published in: New York TWICE, Air de Paris, Paris 2005

The Way We Talk

In August 2004, New York City was appropriated by the Republican Party National Convention (RNC). One of the highlights was Laura Bush's appearance on the podium. She wore a turquoise colored skirt and jacket, reminiscent of a fifties cut. Her accent, that wholesome house-wifey southern one. The way she spoke of her husband, her family, of America—the fifties quotations are serving a purpose, for sure not a nostalgic one.

In Todd Haynes film Far from Heaven (2002), itself a take on Douglas Sirk's film Imitation of Life (1959), we find another supportive housewife with a successful husband and healthy kids. Abandoned by her homosexual husband, she starts seeing her black gardener, and brings him to the local museum's latest art-show. As she transitions from perfection and a status of prominence into a social outcast, her convictions of goodness safely stand. While Haynes works with stereotypical values from the fifties to nuance preconceived societal ideas, the RNC co-opts the rhetoric of the tolerant home-maker, with an understanding of all kinds of social injustices, while visually suggesting a weave of Technicolor-ideology and the values an accent brings along.

Every generation is saying the same thing over and over, but in its own particular way. What if one generation would say exactly the same thing in the exact same way as a previous generation? What if this previous generation itself was already a copy of an earlier generation?


Ultra-Relational Aesthetics

Seth Price did exactly this. In 2004 he 're-appropriated' a Martha Rosler piece and titled it: 2 for 1 (2002). In his review of the exhibition "Notes on Renewed Appropriationism," (Artforum, May 2004) Bruce Hainley wrote in reference to the piece: "Better to recall Douglas Sirk, with his Imitation of Life (1959), itself a remake, which showed how imitation and 'appropriation' cause unruly ruptures in the structures of family, gender, sexuality, and race." The power of imitation or "appropriation" in both Price's work and the RNC's decision about how to frame Mrs. Bush, seems to lie elsewhere—in the reader's response. We are supposed to engrain Laura Bush's honest wholesome image with American family values of the fifties.

Hainley overlooks the actual gesture of the 're-frame' and goes straight in cage. Commenting on the content of Rosler's video, Hainley writes, "one might find the pleasure principle at work in Rosler's 'political' montage, but mass culture has long been sorting through such politico-aesthetic transferences, and the effect here is nostalgic rather than challenging." Looking like a review of Rosler's work from a strange position in time, this symptom of nostalgia exposes a desire in the viewer. Who is nostalgic here, longing for a past, unfulfilled revolutionary potential? It is not the Republican Party. They are already home. Maybe Hainley is not so much into copies after all. The original is supposedly always better...

Hainley points out that curator Lauri Firstenberg does not succeed in articulating the idea of re-appropriation in her essay accompanying "Notes on Renewed Appropriationism". To him, she merely juxtaposes shiny objects and fails to highlight the political relevance. Looks more like formalism at play rather than a classic conceptual quality with hard-to-digest content. Having dumped the concept of appropriation into history's graveyard, this work is not simply about the medium. The power of formalism is used as a tool to revive sedimentary layers of signification. Formal distortions and an disrespectful play with the material and techniques are done in order to set loose a violent slipping of signification.

Rather than deconstructing advertisement's myths and semiotic analysis, common practice in the 1980s, the structural semantic glue is ripped open and exposed by the use of the audience, some twisted relational aesthetic. Participatory reactions of viewers are spit straight back in to our own faces. Shiny objects mirror the provoked, self-reflective readings, making the RNC manipulations feel almost innocent by comparison. Publicly subsidized violence was never high on the agenda of a winning political party.

Though Firstenberg may have lost her trace onto something good, it is all about shiny objects, just as much as it is about a turquoise dress. Something is let loose, the turquoise dress ended up fucking the gardener, but by then the limelight had shifted its spot to the California Governor, with his heavy Austrian accent, rambling on about girlie-men. We all knew who really was talking: The Terminator.


Formalism Signifies Play

Guyton/Walker's collaborative show "The Failever of Judgement Part III" in Spring 2005 felt oddly oppressive, almost deceitfully intoxicating. The mood is calypso. Ridiculous coconut lamps decorate the tops of one-gallon cans containing what could be toxic paint. Each can features labels of scanned juicy fruits, such as cut up kiwis and potent bananas, set against a black background (by default since the lid must be left open). They are erotically slick like crushed Hustler images passing unnoticed by any censorship. Other cans have labels with happy brands such as Energy Vitamin Water. What appears healthy on the surface is actually quite contaminated and degenerate. Surrounded by upbeat colors, like luminous orange and lime green, the room vibrates in a request: "Everybody happy!"—forcing a dentist-bleached smile onto the viewer. Those in attendance were offered Tequila, not "Ketel One" vodka, the brand name, which recurs throughout the exhibition&151;'Hello Ketel One'—adding another dimension of fake cordial friendliness.

The exhibition invites one to see double: the collaboration of two artists, replicated in the image of the balancing-chairs-act by two other collaborators (Fischli & Weiss). The so-called paintings, ink-jet printed, silk-screened, and treated visceral surfaces, were hung in a deadpan repetitive manner inside the larger enclosed space. The added partition prevented proper ventilation, which in turn created an unbearably tropical atmosphere. It also obfuscated a clear view from the outside through its two-way mirror. Only shadows of paintings and visitors were discernible, which added to the disorientation.

This is horrible graphic design. Imitational design of some avant-garde aesthetic-covered up information, distorted logos. Nothing is straight. The jet-set personage featured on the painting with the red, stained "Geneva" ad; the rehearsed smiles, really no smiles at all, speak rather of a 'life style'—a bloody life style at that. This 'canvas' cannot even stand alone. It is supported by two of the cans. These expressive, playful detonations are not without violence. Repeated imagery depicts knives in combination with the slogan 'Dear Ketel One Drinker,' printed in the brand's signature typeface. Too close for comfort to some Third Reich clad text, in shrieking red, matching techno colors. The 'happy' quality of the show returns, in a 'bad ass' way, via the Naziesque flags hung throughout the space, sneakily urging us to 'get together, get wasted, and celebrate some quite dissonant universe.'

Elaborate labor has gone into creating the visual "effects", a re-invented formalism (of sorts) emerges; the effect has been fused with the content. A few texts discussed the material aspects of this work in detail1 along the lines of old-school formalist oriented art writing. The work plays with the idea of 'pure medium,' closer to 'pure' web-design, where the digital effect is structural to the medium, such as metallic font treatments and drop shadows. Early avant-garde graphics also operate along these lines.

Instead of erasing (the Rauschenberg/de Kooning move), here we have scanning and layering. Layers covering and uncovering, covering more or less, there is no attempt to control the spread of semination (as good advertisers might). Instead it is left open; eternally chain linking, killing off single horizon acts like the RNC. The result is a no result, an entropic contradiction. Stuck with the laugh in our throats, we already know how the act of the balancing chairs will end.


Re-Use It - Abuse It

Content is not contained like an onion, which you peel layer after layer. The layers are Photoshop layers-opaque or transparent, virtual and very tangible. In Kelley Walker's case, a collector receives a Photoshop file with layers. The bottommost layer is the non-editable, white background, which provides no transcendence in any ordinary sense. In an allegorical reading , one text is read through another, through a layer, shifting the location from which meaning is relayed. Chronologically layered depth is used rather than making the text transparent.

Walker's piece Schema: Aquafresh plus Crest with Tartar Control (2003) uses race riot images from the 1960s combined with layers of toothpaste, squirted directly on the scanner. Reading them through Warhol's race riot pieces, which use similar imagery, does not let us into the unconscious realm of buried sense. Neither would his shiny Rorschach images. The depth is virtual (not even a quarter inch), making for surface readings of layers flattened for production. Rather we encounter our pseudo-conscious, mass-cultured consumer minds already thoroughly excavated. The literacy of the audience is exploited and abused to the point of ejaculating a proliferation of significations. Beneath the spurted toothpaste, the layers of the image rampage over layers of tropes and possibilities for meaning-production, suggesting no one will be THE one. There is no interest in approximating a closure—the issue lies elsewhere. More like speaking in "allergy"—the sense is expelled with the force of an allergic reaction like the toothpaste discharge.

One recycles a used item and so decides its path to dissolution. Walker's recycling of images and sense-making compromises the viewer (even if opting out of altering the image layers) by making them participate and by playing with the system's rules of circulation and distribution. Submitting us to re-enactment therapy as opposed to the happy gathering of '90s social relational works, meaning is re-use, wrong use, or any use. This eco-art looks like mock-play without hygienic Green Peace pieces. The work mimics 'it', echoing worn out representational strategies, without (like the former) affirming current cultural ideologies or being usurped by them, like a hyperventilating freak, re-circulating known sign-to-sign-relations. What may, at first glance, look like a nostalgic feel for appropriation, following all the correct visual rules, is rather an employed formalism, spreading allergens. It is not about mourning but about playing.


Political Art = Tasteful Art

The tools of appropriation morphed into political correctness in the '1990s, when political came to mean consciousness of any little rat hole of injustice on the globe. The work of Mai-Thu Perret and Wade Guyton goes into the opposite direction. Excluding the 'real', both utilize visuals and objects of design from the early avant-gardes. These items were originally used as propaganda for a new society and way of life, though these societal forms have long since been discarded as non-viable.

In Guyton's 'Untitled Action Sculpture (Chair)' (2001), a shiny Breuer chair has been disfigured - violence to a form becomes violence to an ideology. The inoperative component does double duty as both 'form' and 'content', the hybrid being 'meaningful forms'. If, in Conceptual art content is to determine the form, a formalist approach is all about 'material' and 'process'. Subject matter, politics, and figuration are to be left out. The action in this case is the subject matter: a cover of a Pollock attack, sneaking in subject matter, politics, via the figure of the unusable chair.

Consider Perret's 4 Sculptures of Pure Self-Expression (The Arts and Crafts Movement), (2003). What look like black, shiny, ceramic, everyday objects of the real world from a distance, become upon closer inspection similar shapes connected to each other in similar ways. Variations without any possible use. The mentioning in the title of the 19th century Arts and Craft Movement brings to mind the romantic vision for a new society by William Morris and John Ruskin. While crafts have served for centuries as a terrain of self-expression for women, they are not ordinarily assessed according to their expressive qualities. Instead the precious hand-made quality is here turned into formal, modular 're-takes'. It becomes a mechanical exercise with minimal expression. Reminiscent of the Bauhaus (where Breuer taught) with similar convictions on teaching color and form. These sculptures parasite off of worn-out models of visionary propaganda, the ideas a form can set in motion.


Repeat It - Make It Original

In 1979, Sherri Levine re-photographed photographs by Walker Evans. Some of the original photographs were of his sons. The appropriation resulted in a dismissed court case. Similarly, Michelangelo could not apply this logic to sue Evans, nor the many imitators of David since then. I was once at a panel where Douglas Crimp spoke of Levine's images. Upon admitting he owned these photographs and hung in his bedroom, Crimp told a story of a lover who took the images at face-value: naked young boys. Adding an eerie layer in the '90s PC era, while Levine 'captured' the boys, Crimp in turn 'caged' them. Today Price reverts the positions in his re-screening of the Rosler piece much the same way capitalism always adjusts to destabilizing tendencies.

Another piece by Price: palettes inscribed with various generically written signatures (only first names) of well-known female artists, such as Martha for Rosler, Sherrie for Levine, or Lee Lee Lee as in Krassner, Lozano and Bontecou. They are ambivalently hovering between a cheering salute and an informal familiarity verging on irreverence. Authenticity re-used. Is he aestheticizing a formerly potent weapon? Is it neo-feminism raising the stakes, or...?

Josh Smith has made a series of pieces from his palettes. They are 'paintings' made by looking the other way, surfaces for the making of others. How long can one keep up one's disinterest, leaving out intentionality and gesture as we know it? These are no surrogate images. They are secondary, made from use. The paint ended up where it ended up through the process of something else.

Prefabricated obsessional neurosis—Josh Smith repeatedly paints his name 'Josh Smith' on canvas after canvas, stuttering the idea of the signature. What would look by itself like the marker of authenticity, in this mechanized way starts to erode the fetishism of originality while simultaneously reifying a kind of "difference"—a difference produced by the sameness in the imprint. Looking like lyrical attempts, the chronic indifference and mass production are forging painterly, expressionistic signs.


Formalism as Criticality

Craig Owens' "The Allegorical Impulse - Towards a Theory of Postmodernism - Part 2" discusses how the trope of the allegory functions as a distancing device: reading one text through another it highlights an irretrievably lost past. The image of the ruin is described as the ultimate nostalgic ideal of the allegory. Similar to irony it cultivates a distance between the work and the viewer. However allegory does so in a more static and general manner. It always points to the meta-textual level. One example from the same time, from Douglas Crimp's essay "Pictures", is Troy Brauntuch's installation pieces displaying "appropriated", enlarged, and staged images of Hitler sleeping in a car.

The classic image of Mussolini and his mistress hanging from a bridge toward the end of WWII is used in Adam McEwens piece 'Untitled (A-line)' (2003). The grandiosity of the presentation encourages a fascistic reading similar to Brauntuch's piece. Is it an attempt to imitate? The gesture is different, the image seems new, it has been turned upside down—a twofold sacrilege or re-erection. The hanging corpses are doing the dance—a funny one. I am smiling at the twisted contortions, forced back to my reading of the piece. My smile reminds me of the smiles of the soldiers taking pictures in the Abu Ghraib Prison. Not stopping at the reading of cultural codes and representation as in the Brauntuch, here the participatory reading of the viewer discloses a co-dependency, where the viewer's take is part of the work—a formalist ultra-relational aesthetic.

What was once content became a look; a design, here (re)run as content, whether this act is called re-cycling, imitation, or cover-making. Techno-color nostalgia or retro-quality time—these are the subliminal ways of the best propaganda machine in history: The Republican Party. Now, we don't turn our leaders upside down. In pretty turquoise dresses and cowboy boots-more than just a look—we extended their turn-around time.