[Repost of an online conversation from Miamiartexchange.com in 2003.]
The following was transcribed from the blog of scientist, nicknamed, Ultrabithorax. [His blog is not necessarily visited by artists although a few do on a regular basis.]
Ultrabithorax: Thinking the Unthinkable. Has anyone seen this [article in The New Republic about Matthew Barney written by Jed Perl]?
Can anyone imagine a point where decorative/political/discursive/descriptive schools of art are unified into a single enterprise, or is that utopian? Does art have a general utility to world civilization, or only specific works that compel specific groups of people for specific reasons at specific points in history?
Is Matthew Barney a huckster?
FJ: All I can offer you is more opinions. [link broken at the 2011 reposting]
What I want to know is how one starts in this world. What steps does it take to end up commanding Ursula Andress and dating Bjork?
carmatt: Now now… I think he’s every bit as talented as Damien Hirst!
hehehehe I read the puff piece in the NY Times. I guess I just don’t understand modern art after Magritte. And I’m sure ok with that.
naylandblake: I’m a contemporary artist, curator, and teacher. So I’m pretty much as inside as one get. And I would say first of all that it would take a lot more time to respond thoughtfully to the issues that you’ve brought up in your first question than I have at right now. (I would frame it very differently for starters). I hope that we get to talk it out more thoroughly. But for your second question, I know Mathew slightly and no he isn’t a huckster. That doesn’t mean that I like all the work or that I feel it should be reflexively adored. But I would point out that it is more comforting for people to believe that he IS a huckster. Means you don’t have to think about the work for one thing and reinforces the cozy idea that contemporary art is always for someone else, not for us and is a scam.
Ultrabithrorax: That “it’s a scam” issue is always perilously close by in these issues; there are folks who actively play with that idea, I think. And everyone’s afraid to look foolish, in the same way we’re afraid to look clumsy on a dance floor.
I’m seriously agnostic about Matthew Barney; I don’t know what to say at this stage. And I’m aware that this sort of question can blow up in your face in the right environments. I’m open to suggestions.
chris komater: Nayland, what are you doing here? The question of Matthew Barney’s significance seems to dominate any consideration of his art, well, perhaps because of all that “greatest artist of his generation” bunk that you read about in every article. I think his work is really interesting, mostly because of his engagement with ideas and the scale with which his imagination finds expression–plus his visuals are compelling on their own.
naylandblake: Thnx for the welcome Chris! I think you bring up a good point in drawing a distinction between the experience of the work and and the experience of the discussion around the work. As time goes on I feel more and more convinced that there is a social need for certain figures that one can speak about in certain ways. Much of what I’ve read and heard about Barney’s work is very similar to what I heard said about Julian Schnabel’s work fifteen years ago. Before Schanbel it was Warhol, and before him Dali. It seems that the role of artist who’s success we are suspicious of predates the particular person filling it. I would suggest that the societal attitudes about art function as forms rather than as genuine responses to specific circumstances. All of which would suggest to a crypto-Freudian like myself that when we are speaking about the genuineness of an artist or worrying about their hucksterism we are actually speaking about something else entirely.
I think that all of this is the emblematic of the conflicted, muddled place of visual art in contemporary society. I believe that people are trained to have an alienated relationship to art making in this country. It is one of the few activities that every child engages in (every child draws). Then at a certain that child is taught that “art” the province of specialists, that they have to be taught how to make it and that they may not be good at it. How can we not have conflicted feelings towards an experience like that? Add on top of that the ways that art has been used to mark class privilege (for the patrons) and class mobility (for artists), and the entire art enterprise sends up many red flags for Americans.
But to my mind the real roots of the problem go back about 500 years or so, to the point at which art objects became disengaged from specific locations and circumstances and became part of the free floating commodities that began to circulate as part of global capitalism. Today art objects move around the world in a way that was unthinkable a few hundred years ago. They wander from country to country and cultural context to cultural context. One of the effects of this unmooring is that it has become increasingly difficult to assign value to our experience of them. That is why folks so often fall back on the only other free floating yardstick of value: the dollar. So in one way the the charge of “hucksterism” is an assertion that once doesn’t get value for the dollar. The problem here of course is that dollar based value tends to obscure the less easily quantified value systems we may subscribe to. It’s my guess that many of these value systems are attuned to a local, almost village or tribal scale, the scale humans have produced culture on for millennia, as opposed to the global scale that culture has only begun to circulate on. The collision between these two scales produces feelings of vertigo and threat in us and our reaction is often one of distrust and hostility.
This is all hastily formulated and expressed (not to mention typed) but I hope that it might shift the terms of the discussion somewhat.
As for what am I doing here – well that’s a question I’ve been trying to answer with limited success for around 43 years.
Brodie Chree: Does art have a general utility to world civilization, or only specific works that compel specific groups of people for specific reasons at specific points in history?
If you start with the assumption that world civilization is a complex dis-aggregate interacting in on itself in an unfathomable multitude of ways I think you have your answer. There are only unlimited specific groups, reasons and points in time relating to each other in different ways all the time. More practically I’d say art is just as practical as it ever was. People are unlikely to credit contemporary artists because they don’t want to be played. Those of us who value our opinions tend not to like to be intellectually submissive to others. However we still consider their work and allow it to ferment in said complex dis-aggregate of culture. The creme phases on the surface. By token of culture and civilization being a loosely structured social dis-aggregate art’s utility is already unified in a reliable way.
Hucksterism is very much part of Matthew Barney’s art. And I love it!
Chris Glass: Here’s all I know:
I sat through Cremaster 3, and the fella next to me asked me what i thought. I told him I felt like I was on the outside of a really expensive joke.
Then I thought about the poor kids starving in third world nations.
Then I wondered if I would look good in tartan.
It wasn’t until I looked down at the ground and realized that I needed new shoes that I realized, the power of art touches me deeply. [Chris Glass is a graphic designer and featured cover artist on Miamiartexchange.com in 2003.]
foodpoisoningsf: I think the Russian Supremacists and the Bauhaus have answered the first question, and we don’t have a world civilization yet. We have a lot of art agendas and curatorial territory grabs, but that’s been going on for a while… the art that Jed Perl discusses is pretty much unknown outside a certain culture of urban sophisticates. Besides, he’s such a kvetch. Interest in Matthew Barney declines the further you get from 5th Avenue and 88th Street, dropping of sharply somewhere in New Jersey.
I applaud Mr Barney for his ability to harness not only willing workers but engaged spectators. Rubens made picture and tapestries; Barney makes film and sculpture from petroleum jelly. Both require studio staff and resources, good press and willing patrons. In a few generations will we care if it’s art? No, we’ll be dead. For all we know, Matthew Barney could be the next Winterhalter. But Andy Warhol was a huckster, and he changed both the history of art and popular culture.
And will Jed Perl please leave Caravaggio and Giorgione out of it? They require no further commentary beyond that already provided by Manet…
Onajide: I’m late to this discussion however, to say a few words about Matthew Barney, let me add that having worked with his assistant in the Museum of Contemporary Art, Miami, I got the feeling that he was very meticulous, if nothing else. I also would think that many artists would come under the same scrutiny if they had the amount of funding Barney has for his projects. By that, I mean, some of his projects wouldn’t seem to have the same impact if they were drawings or paintings. Because these images, ideas, have jumped into our reality, they have become more than some fantasy in the artists mind; like the opposite of cyber reality in full 3D.
I don’t think he’s a huckster, but I do think he’s playing to an audience that accepts just about whatever the limits will allow. With other artists wanting to follow the shock tactic, extravagance road, or sexually explicit card, the more subtle, nuanced work with some intellectually complex aesthetics seem to get looked over. Museums and galleries ARE thinking about ways to pay the bills now that governmental funding has decreased, institutional funding is more difficult to get, and big collectors are being more controlling over their endowments.