow Stingel has proposed one of the most naturally (and automatic)
collaborative piece of art ever! I thought that was cute.
But the main image that we keep getting back to is Paula.
Cette chère Paula.
With the painting added, the exhibit is being pushed back to its junction between being unspecifically about reversing what I will term "traditional gallery design" on its head, and the specific context of pinpointing the reality of a commercial gallery confined in the world market of tastes that constitute Chelsea, New York. So indeed, Stingel is both flattering and teasing sarcasm at his gallerist by transforming her space into a temple devoted to her image. Indeed, if art has become
the new religion and the gallery the new church, Stingel is debilitating it all by presenting the powers at be, here the goddess that will decide what will be set in HER space from what won't (it doesn't help that Paula Cooper really looks on the picture like she's a star from
The Bold And The Beautiful, turning all this into pretty humoristic theatre rather than anything really upsetting).
Indeed Stingel exposes a myth to better undermine it (once you met God, I suppose there is not much less to desire).
But in the end I still wonder if it wasn't a bit too much, or rather, if by being this specific he hasn't also undermined the power of his piece a little.
Everybody understands the idea of whiteness, and how it's being in some sort of silly way associated with purity.
Everybody can grasp at the idea of taking a whole gallery and presenting
it as a sculpture, opposing its very constituent to the art market. But....
Who can care about Paula?
Who, apart from a few lucky art aficionados who take the time to travel to Chelsea once in a while, would be able to respond to the iconography of miss Cooper and the reference of her gallery? This is where, with all the best intentions in the world, and the cool trick of one full month of a show in Chelsea that choose to daringly caricature what's happening out there in those
garage slopes (this piece certainly serves as a great mirror to all galleries around), Stingel is facing his own limits.
All this because people are ignorant of one VERY IMPORTANT FACT that quite enhances Stingel's proposal: Paula Cooper is not "n'importe qui", but was one of the major galleries that supported and paralleled the carreers of the Minimalists. The gallery's statement even claims that Sol Lewitt exhibited his first Wall Drawing at her place. She probably also exhibited a few of the walking pieces by Carl Andre. Stingel is probably aware that he stands in the perfect spot to re-evaluate and crticizes a portion of art history, and thus his appropriation of the gallery space becomes charged with the specific, what he probably wanted to underline by adding that Paula Cooper portrait. Was it necessary? Or isn't it that without its presence those who already know about the gallery's background would still be able to connect the work to it? Or is the portrait of Paula not a little too distractive for most spectators who will have no clue about who she is? Bluntly: should the gallery intervention be read as an attempt to create a temple for Paula, or a temple for art? That is where I got a little confused.
As an artist who travels worlwide, I wonder if Stingel's next intention is to appropriate every galleries and their proprietaires as many "different objects", or if he'll be able to transpose his "attacks" on grounds much less specific (he's probably aware of the problematic, since he opted to separate his gallery show in two titled pieces).
Because if you didn't see any attack, I read two:
the long-run, now shorcutted, biting at the art market,
and a more interesting criticism of the affects of conceptualism
on the ways we conceive of the staging of art.
In a sense Stingel's floor is a piece of conceptual design, two words that a while ago would have sound as an
oxymoron, attached together.
Contrarely to a lot of conceptual art, which are proposed as dead ends in themselves, Stingel seems to really be pondering about what is going on next. Attempting to destroy the white cube can only be a sign of desiring to get rid of one big artifice and wishing to start on new grounds.
What will they be ?
Now that conceptual art is truly reaching its end, that ready-mades
and the framing of everything has been debased to quasi psychological ill,
now that we assume, thanks to Stingel's proof, that the white cube is a totally
unneccessary aesthetic fallacy, where exactly are we moving next?
Cedric Caspesyan
centiment@hotmail.com
Rudolf Stingel: "PC"
February 12 - March 12 2005
Paula Cooper Gallery
534 West 21st Street
Chelsea, New York
Tue - Sun, 10am - 6 pm
(Ps: within this month I'll try to review the show of a real hard-edged conceptualist: Lawrence Weiner at
Maria Goodman)
Paul Tillich
Following from yesterday's commentary on Gavin Turk, I thought of presenting
this new work by Rudolf Stingel, just seen at gallery Paula Cooper, and which to me constitute another of these "last nails" of conceptual art, like we've seen popping out in recent years: Art that questions its own value, and questions the market and art system in the meantime.
If you are reading such book as "The End Of Art" by Donald Kuspit, you may think this should have been all over since the 60's, but it seems they were a couple "last" proposals that needed to be made, and that hopefully in their dry appeal hide the potential of finally providing some light for change. I've said since a few years already, that the new major tendencies of art are trying desparately to get rid of the conceptual and embrace the decorative, what art yet succeeds to do only at a perfect meeting point between both design and concept.
You could argue that art never truly escaped from design and that is an impossible reality to wish this to happen, but I do believe the new "post"-concept art is more attracted by aesthetic presentation than it ever was when it only insisted on promoting ideas. Or rather, these new ideas attack the
staging of art itself, or what it represents to formulate an aesthetic form.
In this sense, without realizing it, minimalist art and conceptual art had a great influence on design put in the context of art, since the popular idea that art is only presented on its optimus ideal stage when it is presented in pristine white spaces: what has been referred to as the "White Cube", a concept of the exhibition space that thoroughly expanded since the second World War, and that is peculiar for being an affect of design that was influenced by new ways and considerations in the perspectivism of art.
If the minimalists were simply trying to convey ideas that already existed in the design activities of their era: functionalism, simplified architecture, new industrial materials, etc..all affects of a
technological
industrialization that led philosophers to start thinking like complex compartmental machines, resulting in the schools of structuralism and deconstructionism, than minimalism, which was already a meeting point between art and design, while influenced thoroughly by these new movement of thoughts, probably had a strong impact on this general conception that only a space devoid of the most forms, lines and meaning possible can really serve optimally the presentation of an artistic artefact.
Thus, the white gallery, or white cube, became the new "frame" for art.
The new spatial canvases on which anything could be thrown, and be considered art, as the elimination of any extraneous element from "reality" served the new conceptual aptitude very well.
The art, more and more dependant on this new frame, rapidly became no longer the art itself but rather its dialogue with any space that it found itself in. Not surprisingly, theory argues that as soon as it escapes the white cube, the art object starts to dialogue with its environment. But put it back in the "sterilized aesthetic cell", and the white cube functions like a
psychological seal. We automatically address it as a frame able to abstract any object from everyday reality, like if the gallery was a laboratory, a lense enticing the exploration and scrutinization of this same reality. The absolute spatio-temporal canvas, which Walter De Maria and Dia Foundation are so desparately trying to turn into intemporal somewhere in Soho since the late 70's.
Well, in these present tense of digital dialectics, the white cube days are probably over.
Finally we are able to switch it around and observe the gallery space as the work of art itself, questioning how a peculiar object it has become with age (it is still quite young), and what is with all the heavy charge that we have imposed unto it: all tricks of the mind, in the end.
Someone thought of directly attacking the topic.
Rudolf Stingel, here, presents at Paula Cooper a work that should not be mistaken
as being so original as they are a good number of artists that worked with
empty gallery spaces before him, changing them in spots to have a conversation, or replacing art by a paper statement, or a
subtle sound. What Stingel does that sounds strikingly new to my ears, is objectifying a whole precise context of a commercial gallery stuck in an art system, and using both minimalism and concept to actually dismantle the prescience of these schools of ideas within the arts.
Here is the situation:
When you enter Paula Cooper's space, it seems totally empty. You walk around and
find no art. After a couple contours, you finally face a gigantic realistic canvases that reads on the checklist as being the portrait of "Paula Cooper" (2004) (replicating with
definite skill a photograph by Robert Mapplethorpe, if there was ever one name whose corpus of portraits consisted really in a who's who of art of New York during the 80's).
If you're like me, you are looking around for the second "Untitled" piece, that is listed on the checklist. The curiosity becomes sensible enough that you need to ask for it. I did realize there was a new floor at the gallery, and had a reaction of thinking Paula Cooper simply wanted to flash (something I'd expect from being in Chelsea where every vernissage look more like fashion parade), but I was enlightened to learn that the second piece was the floor itself. Just a serie of pristine white rectangle boards (about 6 per 11 pieces in the main room) covering every surfaces of the gallery's ground.
Nothwithstanding the fact that the Paula Cooper shot actually looks like
coming from a fashion magazine, and you end up with an exaggerated artificial exhibit outlook that seems like the most superficial ever.
"Too good to be true", seems to be the artist's motto, as his intention
from the start was to show how people would normally dirt his flamboyant
floor... They are NO SUCH THING as a perfect white cube!! ah-ha ! What a kick in the ass ! I felt somewhat rejoiced, and "relieved", as I tried my best to imprint the
dirtiest traces possible in a left corner of the room that was still left too untouched for my taste.
Don't you like art that you're able to touch?
I was reminded of the famous walking painting by Yoko Ono, that she so wished Marcel Duchamps would have walked on.
I also thought about a piece by Jochen Gerz, called "Leben" (1974), and which consisted of the words "to live" (or here the french, "vivre" ) spelled many times on a gallery floor with chalk for people to erase them by walking over. Stingel is probably simply doing the opposite by creating his Pollock
out of ordinary living hazards. Afterall, who is this gallery's for? Why does it
exist? We never see any inhabitants when we are shown photographs of works of art,
be it on artnet or in catalogues. By letting life activity being recorded orimprinted in the gallery as the piece itself, somehow Stingel has proposed one of the most naturally (and automatic)
collaborative piece of art ever! I thought that was cute.
But the main image that we keep getting back to is Paula.
Cette chère Paula.
With the painting added, the exhibit is being pushed back to its junction between being unspecifically about reversing what I will term "traditional gallery design" on its head, and the specific context of pinpointing the reality of a commercial gallery confined in the world market of tastes that constitute Chelsea, New York. So indeed, Stingel is both flattering and teasing sarcasm at his gallerist by transforming her space into a temple devoted to her image. Indeed, if art has become
the new religion and the gallery the new church, Stingel is debilitating it all by presenting the powers at be, here the goddess that will decide what will be set in HER space from what won't (it doesn't help that Paula Cooper really looks on the picture like she's a star from
The Bold And The Beautiful, turning all this into pretty humoristic theatre rather than anything really upsetting).
Indeed Stingel exposes a myth to better undermine it (once you met God, I suppose there is not much less to desire).
But in the end I still wonder if it wasn't a bit too much, or rather, if by being this specific he hasn't also undermined the power of his piece a little.
Everybody understands the idea of whiteness, and how it's being in some sort of silly way associated with purity.
Everybody can grasp at the idea of taking a whole gallery and presenting
it as a sculpture, opposing its very constituent to the art market. But....
Who can care about Paula?
Who, apart from a few lucky art aficionados who take the time to travel to Chelsea once in a while, would be able to respond to the iconography of miss Cooper and the reference of her gallery? This is where, with all the best intentions in the world, and the cool trick of one full month of a show in Chelsea that choose to daringly caricature what's happening out there in those
garage slopes (this piece certainly serves as a great mirror to all galleries around), Stingel is facing his own limits.
All this because people are ignorant of one VERY IMPORTANT FACT that quite enhances Stingel's proposal: Paula Cooper is not "n'importe qui", but was one of the major galleries that supported and paralleled the carreers of the Minimalists. The gallery's statement even claims that Sol Lewitt exhibited his first Wall Drawing at her place. She probably also exhibited a few of the walking pieces by Carl Andre. Stingel is probably aware that he stands in the perfect spot to re-evaluate and crticizes a portion of art history, and thus his appropriation of the gallery space becomes charged with the specific, what he probably wanted to underline by adding that Paula Cooper portrait. Was it necessary? Or isn't it that without its presence those who already know about the gallery's background would still be able to connect the work to it? Or is the portrait of Paula not a little too distractive for most spectators who will have no clue about who she is? Bluntly: should the gallery intervention be read as an attempt to create a temple for Paula, or a temple for art? That is where I got a little confused.
As an artist who travels worlwide, I wonder if Stingel's next intention is to appropriate every galleries and their proprietaires as many "different objects", or if he'll be able to transpose his "attacks" on grounds much less specific (he's probably aware of the problematic, since he opted to separate his gallery show in two titled pieces).
Because if you didn't see any attack, I read two:
the long-run, now shorcutted, biting at the art market,
and a more interesting criticism of the affects of conceptualism
on the ways we conceive of the staging of art.
In a sense Stingel's floor is a piece of conceptual design, two words that a while ago would have sound as an
oxymoron, attached together.
Contrarely to a lot of conceptual art, which are proposed as dead ends in themselves, Stingel seems to really be pondering about what is going on next. Attempting to destroy the white cube can only be a sign of desiring to get rid of one big artifice and wishing to start on new grounds.
What will they be ?
Now that conceptual art is truly reaching its end, that ready-mades
and the framing of everything has been debased to quasi psychological ill,
now that we assume, thanks to Stingel's proof, that the white cube is a totally
unneccessary aesthetic fallacy, where exactly are we moving next?
Cedric Caspesyan
centiment@hotmail.com
Rudolf Stingel: "PC"
February 12 - March 12 2005
Paula Cooper Gallery
534 West 21st Street
Chelsea, New York
Tue - Sun, 10am - 6 pm
(Ps: within this month I'll try to review the show of a real hard-edged conceptualist: Lawrence Weiner at
Maria Goodman)
posted by Cedric at 8:42 PM
1 Comments:
Howdy!
Nice and thanks.
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