X-TRA Spring 2017 19.3

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X-TRA Volume 19, Number 3 Spring 2017

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Hito Steyerl, Factory of the Sun, 2015. Video still. Single channel high definition video, environment, luminescent LE grid, beach chairs.

23 minutes. Image CC 4.0 Hito Steyerl.

Courtesy of the artist and Andrew Kreps Gallery, New York.

Erratum: In X-TRA 19.2, Patrick Staff’s artist's project should have been titled $5 To Those Who Deserve It. The editors apologize for the error.

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CONTENTS

Sabrina Tarasoff Desire Lines Review: A.L. Steiner and robbinschilds: C.L.U.E. Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles

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Nicolas Linnert All Access Politics: Reality and Spectatorship in Two Film Installations by Jean-Luc Godard and Hito Steyerl

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Cora Gilroy-Ware Melting Beauty Review: Cindy Sherman: Imitation of Life The Broad, Los Angeles

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Patricia Fernández Memory Is In Progress: The Heart

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Liam Considine Triumph of the Banal: Merlin Carpenter’s DECADES and the Legacy of the Handmade Readymade

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Jan Tumlir Zero, My Teacher

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Sabrina Tarasoff

Review: A.L. Steiner and robbinschilds: C.L.U.E., Part I (color location ultimate experience)

Desire Lines

Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles August 29, 2015– September 12, 2016

The work equalises the emotions, and enables the two submerged to surface in series of unpredictable configurations. Work is the constant carnival; words, the rhythm and pace of two, who mine undeveloped seams of the earth and share the treasure.1 —Gillian Rose In an essay by Noura Wedell on “radical educator” Fernand Deligny’s experiments on children suffering from “deep encephalopathy,” or severe autism, in the 1960s, Wedell writes that Deligny wanted to offer the children “a place outside of the institution” where, instead of being conditioned through restrictions and reprimands, they were set free to “fuck up.” 2 Screaming if they had to, or holding onto objects for attachment— not use—the children would be “freed from being only what they were for those who would ascribe some fixed purpose to them.” 3 The wildness was facilitated, encouraged: their bodies left wholly separate from society’s intentions for them. By mirroring the actions of adults, the children would necessarily absorb certain functional behaviors, but it was not assumed or taught as essential for action—or being. Instead, Deligny’s interest lay in how the children developed a sense of the common through their environment, which is to say through the area they occupied and how they interacted with it materially. As their movements were diagrammed in seemingly chaotic yet consistent drawings, patterns appeared, suggesting that the children’s minds followed an innate “choreography.” Unable to express themselves in speech, the children formed a language that appeared on paper as loops around areas they felt attached to. The children never wandered outside these perimeters, and would often stall in single spots that had been marked, at times violently, by elements they could recognize, such as a place where there had been a fire in the past.4 This “habitat,” as inscribed by the daily life of its occupants, provided an immediate psychological shelter, but moreover crystallized a mode of expression situated in the senses, in proximity to others, and in associations with space.

1. Gillian Rose, Love’s Work: A Reckoning With Life (New York: New York Review, 1995), 131.

2. Noura Wedell, “To Hold a Wild Basket,” The Enemy Reader, September 22, 2014, http://theenemyreader.org/

to-hold-a-wild-basket/.

3. Ibid.

4. Ibid.

4

A.L. Steiner, Untitled (blue), 2007. Color pigment print, from C.L.U.E., Part I (color location ultimate experience), by A.L. Steiner and robbinschilds, digital video, 2007. Courtesy the artists and Koenig & Clinton, New York.

At the beginning of the video C.L.U.E. (color location ultimate experience) (2007),5 by A.L. Steiner and robbinschilds (Sonya Robbins and Layla Childs), two women flop onto a beach wearing outfits composed singularly of shades of blue. This flop is the departure point for a slow procession of open-ended choreography in which the two dancers in shifting colors of costume move through various outdoor settings, from deserts to urban rooftops. In various hues, the dancers—Robbins and Childs—devise a body language that signals through release, plummeting, slumping, falling, and floating. The dancers strive to articulate affect through common movements, which are mirrored yet ever so slightly out of sync. This slight awkwardness articulates inexperience, which, as the video progresses, develops into a speechless language of twirls, spins, falls, and collapses. As precursors for the spectrum that follows, the moves can be interpreted as a way to imagine subsisting on the other side of speech. Accentuated by sky blue outfits, the choreography in the first scene is, as Gertrude Stein would have it, precocious.6 It empties, calms, and neutralizes only to embody communication in common gesture.

Entering the frame as though evolving from the sea, the pair is made primordial: floppy and emergent, they squirm on the sand in unison. Shoes set aside, they begin a dance awkward enough to seem either ill-rehearsed or partly hashed out; the movements change in each sequence, suggesting cyclicality with no apparent end. In this interstitial zone—neither civilization nor the wild—there’s no hurry. Maybe, to be barefoot (especially while primly clad in pearls and a pencil skirt) is to be on the brink of wildness, in an attempt to become feral. But to write of wildness is to undermine and contain it; as Jack Halberstam has noted, “Wildness cannot speak without producing the…order that gives it meaning.” 7 Instead, let’s call it the semiwild. Like a tourism video promoting love’s work, C.L.U.E. is an ideal place where the self can take a break from definition and dwell in its own matter.

Propelled by their open-ended choreography, the women travel through unspecified parts of the country. They pause by mountains and Home Depots, concrete plazas and grassy knolls, exploring their organized freedom, matching each shifting landscape with a new outfit and another set of twinned motions. The dancers exist on a messy and spirited spectrum: with each change of location comes a change of clothes, each outfit color-coded in monochromes constituted of minor variations in hue.

Two people heading decisively in one direction, apparently without destination, the dancers map each landscape in awkward and slightly uncoordinated movements. Their gestures echo the mental maps drawn from the children's motions in Deligny’s research. The choreographies constitute a language affixed to space; their rhythmic pace crystallizes an alternative to the claustrophobic encapsulation of the spoken or written word. The dancers step into the world only to step outside of its social prescriptions.

5. C.L.U.E. featured as a part of the exhibition The Art of Our Time, which was on display at MOCA Los Angeles from August 15, 2015 to September 12, 2016.

6. Gertrude Stein, “Tender Buttons: Objects, Food, Rooms,” Project Gutenberg, March 17, 2016, http://www.gutenberg. org/files/15396/15396h/15396-h.htm.

7. Jack Halberstam, “Wildness, Loss, Death,” Social Text, 32.4, Winter 2014, http:// cranbrookart.edu/wp-content/ uploads/2015/01/Social-TextHalberstam.pdf.

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As the title suggests, the “ultimate experience” requires looking elsewhere, going out of bounds—and doing so for the sake of re-energizing socialization as an embodied, affective process. Grasping payphones on a dark street corner, yet not speaking into them, falling off a display bed in a furniture store, and skipping in a circle holding seemingly empty, disposable coffee cups all feel emblematic of behavioral learning; the choreography becomes an absurd pedagogy to inspire a makeshift wildness.

The colors of the varied and mismatched garments act as interlocutors, translating between the dancers’ bodies and their scenic locations. They find common ground in hues that consolidate affect, such as a bright fuchsia that animates the dancers’ spirits just as the video picks up pace, and an aquatic blue worn by the women while they float face down in a pool, as though holding their breath to see how long they can last within what lies beneath. However imprecise such language may be, the palette, which is in the range of a basic eight-color box of crayons, invokes LGBTQ politics.

Steiner, whose work has generally found its locus in the discourse surrounding identity and sexuality, plays with the basic symbolism of the rainbow as a way to access a more complex spectrum. Their movements, semi-wild and carnivalesque, visualize a freedom—from or of speech—sought after by those who feel marginalized or voiceless under the social codes underlying dominant culture. Within the video, each of the colors is formed from constituent hues, creating minor but palpable differences within the outfits. It is an apt metaphor for the sliding spectrum of sexuality, which is continuously essentialized by models that compress idiosyncrasies into easily digestible formats. This is to say, sexuality is extant in differentiating degrees, yet its presence in the public is all too often constricted by limited expressions.

The scope of emotions, movements, colors, and places in C.L.U.E. form a conceptual structure that speaks to this complexity; the video visualizes the spectrum not as a sequence of clearly delineated colors but rather as overlapping nuanced hues. It collapses the range of identification (the women clad in a band of colors) with the embodied, active language of the choreography, which is akin to the physical articulations of those who suffer from extreme difficulties in communication. Both color and movement are expressed as varied and shifting. Instead of marginalizing, they work in tandem toward a freedom from confining social codes. The choreography suggests a socialization based in communities that acknowledge the affective relationship between bodies and space. Identification, at that, is often constructed in relation to an “other” and is commonly manifest in external signifiers, such as clothing, hairstyle, make-up, behavior, gestures, and ways of speaking. Combining these facets, C.L.U.E. draws an awkward parallel between color and the location of identity, as though dancing around a fixed point could express one’s place on the spectrum, and the color one landed on or, in this case, put on, could incite an affective communicative structure.

The women’s escape to the semi-wild is thus an experiment in color-coding: a trip outside universalism that visualizes difference paradoxically by creating minor variances in color and choreography. It is as though the women predetermined the color palette for each scene—highway as fuchsia, dusty sand hills as green—yet each showed up with her own interpretation 7

A.L. Steiner, Untitled (magenta), 2007. Color pigment print, from C.L.U.E., Part I (color location ultimate experience), by A.L. Steiner and robbinschilds, digital video, 2007. Courtesy the artists and Koenig & Clinton, New York.

A.L. Steiner, Untitled (orange), 2007. Color pigment print, from C.L.U.E., Part I (color location ultimate experience), by A.L. Steiner and robbinschilds, digital video, 2007. Courtesy the artists and Koenig & Clinton, New York.

of these colors. The varying landscapes echo this idiosyncrasy by contrasting the dancers’ attempts to cohere against varying backdrops. The radical scenic changes highlight the dancers’ minor differences. In one sequence, the women, clad head-to-toe in red (crimson, rose, scarlet) hash out something unspoken through humorously argumentative gestures that resemble a fistfight in a low budget sci-fi film or a lovers’ quarrel reenacted from a rom-com. Their corner store hangout seems out of place, enhancing the video’s narrative intrigue. In another scene, they stand in front of a John Chamberlain-esque heap of crushed cars, waving their bodies—clad in white—like flags, resigning to the pure pleasure of new-found freedom.

Colors and contexts crash and collide, demolishing discourse.

Although it would seem paradoxical to introduce prescriptive structures into the realm of wildness, formalism is implicit in all this. However unpremeditated the dances appear, their choreography adheres to a history of experimental dance. Experience, not to mention the question of identification, is enacted through simple movements that push not only the concept but also the pace and tone of the video. At base, the video progresses through this dance, which is then emphasized and mannered by the colors and environs. It contextualizes the subjectivities of both women, even if they differ in costume, vary in hue, and are often out of step or bouncing in opposite directions. One falls, the other watches; one turns, the other observes and follows suit. The motions reflect the doomy, melodic soundtrack

by Seattle-based alt rock band Kinski, which picks up pace as the dancers hop around an empty highway or animatedly gesture with their hands against a mountain landscape. Elsewhere, the sounds match the pair’s more minimal moves, simple shifts like falling or rolling. In fact, falling starts to become formulaic in the film—the two women drop down in various sites as though having figured out how freeing it is, how fun, how crucial to be made speechless. (“Falling forever, going to pieces,” writes Maggie Nelson.)8 The intractable motions are both cyclical and eddying; the dancers match each other’s moods on tiptoes, holding hands, lying down. The minor differences in their pace and body language exacerbate the haphazard, sporadic qualities of the choreography. However, aligned with how the compositions of color and outfit function throughout the film, it seems a calculated choice to visualize certain desire lines and to speak of idiosyncrasy.9 By gesturing toward difference, the women put themselves in a “position of liminality, in that productive space of the construction of culture as difference, in the spirit of alterity or otherness,” to quote Homi K. Bhabha.10 The dance, formally elemental, expresses this otherness like a faux-pas-de-deux.

Repeatedly, the dancers match each other’s moods through color and motion, but also in the composition of their outfits, which is the most differential element of the video. While one is in pants, the other sports an over-the-knee skirt; one in Barbie-pink knickers and a fuchsia blouse, the

8. Maggie Nelson, The Argonauts (London: Melville House, 2016), 135.

9. The concept of desire lines is borrowed from landscape architecture; it describes the

paths that are formed as pedestrians take shortcuts over lawns or knolls that have not been designated as walkways.

10. Homi K. Bhabha in conversation with Jonathan

Rutherford, “The Third Space,” in Rutherford, ed., Identity: Community, Culture, Difference (London: Lawrence and Wishart, 1990), 209. My emphasis.

10

A.L. Steiner, Untitled (white), 2007. Color pigment print, from C.L.U.E., Part I (color location ultimate experience), by A.L. Steiner and robbinschilds, digital video, 2007. Courtesy the artists and Koenig & Clinton, New York.

A.L. Steiner, Untitled (green), 2007. Color pigment print, from C.L.U.E., Part I (color location ultimate experience), by A.L. Steiner and robbinschilds, digital video, 2007. Courtesy the artists and Koenig & Clinton, New York.

A.L. Steiner, Untitled (magenta), 2007. Color pigment print, from C.L.U.E., Part I (color location ultimate experience), by A.L. Steiner and robbinschilds, digital video, 2007. Courtesy the artists and Koenig & Clinton, New York.

other in a Barbie-pink skirt and fuchsia knickers. These amount to correspondences between the dancers independent of their actions, gestures, or speech. They mirror and mimic through clothing and motion, in shades that return the favor of emotion rather than claim authority over it. It’s a way of layering experience, as though the separation between body and affect could be clearly pronounced or formalized. It is, in this sense, beyond language: put together in a place where there is no sense but of an “other,” and where, as Noura Wedell suggests, “the ‘we’ pre-exists our cohering into subjects and is still ‘pre-individual.’” 11 That “we,” in this case, comes forth in color and tailoring, as an empathetic relationship that mismatches, paradoxically, to create stronger cohesion.

I wonder if C.L.U.E.’s dancers affix on their locations to similar ends. With no actual way “out” of language, their restless travels inscribe affect on trodden ground, whether grassy knolls, concrete plazas, or, by extension, the galleries where the video has screened and, in some cases, been reenacted as a live performance. Since its premiere,12 the jouissance of Steiner and robbinschilds’ rainbow has unhooked itself from the expected tropes of political art, as it eschews its infernal didactics to veer into the arena of play. Here, liberation is not posed as a radical concept: it is simply the result of stepping outside of exchangeability and letting another set of faculties— sensory, material, affective—move you. Usually a rhythm will emerge. As Gillian Rose writes in Love’s Work, “It cures, folly by folly.” 13 This dance is childishly simple, but it facilitates a kind of freedom.

As the video reaches its climax, the two women crawl naked around a forest floor as though featured in an SNL parody of a Lars von Trier film. A rainbow of clothes, in a broken spectrum, hangs loosely around a large tree. More than a little cringe inducing, the ending leaves me wondering what is gained by pushing the rainbow to the point of cliché. What do these colors, when placed into proximity with one another, leave us to consider?

What can they tell us about the emotional spectrum that surfaces, invisibly, when experience is essentialized as a common choreography? The refusal to speak or stay put is here linked to a desire to disentangle from the private individual, as though feeling or identifying en masse, collectively, even as a duo, is the only way to feel grounded. Despite the constant relocations, the choreography visualizes a self shaped by similar methods of identification that are rooted not only in attachments to color and mirroring garb but also in specific places that are felt and explored together. Though I am wary of romanticizing autism, which is certainly a much more complex experience than can be considered in this context, the spatial attachments described

by Wedell encroach on a portentously naturalistic or romantic theory of the commons. Wedell proposes two types of freedom: one is found in differential formal correlations as expressions that venture “outside” of language; another results when we “act without any wanting at all.” 14 The latter pertains to a freedom found when our prescriptions can be “shaken off,” which

11. Wedell.

12. The work first premiered in 2007, at Taxter & Spengemann gallery in New York.

13. Rose, 143.

14. Wedell.

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A.L. Steiner, Untitled (rainbow), 2007. Color pigment print, from C.L.U.E., Part I (color location ultimate experience), by A.L. Steiner and robbinschilds, digital video, 2007. Courtesy the artists and Koenig & Clinton, New York.

A.L. Steiner + robbinschilds, C.L.U.E., Part I (color location ultimate experience), 2007. Installation view in The Art of Our Time at the Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles, August 29, 2015–September 12, 2016.

Image courtesy of The Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles. Photo: Fredrik Nilsen.

is to say when we move, dress, or express ourselves without a clear goal.

This does not exclude desire, nor does it eschew signaling one’s identity through such behaviors and characteristics. Rather, it points to the potential inherent when such identifications are given space. The women rid themselves of societal expectations, which, for example, advocate linearity, going from A to B with intent, dressing for success, and ending up in prescribed (often patriarchal) states of being. Boundless desire, or desire without function, could be applied as an ethos for robbinschilds and Steiner's road trip, where the driving force is simply a desire to mobilize an affective reality.

The present moment and the movements that draw two people together simultaneously set them apart. They create desire lines that map and diagram new spaces, relations, and subjectivities. For the trio, it becomes an oblique and romantic pedagogy: a way to understand how emotion pushes its own grand narrative, like a Walter Benjamin-ian love affair, where one is amorously open to a complex, material experience of the world beyond its stagnant frame.

Sabrina Tarasoff is a Finnish writer who divides her time between Paris and Los Angeles.

Together with Naoki Sutter-Shudo, she co-runs the loosely Los Angeles-based space Bel Ami.

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Nicolas Linnert All Access Politics: Reality and Spectatorship in Two Film Installations

by Jean-Luc Godard and Hito Steyerl1

For there is a rule and an exception. Culture is the rule, and art is the exception. Everybody speaks the rule: cigarette, computer, T-shirt, tourism, war. Nobody speaks the exception. It isn’t spoken, it’s written: Flaubert, Dostoyevski. It’s composed: Gershwin, Mozart. It’s painted: Cézanne, Vermeer. It’s filmed: Antonioni, Vigo. Or it’s lived, and then it’s the art of living: Srebrenica, Mostar, Sarajevo. The rule is to want the death of the exception.

—Jean-Luc Godard, Je vous salue, Sarajevo (1993) The commentary from Jean-Luc Godard’s 1993 short film Je vous salue, Sarajevo (Hail, Sarajevo), unambiguously positions art as part of the enlightenment tradition: in the face of culture’s oppressive quotidian normativity, art is seen as an agent for social change. Mozart’s spirited concertos, Vermeer’s cinematic depth, Flaubert’s unromantic prose, and the works of other historical figures are evoked alongside locales of violent siege and genocide during the Bosnian War. The film serially frames elements of a journalistic image showing carnage and armed forces in the former Yugoslavia. A steely portrait of two brutes is confronted by a shot of a clutched rifle, then a grainy detail of an ashen cigarette. Later, we see the faceless bodies of citizens lying against a slick, stony sidewalk. Godard cuts between such details before ultimately pivoting to an expanded frame, these disparate shots combine to form a total image. The collaging of these details, figured as breaks within a totalizing whole, underscores not only a central editing strategy in the filmmaker’s later work, but also his faith in film’s capacity to stir critical observation and knowledge production. If art is the exception to (mass) culture’s rule, how does such an “exception” become integrated, or create a new form of social ordering?

1. A version of this text was originally presented in May 2016 at the Whitney Museum of American Art, as part of its Independent Study Program’s year-end Critical Studies Symposium. With thanks to Ron Clark, and to Nora Alter for her support and critical feedback with the project.

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Contemporary film installations—not unlike film itself—can be seen as straddling concomitantly mass cultural and avant-garde projects, but their generally self-conscious approach toward a particularly embodied, affective visual engagement further complicates the moving image’s unstable history with dialectical thought. Often such productions take editing strategies founded on cutting and joining visual components and expand these approaches by augmenting the role of sound and lighting, along with employing sculpture and architecture to reorder visual signals and reconfigure spectatorship. In the 1930s, Walter Benjamin argued that cinema was an artistic mass form that sidestepped the rarefying forces produced by singular, original works of art. As art became reproducible and broadly representable to exhibition audiences across geographies, its aura waned. Today, there has been a reversal of this process.2 Indeed, the film installation’s deployment within the museum can be viewed as the institutional reintegration of aura. The moving image, when articulated through totalizing audiovisual environments, becomes both less mobile than previous plastic arts were in comparison to film, and also less accessible than today’s digital video formats, which users can readily stream thanks to mobile computing. The film installation also accommodates a subject Rosalind Krauss describes, in a different context, as being “in search not of affect but intensities, the subject who experiences fragmentation as euphoria, the subject whose field of experience is no longer history, but space itself.” 3 Though Krauss’s argument was made in reference to minimalism’s visual register (one of a bodily immediacy) operating within grandiloquent museum spaces, a similar affective response still applies. Thus bodies, space, and objects are here incorporated into the trajectory of the moving image—all within an institutional frame directed toward a public.

In her 2009 essay “Is a Museum a Factory?” Hito Steyerl addresses the shift of political cinema into the museum space, stressing that the white cube can be a site for contestation equal to the so-called reality outside it that political film attempts to reshape. She highlights a remark Godard made to a group of young artist filmmakers at Le Fresnoy-Studio working with film installations. Godard warned them against the inclusion of technical apparatuses accompanying the filmic frame, saying that the objects comprising their installations didn’t contribute to an explanation of reality and cautioned the pupils “not to be afraid of the real.” 4 Steyerl argues to invert Godard’s logic, proposing that the museum’s bourgeois interior, with its “blank horror and emptiness,” is also the “Real with a capital R.” 5 In her view, the real is both staged and produced by the valorized art object through a process of contesting and corroborating representation. For Godard, reality is located not only outside the filmic frame and the museum space, but also outside the site of cultural production. Indeed, the real we should not fear is beyond the camera, preceding representation. It is sited in the space of capture:

2. Erika Balsom, Exhibiting Cinema in Contemporary Art (Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press, 2013), 17.

3. Rosalind Krauss, “The Cultural Logic of the Late Capitalist Museum,” October 54 (Autumn 1990): 17.

4. Hito Steyerl, “Is a Museum a Factory?” e-flux journal 7 (June 2009), http://www.e-flux. com/journal/07/61390/is-amuseum-a-factory/. Steyerl translates this anecdote from a blog that has since been deleted but is available on

the Internet archives. See “Debrief de conversations avec Jean-Luc Godard,” Sans casser des briques blog (March 10, 2009), http://web.archive. org/web/20090622154655/ http://bbjt.wordpress. com/2009/03/10/debrief-de-

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conversations-avec-jean-lucgodard/. The post reflects on a scene from Alain Fleisher’s film Morceux de Conversations avec Jean-Luc Godard (2007).

5. Ibid.

war-torn Sarajevo, massacred Srebrenica, a street corner, the flick of a cigarette. In their work, Godard and Steyerl reveal fundamental differences in their conceptions of critique and image politics, which are elucidated both through these opposing concepts of reality and their attitudes toward the spectator as receiver of critique.

Je vous salue, Sarajevo was one of many short films that appeared in Godard’s notorious 2006 exhibition Voyage(s) en utopie, Jean-Luc Godard 1946–2006: à la recherché d’un theorem perdu (Travel(s) in utopia, Jean-Luc Godard 1946– 2006: In Search of a Lost Theorem), at the Centre Pompidou in Paris. The work looped on a tiny iPod screen placed within a shabby maquette, which detailed one of Godard’s original proposals for the exhibition. Voyage(s) en utopie was arranged as a three-room installation of films and objects in varying states of destruction, but its manifestation—and evolution—inhabited public consciousness well before its institutional debut. Prior to its mounting, a public narrative had already unfolded between the filmmaker and his partnering institution, which accounted for impossibly ambitious programming plans, artistic disagreements, depleted $1M budgets, sixmonth delays, and the firing of the exhibition’s curator. It is likely that the destructive conflict was actively engineered by Godard as a kind of crisis that would nourish his artistic output while congealing a metanarrative of the myopic institution curtailing his artistic agency.6 In Hito Steyerl’s 2015 film installation Factory of the Sun, a massive projection screen enclosed in a slick metal truss system peers down upon its viewers.7 The display construction is configured diagonally to the room’s enclosing architecture, which, with its darkened interior, connects to traditional variations of screening film. However, Steyerl’s installation is less a black box than a framework for representing immersive new worlds. The viewing space, gridded by cyan LED strips, configures itself as an allegorical motion capture studio (in the spirit of Star Trek’s holodecks) wherein the agency of bodily movement is recorded and transmitted to generate renderings of environments and political scenarios. Yulia, one of the film’s protagonists, narrates that Factory of the Sun is a dystopic video game in which users begin as forced laborers confined to the motion capture studio, where every movement is captured and converted to sunshine. Her disembodied, robotic voice speaks over whirling, gleaming metallic 3-D rendered text that reads: THIS IS NOT A GAME—THIS IS REALITY. For Steyerl, reality is deployed primarily through mediation: a world of images and avatars, one that is introduced by a loading progress bar. It is comprehended and disputed through media, within digital realms of combat and scoring, all of which shape the construction of human desire and perception. And it 6. Daniel Fairfax, “Montage(s) of Disaster: Voyage(s) en utopie

by Jean-Luc Godard,” Cinema Journal 54.2 (Winter 2015): 31.

7. Factory of the Sun was initially commissioned for the Venice Biennale’s German Pavilion, in 2015. It was exhibited at the Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles, in 2016.

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Voyage(s) en utopie, Jean-Luc Godard 1946–2006. Installation view, Centre Pompidou, Paris, May 11– August 14, 2006. Image courtesy of Centre Pompidou, Mnam/Cci-Bibliotheque Kandinsky, JP Planchet.

Hito Steyerl, Factory of the Sun, 2015. Installation view, Venice Biennale, German Pavilion, May 9– November 22, 2015. Courtesy of the artist and Andrew Kreps Gallery, New York. Photo: Manuel Reinartz.

is precisely through encountering such an immense, complex rendering of artifice that one can accord the historically privileged status of “reality” to a space of otherwise representation. The real of the viewer is thus subordinate to this melodrama, positioned as a conduit that finds its entry sited in the installation/capture studio.8 All of this aligns with Steyerl’s elaboration of “proxy politics,” her position that the political unfolds today between avatars, bots, or shadowy organizations that stand in for people or groups as agents.9 Agency, in the case of Factory of the Sun, is manifest as the data transmitted and ultimately rendered by one’s recorded movements within the scenarios circumscribed by the namesake video game. The film’s ending is hacked and interrupted by a typewritten “Bot manifesto,” calling for resistance to “total capture,” and that “all politics are proxy politics.” Today, with remotely operated drone warfare commonplace, it’s not difficult to imagine Steyerl’s argument concretely applied. But if this is indeed the case, how within the realm of the proxy do we account for human death—the kind that can’t be re-spawned in the form of new avatars? Where does one locate the suffering inflicted by miscalculated drone fire, or any form of political violence? The norm given to Factory of the Sun circumscribes reality to a complex array of renderings, indicators, and signs, wherein any notion of an “outside”—a break from mediation—is situated within the very installation space that, as a locus of encampment, serves to produces these signals. Norms, as Judith Butler observes, are “enacted through visual and narrative frames” that in their formation imply a level of decisive exclusion.10 This polarity begs for us to examine not only that which is seen and unseen, marked and unmarked but also that which vacillates between these frames’ borders. In Steyerl’s case, the dialectic between the frame and its outside is transformed into a synaptic link. The installation is mimetically subservient to the narrative of the filmic frame; in effect, the frame eclipses the installation. To recall Butler, “The image, which is supposed to deliver reality, in fact withdraws reality from perception.” 11 Pressuring this, one could argue further that the museum space, spectacularly fashioned as a motion capture studio and inclusive of a film riddled with metanarratives, registers itself as a kind of image.12 And within this image, the representation of space (that of the viewer) is formulated according to the narratives playing out on the screen— a representation of the represented.

8. Subplots in the film reference a fictive scenario in which Deutsche Bank uses a drone to kill a protestor. Although a critique of the financial institution, Steyerl’s narrative had no effect on the German Pavilion’s funding, of which Deutsche Bank ceased being the main sponsor in 2008.

Deutsche Bank is Germany’s largest lender; on July 16, 2015, the artists presented in the

German Pavilion hung a Greek flag emblazoned “GERMONEY” over the building’s entrance, in protest of the German government’s insistence on imposing austerity measures on Greece.

9. Hito Steyerl, “Proxy Politics: Signal and Noise,” e-flux Journal 60 (December 2014).

10. Judith Butler, Frames of War: When Is Life Grievable?

(London: Verso Books, 2009), 75.

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11. Ibid.

12. David Joselit discusses this notion of “matter representing itself as image” at length, in response to a quote by Pierre Huyghe and the artist’s contribution to dOCUMENTA (13). See David Joselit, “Against Representation,” Texte zur Kunst 95 (September 2014): 92–103.

If Steyerl’s deployment of “reality” is toward a collapse of the real with the images and representational structures that powerfully mediate our understandings of it—a process within which there appears no outside text—one could think of Godard’s strategy as a collision between film and the real, a negotiation between representations of reality and the reality of representation. In Voyage(s) en utopie, one saw a glaring difference in film’s very treatment: it was nearly everywhere across monitors and handheld devices, and yet made feeble in stature and diffused across a number of historical practices and periods. For Godard, if the moving image was meant to break through the real, here the artist seemed to position the real itself as a victim of violent montage in the museum, with film acting as a museum prop at its side. AV equipment climbed up and around walls of uneven sheetrock, meandering in jumbled circuits. Dense foliage from houseplants in temporary pots crowded together, inhabiting the second room; in the exhibition’s final chamber, Godard’s life size mock-up of a blandly habitable contemporary domestic space appeared to be deliberately as forgettable in the museum space as it is ubiquitous outside of it. A slick HD monitor awkwardly wallowed as yet another horizontal surface in the kitchen corner as it played clips of pornography. Across the room, another monitor rested upright—aloof and alert, at the head of an impoverished double bed—and screened Ridley Scott’s 2001 big-budget Black Hawk Down. John Kelsey writes, “Godard travesties aesthetic strategies that no longer produce images of the world, that do nothing but blindly reproduce the sameness of museums or bedrooms (and the subjectivities that inhabit them).” 13 If capitalism occurs at its most functional on the day-to-day level of the real, Godard stresses this force by presenting all of these quotidian objects together; in their sameness they represent the conditioning of desire (sexual, domestic, and affective) into something readymade. Butler’s emphasis on framing and its “outside” are pertinent, as here Godard gestures as if to frame that which is typically too banal to be captured (the quotidian norm) all the while leaving it in ruins. Reality appeared to percolate everywhere in Voyage(s) en utopie, itself an amalgam of many parts belonging outside the museum, shown as barely functional or visually exhausted. Any façade of completion or polish was either overtly avoided or undone across the installation. On institutional signage, marks from a Sharpie pen slashed the stated “technical and financial differences” that rendered Godard’s original proposal impossible; only one stated difference remained unblemished: the “artistic.” Holes were smashed between the rooms of “Yesterday” and “The Day Before Yesterday.” A model train, surrounded by wooden fence posts, circled through the openings. On the train’s tracks was adhered a quote

by Sartre: “A dialectical thought is first of all, in the same movement, the examination of a reality in terms of it being the part of a whole, in terms of it negating this whole, in terms of the whole containing it, conditioning it and negating it.” 14 Sartre’s tripartite dynamic is operative here in the way

13. John Kelsey, “Double Exposure: James Quandt and John Kelsey on JeanLuc Godard at The Centre Pompidou,” Artforum (September 2006), 397.

14. Jean-Paul Sartre, Situations (Paris: Gallimard, 1972), 76.

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Voyage(s) en utopie, Jean-Luc Godard 1946–2006. Installation view, Centre Pompidou, Paris, May 11– August 14, 2006. Image courtesy of Centre Pompidou, Mnam/Cci-Bibliotheque Kandinsky, JP Planchet.

Voyage(s) en utopie, Jean-Luc Godard 1946–2006. Installation view, Centre Pompidou, Paris, May 11– August 14, 2006. Image courtesy of Centre Pompidou, Mnam/Cci-Bibliotheque Kandinsky, JP Planchet.

Godard treats the objects installed in the museum space. Steyerl made an apt characterization by calling the museum’s “reality” one of “blank horror and emptiness.” If anything, Godard appears to take this schema as a point of departure. But there is no capital R in this space of the real—all that is capitalized (and capitalist) is, to recall Sartre: retreated, worked through, and negated.

A viewer’s actions, or activity, are often decisive traits of film installations, and again, between these two artists, we see their configuration of spectatorial activity in radical opposition. Viewers of Factory of the Sun assume the position of more or less traditional spectators of cinema. Reclining white lawn chairs are bestrewn across the installation’s motion capture chamber, and individuals can lean supine to behold the immense radiance of the work’s broad projection screen. During a recent conversation at the Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles, Steyerl remarked about how the German Pavilion’s fascist architecture represented to her an “almost churchlike structure to inspire awe, to overwhelm people,” and that this process of feeling overwhelmed was something she desired to produce within the context of the information age.15 Is the process of being overwhelmed necessarily an indicator of passivity or of mediation? Factory of the Sun enacts the pavilion’s historically totalizing architecture to produce a kind of contemporary media fascism, one that references a condition totally enveloped by technical apparatus to the extent that what is recognized as artifice might as well be called “reality,” given its lived effects. In comments on the “myth of activity” for spectators of contemporary film installations, Erika Balsom asserts how the binary notion of the passive cinema spectator and the active gallery visitor is rooted in a tenuous conflation of physical stasis with “regressive mystification” and physical ambulation with criticality.16 Any strict determinism between an exhibition’s architecture and the spectator’s criticality precludes an evaluation of the gallery space’s ideological determinations. And, considering how discourses concerning power have shifted from locating centralized nodes to elucidating flexible, broadened networks of control, the very acts of circulation and participation are “by no means activities of resistance, but in fact precisely what is demanded of us in the experience economy.” 17 Indeed, though spectators in Factory of the Sun are configured to static viewer positions, their passivity has less to do with their physical orientation than the thematic and ideological environment enclosing them. By employing sundeck chairs, Steyerl’s proclivity toward kitsch becomes a kind of sculptural pun, whereby viewers are invited to perform the act of relaxation under the screen’s radiating white light, while simultaneously flatly gesturing to a rephrased Donna Haraway quote heralded during the film’s opening sequence: “Our machines are made of pure sunlight.” 18 Can relaxation be prescribed? What interest might Steyerl’s project have in maintaining a passive crowd?

15. Hito Steyerl and Lanka Tattersall in conversation, “What is Contemporary?” Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles, February 21, 2016.

16. Balsom, Exhibiting Cinema in Contemporary Art, 51.

17. Ibid.

18. Donna Haraway, Simians, Cyborgs, and Women: The Reinvention of Nature (New York: Routledge, 1991), 153. In her Cyborg Manifesto, Haraway refers to the signals and

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electromagnetic waves that transmit information, exclaiming, “Our best machines are made of sunshine; they are all light and clean because they are nothing but signals…”

Steyerl’s writings also draw allusions to Jacques Rancière, whose conception of the spectator as group raises concerns similar to Steyerl’s own work.

The narrative in Factory of the Sun allegorizes the audience as a group of laborers, which parallels Steyerl’s position that cinematic politics today produces a crowd rather than educates it. Such post-representational politics “replace the gaze of the bourgeois sovereign spectator of the white cube with the incomplete, obscured, fractured, and overwhelmed vision of the spectator-as-laborer.” 19 For Steyerl, the gaze of this multitude is distinctly not collective but rather “distracted and singular.” 20 Rancière positions the spectator as an individual entity amidst a group that is specifically not a community but rather a kind of mosaic. The power of this group is not by a linked collectivity but rather an amassing of individual perceptions.21 Such an assessment is directly compatible with a work such as Factory of the Sun, wherein the spectator is identified as the participant of a metaphorical single-player video game. But what does individual translation and perception matter within the auspices of such a totalizing sensorial apparatus, the precise purpose of which is to produce affect? Steyerl’s spectator occupies a realm within which the gap between performers on the stage and spectators in theater—between overwhelming spectacle and passive consumer—are rejected. The body in the reclining sun chair is leveled with the role-playing avatar projected on the screen, all of which perform under the guidelines set out in the film’s narrative.

Visitors ambulating through Godard’s Voyage(s) en utopie faced a qualitative difference in relation to film and its presentation. Along with being able to move through multiple arrangements across tangible space, spectators encountered film through dozens of gleaming backlit displays. The vast selection of clips on view were made possible by the fact that such moving images were presented on screens suited for the individual consumer.

Seven films by Godard, some with his longtime collaborator Anne-Marie Miéville, were sequenced on portable-sized LCD panels that were visible through gaudy frames or holes in sheetrock. Godard’s detailed maquettes teetered nearby in piles, decorated with dollhouse-like furniture, printed clippings of paintings, and mobile phones screening short films. These intricate, diminutive dioramas, along with the compact wall-mounted LCD displays, often precluded viewership to a singular body. If Steyerl places the spectator within a hazy collective of individuals linked through experience, Godard here rejects such a conceptual pairing, stressing how display technology and hegemonic ideology have produced alienated individuals, beholding and consuming images in isolation. Notably, he stresses this formulation having worked through various historical iterations of spectatorship accompanying cinema’s display, from the projector and black box to the TV set and now the mobile computer.

19. Steyerl, “Is a Museum a Factory?”

20. Ibid.

21. Jacques Rancière, The Emancipated Spectator (New York/London: Verso Books, 2009), 19.

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Hito Steyerl, Factory of the Sun, 2015. Video stills. Single channel high definition video, environment, luminescent LE grid, beach chairs. 23 minutes. Image CC 4.0 Hito Steyerl. Courtesy of the artist and Andrew Kreps Gallery, New York.

Godard’s installation further troubles spectatorship by rejecting the museum’s direct relation to its audience. The institution’s status as seamless host, as a site of production for historical truth and cultural value, was ruptured by signage informing visitors the installation is one of compromise and conflict—a collaboration brought to its knees by “artistic, technical, and financial difficulties,” the latter two factors being crossed out by Godard’s acrid permanent marker. This particular notice reappeared elsewhere in the halls of the installation, along with the artist’s corrective ink. Such intervening marks engaged a kind of piercing rhythm to the work, as the spectator saw as much the arrangement of film, digital displays, and tawdry, mundane groupings as their defacement, rearrangement, and destruction. The marker’s inscription, a kind of camera-sharpie along the lines of Alexandre Astruc, amended written tenses, it circumscribed visitor movement and knowledge, and to a broader extent served as synecdoche for Godard’s critical voice—one that is punny, intervening, and often establishes itself as a possessor of truth in the face of institutional power.22 In exercising his critical position, Godard insists on showing his audience how “things are not as they seem to be.” Has this clear-eyed, critical view of the system—sited within the museum—become an element of the system itself? 23 To what extent does Godard’s tirelessly corrective mark, his displacement of film and television across myriad exiguous sites of viewing, and his violent collaging of museum space and quotidian objects—in other words, his valorized position of the critic—set up a rhetorical contradiction that produces the spectator as disenlightened and lacking the artist’s valuable knowledge, which itself is given a kind of currency? And how does my own position as critic accept and extend such a dynamic?

Reintroducing Godard’s commentary in Je vous salue, Sarajevo delineates a stark contrast between it and Steyerl’s corresponding model of spectatorship and politics. By figuring art as an exception to the rule of mass culture, Godard holds out belief that art’s capability for social transformation is as ontologically inherent as it is continually threatened. By reshaping such a belief as a false offer corresponding to its own hegemonic structure, Steyerl’s project undercuts the potential for dialectical rupture, in turn reconfiguring critique itself as totality. While a case against the self-superior enlightened critic may be an attractive one, it’s uncertain how such a position renders the dynamics of knowledge production as anything but a standstill. To the extent that Godard and Steyerl each accommodate critique for their own ends, it is clear that such political modes point toward radically dissimilar understandings of reality. For Steyerl, to construct a representation of such immense and complex artifice, and to call it reality, gives a clearer, more precise glimpse of the real. In turn, reality is produced not only in the realm of the museum, but specifically in the space of the film studio, where

22. Alexandre Astruc, “The Birth of a New Avant-Garde: La Camera-Stylo,” in The New Wave, ed. Peter Graham (New York: Doubleday, 1968), 22.

23. Jacques Rancière, The Emancipated Spectator (New York/London: Verso Books, 2009), 37.

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Hito Steyerl, Factory of the Sun, 2015. Installation view, Venice Biennale, German Pavilion, May 9– November 22, 2015. Courtesy of the artist and Andrew Kreps Gallery, New York. Photo: Manuel Reinartz.

Voyage(s) en utopie, Jean-Luc Godard 1946–2006. Installation view, Centre Pompidou, Paris, May 11– August 14, 2006. Image courtesy of Centre Pompidou, Mnam/Cci-Bibliotheque Kandinsky, JP Planchet.

movements are captured and rendered. Such a space of capture, where the camera records, is also where Godard locates the real, but in his case this environment is distinctly outside the studio or the museum. For him, these latter spaces are where representations of reality are violently clipped, stilled, countered, and reassembled into an allegory of social transformation. Given these differences, where do we locate art as an exception to reality? Is this so-called real any different from the one that we encounter in the museum? If the ultimate goal of representation is to reshape the real, our challenge vis Ă vis reality is less to confront a fear of it and more to reposition our distance from and access to it.

Nicolas Linnert is a critic and art historian based in New York.

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Cora Gilroy-Ware

Review: Cindy Sherman: Imitation of Life

Melting Beauty

The Broad, Los Angeles June 11–October 2, 2016

Kitty Fisher strove to live up to her portraits. Between 1759 and 1766 she sat at least four times for Joshua Reynolds, London’s celebrated painter whose studio teemed with flattering images of England’s elite. Kitty was no pampered baroness but rather a courtesan with a knack for fame secured by beauty. It was her beauty that drew the powerful clientele, the wealthy men whose patronage made her an appropriate subject for the canvas. But Kitty’s real-life flesh could not rival the skin the artist gave her. In each of her portraits, she has an impossibly creamy complexion, created with an eccentric blend of pigment, wax, egg, oils, and binding mediums. In order to match her likeness, Kitty coated herself in layers of powder. In 1767, at the age of 26, she died of lead poisoning, one of several “victims of cosmetics” claimed by the eighteenth century.1 Reynolds did not limit this creamy effect to Kitty Fisher alone, nor even to female flesh. He would often proclaim that every “picture ought to have a richness in its texture, as if the colours had been composed of cream or cheese.” 2 In the 1920s, French art critic Élie Faure noticed this tendency, putting it down to the British painter’s blind reverence for a certain Dutch master: “Reynolds was not able to see in Rembrandt, whom he pillages… anything but a creamy and triturated paste.” 3 In fact, Reynolds gleaned this technique not from Rembrandt but from William Gandy, a little-known portraitist from the painter’s native Devonshire whose works he had seen as a child. When not ravaged by over-zealous cleaning or irreversible decay, the rich, fatty surfaces of Reynolds’s figures remain striking.

One of Cindy Sherman’s latest efforts—a group of sisters—contains skin as creamy as a Reynolds portrait. At once glowing and opaque, four visages cluster against a hazy garden backdrop, each wearing round-lens spectacles and hair in soft pin curls. The group is suffused with an air of primness in spite of the sisters’ makeup: eyebrows arched, cheeks rouged and conspicuously smooth, lips lined in maroon. Theirs is a flesh wholly different from beauty advertisements, in which the face is seemingly unmasked:

1. Anthony Synnott, “A Sociology of Beauty and the Face,” in Digging into Popular Culture: Theories and Methodologies in Archaeology, Anthropology and Other Fields,

Ray B. Browne and Pat Browne, eds. (Bowling Green, OH: Bowling Green State University Press, 1991), 150.

2. James Northcote, Memoirs of Sir Joshua Reynolds, Knt.

(London: Henry Colburn, 1813), 16.

3. Élie Faure, History of Art: Modern Art (New York and London: Harper & Brothers, 1924), 264.

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Cindy Sherman, Untitled #577, 2016. Dye sublimation metal print, 48 ⅛ × 52 ½ inches. Courtesy of the artist and Metro Pictures, New York.

Joshua Reynolds, Three Ladies Adorning a Term of Hymen, 1773. Oil paint on canvas, 92 × 114 inches. ©Tate, London 2016.

an illusion of the “pure” and “natural.” Instead it is as if Sherman reached for the same eccentric blend Reynolds used to flatter his sitters, consciously foregrounding the creamy quality it guaranteed. The photograph is the first one encountered in the installation of Imitation of Life, a special exhibition at The Broad that charts Sherman’s over four-decades-long career. It forms part of a series made over the past two years, the rest of which emerge around the corner and usher the visitor into the space.

In her acclaimed series History Portraits (1988–90), Sherman directly channelled the eighteenth century. By contrast, the affinity between her new photographs and historic portraiture is accidental. Reynolds’s Three Ladies Adorning a Term of Hymen (1773), a large portrait of the Irish Montgomery sisters, centers on essentially the same scene as Sherman’s fiction: a group of almost identical women gazing out in various directions, their emphatically flushed, creamy skin enhanced by soft-focus flowers against an ice blue sky. Sherman’s sisters are older, however, and emit a confidence that comes with age. While the Montgomery girls perform for the viewer, fashioning roses—symbols of youth and virginity—into a long festoon, Sherman’s group confronts us head-on. The sister at the apex stares straight into our eyes with a yearning expression that closes the gap between our world and theirs, while the more authoritative sister at the helm reins in all stray emotion with her set jaw and thinner smile punctuated by the black pussy bow around her neck.

Long reticent to join the “critical skirmish” surrounding her work, Sherman has been vocal on the relationship between the works in this new series and the wider representation of the “aging” female body.4 In a recent interview following the inaugural display of these photographs at New York’s Metro Pictures gallery, she confessed to the biographical impulse behind them: “I, as an older woman, am struggling with the idea of being an older woman.” 5 She calls the photographs “the most sincere things I have ever done,” and admits that they stem from a desire to create complex images of women well beyond their “middle years,” women deemed “past their prime” by the mainstream media. She cites Mary Beard, the scholar of ancient Rome, for her fearless commitment to championing the visibility of older women on screen. Interviewer Blake Gopnik goes as far as to suggest that Sherman is enacting “a kind of revenge on a culture that wills women to slowly disappear as they age.” The other works in the series depict lone figures—women “of a certain age”—set against similar hazy, digitized backdrops. They are styled like typical movie stars circa 1960, female actors who blossomed in a bygone era which only they have not yet relinquished. As such they do not conjure the same painterly mood as the four sisters, though their skin is equally evocative of dairy.

4. Morgan Falconer, “Cindy Sherman, London,” The Burlington Magazine for Connoisseurs 145 (2003), 596.

5. Blake Gopnik, “Cindy Sherman Takes on Aging (Her

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Own),” The New York Times, April 21, 2016, http://www. nytimes.com/2016/04/24/arts/ design/cindy-sherman-takeson-aging-her-own.html.

Sherman’s insistence on sincerity with regard to the representation of older women threatens to undermine her decision to conceal skin with makeup, to blur the realities of a mature face with paint. But the painted flesh reminds us that these images are not intended to tell the truth of raw nature nor callously deceive. They are fantasies, or “fancy pictures,” a term coined to describe Reynolds’s portraits of imaginary people, usually female figures, that he produced alongside his portraits of actual individuals. Featuring doe-eyed personifications—Innocence, for example—placed within natural landscapes, fancy pictures set a precedent for the kind of sentimentally ideal painting popular among an emergent industrialist class. Such works were what film director Douglas Sirk had in mind when, in 1979, he observed, “In the nineteenth century, you had bourgeois art without politics, an almost frozen idea of what beauty is.” 6 Sirk is, of course, the director of Imitation of Life, the 1959 film that lends its title to The Broad’s exhibition.

In the same interview, Sirk reflects upon the fact that with that film and others he was “trying to negate beauty, and negate art which was a synonym for beauty.” 7 Wandering through the rooms of the Broad, one gets an immediate sense that for decades Sherman too has made this a central tenet of her work. There is little conventional beauty on display. Rather, with each immaculately presented photograph, beauty confounds our expectations with its haunting absence. In a work from 1984, a large prosthetic nose conquers a sliver of face emerging from behind a curtain of long dark hair. Lit from behind, the image must be looked at closely to notice that the fake nose is bleeding. In another, from 1993, a figure in a bottle-blonde wig sits with her legs spread defiantly, her cheap, russet stockings peeling down her thigh as she clutches three plastic calla lilies poised toward her pubic area. Like the Montgomery sisters’ festoon of roses, these flowers are symbols of youth and virginity. Any such niceties, however, are dissolved by the figure’s brazen perversion of ideal femininity: her face, her pose, her carpet of false body hair. And as Sirk suggests, the purging of beauty from art tends to be a political intervention. Now, more than ever—seen in the light of a visual culture couched in celebrity, advertising, pornography, and social media—it has become impossible to deny the deeply political nature of Sherman’s art.

In the catalog for the exhibition, guest curator Philipp Kaiser recalls that, in the early 1980s, feminist artist and theorist Martha Rosler expressed concern over Sherman’s Centerfolds series (1981, also on display at the Broad), in which Sherman engages with a variety of imagery tainted by its heterosexist objectification of the female body.8 This point is easily countered, points out Kaiser, by the fact that Sherman’s works “are always recognized as fakes…and therefore by no means verge into pure imitation.” But this is not enough of an explanation as to why and how the images avoid the

6. Gary Morris and Michael Stern, “‘An Unhappy Happy End’: Douglas Sirk,” Action: Interviews with Directors from Classical Hollywood to Contemporary Iran, Gary Morris, ed. (London: Anthem Press, 2009), 21.

7. Ibid.

8. Philipp Kaiser, “Imitations of Life: Appropriation, the Cinematic Impulse, and Beyond,” in Cindy Sherman: Imitation of Life, Philipp Kaiser, Sofia Coppola, and Joanne Heyler, eds. (Munich, London, New York: DelMonico Books, 2016), 12.

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Cindy Sherman, Untitled #139, 1984. Chromogenic color print, 72 × 48½ inches. Courtesy of the artist and Metro Pictures, New York.

Cindy Sherman, Untitled #276, 1993. Chromogenic color print, 80 ½ × 61 inches. Courtesy of the artist and Metro Pictures, New York.

Cindy Sherman, Untitled #193, 1989. Chromogenic color print, 54½ × 48 inches. Courtesy of the artist and Metro Pictures, New York.

trappings of what they appropriate. The point is a simple one but worth reiterating: a studied, glaring lack of conventional beauty in the photographs secures their revolutionary edge. What is more, the later series Society Portraits (2008)—incarnations of austere patronesses whose accumulated wealth radiates from within—do “verge into pure imitation.” They are meticulous mimicries—not simulacra but studies from life, fully worked up in color. Like Reynolds’s best portraits, they showcase the elusive bodies of elite women, rendering them allegories of a guarded high culture. And yet the Society Portraits are more coldly realistic than any Reynolds painting.

They do not flatter. Skin is skin, not cream.

Kaiser is correct in that most of Sherman’s productions are more obviously constructed and that this adds to their autonomy. In conversation with director Sofia Coppola, the artist expressed her disdain for perfectly assembled period costumes.9 When she began working on the most recent series, the artist experimented with rented clothing and carefully researched hairstyles, but the resulting images looked too authentic, in her words, “too Downton Abbey.” Since the beginning of her career, her process has been founded on the magic brought forth from “cobbling something together that is not quite exact.” 10 By the time one arrives at the Broad’s installation of the History Portraits, it is unsettling how little they resemble their sources. Sherman’s reconstruction of Madame de Pompadour looks nothing like the frothy odes to the same sitter by François Boucher, the French painter whose studio Reynolds once visited in Paris. Sherman does capture the perfumed orientalism and pastel tones of rococo painting, a color palette tied to the invention of Prussian Blue earlier on in the eighteenth century. But the postmodern Madame is tense and world-weary, unsure of her survival in the world whose gaze she meets. Artificial light bounces off her plastic décolletage, announcing the presence of the camera. All the excessive frills and frivolity that characterize ancien régime aesthetics have been reduced to a stream of thrift store lace clinched by a single orange bow. There is nothing courtly about the pale green drapes that immerse her, not a shred of gallantry in the oversized foot and knitting needles that intrude on the foreground. Like the other History Portraits, this assemblage exploits the wariness toward history expressed by practitioners of avant-garde culture.

From a battered odalisque to a blasé monk, the portrayed appear dusty, neglected, withdrawn; the pictorial space is always cluttered and claustrophobic. In this series, lace cravats collide with polyester leggings; riding boots with plastic pearls and sheaves of corn.

9. Sofia Coppola and Cindy Sherman, “A Whole Theater: Sofia Coppola and Cindy Sherman in Conversation,” in Cindy Sherman: Imitation of Life, 146.

10. Ibid.

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Cindy Sherman, Untitled #397, 2000. Chromogenic color print, 36 × 24 inches. Courtesy of the artist and Metro Pictures, New York.

Yet Sherman’s work remains steeped in tradition, and one must keep her early training as a painter in mind. The Broad’s exhibition underscores how little the artist has adhered to avant-garde values, particularly the myths of formal innovation that have inevitably come to embrace her work and condition its reception. Her approach is the opposite of what historian Jonah Siegel has called “a modernist sensibility at war with tradition.” 11 Sherman is at peace with tradition; it is tradition that provides her with a departure point, an unhewn block to break down and reassemble into countless disruptive visions. In 1939, Clement Greenberg defined the antithesis of the avant-garde—kitsch—as an outcrop of the classical: the final destination of ideal beauty after its commodification and debasement.12 Sherman’s careerlong fixation on the quintessentially kitsch fruits of mainstream American culture, cinema in particular, highlights the less obvious classicism lying warped beneath the surface of her oeuvre.

Toward the end of the exhibition, a series of relatively small-scale works from 2000 are lined up on the wall like candidates for a job interview. One of the most striking is a portrait of a platinum blonde woman wearing a royal blue and magenta track jacket. Crowned in a tiara, she has the gaze of a former beauty queen, a woman struggling to match the idealized images that inform her own appearance. Although her skin is a bleached terracotta rather than toxic lead white, she is the real Kitty Fisher, the courtesan, had she lived to 26. She is “an almost frozen idea of what beauty is” left to melt under the lights.

Cora Gilroy-Ware is a scholar and artist currently based at the Institute for Advanced Studies, University College London. She has held fellowships in Naples, New Haven and Los Angeles and curated exhibitions at Tate Britain and the Huntington European Art Gallery.

11. Jonah Siegel, Desire and Excess: The Nineteenth Century Culture of Art (Princeton, NJ, and Oxford, England: Princeton University Press, 2000), 8.

12. Clement Greenberg, “The Avant-Garde and the Kitsch,” in Kitsch: An Anthology of Bad Taste, Gillo Dorfles, ed. (Milan, Italy: Gabriele Mazzotta, 1968), 116–26.

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Patricia Fernรกndez Memory Is In Progress: The Heart

Patricia Fernรกndez (b. 1980 in Burgos, Spain; lives and works in Los Angeles) studied at Saint Martins College of Art; University of California, Los Angeles; and received an MFA from California Institute of the Arts (2010). Fernรกndez uses personal narrative, memory, omission, and abstraction to transmit histories and build connection between people and places. She works primarily with painting and archives in order to investigate the inaccuracy of inherited memories and the subjectivity of personal experience. She has exhibited her work at Centro de Arte Caja de Burgos, Spain; LA><ART, Los Angeles; Clifton Benevento, New York; David Petersen Gallery, Minneapolis; Commonwealth and Council, Los Angeles; Los Angeles Contemporary Archive (LACA); and the Hammer Museum in Made in LA 2012.

There are no miracles anymore, just coincidences, she tells me. Yet my grandmother does not seem convinced of this. Last week the newspaper reported a heart was found preserved in a mass grave near her village in the mountain pass of La Pedraja.

The heart remains unidentified but my grandmother believes it belongs to her uncle Sotero. One evening in September of 1936, in the beginning of the Spanish Civil War, Sotero was taken out on a paseillo 1 and never seen again. Along with the single heart, 45 brains were found preserved among the bones. It seems poignant that Francisco Franco, who attempted to cleanse society of the ideas of the Left, was not able to destroy the site or the source of thoughtâ&#x20AC;&#x201D;neither the mind nor the heart.

1. A walk, or paseo, whereby a Falangist, or fascist, would come knocking at your door late at night and take you for a walk to his truck, drive you to a clandestine location in the countryside, and, inevitably, you would be shot to death.

2. After the January elections were won by the Leftist Popular Front and the Second Republic was established, a series of incidents and political assassinations, workersâ&#x20AC;&#x2122; strikes, and civil unrest in conjunction with the rise of the minority group Falange led to a military coup that took place on July 18, 1936.

The Spanish Civil War began in the summer of 1936 with a military coup led by Franco.2 In the months that followed, a series of sweeping mass executions took place under the falangistas,3 Francoâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s forces. The paseillos, the sacas,4 and the limpieza5 that terrorized the towns and villages of rural Spain made up much of the violence, collectively known as the White Terror. After general sweeps and mass incarceration of those opposed to the Falange, they conducted a systematic cleansing of prisons.

The Spanish Civil War lasted three years; its inhumane violence was the subject of Picasso’s Guernica (1939), and the idealism and romance of fighting for a democratic republic inspired people all over the world to join the International Brigades in the fight against fascism. The initial sweeps carried out by the Fascists resulted in approximately 140,000 disappeared and unidentified bodies in mass graves. If we include those who died later—by Franco’s aerial bombings, on the front, and at enforced labor camps—the number goes up to at least 500,000.6 At the end of the war, Franco’s forces identified and returned the bodies of their own dead to corresponding families. But those who were killed by the Fascists—because they had actual Leftist political affiliations or were somehow seen as threat to Fascism at the time—were left behind, their bodies forgotten in ditches, mass graves, and other unnamed locations. At the close of the Civil War, a Law of Political Responsibility was passed with the aim of punishing anyone who had supported the Left, or was impeding the spiritual rebuilding of a Franco’s Spain. This effectively extended the White Terror and maintained the fear and violence across Spain.

Franco’s dictatorship lasted until his natural death, on November 20, 1975. In 1977, the government passed a Pact of Forgetting that encouraged looking beyond the crimes of the war and establishing peace.7 The amnesia that flooded Spain in the years following this false amnesty law was like a white sheet covering up all of Spain’s dead bodies.

This is the Spain I was born into. The transition from a dictatorship to a democracy failed because the totalitarian forces in power were the ones who set up the new government, the supposed democratic state. The first judge in Spain to try to bring injustices to light and defend the people against the crimes of Franco became the first person in Spain to be judged for crimes against humanity.8 It is often said that with the death of the Fascist died antiFascism. Spain is a society of amnesia, of ghosts; it is the country with the highest number of mass graves in Europe.

The trauma of loss resulting from illegal detainment, forced disappearances, and executions committed under Franco are felt differently than the losses of those who overtly enlisted and died at the front. War is an unreasonable machine of death that takes advantage; it undeniably benefits some over others, says my grandmother. Sometimes it is a question of forgetting in order to survive.

This doesn’t mean that people have not been searching for their dead. Since Franco’s passing, people have been marching with shovels in hand to various sites where they believe they might find their family members. The retrieved bones are

3. Falangistas are followers of Franco’s Falangism ideology, generally known as Fascism.

Franco’s forces were the Nationalists and the Falangists.

4. Saca translates as “take out.”

Political prisoners, presumably under the impression that they were being freed, were let out of the jails in undisclosed locations, then shot in the back.

5. Limpieza refers to “cleansing,” including but not limited to political, social, ideological, and racial cleansing.

6. The Commissioner for Human Rights of the Council of Europe issued a report in March 2016 stating that there is no central database. Disappearances from July 1936 to December 1951 are counted as 114,226.

Numbers will continually fluctuate because “criminal investigation was blocked.”

“Missing persons and victims of enforced disappearance in Europe,” issue paper published by the Council of Europe Commissioner for Human Rights. https://wcd.coe.int/ViewDoc. jsp?p=&Ref=CommDH/IssuePap er(2016)1&Language=lanEnglish &direct=true.

7. The Pact of Forgetting is part of the Amnesty Law that shielded the perpetrators of crimes during Franco’s dictatorship. It was promulgated in order to create an easier transition into a democracy.

It avoids any reparations to the victims and wishes for the past to stay in the past. Today it is still being used as an argument as to why exhumations should not take place. This law actually violates International Human Rights Laws, and Franco’s White Terror has been declared by the United Nations as a crime against humanity.

8. After attempting to apply the Law of Historical Memory on several occasions, Judge Baltasar Garzón was expelled from his duties as judge in 2012.

9. Under article 21 of this law, the Spanish government is required to create an archive that collects public as well as private documents pertaining to the Civil War and the Franco Regime. These documents of political repression, including lists of those imprisoned, reprimanded, or shipped to concentration camps, link members of the current government to Franco and/or past crimes against humanity.

In 2011, exhumations supported by the government were halted.

distributed to the villages for symbolic inhumations; each village received the number of skulls corresponding to the number of people disappeared by the Falangists. In 2000, the first public exhumations of mass graves started taking place, initiated by the Association for Recuperation of Historic Memory (ARMH), which continues to work to repeal the Pact of Forgetting. It wasn’t until the Spanish Law of Historical Memory in 2007 that exhumations were supported by the government. But, as of late, the law is not being exercised because the right-wing party now in office fears the findings could be potentially incriminating to some of its members.9 A friend tells me I should see a psychoanalyst about my morbidity. It only makes sense, I tell him, because my grandmother witnessed her uncle being pulled out of her house in the middle of the night by Falangists. Since that evening when Sotero was taken, her mother and her aunt and her grandmother—all the women of her household—have cried and cried. Some time after the disappearance, her uncle Sotero’s watch was seen on the streets, worn by a Falangist. Probably the murderer, she says. At that time, my grandmother lived in Briviesca, a village close to Burgos, where I was born. It was a village with a never-ending procession of women wearing black for the men they had lost. To this day it is a place of many secrets, where the Falange and the Reds are still neighbors.

That night in September 1936, thirty-three men were taken from the village. They were put on a truck that was parked in the village square and driven away into the darkness of the mountains.

10. Saponification is the disturbance of molecular putrefaction whereby the fatty cells of the body do not decompose regularly and form a soap-like substance preserving the organs or tissue of a body.

Even after 75 years, there was only a mild odor of death emitted during the exhumation.

11. Fernando Serulla, et al., “Preserved brains from the Spanish Civil War mass grave (1936), La Pedraja 1, Burgos, Spain,” Science & Justice (2016), http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j. scijus.2016.08.001.

Some people say the heart and brains are a sign. It is a most welcome event, where fortune and chance allowed for things to come together in such a way. Maybe it’s revenge. Eighty years later the brains of the Reds, the Anarchists, and those with leftist ideas are preserved through a rare process of saponification.10 The forensic archeologist who pulled the brains out of the ground tells me these were returned to us, ghosts of the past. Even this scientist can’t help but utter the words—poetic justice. After all, it was an ideological war. He told me that for this process of saponification to occur, specific criteria had to have been met. Weather data for the fall of 1936 reports an unusual amount of rainfall and below freezing temperatures.11 The combination of the acid content and claylike dirt of the trench where the bodies were thrown, the linear arrangement of the murdered (no piling of bodies), the single clean shots to the skulls, the quick and violent loss of blood, the resulting hole created in the cranium that allowed the rainfall to enter the vessel-like bone structure, and the temperature of the water mixed in with the brains inhibited the bacteria that usually starts putrefaction and the natural process of death…

The brains recorded the trauma and torture before death, the nature of the crime. Because this exhumation site was not a military front, the murdered here can be officially considered disappeared and illegally detained. This mass grave of 104 bodies is a crime scene—no longer just a site of memory to be studied by historical associations or human rights activists.

This is a big step in the process of acknowledging Franco’s Fascist regime and violent past. These findings could finally be the beginning of building a case to be considered by Spanish Courts. But it is important to note that the exhumation of Pedraja took place in 2010. And it was not until August 26, 2016, that these findings were made public. Admittedly, volunteer forensic work and investigations take time. But I was told, It is probable that the director of the newspaper El País was on vacation when finally it got slipped into the paper.

My grandmother believes coincidences mean something, not dissimilar to miracles. Although I explain to her the conditions for the saponification of the brains, her mind goes only to the women crying for Sotero, his vanishing.

She tells me that when she was little she saw the sunset create a bold red beam in the sky, turning orange, carmine, crimson; and people believed that this signified the blood of the disappeared being shed in the plains, in that unknown place. The dead of the war. It was infinite. Immense. For 80 years there was nothing to indicate Sotero’s absence but a vision of a man in the past wearing his watch. Now, a heart appears. My grandmother’s 8-year-old self collides with the remains of the present. It seems to me it’s about time.

Liam Considine Triumph of the Banal: Merlin Carpenter’s DECADES and the Legacy of the Handmade Readymade

In Merlin Carpenter’s DECADES (2014), the graphic Warholesque visages of Kurt Cobain, Amy Winehouse, Debbie Harry, Al Pacino (as Tony Montana in Scarface), Audrey Hepburn, and Michael Caine were emblazoned across monochromatic fields of saturated color. Hung cheek by jowl across the walls of the gallery, these icons of pop cultural rebellion swapped the insipid ambience of a designer-decorated apartment from the 1990s or a hip Hollywood coffee shop on Melrose for the clinical white cube gallery space of Overduin & Co., on nearby Sunset Boulevard. Known for his market reflexivity, conceptual hijinks, and performative painting practice, Carpenter’s laconic array seemed to sit uneasily within a diverse body of work that has sought to displace value from discrete art objects onto conditions of production and reception. Critics, recognizing a genre of DIY sub-Warhols that lurk in “cafes, IKEA showrooms and medical waiting rooms,” found little beyond a cynical rejection of meaning in Carpenter’s subject matter and execution.1 However, the exhibition offered a twist to attentive viewers, who recognized that these seemingly vacant paintings were not silkscreen printed à la Warhol but were, in fact, hand painted by the artist.

Though the paintings in DECADES seemed devoid of meaning, they solicited a perceptual and historical double take: the handmade presentation of a readymade aesthetic evacuated all but a semblance of authenticity from the artist’s touch, while pointing beyond lifestyle appropriations of Pop imagery in recent decades to the ambiguous lineage of the handmade readymade image. Pop art merged hand and machine to stage the dialectic of art and the culture industry in the 1960s, an era in which artisanal painting signaled a vestigial humanism carried over from the preceding decades.2 Carpenter’s contemporary reassertion of hand painting undermined these associations to rid his work of subjective investment. At the same time, his purportedly meaningless subject matter paradoxically reprised a historical dialectic that his practice is otherwise designed to foreclose.

1. Olivian Cha, “Merlin Carpenter,” Flash Art 298 (October 2014), 100–101; see also http://www.artwritingdaily. com/2014/07/merlin-carpenter-at-overduin-co.html?m=1.

2. I draw on Theodore Adorno's description of “culture industry” as a mass-

media-driven implement of exchange and social control: "The cultural commodities of the industry are governed... by the principle of their realization as value, and not by their own specific content and harmonious formation...

[E]nlightenment, that is the

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progressive technical domination of nature, becomes mass deception and is turned into a means for fettering consciousness." Adorno, "Culture Industry Reconsidered," New German Critique 6 (Autumn 1975), 13, 18–19.

DECADES, installation view, Overduin & Co., Los Angeles June 8â&#x20AC;&#x201C;July 12, 2014. Courtesy of the artist and Overduin & Co., Los Angeles. Photo: Brian Forrest.

The idea of the handmade readymade emerged during the 1960s, in works that conflated commercial imagery with the trace effects of artisanal production. Evelyne Axell, Gérard Fromanger, Roy Lichtenstein, Sigmar Polke, James Rosenquist, Warhol, and others played the effects of massification— standardization, dematerialization, repetition, and dispersion—against their manual imprints and the attendant promises of originality. Though Pop art was often seen to evacuate aura from the work of art,3 Lichtenstein’s mimicry of Ben-Day dot printing, Warhol’s deliberate inclusion of slippages and manual mistakes in his photo-silkscreen works, and Rosenquist’s appropriation of his own commercial billboard painting technique are only the most well-known examples of a wide-ranging tendency. The term “handmade readymade” was first used to describe these hybrid works by Brian O’Doherty in an opprobrious review of Lichtenstein’s October 1963 exhibition at Castelli gallery, titled “Lichtenstein: Doubtful but Definite Triumph of the Banal.” O’Doherty described Lichtenstein’s art as a jejune extension of Duchampian nominalism in painting, complaining, “His banal work fulfills enough textbook criteria of what art should be that it calls the criteria into question.”4 In a passage that anticipates his 1976 anthology Inside the White Cube, O’Doherty wrote: When one looks at Mr. Lichtenstein’s paintings as handmade readymades, the problems are much more complex... It becomes art through a process that forces the critic outside art as such to become a sort of social critic. For unless one goes around with one’s eyes closed one cannot help but notice how art of no importance, such as Mr. Lichtenstein’s, is written about, talked about, sold, forced into social history and thus the history of taste, where it is next door to acceptance as art... Mr. Lichtenstein has produced paintings that carry no inherent scale of value, leaving value to be determined on how successfully they can be rationalized, tucked into society and placed in line for the future to assimilate as history, which it shows every sign of doing.5 O’Doherty's juxtapositions of “art as such” with social criticism, and the handmade with the mass produced, has proven useful for subsequent critics.

David Deitcher has argued that Pop art’s “originals that masqueraded as copies” held industrial and artisanal production in suspension at a moment when academic modernism was being promoted as a synthesis of art and design.6 Michael Lobel has suggested that Lichtenstein’s conflation of the handmade and the readymade marked “a struggle between two irreconcilable positions:

3. See, for instance, the ridicule that met Henry Geldzahler's insistence that Lichtenstein altered his comic book sources at MoMA’s famous December 1962 symposium on Pop art, in Arts Magazine 37.7 (April 1963), 44.

4. Brian O’Doherty, “Lichtenstein: Doubtful but Definite Triumph of the Banal,” New York Times, October 27, 1963.

5. Ibid.

6. David Deitcher, “Unsentimental Education: The Professionalization of the American Artist,” in Russell Ferguson, ed., Hand-Painted Pop: American Art in Transition 1955–62 (New York: Rizzoli International Publications, 1992), 112.

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Merlin Carpenter, Kurt Cobain, 2014. Acrylic on canvas, 60 Ă&#x2014; 60 inches. Courtesy of the artist and Overduin & Co., Los Angeles. Photo: Brian Forrest.

on the one side sits the idealism of…pure, unmediated vision, couched in the technological language of the sublime. On the other sits the belief in a perceiving subject whose imperfect corporeality denies access to such transcendence, yet may provide an imaginary space of safety set away from the machine’s erasure of subjectivity.” 7 The handmade readymade emerges from this discourse as a key to the complex ontology of the Pop image and the interpenetration of the avant-garde and culture industry at midcentury.

DECADES ’s lapidary title could be seen to signal the time lag between this originary moment, when the trace of the hand afforded an imaginary refuge for the creative subject, and Pop art’s subsequent descent into mass cultural cliché. In this negative dialectic of art and the culture industry, the hand collapses from a sign of authenticity to a disabused mark of complicity. This reflexive approach to painting as a means to undermine received notions of authorship stems from Carpenter’s experience working as an assistant to Martin Kippenberger in the storied Cologne art world of the 1980s and 1990s, where artworks functioned as metonyms for outsize personalities and painting was targeted as the fetish object of a hypertrophied market.

Kippenberger’s series Heavy Burschi (Heavy Guy) exemplifies the synthesis of creation and destruction, enchantment and debasement that pitted the artist’s celebrity persona against painterly effects. For a 1991 exhibition at the Kölnischer Kunstverein, Kippenberger had an assistant (Carpenter) make paintings from catalog reproductions of his work featuring commercial lettering and flattened Pop images of celebrity artists. Kippenberger deemed the results “too good” to exhibit, so he had them photographed and destroyed.

The remains were piled in a plywood dumpster in the center of the gallery, and the photographs were hung as substitutes. In a work inscribed with the words “Die Kunst ein Mensch zu sein” (Art Makes You a Man), Hans Namuth’s photograph of Jackson Pollock flinging paint is set against an inverted depiction of Kippenberger painting as a boy, summoning oedipal themes of predestination and self-destruction. Another work juxtaposed the visages of Warhol and Kippenberger with the text “Cool it, dig it, do it.” In these works, which were made with an opaque projector to flatten the source images, photography was the departure and end point, and the authenticity of painting was undermined. Heavy Burschi put the apparatus of Kippenberger’s practice on display as painting, photography, and the artist’s assistant were summoned and negated in a performed involution of artistic transmission.

“I couldn’t give Kippenberger my ideas fast enough,” Carpenter has written, “I needed his assistance to dispose of them.” 8 For his first exhibition at Reena Spaulings Fine Art, in New York, A Roaring RAMPAGE of Revenge (2005), Carpenter returned Kippenberger’s gesture and broadened it to appropriate his gallerists and ultimately his audience as assistants. Excerpting The

7. Michael Lobel, Image Duplicator: Roy Lichtenstein and the Emergence of Pop Art (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2002), 103.

8. Merlin Carpenter, “I Was an Assistant (to Kippenberger, Büttner and Oehlen),” Texte zur Kunst 1 (Autumn 1990), 121.

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Martin Kippenberger, Untitled (from the Heavy Burschi/Heavy Guy series), 1989/90. Color photograph, 47 Ă&#x2014; 39 inches. Š Estate of Martin Kippenberger, Galerie Gisela Capitain, Cologne.

Martin Kippenberger, Untitled (from the Heavy Burschi/Heavy Guy series), 1989/90. Color photograph, 70 Ă&#x2014; 59 inches. Š Estate of Martin Kippenberger, Galerie Gisela Capitain, Cologne.

Bride’s (Uma Thurman) monologue in Kill Bill: Volume 2 (2004) for his title, Carpenter instructed his dealers to make a series of quick gestural paintings reproducing media images of the 9/11 attacks on the World Trade Center, depicting their explosion and collapse “in the style of Josh Smith” (who was at the time a “hot” artist showing at the gallery).9 Over these Carpenter printed reproductions of one year’s worth of Reena Spaulings press clippings, charting the gallery’s rise in Chinatown against the reality and aftermath of the 9/11 attacks. The paintings were stacked against the wall for viewers to rifle through like records in a crate, and the flier for the exhibition reproduced the famous photograph of Warhol shopping for groceries at Gristedes. This menacing allegory of revenge and victimization conflated the pathos of art world relationships—between dealer and artist, artist and assistant—with media representations of the 9/11 attacks. It was built on an allusion to the first work that Kippenberger exhibited as an artist, Uno di voi, un tedesco in Firenze (One of You, a German in Florence, (1976–77)—a vertical stack of canvases measuring nearly the artist’s height that were painted with black-and-white motifs from newspaper clippings and from his own photographs. Kippenberger’s absurdist gesture tied the material contingency of painting to his own physical proportions, reinscribing him as author and replacing “parameters that are immanent in the material with parameters that are completely external to it.” 10 RAMPAGE thus reprised an originary work of Kippenberger’s and used Reena Spaulings (a gallery and artistic pseudo-collective that produces artworks under the same name) as assistants, while anchoring these value displacements in the question of the handmade.11 If the artist Reena Spaulings leeches symbolic capital from the stable of artists she exhibits as a gallerist, and artists exploit their assistants, RAMPAGE turned the tables by figuring a void at the center of authorship where Carpenter was expected to produce.

For the philosopher Giorgio Agamben, the assistant is a displaced, dispossessed, and incomplete being that nonetheless signals the unrepresentable chasm of “oblivion and ruin, the ontological waste that we carry in ourselves.”

9. “Merlin Carpenter: A Roaring RAMPAGE of Revenge,” press release, Reena Spaulings Fine Art (2005), http://www. reenaspaulings.com/MC.PR.pdf.

10. Diederich Diederichsen writes, “This stack of canvases, which is in many respects Kippenberger’s first sculpture, takes up various Conceptualist maneuvers that also played a role in his work later on: the replacement of parameters that are immanent in the material with parameters that are completely external to it, understood in the narrow sense (as paints, colors, format, support, genre, subject, etc.) but not to

another component of the artwork (in this case the artist's body), which thus comes to the fore.” Diederichsen, Martin Kippenberger: The Problem Perspective (Los Angeles: Museum of Contemporary Art, 2008), 124.

11. Pamela Lee has described contemporary pseudo-collectives such as Bernadette Corporation, Reena Spaulings, Claire Fontaine, and The Atlas Group as premised on a refusal of easily co-opted political and artistic identities: “An acute withdrawal of such representation is part of the collective's speculative gambit

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and pragmatic organization; neither moralizing nor judgment is implied in naming such gestures ‘pseudo-collective.’

On the contrary, they are a form of realpolitik, an inversion of those long-cherished values accorded the terms of representation within the public sphere.” Lee, “On Pseudo-Collectivism; or, How to Be a Collective in the Age of the Consumer Sovereign,” Forgetting the Art World (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2012), 151–52.

[Assistants] embody the type of eternal student or swindler who ages badly and who must be left behind in the end, even if it is against our wishes. And yet something about them, an inconclusive gesture, an unforeseen grace, a certain mathematical boldness in judgment and taste, a certain air of nimbleness in their limbs or words—all these features indicate that they belong to a complementary world and allude to a lost citizenship or an inviolable elsewhere… The assistant is the figure of what is lost. Or, rather, of our relationship to what is lost. This relationship concerns everything that, in both collective and individual life, comes to be forgotten at every moment...

[H]e spells out the text of the unforgettable and translates it into the language of deaf-mutes.12 Agamben’s tragicomic meditation on the ontological displacement of characters in Franz Kafka, children’s literature, and Sufi mystic Ibn al’Arabi’s The Meccan Revelations resonates with Carpenter’s use of assistants to surrogate subjective investment, as well as his conscription of others into this bowdlerized state. Carpenter’s two-year long project The Opening drafted not his gallerists but his audience as assistants; or rather Carpenter assisted his audience in their production of his work. In these “painting actions,” as Isabelle Graw has termed them, the handmade figured the void left by the artist’s displacements.13 Beginning in September 2007, Carpenter staged a series of performances in which the paintings were made at the opening. At Reena Spaulings, the audience stood around with thirteen blank canvases hanging on the wall; piano music, vodka, cucumber sandwiches, and flowers provided atmosphere. At a certain point, Carpenter walked up with a bucket of black paint and scrawled phrases such as “Die Collector Scum,” “I Like Chris Wool,” and “Relax it’s only a Crap Reena Spaulings Show” across six of the canvases, with some of his marks continuing onto the gallery wall. Performed in different variations over two years at Overduin & Co. (Los Angeles, 2008), Galerie Christian Nagel (Berlin, 2008), Galerie Mitterrand + Sanz (Zurich, 2008), Simon Lee Gallery (London, 2009), and dépendance (Brussels, 2009), these painting actions summoned the avant-garde legacy of Allan Kaprow, Yves Klein, Georges Mathieu, Niki de Saint-Phalle, Robert Rauschenberg and others, only to stage their absorption as “value added” for the art market.

The Opening not only expropriated the symbolic capital of art history and of the audience in attendance but also, as Caroline Busta has noted, limited production to the opening itself, so that Carpenter would be “making art only during the exhibition’s opening, when he would be ‘working’ anyway.” 14 If The Opening provided a kind of social reciprocal readymade, Carpenter nonetheless anchored authorship qua complicity in the scrawled and splattered paint on white canvas.

12. Giorgio Agamben, “The Assistants,” Profanations (New York: Zone Books, 2007), 30, 35.

13. Isabelle Graw, High Price: Art Between the Market and Celebrity Culture (Berlin and

New York: Sternberg Press, 2009), 215.

14. Caroline Busta, “Text,” Merlin Carpenter: The Opening (Berlin and New York, Sternberg Press, 2011).

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Merlin Carpenter, A Roaring RAMPAGE of Revenge, 2005. Installation view, Reena Spaulings, New York, November 12–December 18, 2005. Courtesy of the artist and Reena Spaulings Fine Art, New York/Los Angeles.

Photo: Farzad Owrang.

The Opening, installation view, Reena Spaulings, New York, September 23–October 28, 2007. Courtesy of the artist and Reena Spaulings Fine Art, New York/Los Angeles. Photo: Farzad Owrang.

A final example brings Carpenter’s vitiation and reconstitution of hand painting into focus. The paintings in Hands Against Hands (Reena Spaulings, 2015) use as their starting point his friend Josephine Pryde’s photographs of hands holding various touch-sensitive IPS screen devices. Carpenter mimicked Pryde’s photographs and interposed his own gestural responses in overlapping layers, leaving the source image twice removed. Pryde’s photographic meditation on a technological matrix of vision and touch was reprised through gesture, thematizing the tension between manual and mechanical imagery. Carpenter also sardonically painted the walls and floor silver, irreversibly substituting the shabby chic ambience of the gallery’s chipped rusticated wall paint for an embarrassing throwback reference to the glory days Warhol’s Silver Factory and of New York underground culture. The paintings in Hands Against Hands bore titles mined from Marx’s Economic and Philosophical Manuscripts, such as “Man as a mere workman who may therefore daily fall from his filled void into the absolute void—into his social, and therefore actual, non-existence.” The $40,000 price of each painting was listed on the press release in an acerbic jab at critique as value-added collector bait. These involuted gestures implicated Carpenter’s social relationships, the downtown status of Reena Spaulings, historical materialism, and the fetish for the handmade in a matrix of symbolic and market value.

Warhol famously claimed, “Pop art took the inside and put it outside, took the outside and put it inside.”15 While celebrating the incorporation of the creative subject by the image-driven symbolic economy of the 1960s, the statement captures the pathos that attended Warhol’s “deeply superficial” transgression of the limits of inside and outside and the tragic collision of the culture industry with formerly recalcitrant realms of subjectivity. In his recent text “The Outside Can’t Go Outside” (2015), Carpenter goes a step further than Warhol in dispensing with notions of art’s resistance to exchange. Examining theories of art and surplus value proffered in the wake of the 2008 financial crisis, Carpenter argues that critical practices, far from pointing to an “outside” of exchange, instead supply managerial information or “control value” that streamlines profits for capital: [Control value] could create role models for subservience to capital, or mentor industries around which productive or non-productive wage labour can happen at the margins by pushing creative technology toward the market. Or it could be about dropping casual tips for speculative investments to keep capital ticking over as it awaits further productive use. Criminals, police, lawyers, artists, academics, bohemians and so on, may prepare the ground for the exploitation of human labour by unwitting research into more specialised, socialised and efficient public or private circulation, enabling rapid turnover and reducing deductions from surplus value.16

15. Andy Warhol and Pat Hackett, Popism: The Warhol Sixties (New York: Harvest Books, 1990), 3.

16. Merlin Carpenter, “The Outside Can't Go Outside” (2015), http://www.merlincarpenter.com/outside.pdf, 8.

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In this densely argued text, Carpenter suggests that by perpetuating a fantasy or “trance” vision of an outside of value, art provides a targeting mechanism for capital in its quest for profit, staging an inevitable crash of trance into instrumental value. Veering toward Debordian resignation, Carpenter argues, “The problem with an exceptional artist like John Knight is that because he is an exception, the last bastion of institutional critique, this is a guidance system for the market. It is not that the critical message of institutional critique is any kind of problem, in fact the content that it has is irrelevant—it is that this element, whether critique or not, marks itself as an outside.” 17 While some might dismiss this line of thinking as a kind of knowing cynicism, it reflects a growing desire, since the crisis of 2008, to directly confront uncomfortable realities surrounding the market value of critical/political practices. Andrea Fraser’s 2011 article “L'1%, C'est Moi,” for example, launched a powerful call for artists and critics to evaluate “political or critical claims on the level of their social and economic conditions” and to “insist that what artworks are economically centrally determines what they mean socially and also artistically.” 18 Warhol has long served as a horizon for those grappling with the fact that avant-garde practices, though notionally antagonistic to capitalism’s depredations, have nonetheless acted, according to Thomas Crow, as “a kind of research and development arm of the culture industry” whose innovations are ultimately “as productive for affirmative culture as they are for the articulation of critical consciousness.” 19 For Benjamin Buchloh, Warhol is “but the most conspicuous of postwar artists situated in the moment when culture industry and spectacle massively invade the once relatively autonomous spaces, institutions, and practices of avant-garde culture and begin to control them.” 20 Carpenter’s response to this well-rehearsed Adornian problematic and to the hypocrisies that Fraser detailed parallels that of other artists, such as Bernadette Corporation, Claire Fontaine, and Ed Lehan, in that it seeks to evade control value by presenting already-recuperated content. Warhol knockoffs, the work of friends and assistants, and the audience itself are proffered as a means of “feed[ing] the art world to the art world.” 21 As a result, DECADES leaves nothing but the trace of the artist’s hand to sustain the valorizing apparatus of contemporary art. While Pop art’s handmade readymade suggested the residual possibility of humanistic transcendence, the handmade in DECADES and other works acts more like a fingerprint at a crime scene—a mark of complicity foreclosing any notional outside.

17. Carpenter, “The Outside,” 22.

18. Andrea Fraser, “L’1%, C'est Moi,” Texte zur Kunst 83 (September 2011), 126.

19. Thomas Crow, “Modernism and Mass Culture in the Visual Arts,” Modern Art in the Common Culture (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1996), 35, 33. Crow’s essay was republished in the first issue of Texte zur Kunst, which also included Carpenter's essay cited above, “I Was an Assistant

(to Kippenberger, Büttner and Oehlen).” See Texte zur Kunst 1.

20. Benjamin Buchloh, “Introduction,” Neo-Avantgarde and Culture Industry: Essays on European and American Art from 1955 to 1975 (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2000), xxii.

21. Merlin Carpenter, “The Tail that Wags the Dog,” in Daniel Birnbaum and Isabelle Graw, eds., Canvases and Careers Today: Criticism and Its Markets (Berlin: Sternberg Press, 2008), 87.

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Hands Against Hands, installation view, Reena Spaulings, New York, November 8â&#x20AC;&#x201C;December 6, 2015.

Courtesy of the artist and Reena Spaulings Fine Art, New York/Los Angeles. Photo: Joerg Lohse.

Hands Against Hands, installation view, Reena Spaulings, New York, November 8â&#x20AC;&#x201C;December 6, 2015.

Courtesy of the artist and Reena Spaulings Fine Art, New York/Los Angeles. Photo: Joerg Lohse.

Swapping trance for crash and transcendence for complicity, DECADES would seem to achieve a Pyrrhic victory against value—whether expressed as market price or critical interest. Yet by staging the collapse of Warhol’s silkscreen aesthetic into mass cultural cliché, Carpenter retroactively revokes the symbolic value (or critical interest) of Pop art, and it is here that a paradoxical historicity emerges: To prevent this “outside” from becoming just a decorative capitalist fantasy like a video game—and thus an assignable space—one has to refuse its status as reality rather than reinforcing it. This is not the trance of surrealism, or of psychoanalysis, where what is imaginary is considered equally real, but one simultaneously more full and empty. It is totally non-existent, and yet because it negatively relates in a structural way to capitalist existence is also more important than these older definitions, and in that sense perhaps even more substantial.22 If the outside exists to the extent that it creates real “substantial” effects, meaning persists in Carpenter’s practice as a performed failure to foreclose a historical dialectic of art and the culture industry. The tragedy of the handmade readymade is recast in Carpenter’s farce, and the critic is once again forced outside the boundaries of art as such.

Liam Considine is an art historian and critic based in New York. His writing on postwar and contemporary art has appeared in publications such as Art History, Art Journal, The Brooklyn Rail, and Tate Papers.

22. Carpenter, “The Outside,” 9.

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Zero, My Teacher Jan Tumlir

In 2008, I was invited by Charlie White, then-director of the University of Southern California’s Roski School of Fine Arts, to contribute an essay to the catalog accompanying that year’s MFA graduate exhibition. Considering the etymological link between critique and crisis, the first bearing a diagnostic relation to the second, I hit on the idea that art education could perhaps be considered from a medical perspective, in the specific terms of bacteriology and inoculation. This became the thematic through-line of my essay, which was titled “Critical Times.” Its concluding sentences read: “Knowing that it only survives through regular, immunizing infusions of the poison that would otherwise destroy it, this is what makes art ‘special’ today. The point of critique is not to build a stronger artist or artwork. To the contrary, what one learns as an MFA student is how to live with the disease.”

Initially, this seemed like a novel approach to the subject. However, more recently, while researching the work of Kazimir Malevich for another project, I learned that this medical outlook was in fact one that this artist staunchly upheld in both the studio and the classroom. In the light of this finding, it occurred to me that my original thoughts on the matter could bear some revision. Moreover, in the interim between my earlier text and this one, we have witnessed the astounding corporate takedown of the Roski School of Fine Arts. This event generated a great deal of critical blowback, which was met, at every step of the way, with the upbeat, boosterish claims of a patently mandated institutional consensus. This critical struggle, although it was waged on the front of “Disaster Capitalism,” also paradoxically recalled the situation encountered by Malevich almost a century earlier in Russia, within an educational complex then undergoing Communist restructuring.1 More recently, the Roski school has unveiled a new program that is not entirely unpromising, but the fact remains that this is the product of a brutal “regime change.” The relation of critique to crisis within art school, which I began by observing in the metaphorical light of physiology, always discloses a political cause that can be analyzed somewhat more concretely as a historical inheritance. Accordingly, I would like to take a step back from our immediate problems in art school for the sake of a longer-range vantage.

The Roski debate, as it continues, can only grow increasingly one-sided on both sides, and into the chasm that opens between them, much gets lost.

1. On “disaster capitalism,” see Naomi Klein, The Shock Doctrine: The Rise of Disaster Capitalism (New York: Henry Holt & Co., 2007).

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Although the collapse of the old regime can be blamed largely on external pressures, one could also argue that a certain measure of crisis is inherent in the very structure of art education, and this too can be subjected to diagnostic critique. What follows is a highly selective historical overview of artist-teachers who confronted this crisis head-on, if sometimes eccentrically. Whatever course of treatment might be derived from their examples will have to remain questionable on the pragmatic plane, but this is not to deny their seriousness—far from it. Let’s begin with Malevich, my case in point.

1 We tend to think of Kazimir Malevich as a serious man. With the appearance of his Black Square (1915), possibly the first “last” painting, he had arrived, in both theory and practice, at the bottom of things. This somber monochrome is a work that reduces the act of painterly composition to the minimum of merely reiterating its framing conditions. The band of white that traces the edges of the central black shape defines that shape, in the artist’s own words, as a “painted mass,” and one that is held securely within painting, within art.2 Black Square was proposed as a demonstration—today we might say a “teachable moment”—and its lesson is this: art cannot be about anything and everything. The artist who takes this lesson to heart will be charged with seeking out content appropriate only to art. In order to do this, Malevich first had to take leave of the world as it is.

Following a preliminary “sketch” that Malevich produced as the set designer for the Cubo-Futurist opera Victory Over the Sun, which premiered in St. Petersburg’s Luna Park theater in 1913, Black Square was officially unveiled two years later at the event 0,10: The Last Futurist Exhibition of Paintings. “I have transformed myself into a zero of form,” the artist triumphantly announced in a brochure printed to accompany the show, highlighting his achievement in distilling painting down to an essence no longer beholden to perceptual phenomena, the world as appearance.3 His statement resounds with the overblown heroic tone typical of early twentieth-century avant-gardism, and today we might be tempted to greet it with a skeptically arched eyebrow, or even as a cause for mirth. But this is not to suggest that Malevich was oblivious to the potentially off-putting effect of his words. Of particular note is the canny conflation of subject and object positions within his statement: it is not, or not only, the painting that has been set back to zero, but “I,” the painter, as well. In order to arrive at the grounding origin of all that has accumulated upon the painterly surface through history, and to find there the medium’s teleological end-point, “I” too must be nullified.

2. Kazimir Malevich, “From Cubism to Suprematism in Art: To the New Painterly Realism, to Absolute Creation,” in Malevich Writes, A Theory of Creativity, Cubism to

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Suprematism, ed. Patricia Railing (Forest Row, East Sussex, England: Artists Bookworks, 2014), 25.

3. Malevich, 31.

Zero—what kind of a teacher is this? A philosophical one, I want to suggest, stressing that aspect of philosophy that is devoted to non-applicable, un-pragmatic, anti-positivistic truth. In this regard, teleology, which in Aristotelian terms is defined as “the doctrine of final cause,” becomes salient. From a worldly can-do perspective, the word immediately sounds a note of alarming paradox, forcing all our most advanced pursuits—along with the sum total of our gathered knowledge in science, technology, social engineering, product design, business, culture, pedagogy, self-help, and what have you—to collapse in on themselves. That is, in the end, at the limit of progress, all that we learn is where, how, and why we began. Only in the religious terms of revelation does teleology make sense, and here it makes absolute sense, a sense that applies equally to everyone. In the case of art, a somewhat more limited, and perhaps exclusive, form comes to light. This is the domain of “the weak universalism,” to cite the title of an essay by Boris Groys, who builds on Walter Benjamin’s concept of “weak messianism.” Groys proceeds to propose Malevich as a model, drawing a parallel between his aesthetic lessons and those of Saint Paul in the religious sphere, both of them equally devoted to “the constant revocation of every vocation.” 4 The way to Malevich’s “zero” is contra mundum. I refuse, my painting refuses; only by renouncing my expertise as a painter do I come to understand just what it is I should do, what all painters—and by extension, in principle, everyone else—should do. This revelation is attained by working backward and traveling full circle, but without winding us up anywhere near where we began. The end is not the same as the beginning, for now at last you know! Black Square, then, marks a new beginning, and the number 0,10, affixed to the title of The Last Futurist Exhibition of Paintings, in which the work was delivered to public life, indicates the future course to be traveled: beyond zero—or better, beneath it—there is always further to go.

Between the years 1920 and 1927, Malevich largely abstained from any sort of studio production, and this was due to the missionary zeal with which he took up teaching. The gospel of Black Square, once it had been revealed, had to be spread. Malevich’s career as a pedagogue began in September 1917, when the then-provisional Soviet government recalled him from military service to act as deputy director of its newly formed arts section.

He immediately set about organizing a countrywide “People’s Academy” art school system. Following the October Revolution in that same year, Malevich taught for a time at the Free State Art Studios in Moscow. In 1919, he departed for the Vitebsk School of Art and there became a highly influential instructor, forming with a devoted group of students the organization UNOVIS (an acronym for The Champions of the New Art), which proceeded to subsume the largest part of the school’s curriculum to their aesthetic ideology, as expounded in the pamphlet “On New Systems in Art.” In 1922, Malevich left Vitebsk, which was then was struggling financially,

4. Boris Groys, “The Weak Universalism,” e-flux Journal 15, http://www.e-flux.com/ journal/the-weak-universalism/.

The concept of “weak messianism” is taken up in Walter Benjamin’s “Theses on the Philosophy of History” (1940).

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Kazimir Malevich teaching students at UNOVIS, 1921â&#x20AC;&#x201C;22.

and with his student followers and several colleagues on staff set off for St. Petersburg. In 1923, he became the director of INKhUK, the Museum of Artistic Culture, and shortly thereafter began work on developing it into a research and teaching institution, renamed GINKhUK. The formulation of Stalin’s first “Five-Year Plan” of economic and cultural restructuring brought this career to a close around 1927; Malevich was denounced as a bourgeois reactionary and, worse, a monk-like obscurantist, and promptly sacked from his post.5 On the surface, all of the academic maneuvering that leads up to this end appears to follow a familiar pattern, for already by the early twenties it had been made evident that the so-called “laboratory stage” of Soviet art would have to start yielding some concrete product. The leeway for aesthetic experiment radically narrowed from there on, as artists were challenged to submit their various findings to social implementation. One could say that Malevich’s exit from the studio and into the classroom followed the transition of advanced art in Russia from Constructivism to Productivism, but it is important to remember that he never accepted these terms. Not painting but teaching, Malevich partly complied with the order of the state and made himself useful, while at the same time campaigning in his own self-interest, stubbornly retaining his designation as a Suprematist—above all!—and converting as many others as possible to the nebulous cause.

Black Square is the epitome of what Thierry de Duve terms “painting as model.” 6 It refers to nothing outside itself and thereby accedes to a plane of supreme autonomy. But how, then, should we qualify all of the other paintings that refer to it, beginning with the paintings of students who closely followed its model? Black Square could be, and in fact was, faithfully reproduced, and whether by Malevich or someone else is finally less relevant than the spirit in which it was done. Technically, the task poses few problems, which is exactly the point: no painterly expertise is required to produce a superficial likeness of this work, but this does not mean that it really is within the reach of everyone. Rather, its outward simplicity belies arduous mental preparation, for in order to produce a proper Black Square, one has to travel full circle with Malevich and to likewise become “the zero of form.” Self-cancellation is the first step toward the non-objective or “objectless” world of the monochrome, and upon completion one can also forsake this painting as object. Every time it is remade it is to restate this case, to preserve only the injunction to preserve nothing. This is the lesson of Malevich: the dark star of aesthetic refusal must be pursued all the way to the flaming finish.

5. The monastic metaphor was applied in a damning article entitled “A State-Sponsored Monastery” penned by militant critic Grigory Seryi for the leading party newspaper Leningradskaya Pravda in June 1926: “A monastery has taken shelter under the name of a state institution. It is inhabited

by several holy crackpots who, perhaps unconsciously, are engaged in open counter-revolutionary sermonizing, and making fools of our Soviet scientific institutions. As for any artistic significance in the ‘work’ of these monks, their creative impotence hits you right in the eye at first glance.” Charlotte

Douglas, “Biographical Outline,” in Charlotte Douglas, ed., Malevich: Artist and Theoretician (Paris: Flammarion, 1991), 18.

6. Thierry du Duve, Painting as Model (Cambridge, Mass / London: The MIT Press, 1993).

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During his years as an art educator, Malevich consistently downplayed his practical accomplishments as a painter in favor of his intellectual pursuits, and some would say for good reason.7 By any standard of measure, his painterly corpus is patchy and includes a number of works that might be declared downright bad. He often described himself as self-taught in the field, though not necessarily to insist on an innate talent. In fact, records suggest that the young Malevich repeatedly applied to the Moscow Art Academy and was denied entry each time.8 Whether this early snubbing had any impact on his sense of artistic self-worth is worth pondering, but what is more established from an art historical standpoint is that his crowning achievement, as he himself understood it, is a piece of writing titled The World as Objectlessness, composed between 1923 and 1926. Moving from the work of the studio to that of the studium, it is here, in his philosophical summa, that the painter lays out his theory of the “additional element,” sometimes translated as “supplementary element,” which holds the key to both his art and his teaching method.9 Malevich derived his “additional element” from an in-depth analysis of the succession of styles within Western Modernism, distilling from Realism, Impressionism, Post-Impressionism, Cubism, Futurism, and so on certain nascent qualities of line and color, paint application, and spatial composition that could be appropriated and further elaborated. Together with his students, he composed detailed charts made up of photographic reproductions of past works and schematic drawings that demonstrated precisely what, at every stage of art, was in the process of emerging as the latent addendum to its manifest forms. The way to zero is complicated, as mentioned; Malevich’s charts track a simultaneous movement backward and forward, a teleological skewering of timelines. These charts served ends both explanatory (for others) and revelatory (for himself ). That is, they showed Malevich where to go while showing others how he got there, which is exactly how they were applied in instruction.

To the spiritual side of the “painting as model” that is Black Square must be added a (pseudo-) scientific side. The “additional element” is precisely that which is not characteristic of a style, or that which exceeds it, mutating toward the next style, and the next, though not in a manner that is necessarily progressive. That Malevich considered this quantum in clinical terms, as a kind of bacteria or virus, is especially suggestive from our current perspective within the educational complex of art. During his tenure at GINKhUK, he conformed all cultural research to medical protocols, going so far as to found a Department of Bacteriology of Art. This department,

7. In a pamphlet produced in Vitebsk in 1920, entitled Suprematism: 34 Drawings, Malevich writes: “This work with pen rather than brush is my chief occupation. It seems that one cannot attain with a brush what can be attained with a pen. It is tousled and cannot get into the inner reaches of the brain—the pen is finer.” Britta Tanja

Dümpelmann, “The World as Objectlessness: A Snapshot of an Artistic Universe,” Kazimir Malevich: The World as Objectlessness (Ostfildern, Germany: Hatje Cantz Verlag, 2014), 13.

8. “Archive no. 680 at the Central State Archives of Art and Literature…does not contain a file on Malevich, nor is he listed among the students

of the years covered—but his name appears three times as an applicant. … In all three instances someone has written a similar note on the application: ‘Papers and cards received.’ Evidently Malevich was admitted to the entrance examination three times but never managed to pass…” Irina Vakar, “Malevich’s Student Years in Moscow: Facts and

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Fiction,” in Malevich: Artist and Theoretician, 28.

9. This writing was originally published by the Bauhaus: Kazimir Malevich, Die Gegendstandslose Welt, Bauhausbücher no. 11 (1927).

The source employed here is: Kazimir Malevich, “Introduction to the Theory of the Additional Element in Painting,” in Malevich Writes, 321–75.

Kazimir Malevich, Analytical Chart, 1925. Cut-and-pasted papers, pencil and ink on paper, 21⅝ × 31 inches.

Digital Image © The Museum of Modern Art/Licensed by SCALA/Art Resource, NY.

as Malevich put it in a submission to “The Work Plan of the Department of the Painterly Culture for 1926–1927,” “considers all painters as medicine considers the sick...” 10 While teaching, he characterized himself as a doctor and his students as patients, an approach almost unimaginable in art school today. No doubt, Malevich took to his profession with scholarly rigor and in all seriousness, but this does not automatically imply that he took himself so seriously. I prefer to think he did not, and that all of the earth-shaking authority we make out in his voice is slyly leavened with a Chekhovian absurdism. It is said that he would perform his student studio visits attired in a starched white lab coat, administering “doses” of Suprematism to those most wanting.11

2 The sorts of “shenanigans” mentioned above made an easy target of Malevich and his ilk and only hastened the withdrawal of state-sponsored support for their artistic experimentation. The new order that followed was founded on a demand for results—design solutions or socially effective propaganda. For a considerable time, the lessons of Black Square were effaced, or rather went dormant. In the postwar years, however, the black monochrome reappeared in America, and with a vengeance, for here as well signs of ideological stress were instantly evident. This “second coming” signaled a breaking-point crisis for Western Modernism just as it had in the East, only here we are faced with a much longer timeline and hence a much slower process of unraveling. Among those who took Malevich’s teachings to heart, Ad Reinhardt stands out, not only because he committed himself to painting canvases black, or near-black, for the last fourteen years of his life, but because he likewise sealed these works behind a protective bulwark of willfully obtuse theorization. Like Malevich, Reinhardt would be characterized as monkish: the “black monk,” as Harold Rosenberg called him.12 Reinhardt was born in in Buffalo, New York, to immigrant Russo-German parents. Remarkably, his birthdate, 1913, coincides with the first appearance of Black Square; this fact is acknowledged at the start of his self-penned “Chronology,” and we might remember as well that the date transitions toward the start of World War I.13 On all fronts, then, one could say that Reinhardt came into a world of trouble. From here on, his project was set: to protect the aesthetic sphere from “ideological struggle,” as Clement Greenberg put it in his breakthrough essay “Avant-Garde and Kitsch,” tellingly published in 1939, at the outset of a second round of total war.14 In “Toward a Newer Laocoön,” penned just one year later, Greenberg

10. Further: “The Department of Painting of GINKhUK finds that various kinds of illnesses exist in the field of arts, too... According to their form of behaviour, artists can be classified as naturalists, realists, geometricians, romantics, lyrical, mystics, metaphysicians, etc. and

prescribed treatment according to the diagnosis.” Kazimir Malevich, quoted in Mark A. Cheetham, Abstract Art Against Autonomy: Infection, Resistance, and Cure Since the ’60s, (Cambridge, England, and New York: Cambridge University Press, 2014), 5–6.

11. Ibid.

12. Michael Corris, Ad Reinhardt (London: Reaktion Books Ltd., 2008), 90.

13. Ad Reinhardt, “Chronology,” in Art as Art: The Selected Writings of Ad Reinhardt, ed. Barbara Rose (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1975), 4.

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14. Clement Greenberg, “Avant Garde and Kitsch,” in The Collected Essays and Criticism, Vol. 1: Perceptions and Judgments, 1939–1944, ed. John O’Brian (Chicago and London: The University of Chicago Press, 1986), 7–8.

restates his case more adamantly, arguing that what is to be strictly avoided by artists are “ideas” as such, for these could now only be seen as “infecting the arts with the ideological struggles of society.” 15 Reinhardt subscribed to this view, but only to an extent. The vaunted purity of his work is, from the first moment, riven by conflict; it is no less “infected” than that of Malevich, to which it owes an obvious debt, while also presenting some notable points of divergence.

The modern history of art, as Reinhardt sees it, is concisely articulated in his 1962 essay “Art-as-Art,” an early entry into his foundational “dogmas”: “The one intention of the word ‘aesthetics’ of the eighteenth century is to isolate the art experience from other things. The one declaration of all the main movements in art of the nineteenth century is the ‘independence’ of art. The one question, the one principle, the one crisis in art of the twentieth century centers in the uncompromising ‘purity’ of art, and in the consciousness that comes from art only, not from anything else.” 16 Whatever socially redemptive optimism we can still make out in Malevich’s argument is here eclipsed; in Reinhardt’s view, everything now converges upon the separation of art from every other sector of our experience. To put a negative spin on Malevich’s bacteriological analogy, this process could be compared to quarantine. “The one place for art-as-art is the museum of fine art,” Reinhardt writes.17 In direct opposition to the avant-garde call for the “supercession” of art, and/or its integration into everyday life, Reinhardt affirms: “The one thing to say about art and life is that art is art and life is life, that art is not life and that life is not art.” His opening line effectively says it all by way of a series of tautologies: “The one thing to say about art is that it is one thing. Art is art-as-art and everything else is everything else.

Art-as-art is nothing but art. Art is not what is not art.” 18 Society is categorically refused in Reinhardt’s black paintings, which pursue an agenda that belongs to art alone, outside any explicit ambition to change the world. Yet it is well known that this artist, who grew up in a leftleaning working-class household, remained throughout his life politically committed and active. He just made a point of leaving his politics outside the studio door. No doubt, his early experience working as an editor, columnist, illustrator, and layout designer for a number of socialist publications, PM and New Masses among them, contributed to his sense that politics are best pursued by other, specifically non-art, means. The implicit assumption here is that artists interested in wielding some social clout might want to compartmentalize their activities. In the context of Russia after the revolution, artists may have felt that they had a stake in the formation of the general culture, but to go on thinking this way in postwar America could only be considered naïve. A culture that is “for” society and directs the course of its development already existed, for good and ill, and Reinhardt’s art would play no part in it.

15. Clement Greenberg, “Toward a Newer Laocoön,” in The Collected Essays and Criticism, Vol. 1: Perceptions and Judgments, 1939–1944, 28.

16. Ad Reinhardt, “Art as Art,” in Art as Art, 53–54.

17. Ibid.

18. Ibid.

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Ad Reinhardt in his studio in New York, July 1966. Photo by John Loengard/The LIFE Picture Collection/Getty Images.

Ad Reinhardt, How to Look at a Cubist Painting, published in P.M., January 27, 1946 (detail). Artwork © 2016 Estate of Ad Reinhardt/Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York. Courtesy of David Zwirner, New York/London.

Reinhardt began teaching in 1947, at Brooklyn College, and continued to do so, often traveling between institutions, until he was felled by a heart attack in 1967. By his own admission, teaching was mainly a means to make money, which might strike some as callous. But the reasoning behind it was high-minded: to relieve his painting from any financial burden. The same can be said for his editorial columns and cartoons: these are merely the products of a day job, not the vocation. And yet he approached all of these extraneous occupations with an ambition that cannot be confined to the realm of the strictly professional. As Reinhardt puts it in a catalog statement from 1949, “Contradictory as though these roles may seem, they can be viewed as aspects of a unified stance.” 19 Work inside the studio could feed into the work outside it, and vice versa. Every one of his black paintings is at once a supremely autonomous object, mutely receding from “the ideological struggles of society,” and a hyper-rhetorical construct, suffused in contrarian bile. The crisis of Modernism that these signaled is not just that of de-skilling and de-composition—the reduction of painting to the Greenbergian nadir of a “tacked-up canvas” that perpetually reasserts the dumb facticity of its material makeup—but also the elaborate theoretical scaffolding that this deconstruction would demand.20 Reinhardt probably fell afoul of his New York School colleagues on both counts, and no doubt this is also why he was celebrated by the subsequent generation of polemically minded Minimalists.21 Inside the classroom, one can imagine Reinhardt himself sternly posing to students the question that issues from a modernist painting in one of his best-known cartoons: “What do you represent?” 22 In the context of art school, the correct answer would have to be “nothing!” Here we devote ourselves to abstraction; we plumb “the zero of form;” we open the way to “the world as objectlessness.” For Reinhardt, this required not only voiding painting of any explicit ideological message, but also detaching it from the implicit ideology of the art market, from “the umbilical cord of gold,” in Greenberg’s words, that connects art to the patron class.23 “I tried to oppose

19. Corris, Ad Reinhardt, 12.

20. Greenberg develops the idea of the “tacked-up canvas” in his 1962 essay “After Abstract Expressionism”: “By now it has been established, it would seem, that the irreducible essence of pictorial art consists in but two constitutive conventions or norms: flatness and the delimitation of flatness; and that the observance of merely these two norms is enough to create an object which can be experienced as a picture: thus a stretched or tacked-up canvas already exists as a picture—though not necessarily as a successful one.” Clement Greenberg, “After Abstract Expressionism,” in The Collected Essays and Criticism, Vol. 4: Modernism

with a Vengeance, 1957–1969, ed. John O’Brian (Chicago and London: The University of Chicago Press, 1993), 131–32.

21. In his 1967 essay “Art and Objecthood,” Michael Fried argues that this gathering cloud of verbiage actively diminishes the work of art. There is, he suggests, something acutely remiss in a work that “seeks to declare and occupy a position— one that can be formulated in words, and in fact has been so formulated by some of its leading practitioners.” Michael Fried, “Art and Objecthood,” Art and Objecthood (Chicago and London: The University of Chicago Press, 1998), 148.

22. This cartoon was composed in 1946 for the journal PM, as part of a series entitled

How to Look at Looking, which aimed to shepherd a still recalcitrant public into a proper appreciation of modern art, while simultaneously ridiculing that art’s undeniable pretensions. The key section is comprised of two sequential frames. In the first, a member of the public points laughingly at an abstract canvas, asking: “What does this represent?”

Clearly, his words constitute a reproach, suggesting that this work has failed to function as a painting should. In the following frame, however, the painting responds by launching the same question right back at him: “What do you represent?” On first read, one might imagine that this brief volley of hostile interrogation serves to

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demonstrate the redundancy of the very idea of representation within this arena; it has no place in any discussion of modern art. The first question is posed in ignorance, whereas the second is rhetorical, an impatient corrective, yet it is far from “winning” the argument. In the course of this exchange, the painting is itself transformed into a figure. In the public arena, it is doomed to operate as a kind of hostile witness, always answering back to the beholder in a heated voice.

23. Clement Greenberg, “Avant Garde and Kitsch,” in The Collected Essays and Criticism, Vol. 1: Perceptions and Judgments, 1939–1944, 11.

the academic to the market place,” Reinhardt explains in an interview from 1966. “I think in the future I see mainly the university academy as the proper place for the artist because the market place is insane.” 24 If the good virus of the “additional element” had now met its most daunting antagonist in the capitalist economy, then the solution can no longer be a Black Square for everyone. This is how Reinhardt rewords the lesson of Malevich: “This painting is my painting if I paint it. This painting is your painting if you paint it.” Is it also yours if you simply buy it? Basically Reinhardt says no, “with few exceptions.” 25 Reinhardt taught to make ends meet, but he also did so in pursuit of the teleological end, for the void hollowed out by his work is here filled with words, and these serve to communicate the social promise, however attenuated, of via negativa. To refuse society as it is points to self-centered, “holier than thou” withdrawal, but inside the ivory tower of academia a vision is shared of the society that could be if everyone else refused as well. Of course, Reinhardt did not believe that this vision could ever be realized, not even in the limited context of art school. Note that he set aside this place as a proper one for the “artist-as-artist;” the general art student body, who may have already been thinking of their debt in terms of investment, was another matter.26 Anyone too beholden to society could not have been on his side. It is in this spirit that Reinhardt proudly declared that, after almost twenty years of teaching, “I’ve never been called a good teacher.” 27

3 Moving forward another generation or so, monochrome painting, or any painting for that matter, would no longer figure so highly on the list of educational priorities—especially not in the post-studio department at California Institute of the Arts (CalArts). Founded in 1970 by dean Paul Brach, his assistant Allan Kaprow, and newly hired faculty member John Baldessari, this part of the school was to cater specifically to “students who don’t paint or do sculpture or any other activity done by hand,” as Baldessari explains in Richard Hertz’s oral history of the period.28 But let’s also remember that Malevich’s Black Square was from the first moment proposed as a model for painting as well as not painting.29 One could always produce further Black Squares, and thereby repeat the order of the first last painting from the perspective of “the last things before the last,” in the words of Siegfried Kracauer, or else one could simply cut to the chase.30

24. Ad Reinhardt, “Monologue,” in Art as Art, 24.

25. Ad Reinhardt, “Abstract Painting, Sixty by Sixty Inches Square,” in Art as Art, 84–85.

26. “The one purpose of the art academy university is the education and correction of the artist-as-artist, not the ‘enlightenment of the public’ or the popularization of art.” Reinhardt,

“Monologue,” in Art as Art, 24.

27. Reinhardt, “Monologue,” Art as Art, 24.

28. “I was actually hired as a painter… I said I would teach painting but that I wasn’t overly interested in it. Paul (Brach) asked, What do you want to teach? I said I want to teach students who don’t paint or do sculpture or any other activity

done by hand. I didn’t want to call it ‘Conceptual Art’ so I called it ‘Post-Studio Art.’” John Baldessari, quoted in Richard Hertz, Jack Goldstein and the CalArts Mafia (Ojai, CA: Minneola Press, 2003), 60.

29. In 1920, at the start of his studio hiatus, Malevich wrote: “There can be no question of painting in

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Suprematism; painting was done for long ago, and the artist himself is a prejudice of the past.” Douglas, “Biographical Outline,” in Malevich: Artist and Theoretician, 20.

30. Siegfried Kracauer, History: The Last Things Before the Last (Princeton, NJ: Markus Wiener Publishers, 1969).

Before the inception of his post-studio program, Baldessari had put in his time wrestling with the medium, but then suddenly decided to send his painterly oeuvre up in smoke. This drastic move, which laid to waste over one hundred works, resulted in one “last thing”: a modest funerary urn and corresponding plaque bearing his name and the dates “May 1953” (his college graduation) and “March 1966” (his turn to Conceptual art). The event that yielded the Cremation Project, as it came to be titled, occurred on July 24, 1970, just prior to the start of Baldessari’s first semester as a teacher at CalArts. This timeline is suggestive, for it sets his teaching practice on a tabula rasa of scorched earth. All the way to the flaming finish: certainly, here the lesson of Malevich still holds some sway, for isn’t the crematorium perhaps the secret site of his dark star’s apotheosis as supernova? If so, then we arrive at a “zero” of a quite different sort, one that will not lend itself to any further subliminatory treatment. If we accept the Freudian line that all art is a form of sublimation, offering a socially acceptable outlet for often perverse and agonistic drives, and if further we characterize formalist art as the sublimation of sublimation itself, then here we must consider at least a modicum of de-sublimation, a return of the real. Perhaps this is just what Baldessari meant when he wrote, “I will not make any more boring art” over and over into a spiral-bound note book in his 1971 video of the same name.

By the seventies, the modernist ideal of Kantian disinterestedness had become merely uninteresting; the social stakes of art would have to be raised.

In Baldessari’s video, the good teacher is presented as a bad student, or perhaps it is the other way around. Whichever is the case, this work suggests that art and school have become more closely imbricated than ever before. In the list of assignments Baldessari drew up for his post-studio class at CalArts, it is quickly made clear that the former bad is the new good, and again not just in relation to a formal analysis of art making, but also to the general comportment of students on campus and in the world.

Of the 109 options that he circulated among his young charges, a good number cross the line of legality, involving such things as impersonation (“1. Imitate Baldessari in actions and speech.”), lying (“4. Write a list of art lies, un-truths that might be truthful if we really thought about them.”), obstructionism (“18. Subvert real systems. …Put a sign that says slow in the middle of a street.”), theft (“29. Have some take photo portrait of you just before you go into a store to steal something. Have your portrait taken immediately after the act. Photo the object stolen.”), vandalism (“34. Defenestrate objects. Photo them in mid-air.”), and forgery (“43. Forgeries. Ea[ch] in class tries to forge my signature on a check by looking at an original.”).31 The point of these exercises was obviously to rid students of their aesthetic preconceptions and tastes, to “think backward” as Baldessari writes further on in the list, and yet it is telling that this guided break with the disciplines of painting and sculpture and “any other type of activity done by hand” should lead so swiftly to a more general sort of insubordination, 31. These assignments are quoted from the original document, a typewritten sheet presented in the exhibition The Experimental Impulse, which was mounted at REDCAT, in 2012, as part

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of Pacific Standard Time, the Getty-helmed overview of Los Angeles art between 1945 and 1980. See http://www.redcat. org/exhibition/experimentalimpulse.

John Baldessari with plaque from Cremation Project, 1970. Courtesy of John Baldessari.

a succession of social transgressions. It is as if the post-studio assault on the prior order of art, which could no longer be absorbed by all those media now disallowed, could only escape into a world where symbolic acts have real, and sometimes dire, implications. To read this document today, when teachers have to take out insurance to mount an innocuous museum field trip, is doubly thrilling.

Art school has long served as an intermediate station between lofty ideals and worldly corruptions, but at CalArts, in the seventies, it could no longer be considered a space of reprieve. Post-studio art, while still in its infancy, was directed into society and often against it, and this effort inevitably reflected back upon the contradictions inherent in art school itself. How does one go on thinking anti-business like Reinhardt in what is becoming basically a service-sector industry? The solution proposed by Baldessari’s assignment list could be seen as a form of acting out, at once burlesque and quixotic. Michael Asher, who joined the post-studio team at CalArts in 1973, would take a more introspective approach, in regard to art-institutional matters, with his legendary critique class. The first thing he did was “throw away the clock,” as he explains in a 2006 interview, because “there is never enough time to get everything said.” 32 The resulting marathon sessions of analysis served to focus student attention utterly upon the work of art by limiting access to anything outside it. What if there really was nothing outside art, or to put it in Asher’s more pragmatic terms, what if we simply made no time for it? This is a utopian initiative, to be sure, but that does not mean it will be agreeable, let alone fun. The utopia of art is here met in both empty and full time: a time that dumbly elapses, winds down, amidst agonizing stretches of silence, and a time that ecstatically gains as it approaches its end, unmarked and unnoticed—the end of this class (0), and beyond it (0,10) all classes, all schedules—the end of times.

Boredom, the principle drawback of every utopian plan upon realization, must be preemptively embraced in the art institutional setting. This is one of Asher’s key lessons, and his student Stephen Prina systematically applied it in another highly influential class, this one taught at Art Center College of Design in the nineties. “For years I had wished to offer a class the structure of which would allow me to screen the same film week after week,” the artist recalled in an Artforum essay from 2000 that commemorated the work of the then-recently deceased director, Robert Bresson.33 The film that was played on repeat in the school auditorium was Bresson’s Le Diable, Probablement (1977), which follows a group of disaffected youths through the streets of Paris as they erratically renegotiate the battle lines that had seemed so clear to the prior generation of huitards. Certainly, this was a historically targeted selection in regard to these students, most of whom would have been born into the post-May 1968 moment that this film subjects to rueful scrutiny. Perhaps there is a measure of cruelty in 32. Michael Baers, “Michael Asher (1943–2012): Parting Words and Unfinished Work,” e-flux Journal 39 (November 2012), http://www.e-flux.com/ journal/39/60293/michaelasher-1943-2012-parting-

words-and-unfinished-work/.

Time is of the essence for Asher; he applied the same principle in a work from 1970, titled simply Installation, in which the door to the Pomona College gallery was removed,

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leaving the space continuously open day and night.

33. Stephen Prina, “Devil’s Advocate,” Artforum (April 2000), 124.

Michael Asher with Tom Jimmerson and David Askevold at LAICA, 1977. Courtesy of CalArts archive.

Photo: Bob Smith.

having Bresson restate his case, over and over, to the next generation: the world you have inherited is post-idealistic and, even more damningly from any young artist’s vantage point, post-avant-garde. At any rate, this could be a topic to take up in class discussion, but it also suggests that anything could be discussed in class. Another seminar conducted by Prina on the filmography of Keanu Reaves was even more emphatic on this point. The search for art-appropriate subject matter that had directed the entire course of Modernism toward the zero degree suddenly switched into reverse. The former void became a sucking vacuum, and a new challenge emerged: it was no longer how to avoid talking about what everyone else talks about, but how to do so differently.34 At a time when the old avant-garde mantra, “Every man is an artist,” has been appropriated by every sector of the economy, and art school threatens to become just another arm of the creative industries, the need to extract from the anything and everything of the world something else—a new strain of the “additional element”—becomes all the more pressing.

4 The Soviet example sets the mold: the hands-off interregnum of any “laboratory stage” is typically short. In the American context, the demand for artistic “results” will come not from state apparatchiks but the corporate sector. The seemingly limitless growth of art schools at present obviously answers to market calculation. At the University of Southern California, the forced merger between the Roski School of Art and the recently established Iovine and Young Academy—which counts “art” as a principal area of concentration right alongside “technology” and “the business of innovation”—portends the triumph of instrumental reason over experiment.35 It is certainly a worst-case scenario, but by no means unprecedented, for what has happened there points to problems endemic to art school. Let’s not forget that CalArts was actually built by the culture industry, to channel young talent straight into the Disney studio system. The radicalism of the post-studio program, the vehemence of its refusal, was partly developed in answer to that.

Art departments must always contend with other, often more commercially integrated and therefore more secure, departments that surround them.

One could say, further, that if art school is to work as it should, it is precisely by not working as other schools do and, to put it more generally, by not working as the world does. In this sense, art school, in order to maintain its integrity, also partly invites its own destruction. The particular version 34. I was reminded of this by my partner, the artist Won Ju Lim, who recently underwent a whole battery of art school job interviews where the most frequently asked question was: “Is there any subject that should be considered off-limits in class?” Her consistent reply was no to subject, but yes to approach, and this reflects the

lesson of Prina, under whom she studied at Art Center. It may also be a reason for why she repeatedly did not make the cut.

35. In 2013, the music producer Jimmy Iovine and rap star Andre Young (Dr. Dre) donated $70 million to USC to found a new program, initially named The Jimmy Iovine and

Andre Young Academy for the Arts, Technology and the Business of Innovation.

Partnering with Erica Muhl, a classically trained composer who had just been appointed as dean of the Roski School of Art amidst a great deal of protest from faculty and students, they shaped a curriculum that would integrate the fine arts,

89

engineering, product design and business management.

The mass exodus of the entire MFA class of 2016 from the school occurred partly in answer to these structural changes. The majority of the core faculty also defected and, since then, has been replaced.

of the utopia of art that occasionally takes root in an institutional setting is, as we know, a contentious one from the start. It does not on the whole agree with whatever lies outside the perimeter of its “magic circle”—the rest of the school, the rest of the world—and neither are those inside necessarily in agreement as to the nature of this disagreement. From the outside perspective, the internecine struggles of art school might seem absurd, especially when they are driven by ideological, rather than strictly administrative, concerns. This is perhaps just as it should be, and in this regard we might more accurately define the utopia of art school as a heterotopia, in the sense that Foucault meant it—that is, a place of carnivalesque inversion, and one that is inherently provisional.36 The order of the heterotopia is, by definition, volatile. It is not decreed democratically and certainly not by committee. If we consult the historical record, we find that all of our most revered art schools—alongside those already mentioned, the Bauhaus, Black Mountain College, Nova Scotia College of Art and Design, etc.—experienced their productive apex under the leadership of individuals unilaterally appointed, rather than elected, to their post.

And, as it turns out, the chief qualification for the job was rarely responsibility, fairness, or compassion, let alone “the vision thing,” as George H. W. Bush dismissively put it in a 1987 Time magazine article. Rather, it would seem that many of these people were driven by some measure of righteous perversity. Sadistic? Masochistic? Probably both; whatever it takes to turn the world upside down.

To be clear, upending the order of things in this way should not merely provide us with a recipe for “thinking outside the box.” The greatest dangers facing art school at present stem not only from institutional opposition to the radical lessons of the past, but also from their cooptation and normalization. The bad student makes for a good teacher, as mentioned, and this might recall the ideal figure of the “ignorant schoolmaster,” as Jacques Rancière would have it.37 But I would like to stress a point that Rancière’s text, in its current art school implementations, often allows us to overlook. Has it not become imaginable today that the sort of ignorance that this philosopher cherishes may in fact be closer to the safe shores of the status quo than its revolutionary horizon? Those who follow this model are obviously not hapless pedagogues, but elected representatives of the school-attending public, whom they organize—rather than teach, with all its top-down implications—into a collective forum that can then determine 36. “First there are the utopias. Utopias are sites with no real place…. [T]hese utopias are fundamentally unreal spaces. There are also, probably in every culture, in every civilization, real places—places that do exist and that are formed in the very founding of society—which are something like counter-sites, a kind of effectively enacted utopia in which the real sites, all the other real sites that can be found within the culture, are simultaneously

represented, contested, and inverted.” Michel Foucault, “Of Other Spaces: Utopias and Heterotopias,” documenta X: the book (Ostfildern-Ruit, Germany: Cantz Verlag, 1997), 265.

37. Jacques Rancière, The Ignorant Schoolmaster: Five Lessons in Intellectual Emancipation (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1991).

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Raymond Savignac, poster for the film Le Diable Probablement, directd by Robert Bresson, 1977.

62 Ă&#x2014; 47 inches.

its own curriculum. This obviously sounds good on paper, but paper is also perhaps the only place where it sounds good. Far from suggesting that Rancière’s ideal is unrealizable in practical terms, the problem is rather its all-too swift implementation as paperwork. From the perspective of art school administration, the “ignorant schoolmaster” is the safest bet, the one least likely to generate a complaint. After all, who did not prefer that teacher in high school who asked, just like the first Apple computers, “Where would you like to go today?” Back then, it was perhaps a perception of institutional insubordination that seduced us; now that this approach is sanctioned, even demanded, hasn’t that alluring glimmer of mischief been eclipsed? The “ignorant schoolmaster” is just angling for a decent student evaluation, and I’d be the last one to blame him, because I do it too.

It is to this nominally user-friendly environment that art school has perhaps incurred its greatest losses. The list could go on of pedagogical approaches, once perfectly germane to the field, that have turned egregious by current standards. Certainly, it would be a worthwhile project to provide a fuller, and more nuanced, accounting of these at some point, but here I will furnish only two more. It was not so very long ago that Charles Ray would convene group critiques in his office at the University of California, Los Angeles, crowding the small room with student bodies, and then turning the light off. The object of this exercise was probably to remind them that art exists in the memory and imagination, but that we remain all the while physical beings. Nancy Rubins may have been thinking along related lines when, at the same institution, she had students make a piece based on their weight as her introductory sculpture assignment. (This process began with having the students mount the scales one after another!)

Here again we might be reminded of Malevich’s work at the Department for Bacteriology of Art, where the teacher “considers all painters as medicine considers the sick.” In his treatment plan, Malevich was evenhanded; if he did not specify its application to students, it is because he considered students as artists, and vice versa. In effect, he presented himself as the ultimate artist-as-student, and hence also the one in the best position to administer the cure. To reverse this protocol via the figure of the ignorant schoolmaster is increasingly to rehearse the literally shopworn saying, “The customer is always right.” For students to approach their education in this way, as righteous customers, is to guarantee that nothing will be learned in the end about art, or about society for that matter, where the assumption is proven false from the first moment. Sham empowerment—this is merely a selling point, a shopkeeper’s strategy, and precisely the virus that one should be inoculated against. If history teaches us anything in this regard, it is rather that the customer is never right.

What a guilty pleasure it would be to transcribe those words into a syllabus, when in fact we are asked to produce something more akin to a legal document, a liability waiver, just another airtight page to fill the exponentially expanding folder marked “risk management.” Perhaps even worse is the demand to provide an indication of “learning outcomes,” especially when this means aligning the lessons of class with a range of real-world competencies.

There is no end of art-related occupations that could, at this point, serve as potential student objectives; however, these will surely drive us off the 92

road. That the critical methods of art school can now be applied across the board is confirmed in best-selling books by the likes of Malcolm Gladwell and Daniel Pink, but if it really is true that “the MFA is the new MBA,” as Pink has repeatedly declared, then this might be a sign to draw back.38 Any art school that has instead seized upon this cultural turn as an opportunity for expansion, rebranding itself as a growth industry, becomes something else—anything and everything else. Let’s leave it to others to convert the lessons of the great revolutionary struggles of the twentieth century into the design of a “better mousetrap” for the twenty-first. And let’s avoid nostalgia as well; the point is not that art school was better back in the day, but that it was always to some extent bad. The way to zero is not, and has never been, just a way backward or forward. At every stage in the historical process, the teleological end, the final cause, must be recalibrated through a new round of refusals.

Jan Tumlir is an art writer who lives in Los Angeles. He is a founding and contributing editor of X-TRA. His most recent book, The Magic Circle: On The Beatles, Pop Art, Art-Rock and Records, was published by Onomatopee, in 2015. He teaches in the MFA department of Art Center College of Design and is presently a Wallace Herndon Smith Distinguished Scholar at Washington University in St. Louis.

38. Daniel Pink, A Whole New Mind: Why Right-Brainers Will Rule the World (New York: Riverhead Books, 2006).

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On View: January 28 – May 13, 2017 Opening Reception: January 28, 2017, 2-5pm

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The Beall Center received its initial support from the Rockwell Corporation in honor of retired chairman Don Beall and his wife, Joan, the core idea being to merge their lifelong passions!—!technology, business and the arts!—!in one place. Today major support is generously provided by the Beall Family Foundation.

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COMING THIS FALL TO THE POMONA COLLEGE MUSEUM OF ART

Prometheus 2017 FOUR AR T IS T S FROM ME X IC O RE V ISI T ORO Z C O

Isa Carrillo, Adela Goldbard, Rita Ponce de León, Naomi Rincón-Gallardo, and José Clemente Orozco Prometheus 2017: Four Artists from Mexico Revisit Orozco is part of Pacific Standard Time: LA/LA, a farreaching and ambitious exploration of Latin American and Latino art in dialogue with Los Angeles, taking place from September 2017 through January 2018 at more than 60 cultural institutions across Southern California. Pacific Standard Time is an initiative of the Getty. The presenting sponsor is Bank of America.

Major research and exhibition grants provided by the Getty Foundation.

Pomona College Museum of Art 330 North College Avenue Claremont, California www.pomona.edu/museum

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SIMON DENNY, BLOCKCHAIN COMPANY POSTAGE STAMP DESIGNS:DIGITAL ASSET, 21INC, ETHEREUM [WITH LINDA KANTCHEV] CUSTOM DESIGNED POSTAGE STAMPS. PHOTO: NICK ASH

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January 21–April 23, 2017

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1 MUSEUM • Los Angeles • hammer.ucla.edu Free Admission | Hammer Museum hammer_museum HAMMER PROJECTS IS PRESENTED IN MEMORY OF TOM SLAUGHTER AND WITH SUPPORT FROM THE HORACE W. GOLDSMITH FOUNDATION. HAMMER PROJECTS IS MADE POSSIBLE BY A GIFT FROM HOPE WARSCHAW AND JOHN LAW. GENEROUS SUPPORT IS ALSO PROVIDED BY SUSAN BAY NIMOY AND LEONARD NIMOY. ADDITIONAL SUPPORT IS PROVIDED BY GOOD WORKS FOUNDATION AND LAURA DONNELLEY.

Mark Rothko, No. 301 (Reds and Violet over Red/Red and Blue over Red) [Red and Blue over Red], oil on canvas, 93 ¼ x 81 × 1 ¾ in., The Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles, The Panza Collection

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X-TRA CONTEMPORARY ART QUARTERLY

Sabrina Tarasoff Review: A.L. Steiner and robbinschilds: C.L.U.E. Nicolas Linnert All Access Politics: Reality and Spectatorship in Two Film Installations by Jean-Luc Godard and Hito Steyerl Cora Gilroy-Ware Review: Cindy Sherman: Imitation of Life Patricia Fernández Memory Is In Progress: The Heart Liam Considine Triumph of the Banal: Merlin Carpenter’s DECADES and the Legacy of the Handmade Readymade Jan Tumlir Zero, My Teacher