final victory

After Michael Jackson’s funeral, I started to think about Greil Marcus’s 1989 book, Lipstick Traces: A Secret History of the Twentieth Century--which links the Sex Pistols to Hugo Ball, Guy Debord, and just about everything else. At one point in the book, Marcus describes that moment in May of 1983 when Jackson first moonwalks on national television:

Lithe, beautiful, grown up but still a child, an Afro-American with surgically produced Caucasian features, androgynous, a changeling, communicating menace with the dip of a shoulder, comfort with a smile, singing a song from his new album, Thriller, stepping forward but somehow seeming to glide backward at the same time, walking the television stage not as if he owned it, not as if it was built for him, but as if his very presence had called it into being, he shocked the nation.

Okay, so that’s one long, hyperbolic sentence. But in the pages that follow, the author gives a clear sense of the strangeness of what he calls Jacksonism. Marcus contends that Jackson’s rise was unlike other pop explosions that came before—was ultimately different from, say, the emergence of the Beatles or the Sex Pistols, figures who “raise the possibility of living in a new way.”

It was the first pop explosion not to be judged by the subjective quality of the response it provoked, but to be measured by the number of objective commercial exchanges it elicited…the pop explosions of Elvis, the Beatles, and the Sex Pistols had assaulted or subverted social barriers; Thriller crossed over them, like kudzu.

So Thriller didn't split people into opposing camps; it was a cultural phenomenon that one participated in simply by being alive at that moment and acknowledging the pop culture landscape, which Thriller pervaded utterly. Ultimately, though, in Marcus’s telling of the story, the illusion of Jacksonism falls apart with the subsequent Victory Tour, for which tickets are only available for sale at $30 a head, in blocks of four—that’s a mandatory commitment of $120 in 1984 dollars to see the King of Pop.

Jackson’s main fans, tween African-American boys and girls, were locked out in large numbers. Stories of families going without medical care or food in order to buy the tickets surfaced, and in the end, the audience for the Kansas City kickoff was predominantly well-off and white. For Marcus, it appears that the Michael Jackson phenomenon was directly connected to the political culture of the 1980s:

The Jacksonist pop explosion…was brought forth as a version of the official social reality, generated from Washington as ideology, and from Madison Avenue as language—an ideological language, in 1984, of political division and social exclusion, a glamorization of the new American fact that if you weren’t on top, you didn’t exist. ‘Winning,’ read a Nestle ad featuring an Olympic-style medal cast in chocalte, ‘is everything.’ ‘We have one and only one ambition,’ said Lee Iacocca for Chrysler. ‘To be the best. What else is there?’ Thus the Victory Tour—which originally boasted a more apocalyptic title: ‘Final Victory.’

the twofold path

Kriston asks which is more compelling: Austere installations featuring the likes of Anish Kapoor and Rachel Whiteread...or a double-ended metal dildo by Lynda Benglis, fashioned in honor of the founder of October?

Consider your answer carefully.

boxing over the boxer

Apparently, some folks are not happy with Lisa Marie Thalhammer's boxer girl mural, which went up in Bloomingdale at the end of May. See the video clip below:

an inside job

Yesterday Tyler weighed in on the Jerry Saltz vs. MoMA phenomenon. I briefly mentioned the discussion between Saltz and MoMA curator Ann Temkin in this post from last week.

Tyler expresses his disappointment that Saltz's campaign is essentially ghetto-ized, i.e., taking place for the benefit of his (presumably art-world oriented) Facebook friends, and not reaching the broader audience that a crossover critic like Saltz--someone who is a contemporary art insider, but who writes for the general public--could reach, if he wanted to. He points to this as yet another sign of the decline of arts journalism.

I think Tyler's on to something. I hate to say it, but because of the novelty of seeing this unfold on Facebook, the thought that Saltz might just be preaching to the choir hadn't occurred to me.

Having said that: Is Saltz's facebook network really so small a neighborhood? Doesn't holding the discussion there allow the 5,000 friends who did read it to disseminate that content in other places, as Ed Winkleman did by reprinting it on his blog? (Which is arguably just another neighborhood in the same ghetto...but, hey.)

I also have to wonder exactly how engaged the general public has been with this particular fight of Saltz's. Isn't the visual art world at its highest levels all about privilege? That's the prevailing assumption amongst non-artsies I know, anyway, so latent gender discrimination within the halls of an elite arts institution is probably no surprise to them, and confirms what they already think.

Tyler would probably argue that disspelling those assumptions is exactly Saltz's job. And I think he'd be right.

But it seems to me that the question of really changing MoMA is whether you should apply pressure from within or without--rally the art world, or focus on educating everyone. In this instance, anyway, Saltz seems to have opted for an inside job.

back from the shadows again

This is a brief post to announce that:

1) I'm back at my desk at the AAC, and

2) you should visit artist Andrea Chung's new website.

Andrea was in our FALL SOLOS show last year, and currently has work on view here.

an exclusive club

Unfortunately, I was only able to stay for the first couple of hours of Figurative Art Today: Between East and West—for the presentations by artist Iona Rozeal Brown and collector (and colleague, and friend) Henry Thaggert. I missed Allan DeSouza and Kristen Hileman, and the conversation all four panelists had with Phillips curator Vesela Sretenovic. It was a full day, and I couldn't take it all in.

Iona shed light on her lifelong, mostly failed search for positive depictions of black women, and how that search has made, for her, the thought of not addressing the figure in her work seem impossible. Iona showed images of her art that were familiar to me--ganguro youths, Japanese teens who attempt to emulate hip-hop fashion in unlikely and shocking ways, going so far as to paint or dye their faces in what amounts to blackface, rendered in a ukiyo-e style. She also showed images of invented figures she calls hoochie-putti—what appear to be demon spirits made entirely from pale breasts and butts, and shrouded with long, stringy hair extensions. Even more disturbing than these were video clips Brown showed of Japanese women trying to turn themselves into outlandishly amplified versions of hip-hop stereotypes, scantily-clad, and showing off hyper-sexualized dance moves.

Henry’s talk relied on a novel conceit. The title for his talk: Was Andy Warhol Black? (Spoiler alert: He was not.)

Henry did make a fairly compelling case for Andy Warhol’s game-changing career as basically laying the groundwork for the re-introduction of all sorts of images and narratives that had been marginalized up to that point by the rise of abstraction, formalism, and the belief in universal values for visual expression. After Warhol, popular images, crass consumer culture, consumer products, movie stars, all of it could find its way into serious art and elite institutions. So, Henry asked, why not art about the African-American experience, too?

At one point, Henry quoted artist, philosopher, and rabble-rouser Adrian Piper. I can’t find the exact quote, but Piper basically said that abstraction and formalism led directly to the suppression of black cultural heritage…and that, whenever women or minorities move in significant numbers into any avenue of cultural production, that type of work necessarily becomes devalued, and the establishment moves their party somewhere else.

Now, whether or not you accept Henry's premise, or Piper’s description of systematic institutional exclusion, this thought does lead to an unanswered question, one that I would’ve loved to hear Iona or Henry address.

All of the standards of museum and gallery culture—the pristine white walls of the room that’s equal parts scientific laboratory, mausoleum, and shopping mall; the reliance on artificial light and huge expanses of space between works in order to isolate them as specimens, out of any context; the continued dependence on the long shadow of the canon, of works of white males that still serve as a measuring stick for considering all future works—all of these continue to place new art in an ideologically loaded frame, one that still enforces a high modern, universalist idea of art. (I'm obviously thinking about Brian O'Doherty here.)

This is true despite all of the self-examination and public hand wringing done by contemporary museum professionals, who usually acknowledge that women and blacks are still not represented in any significant numbers in their collections—but seem powerless to do much about that fact. Read, for example, this fantastic conversation between Jerry Saltz and MoMA's chief curator of Painting and Sculpture, Ann Temkin (thanks, Edward, for reprinting this).

Which leads me to ask: If the art establishment really does, as Piper suggests, tend to turn away from women or blacks…and if it still relies on the standards of an earlier era, privileging heroic male painting and sculpture, and the standards of presentation that support that sort of work…then why should women or people of color bother looking for approval or acceptance from said establishment? Is the whole game essentially poisoned, regardless of the self-awareness or self-criticality of curators and directors now?

And if museums like MoMA, as Saltz suggested, are heading for obsolescence because of their inability to change fast enough...do underrepresented artists need to go somewhere else?

Where would that be?

All of which, appropriately or not, makes me think of Woody Allen, quoting Groucho Marx: "I'd never join a club that would allow a person like me to become a member."

Pictured: iona rozeal brown, all falls down, 2008

off the wall

Michael Jackson graffiti spotted at the Brookland/CUA metro stop on my way to see Iona Brown and Henry Thaggert speak at Figurative Art Today: Between East and West, a panel discussion that was held at the Phillips Collection this past Saturday, June 27. More on that after the inevitable diaper change.

alt-woo-hoo! again!

I'm pleased to announce that last Friday, I won the First Place 2009 Altweekly Award for arts criticism.

That's two years in a row! Good grief.

My competition this year hailed from the LA Weekly and the Village Voice...which, frankly, led me to believe I'd be taking the honorable mention home. Somebody at the AAN must like me.

You can read the pieces for which I won--the only three pieces, I'm sad to say, that I wrote last year for the WCP--here, here, and here. Read about the rest of the WCP's awards here.

little miles

Pictured: Miles Herbert Hopkins Cudlin. The little boy was born last Wednesday, June 17, at 4:39 am.

I will be away from my office at the AAC--and from this blog, most likely--for about two weeks, as I get accustomed to this new business of daddyhood.

Big thanks to all of the well-wishers who found out from facebook, or from Claire, or who simply intuited that my sudden disappearance meant that Miles had finally arrived. Cassandra and I have received so many wonderful messages over the past few days; my apologies if I haven't personally responded to yours!

Now if you'll excuse me...I have a diaper to change.

marching orders for friday

Today at 12:30 at the Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden, Jason Horowitz will be giving a gallery talk about the current show, Strange Bodies. As a choice for a speaker to address this show, Jason makes perfect sense. His larger than life photos are definitely both strange and of the body: They're surreal, heightened, quasi-abstract fleshscapes that alienate the viewer from her or his own corporeal form, and they seem to recall everything from heroic abstract painting to forbidding, destroyed landscapes. Jason is represented by Andrea over at Curator's Office.

And tonight, Jayme has a cool show for you over at Civilian Art Projects: Paper Jam, featuring East Coast rock posters, silkscreened, xeroxed, and otherwise. Opening reception starts at 7:00 pm. 406 7th St NW, Chinatown.