Art Lies, Volume 66, Summer 2010 Page: 22
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merely perpetuate itself by suspending critical animation so that it may
enjoy a kind of blessed immunity and freely circulate in the marketplace.
Whereas there is another kind of strategy-or, rather, an approach-liable
to arrest the flow of language, and at the risk of sounding naive or ide-
alistic, is more linked to breaking ground and therefore of a more pro-
ductive nature, happening not in order to create a vacuum but because
it's doing things for which no language yet exists. Duchamp's readymade
being probably the best example of the latter.
It's interesting that most consummately strategic art-or at least
most of the art I have taken to task in the past-is painting. There is some-
thing fundamentally safe about painting. Although it is quite literally the
most historically saturated medium, and is therefore the least open to
innovation (and also the most difficult to write about), no matter how bad,
idiotic or offensive it is (i.e., Merlin Carpenter), it's still eminently market-
able as an object. (Who would want to buy a two-by-four with a bunch of
decals of cars on it? Now that's truly retarded.)
I r E,t
/
* '
i
ji ri
Merlin Carpenter, I'm Bored, 2006; wood and pencil; 263/4 x 161/2 x 3/4; courtesy
the artist and Mitterrand + Sanz, Zurich
Another thing worth considering is the word "strategy" itself, because
it is anything but innocent. Originally a militaristic term, it was taken over
by marketing (which accounts for its primary meaning now) and was even-
tually imported into art. I'm not sure if it would be possible to verify this
claim, but I suspect that the word entered artspeak under a political star
and was gradually ushered into a more market-oriented constellation, sothat now you hear dubious, aggressive-sounding catchphrases like "strat-
egies of visibility," as if something other than higher auction prices were
at stake. It is also curious to note that consummately strategic art seems
to perfectly replicate this philological journey.
JL In regard to origins, I think that most artists engaged in deliberate
idiocy are probably not interested. They are more concerned with immedi-
ate effects, which in itself is not a bad thing. If the work is good, this can
be its own particular approach to history-one in which the artist is pos-
iting themselves as a subject rather than a detached objective observer. I
actually think problems arise when there is an unacknowledged attitude
of disenfranchisement; particularly when the work's meaning is staked on
it. I think there are a lot of artists out there who make angry, aggressive
art not out of a desire to shock people but out of anger that not enough
people are paying attention to them. This is ego-driven rather than stra-
tegic. There is also work that is willfully anti-ideological without recog-
nizing that this, too, is an ideology. It is a kind of rampant individualism.
Artists have always been attached to this attitude because it is roman-
tic. But when you see the way this individualism has become the rule of
the culture, perpetuated by power in the name of exchange, it starts to
look a little naive. Most of my friends disagree, but I actually think Merlin
Carpenter's work has a funny sort of humility to it. Yes, it is aggressive and
occasionally offensive. But it also reveals the futility and absurdity of its
own pithy gestures. It is a million miles from Dan Colen, whose work-to
me-is simply nihilistic. We have seen time and again how quickly nihil-
ism, anti-ideology and anti-aesthetics can be instrumentalized. I am not
opposed to strategy. I just think it needs to be employed in a constructive
way, and for the right reasons. Stephen Prina is an artist whose work I love.
His installations are funny and strategic. They have a lightness as well-
not a sledgehammer blow like Carpenter's. Work that actively engages the
political is always going to have enemies as well as friends, because it
makes those very distinctions.
CS You make a number of excellent points, and in particular, I think you're
entirely right to counter my either/or tendency to flatten the subject
with a description of the more nuanced hydra-headed affair that idiocy
is. However, I don't know that the current perpetrators of idiocy are as
insouciant with regard to origins as you suggest. I say this because the idi-
otic in art seems to me to be fundamentally reactive. Of course, this is a
hard distinction to make, because any historically aware art is to a certain
extent reactive, otherwise it's outsider art. But while this reactivity seems
to be but one part-one ingredient that drives artistic practice-it seems
to play a thoroughly dominant role in the idiotic, which is to say, it's all
reaction, or even, as I have already claimed elsewhere, preemptive reac-
tion. Even though I'm not so sure such a gesture, by virtue of being so self-
consciously pseudo-subversive, falls within the benighted ambit of idiocy.22 ART LIES NO. 66
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Gupta, Anjali. Art Lies, Volume 66, Summer 2010, periodical, 2010; Houston, Texas. (https://texashistory.unt.edu/ark:/67531/metapth228031/m1/24/?q=%22Puleo%2C+Risa%22: accessed May 28, 2024), University of North Texas Libraries, The Portal to Texas History, https://texashistory.unt.edu; .