Matthew Barney--Power

It's Matthew Barney Season...
And it's time to carefully pull apart Barney's...what should we call it? Sthick? Oeuvre?

So I will start, and I am going to start in a way designed to get Kat's goat. I have written that I think Barney is important. That he has good intentions, that he is working hard to move the Sculpture Discussion past the Minimalism v. Fried argument. Yes, yes, he bungles constantly and is so in love with his pretty face onscreen that he makes awful choices often. But he is reaching for something enormous, and that is what distinguishes him.

Sculpture has been a meditation on power for millenia. Magical fetishes are imbued with it; monuments embody it; Serra personified it; Bourgeois tickles and smacks it. Sculpture became largely irrelevant as a medium and began this "post-medium condition" stuff-in-a-gallery phase when using power became a lame intellectual strategy and critiquing power structures fully took over. (Sorry, Rosalind, I don't buy that this is a media thing. I think it's a power thing.)

Barney is interesting to me because he smacks of power. Often failed power, and usually self-absorbed small-minded power that has a lot to do with Barbara Gladstone's power and his own good looks. But it is this (often awkward) embrace of power in all its forms--including the power of celebrity, logo/branding, money, high production value, baroque overmaking, process, scale, size, and... I hate to say it... gravitas--that makes me think he could actually do something one day. I say that because he is not his elders. He understands that he is not living in modernism (which is why his work is, IMO, so tedious and couched in these booorrring personal mythologies that ground his power squarely within the self). And he understands the power structures of now. He's not fighting for truth or goodness for all. He's fighting for his corporate identity.

What is he doing with this power? Well, I have to admit that I don't know. I have guesses, but I may just be projecting my hopes and fantasies about what I would do if I had MB's resources.

I think he's making films because sculpture has an extremely slippery relationship to time, and he's hoping to pin it down.

And I think that his obsession with self could be rooted in a similar desire to explicate the relationship between sculpture and the body. (Although it is more likely that he is a raving narcissist).

But is his sculpture any good? And what is the difference between the sculptures and the movies? Delving deeper next time...

After the Deluge by Kara Walker at the Metropolitan Museum of Art

I have always appreciated Kara Walker's work, but have never really liked it very much. She is good at what she does, but her work is overly graphic for my taste, and depends too much on too few formal elements. And it doesn't surprise me. For all its shock value, it tells the same stories over and over again. It's easy not to look at it very hard. So I was pleasantly surprised by After the Deluge, an exhibit curated by Walker that consists of her own work paired with selections from the Met's collection. The exhibit, inspired by Hurricane Katrina, is a visual treat that gave me a whole new appreciation for Walker. She is a powerhouse! It is satisfying to compare her work to historical masters of the silhouette like Auguste Edouart, and indulge in the way she manipulates a rich set of conventions that govern precisely how gentility and savagery are flattened into cutout representations. It is also a delight to watch her play as a curator, and I mean that in the richest, most intense sense. Love Walker's work or hate it--it is apparent that she is always having a really good time. Her maniacal close eye and strong hand are everywhere here, assembling an essay in objects and pictures that presents no new stories, but thickens old ones. In this context, it became clear that much of Walker's work was lost on me. Cutouts are, by their nature, thin and flat. Walker depends on the way she references other worlds: this rich antebellum history and a contemporary culture that is still infected by it. The knowledge, assumptions, stereotypes and experiences viewers bring to her work are what breathe life and dimensionality into it. I really enjoyed having Walker do some of that heavy lifting for me. I left the Met excited about Walker's prowess and ready to engage in a conversation with her.

And all week long I have been staring at a blank screen, thwarted and thwarted again.

Walker is masterful on so many levels, and I have been struggling with this power because much of it is gained through that systemic dishonesty pervading all discussion of race. Frankly, it's made for a frustrating week. I am eager to engage with anyone who has the technical skill and grace to whip around all this madness and badness and make my eyes drink it up. And I am deeply grateful that she has the balls to play with race within the mostly white art establishment. I love that she is not just recording racism in a didactic Adrian Piper kind of way. She is focusing all her playfulness and perversity on the single most destructive aspect of racism--the too-tight grip on slavery's legacy that wedges itself between white and black people, a constant unspoken rift that makes progress and healing impossible. And so here we are, Kara Walker and I, a black woman and a white woman wrestling in the muck.

Walker constructs the history of slavery and its constant, nagging present tense in terms of inside and outside space. She starts with the black subject as a container for what she terms "pathologies of the past," and then moves outward as this container overflows to create a muddy, treacherous social landscape infected by this degrading past. This sense of inside-outside is severely flattened in her own work, reduced to positive and negative space. She often winds up talking about a container when what she gives us is a flat black shape. This time, she gives us the whole container by pairing her own work with lots of juicy bits from the Met's collection. The black subject here is exoticized in Edouart's South Sea Islanders, backgrounded in Copley's Watson And The Shark, alienated in Winslow Homer's The Gulf Stream...

...and of course there's a problem with looking at Walker's black subject. This looking is rather trecherous and loaded. Roberta Smith writes in her review of After The Deluge:

"That she (Walker) is an African-American woman seems to be the last thing on her mind: one of her central messages is that slavery visited degradation equally on all concerned and that its tragic legacy poisons life for all Americans."

This is bullshit--a classy sidestep when you just want to get your 1000 words in without any fuss. Walker is representing a specific black subject that is writhing and seething and spilling, caught between the existential burden of being human and all the other burdens of being 5/8 of a person. A book detailing the survivors of the Amistad is chilling and gorgeous. Take the time to get as close to the vitrine as possible, to see the considered, distinguishing detail in each silhouette profile of each individual. Read the completely un-ironic descriptions of who these people are, what their parents do and where they came from. What they were doing right before they were sold into slavery. Compare the bizzare excess of Walker's hyperstylized black subject in her 2001 series American Primitives to the Amistad book's sensitivity. To Edouart's reliance on conventions of whiteness and gentility, like very tiny feet.

Descent Into Hell, in the style of Hieronymous Bosch, is not representing whiteness here, nor is Joshua Shaw's Deluge Towards Its Close. Edouart's capturing of whiteness is here to bounce off of what Walker is doing to similarly conventionalize and exaggerate blackness. This is not about unity, and to miss this is to sidestep the meat of this exhibit. Because what I can really sink my teeth into is how Walker's choices so deftly point, again and again, to that inside/outside problem. To this specific and hideous past that fills the black subject and spills out of it. This gesture--not water, not specifically Katrina but the way the levees were not high enough---predominates. This is not a show about water, it is about what water does and describes. It is about the pressure of being defined by an atrocity that is no longer happening but that we can't stop thinking about. That is a very specific kind of flood, and that flood moves through the body and fills the space we share.

Walker is so good at representing this particular social landscape in which the past flows into the present, and it is a landscape that I am intimate with. I work with a crew of manual laborers that is exclusively slave-descended African American. I have no choice but to navigate this constant need for my colleagues to see things in terms of slavery, and it makes everything so tricky. I have worked hard with them for the better part of a year, and most of them are still not my friends, despite my best efforts. Most of them do not trust me because they keep thinking I have power over them, even though I am their colleague, not their boss. We wind up doing a high-stakes dance, in which they keep giving me power I don't have and then resenting me for it. And I keep failing to resist their power-shove and not understanding what the problem is. Really dumb stuff, like whether I am wearing a baseball cap or my wide-brimmed "overseer" hat, can make all the difference in the world. These guys are not stupid--the situation is just that visual and deeply coded. And try avoiding references to slavery when you actually are slaving, when you are breaking rocks in the hot sun! Conversations, especially requests, grow thick underbellies of subtext. And because I am no good at subtext, I get it wrong all the time.

Walker is interested in the "story of Muck." And my work life is muck, a very specific muck that Walker mines and perverts and throws back at the (mostly white) viewer. And this, because the muck is so visual and because it is so difficult to talk about, could be the single most revolutionary thing any person dealing in race ever did. It could blow a hole in the wall of polite, ineffective silence that dooms day-to-day interactions between white and black people, that drives racism underground where it becomes a million little sulfurous hotsprings of mutual contempt. And since I happen to love my job and hate this one tiny part of it, I really want this work Walker is doing to be meaningful. I want it to be as powerful as Walker is.

But it's not. It's just not. I don't think I am asking too much. I don't want Walker to become the Unity Fairy, or even the lady at the Helpful Advice for White People About Blackness booth. She couldn't cure racism for me, and shouldn't even if she could. Art is not about that. All I want her to do is follow through on what she starts. I know this is a tall order. I know that I am not calling anyone out at work because I would rather just wear the wide-brimmed hat.

But you know, I tromp around a park trying desperately to get along with a handful of big black men from Astoria Houses. I do not have a show at the Met--a show that forcefully portrays the black body in turmoil and seething with rage. And I am not the one openly calling the viewer Massa and in all caps shouting CROUCH DOWN IN THE NIGGER TRENCHES! calling out to the black middle class for a race riot with one breath and politely suggesting that there is possibility for rebirth with the next. Kara Walker is too powerful to get away with this racist doubletalk. I do not buy her worn out conceit that she is the Met's House Negress and that playing out the dynamic she represents--soothing Massa with one hand while the other hand is a clenched fist that then explodes somewhere else, somewhere safe--is part of the concept.

I have no problem with her rage. It's the fact that she refuses to own the rage--to use it to step outside this hurtful system of pandering and resentment that turns me off. After The Deluge is comparatively strong because much of the soothing happens in the wall text, leaving the gallery a strongly angry and devastated place. This relative directness gives her power that I didn't think she had. She has the power to turn the Nkisi nail-fetish figure into a portrait of a black body in turmoil, negating the figure's original purpose as a magical transformer. She has the power to make an inferred black subject loom over The Deluge Towards Its Close. And she is strong enough to put herself and her own hand at the center of this madness, all nappy hair and pointed shark teeth and huge feet and billowing smoke that for once is not just a paper shape. Her Text Cards, which I have previously found tedious because I hate being called a Massa, cement this show, make it abundantly clear that her subject is rage. So what is with all the sidestepping in the essay on the wall? Why move away from the horrific and racialized particulars of Katrina to focus on more polite topics like water in general? Why claim that this show has any content about renewal or rebirth?

The only really powerful thing art does is create distance and new perspectives on what we see every day. Walker halts this process halfway. She undoes this revolutionary act of looking by doing exactly what she sees. Her wall-text works too hard to make me feel okay about what I am looking at. And Walker's reliance on the Met's collection winds up functioning as just another code in which to speak. All that art history puts viewers (and reviewers) at a disadvantage. Is the correct reading what it all looks like or what I learned in school? Or, in the case of Copley's Watson and the Shark or Homer's The Gulf Stream, is the correct reading based on newer afrocentric texts that I haven't read? For every single ounce of power Walker displays openly in After The Deluge, she counters with a dose of backpedaling or obfuscating detail. Every image culled from the Met's collection is so rich. The dense salon-style hanging and sheer breadth functioned in the moment as a shock-and-awe tactic. It heightened my visceral response to the show to be confronted with all this work--a big, slow-moving, well telegraphed punch in the eyes. But as the time comes to really sit down and think about what Walker is doing, each image becomes its own little rabbit hole down which I am constantly slipping and losing the real question:

What is Walker doing when she is not hiding behind these images and histories?

I want Walker to stop diluting this rage. I want her to just fucking say what's on her mind. I want to be able to trust and believe her. I do buy that the rage I saw at the Met--the rage that I don't think I am supposed to actually talk about because it is so shifty and encoded--is completely real, and that it is rooted in this twisted, uniquely visual legacy of slavery. I absolutely buy that there are demons and skeletons and people fucking and sucking and beating and burning locked inside Walker's black subject. And I want to see it. I don't want to see all of this pain and rage because it's exotic, or to make me feel better about my whiteness. I want to see it because in my life all that rage is a huge boil that needs desperately to be lanced, and I have no power to lance it. I buy that Walker is angry, and that she has a gift, and that this gift is being able to hold her anger far enough away from her so that she can play with it, twist and sculpt it.

What does one do with such a scary gift? What if Walker just put together After the Deluge and let it sit there, writhing and slithering and lashing and fist-pumping? What if she did no apologizing on the wall text whatsoever, and left us at crouching down in the nigger trenches? With her own naked words? What if we had to interpret these images ourselves, visually, without relying on wall-texts and art history to save us from the rage Walker wants so desperately to represent?

Well, then she would be making a definitive statement of what is actually going on. And if she did that, I could, as a reviewer, turn it into a dialogue. I could say something with integrity. I could say, "I had no idea what all this pain feels like until you showed me." or "We are more alike than you think" or "I'm not your Massa and resent being forced into this position as much as you resent always winding up a Slave."

As After the Deluge stands, covering up its rage in layers of historical detail and bracketed by downcast eyes saying that the unifying element is water, which it is not, and that the water is cleansing, which it is not, it is still falling flat, merely a monologue about the Great Historical Wrong that will never be overcome, that we can never move past because we can never admit that it is truly there.

More thoughts on the problems of reality
So, as a practical matter, when something real is your medium or your concept, how do you show that you are not just the mute recorder of reality? Have you taken reality, done something to it, and then done something else to it? Have you really done anything at all?
To take an instance from an artist I love, Burtynski's shipwrecking photo below.


For me, I love this photo (and series of photos) in large part because I love industrial form. I love old factories. I love new factories. I love the giant fans at the con Ed station not far from here. I love silos. It happens that Burtynski also is using his choice of subject to make his argument about "nature transformed through industry." But is the argument being made, and if so, is it being made by Burtynski? I think it's fair to ask if the photograph is doing any work, because most thoughtful people are as likely to think about "nature transformed through industry" when looking at the photographs as they would be looking at the real things. And as likely to think "wow that's really cool looking" and leave it at that.
By contrast, Chris Verene leaves clues in his photos that point to his intention and his intervention. (BTW-Chris is a friend of mine)


My Twin Cousin's Husband's Brother's Cousin's Cousin, above, is a great example. Chris didn't photograph just any moment. The photo may or may not be posed, but it is definitely composed, and with purpose. By bringing his intention into the photograph he puts himself into the equation, and that alters it. You can't ponder this image without wondering if he asked the adults to whirl the kids in tandem, and how many times did he snap a picture before he made his art. His photographs are warm and respectful, which could be easily dismissed along with their beauty as objects if he didn't consistently make his mind manifest in the work.
It's a question that can be fairly asked of a lot of art. David used his style of representation to make political statements (masculine linear clarity-good, rococo curlicue-bad), but what was Ingres doing? Maybe this is a little unfair, since the model for art was so different back then. So let me take a pot shot at an artist who can take it. What is Banks Violette doing? I don't know about the average random reader of this blog, but I went to high school with metal heads. I see the tropes, I recognize the tropes, I can even expand from that small universe to the occasional but common experience of getting wrapped up in a subculture's mythology. Saw that in high school. His reconfiguration of reality isn't inducing any thought that the originals didn't do just as well the first time around, which makes me think that the metal heads and me are doing all the work here.
But it doesn't have to be that way. I hate John Curin's work, but he's doing something with the medium of reality. I have really mixed feelings about Kara Walker (envy, love, disappointment), but she's sculpting perceptual-, art history-, and historical-reality into an amazing body that works as hard as anyone looking at it.


And then there's the artist who triggered this conversation in reality over a week ago. Johnston Foster had a great show at RARE last month, a bizarro golfing heaven. His work is roughly mimetic, and it wouldn't work otherwise. Like a lot of current work in Chelsea, his installation (or group of sculptures) starts with a specific, researched, subculture. But instead of playing amateur anthropologist and just documenting rich men playing golf, or taking fragments of golf culture (plaid for instance) and throwing it around the space da da style to provoke some randomized meaning-making, he took their reality and ours and made art out of it. Nothing was taken as a given. Even the q-tips in the trash can were recreated from other materials. And he didn't stop at just recreating the world of rich white golfers. The evidence of the life I live in, and that he presumably lives in, literally builds another reality of Santa-sleigh golf carts, tire-eagles, trophy holes, in a crazy clash of privilege, delusion, consumption, aspiration, and waste.
He took reality, did something to it, then did something else to it.

thanks to J. Saltz for putting Jasper Johns' quote in a review, and thanks to Fisher6000billion for digging it up for me after I had lost it.

Sidebar: The Dutch Model

Why is the NewYorker's site so unsatisfying? Okay, in my hands I am holding a paper version of the April 3 New Yorker magazine. And it's got a fascinating article by Jane Kramer about "The Dutch Model," which she argues creates alienated communities of muslims.

The Dutch Model is, to simplify things, a model on which people live and let live. Homogenous pillars are created within Dutch society--a Catholic pillar, a prodestant pillar, a whores and dope pillar... and Dutch people don't have to like or be similar to one another, they just have to tolerate the fact that the other pillars exist when in a shared space.

This is why it feels completely natural to light up a big ol' blunt in some parts of Amsterdam, while in other neighborhoods you can feel the quiet scorn oozing out of people. You can still do it, but you are in the wrong place and must be actively tolerated, you tourist.

Guest workers from Turkey (to oversimplify) were encouraged not to assimilate. Rather, they were encouraged to form a muslim pillar. This creates, as this first wave of guest workers creates generations of Dutch-born/Muslim-pillar youth who do not have a physical homeland (like Turkey) in mind that they are replicating, a big alienated rotten tooth in the mouth that is Amsterdam/Rotterdam/etc.

Why? There is no shared space, no shared sense of values, no common cause. (again, this is an oversimplification). From the Dutch perspective, the most important value is tolerance and multiculturalism. But this tolerance is based on rules that must be unspoken in order to work. A fair and welcoming impulse turns into disdain and neglect through bad translation.

More About Kara Walker

Shame on me--I need to go find my testicles. It's not complex at all, what Kara Walker is doing. Her audience is mostly white (or at least not primarily slave-descended African American), and she is focusing on something white people adamantly refuse to talk about. This critic-proofs her and titilates her audience, and gives her work a somewhat pornographic sensibility.

More later.

Kara Walker

Kara Walker is the ultimate, most graceful and powerful muckraker. Black artists like Betye Saar rail against the "unpositive" nature of her work. Her shock tactics consistently create controversy, usually from her "base" of African American and women artists. She's an art star--she's not playing to the woman-artist/African American-artist ghettos. She is the youngest recipient of a McArthur award. She has created a really specific and tenacious niche for herself: she is the White Art Establishment's Negress, spewing forth endless reams of gorgeous silhouetted ugliness and the darkest, most playful, off-the-hook embarassment and shame. She is shameless. She seals a dirty pact with her viewers. We do the work of profiling these characters. We create the stereotypes with her. Walker has a unique ability to represent race as a social landscape in which we are all projecting, creating the sihouetted stories with her. Nobody is exempted in her picture of the way race works.

I am working on a review of her show at the Met this week, and will be masticating years of looking at her work and how it plays out in my life. So stay tuned as I flop around like a fish on the deck of a boat! This is an exciting challenge--if it feels uncomfortable, it's important to do it. I go to Kara Walker's work with a lot of needs, and I actually love that she consistently refuses to give me what I need. At the same time, I hate that she doesn't give me some things I want from her work. When I think Kara Walker, I think A Simple, Constant Pain That Feels Vaguely Satisfying, Like When You Cut Your Fingernail Too Short and Can't Stop Worrying It.

This is a complex, kind of critic-proof feeling, and my first task as a reviewer is to tease apart what I need from her work and what I want from her work. Because race is such a loaded issue, and because I can't quite tell my needs from my wants, I need to start by telling you who I am in terms of race.

I am a liberal white woman who grew up in a liberal enclave of the self-segregated, conservative American Southwest. This means I grew up on platitudes about equality and a worshipfulness of MLK, but I never mixed with many black folks. This cultural vacuum and the idealistic ignorance it spawned has led me to two great day jobs that teach me a cold new lesson every day about how pernicious and wasteful racism is, and about how completely implicated I am in it. My parents fucking lied to me. They gave me this idea that racism is outside of me, of the past--that not being racist is as easy as not saying words like pickaninny. Racism doesn't work this way at all. It is not about who says or does what to whom. From where I stand, it is about what isn't said. It's about what white and black people assume about themselves and about each other. It's about everybody's internal dialogue. It's a thicket that I am constantly catching my legs in.

I go into the public schools in Brooklyn and teach (almost exclusively non-white) kids about environmental awareness. When I'm not doing that, I am the de facto "overseer" of the landscaping crew at Socrates, which is plucked mostly from the Astoria Houses up the street. And that very fact, that I wind up assuming this role of overseer--not even boss, overseer--even though I work with these people and am not even their boss, that is exactly what racism is to me.

And I tell you, I truly hate and am very much affected by racism. It is just fucking chilling to look at a ten-year-old boy and know by the way he stares past me, by the way his teacher treats him, that everyone has given up on him already. I learn from other people, and racism makes too many people unavailable to me. It makes too much conflict in my work life. Being a white woman coming into an African American teacher's classroom and "disrespecting her by telling her what to do" has created a lot of tension in my life. Befriending guys on the landscaping crew can have awful effects. Suddenly the person I was chatting with about stuff like family, weekend plans, old-school rap and how much better it is than boring post-Public Enemy lawsuit rap... is a snitch and an oreo. He gets threatening looks from the other guys. He tries to solve the problem by asking what he did wrong and a fistfight almost erupts.

Over what? Snitch about what? I am not their boss. And why are the stakes so high?

I go to Kara Walker's work as a white person with a lot of questions about how this all got to be so ugly. What do I do to create this tension? Is there anything I can do to stop it? Who has the power? What are the people I work with thinking? Since I am from Arizona... why is working with Mexican immigrants so profoundly different? It's obviously that nasty legacy of slavery... but what is it about American slavery that is so uniquely degrading? Is it the way we handled it together? Is it the level of atrocity? Why are the Vietnamese eager to befriend me as a tourist after the ungodly horror of their American war? And why are we so quick to drop the gook thing now that the war is over, even though we don't even have all our POWs yet... and why do any Jews at all live in Germany?

Horrific, horrific, horrific. Slavery is horrific! But people do truly horrific things to one another all the time. There is something else going on here. What is it? Why are we still holding on to slavery with such a tight fist? And why do I feel so dirty even asking this question? I legitimately want to know! I am affected by this!

So yeah, Kara Walker's work is loaded for me. I go to it needing absolution and answers, and I don't get either, and this is one of the greatest strengths of her work. She has no business being the Racism Absolution Fairy or the helpful gal at the Advice For White People About Blackness booth, even if she could. But there is something in this sticky gap between what she puts out and what I bring that is as weak and disappointing as it is strong and correct.

Johnston Foster at RARE (closed yesterday...)

This is really Kat's baby--she is the one with all the cogent thoughts about reality.

But just to get the ball rolling (and to procrastinate on my taxes for one more half hour)... this is the most sincere and loving commitment to crapture I have seen in a long time. I want to burst into giggles when I walk into a gallery more often. Smart material choices, and attention to detail that rewards actual sustained looking. The carpeted reindeer wouldn't really swing if the upholstery job wasn't done with sheetrock screws. The cornucopia of garbage is a festival of careful and gleeful representation.

Trash aesthetic need not collapse into abject richboy holy shititude.

Just a shout out to Fisher6000! She got a Puffin Foundation grant today, which she so totally deserves!