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THE LIVES of the ARTISTS Beyond the Cult of Personality: the Emergence of Public Persona As an Artistic Medium

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THE LIVES of the ARTISTS Beyond the Cult of Personality: the Emergence of Public Persona As an Artistic Medium THE Idea: Fischer, West 2007 Published by Schlebrügge.Editor 1Euro TESA DELLA NUOVISSIMAAMSTERWHEEL 105 / ARSENALE DI VENEZIA, JUNE 8TH - AUGUST 26TH OPENING JUNE 7TH 4PM H& LE PRINTEMPS DE SEPTEMBRE – à TOULOUSE, SEPTEMBER 21ST - OCTOBER 14TH 2007 THE LIVES OF THE ARTISTS Beyond the Cult of Personality: The Emergence of Public Persona as an Artistic Medium Alison M. Gingeras fiction. Five hundred years have, and look. From the image after Vasari’s death, art histo- of the young struggling artist Flamboyant. Extravagant. Extro- ry has become a much more in an unheated Williamsburg verted. Eccentric. Meglomaniac. stringent practice. By dismiss- loft to the dj-cum-painter spin- Alcoholic. Sexually obsessed. ing Vasari’s factual errors and ning in an Electroclash club in Manic-depressive. Bohemian— exaggerations, the current former East Berlin, the bohemi- there are as many stereotypes academic consensus contin- an imaginary persists in shap- as there are anecdotes about ues to discredit one of his ing the contemporary expec- famous artists. The inevitable main contributions to the field tations of what role artists entwinement of an artist’s - the idea that legend and should play in society. colourful biography and aes- myth, as generated by the thetic genius has provided artists themselves, are insep- Not all artists continue to take fodder for scholarly specula- arable from understanding refuge in bohemian or coun- tion, populist fascination as their art. tercultural ideals. Western well as plain, old-fashioned society has changed this, entertainment. Beyond the It is not only art historians that epitomized by the obsession mere sensationalism, how are to blame. Artists have with celebrity. The result has important is persona in under- always been granted a differ- been that avant-garde strate- standing an artist’s practice? ent status than the rest of the gies have been absorbed into Gelatin, 2001, untitled, drawing, 21,5 x 27,7 cm Courtesy Galerie Meyer Kainer, Vienna It’s a question that has trou- populace, and were, conse- mainstream culture, sucked bled art historians for a long quently, treated differently. into the allure of the ‘culture time. For many, the artist’s They could speak to the gods. industry’. So, what is left at persona is like the pesky shrew They were granted privileged the artist’s disposal? How, A Refuse Between Mind and positions, disre- then, can artists resist the cul- garding traditional ture industry? Should they class divisions. As resist? Are they passive vic- Matter is a Mine of an inverted baro- tims or active proponents of Information meter for societal this industry? What position values, artists could should artists occupy in this Chaos Used Creatively in Gelitin’s www.hamsterwheel.eu act out safely fan- kind of society? Humanely Conceptual Art tasies, break the Midori Matsui download texts: taboos, and enjoy Many artists have consciously the indulgences that cultivated their public per- are shunned by the sonas as a strategic, often Gelitin’s art projects can be characterized as a humorous moral consensus. antagonistic element in their and humane interventionist practice that creates situa- that is best chased away so The figure of the artist pos- art practice. While there is no tions for a lively communication and refreshed perception as not to impede the histori- sessed a unique duality, elicit- single moment of origin when of the everyday phenomena, by providing a physically an’s or critic’s “serious” quest ing equal doses of fascination artists began to elevate their engaging space in which the participants are encouraged for facts and objective inter- and contempt, envy and dis- own personas into something to reestablish their individual contact with the immanent pretation. dain. more significant than simple biographical interest, there world. Yet this antagonistic shrew The invention of bohemianism are those who have contributed has been an integral part of in nineteenth-century France to the transformation of per- Gelitin’s works obviously inherit the spirits and method- art history. Giorgio Vasari’s provided an efficient means to sona into an autonomous field ologies of Fluxus, Situationists, and Land Art, emphasiz- Lives of the Artists the six- prevent artists from ‘contami- of artistic activity, as equal as ing audience participation rather than artist’s autonomy, teenth century classic, and nating’ everyone else. Derived any traditional artistic prac- process over a finished work. In this sense, they are in required reading for all stu- from the name of a region in tice. dents of art history, densely the Czech Republic known as affinity with relational art. But there is a difference interweaves detailed descrip- Romany, an area inhabited by This use of persona, however, between the relational art practiced by the generation of tions of the achievements of nomadic gypsies, the modern should not be confused with a Rirkrit Tiravanija, and that of Gelitin. Although both of the great Renaissance artists notion of Bohemia designated type of art practice that them encourage the audience participation, using such (from Cimabue and Giotto to a place where artists and dis- emerged in the course of the basic physical mediums of food and travel, Gelitin’s instal- Leonardo da Vinci and illusioned members of the 1970s in which artists used Michelangelo) with biographi- bourgeoisie could intermingle their own life as their primary lations and public performance are far more chaotic than cal anecdotes intended to with the poverty stricken, for- subject matter. Such figures Rirkrit’s. Inheriting conceptual structures from the six- reveal their inner character eigners, racial minorities, as Sophie Calle, Christian ties’s and seventies’s avant-garde art, Gelitin execute and better illuminate their art. homosexuals, and anyone Boltanski, Hanna Wilke, or their performance with their comic (cosmic?) scatology To say that Vasari was a good else on the margins of society. Eleanor Antin used art as a that mix serious reflection with childlike excess. The storyteller is like saying Frank As the historical epicenter of poetico-sociolgical vehicle for physical affects of heat, cold, wetness, closednesss or Sinatra could carry a tune. He la vie de bohème, mid-nine- the documentation of their was, as one critic put it, a teenth-century Montmartre expansion of space break down the participants’ sense of “profoundly inventive fabulist” provided as the basis of most decorum, enabling them to accept the relatedness of their who not only embellished of the populist notions about Continues On mind to the “lowest” cycles of excrements and discharges tales about dead artists, but how artists should live, be- Page 5 of bodily fluids. Theirs is a conceptual art made human also incorporated the self- through the artists’ contact with contemporary life. propagated myths told to him Receiving art historical knowledge and children’s games by his contemporaries. His collection of biographies freely blended aesthetic theory, soci- ological description, fact, and Continues On Page 3 2 HAMSTERWHEEL Gelatin, 2003, yuko, drawing, 32 x 24 cmCourtesy Galerie Meyer Kainer, Vienna A Refuse Between Mind action that dissolves the sense of adult propriety. and Matter is a Mine of Rabbit demonstrates Gelitin’s reinstatement of a land artist’s visit to a Information specific site, frequently to a defunct place to endow it with a sense of myth and magic. The project can be compared with Robert Smithson’s Chaos Used Creatively in Gelitin’s Spiral Jetty. With its gigantic spiralling monument, Smithson indicated Humanely Conceptual Art the endlessness of time, the incommensurability of matter, and the uncertainty of the human perception of it, while evoking the primordial Midori Matsui state of creation through the “molecular lattice of crystals” that connect- Continued From Page 1 ed the monument to its environment. The mixture of crystals with salts enhanced the decay of the monument and its assimilation in the lake’s red water. In a more prankish way, Gelitin made the gigantic stuffed pink with equal appreciation, they adopt them as equally significant elements to rabbit sprawling on the hill overlooking a small village in Tyrol, forming constitute their art. In this, one may see a working of a “pop” sensibility, which a new site that encouraged people’s visit to a quiet village, causing a new is not related to American pop art, but is informed by Gilles Deleuze’s idea of traffic of things and people. Although the appearance of their monuments a minoritarian art. It is a non-institutional positionality that provisionally were different, one geometrical, and the other “pop,” both endowed a new forms its codes of behavior by rearranging fragments accumulated through significance to an obscure place, making it a site for a public assembly as various communicative processes and informational resources, using an well as meditative contemplation. Smithson and Gelitin share certain con- advantage of a dweller of a big city. Forced to function in a major culture with ceptions of and attitude toward things. Describing the significance of a limited access to the institutional body of knowledge, this “minor” and “pop”—”micropop”— sensibility inevitably makes deviations and gaps, creating scale of Spiral Jetty, Smithson stated that “scale depend[ed] on one’s 3 a new “language” to express and communicate with. Deleuze describes this capacity to be conscious of the actualities of perception.” For him, the micro-pop positionality as one that
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