Art Lies, Volume 66, Summer 2010 Page: 24
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it wasn't "original") about Japanese anime culture, cribbed from pop art,
etc., and only later entered a state of pure production. Smith's work, how-
ever, is predicated upon not having an idea. No idea, no subject matter,
but his own name which is meant to bracket the issue of subject matter,
the absence of idea (am I quoting you from somewhere?), while obeying
a blind will to produce, which cannot be merely justified by the fact that
artists make art, although that certainly plays a role in it. However sancti-
monious it may sound, Smith is conceding to an injunction to produce, to
overproduce-even if he is only doing so in appearance, speciously. In his
recent review of Besides, With, Against, and Yet: Abstraction and the Ready-
Made Gesture at the Kitchen, Morgan Falconer shrewdly characterizes the
anxiety around painting over the past forty years in Beckettian terms: "I
can't go, I'll go on."' That is a quite trenchant and succinct formulation of
the matter, reflecting a quandary that the work of Josh Smith encapsulates
with flatulent precision, to the point of totally parodying it.Francis Picabia, Villejuif, 1951; oil on canvas; 24 x 193/4 inches; courtesy Tibor de
Nagy Gallery, New York, and Galerie Michel Vidal, Paris
Once, I had a conversation with a guy working on a Diesel campaign
that involved a fist-shaped bottle of cologne. Their intention was to dis-
tribute giant plastic fists to graffiti artists who would write on them and
then photograph the fists in public places. This was to be followed by an
exhibition of the photography in which an even larger fist would be dis-
played in the center of the gallery. They were going have a troop of guys
doing parkour, jumping off of the fist at the opening. This is so supremely
stupid, I just might have liked it. It would have been an enormous spec-
tacle in the worst possible taste. It would have been a disaster, I'm sure.
Maybe that is why Diesel rejected it.
CS Picabia, indeed. He also embodies the more romantic, self-destruc-
tive side of a certain kind of rock-star dandyism (which was a torch that
Kippenberger bore to the bitter end). As for what you say about Josh
Smith-I am afraid I am going to have to disagree. First of all, I see a big
difference between your compulsion to produce and his. While there is
something unbalanced about what you do-and possibly why you do it-
it has nothing to do with pure production. As for Murakami and Hirst,
well, they are two different beasts altogether. Hirst made a few good
works with classical, high-stakes ideas in the nineties, and he has basi-
cally been repeating himself ever since. His status as a producer came
later-but he had an idea. Murakami, let's say, also had an idea (even ifUAF
Street view of Diesel "Be Stupid" campaign, 2010
As for the Diesel ad-yes, it is most maddening. Anytime I saw it in a
recent trip to New York, I was consumed with a kind of outrage and humil-
iation. Why is that? I think it was because it made me feel quite powerless.
Because it, as a marketing strategy, seemed so invulnerable and straight-
jacketing. But what made it so invulnerable and straightjacketing? A dia-
bolical, understated awareness that it is telling "us" to do something "we"
are already doing (taking it for granted that "we," whoever "we" are, are24 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/m1/26/?q=%22Puleo%2C+Risa%22: accessed June 7, 2024), University of North Texas Libraries, The Portal to Texas History, https://texashistory.unt.edu; .