Wrong steering

Original / Roger Kingburg, Translator / Qin Zhaokai

Translator's Order

Since the second half of the 20th century, Western art writing has tended to be increasingly obscure and overly theoretical. In contrast, Roger Kimball's writings reveal a tradition that is consistent with the clarity, brevity, and distinctiveness of the writings of Dr. Johnson, Ruskin, Wilson, Greenberg, and Kramer. Jinbao's style is clear, sharp, free, full of irony, and direct to the point, reading it is smooth and refreshing, often making people can't help but clap the case. I hope that readers can indirectly feel the style of the Golden Castle text in the translation of "Wrong Turn" from here.

In a sharp and humorous tone, the author uses the incident in which gallery cleaners mistook damien Hirst's so-called "work of art" and threw it away, trying to reveal the underlying causes of this absurd phenomenon: the false turn that art made in the middle of the 20th century—frivolity and artistic attitudes that deviate from aesthetics. For Kimberg, almost all artistic misdirections originated in the first decades of the 20th century. The first to bear the brunt of its perpetrators was Duchamp. The elitist indulgence that began with the advent of Dada, Surrealism, and Duchamp had evolved into a full-blown pastime by the 1960s. At this point, the wrong turn took the lead and a rare catastrophe was unleashed.

Next, Through a review of the 2001 exhibition "Revelations: Projected Images in American Art 1964-1977" at the Whitney Museum of American Art, Kingberg reveals to the reader the process by which these erroneous turns formed. Whitney's press release described Revelation as "an important exhibition of works that have a transformative impact on art." But Gimberg argues that while the works in the exhibition from the 1960s and 1970s did have a transformative impact on art. But, "it's not an aesthetically interesting influence." There are a total of 19 installations in the exhibition. None of them have even the slightest artistic interest." Kimburg can't help but sarcastically say, "As a case study, Revelation is an illuminating event. Its value is educational, not aesthetic. Like a trip to an insane asylum or hospital ward, it helps us become better epidemiologists, giving us a sample of something terriblely wrong somewhere. ”

Gimburg relentlessly notes that the work of The Spinning Sphere, which is interpreted as "showing Naumann's interest in using repetition and ambiguity to create a new sculptural language," "has nothing to do with sculpture or sculptural language." In many of the works on display, Gimburg feels that the most striking problem is that the boundaries of artistic practice or the conventions or languages are being "redefined", "questioned", "crossed" or "challenged" in disguise. He lamented sarcastically: "Judging from the many artists who have been given the conventional honor of redefining their art, you would think that it is only a matter of minutes to complete such a transformation." In fact, "redefining or creating a new artistic language is something that happens only once in a century." Kimberg concludes that the works commemorated in Revelation help to codify a "frivolous" attitude toward art and culture that finds contemporary supplements in Damien Hirst and all the other evil frivolous henchmen.

By dissecting concrete examples, Gimburg ruthlessly exposes and satirizes the common use of reasons and obscurities in contemporary art to cover up its inner emptiness. At a time when more and more art writers are also trending towards contemporary Western "academic" art writing, Gimburg's writing undoubtedly makes our eyes shine.

Dada is an extreme protest against the material side of painting... It is a nihilism that I still have great sympathy for.

—Marshall Duchamp, 1946

Inane: Adjectives, lack of meaning or content; hollowness.

- American Traditional Dictionary

One

The most popular news of the year in the arts took place in October, thanks to news from the BBC. Under the pleasant title of "The Cleaner Throws Away Hearst's Installation," the world reads:

A London gallery cleaner mistakes one of Damien Hirst's installations for garbage and removes it. Emmanuel Asare stumbled upon a pile of beer bottles, coffee mugs and spilled ashtrays at the Visual Storm Gallery on Wednesday morning and threw them away.

I hope that Mr. Asari will receive a substantial salary increase immediately. A person who can make such a mistake is an extremely useful talent around him. In fact, I would like to suggest that he be hired by some prominent London newspapers – say, The Times or the Daily Telegraph – as an art critic. Militaries usually have special and secret forces, so why not critics? As a model of simplicity and effectiveness, Mr. Asari's lean and critical intervention is almost unmatched.

Unfortunately, his beautiful work was soon offset. Mr Hearst reportedly found the little episode "hysterically funny". Why not? The gallery's owner — probably inspired by the six-digit number of works expected to sell — immediately set about reviving Hearst's work. Thankfully, they have a "record of what the work is like". Otherwise, imagine the loss of world culture! In fact, I suspect that the task of reviving the work was not so laborious. After all, this is not the kind of thing we call that cannot be repaired once damaged. The BBC report published a photograph of the work, (original?) Or is it restored? Maybe we will never know. It looks exactly like the work as it is: a tray of "beer bottles, coffee cups, and spilled ashtrays." This description could not have been more appropriate. Let's pause for a moment to reflect on the meaning of the phrase "six digits": that means at least a hundred thousand pounds or about one hundred and fifty thousand dollars, just for a tray of "beer bottles, coffee cups and spilled ashtrays". As far as I'm concerned, I don't blame Mr. Hearst for finding the whole thing "hysterically funny." No doubt his banking advisers felt the same way.

A gallery spokesperson suggested that Mr. Asari's wholesome sense of order has the potential to bring about "a positive outcome that can encourage a discussion about what art and what is not, which is always beneficial". Here's another piece of advice for me: immediately abort the discussion about "what is art versus what is not art." "Far from being beneficial, it is one of the most pronounced mentally retarded acts of our time." It is not a discussion, but a dead end. When critics get infected with the germ of "what is art and what is not art", you know they will be completely bored with art. When an artist catches that germ, you'll clearly understand why critics get bored.

Two

The positive significance of Damian Hirst or "The Littering Incident" is that— in addition to its entertainment value— it vividly illustrates an important erroneous turn that art made in the mid-20th century. Hirst didn't cause that wrong turn. Far from it. He was merely one of the main victims of that detour — or, depending on the individual's point of view, the beneficiaries.

Almost all of the artistic misdirections we tolerate today originated in the first decades of the 20th century. But the elitist indulgence that began with the advent of Dada, Surrealism, and Duchamp had by the 1960s evolved into a full-blown pastime. It was at that time that the wrong turn became a highway, and at this time, a rare disaster was flooded.

The most important perpetrator in this story is undoubtedly Andy Warhol. It was Warhol—instigated by figures like Robert Rauschenberg and Jasper Johns—that injected art into art the evil frivolity that made pop art and its offshoots so eerie and had two faces: a cold society of drugs, sexual assault, and nihilistic narcissism on one side, all smiles and canned Campbell soup. The main reason why Pop Art has won such great success is that its practitioners have managed to combine the opposing elements in their art: adding a layer of sugar coating around the poison pill. For the easily affected souls – their sheer number – it is an addictive combination.

People like Damian Hirst and other professional violators who dominate the art world today are the inheritors of Warhol's evil frivolity. No serious Turner Jackpot contender can lack it. The Whitney Biennial is also full of this frivolity. And almost all of the big-name star artists of the past few decades have been largely endowed with that destructive appeal. It is more of a psychological than an artistic talent, yet the deliberate fusion or obfuscation of these abilities has always been one of the most fashionable areas of the contemporary art world.

Anyone interested in observing the concrete formation of the sensibilities that made artists like Damian Hirst possible should stop by the Whitney Museum of American Art for a visit to the exhibition "Revelation: Projected Images in American Art 1964-1977" (opened on October 18, 2001 at the Whitney Museum of American Art in New York and lasted until January 6, 2002). A catalogue of the exhibition, edited by Krisch Ayres, has been published by the Whitney Museum of American Art, on 184 pages). I don't think many people would find it a pleasant experience. Film and video installations are almost by definition a model of pretentious tedium. Even by strict standards in this field, Revelation is a leader in creating an irritating atmosphere of worthlessness.

Whitney's press release described the "revelation" as "an important exhibition of works that have a transformative impact on art." That's only half right. The works in the exhibition from the 1960s and 1970s did have a transformative impact on art. But it is not an aesthetically interesting influence. The Whitney press release called that period "a golden age that produced some of the most meaningful moving-image installations to date." In fact, it was a decadent and crumbling time, as will be evident to anyone revisiting that history. There are a total of nineteen installations in the exhibition. None of them have even the slightest artistic interest. But as a case study, "revelation" is an enlightening event. Its value is educational, not aesthetic. Like a trip to an insane asylum or hospital ward, it helps us become better epidemiologists, giving us samples of something terriblely wrong somewhere—some cruel, some just pathetic.

It may be a little strange to associate artists like Damien Hirst with film and video exhibitions. As far as I know, Hearst never invaded this art genre. But although the "revelation" consists entirely of film and video works, its significance lies in the artistic and cultural attitudes it embodies. It was an attitude that Hearst deeply identified with his peers.

Three

The best way to understand this attitude is to think carefully about some of the descriptions of the works on display in the exhibition catalogue. Bruce Nauman's Rotating Sphere (1970), for example, was described as an attempt to "shake the viewer's perception of physical space." The work is roughly divided into two parts: an admirable and precise explanation, and an absurd explanation.

Four movie projectors show a small steel ball, placed in a white box on a glass plate and greatly enlarged, rapidly rotating for three minutes. Each time the sphere stops, the image of a white square can be faintly visible and reflected on the surface of the rotating sphere. The magnified, abstract surface blurs all senses of scale, creating a dizzying vortex that pushes the viewer outside and back into the gallery space. The Spinning Sphere shows Naumann's interest in using repetition and ambiguity to create a new sculptural language. In this language, visual perception is explored by changing the parameters of physical space.

Is it necessary to point out that Naumann's work has nothing to do with sculpture or "sculptural language"? Is mere repetition different from being interested in (or deep insights) about the phenomenon of repetition? Isn't photographing a rotating sphere "exploring" visual perception?

Anger is the emotion that is fully exercised in this exhibition. This is what yoko Ono's Sky TV says in the exhibition catalogue: a camera is placed on a wall or roof outside the gallery, and the camera is pointed at the sky. Real-time images of the sky are delivered to a television screen inside the gallery, projecting the outside world into the interior space... Meaningfully, the camera is not aimed at the viewer, but at the sky, suggesting the need to focus on the self and the need for an infinite world beyond the hypnotic effects of commercial television.

Once again, I have to praise the unemotional precision of this explanation—Ono's work is indeed just a film of the sky—and the explanation that follows is just nonsense. Most of the descriptions in the exhibition catalogue follow this pattern. They start without emotion and then gradually become eccentric. When we read the following text about William Anastasi's Free Will, we know where we are.

A video sculpture that has drawn attention to the gallery space focuses on one of its most common and overlooked faces: its corners. A camera fixed to the top of the display is aimed at a corner where the image is delivered to the monitor's screen in real time.

A corner video. Wonderful. I'm sure you can imagine it. It supports the curator's rhetoric about exploring "the connotations of the concept of autism." But what about this grammatically flawed sentence: "This self-referentiality evokes a Buddhist admonition about the importance of the individual's search for external answers and in examining the inner self." ”

Of course it's downright nonsense, and the interpretation of Buddhism is also inaccurate. But you can still admire this effort to mask aggressive mediocrity with supports of a higher meaning. In fact, it is a step that one who wants to emerge in the world of art video must be proficient. Let's look at Peter Campus's The Web (1977). You walk into a dark space and can't see anything until you turn around and face a TV monitor with an upside-down image of yourself playing on it. When you pass by an appliance store with cameras aimed at passers-by, you've probably seen a similar scene hundreds of times. But in that case, you're just being videotaped. In Whitney's hideout, you find that The Web "belongs to a pioneering set of closed-circuit video installations... Kampas's dim projection, on the one hand, explores forms in space, surface, and scale, and on the other hand acts as a reflection of a ghostly night, bringing us into an existential conflict with our inner selves. ”

Four

Most of the installations on display in "Revelation" have the appearance of a scientific research project for elementary school students. But, instead of clarifying and explaining a natural phenomenon, they triumph over collapse, ineffectiveness, or simply emptiness. In Anthony McCall's Line Depicting a Cone (1973),

A film showing the process by which a large circle is drawn is projected onto the walls of a dark space. Then a thin spray is introduced into the space, so that the projector beam is revealed, and the figure gradually develops from a line to a large conical shape, so that the circle depicted is completed.

It's probably as gripping as watching the grass grow. We are told that in Shutter Interaction (1975), Paul Sharits "explored the material properties of film and the rigorous analysis of the mechanics of cinema." What we actually see, however, is three colored rectangles fluttering and flickering on the wall, while some sort of indistinguishable murmur ("abstract dubbing") is transmitted in. Viewers were warned that this "flickering effect could be harmful to people with epilepsy." But what about those who are allergic to arrogant, pseudo-artistic dressed up in half-digested, fragments of scientific terms? Where is that obviously dangerous health warning?

Many of these devices have a political component. For example, in Vito Acconci's Alternative to the Second Vision (1974), I overheard the artist broadcast "a series of communiqués from 20th-century left-wing revolutionaries like Che Guevara, Franz Fanon, and Ebi Hoffmann to express what he and other artists felt was the loss of direction and integrity that took place during the Vietnam War." Of course there was a loss of direction and integrity during that time, but it was a loss not discovered by Aconzi, but represented by artists like him.

While political undercurrents are highly perceptible in exhibitions like Revelation, what is more striking is that the boundaries or conventions or language of artistic practice are being "redefined," "questioned," "crossed," or "challenged." We've seen how Bruce Naumann's stupid films can be described as "creating a new sculptural and cinematic language". The same situation occurs almost every other work in this exhibition. Joan Jonas' Environment (1976/2001) is said to have "redefined the boundaries between sculpture and cinema". Simone Forti was given the honor of creating "an iconic work that defines a new language of movement." Robert Morris is described as "with others" as creating "a new artistic language in which our perception of the work becomes an important part of its meaning". Andy Warhol's two-screen film is said to have "abolished linear movie time" among others. Judging from the many artists who have been given the conventional honor of redefining their art, you would think that completing such a transformation is only a matter of minutes. In fact, redefining or creating a new artistic language is something that happens only once in a century, if it does.

"Revelation" is not unique in spreading such pretentious nonsense. On the contrary, it fully represents the mainstream of the contemporary art world. So many art successfully questioning its own conventional ideas is partly the result of confusing words with deeds. It's one thing to say "I'm redefining my art and creating a new sculptural language," it's actually another to do it. Nature abhors emptiness. Faced with a surprisingly empty job, human ingenuity occupies this void under the pretext of meaning. A useful rule of thumb in the contemporary art world is that the level of conceit is inversely proportional to the level of artistic achievement. Therefore, one can expect a high degree of conceit for the "revelation." Sure enough, people were not disappointed. In the exhibition's catalogue, Thomas Zumer (scholar, writer, curator, and artist) concludes with an article called Projection and Embodiment/Separation: A Genealogy of the Virtual. The article observes that a system of "pure repetition" commitment of Deleuze is blocked by its own continuous repetition, interrupting the space of the medium from time to time, shaping the interaction between the phenomena that make up the work and the incidental phenomena. The idea of the body entering space, traveling through time, entering other spaces, crossing generations—and the delay of the body are always constant variables in the medium. In the resulting ignorance, the body is seen to stop for a moment, everything is revealed, and the background is transformed into an image in the image (mise-en-abyme). So we are no longer who we are. Not really.

Articles like Mr. Zumer's are a sure warning sign: something terrible is wrong. Like a labor pain along the arm, it should prompt us to seek emergency help. That's why a reliable person like Asari can be extremely useful, if only there were enough of them. The works commemorated in Revelation help to codify an attitude towards art and culture that finds contemporary supplements in Damian Hirst and all the other evil frivolous henchmen. Andy Warhol did no less than anyone else in making that false turn popular. But the origins of that catastrophe occurred even earlier. In an article he wrote for the exhibition catalogue, Chrissie Iles mentioned Duchamp more often than any other artist. This is entirely appropriate. Because if Warhol is the frivolous father of evil in the art world, Duchamp is his grandfather, the real patriarch. Duchamp's spirit is such a lasting influence on the art world that we can't help but forget that Duchamp is not trying to revolutionize art, he wants to eliminate art. No one was more surprised than Duchamp himself at the absorption of Dada into the classics of art. "I threw bottle racks and urinals in front of them as a challenge," he wrote dismissively, "and now they appreciate the beauty of the art in it." "I used to think that Duchamp's successors had fundamentally misinterpreted him, and that they, though in their grotesque and perverted form, were perpetuating precisely an artistic activity that Duchamp had begun to destroy. But artists like Damien Hirst have to think twice about exhibitions like Revelation.

There are many ways to destroy a system. Duchamp chose barbaric parody and abandoned art. (Why do art when one can play chess?) His successors were less careful. But maybe they're just as effective. The hollowness, through the unremitting fermentation of conceit, has undoubtedly caused damage.

Five

When I finally carefully walked through the dark corridor of the Revelation, I decided to use the stairs instead of the elevator to go down the fourth floor. Down to the third floor I saw a bench on which— curled up and visibly asleep — was a young woman. She seemed to pose so carefully that I suddenly stopped: this is... It could be... A work of art? A work of performance, perhaps, to illustrate the devastating effects of the enormous power of capitalist patriarchy on women? Despite the great temptation, I resisted not waking up the sleeper and asking for the truth, and continued to walk down. When I went down to the second floor and found, curled up and visibly asleep, twins of a sleeping beauty on the third floor, imagine my surprise. It must have been "a fixture," I suppose, and far more moving than anything I've come across on the fourth floor. It even got me thinking that this might be an ironic commentary on "revelation" to emphasize the fact that this is an exhibition designed to push the viewer into the arms of the sleeping god. I hurried downstairs and asked a security guard if the sleeping man was part of an exhibition. He was dazed. Then I asked a passing manager. She showed a worried expression and asked the security guard what was going on. Then they started going upstairs together to find out. I went outside. I apologize for disturbing so much sleep. But at least, I think, Whitney didn't hire Emmanuel Assari: Who knows what he'll clean up? (This article is translated from Roger Kimball, "Wrong Turns," Mew Criterion, december issue, 2001.)

Qin Zhaokai is a scholar in the United States

(This article was originally published in Art Observation, No. 12, 2021)