Between Koons and Merz lies...?

During our last two classes, we've looked at the often inscrutible work of postmodern German artist Gerhard Merz. Seeking to find out more about him, I googled his name, and discovered James D. Campbell's catalog review of Merz's exhibition in Philadelphia's Lawrence Olivier gallery during the late 1980's.

If Jeff Koons took postmodern art to one extreme - creating works that are (arguably) anti-intellectual and immediately accessible to even the least artistically-savvy viewer - then Merz (and Campbell) take postmodernism to the other. It seems as if the viewer 1) needs an art history degree to understand the meaning(s) inherent in Merz's work, and 2) a PhD to understand Campbell's analysis of the exhibition. For example, consider the first paragraph in Campbell's catalog essay:

There are feelings which tax our powers of expression and seemingly defy explanation. Why should certain things in later Schoenberg-that crescendo of an abstract classicism based on pure form -make me think of Gerhard Merz's Italia MCMLXXXVI? Why should reading certain passages of Sofficci's First Principles of Futurist Aesthetics send my thoughts wandering through the four floors of Merz's staircase installation in Munich's TRV building? What was it in the pellucid blue in Mondo Cane that flashed before my eyes the blue of Giotto's Arena Chapel frescoes? Again, and further, why should this artist's Dove Sta Memoria evoke with wonderful clarity the multiple oddities-the rectangular hollows over the tabernacles, the isolated triglyphs - of Michelangelo's anteroom to the Laurentian Library in Florence?

This paragraph is not an exception, but rather representative of the tone of the entire essay. Campbell does not analyze Merz' work as much as he links it - via academic jaron - to increasingly obscure reference points.

Of course, this tension regarding the "accesibility" of art is nothing new. What I find fascinating, however, is just how dichotomized this subject became during the 1980's. The more that artists such as Koons rejected the critical, intellectual legacy of 1970's conceptual art, the more that artists such as Merz felt the need to defend this legacy. They're reacting to the same artistic legacy within the same artistic movement, yet their artwork could not be any more polarized.


In the end, my goal is not to demean the work of either Koons or Merz. Rather, my goal is point out the importance of finding an artistic middle ground. In my opinion, both Koons and Merz belittle their audience: Koons makes work that is purposefully anti-intellectual, while Merz makes work that is purposfully elitist. Surely, it is possible for an artist to challenge his or her audience without alienating them. Difficult, but possible.

Exhibition Review #2: Calligraffiti

Untitled, 2003. "Chaz" Bojorquez, Keo, Mear, Toons, Zender, and Xu Bing.

Calligraffiti: Writing in Contemporary Chinese and Latino Art is an exhibition of contrasts. Currently on display in the Pacific Asia Museum in Pasadena, the name “calligraffiti” is a portmanteau combining “calligraphy” and “graffiti.” And combination is definitely the key element here – few other shows can claim to juxtapose contemporary Chinese calligraphic with graffiti-style paintings by Los Angeles graffiti artists. These two art worlds further merge in exhibition’s centerpiece, a series of three murals created for the museum in 2003 by a team of Los Angeles graffiti artists and contemporary Chinese artist/calligrapher Xu Bing.

While calligraphy and graffiti initially seem to make an uneasy combination, the two are actually thematically linked through the notion of “writing” as art. As forms of writing, the exhibition catalogue argues, there are many “correlations between the elevated form, calligraphy, and its historically devalued twin, graffiti”; calligraphy and graffiti, therefore, are not disparate entities rather but two sides of the same coin. Thus, the exhibition seeks to problematize the labels of “high art” and “low art” that typically accompany these artistic mediuma. More alike than different, both calligraphy and graffiti “address issues of power, culture, and universality.”

The exhibition itself can be divided into three sections. The first section focuses on traditional Chinese calligraphy, as exemplified by the works of contemporary Chinese artist Gu Wenda. The second section features contemporary works that question the boundaries of what is considered “calligraphy” or “graffiti.” The paintings of Zheng Chongbin, for example, utilize traditional calligraphic structures but feature ink blots rather than characters; similarly, the two pieces by graffiti artist Gronk more closely resemble a Jackson Pollack painting than a stereotypical graffiti piece. The third and final section – featuring the three 2003 murals – fuses the two mediums. As demonstrated by works such as Untitled (pictured above), Xu’s Chinese characters flow so effortlessly into the graffiti “script” that it is often difficult to differentiate between the two. If graffiti is the “low” form of artistic writing and calligraphy the “high” form, Untitled blends the two into a postmodern milieu that purposely defies categorization.

While Calligraffiti was well-curated and attractively presented, I could not help but reflect on the irony of a major museum doing an exhibit on graffiti. “Tagging” (as graffiti is referred to by its participants) is a complex social practice; for example, MacGillivray and Curwen’s ethnographic study of Los Angeles taggers highlights “tagging’s varying purposes to sustain relationships, carry on dialogue, provide social commentary, and establish and identity by being recognized and known.” Thus, within the tagging community – a community with its own rules, regulations and social norms – tagging serves as the means by which individuals can gain status and establish their identity. As the authors note, “this interpenetration of text and identity captures one of the powers of tagging.”

Thus, while Calligraffiti does serve to validate graffiti as a form of “art,” the very act placing graffiti in an institutional setting strips these works of their social context, and therefore their much of their meaning. The works begin to function simply as images, rather than transgressive attempts to form a social identity. For example, the placard accompanying Two Talk(pictured right), a painting by “Chaz” Bojorquez, began with the following sentence: “Like syncopated notes in jazz, these two calligraphic clusters play off one another.” While Bojorquez is a cross-over artist (he quit tagging in 1986 to focus on his graffiti-style paintings, such as Two Talk), to analyze the work through such academic, formal analysis seems to miss the whole point of graffiti. Similar to how the transgressive video and conceptual art works of the 1970’s were eventually incorporated into the mainstream art world, it was difficult to tell whether Calligraffiti represented a celebration graffiti as an underrepresented art form or the process of co-opting graffiti by aligning it with established art forms (calligraphy) and categorizing its “cannon” through formal analysis.

Perhaps my analysis is too harsh; after all, I would also argue that it is undeniable that graffiti is an art form. One of the concepts that stressed throughout the exhibit is that when people discuss graffiti, they often conflate two separate concepts: art/creation and vandalism. Although it is true that taggers paint on walls that are other people’s property, that doesn’t mean that their work is not “artistic.” This argument is furthered by the juxtaposition of calligraphy and graffiti, which highlights their remarkable similarities. The two mediums each play with the expressive qualities of words, pointing to the ability of words to simultaneously express linguistic and artistic meanings. Moving beyond the low art/high art binary, it becomes apparent that calligraphy and graffiti are both textual mediums, in that they physically incorporate words (text) and that they can be read as a “text” in the post-modern sense.

In the end, it's hard to come to a singular conclusion about Calligraffiti. Regardless of whether you see the exhibit as celebrating or institutionalizing graffiti, however, I believe that all can agree that the exhibition is nothing if not thought-provoking.

Musings on Kitsch

In class this week, we spent a great deal of time discussing the works of Cindy Sherman and Jeff Koons as exemplars (within their respective mediums) of 1980’s postmodern art. As per other AHVA classes I’ve taken at Oxy, our discussion of Sherman centered on the ways in which her photographs explore and critique of gender roles, female performativity, and the male gaze. Much like the critics of October, we came to a general consensus of Sherman as a “good” postmodernist. In contrast, our discussion of Koons generated more debate. Some viewed his works as commodified, pure kitsch, lacking any critical intervention into the medium of “kitsch”; others viewed placed his work within the celebrated Duchampian “readymade” tradition, arguing that he is unfairly disregarded by critics simply because his work is so unpretentious and readily accessible.

I bring this up not simply to summarize our class discussion, but to demonstrate the frame of reference by which I had come to view the work of Sherman and Koons. That frame of reference was challenged, however, when I discovered the following review online. The article, entitled “Kitsch in Sync,” was published in the New York Times Magazine in May 2005. A review of retrospectives of Koons and Sherman’s work (occurring in separate galleries), the writer links the two artists together due to 1) their prominent position in the art world of the 1980’s, and 2) their focus on kitsch. As writer Mark Stevens notes, “Jeff Koons is a razzle-dazzle impresario of the kitsch object, Cindy Sherman an explorer of clichéd roles and social disguises. They are very different artists, but their approach to the kitschy illustrates the characteristic strengths—and, at times, the principal weakness—of this tradition.”

At first, I was taken back by Steven’s designation of Sherman’s work as “kitsch.” I should note here that I am a sociology major (with a focus on gender studies), a unabashed feminist, and a huge fan of Sherman’s work. To deem Sherman’s work as “kitsch,” it seemed to me, was to make a gross oversimplification. But as I thought more about Stevens’ designation, I began view Cindy Sherman in a different light. It’s commonly argued that Sherman’s work during the 1980’s (such as her famous “film stills”) subtly but powerfully critique gender performativity and the social construction of femininity. But what makes theses works so powerful? This is where I have come to realize that Stevens is actually correct with his “kitsch” designation. Sherman’s photos, I would argue, are so powerful precisely because they draw upon kitsch. Each of her “film stills” draws upon a clichéd, kitschy film scenarios and/or characters (the damsel in distress, the moment before the attack, etc). As kitsch icons, the viewer already has a cultural script of what should be happening in the scene. But Sherman’s characters do not subscribe to these cultural scripts; Instead, they question them. The power of Sherman’s photos come from seeing a familiar, kitsch scene, but realizing that something about it is not quite right.

In conclusion: sorry, Mark Stevens. I judged you much too quickly.