My three days in New York among the gallery-hopping, social-climbing primitives
Evil Zeitgeist
Art today is understood as a series of moves that you have to comprehend and absorb, in order to position and advance yourself in a game for a group of people whose creativity has become repellent without their realizing it. That is, if you’re an artist. Your whole role in society has become weirdly hateful. What on earth happened? The shows roll by, feeding the art industry, not feeding anything else, just seeming like object versions of shouting, or someone reading familiar, acceptable meanings off a list, or idiotically droning or mumbling in a childish attempt to come across as a mystical genius or someone highly educated. It’s very rare to see a contemporary art show that isn’t like toys for children.
Empty Hungry Souls
There were a lot of tall, beautiful, well-dressed women at Tom Sachs’s opening at Lever House in New York City on May 8. I saw the handsome collector — sinister, slightly dyed and embalmed-looking, like Roy Scheider in his Marathon Man period — who "flipped" Jeff Koons’s Hanging Heart (1994-2006) at auction last year for $23.6 million; he was with Moshe Dayan’s granddaughter. I couldn’t understand this opening crowd’s aspirations. They wanted to be seen at an important event, but the show was completely persuasive that Sachs isn’t interested in anything important, only in being shallow.
I liked the Jeff Koons puppy on the roof of the Metropolitan Museum of Art, however, for about six seconds. It’s good that he can even give you that pleasure for one quick blast. I don’t care about seeing it again, of course. Who would? No one, really. In fact, no one’s really all that interested in seeing it the first time; we’ve just got used to the social rigmarole. We want to socially climb by acting like primitives.
Clash of Values
The next day I saw some paintings by Jeremy Gilbert-Rolfe at Alexander Gray. They were all startling, rich and deep. The pleasure of Sachs’s 12-foot-high Hello Kitty sculptures is their aggrandizing of the everyday: nothing could be more familiar to us than that kitschy stuff. But the pleasure of Gilbert-Rolfe’s paintings is their quietness, their refined Bauhaus sensibility. Endangered by the Rain (2007), for example, has the interest of something hidden; hidden forms, things peeping from behind, systems that are broken. But it has a sophisticated balance; it’s got tonal variety without the tones ever jumping out into hideousness. And those things are really hard to master.
I’m afraid I’m making it sound worthy; maybe Sachs sounds great now — he’s full of hot pleasure! But Gilbert-Rolfe’s art really is based in pleasure, while Sachs’s art is the object equivalent of going shopping; it’s about looking for the thing that’s the biggest, glossiest, clearest, and most shockingly clean. With Gilbert-Rolfe, the experience isn’t so much about buying — what seems to be important is the work’s made-ness. The Hello Kitty sculptures have obviously been outsourced, and could have been made in China. But Gilbert-Rolfe’s art seems like unalienated work. Sachs’s art is like we’re gasping in admiring wonder at how alienated we can be — but I’d like to feel less alienated.
Bad Hides
Zhang Huan showed a bland picture at PaceWildenstein made of incense ash that you had to climb into the rafters to view. Done from a photo, it wasn’t worth looking at even though it was 59 feet wide. China is really high on this kind of thing at the moment. Ash suggests death, and so do dead animals: he also showed a sculpture of a prone monster-man as big as a house, done in polyester foam clad with real cowhides. These hides were more or less whole, with the tails and hooves still attached, hanging down like arbitrary decorative embellishments of the main form — which was helpful because this form was so corny and obvious there was no reason for it to exist. It’s appalling that Zhang Huan was allowed to put on some kind of performance in a museum in Rome the other day, which involved him caressing a really good statue from 2,000 years ago.
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