#lane relyea

[paintingafterpainting]

[paintingafterpainting]

[paintingafterpainting]

[alittlelessdemocracy]

The Subject of Free Agency

Lane Relyea, from his book Your Everyday Art World:

...today’s network paradigm lends itself to a neoentrepreneurial mythology about volunteerism and “do it yourself” (DIY) agency. “In a world regarded as extremely uncertain and fluctuating,” Luc Boltanski and Eve Chiapello write in The New Spirit of Capitalism, their 1999 study of networked and flexible business and labor practices, “the self is the only element worth identifying and developing, since it is the only thing that presents itself as even minimally enduring.” DIY serves as the honorific term for the kind of subject required by the constant just-in-time turmoil of our networked world. It has come to stand for a potent mix of entrepreneurial agency and networked sociality, proclaiming itself heir to both punk autonomy, the notion of living by your wits and as an outsider, and to a subcultural basis for authentic artistic production, the assumption that truly creative individuals exist in spontaneously formed social undergrounds...

Ergo, the free agents, action-oriented individuals liberated from the confines of labels and titles - “a growing population of people,” as Frances Stark describes the budding art scene in early-1990s L.A., “trying to eke out an existence in any number of vaguely defined layers of a so-called art world.” (Later I’ll talk about a diametrically opposite identifying statement, Andrea Fraser’s declaration, “I am the institution,” also from the early 1990s.)

Of course, doing it yourself and being in a network are not identical - on a desert island you can be self-reliant and yet lack social connections - but today the two do closely overlap. That’s because the subject of DIY is not an autonomous individual; rather it’s a “free agent” or networker who, by being so thoroughly defined in her or his predisposition to “doing” and making connections [All verb, no predicate. All open-ended adaptability and responsivenes, no set vocation], is always situated and contextualized, externalized and performative.

[bluelemmings]

Studio Unbound by Lane Relyea: Reading Response

The article presented the idea of the new emerging studio as a network in a intriguing way.  By blurring the lines between studio and gallery, the process of making art and displaying it, Relyea brings up participatory art as an example.  Referencing Gareth James’s piece where he made a functional bar in the museum and invited the public to drink and graffiti the walls, Relyea shows how this new sense of creating art connects the artist and the public in a network that together allows the “art” to be possible. The artist relies on others connected in this web to make his or her work possible.  

In this sense, the process of making the art and it’s central idea becomes more important than the finished product.  In discussion, someone posed the question of whether this more intense focus on the process of art draws the public in or makes them more critical of how an artist approaches his or her work.  However, the participatory nature of this networked studio engages the public as they get to feel a deeper connection to the work if they are a part of it themselves. 

 Over winter break, I visited the Power Station of Art in Shanghai and there was a piece where the artist laid thousands of steel triangles on the floor and allowed the people visiting to make patterns and design the tiles themselves.  The process of allowing the public to interact and change the piece drew me in as I essentially played with the little metal triangles.

The concept of a dynamic studio as a network ushers in an exciting form of participatory art.

[alittlelessdemocracy]

And I Still Do

In my experience, people grow attached to the vocabulary that gives their own lives meaning. This is hardly unique to artists, but artists are no less prone to it. We tend to like stories which give us something purposeful to do, stories - in the end - of which we ourselves are as much the effect as the cause. And we tend to fight to reproduce the “world” of which we find ourselves the symptom. Happiness be damned.

Ten years ago I got in the habit of telling people (mostly at openings) that although I thought it was important to remain open to critical voices – I also thought it was at least as important to establish a healthy distance from any particular strain of discourse which threatened to immobilize one’s practice. This was a few years out of grad school, and I didn’t want to be one of those artists who succumbed to problems that weren’t necessarily their own. It sometimes looked to me as though what passed for critical thinking was simply masochistic self involvement – or worse – involvement in someone else’s debilitating fantasies - a sickness to be avoided at any cost.

I thought it was important to know what fights belong to you, and which do not, and to cultivate the insight necessary to walk away from unnecessary and potentially distracting interpersonal conflicts masquerading as ideological ones, and vice-versa.

When I spoke skeptically about engaging with negative stories - I had specific ones in mind – those which delegitimized painting (since that was mostly the frame through which I legitimated my own existence at the time), and those which delegitimized the art world that I was a little bit too desperate to make excuses for (since that was the only place that still took painting seriously). Chief among these stories was the one told by Lane Relyea, in lectures, in essays, in person, and in passing.

At first I found his writing exhilarating, if overly obtuse. Metonym? Synecdoche? I was just glad somebody still cared about the kind of paintings that got me excited about painting in the first place. Lane connected the kind of painters who were working ‘now’ (Laura Owens, Monique Prieto, Kevin Apell, Ingred Calame) with the kind of painters I looked to as models of what it meant to be an artist in the first place (Morris Louis, Frank Stella). As a young artist, I used his arguments in classes, and relied on his opinioins to form my own. I eventually came to think of myself as respectfully problematizing his notion of the frame in my own work. I thought of my paintings at the time in part as attempts to refute in practice the unnecessarily restrictive limitations of post-minimalist painting tropes without violating any of the basic modernist premises as I understood them then. I was sympathetic to his skepticism about art which evaded the direct address of modernist painting and sculpture, but I was skeptical about its implications. I thought a marriage was still possible between modern art and minimalism, or between the literal and the metaphorical. Or, as Relyea disparagingly quotes from Maria Lind, director of the Center for Curatorial Studies at Bard College, I too thought it was possible to merge “enthusiasm and skepticism” in a single work or practice.

As awkward as it is to put it this way now, I think like a lot of impressionable young art students I basically thought it was possible to pick up where modernism had left off, before it had been interrupted midstream - to absorb the lessons of minimalism and everything after without succumbing to the kind of limited aspirations and aesthetic impoverishment that seemed to have infected painting since. But a studio visit with Relyea at my thesis exhibition put these dreams in perspective. I quickly realized that we were not on the same page at all. He casually referred to my paintings as furniture, which was totally fair at the time, but still - coming from him I knew what it implied: I was on the wrong team. I was with Jorge (Pardo). By calling me a furniture maker he was placing me with the much maligned D.J.s and socialites, which was really disconcerting at the time. Even though I had entered school with all of the late nineties art school aspirations he was so fond of critiquing in print, by the time I was talking to him I had thoroughly absorbed his critique of those very aspirations. I wanted nothing more sincerely at the time than to be taken seriously as a painter, very much in the mold that he seemed to celebrate. I looked up to artists like Owens, who he had (seemingly) previously championed, and I tried to incorporate their lessons in my work. (I say seemingly because in time I came to see that no art works actually pass his scrutiny unblemished. Even his most favored object lessons are still just that - examples - not of success, but of just how impossible it is to successfully evade capital.) Although I’m sure he had no idea what he was walking into, I sort of thought of myself as a secret apostle, his ‘number one fan’, and now I realized that to him I was just another symptom. Maybe I was, but it still pissed me off, so I started looking for holes.

When his essay Allover and At Once was published in LA art mag X-tra in 2004, I spent close to a year piecing together a rebuttal in my free time between my studio and my day job. My closest friends cheered me on, and one of my former professors, Katherine Hixson, when she found out about my project through a close friend who was a current advisee, invited me to an informal gathering she referred to as the Autonomy Potluck (with Lane as the guest of honor, I later discovered) to test out my ideas in conversation. My argument was built mostly on Lyotard’s ideas about thought that’s performative - making itself useful to existing categories and structures - versus thought that’s parological - seeking out instabilities and exploiting loopholes in existing thought – my argument being that the art Lane wanted to dismiss was allied with the latter (even though Relyea’s most recent work, which I will address later, convincingly - typically - argues that this work, although it successfully passes itself off as parological, is actually extremely perfromative – that is – complicit and exemplary of a kind of subjectivity that is demanded and enabled by current networks of power.)  The results of my moonlighting as a DIY art critic were later printed in one of the local art publications that used to bubble into and out of existence on an annual basis as recently graduated MFA’s attempted to construct the appearance of a critical mass which would buoy them between the momentum of art school and (hopefully) their emergent careers as young artists and critics. My essay circulated online for a few years after that in a mutilated form – littered with unfortunate artifacts of repeated auto-formatting changes as it was moved from platform to platform, it’s footnotes a mess to begin with, now a comets tail of partial citations and out of context asides. It’s since mercifully disappeared from online circulation without a trace. I never even listed it on my CV, though I probably should now. I have a single copy of the article on newsprint somewhere in a binder with old cv’s, artist statements, and slide sheets.

Lately I’ve gotten in the habit here of quietly recanting on earlier positions I took mostly in private.  For what it’s worth, for the past couple of weeks I’ve been bouncing back and forth in my reading between a famous biography of Matisse published in 2005, and Lane’s recent book -Your Everyday Art World, published in 2014. The former I picked up on one of my weekly trips to the library at the school where I teach; the latter I serendipitously received by surprise as a gift in exchange for some zines I exhibited in a group show in Philadelphia last month. I had been meaning to pick up Lane’s book since it came out last year, but I’d also been purposefully avoiding engaging with it for the same reasons I had to move on ten years ago. I’ve been feeling good about my practice, and I didn’t want to be pulled into his terminal orbit.

Be that as it may, reading the Matisse biography after spending some time last month listening again to T.J. Clark’s Mellon Lectures has made me both more receptive to Relyea’s argument this time around, and also more affected by it.

Talking to some of my painting students in recent weeks, I’ve taken to making a distinction between Modern painting and Modernist painting - a neologistic usage I realize, but one I hope I can explain. I routinely find myself using Matisse and Picasso as examples in my classes – primarily their most groundbreaking work from early in the century, while I find myself pointing to fewer and fewer contemporary painters as models of how to proceed, maybe because compared to these earlier artists, the new ones just seem so limited. Looking at contemporary art it’s sometimes hard to understand why anyone even bothers – it’s just so bloodless. Even Laura Owens’ recent maximalist works strike some of my most ambitious students as overly cautious and unnecessarily stingy. For the most part I concur. Even though I find much to admire in her work, I think Sillman is better. I’m still able to see the risk because I remember how impossible her paintings looked at first. But my students just don’t. I have to explain it to them, and then they understand, but they don’t feel it. It reminds me of a conversation I had with a former grad student abut David Reed. She couldn’t see the stakes at all. Compared to more recent painting it just looked to her like retro design, which is sad, since to me it was once a little bit revelatory. But something is getting lost in translation now. The screen is purifying our intentions, exposing every gesture as an image of itself. Emptying every moment of its historical context and physical embeddedness. We are being tested – and we’re mostly failing. I think there has to be another way out of the post-minimal impasse, and I think it has to be through affect. I’m always impressed by the colder ones - for possessing a ruthless strength I simply lack - especially when they make little effort to win anyone over by disguising it - but it’s the warm ones who persist in the face of overwhelming odds without renouncing their intellectual commitments who truly amaze me, which is why I side more often than not with painters like Sillman (and Matisse) and local spaces like Julius Caesar. They give me permission to feel, and in doing so make me feel welcome to be here.

Likewise, Modern painting (Picasso and Matisse most of all) I think is ultimately humanist, always in conversation with the logic of representation, always incredibly ego driven, yet fundamentally honest in its means. Fiercely personal, but also insistently public. It was an art of courage and humility. Although many of its staunchest supporters were proto-modernists (in a modified sense I will explain shortly) its strongest practitioners were not. These latter, although they were deeply philosophical, and nothing if not historically self conscious about the meaning of their endeavors, were also unapologetic hedonists. They were disciplined, but they were also lazy, and valued idleness as a Nietzschian ideal. They loved life in a rather uncomplicated way, but they loved art even more, and they had  rather poetic ideas I think about both, suffused with a tenderhearted cynicism. Pragmatic to the core, yet hungry to evolve, they were not driven by overly discursive frames, but rather by intensely personal conversations based on strong interpersonal bonds (to borrow a motif from Relyea’s book, which focuses on the opposite –the diabolical strength of ever expanding weak ties in contemporary art and life). Modern art still believes in love.

Modernism, by way of contrast, although its earliest theoreticians were some of the Moderns most vocal advocates – playing a crucial role in articulating for a bewildered public what it was the Moderns were up to – (as I’ve speculated elsewhere) grew out of a principled rejection of life and of art. Every Modern ‘ism was a Modernism, but not every practitioner of these ‘isms was a Modernist. Mondrian may have been a Modernist much of  the time (especially in his awkward attempts to modernize his own work early in his career) but he was also a Modern, especially near the end.  Modern art was a French invention (of course), loved most passionately from afar (if the Matisse biography is to be believed). Modernism, on the other hand, was an attempt to systematize and universalize this invention, to turn this art into a science, and to use this science to transform the world. Modern art was quintessentially bourgeois. It was hardy, but it was vulnerable. Modernism was revolutionary. It was materialist, positivist, and progressive in a way that Modern art never actually was.

Modernism took a hard left, and found it’s fullest articulation later – in the 1950s and 60s. From a public relations standpoint, Modern art was born in Paris, but Modernism found its home in the New World, as befit the aesthetic offspring of the enlightenment. Picasso and Matisse were Modern. Mondrian – less so. DeKooning – even less, but not yet Modernist…rather an athletic throwback already tainted by the conservatism and lack of faith in doubt that Surrealism reintroduced back into the picture. Newman is a special case – almost a Rouseau of the Absolute, and like him, nearly Modern. Reinhardt – who can say? He talked like a Modernist, but to such an extent that it’s practically camp.

Who was the first Modernist? Malevich? Rodchenko? Maybe. It doesn’t really matter. What matters is that the Moderns still wore their hearts on their sleeves. The Modernists simply didn’t. They were jaded. Incredulous. Modern art was born of an attempt to follow the implications of post-impressionist, realist, and symbolist painting, which had as much to do with subjectivity and capricious leaps of the imagination as it had to do with form and surface. Modern art was essentially anarchistic, subjectivist, fanciful, and full of  hope and terror at the new age. Where Modern Art was about this new age from the vantage point of the previous one (per Clark),  Modernism was of it. Modern art was about permission – to feel, to act, to see, to take a stand. Modernism was about responsibility. Maybe it was the fact that the avant garde, exhausted by life’s losses, retreated after the First World War. Or maybe it was just the fact that by the time the Modern spirit reemerged in America after the Second World War, the fears of the new age had been fully realized. The damage had been done, the shock had been absorbed, and all that was left was rubble – fantasies made up of fragments of fragments – no longer recognizable as human or divine. A pile of stones, no longer temples, nudes or even still lifes. Simply rocks - Structure, Sign, and Play, but nothing more.

Although Fried wanted to distinguish between the works of Stella and Louis and those of Judd and Andre, the literalist cat was out of the bag well before then. Modernism was not a complete misreading of Matisse, any more than Marx was a complete misreading of Hegel. They just came later, so it was different. Louis was both a Modern (like Matisse) and a Modernist (like Stella). What makes his work good (and Stella’s too) is how they fail the program - their recalcitrant vision and irrational scale. Which goes the same for Fried himself. We should never forget that he writes poetry. That’s why he had to leave, only to come back later as a critic of photography. It wasn’t just that history passed him by, it was that history just kept moving, and he lost interest. It became cold to him. But contrary to Fried, Mimimalism (and later conceptual art) wasn’t a misreading of modernist theory – it was its completion. All that was left after that (as Relyea and others argue) was talk – conceptual art, social practice, art in the expanded field. In other words, rumor, innuendo, and fiat without a sovereign. Just as Marxism predicted the end of Philospohy and eventually the State, Modernism predicted the end of art, and eventually the Subject. Which leads me back to Relyea, and his crushing arguments about the direction of contemporary art and culture.

Keywords appear again and again in the text to remind you how you should feel about all of this. Ten years ago it was “allover” and “at once” (which I always took to mean “You are all over at once!”); now it’s “on demand” and “just in time.” When you read these words you know your heart should sink at the sound of the tone. It tolls for thee. It’s really you who’s now available on demand, and just in time. You think that you’re free – but you’re really a slave. You think that you’re mobile – but you’re just on call, with no interior left. That is – all of the flexibility we try to pride ourselves on as contemporary subjects – all the ways the inhuman values of the Modernist avant guard have seamlessly blended into everyday life as we move towards the posthuman horizon - also mean the end of you and me – the end of conversation and strong ties – replaced by weak signals, talk, text and unlimited data.

So I’m back in this cul-de-sac again. As usual – no answers, just these bitter riddles. But it’s different this time round, because I’m not thinking about Stella anymore. He’s still in my habits, still in my choices somehow, because he’s still right about something. Something was true then that’s still true now. That impatience is necessary, that deferral to the mechanical, to the universal...but I think it’s coming to an end. I’m finally thinking about Matisse. I’m finally thinking about Picasso again. I’m thinking about T.J. Clark and what he has to say about these artists, working through what it meant to be alive when they were. Like them, like Lane, I think I’m finally thinking clearly about what it means to be alive right now. It’s harder than I thought, but this time I no longer believe that this is a fight I can walk away from. The cat came back. And now I feel ready to take it into my arms and listen to it purr. I don’t know what it means this time, but I know it doesn’t mean walking away again. It just means walking away from what’s left of Modernism. Back to the future - finally.  

[thingsarelikeotherthings]

Somewhat like the marketplace for retail commodities, databases are the result of often unnoticed labor, the collecting together of things (objects, information, people) all made to appear as if passively and innocently awaiting activation, like a reserve army of supposedly dormant units each amenable to being isolated from or arranged with every other. —Lane Relyea, Your Everyday Art World

[rematerializationchamber]

Well, there sure is a whole lot of surplus or excess wealth out there, only it’s a surplus that’s misrecognized as individually rather than socially produced and that in turn is appropriated by an infinitesimally small fraction of the population. And then on the other hand here are all these artists with huge student loans to repay, struggling to survive, their creativity narrowed by necessity, their art as surplus folded back into scarcity. They have zero chance for commercial sales and no more government support to turn to. Rather than the N.E.A. they have to hit up today’s Medici-like mega-patrons like the Warhol Foundation, or they simply turn to each other through crowdsourced funding and community supported art schemes. That’s a pretty tense situation. And pretty interesting. All these people walking around, in all these different places, saying, “I just want to do things for their own sake.” I have no problem with that whatsoever. More artists out in the world thinking that, in a society able to create such incredible wealth, more people should be able to spend their time freely, doing whatever it is they want to do.

LANE RELYEA with Katy Siegel - The Brooklyn Rail

Did I post this already?