Last year, I attended a touring talk given by critic and curator Bob Nickas in which he showed slides of a hundred paintings, one from each year in the past century. A colleague of mine complained, “This guy is too cocky. What the hell does he know anyway?” I laughed: He was right, but only kind of. Nickas was a little arrogant as he blazed through a century of art in just over an hour. But an off-the-cuff, disaffected manner of talking and writing about art is energizing— it keeps you looking. He’s often called a misfit, and his work is seen as an antidote to stuffy art history and unintelligible critical theory. To me, having seen him draw large crowds of young artists and art history students, he’s not really a misfit. He does, though, seem keen on maintaining that conception: “The art world is such a haven for misfits … because it can be very forgiving of its talent.”

In Nickas’s latest book, The Department of Corrections: Collected Writings 2007-2015 (Karma), he does little to dispute his reputation as an art world maverick: After all, he wrote that “in art, if you’re allowed or encouraged to do something, I always opt out.” Covering his writings from a period of eight years in over 400 pages, he doesn’t drone on about what’s aesthetically worthy of attention or what’s fashionable at the moment. Neither is this book a sampling of his favorite artists: Nickas is just telling the reader about art ad hoc because it’s in our midst and it occurred to him to do it that way. Throughout his oeuvre, Nickas considers art just as we consider other things in life, without hierarchical assumptions of quality that get in the way of curiosity.

The book is organized into four theme-driven sections: Lost & Found; NYC; Repetition and the Politics of Time; Out of the Blue and into the Black; and Supply & Demand. The lattermost section is my favorite: It has a poem composed by Nickas, made up of phrases and lines from a piece of art criticism published in Artforum that engaged in what Nickas calls the old “See How Pretty, See How Smart,” or what he describes as “a foxy, linguistic blurting.” It’s a pretty good reminder to keep it simple. “Why are there prizes in art?” he asks in “Closing the Gap Between Art and Life,” adding “it doesn’t get more medieval than that.” Nickas often deals with the practical implications of producing art today, and he’s recommending that we pay attention right now — meaning that we ought to forget what we’ve been told, do things “the wrong way,” or piss some people off if that’s what it comes to. But at the same time, he’s not calling for some kind of idiotic, random art for the sake of itself, created just to produce more material waste. He can be deprecating and appreciative at the same time: “We really have to stop blaming Andy for the numbing commercialization of art. From the very beginning of his career, Warhol implicated himself within a system where not only is art for sale, but so too is the artist. And so he became the CEO.” I find his analyses of the art world to be necessary (and funny) in such a complex political and social period; they pull no punches about its problems. “Branding wasn’t just for cattle” he writes, “apparently it’s also for sheep,” complaining that the blasé look,of much contemporary art exhausts us all.

Nickas is critically aware of the flaws in collecting and art historicism, and writes that “history usually ends up being written by those who came into the world around the very same time that is subject to examination,” indicating that a close look at the infuriating circumstances of our time might be a good idea; although his comment that “the future is a thing of the past,” hints that maybe the past wasn’t exactly ideal either. That said, there’s an entire section dedicated to New York, a place where “art has always left traces behind, but like everything else in the city, those traces vanish a little more every passing day, until they are completely erased.” With the exception of the appearances of the ‘80s and a dedication to New York, there’s not too much sentimental nostalgia here.

Corrections rings true to free-association, but only in part. One thing of note here is a critical sense of what’s been given too much publicity (such as Jeff Koons) and who’s been left out of the conversation. In “Basquiat and the Collecting of History,” Nickas takes a popular Frank Stella line for a spin, changing it to “what you don’t see isn’t there,” adding that, despite Basquiat’s popularity in contemporary eyes, the MOMA has not yet acquired any of his paintings. He makes it a point to write about other important black artists like Kara Walker and David Hammons — with a notable sense of curiosity, making an example of how to approach contemporary art and culture with imagination and a critical mind. As Nickas has said, “it’s what’s in front of you that’s important.” His interest is in stories and in seeing things, and nothing is prescribed or necessary. Rather, for Nickas, art is about experience on a continuum.

Bob Nickas: The Dept. of Corrections: Collected Writings 2007-2015. (New York: Karma, 2016. 416 pp. ISBN 9781942607199. $25.00)

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At the Jewish Museum, on the night of October 23, a large crowd turned out to hear “What’s at Stake for Abstract Painting Today — and Where Do We Go from Here?” The panel featured a discussion among painters Joanne Greenbaum, Philip Taaffe, and Stanley Whitney, responding to prompts from the writer, critic, and curator Bob Nickas, who was the moderator. It was followed by questions from the audience. I showed up just moments before the program’s commencement, and after an onerous check-in process I was happy to see several friends in attendance. Nickas focused the conversation especially on young abstractionists, who he identified in his opening remarks as men born between 1980 and ’89. Other critics have likewise been eager to harp on a highly visible cadre of such boys: Parker Ito, Jacob Kassay, Lucien Smith, Oscar Murillo, David Ostrowski, Fredrik Vaerslev, and others. Their work has been given many monikers, including “Zombie Formalism” by Martin Mugar (subsequently popularized by the artist and critic Walter Robinson), or Jerry Saltz’s minimally clearer and more incisive term, “MFA-clever” painting.[1]

No artist of that cohort sat on the panel, which Nickas explained by saying, “I considered inviting some of them, but it felt like setting them up and not a good thing to do in public. They can have a panel of their own and talk about how we’re wrong or don’t understand.” Neither were any of them mentioned by name during the discussion, though images of the artists and their work (as well as the work of the panelists) were shown in a slide presentation that was paged through by Nickas mostly without commentary during the conversation. In his introductory remarks, Nickas emphasized his dislike of those artists as voguish and robotic by describing their careers as suffering a Menudo Problem: every artist as a boy band (a brand), “in a rush to be famous and therefore in a rush to be forgotten.”

The conversants were affable and their sharp quips were balanced with genuine acquisitiveness — an interest in what one another saw as the predominating problems and issues of contemporary painting, and seeing what insights they had gleaned from or about younger artists. Each was sure to reiterate, unequivocally, that there are younger artists they appreciate and admire. Nickas and Greenbaum were both quick to proclaim explicitly that they’re not generational.

Criticisms of the aforementioned youths were varied and most were well deserved, albeit delivered with what to my ear sounded tinged with a kind of “what’s wrong with the kids these days?” ageism, though perhaps I’m mistaken. Whitney and Taaffe noted that there have been bad artists in every era. Whitney offered that, “Painting changes, but not very much.” Nickas remarked that in The Afternoon Interviews, a series of conversations between Calvin Tomkins and Marcel Duchamp published in 1964, that many of Duchamp’s complaints are identical to those being made about today’s arts, and that “the [arts’ economic structure] has remained continuous.” Indeed, commoditization, cynicism, and repetition were perhaps as common in that era as they are today. However, Nickas went on to say that there is little similarity between today’s art market and the one Duchamp experienced a century ago: during the Armory Show, for a short time, Nude Descending a Staircase, No. 2 (1912) was one of the most famous and shocking new paintings in the world, after which it wasn’t displayed publicly for a very long time and Duchamp didn’t exhibit for several years. Nickas speculated that today — 50 years after Tomkins’s conversations with Duchamp, and 100 years after the first Armory Show — if a painting achieved the same level of fame it would likely be immediately repeated by the artist a dozen times over and shown as much as possible.

The panelists’ lamentations were primarily aimed at the mindless production-line work of those certain young artists: paintings that are churned out in large quantities, using the repetition of a few simple gimmicks. Such work is often described as conceptual, but with an abusive use of the term; this “conceptualism” conflates process and content, prioritizing the former at the latter’s expense. It typically employs expressive-like gestures, their formalism pre-slotted into a post-war art-historical genealogy. Greenbaum especially hypothesized that the young men are underformed and that their work is rushed from brainstorm to execution to market.[2]

The sum of all these features is decoration: canvases that are speckled or monochromatic or heavily worked into atmospheric mush or inscribed with a solitary line of colorful spray paint, pigment shot from fire extinguishers, athletic line markers, or whatever. Images that are nominally painterly, but essentially just expensive color swatches, follow not only formally but also ideologically from Abstract Expressionism, which the art historian TJ Clark lamented for its undying endurance and described as “vulgar,” the more successful for its greater vulgarity:

Seen in normal surroundings, past the unobtrusive sofas and calla lilies, as part of the unique blend of opulence and spareness that is the taste of the picture-buying [bourgeoisie] of America, a good Hoffmann seems always to be blurting out a dirty secret which the rest of the décor is conspiring to keep. It makes a false compact with its destination. It takes up the language of its users and exemplifies it … For what it shows is the world its users inhabit in their heart of hearts. It is a picture of their ‘interiors,’ of the visceral-cum-spiritual upholstery of the rich. And above all it can have no illusions about its own status as part of that upholstery. It is made out of the materials it deploys. Take them or leave them, these ciphers of plenitude — they are all painting at present has to offer.[3]

It should come as no surprise that Lucien Smith’s “rain paintings” resemble Pollock or that Jacob Kassay’s reflective monochromes allude to Barnett Newman or Frank Stella. Their work fulfills a nearly identical role.

In a recent essay for New York Magazine‘s Vulture blog, Jerry Saltz averred that the Internet, speculators, and schools are in some way coacting to make contemporary abstraction more dull and painters more conservatively similar. (He did not hypothesize a specific mechanism or motive.) By way of example, Saltz selected more than a dozen works by the cohort in question, compiling a Buzzfeed– or Huffington Post-like slideshow. Others in the slideshow included Mark Flood and Charline von Heyl, both of whom are about a generation older than the artists in question, as well as Helene Appel, whose work is spare and minimal, but trompe-l’œil, except if viewed as a 200-by-300-pixel jpeg. So the definitional boundaries of abstract painting’s contemporary problem children may be up for debate, depending on the peculiar tastes of a critic, curator, or artist. Or it may simply be dependent on the particular formal affinities that make for a contemptuously banal clickbait slideshow.[4]

Looking through back issues of arts magazines it’s easy to find faddish similarities between artists, curatorial experiments, and even exhibition advertisements from every time prior to the web’s arrival and the market’s recent rapid growth. In the 1960s and ’70s every zombified manner of grid, dash, monochrome, and unconventional canvas could be found on gallery walls and in print. Today’s scholars, critics, and curators are apparently eager to rediscover middling parishioners from the church of the grid and rectangle who have since fallen by the historical wayside. They should, and we shouldn’t be surprised if many new painters are consigned to such fates in the near and distant future. What is different about the contemporary, readily digitized era is our ability to easily index and examine a vast array of artists and their work, both past and present. Greenbaum asserted that she believes many of the young artists she speaks with are mostly looking at work that was made in the past 18 months, on their computers and at art fairs.

Perhaps even more so, as far as I can tell, a bigger problem is the profusion of superfluous rhetoric that substitutes for… uh… discourse. Published in Triple Canopy last year, Alix Rule and David Levine’s “International Art English” identified the way that fuzzy, otiose language has become the argot of arts conversations from press releases to the academy and everywhere between. The willing abrogation of critical talk to artists, consultants, and markets virtually guarantees that phony explanations will be offered in lieu of considered content, that buzzwords stand as simulacra of thought rather than leading to any idea, that every kind of nonsense is spoonfed to people willing to buy into it, and that ambiguity is prized over staking a claim.[5] That has nothing to do with the bogeymen that are more often worried over: fairs, auctions, speculators, dealers, and on and on.[6] As Nickas asserted at one point, this relatively contemporary ethos of de-skilling, and the seemingly accepted truism that anyone can be an artist, “teaches naïve people that they’re also talented.”[7] My feeling is, tangentially, that the actual sin is to try to persuade people, by way of inane jargon, that naïveté and redundancy are actually relevant.

Toward the end of the event, a young woman asked if the panelists still believe that a group of boys sits at the apex of contemporary painting. Nickas answered Yes, and then smirkingly added that he takes this from a good source: Philips auction catalogues.[8] I don’t know whether this is earnest or not, but the people who probably benefit most from the confusion of cultural capital with an investment strategy are investors. It would be far better, as I see it, to note that those young men are a symptom of lazy allowances for people seeking highbrow excuses to decorate their homes with banalities, and who might make a profit on later resale. Nickas quoted John Miller’s aphorism that painting is a “service industry,” which I think gets at this very problem — not a new one, nor an invention of young men painting today, and one that is propped up by rhetorical structure that acts like a Fuck You to any thinking viewer. One would hope, though, that the wizened representatives of earlier generations, some of whom have actively supported a few of these young men and their peers, can take responsibility in their laxity, and that we can as well,[9] and that perhaps we could all demand more from what we look at, calling out bullshit where it is found.

[1] Fashionable painting has begotten a fashionable dispute.

[2] This judgment is probably true, but is likewise applicable to earlier generations, such as Frank Stella, Richard Serra, Chuck Close and others who emerged from grad school and more or less walked straight into the gallery system. And anyway, this problem isn’t one owned by any particular party, and both the artists and galleries share in the responsibility of prematurity.

[3] Clark, TJ “In Defense of Abstract Expressionism.” In Farewell to an Idea: Episodes from a History of Modernism, 397. New Haven: Yale University Press, 1999.

[4] The unspoken flipside of Saltz’s critique is the equally vapid and arbitrary cheerleading promotional apparatus, including much of recent criticism. Saltz even tempers his critique with an apologia, noting that while he thinks such work is a problem, he likes the way it looks.

[5] My preferred example of this kind of thing is the press release for Jacob Kassay’s 2013 exhibition at 303 Gallery, which is so riddled with typos and non sequiturs that it’s absolutely depressing that such a document can hope to explain or even entice the hundreds of thousands of dollars spent on such work.

[6] In fact, despite their problems, galleries have historically done a great deal to protect the artists that they represent (again, taking into consideration the disparities in who they choose to represent and other very serious crimes). And the expansion of the art market since the 1980s, while concentrating wealth among a small class of artists, collectors, and dealers, has also sparked an enormous widening of opportunities that allows for more artists, more writers, more artist-run spaces, more non-profits, marginally greater diversity, greater museum attendance, and so on.

[7] About all of these phenomena and propositions I’m basically agnostic.

[8] In September, Nickas, with artist Ryan Foerster, released a zine made from collaged Philips catalogues, inscribed with marginalia poking fun at many of the young male artists featured therein and also discussed on the panel.

[9] This includes me, by the way.

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Jurgen Teller: Daddy You’re So Cute
Lehmann Maupin
540 West 26th Street
New York NY 10001
212-255-2923
September 13 to October 18, 2003

my people were fair and had cum in their hair
(but now they’re content to spray stars from your boughs)
curated by Bob Nickas
TEAM
527 West 26 Street
New York NY 10001
212 279 9219
18 October through 15 November 2003

In two exhibitions encountered at random during recent visits to Chelsea galleries, sex is used as a vehicle for investigating issues of national and racial identity: Jurgen Teller’s beer, pork and penis studies of German-ness as reflected in a series of self-portraits is one, and Reagen Louie’s brothel and sex show encounters with Asian-ness the other. Additionally, a group show at Team Gallery offers a survey of utopian and mystical extensions of the sexual, dating back thirty-five years or so, with male artists looking at male subjects (and a few women) giving and receiving pleasure with a nostalgic abandon. Here, multiple Christ-like figures engage in anal sex, an attractive young man offers himself through an open car window, and another young man pleasures himself with a pumpkin, all in an effort to convey”sexual energy as key to kingdom and entering into a more fluid state between the mind and the body,” as Bob Nickas, the curator of the exhibition, is quoted in the press statement.

In short, what these three shows had in common was a male evocation of a social erotic, a situating of the masculine in relation to a collective identity or transcendent figure (Christ or Shiva, Eastern or Western sexual experience). Images of identity construction on the outer margins were few-no blood or whips or extreme piercings; nothing particularly squeamish or ‘kinky’. Theory was absent as well. No sightings of the fearful objet petit a), but lots of young flesh posed in the landscape of conventional male fantasy: bordellos, parking lots, hotel rooms, restaurants, and beaches. Irony was rampant, but so were various forms of earnestness. Sometimes the two were difficult to distinguish.

This blurring of the earnest and the ironic was particularly evident in the work of Reagan Louie. The implication of his images of sex workers is that-surprise!– they are individuals just like you and me. They horse around together, chat over cigarettes or soda, and work. Although they are often photographed nude, the fact that they have sex for money is kept out of view, and the voyeuristic pleasure of exposed flesh is deflected by the lush composition of the images. The seemingly hygienic attractiveness of the women, the tonal warmth and elegant structure of the compositions, and not least the absence of sex make women seem all the more wholesome. Yet isn’t that the core of fantasy in scenarios involving commodified sex? The woman for hire is lovely and sweet, just like the girl next door, and conversely the girl next door is, with the right man or in the right circumstance, sexually voracious or ‘slutty.’ What is fascinating about these photographs is that, even whilefantasy operates within them, the images also appear to be motivated by a desire for kinship or sympathetic bond with the subject, a bond that would turn wanderings in the sex industry into an artistic or spiritual quest, a visual bildungsroman with pasties. A fifth generation Chinese-American, Louie previously explored questions of identity, journeying to China to take the documentary images collected in “Toward a Truer Life” (1991). For this project he undertook a six year odyssey through Taiwan, Thailand, Japan and the Philippines. So, whereas one might expect images that raise difficult issues of sexual exploitation, racial exoticism, and decadence in the global marketplace, one finds unresolved attempts to find human contact in the most unlikely places.

At Lehman Maupin Gallery Jurgen Teller turns his lens from the celebrities and fashion models of his recent work onto himself. The confessional rigor of this work suggests the paradox that photography with sex as a focus is likely to achieve greater depth with the absence of the other. In place of objectified women, Teller conjures his dead father and a macho culture of German soccer and beer, each a bitterly unresolved attraction and repulsion. “Father and Son” depicts the artist nude on his father’s grave at midnight; a soccer ball serves as an allusion to his father’s dislike of the sport. Elsewhere, Teller lounges in a sauna, his face hidden behind a soccer magazine. With his rear presented to the camera, he exposes himself as ‘arsehole’ (his term) and as an object of desire. Beneath the self-loathing of these images, it is not hard to find a longing for a masculine ideal made problematic by a confluence of German and personal recrimination.

Almost six decades after the end of the Second World War, Germany and ‘the orient’ (a term Louie employs in the title of his show) still conjure sexual mythologies too troubling and complicated to confront directly or dismiss completely. Still, Teller’s pasty, drink-addled figure is the “real” element missing in Louie’s photographs; conversely, the giving and attractive women in Louie’s work are the fantasy missing in Teller’s images.

After seeing the Louie and Teller shows, one can be thrown by the poetic dreaminess of the organizing theme at Team: “My people were fair and had cum in their hair (but now they’re content to spray stars from your boughs).” Perhaps a new sexual revolution might run like an x-rated production of Midsummer Night’s Dream or a recitation of early Yeats by the cast of a gay porn film, but probably not. The reactions, or lack thereof, of visitors to the gallery indicated that the premise of the show (“Lately, a lot of work by younger artists has brought back ideas revolving around hedonism, liberation and revolution”) provokes the same sort of wary if bemused interest as a pair of outlandish sneakers at Jeffrey. This is because hedonism is already a given of contemporary consumer culture. Self-control is the new lost paradise-lose weight, organize, manage time, manage money, eliminate the menstrual cycle. This is not to suggest that all of the works at Team are glimpses of simple pleasure. Jules de Balincourt’s satirical image of corporate sexual processing (people burn their clothes upon leaving the plant) gave a refreshingly whimsical take on capitalism and sex, and Tim Lokiec’s cartoon grotesque of oral sex was intriguingly fierce and unresolved. Wolfgang Tillmans’s “Do Not Disturb”-an image of a man opening a door just enough to present his genitals- was amusing and disturbing all at once. It would be interesting to see what else lies behind the door-a geisha, a harem, a rucksack for a back to nature stroll, a pile of crumpled beer cans…We’ll see.

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