memo #2

on Dean Kissick's Harpers' piece, la vida loca

So, everyone in the art world has their opinions about Dean Kissick’s Harpers’ piece. It seems that most people don’t really want to share theirs, beyond deeming the article good or bad. Or maybe people are so exhausted that they don’t have further thoughts. I also have heard this position circulating that is like “don’t give him the pleasure.” Like don’t talk about it, don’t waste your breath, don’t give “reactionary” ideas air-time.

Before getting into the article and the surrounding hubbub, I’d like to say that I think that the above is a bullshit position and is more worrisome than anything Dean opines. If something makes waves in the field, then it's our job to work through it, if we are going to call ourselves artists, critics, curators, etc. (perhaps the greater problem is that there are not really critics anymore, so it’s literally no one’s job right now to argue about these things!). Making a position you disagree with that appears in a major magazine out to be too fringe and in poor taste to talk about is really silly. Also because everyone is talking about it anyway. Ignoring it pretty much just allows it to be the last word. I said as much in a panel at the Academy of Arts and Letters a few weeks ago, when someone asked what the group thought about Dean’s essay. One or two panelists expressed that they didn’t want to spend time on it–which is fair in an event with a time limit. Someone then said that the essay was at least interesting because it made clear that the art world was not full of liberal and left-leaning people and was in fact more politically diverse. In response to this, I said that I thought that a better response than ignoring or boo-ing down Dean’s essay’s analysis of the last few years would be to provide an alternative one, grounded in a “left” position–should its author choose that stance–that could counter what so many believe to be a “bad take.”

This memo is not an in-depth account or definitive history of the last 15 years of the art world from a different political position, but more of a note on the whole Harper’s affair with some ideas about where I think Dean’s article falls short (+ succeeds!) rhetorically and analytically, and how things are falling apart in general. Maybe some thoughts on alternative analyses as well.

My overall thoughts are that Dean’s article is not very good in comparison to many of Dean’s other contributions to art and culture over the years. Dean is a very adept thinker and has been correct and insightful about many of the curveballs culture has thrown us. “The Painted Protest” is not as good at most of this because it is not meant to be. It is meant to tell an intellectual public beyond the art world what has been going on in our neck of the woods, meant to essentially break the story of how utterly lame we’re being–lame in a way that is reflected in other parts of the culture industry, but has not been industry-standard for long enough for anyone in those sectors to outright criticize and not get totally burned. The art world is already nearly done with its identity politics phase, at least rhetorically, so there is room for this (finally). When you look at shows like the most recent Whitney and Venice Biennials, you still do see the demographics of the identity politics period, but the language has moved toward telling us that the artists are now critiquing that paradigm.¹ We’re on to fluidity, indeterminacy, transience, crossing borders. On to artists being given just enough space to complain about being pigeonholed and profiled as long as they agree to have their race, gender, and citizenship status noted along with their anguish. All that shit.

So, I think the very premise of Dean’s article is somewhat cynical and opportunistic (hats off though). Even the subheading, “how politics destroyed contemporary art,” is clickbait–none of what Dean blames art being boring on could pass for real ‘politics.’ And anyway, the idpol party is over, everyone has a hangover, and most agree that it was like really unfun and the drinks ran out too quickly and we all wanted to go home within an hour. But the rest of the world doesn’t know that, because if there’s anything art people do wonderfully, it’s feign interest until someone says it’s okay not to. Dean knows all this, and also knows that someone has to tell everyone who wasn’t there what exactly went down.

From what I have seen, it looks like the essay upset so many people because they agreed with the exhaustion and frustration that Dean spoke of, but his reasoning reeked to them of what they understand to be a right-wing or reactionary position–the position that there is something wrong with using identity as an organizing principle and institutional mandate. Surely some others were just horrified overall because they really love identity politics art and expression and changing the world through good vibes and the archive etc etc. but I have nothing to say to or about those people.

Maybe the bad vibes that the essay gave people in group #1 just stand in for the fact that the essay also seemed to be...off in certain ways, analytically-speaking. On the Zwirner podcast, Helen Molesworth does a great job speaking for the distressed individuals of this group #1 in her interview with Dean. Put simply these issues with it are like, “Isn’t what happened more complicated than a ‘desire to escape the present,’ a subordination of art to ‘decolonial and queer theory.’”? And these conceptual problems can’t help but come out as “How can you say it’s negative for marginalized artists to be in the spotlight???” The conversation is really worth listening to and finds Molesworth admitting that she too is tired of the art we’re served up show to show, the lazy curation and half-assed identity-focused wall texts. She pushes back on Dean’s argument in a few crucial places. I thought that Dean’s responses were really great, and their conversation a generous and thought-provoking one.

I should say here that, for me, Dean’s overall position and analysis is not itself entirely bullshit. I say this from what I think I can reasonably call the Front Lines. I have been making art, exhibiting it, and writing about art by others for nearly ten years and the whole time I have been Black and a Woman; I have seen those facts of my existence used to my benefit and against me, and I have admittedly both used and rejected them myself! I have felt distinctly wanted for these conditions of my existence, and I have tried to do work that exceeds them, been told it’s a bad idea or invalid, and had my position overridden by institutional interests in foregrounding my blackness and womenness. Most recently, and of great interest to me–and totally fine because it’s their subjective opinion–Divacorp wrote that my show at Chateau Shatto in September was the first time I’d made work that was not explicitly related to blackness. This is fundamentally untrue, if we’re going by exhibition materials (whether or not they are written by me). If we’re going by subjective experience of the work, then okay, do your thing, but seems like a you prob.

I also agree with Dean about art being far more interesting from the 90s to the early 2010s. Though, I basically have accepted that I just think that because it's the stuff I was weaned on. I too miss the period of late 2000s and early 2010s work he seems to really pine for. This is probably a result of getting mixed up in the same scene of people that I assume he’s referencing vaguely in the essay at times, people who were probably somewhat associated with “post-internet,” which is the stuff that got me into art in the first place–between having close friends in LA who were involved with The Jogging, a weirdly laser-focused diet of net art at Oberlin College (something to do with Cory Arcangel, Lauren Cornell, and Jacob Ciocci attending the school many cycles earlier), and working for Rhizome very soon after graduating. So that’s just to say, everything I have to say here is said with basically a feeling of sympathy and agreement about what is good and what is bad. Although, I didn’t like Dora’s video at the Biennial nearly as much as he did.

Between Dean’s essay and his interview with Helen Molesworth, the most interesting and unresolved point is the question of contemporary artists’ relationship to history. Many of Dean’s criticisms in the essay revolve around this, identifying the major thread of this limp-dick period in art as “celebrations of identity made in such deeply traditional styles are progressive in content but conservative in form.”² The form that this work takes is most often “canonical art remade by artists with minority identities.” He uses Louis Frantino as an example, deeming his painting “modernist pastiche,” and “. . . representative of today’s culture of spin-offs, remakes, quotations, interpolations, and revivals.”³ All of this tracks to me, but Dean’s wholesale writing off of this mode of working does his argument an injustice. There is much to investigate here.

In the interview on Zwirner podcast, Molesworth presses him on this point, saying that artists are always talking to one another across history. I think that this is true, and most good art is art that works on the problem of art, and in doing so has to look at the field and its previous experiments and findings and build upon that body of knowledge. However, there is a distinction between the general premise that Molesworth invokes–one of historical allusion in art, which Dean responds to her positively about, like yes sure artists should totally do that–and the use of allusion as justification. Artists who operate this way are not usually talking to other artists across history, but–like Kissick’s criticism of Frantino–are using history as an alibi and as a shortcut to confer value onto a work.

Dean says that it is the artist’s identity that gives the work value in the current paradigm, but I think it is more the manufactured-historicity that does the job, and that it’s when that pseudo-historicity is the artwork’s raison d'etre that we get the ick. The artist’s identity is the language that we have at our disposal to advertise the work, but the thing that makes an artwork a smart bet institutionally and a stable commodity is making that iron-clad link in the chain of historical forms. Kerry James Marshall has done something like this, just with allusions to the 19th century–I think he’s pretty great sometimes, and a lot more complicated than this, but I’m just saying you could rope him in superficially. I’ve definitely been advertised as doing this, at least with the sculpture I made for the Whitney Biennial that some people said was “reclaiming minimalism.” There are a lot of artists who do this with readymades or things that sort of appear to be readymades (Essex St. Maxwell Graham stable), and then have a secret history offered by the wall text that tells you it's not your Grandfather’s Readymade, but a very specific and resonant object. And I think that this gives us the ick because we can sense that the secret raison d’etre behind such raisons d’etre is just value itself, and the market. I think on the podcast either Dean or Molesworth also says something about how we’re uncertain these days about whether the museum is preserving or creating culture–or maybe I read this somewhere, I dunno–and this seems related; in the absence of art having any other clear mandate, its fallen back on a sort of cultural-anthropological model figured at the level of the individual and the cheap play of signifiers.

Yes, put that purple Nalgene in a glass case. It represents the artist’s alienation as a black woman who goes to Equinox.

My problem with Dean’s essay: it seems to suppose that these problems suddenly cropped up around the time of Trump’s first presidency; that things were getting sort of lame before that and then just fell off. However, the problems of the contemporary art market (“world,” to be nice to everyone) are the result of the rather obviously combination of a few factors: the actual functions of neoliberal economic policy and its resulting culture (neoliberalism at large), multiculturalism and its various clones and offshoots, and a corporate internet.

First, and supah basique because I don’t purport to be an economist, but Neoliberalism as an actual economic program obvi made possible the development of a global art market and set its enduring mandates through its push for deregulation and insistence that markets will regulate themselves. And in the very same 50ish years that these policies have run their course, everyone has suffered except the very very rich, and funding for the arts has been whittled down to nearly nothing, even in countries that used to have a decent amount. When Dean laments the disappearance of awesome and decadent artist projects funded by biennials, museums, galleries, foundations etc., one has to just look at the numbers. There is money but it’s in the hands of the few and fewer, and they don’t feel that they have to hand it out willy-nilly. The onus is thus put on artists to finance their own projects, or make do with small sums, or get grants that are often surprise-surprise looking to fund projects that are safe bets because the financial stakes are high, and in this economy a safe bet is something with a political or social justice angle (where art is not necessarily of value to society, political art has to work less to justify itself and the money spent on it because it’s supposedly changing hearts and minds), modeling the apex of neoliberal attitudes and policies. “It’s on you, bro.” I would love to go to Patagonia like Phillipe Parreno and whisper to penguins but literally how…I will tell you how: “My exhibition explores the thin line between the human and the animal; weird intimacy across species. Visually, this will take place on the white backdrop of Patagonia in the winter, signaling the ever-looming presence and threat of whiteness as a naturalized frame within which such radical attempts are forced to take place. Make that check out to…” None of this means that trying to explore histories beyond White and Western ones is bad, but the ways of doing so that are incentivized…

Further–evidenced in part by the above–the artist’s position is possibly the most cartoonish representation of neoliberal subjectivity on offer (closely followed by the influencer–and we all know the difference between the two is disappearing quickly). Beyond my cursory and possibly inaccurate assessment of the petrified umbilical cord between neoliberal economics and arts funding, the artist functions as and represents the neoliberal subject par excellence: flexibly or precariously employed, herself productized, a bonafide Foucaldian “entrepreneur of the self.” (Sorry to go Foucault-mode but it just fits here.) The artist does neoliberalism every goddamned day to the level of parody. Interestingly, a lot of the work of the period that Dean references being the last good old days explored these conditions (even work from the 90s; he doesn’t mention her but I think Renee Green is a great example, as is Michael Krebber. Maybe Mike Kelley too). Not so many people making work about the situation of the artist as an economic actor these days, maybe because the rest of the world is catching up and now you have people blogging on Substack and doing the very same thing, so it’s now a lot less interesting to people to watch you think through.

In 1996, Wendy Brown wrote that late capitalism’s “disciplinary productions [produce] a fantastic array of behavior-based identities . . .and work to conjure and regulate subjects through classificatory schemes, naming and normalizing social behaviors as social positions.”⁴ Our problems are now kind of still that…but different… We’re actually quite free to engage in any social behavior we like and it doesn’t really stick to us as an identity (maybe just makes us ___-core), but our demographics do that work instead. This would seem to have something to do with the legacy of multiculturalism, which seemed really great and radical to many in the art world of the 90s, but which curdled into weird and more intense regulatory schemas with the introduction of the corporate internet. When you look back at early discussions around multiculturalism, you see some art that is actually quite cool, a fairly even-handed assessment of the intersections of class and race, suspicion of institutions, and a sketch of a program that is actually not necessarily that boring or regressive. I just reread Cornel West’s “New Cultural Politics of Difference” from 1990 for this, and found that his call to action is not so bad. He argues against a “narrow closing of ranks amongst [artists and critics of color] and to “aim to recast, redefine, and revise the very notions of ‘modernity,’ ‘mainstream,” ‘margin,” ‘difference,’ ‘otherness,” and in the process avoid “ethnic chauvinism and faceless universalism” and “refuse to limit visions, analysis, and praxis to their own terrain.”⁵ I’m not sure what “own terrain” West was thinking of back then, but to adapt it to now, one would have to imagine one’s supposed terrain as one’s own history and identity.

With the rise of social media, the internet shifted from a place that rewarded or at least accommodated anonymity and play toward a field obsessed with authenticating and verifying everything, even the simple stupid fact of who you are. We really shouldn’t overlook how influential this paradigm has been on art, as a technical infrastructure as well as in terms of the content it has circulated and accelerated–the personal essay for instance. The art that Dean decries reflects this, but he fixates on the retreat into craft-based practices as a return to identity-based tradition, when it really–to me–seems to just be a reaction to the internet and its ability to circulate capital far more easily than the art market, a “touch grass” impulse combined with a “I’m a Real Boy!” plea taken to a pitiful Nth degree. This seems more related to a crisis of why bother than any truly antagonistic relationship to the present or the future. Already useless by nature, the only way the art object can be justified–without real intellectual toiling–is by one of these returns, to material history or to authentic identity. In the end, whether it’s indigenous textiles or digital video, most work today is as incurious and rigid as a day’s worth of Twitter or Instagram content. The best thing one can hope for in any of these feeds is a good meme or provocative statement.

So I guess the above is just to say that:

1) This problem in art has been in the making since the 1970s.

2) its roots are economic and technological, not simply cultural and not simply the fault of people who make bad art; bad art happens constantly and takes all kinds of form. Why this bad art fills our museums says more about what institutions and the people who fund them need art to do. Hint: they do not need it to be good. (As Hannah Black wrote in Artforum eight years ago, “identity politics is a really existing mechanism through which institutions attempt to publicly exonerate themselves of their role in the reproduction of domination.”⁶)

3) None of this can change unless something changes economically that makes artists less dependent on a market that requires them to mine their own history as material (without overhauling the global economic system this could be something like Brad Troemel’s cooperatively-run/owned gallery joke that I vaguely recall seeing on instagram, or the actually once-existing Art Workers’ Coalition), or changes technologically that gives artist a new transmission tool (Thinking the advent of video, or the advent of the internet) or takes one away, or unless artists and critics wean themselves off of the art economy and just get “regular jobs”–but those are few and far between too–because you literally just can’t get anything interesting done if you need everyone to like you and you’re fighting everyone you know for scraps.

And okay, 4) A hanging four. This isn’t about something Dean said, but about something that Helen Molesworth said that I think might be the real one true problem and means that you just wasted your time reading all of this! She said something about how Dean’s essay said that maybe these artists are no longer marginal if they’re getting all the shows (in a way this is fair, but needs further explication) and says that’s not a cool take because it’s good that we’re finally getting to hear other, marginal peoples’ histories, stories and so on. This is a thing you hear often in art world circles. My favorite weird version that seems to have begun in the 90s and still circulates is that the ‘death of the author’ was all too conveniently timed with artists and writers of marginal identities finally getting a foothold. Not saying it’s not true in part, but it is indubitably a lulz position to take and silly reason to toss out poststructuralism.

But thinking about this, I couldn’t help but wonder. . . What is this narrative that this is what art has been about for all these years? “History” “story” “experience”? Like yes, in the Before, it was just a bunch of white guys talking to each other, but the art that I’m aware of, especially in the modern period is definitely not about those white guys “sharing their stories,” or ‘expressing themselves.” I mean, the Ex in Ab-ex is “expressionism,” yes; but we all know that stuff is really bad, and totally fair to criticize on these grounds. But looking at the arc of art history in the west in the modernity, it’s not like these guys are like ‘I made this painting because I needed to express the trauma of my background as a white male.” Or even the obverse, the triumph of their experiences! They usually just talk about working on historical problems in relation to the form and politics of their time. Or like modes of vision and accessing the sensory world. So there is kind of this false flag story underneath all of this discourse, the idea that art is about expressing oneself and a peoples’ history etc.,. Glad Molesworth brought it up; it is annoying, and I think a really bad outlook on art, but good for the historical record to hear it crop up again if that’s what people really think.

There is a whole lot more to say on these topics, but the point of a memo is that it’s just for now. This is all I’ve got at the moment. I really do think that the thing to take from all of the hubbub is that something gross happens when history, objects, and identities (not subjectivities) and the market get together these days. That’s the thing that gives the ick. And specifically, I’d argue, when the objects used are deemed “culturally significant” or “materially significant.” Something bad happens there that relates to some of the good art of the 80s and 90s attempting to demystify and deconstruct how such objects work and signify.

I conclude with a bit of good art that is About Identity and does not Thematize (An) Identity:

Adrian Piper, Mythic Being, 1973-1975

David Hammons, Three Spades, 1971

Joe Scanlan, Donelle Woolford, 2014 (being contrarian here, but this work is aging into being interesting and addition to its fuckedness)

Ed Fornieles, Cel, 2019

Robert Morris, Mirror, 1969

Amalia Ulman, Excellences and Perfections, 2014

Krebber forever

And here is a pic of me (+Paprika the Cat) the other day in my Leo Rosa Xmas Year Round sweater on actual Xmas. Because this was a lot of text and citations and blogs are supposed to be casual, whoops. Just vibes.

Anyway, until 2025.~~

~

1. The 2024 Whitney Biennial’s curatorial statement says its artists explore “permeability of the relationships between mind and body, the fluidity of identity. . .” https://whitney.org/exhibitions/2024-biennial

2. Dean Kissick, “The Painted Protest,” Harpers’, https://harpers.org/archive/2024/12/the-painted-protest-dean-kissick-contemporary-art/

3. Ibid.

4. Wendy Brown, Wounded Attachments, 1996, http://ereserve.library.utah.edu/Annual/ECS/6624/Thompson/wounded.pdf

5. Cornel West, “The New Cultural Politics of Difference,” 1990, http://ereserve.library.utah.edu/Annual/ECS/6950/Land/ecs6950newc.pdf

6. Hannah Black, “The Identity Artist and the Identity Critic,” Artforum, Summer 2016, https://www.artforum.com/features/the-identity-artist-and-the-identity-critic-229240/