We’re not going to be disrespected. We have to get something out of this. And I don’t know what that even is

October 17, 2013 § Leave a comment

we're-not-171013

In the ever-expanding search and desire for materials and forms and structures artists go in wildly different directions. Casinos, Corbis Images, Olive Garden, Target, Tumblr, Spencer’s, the Frick, Evangelical Mega-Churches, eBay, Dallas BBQ, the list continues on eternally. This is hardly news, but might worth be considering a little further. I was in the computer lab the other day going through my lists of artists compiled from Artforum back issues in 1988 to see who had work available online, how they were documenting themselves, who dropped off the face of the earth, and just where exactly everyone was (I have the archivist’s bug). My friend, Hannah Levy, sitting across the room was browsing different materials websites for potential sculptures when she stumbled upon a gem. Hannah’s material searches are wild in themselves, all of the carpeting websites, pool and bathroom support manufacturers, pleather outlets and so on. I’m sure others have similar tales. This particular website, PVCSTRIP.com, the original online strip door outlet, was infinitely more bizarre than the usual mix of late Geocities/Angelfire style design, hokey and broken down early usage of flash, and garish pop ups and splash pages. No, this was something else entirely.

I mean Jesus. The hyper corporate blues, outlining the body, that everyone has been obsessed with. The model, sitting with all of the rolls of PVC strip almost as if it were a before shot in the documentation of a performance. The rolls, themselves, recalling, even with the affordances allowed for the differences in materials, figures as diverse as Franz Erhard Walther, Kerstin Brätsch, Davis Rhodes, amongst others. The slight pose, the way she’s contorting her core, the wash of the jeans, that perm, the lighting, those boots! Hannah called me from across the room to come check this out. I wasn’t disappointed. As we dug around through all of the different products, the site just kept giving and giving.

The photoshoot section of the website reads as follows, “The images on this site were achieved after over 100 hours of professional set design, lighting, and photography…not to mention the saintly patience of Cindy, our sales associate. Why did we ask Cindy to present our products? Because without someone in the pictures, our rolls, doors and strips could appear to be any size!”

It seemed once again that commerce absolutely nailed something that artists lust after with watery eyes and hearts aflutter. The seductiveness of the corporate “we”, a “we” that is so tough to grasp at, a “we” that just calls out to be used but it is ever so slippery. What is it about that “we” that stands off on the side all coy yet boisterously in your face at the same time? Peter Schjeldahl’s excerpts on pronouns come to mind,

I suggest starting with a pronoun that I’m throwing around: ‘we’. It’s a dicey word in a democracy. It presumes an agreement where none is proven or can be proved, without taking a vote. In critical writing, it is a rhetorical stratagem, a seduction with aspects of being a fantasy and a trick. But when a writer gets away with it – that is, when readers don’t think to object – it is kind of sublime. It has interesting powers. I’m going to talk about it…When a writer folds ‘I’ into ‘you’ to make ‘we’, he or she projects a world of common values. Call it civil love. (You’ve noticed that I just used the politic ‘he or she’. Call that civil justice.) The ‘we’ is make-believe. We – if you’ll pardon the expression – do not inhabit a world of civil love. But guess what? We can pretend that we do.

I’m reminded of a conversation I had with Joshua Citarella about the varieties of gambling in Connecticut and New Jersey, and the difference between a place like Foxwoods Resort Casino with its infamous 5000 person Bingo Hall and the sheer wonder that is Atlantic City. He said, “Name me an installation that is better than the worst casino.”  read more

PHOTOGRAPH: Eva Stenram

Oder – irr’ ich wieder? Verändert dünkt mich alles

March 29, 2013 § Leave a comment

I recently attended a lecture in which Linda Nochlin — widely considered to be the mother of contemporary feminist art history — addressed the issue of the nude. She approached the subject through the lens of her life experience, which has informed her tastes in and fascination with its representation. Reading from her essay “Offbeat and Naked,” Nochlin said: “I like any nude that isn’t classical, any naked body that doesn’t look like Michelangelo’s David or the Apollo Belvedere. For me, as for the poet-critic, Baudelaire in the 19th century, the classical nude is dead, and deathly. What is alive? The offbeat, the ugly, the other, the excessive.” Afterward, I asked Nochlin where, if anywhere, she felt the pin-up genre belonged in this aesthetic of the offbeat. Without hesitation, she began an impromptu paean to perhaps the most beloved pin-up in the history of the genre — the Varga Girl. Nochlin recounted how, as a young girl during the Second World War, she would rifle through her uncles’ Esquire magazines to marvel at the grotesque beauties within. Those endless legs! Those bowed feet! Those fetish fashions! Absolute freaks of nature! “Yummy!” she enthused with a troublemaker’s grin…

At Esquire, the shift from the wartime to postwar pin-up reflects such wider trends in American culture. First, the magazine lost the artist whose women personified the transgressive wartime woman on her way out of fashion. Esquire’s legal troubles with Vargas had begun at the cusp of the war’s end; when the artist attempted to renegotiate his contract with the magazine, he proceeded to lose his job as well as his rights to his name at and work for Esquire. As a result of his departure from the magazine in 1947, the transition from the “Varga Girl” to the “Esquire Girl” coincidentally occurred in the shift from wartime to the postwar eras–making the change in the magazine’s pin-ups all the more dramatic in their adherence to postwar ideals of femininity. Fritz Willis, Al Moore, and Joe De Mers were among the new pin-up illustrators who eschewed the career woman and sexual dynamo for the bobby-soxer and cuddly co-ed. The one working woman represented among these postwar pin-ups was chided in the accompanying text to “shake off the phony blessedness of her solitary way in favor of the more savory satisfactions which only come from sharing.” As feminist historian Susan Faludi would later write, in the postwar era the independent woman of WWII, who had flaunted her economic, social, and sexual agency, was viewed as an outdated construction that “provoked and sustained the antifeminist furor [of the ‘50s, and]… heightened cultural fantasies of the compliant homebody and playmate.” In fact, a new “playmate” emerged in the pin-up genre that capitalized on both the dearth of openly transgressive female models in the ‘50s and the era’s willingness to (re)construct womanhood in a simplistic, one-dimensional manner.

With the renewed focus on morality and maternity that accompanied many women’s postwar retreat to the home — similar to the “cult of True Womanhood” among upper- and middle-class women in the Victorian era — came a resurgence of the “ladies club.” These groups aimed female activism at societal disruptions of “moral order,” under which they felt young women’s access to and influence by pin-ups fell. Due to such groups’ postwar protests against the display of pin-ups in media viewed by women and children, many popular publications (such as early pin-up pioneers, Esquire and Life) de-emphasized or altogether eliminated their pin-up features. To fill the void left by the disappearance of images of the sexualized female in broader popular culture, former Esquire employee Hugh Hefner molded a new kind of pin-up — the “Playmate” — in his magazine, Playboy. Here, Hefner sought to both reclaim the genre and postwar women’s sexuality for privileged male viewing.  read more

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