Rupturing Beauty Exhibition
Toward a New Definition of "Strange"
James Elkins
Sorry to be so contrarian, but I want to begin by saying why neither the informe nor beauty are operative concepts in this exhibition. The informe is an extremely tempting concept for an increasing number of artists: it seems to offer a way out of Greenbergian modernism, a way around the current fascination in cyberspace and unreflective multimedia installation, a strong antidote to current practices that still depend on romanticism and the sublime, an alternate to current concerns with kitsch and camp, and an improvement on theories of abjection, the body, and horror. It does those things: but it is also the very specific product of just two art historians (Rosalind Krauss, and to a much lesser degree Yve-Alain Bois), at a specific place in their careers (for Krauss, a moment in which it seemed important to resist readings of surrealism and Bataille proposed for example by Georges Didi-Huberman), responding to particular historical sources (Bataille’s dictionary, and the newly-rediscovered women surrealist photographers), and reconfiguring particular disciplines (especially the intersection of art criticism with the art history of surrealism, an intersection that is put to work throughout the book Formless). So the informe needs to be used with caution, if it is to be applied outside the particular concerns of Formless. Can it really be a pass-key for current post-minimal practice?
Well, luckily I can’t answer that in this essay. Given another 30,000 words I would want to argue that the informe is the theory du jour, which actually functions in an illogical manner to get all sorts of unrelated projects started. I like “ruptured beauty” better, except that the current renascence of beauty is so utterly conceptually confused (Steiner, Hickey, Nehamas, Scarry, Beckley, Saint-Girons… the situation is entirely ridiculous). There is no theory of the emergence of beauty: even Hickey’s theory is so riddled with contradictions (and his teaching shot through with inconsistent students) that it is more an inspiration to change than a coherent program. “Ruptured,” on the other hand, seems exactly right.
Let me propose, provisionally, that the works in this exhibition share a sense that the immediate past is slightly but not irreparably broken, and needs to be repaired—not a postmodern alienation, or a nihilistic dismissal of history, but a feeling that the past has just fractured a bit, and therefore needs to be treated as if it were a broken limb or a machine that has recently stopped working. Needless to say “strangeness” as I’m going to define it isn’t a Rosetta stone for this exhibition or for current art practice: but it is a concept that I think applies far more widely, and more closely, than the informe or beauty.
Some brief examples:
1. Perhaps the closest to the informe is Jocelyn Nevel’s work, but with an important (in fact, debilitating) caveat: Krauss and Bois explicitly deny that the informe is related to the abject, and Nevel’s work belongs clearly in the latter tradition. It descends in interesting ways from minimalism, and it owes its themes both to Pop and to Eva Hesse: but it is just the kind of work that Krauss excluded from Formless. That move, in Formless, is perhaps historically implausible given the incremental closeness of the abject and the informe: in the present context, it’s interesting that Nevel’s work also asks for a rethinking of the utility of the older traditions—there’s a dislocation, a “rupture,” in the use of recent art history, which fits my theme.
2. Another of the “illegitimate” readings of the informe equates it with whatever is taken to be unrepresentable. Shane Huffman’s installation includes all kinds of ordinary objects imagined as if they were the exotic and nearly invisible traces and notations of science. Ultimately, work of this kind (including, for example, the overtly domestic images made by Marco Breuer) owes its genealogy not to Bataille but to Jean-François Lyotard, especially the seminal exhibition Les Immaterieux which posited a postmodern sublime understood as immanent presence without signification. (A recent continuation, in modernist mode, is Alain Besançon’s book The Forbidden Image.) The more mysterious the traces, the deeper the advance into the unrepresentable: such is the proposal made by this kind of art, which I find very promising. It’s also the case that the past—in this case, the past of art that worked with science—is in need of extensive rethinking.
3. Michael Kiresuk’s paintings belong more systematically to the same post-minimalist field, where “systematic” denotes an absence of references outside the immediate domain of painting (as it’s defined, in particular, by Stephen Melville’s very important catalogue As Painting). His multiply-layered paintings also refuse to display the fastidious and labor-intensive manner in which they were produced, unless—as he says—a viewer happens to notice the thickness of the paint in cross-section. That reticence is extreme, but it could be made even more so: it could be absolutely disguised, and at the moment there is nothing in the logic of the paintings themselves that would argue against such a move, unless it is a sense that the way forward cannot be any simple extension of minimalist and support/surface methods—and in that case, again, history is just a bit dislocated. The quandary over history’s health is part of the field of ambitious painting after minimalism.
4. Marie Krane Bergman’s paintings are informed by the same history—a history, as Melville says, in which painting can no longer go on being counted as it has been in the past, as a succession of individual exemplars or masterpieces. Instead painting has to remember that history, and acknowledge its impossibility (that is, it’s no longer possible for any single painting to exemplify Painting for any given moment), while at the same time working in such a way that “counting,” as Melville puts it, can continue as a possibility. Bergman’s paintings do that in an exemplary fashion, engaging the history of minimalism and also painting’s illusionistic past. They work “as painting” (Melville’s term again): as examples of what painting’s ambition can do, and what it has to leave behind. Bergman systematizes illusion as if it were a child who has misbehaved—regimenting, quantifying, and measuring out how illusion can work, and dispersing it (in an ultra-rational but private fashion) across several canvases and numbered projects. This is illusionism remembered as a machine, and minimalism practiced as a code: a very promising direction for painting, one with parallels to Duchamp’s utterly unbelievable but deeply professed interest in science.
The artists in this exhibition are skeptical about particular elements of the history of modernism: in Nevel’s and Huffman’s work there are multiple object of skepticism (science, reason, Pop, the abject, adequate representation); for Kiresuk and Bergman it’s painting as method, or method as painting. One of the affects of such work is strangeness, which I’ll define here provisionally as a sense that history has become either unreliable or dysfunctional, and therefore in need of artificial regimentation and protracted study. Strangeness in this sense is different both from surrealist unheimlichkeit and from postmodern alienation or appropriation. This is work that takes history seriously (otherwise I wouldn’t be writing this catalogue): but a common thread is the oddity of the operations that seem necessary to reconfigure the broken machinery of the past into some kind of working order.
5. Frances Whitehead’s work is dense with the kind of strangeness I have in mind. Her sculpture is from a late-romantic classic, Holland’s Moth Book, which is full of poetic apostrophes about the luscious and sensual (and anti-social) business of moth collecting in places like China. It’s also full of Victorian seriousness about natural history, and replete with Latin names and dry descriptions. So what does an enormous version of an early twentieth-century spreading board (a disused kind of board, itself an antique) have to say about sculpture, about natural history, about the bodies of the collector and the moth, about the environment, and even about late romanticism? Lots of things, but let me close by mentioning just one, which has resonance with all the works in this show: let me propose that the sheer size of the object is a lovely way of proposing the enormous conceptual machinery that is needed—that would be needed—to bring these themes into the twenty-first century. Cultural dislocation, as in a broken hip that needs an artificial joint: that is a principal form of art history at the moment.
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