Anna Ostoya's Avant-Garde

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REVISIONIST HISTORIES: ANNA OSTOYA’S AVANT-GARDE

Tom Williams

In a sculpture from 2010, Primary Structure with a Plant it exemplifies Ostoya’s larger effort to recover the criti- (The Plant as a Metaphor in George Orwell and Other Con- cality of the avant-garde in the face of its failures. texts), Anna Ostoya restages the domestication of Mini- The early-twentieth-century avant-garde movements— malism by making this domestication literal. This austere and to some degree their successors of the 1960s—devel - white pillar echoes Robert Morris’s plywood sculptures oped in antic ipation of radical political change. Their from the mid-1960s in both its materials and its anthro- histories are predicated on the possibility of revolution- pomorphism—its nearly human proportions—until a ary praxis. As Peter Bürger and others have pointed out, motorized platform concealed within the column raises the aim of the avant-garde was to abolish the autonomy a potted plant through its top and into sight. As if sum- of art and reintegrate it into daily life, and accounts of moned by a magician’s incantation, the plant transforms this project abound in its literature. “Down with art,” the vertical structure from a modernist sculpture into a proclaimed Alexander Rodchenko, “as a means to es- base for an ugly, inglorious little houseplant. This partic- cape from the life that is not worth living.”3 If art was ular plant, an aspidistra, was, as Ostoya notes, a metaphor the sublimation of revolutionary impulses, then fulfilling for middle-class materialism and conformity in George those impulses entailed the negation of art. The lan- Orwell’s novel Keep the Aspidistra Flying (1936).1 Her guage of these movements was, however, often total - Minimalist column, a once-radical form, thus alludes to itarian. Futurism, for example, promised to “exalt the swift commodification of avant-garde practices and aggressive action” and to “glorify war—the only hygiene their trans formation into a bland embellishment of the of the world—militarism, patriotism,” and “contempt anodyne decor of late capitalism. for women,” thereby offering extreme, but not unique, Primary Structure with a Plant relays the familiar tale versions of the avant-garde break with the bourgeois of “the tradition of the new.” Just a few years before the past.4 Even Walter Benjamin—one of Futurism’s most Jewish Museum’s 1966 landmark Minimalist exhibition, vehement detractors—succumbed to inflammatory, “Primary Structures” (from which Ostoya took the title chauvinist rhetoric when he celebrated the historical for her sculpture), art historian Leo Steinberg famously materialist who was “man enough to blast open the con- quipped that the enfant terrible was destined to become tinuum of history.”5 If the neo-avant-garde artists of “an elder statesman” in a short span of seven years. the 1960s seldom employed such violent rhetoric, they “The rapid domestication of the outrageous,” he wrote, nevertheless embraced their forebears’ extreme break “is the most characteristic feature of our artistic life, and with the past and repudiation of aestheticism. the time lapse between shock received and thanks Born of the intense political contests of the nineteenth returned gets progressively shorter.”2 During the fifty and twentieth centuries, the avant-garde often seems years since his prediction, we have repeatedly witnessed irrelevant in a “postpolitical” world in which we have this cycle. Even as Primary Structure with a Plant enacts been told again and again that there is no alternative to this recurrence of scandal and retroactive vindication, the free market and liberal politics. While she makes no

20 PRIMARY STRUCTURE WITH A PLANT (THE PLANT AS A METAPHOR IN GEORGE ORWELL AND OTHER CONTEXTS), 2010, from the Autopis series MDF, acrylic, electric mechanism, and potted plant; 63 ¾ x 21 ⅝ x 33 ¾ inches (162 x 55 x 35 cm)

grand claims in relation to these circumstances, Ostoya super ﬁcial observers of contemporary art have been aims to reestablish art’s political valence in the face witness to an endless litany of neos and posts. But of such depoliticization by striving to recuperate the most of these revivals, as so many critics have noted, mission of the avant-garde, if not its authoritarianism, have little in common with the revolutionary aspirations intellectual chauvinism, misogyny, and will to power. To of their predecessors. borrow Carol Duncan’s celebrated formulation, Ostoya Like many of her contemporaries, Ostoya rehearses has dedicated herself to avant-gardism, but without its these histories in both her work and her writing, but she commitment to “virility and domination.”6 Her aspira- resituates and complicates the avant-garde’s program of tions echo the poet and artist Anne Boyer’s call for a revolutionary transformation. Ostoya’s appropriations “provisional avantgarde.” Such an avant-garde, Boyer of works by Gustave Courbet, John Heartﬁeld, Lyonel claims, would “mimic something other than war or Feininger, Kazimir Malevich, and innumerable others machines or violent manly death”; it would offer “a constitute a revisionist reading of twentieth-century art healthy combination of jouissance and juiciness.”7 These rather than a mere deconstruction of its claims to imme- sentiments correspond, in many respects, to Ostoya’s diacy and rupture.8 In her work, avant-garde histories conviction that the avant-garde’s commitment to social become artistic material. In an interview, she describes and political change cannot be discarded without risking her relationship to art history generally: either cynicism or aestheticism. I would like to treat art history as a material or a medium. To me, like paint it has its form and its I. Elasticity and Endurance consistency. It has its history—the history of art history. Maybe it is better to say: it has its histories. The developments the avant-garde inspired have in I like this material. It seems the most interesting recent years been the objects of innumerable artistic material to work with now since it changes . . . revivals and deconstructions, and the appropriation of how art and history can be understood. By work- its forms has become one of the most consistent maneu- ing with art history as material, I mean engaging vers in the art of the past thirty years. Even the most critically with its narratives.9

22 THE TRADITION OF INTENSITY AND FORCE, THE TRADITION OF ELASTICITY AND ENDURANCE, 2010, from the Autopis series 2011, from the Autopis series Framed archival pigment print on paper; 16 ⅜ x 11 ½ inches Framed archival pigment print on paper; 16 ⅜ x 11 ½ inches (41.5 x 29.2 cm) (41.5 x 29.2 cm)

If Ostoya is acutely aware of art-historical narratives, her to radical politico-artistic programs—Abstract Expres- preoccupations are not, as she notes, with historiography sionists, Conceptualists, Futurists, Surrealists, etc.; Elas- so much as with a dialectical reconsideration of the his- ticity and Endurance highlights isolated faces of women. tory of twentieth-century art. One of her most consistent These juxtapositions call attention to the familiar story tactics has involved juxtaposing iconic twentieth-century of the patriarchy of the avant-garde. As her titles suggest, figures with images drawn from outside normative his- each of these photomontages recounts the history of tory. In one series, for example, she appropriated images modern art from a distinct standpoint, and her presen- of leading avant-garde artists—including famous photo- tation proposes an equivalence between them. In one, graphs of the “irascibles” of the New York School, the we witness the male-dominated tradition of avant-garde Conceptualists featured in Seth Siegelaub Gallery’s pio- defiance and, in the other, a countertradition that cele- neering exhibition “January 5–31, 1969,” and numerous brates the solitary accomplishments of the women artists others—and collaged them together in a patriarchal who moved in the shadows. rogues’ gallery that she called The Tradition of Intensity The related Pseudomorphisms (2010‒11) stage similar and Force (2010). Two women (Hedda Stern and juxtapositions. Although many of these photomontages Rotraut Uecker) appear within this ocean of male faces, address politics and popular culture, they also often take but they are outliers. In a companion piece, The Tradi- on the histories of the avant-garde. In one, the American tion of Elasticity and Endurance (2011), she montaged sculptor Eva Hesse and the Polish sculptor Alina faces of women artists that she had gathered from pub- Szapocznikow appear side by side in an arrangement lications and through Google image searches for “a wife, that levels their incommensurate reputations. Both a girlfriend, or a lover of a male artist.” The differences images angle away from the wall and converge like the between these works are striking: Intensity and Force fea- sides of a prism so that viewers must shuffle back and tures groups of men who are united in their commitment forth between them, making the act of comparison a

24 physical exercise. For another, Visual Pseudomorphism in In recent years, Bürger’s theory has sustained this Monochrome (2010), Ostoya mounted reproductions of understanding of photomontage as an assault on art. Minimalist sculptures onto jigsawed pieces of fiberboard Ostoya’s use of it, however, presents a different reading. to make them into a child’s matching game. Views of The Pseudomorphisms—those involving photomon- works from a 1964 Robert Morris exhibition at the tage—often feature two images rather than a plurality of Green Gallery in New York are positioned beside images fragments, and through these binaries, she implores the of formally similar works by Zbigniew Gostomski in a viewer to consider relationships between two realities. 1967 exhibition at the Foksal Gallery in Warsaw.10 She These works do not stage destruction, as they are little thereby made the task of differentiating them into a puz- more than juxtapositions of images. Rather than being zle suitable for both children and art historians. Some of confronted with incoherence, viewers are forced to con- the titles in the Autopis series (Pseudomorphisms, or tend with the myriad likenesses and differences between “false resemblances”) call these staged comparisons into the realities on display. Often, the differences are matters doubt. Their compelling likenesses are ultimately illu- more of ideology, politics, geography, and history than sory because they are based primarily on formal conti- of form, and the collisions they stage provoke thought nuities at the expense of content. They are false not only instead of action. They are less concerned with the because the subjects of the photographs hold such didactic aggression of the historical avant-garde than disparate positions within conventional narratives of they are with critical and historical reflection. They are modern art but also because they reflect the divergent provisional rather than revolutionary. realities of social, political, and cultural life in Poland Some of the paintings from the Autopis series pit and the United States during the 1960s. Although they “elasticity and endurance” against the “force and are often manifestly superficial, these likenesses nonethe- strength” of modernist abstraction. CONSTRUCTION/ less call attention to the lacunae and the tendentiousness DECONSTRUCTION (2010), takes up Cecil Beaton’s of conventional art history and ask why one history famous 1951 photograph of a fashion model posing becomes established while others fade into the shadows. before Jackson Pollock’s iconic painting Autumn Rhythm In addition to their subject matter, Ostoya’s works (Number 30) (1950) at Betty Parsons Gallery in New often borrow their techniques from the historical avant- York. As if to signal to the viewer the photograph’s garde. Photo montage, for example, in Bürger’s theoret- particular importance, Ostoya appropriated it from the ical account, as a strategy of picture building through cover of the essay collection Reconstructing Modernism. fragments, repre sents an immanent assault on pictorial Within that volume, art historian T. J. Clark famously coherence and therefore on the work of art itself. “What refers to this image as “the bad dream of modernism” distinguishes [collage and photomontage] from the tech- and describes how the photographer reduced the paint- niques of composition developed since the Renaissance,” ing to decor. To take this further, the model in the he wrote, “is the insertion of reality fragments into the image becomes an agent in the unraveling of modernist painting, i.e., the insertion of material that has been left pictorial ambitions. She stands, quite literally, for the unchanged by the artist.”11 As fragments of reality dis- failure of modernist ambitions and for their suscepti - rupt the experience of the work, they deprive the viewer bility to deconstruction. She is poised like the aspidistra of the intellectual and aesthetic grounds to address it as on a Minimalist column, and she almost seems like a work at all. Bürger argues that such disruptions defined Ostoya’s stand-in amid all those splashes of paint. the collages of Picasso and Braque along with the As Ostoya herself has noted, there is a gender dynamic photomontages of Heartfield, but his analysis could also at work here. “The image reinforces the stereotype of easily be applied to the photomontages of Hannah a woman as a passive object of beauty,” she claims, Höch, Raoul Hausmann, Johannes Baader, and other adding, “It also promotes a new lifestyle where modern figures who employed montage to shock viewers out of art, not unlike a fashionable dress, becomes a com - complacency and aesthetic reverie. These shock effects modity.”12 At the same time, however, the woman in are, of course, temporary and unrepeatable, but they this image surreptitiously undermines the swagger and represent a corner stone of the avant-garde attack on aes- willful seriousness that Pollock’s abstraction had come theticism and on the separation of art from daily life. to represent.

26 VISUAL PSEUDOMORPHISM IN MONOCHROME, 2010 MDF, acrylic, and archival pigment print on paper; 11 ½ x 16 ⅜ x ¾ inches (29.2 x 41.5 x 2 cm)

A companion piece complicates this concept: RE- she sometimes seems to describe a position rather than CONSTRUCTION/CONSTRUCTION (2010) features occupy one. Like the hero of Edgar Allan Poe’s short Carissa Rodriguez, an artist and gallerist, wearing one story “A Descent into the Maelström” (1841), she studies of the skirts she designed for a lobby installation at the the cycle of recuperation as a way of eluding it. That very Swiss Institute in New York that year. The opposition cycle becomes the subject, rather than the destiny, of between art and fashion seems to be wholly vanquished her work. when the two works are hung side by side. We are con- If her engagement with the history of the avant-garde is fronted with a “ruse of history,” for the culture industries analytic, it is also impassioned in its critique of that his- have become a model for art rather than the other way tory’s hegemonic forms, triumphalism, and exclusions. around. Rodriguez preempts the recuperative powers Even so, it does not thoroughly repudiate that legacy. Her of the spectacle by eliminating entirely the distinction use of the Beaton photograph represents a corruption of between art and fashion. modernism’s pictorial ambitions, while her appropriation Ostoya imposes onto these images a fragmented paint- of Rodriguez represents the arena in which a depoliticized ing style that recalls Feininger’s, as if to détourn the avant-garde plays out its conceptual aspirations. The détournement. Triangular blades of color project outward woman in each image is an agent, but she has now from each ﬁgure, seemingly extending their forms and become an agent in a round of the avant-garde cycle powers even beyond the edges of the canvas. Her inter- instead of an agent of its wholesale undoing. Ostoya’s vention might suggest a reversal of Rodriguez’s one- response seems simultaneously to advocate the agency dimensional scenario, where the opposition between represented by Rodriguez’s image and to lament the loss art and fashion—recounted so powerfully by Clark—is of the avant-garde oppositionality that this cynical overcome. Perhaps she’s offering modernism as the anti - detachment has entailed. However ambivalent her work dote to its own bad dream. But as with Primary Structure may be, it represents an attempt to recover and repossess with a Plant, Ostoya doesn’t seem to resist this logic of the legacy of avant-gardism at a moment when art seems recuperation (as with Pollock) or to carry it forward (as less and less distinct from the prevailing conditions of with Rodriguez) so much as she simply accounts for its spectacle culture. operations. Her project is, as always, relentlessly analytic;

28 II. Painting Is Embarrassing we feel ugly, stupid, or naive. We are embarrassed to have missed the joke. Most of all, we are embarrassed when One of the most paradoxical aspects of Ostoya’s elusive we feel different from others (even if being different is avant-gardism is her return to painting. She took it not necessarily embarrassing). Embarrassment usually up again in 2008 after a long hiatus with A Sense of reinforces the power of norms even as it discloses their Per spective and Other Attempts, and initially she was inevitable slippages and aberrations. It stems from our responding to a newspaper image of children living on a own propriety and conventionalism. It’s founded in our garbage dump, which for her recalled the rubbish heap desires and in our failure to “keep the aspidistra flying.” of Leonia in Italo Calvino’s Invisible Cities. She decided Some time ago, painting also became an occasion for that it demanded a weighty presentation. “I didn’t want embarrassment. Sustained attacks on the medium dur- to print or to draw it,” she claimed, “since these tech- ing the 1960s and 1970s left it more or less discredited niques seemed too light in relation to the subject of the for a generation. Critics variously condemned its illu- image. . . . Oil on canvas seemed the right choice sionism, irrationalism, subjectivism, egoism, and spiri- because of its gravity, its historical meaning and value.”13 tuality, and its commodity status compromised its She built on this with a series of works about violence legitimacy as a critical mode. Mechanical reproduction derived from correspondence between Albert Einstein superseded it, and materialist ontology negated it. While and Sigmund Freud on war (1931‒32). For Scene (2009), few would argue today that painting is dead (Ostoya has she appropriated a propagandistic photograph of soldiers little interest in those arguments), it nonetheless still posed almost like the statues at a war memorial, but she seems disqualified from the most serious aesthetic and transformed it into a Cubo-Futurist abstraction. In this critical ambitions. Painting is irretrievably lyrical, exces- work, the Futurist techniques enact the authoritarianism sively sincere, overly decorative, and indisputably bound that the original photograph endeavors to efface. Her to the marketplace. In neo-avant-garde narratives, turn to avant-garde painting, in this instance, was a crit- Minimalism and Conceptualism offered other avenues ical engagement with both art history and the visual pol- for a critical practice, and since the 1960s, painters have itics of war, and her subsequent work has been similarly had to contend with the condition that these narratives multivalent in its engagement with both the conditions relate—that is, with the claim that painting has exhausted of painting and its real-world context. its critical potential. Those who haven’t have often found Ostoya has called painting on canvas “the most com- themselves marginalized within contemporary discourse plex and embarrassing medium in art making,” and this (if not within the ever-expanding marketplace). Painters refers only partly to its marginal status within critical cir- who have garnered reputations today have often done so cles.14 Embarrassment is also a personal response to the in spite of painting. The work, for example, of R. H. cynical detachment and opportunism that permeate Quaytman, Gerhard Richter, and Luc Tuymans is self- the contemporary art world and can thus be adopted as reflective or intertextual at the expense of material con- a tactic for a provisional avant-garde. As Boyer proposed ditions, metaphysical baggage, and even commodity in her manifesto, such an avant-garde could “develop status. Painting stands “beside itself” or “in the expanded many languages, all of them like lovers to each other or field.”17 To paraphrase Ostoya, contemporary painters parents to their child. These will probably be embarrass- must confront a pervasive embarrassment over their ing.”15 In Ostoya’s account, however, embarrassment is medium’s history and mythology, and, more to the point, not a secondary effect of avant-garde tactics but is the they must dispel the embarrassment of its public. tactic itself. It may even be a condition for practicing The pursuit of painting as embarrassment does not avant-gardism in a moment when the authority and crit- merely contradict conventional wisdom and neo-avant- ical potential for art are very much in doubt. “Embar- garde orthodoxy; it is not simply contrarian. The occu- rassment,” she claims, “represents a nonauthoritarian pation of this stigmatized position belies art-world approach to criticality. It does not presume to know.”16 decorum, and it is in this sense one aspect of Ostoya’s Embarrassment, of course, follows breaches of decorum. avant-garde engagement. Her turn to painting seems to We are embarrassed when our secrets are disclosed and declare that antiaestheticism need no longer be viewed as when our bodies are exposed. We are embarrassed when a condition for artistic commitment. While conventional

30 PERSON CRYING, 2009, from the From a to ∞ series Oil on canvas; 31 ½ inches (80 cm), diameter

wisdom finds painting conservative and other media its of entrepreneurialism in the art world. Ostoya’s por- critical and progressive, Ostoya, instead of ratifying this trait of Fraser, Person Crying (2009), evokes a Madonna narrative of “the end of painting” or “acts of mourning,” not only for its subject’s lachrymose disposition (Fraser attempts to engage the medium as a contested field often cries in public lectures and performances) but also rather than a moribund tradition. for its frontality. Fraser assumes a typically Byzantine Embarrassment in the art world also involves what posture, with her head at an angle and her face forward. Isabelle Graw has called the “biopolitical turn” in con- Ostoya’s use of the tondo, which encloses Fraser like a temporary art. If the historical avant-garde attempted to nimbus, reinforces these religious associations, but the low overcome the separation of art and life, many argue that cut of her dress aggressively contradicts them. The tondo that goal has been reached but only at the expense of art suggests the disparity between the actress and the role in rather than as a consequence of its aspirations. The con- which Ostoya has cast her. It’s a breach of decorum that temporary artist must submit to the prevailing condi- suits its subject: the painting suggests something loftier tions of entrepreneurialism and to the demands of the and more exalted than the person it portrays. market. One must network, promote oneself, and be In a bizarre addition, the folds of Fraser’s dress, along flexible. As Graw has written, “The artist is clearly with the shadow that falls across them, splinter into expected to give life form—to do so, however, he [sic] Feininger-style fragments. She appears as though en- must also be capable of rendering every scrap of his own veloped by the crystalline landscape described in J. G. life productive.”18 Ballard’s celebrated novel The Crystal World (1966). The The artist Graw identifies as having most consistently intersection, in this case, of hyperrealism and stylistic addressed embarrassment has been performance artist– Cubist fragmentation is not so strange in itself. Ostoya exhibitionist Andrea Fraser, who openly courts and pro- often breaks up her images into facets or distorts their vokes the feeling while acknowledging it as a condition contours. These devices of alienation typically work to of an art world that demands optimal social and eco- refuse any easy equations between art and life. Courbet’s nomic competence among its operators. Her recent inter - infamous Origin of the World (1866)—his closely cropped ventions—notably Official Welcome (2001) and Untitled depiction of a woman’s genitals between splayed legs— (2003)—have also foregrounded the conditions and lim- is subjected to similar Cubist fragmentation in Ostoya’s

32 decidedly antierotic The Origin/The End (2009). She defeats the peep-show illusionism of Courbet’s painting by abstracting it into a field of contiguous triangles that render the image illegible on close inspection. The realism and Cubism of Person Crying are not so much superimposed as juxtaposed; Ostoya does not synthesize competing modes of representation (in the manner, for example, of Juan Gris), but, rather, places them in oppo - sition (in the manner of postmodern pastiche). Here, because the abstraction is subordinate to representation (creeping in at the edges), realism and sentimentality trump formalism. Abstraction never interferes with our awareness of the subject’s identity and her abject emo- tional state. The meticulous realism of the image of Fraser belies, of course, the falsity of her tears. Ostoya’s engagement with Fraser is not limited to this Such general proclamations are not often uttered within single portrait. For her own version of Fraser’s Official the climate of pervasive cynicism today. An art that Welcome, Ostoya translated fragments of the original aspires to “address” (her manifestly generic term) the script (those where Fraser used the first person) into Pol- market, sexism, and cynicism must be doomed to fail, ish and adopted the text as her own artist statement for but her aspirations here are reflections on the content of the magazine Ha!Art. This act of plagiarism (although the exhibition. In the wall text, she refers to this program she acknowledges Fraser, as Fraser credits her sources) as “other, less defined desires,” and the text reads more as is not entirely unusual for Ostoya. She also adapted a confession or an embarrassing disclosure than it does Katarzyna Kobro and Władysław Strzemin´ski’s 1931 as a manifesto of the avant-garde. manifesto “Composition of Space” by substituting infor - It is no longer possible to declare with Barnett mation for space in the title and the subsequent text, and Newman that if one’s works “were properly understood, her exhibitions frequently feature the words of others. it would be the end of state capitalism and totalitarian- Her adaptation of Fraser’s script is, however, a more ism.”19 We are perhaps more sober-minded today, but significant gesture. The appropriation of Fraser’s appro- we are also less committed to and less confident about priations (of critics, collectors, and such artists as the agency of culture; to say otherwise would miss the Francesco Clemente, Damien Hirst, and Tracey Emin) persistent triviality of much serious contemporary cul- seems only to strip all authenticity and authority from ture. We like to think of art as perpetually relevant, but the figure of the artist, but not merely as yet another cri- this relevance seems to come at the cost of praxis. At a tique of authorship. For Fraser, embarrassment follows moment when any aspect of life has the potential to the slippages, excesses, and ineptitudes within the criti- become art, nothing is more naive than confusing art for cal and aesthetic decorum of the contemporary art world; life. Marina Abramovic´, for example, enjoined visitors for Ostoya, embarrassment creates an opening in the art to rub up against naked performers at her 2010 retro- world’s hegemonic conditions. spective, “The Artist Is Present,” at the Museum of “Disclosures,” a 2013 exhibition at Bortolami Gallery Modern Art in New York, but anyone who lingered to in New York, which featured a few large canvases and a embrace or fondle them was expelled from the museum. lengthy statement by Ostoya, as well as a series of fanciful Rather than failing to take the works seriously enough, sculptures by her former drawing and painting instructor these individuals took them too seriously. Ostoya’s “dis- Barbara Leoniak, takes on art-world power relations. closures” acknowledge this paradoxical situation. Her Ostoya’s artist’s statement, which appeared initially in comments suggest that avant-garde aspirations have an Artforum advertisement and later in revised form become repressed desires. They have participated in the along the walls of the exhibition space, demonstrates a containment (if not sublimation) of the passions that willful, overweening, and almost cringe-inducing naïveté: the avant-garde tried to overcome.

34 Barbara Leoniak, Maidens, 2013 Acrylic, cardboard, resin, and Plexiglas; 18 ⅞ x 14 ⅛ x 21 ⅝ inches (48 x 36 x 55 cm)

The paintings that accompanied this text tackled these Ostoya treated the Heartfield photomontage to similar circumstances by again challenging the avant-garde. Two abstraction in Work (2013). The original featured a man, of the four large works featured her characteristically frag- seemingly unemployed and homeless, bearing a sign mented re-creations of historical works—Ernst Ludwig reading “Nehme jede Arbeit an!” (which she translates Kirchner’s Potsdamer Platz (1914) and the Heartfield mon- in her painting as “Will take any work!”). He stands tage The Finest Products of Capitalism (1932)—that repre- before a mannequin in a bridal gown as though displayed sent opposing tendencies within the avant-garde. The in a store window. Ostoya points out that the man is exhibition’s other two paintings were based on a snapshot Heartfield himself. Her transformation of the photo - of the Conceptual artist Lawrence Weiner and the critic montage renders the scene an example of the formalist Benjamin Buchloh kissing each other on the mouth. abstraction that Heartfield repudiated. In Kirchner’s scene of urban alienation, two street- Both works make ornaments of women—in this sense, walkers pose in a Berlin square at night as they are sur- Kirchner’s expressionism and Heartfield’s activist mon- rounded by the shadows of men lurking at the margins. tage coincide—but the exhibition’s other two paintings One of the prostitutes dons a widow’s veil, a poignant offer a kind of a coda to this avant-garde chauvinism. For detail familiar to students of this era. While the original The Kiss (1) and (2) (both 2013), Ostoya turns from his- work boasted Cubist angularity and shifting planes torical moments to a recent photograph of Buchloh and of space, Ostoya’s re-creation, Place (2013), subjects Weiner embracing at a 2007 gallery opening. Although the scene to Feininger-style abstraction. She reduces the abstracted (in The Kiss [1] with Cubist angularity and [2] painterly brushwork of Kirchner’s image to simplified, with more circular shapes), the figures are more or less angular, geometric shapes, a technique that heightens recognizable. The photograph on which the paintings its decorative quality. Here, the city occupies the fore- are based, grabbed from artnet.com, is an awkward and ground, and the figures, particularly the prostitutes, fade private image that has entered the circuits of spectacle ghostlike into the background. “I wish they would dis- culture. Her appropriation suggests (fairly or not) that appear,” she writes in the exhibition texts, adding, “I the avant-garde boys’ club (or the “tradition of intensity suspect that they represent Leoniak and me. They whis- and force”) endures a full hundred years after Kirchner per the old indictment: all artists are prostitutes.” painted his prostitutes on Potsdamer Platz.

36 UNTITLED (NON-SPACES), NO. 10, 2011 MONOCHROMES AND LANDSCAPES ’09, NO. 10, 2009 Newspaper on canvas; 27 ½ x 19 inches (69.8 x 49.5 cm) Newspaper on canvas; 20 ⅛ x 16 ⅛ inches (51 x 41 cm)

The Leoniak sculptures that accompanied these works Potsdamer Platz exemplifies an embrace of decoration, in the Bortolami exhibition correspond to Ostoya’s and the reinterpretations of Morris and Beaton showcase paintings in their deployment of abstraction, describing modernism’s lapses into decoration despite its ambi- Buchloh and Weiner’s profiles in amorphous forms com- tions. Decoration wasn’t always so embarrassing: French posed from thin ribbons of plaster that combine drawing modernists celebrated the decorative for its abstraction and sculpture. Ostoya’s inclusion of works by her men- and flatness, and artists such as Gris and Feininger tor defies the Oedipal antagonism that often separates openly pursued it. As art moved toward abstraction as a teacher from students. The embrace of her predecessor mode and technique, decoration became a mark of triv- is a proclamation of solidarity that is posited against iality instead of another instance of “truth to materials.” avant-garde patriarchy, an effort to overcome the isola- The pursuit of abstraction as decoration—even in an tion described in The Tradition of Elasticity and Endurance. engagement with political themes—is evident in a daz- This detail of her own artistic autobiography is just one zling series of collages for which Ostoya organized the of the disclosures that Ostoya advertised in advance of margins of and color tests from contemporary news - the show. Each piece contributes a point to her larger papers into complex formal patterns. For Untitled (Non- argument; her politics emerge not from individual works Spaces) III (2011), she arranged these colorful fragments but from their constellation. into a Mondrian-style balancing act of verticals and hori - zontals. Many of these collages, which recall decorative 1960s Op art compositions and are composed entirely of III. Production Lines the marginalia from daily newspapers, fragments that readers typically ignore, to invert hierarchies of figure Ostoya’s paintings and collages consistently operate at and ground. the contested intersection between abstraction and dec- For her Monochromes and Landscapes series (2009), oration, and it is perhaps decorativeness that is the most Ostoya arranged financial graphs, diagrams, and charts provocative aspect of her work. The reinterpretation of from newspapers into complex decorative compositions

38 MERTEDI 26 MAGGIO 2009, 2009, from the More Real Than What INTOXICATIONS NO. 6, 2013, from the Rips: Future Works series We See series Shellac, plastic, and fly on canvas; 27 ½ x 19 ¾ inches Newspaper on canvas; 20 ⅛ x 16 ⅛ inches (51 x 41 cm) (70 x 50 cm) that render the informational devices completely inoper- is the realist’s morning prayer. One orients one’s attitude ative. The resulting works, which induce tense oscilla- toward the world either by God or by what the world is. tions between reading and looking, between the whole The former gives as much security as the latter, in that image and its textual detail, detach the signified from the one knows how one stands.”20 More Real Than What We signifier though radical fragmentation and recombina- See makes manifest the failure of the notion that the tion. Considering that she appropriated these fragments media can tell us where we stand. from the financial press at the desperate height of the cri- During February 2011, Ostoya adopted the role of a sis, these collages illustrate what Fredric Jameson has model worker when she made Disclosures, a series of dec- called the “hysterical sublime,” or our incapacity today orative constructivist collages, under rigorous discipli- to visualize or understand the operations of global capi- nary constraints, one per day, each on a 20-by-24-inch talism. The works recall earlier montages such as Carlo panel. Many of them, which feature newspaper, maga- Carrà’s Patriotic Celebration (1914) and Laurie Anderson’s zines, computer printouts, papier-mâché (made from New York Times, Horizontal/China Times, Vertical (1971‒ the leftover paper), and gold leaf, repeatedly reference 79), for example. Carrà’s word collage, drawn from the concurrent uprising in Egypt. While some originate newspapers, abstracts language, and Anderson’s literal in global politics, others draw content from art history; interweaving of two languages renders each illegible. For most combine aspects of both. Ostoya superimposed More Real Than What We See (2009), a distinctly more Mondrian’s New York City I (1942) onto rectilinear blocks representational series made for a show in Bologna, of newspaper columns, she cut Malevich’s famous Ostoya created more personal maps of unknowing that squares out of an image of a huge and boundless crowd acknowledged her ignorance of the Italian language. (perhaps a political demonstration), and she re-created Combinations of long strips of unrecognizable and thus Rodchenko’s trio of red, yellow, and blue monochromes merely decorative media images showcase an experience with a fist projecting upward from the bottom of a of the media that hovers at the edge of legibility. G.W.F. sky-blue panel. Nearly all the collages are manifestly Hegel once noted that “reading the morning newspaper decorative, abounding in checkerboards, stripes, and

40 starbursts, often ornamented with expanses of gold leaf a new abstract age, however, but it does recollect that that recall Art Deco designs from the 1920s. moment of potentiality. Works in a more recent series, Rips: Future Works Ostoya’s self-discipline adapts the model of produc- (2013), feature heterogeneous selections of materials— tivism that shaped the avant-garde of the 1920s and including shellac, metal leaf, blood, sandpaper, glass, 1930s. While her practice as the model “proletarian plastic, and even an insect—into decorative composi- artist” follows the program Walter Benjamin outlined in tions. The “pussy paintings” and “pornaments,” in par- “The Author as Producer,” Transpositions suggests some- ticular, in this series introduce the body into formalist thing quite distinct from his call for a revolutionary art. language of modernism. Obscenity and abjection dis - While he believed that an avant-garde art should find rupt aestheticism. The focus on vaginal mark making a place within the existing relations of production and and the display of male bodies offers a counterpoint to become an instrument of politics, her routine is less a the “virility and domination” of the avant-garde, turning matter of Brechtian engagement than a reflection on the male bodies into adornments even as they bear the historical conditions of painting and its display. These marks of Ostoya’s own. They reverse that age-old gender works aestheticize production. They hold a mirror to a dynamic of male painter and his model while embracing museum that was built in the ruins of a factory, and they a decorative impulse that modernism suppressed. suggest that the transformation of the sites of production As in so much of Ostoya’s work, discourse, politics, into cultural institutions marks the historical failure of and decoration contaminate the purity of modernist the Benjaminian program. Indeed, if cultural tourism abstraction. has supplanted industry today, then Ostoya’s paintings The works from the Transpositions series for La Kunst - attempt—in a typically provisional fashion—to make vis- halle Mulhouse follow these tendencies, but their politics ible the history occluded in this transformation. They are sublimated in disciplinary procedures. The ten large, align culture with the industry of days gone by, and they horizontal paintings, each spanning 100 by 200 cen - offer an image of production for an era that makes avant- timeters, were made in succession under demanding garde art into an object of leisure. She approaches this self-imposed constraints. Taking inspiration from the task not only through her discipline and her formal con- museum’s postindustrial factory building, Ostoya origi- ceits but also through her recollections of a historical nally aspired to produce the works by working five days avant-garde that glimpsed something radically new a week, eight hours a day. Although this discipline was within its own time. That prospect is elusive in an era of hard to maintain without a manager to enforce it—she neoliberal capitalism, and the avant-garde artists who frequently fell short—her conceit rejects the widespread championed it often seem compromised by simultane- view that art represents a “zone of freedom” independ- ously their authoritarian rhetoric and their co-optation. ent from the workaday world. Ostoya’s attempts to revise this history take up the past She also applied such discipline to the compositions of as both an object of criticism and a critique of the pres- the works, which are each defined by a small square. In ent, and they hold on to the promise of avant-gardism the first painting, a white square on the right side radi- despite the failures of the avant-garde. ates waves of color leftward across the canvas that follow the rectilinear form of the square on the right side but become curvilinear as they approach the left edge. In each subsequent painting, the square appears farther to the left, as if following the steps in a board game of factory production, and in each case it carries a pattern over from the previous one, so that, in assembly-line fashion, each painting adds to or elaborates the one that preceded it. This formal gesture and its playful develop- ment recall El Lissitzky’s famous children’s story where two squares descend on the earth as agents of the new. The square in Ostoya’s account is not the harbinger of

42 Notes 8. As Boyer wrote of the provisional avant-garde, “There will be a lot of sewing last year’s fragments with this year’s threads.” 1. Anna Ostoya exhibited this work with an aspidistra in Poland, Ibid. where the plant still bears these associations, but she varies the 9. Anna Ostoya, interview by Marta Gnyp, Zoo Magazine, no. 41 plant variety depending on the venue. In Amsterdam, for example, (Winter 2013), online at http://www.martagnyp.com/interviews/ she replaced the aspidistra with an orchid. anna-ostoya.php. 2. Leo Steinberg, “Contemporary Art and the Plight of Its Public,” in 10. Ostoya made many works specifically for her exhibition at the Other Criteria: Confrontations with Twentieth-Century Art (Chicago: Foksal Gallery in 2010 to focus on not only the visibility of University of Chicago Press, 1972), 5. the Polish avant-garde in the West but also the representation 3. Alexander Rodchenko, “Slogans,” in Rodchenko and the Arts of of women in the avant-garde, particularly in this gallery. Revolutionary Russia, ed. David Elliot (New York: Pantheon Books, 11. Peter Bürger, Theory of the Avant-Garde, trans. Michael Shaw 1979), 129. (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1984), 77. 4. F. T. Marinetti, “The Founding and Manifesto of Futurism,” in 12. Anna Ostoya, press kit for “Autopis: Notes, Copies and Master- Futurism: An Anthology, ed. Lawrence Rainey, Christine Poggi, and pieces,” Foksal Gallery, Warsaw, 2010. Laura Wittman (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2009), 51. 13. Ostoya, interview by Gnyp. 5. Benjamin wrote: “Historicism gives the ‘eternal’ image of the past; 14. Anna Ostoya, Jiggling and Rustling, lecture-performance, Knight’s historical materialism supplies a unique experience with the past. Move Performance Program, SculptureCenter, New York, 2010. The historical materialist leaves it to others to be drained by the 15. Boyer, “The Provisional Avant-Garde.” whore called ‘Once upon a time’ in historicism’s bordello. He 16. Ostoya, phone conversation with the author, January 20, 2014. remains in control of his powers, man enough to blast open the 17. See David Joselit, “Painting Beside Itself,” October, no. 130 (Fall continuum of history.” Walter Benjamin, “Theses on the Philos - 2009): 125‒34; and Daniel Birnbaum, Isabelle Graw, and ophy,” in Illuminations: Essays and Reflections, trans. Harry Zohn Nikolaus Hirsch, Thinking through Painting: Reflexivity and Agency (New York: Schocken Books, 1968), 262. beyond the Canvas (Berlin: Sternberg Press, 2012). 6. See Carol Duncan, “Virility and Domination in Twentieth- 18. Isabelle Graw, High Price: Between Celebrity Culture and the Art Century Vanguard Painting,” Artforum 12, no. 4 (December 1973): Market (Berlin: Sternberg, 2009), 159. 30‒39. Ostoya’s Scene (2009) makes some of these aspirations 19. Barnett Newman, “Interview with Emile de Antonio,” in John explicit. See my discussion below. Philip O’Neill, Barnett Newman: Selected Writings and Interviews 7. Anne Boyer, “The Provisional Avant-Garde,” HTMLGIANT, (New York: Knopf, 1990), 307‒8. July 3, 2009, http://htmlgiant.com/author-spotlight/anne-boyer 20. Miscellaneous Writings of G.W.F. Hegel, trans. Jon Bartley Stewart -on-a-provisional-avant-garde. (Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 2002), 247.