Let us Declare the End of All Ends

I may take flight, but all the while I am fleeing, I will be looking for a weapon! -Ludwig Fischer

Ryan Trecartin's rise within the art market has been ballistic. His practice has been enthusiastically framed, or perhaps I should say marketed, like MTV, as the voice of a generation--a principle dear to our institutions of higher curating. I am referring of course to Younger than Jesus. Trecartin's ambitious installation functioned as the exhibition's battle cry--the exuberant and idiomatic scream of a generation.

The embrace of Trecartin has been nearly universal. There has been no true criticism, but much written about his work. It certainly elicits the awe of those joyous technicians of excoriating prose that rest content tracing the surface and contours of a practice without assessing its stakes or its inner logic. Yes, I know. It is altogether untimely, even unfashionable--dare I say unzeitgemäß in my father's tongue--to insist on the persistent necessity of taking a position. For one might legitimately ask what does a position mean in a world more post than any post.

Yet, if one stubbornly persists in searching for his artistic position, one need not go further than his current curatorial effort at Vox Populi, entitled VOX V. True to his practice and to his credit, Trecartin approaches the show with utmost seriousness, which within the logic of his practice necessitates a certain requisite lack of sincerity. If Trecartin's work and the world it powerfully evokes and indisputably engenders does indeed place itself under the sign of being post all posts, the end of all ends--post-post-modern, post-gender, post-castration--in playing the role of curator he by no means disappoints, joyously affirming the end of all sincerity, a world in which mockery is akin to the highest praise.

The logic that is here laid bare for all to see and to consume is simply put the death drive--a tendency to regression, to homeostasis, that is the plight of all organic life. The orchestration and monstrous pairings that result whether through ingenuity or happenstance systematically and incisively demolish the claim to value, to seriousness, to integrity, and in the last instance, to art. All distinctions and pretension to critique here fade away into oblivion, indifference. He weaves an obscene context in which each individual work through no fault of its own devalues itself, declaring its headlong drive to annihilation by simply being a part of the collection.

We have an instance here where the whole, the organon, destroys the autonomy of the parts by mixing them all in an hermaphrodictic bog. The individual works are reduced to their bare and pathetic desire to simply be in the show. A work adequate to the monstrosity of the spectacle would no doubt have to insist on its self-effacement, simply and adeptly enunciating its own death...2 + 3 + times, its own desire to be consumed.

But for all its virtues there is too little thought for my taste. Yes, thought is sacrificed to the joys of consumption. I at the very least wonder why in Trecartin's truly abject future the only determinant of identity clearly not purportedly overcome is capital. For those who invest his characters and the virtual world they inhabit with what at times appears to be a utopian joy should be reminded that their blissful identitilessness may be little else than the effect of the grotesque machinations of a world stripped bare by the ruthlessly abstract potency of the universal equivalent. The promise of virtual equality may be nothing more than the freedom extorted by the solicitation to consume.

Visions of Excess

I doubt, in fact, that it is possible to give a serious definition of art unless we examine the question in terms of one constant—namely the transformation of art into merchandise.  In our time this process has accelerated to the point at which artistic and commercial values are superimposed.  And if we are concerned with the phenomenon of reification then art will be a particular instance of that phenomenon—a form of tautology. -Marcel Broodthaers

Nick Paparone’s recent installation, Bacchanal-Tootsie Roll Whip, soon coming to a close at Vox Populi, reopens a wound in that body which still, through graphic habitus, bears the name modernity. The wound was inflicted long ago.  But like a cut administered by the most precise of samurais, the living corpse remains standing until a gentle breeze separates head from body.  My Belgian master—Marcel Broodthaers—was the gentle breeze, the most uncanny of messengers that announced the art works’ decapitation—the end of its illustrious exception from market forces.  This one constant, this stellar axiom, remains our condition of artistic labour.

Despite the fetid air that today cloaks such announcements, bellowed chiefly from the stuffy corridors of academe, we should not shy away from committing this axiom to memory, digesting it, as Marcel digested Mallarmé’s poems.  

As Paparone shows indelicately, with pomp, fist pound, and bombast, its grip on our artistic present tightens all the more that it is dismissed as the concern of theoretical curmudgeons who frown fustily on aesthetic delights.

Of course Paparone's Bacchanal does not follow the path of my dear Marcel.  Such a grand spectacle of our hopelessness is not to the latter’s taste.  The spectacle is hopeless not because it exposes us to our miserable condition, to our incessant infantalization.  Rather it is hopeless because the feelings it rouses in us are the very affects that keep us subjected.  We remain enthralled to the very thing that menaces us. 

Being forced now and then to bath in one’s own vomit, to consume one’s own abscesses, has its virtues.  But if we are to slurp up our own phantasmagoric mess, we must not cloak its taste with sweetener, disguise it with candy coating. There is no more cynical a gesture than reinforcing the confusion that leads us to think we are eating chocolate while all along we are swallowing shit.

But before the thread is lost let me return to the wound swollen with puss, for like all infections they fester with neglect. So it is a great thing indeed that Paparone has exposed the wound to Philly’s fresh air, restaging the empty ritual of the art market, its continual and desperate attempt to resuscitate the fallen idol, ART, by injecting a little 'life,' i.e., capital, into its veins, comically rendered through the serial sacrifice of a little Mountain Dew before an altar erected to Brancusi’s The Kiss. 

But the sacrifice could not be more delusional, the scene more pathetic, the maenads less feminine, reduced as they are to cruel and pitiless embodiments of the most adolescent of male gazes.  Faceless and exhausted, they pour libation after libation, drained of joy, unable to summon the god.  As lifeless as a gangbang.  There is no Dionysian revelry in this bacchanal, in this simulation of the orgiastic, that seeks through its wasteful and senseless consumption, this ultra mundane bloodletting, to breathe life back into art, into the modernist monument. 

So hopeless is the attempt at revitalization that all we devotees of the market can offer it are gift’s in the form of small framed abstractions that give back to the idol, works composed of its own excretions (the pictures resemble shit or chocolate smears). Blood and shit to soda and chocolate: an abject transubstantiation.  A sardonic parody of high art’s fetishization, of its deification and destruction at the hands of the market’s unrelenting law.  This is all too cleverly conveyed by the equivalence of sign established between Brancusi’s The Kiss, updated in gold, and Pennsylvania’s own, Hershey’s Kiss, establishing at the center of the altar the symbolic relation between gold and shit, the high (the Museum) and the low (the Market Place), as if signed by John Miller himself.  The lovers’ embrace sullied by the Hershey turds they excrete, surrounded by images that reflect back to the idol its own filth.  Reification indeed dear Marcel.  The strategy no doubt is to rouse the corpse with its own deadly evacuations.

And indeed such a vision of excess is worth pursuit.  One would hardly be astonished if one found a well worn copy of the selected writings of that grandiloquent terrorist of the concept, George Bataille, upon Paparone’s bedside table, so innocently and naively does he move through a whole litany of Bataille’s favorite tropes: the grand equation that links high and low culture, porn and art, the sacred and the profane, the ecstatic and the abominable, shit and gold, sex and death, expulsion and consumption through the restriction and unrestriction, build up and release, of this cosmic economy. 

But to write large the spectacle of the art market’s reification hardly disturbs the spectacle.  Too little does it transgress its law, too little does it thirst for its annihilation. 

What it does do, however, is trample on the nostalgia, drifting toxically through our present, for that utopian spring that once gushed naturally from the pores of the artist-militant.  I agree.  Nostalgic fits for adolescence must be crushed.  Good riddance. 

But if in fact we are left only with the cynical pleasure of enunciating the obsolescence of the utopian dream, I want none of this dilemma.  Nostalgia or cynicism is a false choice, fit for a night on the town and its promise of good fun, but not the artist’s vocation.  This is not la promesse de Bonheur.  We have simply leapt from the horn of nostalgia to be impaled upon that of cynicism.  

We artists must dissolve this dilemma upon which Bacchanal—Tootsie Roll Whip divides.