In After the End of Art, Arthur Danto writes, “By contrast with the exultant, even feverish art market of the mid-1980s, which a certain number of grudging but not altogether misguided commentators at the time likened to the famous tulip mania that swamped the characteristic thrift and caution of the Dutch with a kind of speculative fever, the art world of the mid-1990s is a triste and chastened scene.”  Many would now predict that this description will serve equally well for the art market’s shift in the 2000s.  Prediction is certainly not foreign to the art word–a speculative market if there ever was one–prediction, in fact, may be the art market’s primary currency.  Danto’s view of the future continues,  “…the complex of casual determinants that accounted for the appetite to acquire art in the 1980s may never recombine in the form they assumed in that decade.”   Here Danto’s crystal ball proved cloudy, the 2000s saw not only a renewal of appetite, but the creation of a seemingly insatiable one–a veritable tapeworm in the collective stomach of the art-acquiring class.

The real irony, however, is that Danto would be bothering to make predictions at all in a book dedicated to announcing the end of art history.  Of course, the benefit to announcing the end of any history is that one gets to be that history’s final prophet.  Prophecy unites the theorist, the art dealer, and the author of science fiction–each pedaling their vision of the future.  It is in this vein that D’Amelio Terras gives us 1992009, a group show with a catchy sci-fi name that offers the theory that 1992 and 2009 share not only similar cultural landmarks–the replacement of a Bush in the White House with a Democrat, the war in Iraq, and fiscal failure–but also an artistic vision.  Thus heavyweights of the 90s–Christopher Wool, Felix Gonzalez-Torres, Sue Williams–are paired with younger artists represented by the gallery, such as Sara VanDerBeek, Leslie Hewitt, and Heather Rowe.

The cynical read conjures an obvious ploy to lend credibility to the gallery’s roster by billing these younger artists as stars of the future–imagine a 2029, this show whispers, in which Jedediah Ceasar is the new Robert Gober.  Such gestures–recession marketing, if you will–abound in Chelsea at the moment.  Witness the close proximity of solo shows by Jennifer Dalton and William Powhida, at Winkleman and Schroeder Romero Gallery respectively, which both offer cute, topical takes on the art world’s monetary woes.  Elsewhere, it is easy to imagine financial considerations as the motivator for a gallery’s selection of works even when this might not be the case, easy to see the recession lingering behind every hopeful show of mid-sized and polite paintings, and screaming behind sure-to-please blockbusters such as Picasso at Gagosian.

1992009 offers neither overly polite works nor guaranteed crowd pleasers.  The show’s relationship to the dates that form its title is largely the matter of the curatorial statement, rather than a topical consideration of the art, so it is easy to ignore this premise and focus on the work.  And here cross-generational relationships do emerge.  Nicole Cherubini’s vessel and pedestal are connected by a thin, wobbly arc that turns the whole sculpture into a sort of cup, creating the sense that the real purpose of ceramics is to offer a set of conventions that can be undone, and Steve Parrino’s canvas lies across its stretchers bars with the unruliness of a slept-in bed–here too it is the misuse of a set of material traditions that provides the work with its substance.  Noah Sheldon and Maggie Peng’s oversized, motorized wind chimes are a little bit beautiful, a little bit mysterious, and a little bit silly in a way that is not dissimilar to Kiki Smith’s white wax figure, crouched on the floor with long, outstretched arms.  Peter Missing tags the gallery wall with red lines representing an overturned wine glass atop three marks slashed through by a forth; this improvised hieroglyph mirrors the question mark slashed by two lines in Jessica Diamond’s graphic red and black wall painting.

“What money?” Diamond’s painting reads, the most overt reference to recession in the show.  That her work would have responded to the art market in such a fashion only makes sense, in the 90s Diamond’s paintings were primarily concerned with capitalist critique.  That this is not a cause unanimously championed by the other artists in the show doesn’t prevent meaningful relationships from forming among much of the very good work in 1992009, but it does contribute to the shows  failure to create a gestalt.  Despite the 2009 dating of many of the younger artist’s contributions, these pieces came out of bodies of work formed not during an art market bust, but rather in the height of its boom. Art is inevitably a product of the time in which it was made, but how this financial crisis will affect art, it is still too early to tell–even for a prophet.

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Life on Mars is the title of a David Bowie song and now, too, the 2008 Carnegie International.  The oldest exhibition of international contemporary art in North America, it has taken 55 incarnations for the show to bear a title.  “Is there life on Mars?” is a question curator Douglas Fogle asks as a way to explore “what it means to be human today,” “investigate the nature of humanness,” and “demonstrate hope for humankind.”  Uh-oh.  It doesn’t take an extraterrestrial perspective to realize that stating an artwork is an exploration of human nature is just a touch more specific than claiming it is about life.  Fogle’s big questions, however, guided a selection of works that share material concerns recently associated with less unwieldy notions.

I am thinking in particular of two other survey shows of the past year: the much-discussed inaugural exhibition of the Lower East Side’s New Museum, Unmonumental, and the 2008 Whitney Biennial.  Unmonumental offered up the informality of assemblage and collage as the proper antihero for our times.  Shortly thereafter the Biennial made much the same proposition, with one of the show’s curators, Henriette Huldisch, adding the catchphrase “lessness” to the New Museum’s “unmonumental”. And so a style was born, or rather, codified.  Life on Mars shares a number of artists with Unmonumental, including Mark Bradford, Cao Fei, Thomas Hirschhorn, Matthew Monahan, Manfred Pernice, and Susan Philipsz.  For a show of only 39 artists, that makes nearly a sixth.  This is perhaps unsurprising considering the New Museum’s Eungie Joo served on the advisory committee for the 2008 International, but is rather suspect for a show that purports to be global in its representation.  Suspect as well is that all but seven of the artists are from the US or Europe and only twelve are women.

Fogle furthered aligns himself with Unmonumental by stating “these artists are inheritors of an artistic legacy that seeks to produce not the monumental but the momentary, the ephemeral, and the modest”.  The problem with speaking in terms of inheritors and legacies   is that it can make for rather reductive relationships between works.  Paul Thek’s Untitled (Earth Drawing I), an acrylic on newspaper painting of Earth as seen from space, has become the signature image for Life on Mars.  Besides this work’s obvious play with the show’s title, Thek’s inclusion among the others artists in the exhibition presents his use of ephemeral materials as a precursor for a younger generation.  But pairing Thek with an artist with a similar materials list, like Mark Bradford, flatters neither.  At his best, Bradford’s mixed media collages seduce with a dense, dark physicality.  When he uses quotidian materials it feels simply as if the work pulled them in with a gravitational force.  Attaching any meaningful metaphor to the fact that Bradford assembles map-like images out of scraps of paper that you would commonly find on the street leaves one with a lot of overly obvious and not so useful metaphors.  Thek, on the other hand, hardly used materials in a way that could be described as seductive, but the information those materials bring to the work is always pointed.  At the time of its making -1974, just five years after the first human contact with the moon- his painting of Earth featured an image that had recently and frequently graced the pages of many newspapers.  Thek’s rendering of this icon with his characteristic light and fast touch leaves much of the newspaper underneath exposed.  What could be a poetic image, Earth seen from a distance so great that all its features become abstract, is interrupted by information about the US Army building a golf course or an oil company’s profits.  The pleasure of such wry humor isn’t transferable to Bradford.  His work’s sexiness starts to feel like so much art school posturing in comparison, while Thek uselessly becomes the enigmatic outsider.

The prevalence of what was being termed “scatter art” in the 90’s also renewed interest in Thek.  Ironically, the very person to have written extensively about the problematics of such resurrection jobs, Mike Kelley, is included in the Life on Mars as well.  His contribution, seven architecturally-based works from his Kandor series, cleverly capitalize on their incongruous relationship to the doric columns and marble austerity of the Hall of Sculpture in which they are housed.  Noticing that Kandor, a fictional city in the Superman comics, is represented differently in one issue of the comic to the next, Kelley presents the conflicting depictions of this fictional locale as a series of miniature cityscapes covered in glass domes and basked in glowing synthetic lights.  Each dome is connected via respiratory tubing to an oxygen tank of candy-colored hue and displayed amongst sleek platforms, pedestals, and partitions, with the occasional random decorative element, like a throw pillow, tastefully placed in their midst and video projections of similar set-ups on walls nearby.  In other words, the life of a pop-cultural fiction, Kandor, is being sustained by a parody of contemporary reworkings of modernist forms.  Perhaps Kelley is suggesting Modernism is a sort of Superman: a constantly evolving fiction rendered invincible through endless resuscitation and regurgitation.  In any case, Kandor 1, 4, 6, 13, 15, 17, and 20 are ephemeral only in the jokey sense that they are connected to respiratory tubes.  The work seems to critique rather than support the claims made on its behalf by our curator Fogle.

Other works in the 2008 International are also well worth seeing, but gain little from their placement in the show.  Fischli and Weiss please as always with a scene built of fabricated items that would be common to any workshop, everything from a plate of peanut shells to workman’s boots, and please as well with a dizzying video of double-exposed and constantly moving images that is as mesmerizing to stare at as a gasoline spill or a rave. Bruce Conner more than pleases with Angel, a series of stark and beautiful photograms made using the artist’s body and a slide projector, appropriate photographic portraits of someone who always played with ideas of artistic authorship.  However, thinking of Vija Celmins star-filled skies as evoking life on Mars is the least interesting context I can possibly imagine for works that otherwise play with the very limits of representation.

And yet, Fogle is not without my sympathies.  The job of curating a survey show of the magnitude of the Carnegie International is a thankless one; such exhibitions make it structurally impossible to appease all or even most expectations.  The history of the International is a complicated one, with the exhibition first beginning as a convenient way for Andrew Carnegie to build the museum’s collection.  Rather than traveling to find work for the museum, the International brought work to Pittsburgh that then could either be added to the permanent collection or shipped back home.  In its current position, the International serves as one of Pittsburgh’s only points of exposure to a larger art world.  A rather big job, but not one at which it has been wholly unsuccessful.  I grew up in Pittsburgh.  When I was fifteen the International was the cause of my first seeing Cindy Sherman, Chuck Close, and Tony Oursler, artists with whom I can no longer imagine a lack of familiarity.  I’m sure to many seeing the 2008 Carnegie International this exhibition is similarly revelatory.  However, in order to avoid appearing to be guided primarily by an unimaginative ploy to escape provinciality, the next curator of the International would do well to take less cues from New York, show a less predictable group of artists, and contextualize their work in a less uselessly broad way.

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If love finds its most ready representation in pop songs, memento mori and vanitas still life painting make the argument that art’s responsibility is to death.  That the populist appeal of a popular song would draw on sentimentality’s most frequently invoked sentiment is as par for the course as the fleeting nature of most pop songs.  Art bears the weight of greater claims: not only of permanence, but also of purpose.  Like the bastard twin of metaphysics, we want art to tell us the meaning of it all.  By abandoning such cumbersome notions as universality and monumentality, much contemporary art hopes to shirk this burden; it accounts for failure, acknowledges futility, and welcomes temporality.  The opposing impulse to preserve and even immortalize could provide one polarity to this attitude, but the history of memento mori and vanitas – in which representation is always coupled with reminders of loss – shows us that when work makes death its overt subject, preservation is just another way of acknowledging transience.

Bellwether Gallery’s If Love Could Have Saved You, You Would Have Lived Forever brings together a collection of objects that address mourning.  By pairing the work of contemporary artists with traditional representations of the material culture surrounding death that are not typically contextualized as art, curator Becky Smith demonstrates how the desire to commemorate runs across the impulse to make both art and non-art objects.  The best works in the show deal with this impulse directly by revealing the slippery nature between physicality and remembrance.

Across the room is a work that references another tradition in funerary sculptures and serves as the Joss paper effigies material opposite: Patricia Cronin’s Memorial to a Marriage.  A depiction of the artist and her partner Deborah Kass embracing in bed, this bronze serves as a double to the grave marker Cronin created to adorn the plot at Woodlawn Cemetery reserved for the couple.  This piece is at once time-based – its meaning is bound to its performative function and the portentous resonance it now possesses differs from the finality it will have when both artists are buried underneath – and eternal, the couple is pictured in an idealized moment that fixes them at a certain time in their lives, forever transgressing and transcending the sexual politics of that time.

Memorials to specific people known and imagined run throughout the exhibition.  Marc Swanson and Joe Mama-Nitzberg’s sexy photos of floral arrangements designed in memory of the likes of Darby Crash and Anna Nicole Smith give way to Tanyth Berkeley and Todd Chandler’s video commemoration of their friend Brad Will (an anarchist and documentary filmmaker who was shot and killed during a teacher’s strike in Oaxaca, Mexico in 2006) and Vanessa Albury’s single-slide projection of a still image taken at her grandmother’s funeral.  Visual rituals of grief to unknown subjects are displayed in a grouping of Victorian hair wreaths and Rob Hauschild’s disposable-camera snapshots of roadside memorials.

A fitting endnote for a show about demise is Becky Smith’s collection of the photographs of blank grave markers used to sell headstones. The graves are pictured in idyllic manicured lawns peppered with flowering trees, many of which are clearly painted backdrops.  Unnamed, these newborn gravestones wait hopefully for their prospective owners, eerily like orphaned children.  Despite their romantic backdrops, they resemble nothing so much as minimalist monoliths.  And yet, like many contemporary re-workings of modernist forms, they account for failure, acknowledge futility, and welcome temporality.

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