Filed under: Contemporary Art | Tags: Altermodern, Designer Fetish, Dispersion, ICA, Nicolas Bourriaud, Postmodern, Seth Price, tate, Tate Triennial
Quite similar to the Tate Triennial installation, but not it
That French guy who invented ‘Relational Aesthetics’ (the art theory based on a period of sustained economic growth and a rising art market, where everyone pretended that they weren’t trying to sell something to some rich man with hands on his face, YOU CAN’T BUY YOUTH OLD MAN, BUY ANOTHER HOUSE OH NO, PROPERTY MARKET CRASHED NEVER MIND) has curated a show based on a new made up word (my favourite recent made up word is ‘Factiality’, but that is another kettle of theory entirely, and is technically a translation of a French term {always French, why is that?}), ‘Altermodern’. Altermodernism is an, ‘in-progress redefinition of modernity in the era of globalisation’. Not entirely untrue I suppose, but entirely unnecessary.
But someone else can do the review. I would simply like to ask a question’. And that question is, what the fuck Seth Price?
What the fuck is on the wall Seth Price? What the fuck is it made of? And what the fuck is it meant to be?
Oh right Seth Price, ‘images from the internet … cut from luxuriously exotic wood and coated in plastics to create works resembling bespoke design objects’.
What the fuck Seth Price?
Check Seth Prices website
You can download a lot of his essays, there are links to websites he is involved with, and a link to rent his films (though $50 seems a bit shit for a film without a proper story, know what I mean? Not like ‘The Crying Game’! Crazy shit man, I won’t spoil the ending. IT SINKS! I’m joking, that is the ending to ‘Titanic’, another must see. I saw it three times, by accident! Weird eh? First time I held a girls hand in the dark, second time I shouted, ‘LOOK AT THOSE BANGERS!’ when Winslet got her brags out, and the third time was with my parents, and nothing interesting happened). This is all presented in that affected, ms-dos, no fuss, geek-retro-web style we all love.
Also, one of his essays, ‘Dispersion’, is the basis for a group exhibition at the ICA, in which Seth Price took part. I won’t quote it (or bother to re-read it), but it has some interesting ideas about using capitalist modes of mass distribution to subvert the system of an object obsessed art market. Good idea. The film shown in the exhibition was on unlimited, low cost distribution, and featured a mashing together of loads of his previous video work. I like that lack of respect for your own art work, and the attitude to making work in general.
Let me just re-quote the blurb for the piece at Altermodern
‘images from the internet … cut from luxuriously exotic wood and coated in plastics to create works resembling bespoke design objects’.
What the fuck Seth Price?
This seems exactly like the sort of dead-end Post-modernism that Bourriaud is so smug about finishing off. The sort of art market, object-fetish, money-critical work that people have made for the last ten years without any sort of perspective on the ribs they must have had removed to make such a horrific position possible.
Again, not
They don’t resemble bespoke design objects Seth Price. They are bespoke designer objects. ‘Exotic’ wood just means rare and expensive wood. And no one gives a shit that the images are ‘ripped’ from the internet. I didn’t even know what they were (though, I didn’t look at them for very long, so they might be LOLCATZ!!! Who knows?), and where do you think designers get their ideas from? They don’t just magic the little bastards out of thin air. Pointing out the lack of originality in the culture/design industry is just massaging an over worked tautology. Seth Price, you are making the meaning explicit to the viewer in the worst possible way. They are from a private collection, which is fine, art is sold and bought, but you have made an aesthetic object, to be bought. You have then half-charged it with ‘concept’, so the collector can feel clever, while looking at a lovely, abstract, wall hanging. It is at odds with what you write in, ‘Dispersion’, and like a lot of the work in this exhibition, it is completely at odds with even the possibility of a, ‘re-definition of modernism’.
What the fuck Seth Price?
What the fuck Nicolas Bourriaud?
What the fuck, everyone.
Quotes from ‘Altermodern: Exhibition Guide’.
www.dekersaint.co.uk
Filed under: Comment & Opinion, Contemporary Art, Exhibition Reviews | Tags: art, curator, Whitechapel Art Gallery, Leeds City Art Gallery, PSL, Rank, Mustafa Hulusi, Mark Titchner, Victor Burgin, Mark Lombardi, Heath Bunting, Job Centre plus, William Powell Frith, Jenny Holzer, Rory Macbeth, P45, idiots, Idiot Curators
Do you have any transferable skills?
Rank, adj
1. Having a very strong and bad odor.
2. Something which is disgusting.
3. Complete, used as an intensifier.
Slang; disgusting, ugly. E.g.”Have you seen Bill’s new girlfriend? She’s rank!”
There is a faint smell of some thing gone off wafting through the cherished halls of the Leeds City Art Gallery. It is the careers of the curators of the latest installment in the continuously disappointing gallery programme. Not that this Blog wishes to make any enemies within the Leeds arts intellgensia (who us?!), but the current show Rank: Picturing The Social Order 1615-2009 is so SHOCKINGLY BAD that the curators should soon be meeting their P45s in a dark Leeds alley. This show is not unfortunately concerned with the disgusting rotting corpses of unemployed curators, alas- “This fascinating and unusual exhibition, which looks at how artists have pictured the shape of society from Renaissance times to the present, A society without stratification is barely imaginable, but how do we picture our own system of hierarchies, of difference?…” How indeed.
This show contains way too many pieces of work, with over 100 pieces it is overwhelming. Frustratingly the ‘only as good as the worst piece in it’ virus has struck with the decent artworks lost in a small sea of crap artworks competing within an ocean of ‘helpful realisations’. Statistical visual representations on wealth and class in the UK so misguided it includes a hideous shirt ‘graph’ depicting the classifications of UK age population via a differing shirt fabric that corresponds to a demographic category. P45!
Other cringe worthy examples of institutional patronising include maps of wealth across the world in swirly colors and (let them eat) cake ‘pie charts’-more statistics, more waste. P45! Turning statistics into commissioned pieces of 3D artwork. P45! The show is about class and rank and those statistics are, yes interesting and indeed relevant but this is essentially RESEARCH and this is essentially an ART GALLERY. Except we don’t want our art galleries to be art galleries we want them to be educational places, accessible places, innovative places. Whilst this isn’t a bad thing for art galleries to be there is always the danger of throwing the baby out with the bath water.In the case of the Leeds City Art Gallery that baby would, it appears, also have to be spoon fed and now lies out front with the passing traffic.
There are some amazing works in here, works which do convey their points and do provide a document of the attitudes to wealth and class. Except the juxtaposition between the contemporary works and the ‘helpful realisations’ is so hideously stark they’re subdued. You can still feel the cringes of the artists as they dutifully turned up to the private view and tried to restrain the impulse to not smash their glass of cheap Chardonnay in to the stupid FUCKING FACE OF THE IDIOT CURATORS! Mustafa Hulusi’s ‘Possession’ shoved in a corner so far away from the Victor Burgin work it is supposedly in ‘conversation’ with that they are practically on non speaking terms. P45! Mark Titchner’s double-sided print ‘No Them Only Us’ has a huge presence in one of the rooms, but loses any impact for being surrounded by other works covering the walls like a regular old jumble sale. P45! Heath Bunting’s ‘The Status Project’, a 10 year long research project looking at the types of public identity data held by businesses and government agencies is relevant, but would have been better left alone, looking as it does like a crap and unconsidered version of a Mark Lombardi map. P45!
Mark Titchner, No Them Only Us, 2008
There are some Job Centre plus points – ‘Derby Day’ by William Powell Frith (1856) illustrating the mix of classes at the time: poor in the middle at the front of the frame, with the rich around them, higher up, keeping their distance, not a lot changes, but a gorgeous meaty piece of proper painting. Jenny Holzer’s text piece, floating above one of the gallery doors and Rory Macbeth’s crash barriers ‘Re-enactment #2′ (though they would be far more ambiguous and intriguing without the annoying penchant for BIG gallery labelling. P45!), and his soundpiece ‘Fanfare for the common man’ within the foyer…but alas none of it is enough to stop the rank stench.
This stinking pile of curatorial dog shit fills these hallowed pages so you don’t have to waste your time puking your metaphorical guts up through your metaphorical nose and stinging your beautiful art loving eyes. Instead spend your valuable time as this hot tip for Leeds art-goers – make the trip to PSL to see <195 miles>a Joint exchange project developed by PSL and the Whitechapel which showcases collaborative art works made by the 8 artists all from Leeds and London See it before it ends, see some work, grab an optional informative gallery map and enjoy letting your minds wander whilst savouring the fresh smell of young creative juices….
Rank: Picturing The Social Order 1615-2009, The Leeds City Art Gallery, 14 February – 26 April 2009 (as we feel nothing but disdain – there is no link)
<195 Miles>, PSL, Leeds, 17 December 2008 – 28 February 2009