VOLUME 21, NUMBER 2 ART CRITICISM Art Criticism vol. 21, no. 2 Art Department State University of New York at Stony Brook Stony Brook, NY 11794-5400 The editor wishes to thank Art and Peace, The Stony Brook Foun­ dation, President Shirley Strum Kenny, Provost Robert L. McGrath, and the Dean of The College of Arts and Sciences, James V. Staros, for their gracious support. © 2006 State University of New York at Stony Brook ISSN: 0195-4148 2 Art Criticism Founding Co-Editors Lawrence Alloway Donald B. Kuspit Editor Donald B. Kuspit Advisors James Rubin Mel Pekarsky Managing Editor Danielle Lenhard Business Editor Kim Woltmann Art Criticism is published by: Department of Art State University of New York at Stony Brook Stony Brook, NY 11794-5400 Prospective contributors are asked to send abstracts. However, if an entire manuscript is submitted, please include a self­ addressed stamped envelope for its return. Manuscripts ac­ cepted for publication must be submitted on a cd. Please contact the managing editor for a style sheet. Subscriptions are $20 per volume (two issues) for institutions and $15 per vol­ ume for individuals in the continental United States (+ $5 outside the continental U.S.). Back issues are available at the rate of $10 per issue. vol. 21, no. 2 3 4 Art Criticism Table of Contents Administrativism and Its Discontents Mark Van Proyen Introduction Art in the Age of Cultural Tourism 9 Chapter 1 Contemporary Art and the Administrative Sublime 25 Chapter 2 Schizoid Administrativism 57 Chapter 3 Critique of Cynical Criticism 83 Chapter 4 Mutation Mutandas: Miming for Meaning 117 Coda The 2006 Whitney Biennial 155 Notes 161 vol. 21, no. 2 5 6 Art Criticism Administrativism and Its Discontents Mark Van Proyen vol. 21, no. 2 7 8 Art Criticism Introduction Art in the Age of Cultural Tourism For too long, critics and artists have considered the shell without the context of the ocean. - Robert Smithson, Art and Dialectics (1971)1 If I don 't look after the interests of the under-privileged, maybe someone else will; someone without money or property. - Orson Wells as Charles Foster Kane, in Citizen Kane (1941)2 Vampires playing humans playing vampires! How Avant-Garde! - Anne Rice, Interview with the Vampire (J 994? For some, the term avant-garde continues to suffice as a description of a set of display-making activities that can still be alleged to challenge and disrupt the conventionally typical stylistics of a hidebound status quo. Others prefer the euphemism "cutting edge" as a way of valorizing such activities, allowing for a smooth avoidance of the fact that a once oppositional avant­ garde has since become the complacent and manneristic neo-avant-garde prior to transforming itself into a spectacularly trivialized pseudo-avant-garde op­ erating in research-and-development service to pan-capitalism's omni-global fashion industry. It is also still common to hear the label conceptual art ap­ plied to the most recent of these "advanced" activities, although of late the term has become more of an umbrella designation pertaining to a wide variety of artistic projects that now seem to grow ever more indifferent to a logically vo!' 21, no. 2 9 rigorous linking of facts to purpose. But even at this late date, no one has yet dared to use the term Art Administrator A rtas a label for the contemporary art that has been most visibly positioned under institutional spotlights during the past 20 years. This lexicographical omission is no mere oversight; rather, it repre­ sents a programmatic denial of the obvious fact that ArtAdministrator Ar t is what we see when we enter the precincts of art administration, keyed as they are to their own self-serving hierarchies of "importance" buttressed by the momentum of markets that have been administered into being. Such art plays the role of convincing us that it needs administrators as much as it needs artists to come into social being while also convincing us that we need administrators to enlighten our otherwise bemused or indifferent relationship to it. While an extreme skepticism might claim that this is all that ArtAdministrator Artdoes, and that, as such, it embodies no other cultural value outside of the role that is given to it by this narrow circumstance, I do not go quite that far, because it is clear that ArtAdministrator Art is of other uses as well: in its various guises, it takes the form of equity chips that are bought and sold in the fluctuatingponzi­ scheme called the art market prior to their being transformed into inflatedtax deductions, and it also provides a notable service as mute subject matter awaiting proper ventriloquization by the pedagogical-bureaucratic institutions of aca­ demic credibility that would embrace art as a subject of study. And yet, fair­ ness insists that we recognize that these latter-named systems of utilization are of a secondary and epiphenomenal significance, because the "history" that they reference is in tow to a market that is keynoted by mythological valua­ tions that follow from topical sensationalisms that are "administered" into the forefront of public consciousness via the instrumentalities of influence-ped­ dling (aka "networking"), capital-intensive production values and, of course, the amplifiedvisi bility that comes part-and-parcel with the convening author­ ity of the presenting institution. For the purposes of this introduction, it is sufficientto note here that the artistic activities formerly known as avant-garde continue to be manifested in many sub-generic types, and each is worthy of a general illustration. One of these might point to an artwork that may or may not have a video component; perhaps it is a multimedia installation built around a video projection that either slows or speeds-up its image in sync with a soundtrack that is either annoyingly noisy or soothingly calm. Or maybe it is a series of large or small photographs of the artist acting in the manner in which artists are supposed to act, in turns clownish, impassive, or mock-dangerous. Or it could be an ar­ rangement of found objects calling special attention to some real or imagined form of taxonomic regime. It may even include text as a visible component, and that text may have some political implication pertaining to some perceived rupture amid the categorical imperatives of informational normalcy. Indeed, it to Art Criticism very often engages in an algebraic designation of meaning staged as a specula­ tion about what meaning might be, al1-the-while shying away from any presen­ tation of the tangible embodiment of same. Almost never is it an optimal1y executed crystallization of experience, knowledge, and desire, nor does it ac­ tual1y provide the actual moments of dangerous ecstasy to which it might al­ lude. Never does it crystallize experience and knowledge into a persuasive symbol of optimal subjectivity, because this would be tantamount to enacting an untoward aggression pointed in the direction of rhetorical efficacy. Usual1y, it is something quite large, and sometimes it is exceedingly large, making it unsuitable for most domestic dwellings and most suitable for placement in or near a museum building of recent vintage. And almost always, it is something that needs to be set-up and activated within one of these muse­ ums in order to establish a relationship to the viewer, because it knows that the creation and orchestration of aesthetic "situations" has been deemed prefer­ able to the seemingly benign manufacture of objects - "mere commodities" - this on the grounds that such situations are somehow more audacious, and also more representative of a speculative condition of "liberation." The same pre­ sumption tel1s us that the aforementioned commodities are by definitionslaves to an oligarchic market that has been said to control everything to the grim purpose of reification. Most tellingly, it almost never propels us with any real force in the direction of Martin Buber's Thou. for that (and perhaps only that) is the last blasphemy, as far as art administrator art is concerned. As a candidate for the appreciation implicit in being one of the afore­ mentioned situations so pointedly claiming to represent a condition of liber­ ated consciousness. it wil1ingly subjects itself to the convening authority of the museum, which it takes to be its venue and its destiny. Granting the museum the power to make it over into a hierarchical1y-keyed object of said authority's moral universe suffusesit with the taint of bad faith. Given the viability of the above-stated sequence of facts (the past twenty years of art theory seem unani­ mous only on this one point), the final question that remains is the one that asks about the ethics of that moral universe, or put more precisely, the one that asks about the real ethics that are forwarded by the psychological politics en­ couraged by the ensemble operations of that moral universe. This is the major question that this book seeks to answer by attempting to organize the many whys-and-wherefores leading up to its asking. The reason for asking is simple, even if the possible articulation of a satisfactory answer is hardly so: we want to know why most of the visual art that emerged during the 1990s fel1 so short of being durably interesting as anything other than a peculiar sociological epiphenomena. Or, stated a bit dif­ ferently: why did it back away from embracing the genius moment of auda­ cious symbolic initiation while also eschewing the time-honored chal1enge of achieving a masterly crystallization, synthesis and idealizing summation of vol. 21, no. 2 11 meaningful experience? Answers taking the form of quips point to the fact that the 1990s were a kind of interregnum existing between the exhausted will-to­ present-tense originality called Modernism and a yet-to-emerge revival of a new aesthetics of mastery, but of course, one could easily point to the art of the past fifty years as adequately fulfilling that criteria of abeyant in-between­ ness.