May to October, 2016
941 North Street (at Hurlingham Drive)
Greenwich, CT, 203 869 0611

“My body will not be a tomb for other creatures.”
-Leonardo da Vinci

Guests to the opening of Jonathan Horowitz’s “Occupy Greenwich,” at the Brant Foundation, may have been very surprised: whereas the multimillionaire paper magnate Peter Brant and his wife, Stephanie, typically open the spring exhibition at their art and study center with a pig roast, the carcasses of dead animals forced open and staked on the grounds, this year’s attendees were greeted with vegan catering. Horowitz is vegan, and dressing as a slaughterhouse the beautiful Connecticut estate surrounding his show seems likely to have undermined his work, some which speaks to the politics of what people eat and why.

Even before it opened, the show embraced some surprising contradictions. It runs the gamut, in a way, speaking to a number of social and political problems. It was promoted with a full-page ad, reproducing Horowitz’s print Go Vegan! (Stephanie) (2016), with the slogan underscoring the portrait of a seductive young woman. Horowitz is gay, but he also understands that pretty girls sell better than pictures of cute animals, which are often paired with that exhortation. (Though women are also often referred to with metaphors for penned animals, obviously.) At the bottom was the show’s sardonic title, equating the carefully executed exhibition of expensive collectibles with an anarchist takeover of the exurban enclave.

“Occupy Greenwich” touches on a number of seemingly partisan themes, often with messages that are superficially evangelist but which also include a subtext of uncertainty or perhaps even irony. That’s especially useful as America’s political discourse has grown increasingly polarized, in spite of the fact that people don’t lead polar lives and usually have beliefs and practices that differ radically from common stereotypes about, say, vegans, Republicans, working class voters, queer people, gun owners and so on.

Hillary Clinton is a Person Too (2008), staged in one early room, is a cartooned, life-sized bronze sculpture of a woman being crowned by a small boy standing on a chair, with the sculpture’s title cast into the base, in a corny comic font. Next to it, a whole wall of similar figurines — the size of paperweights and cast in the style of 1970s Sillisculpt statues, titled We the People are People Too (2008) — are marked with affirmations that “Young Mothers Are People Too,” “Socialist Medics Are People Too,” “Donald Rumsfeld Is A Person Too,” “Ellen And Portia Are People Too,” “Fetuses Are People Too,” and others. It’s not at all obvious how sincere Horowitz is being in his parodic coronation of Mrs. Clinton and the insistence on a common humanity shared alike by working people and Rumsfeld et al. It is absolutely essential to remember that everyone is a person, but it’s also important to recall that both of those politicians were managers of massive death, and putting them on the same scale as mothers, doctors, and embryos, etc., is discomfiting.

A stairway leading to galleries downstairs is lined with Go Vegan! (200 Celebrity Vegetarians Downloaded from the Internet) (2002/10). Each low-resolution-pictured person eats (currently, formerly, occasionally) a vegan or vegetarian diet, including Vincent van Gogh, Prince and Franz Kafka, among many others. Similar mosaics are found in vegan restaurants, online, and on posters produced by PETA. But they’re also dubious; Horowitz commends the plea and also slyly digs at its cheesy, superfluous celebrity endorsements, which seem to put animal-cruelty-free eating in the same basket as Coca-Cola and Nike.

Downstairs, a large room recapitulates Horowitz’s November 4, 2008 (2008) installation, originally staged at Gavin Brown’s Enterprise, wherein viewers watched live election returns in a room divided between red and blue, FOX News and CNN, on back-to-back LCD screens. Here is the same set up, balloons poised to drop from the ceiling. The TV monitors are still playing the ‘08 election, and all of 24-hour cable news’ on-screen signs of urgent immediacy — rapidly moving graphics, breaking updates, a scrolling crawl at the bottom, and more — all this stuff that’s meant to convey nowness, is, eight years later, manic, diminutive, impotent.

The last installation, I, Hillary (2016), is a room empty save for a spare white bench, desk and chair, and an ink-jet printed and framed low-res portrait of Mrs. Clinton. From a small PA system comes Horowitz’s voice, giving a meandering, rational and sort of defensive account of the show and his support for Mrs. Clinton’s candidacy. He describes how capable she is, and that her policy aims seem pragmatic and reasonable. Although Horowitz sounds like he’s speaking extemporaneously, if haltingly, his remarks also seem canned, robotically parroted from Clinton surrogates, partisans and pundits. Many of the same claims were repeated at the Democratic National Convention in July and have been found in the opinion media for the past year — the thrust being basically that he’s not crazy about her, but thinks she’s capable and will do a good job and have you seen how insane the alternative is? Horowitz’s minimizations of Clinton’s closeness to Wall Street money and influence are followed by preemptive defenses about working with the Brants at their ostentatious estate, drawing a sharp parallel between her compromises and his own.

“I guess I am not a big proponent in general of supposed ideological purity,” says Horowitz in his monologue. Probably few people are. More than that, though, Horowitz seems deeply interested in apparent contradiction, performativity, appropriation and allusion, both in politics and culture, and in his own life. One can hope that poking at those conflicts and misconceptions might lead to better elections, or maybe more civility. Or perhaps even just a few more vegans.

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June 23 to August 5, 2016
83 Grand Street (between Wooster and Greene streets)
New York, 212 279 9219

The same day “Golden Eggs” opened at Team Gallery, the UK voted for the economic insanity of leaving the European Union, following on another economic insanity of austerity, privatization, and cheerful steroidal encouragement of the financial sector. The vote to leave was, in part, a severely misguided reaction against wealth concentration and the technocratic institutions of Brussels, Frankfurt and London, which have for decades segregated citizens and underserved them, or even put a boot to their neck. “Golden Eggs,” with work by 10 artists organized by Alissa Bennett, performs a similar kind of disaffection as those referendum voters, though framed by the analytic reflectivity of Marxism (probably at least a little sardonically) instead of the reactionary know-nothing populism that just made a basket case of Britain, that has threatened other European nations for almost a decade, and which is threatening the US election.

Bennett described the show to me as a kind of answer to Art Basel, which had concluded five days earlier. That fair was, this year, seen as something of a test of the market’s continuing hypertrophy, coming on the heels of an apparently lackluster run of auctions. And the outlook was judged to be good. Wasn’t everyone very glad that the party is likely to continue?

A large red-and-white painting by Gardar Eide Einarsson, The Next Recession and Where to Hide (2016), summed up the mood of the show succinctly: a giant arrow hurtling toward the lower right corner, imitating a graph of a crashing global market. It’s a brusque, cool image that invites both terror and dispassionate admiration. It’s appropriated from a January 2016 cover of Time Magazine, headlined with the painting’s title in fearful, capitalized letters. Einarsson’s painting excludes the original text, which had also ominously crowed about China and boasted a clever report from Davos, meaning the World Economic Forum, another Swiss confab for market makers, then congregating leaders and representatives of the most powerful businesses and nations on Earth to discuss economic policy, as they’ve done for 45 years. Although the meeting intends to help guide capitalism toward the benefit of all, it has prevented neither the greatest worldwide consolidation of wealth in almost 100 years, nor the costly, global, economic supercatastrophe that’s been playing out since 2007. In fact, it’s probably done a great deal to enable those twin phenomena. Einarsson’s bolting arrow isn’t predicted by or aimed at Davos, but is cast by Davos; it’s everyone else trying to find where to hide.

The people at Basel and Davos can be seen as the market’s invisible hands, though perhaps “occluded hands” would be a better name, since although many of the participants at each conference are certainly recognizable, there’s almost zero transparency in what they do. Hans Haacke’s kinetic sculpture, The Invisible Hand of The Market (2009), anoints the whole show, hanging high on one wall. It’s a large box, with the title written out like a billboard. In the center, a large, open hand tilts from side to side, its innards ticking metronomically. The disembodied hand greets, waves, grabs, swats, remains out of reach, and dominates. It quotes Adam Smith, capitalism’s godfather, and his proposition that the private vices of individuals can, in their self-interest, invisibly, almost magically, develop into public benefits. However, Smith was speculating about the disembodied power of crowds, not the secret pillaging of oligarchs. And what is the social benefit of a global art-as-investment frenzy remains unclear, even more so when vast quantities of artworks bought in Switzerland remain there, sealed in indefinite storage at the Geneva Freeport, constructed to sequester collections and avoid taxes, and maybe trade and deal and hide. Given bad incentives — such as those that reward opacity in the art market, or that repay, with taxpayer money, dumb, massively over-leveraged financial bets — private vices may instead yield results which are simply vicious, yield a market whose aims and procedures are warped to favor wealth accumulation rather than innovative cultural production or social good. Karl Marx asserts that this is capitalism’s inevitable trajectory, not merely an accidental flaw.

Alex Bag, in Coven Services (2004), shows what such market forces look like as products for ordinary consumers (not citizens). Her video strings together several ad parodies, with interludes consisting of segments from a published sex tape starring the heiress Paris Hilton, shot in infrared, so that she and her paramour are rendered in green and black. This is riffed on by Bag, in clips where she plays PFC Jessica Lynch in green Army fatigues, selling Halliburton; a green witch named Eli Lilly dosing nubile children with Prozac and Satanism; and by a guy in a night-vision segment pimping the “warm, sticky infojaculate” pumped to consumers by AOL-Time Warner. She weaves a narrative of the interconnectedness (read: “collusion”) of the military, politics, capital, and entertainment in the construction of a totalizing ideology of consumption and obeisance.

Three text-based works — by Barbara Kruger, Jessica Diamond and Bjarne Melgaard — sneer at the developed world’s socioeconomic turmoil, bringing to the surface a primary contradiction. Diamond’s wall drawing declares “I HATE BUSINESS,” which is the product of her own business. Two prints by Kruger, wonder, respectively, about the relationship between being successful and feeling “FAKE,” and “IS BLIND IDEALISM REACTIONARY?” Melgaard snipes, “THE WORLD iS FULL OF RiCH CORRUPT CUNTS.” But his oeuvre is known for its ostentatious kind of cuntiness and opulence, and here is also included one of his sculptures, mounted with beauty products and a Brioni jacket. Embroidery over the interior breast pocket, conspicuously visible, indicates that it was made specially for Melgaard; I have no clue what a bespoke coat costs, but suffice to say its retail price is at least several thousand dollars. None of these artists would be considered rich from the vantage of patrons in the transnational capitalist class who fund so much of the art market. But, looking upward, they seem rich, and it can feel really impossible for emerging artists to gain purchase among such established figures. The art market, like other markets for other labors, is built in such a way as to suppress or exclude the emergent and retain the privileges of the already established, even the blasphemous establishment.

It’s tempting (and probably necessary) to extend this kind of critique, but it also smacks of the same myopia that always infects dogmatic demands for ideological rigor, or at least for the appearance of absolutism. In 2011, during the Occupy protests, TV personalities jeered at the protesters for leaving rallies to withdraw cash from Bank of America ATMs for lunch or whatever, as if the protesters’ coerced interaction with corporate behemoths was in some way hypocritical to that movement’s purpose. Einarsson, Haacke, Bag, Melgaard, Kruger, Diamond, and other artists here, as well as Bennett, have a license to criticize money and power. The meaning of their work, as pointed as it may be, is often secondary to its value for collectors. If the insults lobbed at capitalism provide good return on investment, then the market will reward its hecklers. These artists didn’t choose this, but they are illustrative. They’re collected at Basel by the kinds of people meeting at Davos, and they make a living. But Davos and Basel have true power, not them.

Marx, elaborated by ideologists such as Vladimir Lenin and Rosa Luxemburg, wrote of sharpening contradictions as a propulsion towards the collapse of capitalism (a longtime fantasy not likely to be realized anytime soon). As can be expected, those forces and contradictions play themselves out in every aspect of culture, from factories to studios. The depredation of middle and working class nest eggs, combined with the distribution of golden parachutes to speculators who were supposed to lose under the economic laws they had championed, has driven the contradictions to extremes. Will they crack? What happens then?

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“Wonder” and “beauty” by now are clichés we’re bound to encounter when discussing visual art. How else is one to talk about it, but to opine what’s wonderful? One obvious, however difficult, answer would be to describe what one naturally sees. As Heraclitus tells us, via his curious philosophy, nature has a passion for hiding from us. With this in mind, it’s helpful to remember that even what’s defined as “natural” can be in itself an enigma; think of the eerily exact still-lifes done by countless artists throughout time. Parmenides later says that all of what’s real is alike, and that furthermore, if you find something real here, you’ll likewise find the same amount of it over there. Open to all influences, artists have found more to attend to than what’s plainly visible. And so, what’s difficult about this? Artistic independence bears its garbage as well as its gifts. Thanks to assiduous contemporaries like Richard Tuttle, whose works are motivated by both nature and imagination, viewers can throw off the visual strain of having to guess at what they’re seeing, and simply admire Tuttle’s objects for what they are.

With such an unrestraining ontological setup as the above, we can agree that what artists have to work with has no limit, and art is really a game and nothing more. In this game, the only thing to do is discover and understand — or, in the case of Richard Tuttle, to simply ask questions. Artists have always the problem of showing what it’s like to live during the time of art-making. It’s here, where very little makes sense, we can appreciate works by artists of the current milieu; here and now you can really say whatever you like. Richard Tuttle says and makes whatever he pleases. His is a polarizing endeavor, but certainly worthy of anyone’s time when done with such a steady and varied output as evinced by the new publication, Richard Tuttle: Prints, published by JRP|Ringier.

In this book, perhaps in reply to our aforementioned Classical philosophers, Tuttle reminds us that “to learn what something is, you sometimes have to reference what it is not,” a statement telling of his ever-quixotic process of making art. The book’s publication was occasioned by the exhibition “Richard Tuttle: A Print Retrospective” at Bowdoin College Museum of Art from June 28 through October 19 of 2014, and it demonstrates Tuttle’s sheer prolificacy and his bent for the mechanisms and outcomes of printmaking. The book is organized chronologically by exhibition, from 1963 to 2014, and from its beginning through the duration of Tuttle’s career, he makes no bones to remind us that what we’re seeing may not be what’s actually there, and questions the acts and objects we’re often to understand as being Art.

Throughout Prints, it’s difficult to discern whether a reproduced work of Tuttle’s is a drawing, a painting, a silkscreen, a woodcut, a sculpture, or a collage: a trait of diversity which remains at the center of his oeuvre. Stating that “a print is not a drawing,” we can be grateful to Tuttle and the editors for giving us examples of just what is a print. Even in the Classic example, Tuttle is making connections and analogies to the print process, such as “when Homer has Nestor ask his men to choose between fighting the Trojans or dying on their way back home, their choice is a space for a print.” To guide us along, we are given statements from the artist himself, like the dictum that “science exists to resolve problems; art is there to raise problems.” Tuttle’s approach to art is often eccentric and always investigative, to the bafflement, bemusement, and excitement of his audience.

One especially puzzling series from Prints, consists of seven woodcuts printed in colors, entitled Galisteo Paintings (1993). These prints, based on delicately painted watercolors done by Tuttle in Galisteo, New Mexico, were “translated” in the process of the woodcuts being printed. This series is an example of how Tuttle’s process is never limited to one definition or specific outcome, as it “conflates both the printing and painting techniques.” These prints appear as watercolors of flowers and birds, and the process of their making is startlingly imperceptible.

Now more than ever are categorizations like “Minimalist” or “Post-Minimalist” fitted best out the open window, and Tuttle seems to know this well. For his chosen medium of printmaking, the printing plate’s function is to deliver “information as a pen does for the writer,” and Tuttle allows a view into this work as being comparable to language, specifically with the surprising connection the book draws: through the transformation of drawing into print via its plate, a “translation” is taking place. These prints ask questions, raise them, and are meant to be dialogues in print without language.

Editor Christina von Rotenhan mentions (in a nod to Tuttle’s being an artist through-and-through) his “residing in border zones,” when interestingly, he uses even the borders and “empty” spaces in the way that one could view the spaces around letters in typography as important rudiments of the composition. Tuttle sometimes includes all parts of the printing press machinery as elements for the final object. One section of the book features a 1998 exhibition entitled “Edge,” inspired by botanical prints from the 18th century. Here, the intaglio printing plate’s edge is seen embossed on each finished print, thus obscuring “our understanding of the order of printing and the emergence of the printed images,” and making an allusion to an actual frame within the borders of each print. Funnily enough, these dynamic and colorful lines appear less botanical, and more like sketches for needlepoint in fragments. One could stare at these particular works for hours, guessing at their beginnings and endings, and the junctures at which hues blend and never really come up with any answers, because Tuttle has altogether relieved us of what we’re “supposed” to see in (or even say about) his prints.

If we’re forced to bear the old bearers of beauty, let them be of the Tuttlean stock, which adheres to the poetic rule wherein the art requires as much from you as you require from it. Richard Tuttle’s prints are startlingly neutral; his methods are totally efficient, and yet they have the capacity to lead the viewer from any individual print in a thousand other directions and spaces without indulgence, which would in any case fade. Meanwhile, Richard Tuttle’s exhibitions continue, giving viewers the close-up view of what this book tantalizingly foretastes.

Richard Tuttle: Prints (Zurich: JRP|Ringier, in co-edition with Bowdoin College Museum of Art, 2014). Ed. Christina von Rotenhan. English edition. ISBN: 978-3-03764-365-5, 144 pages, $80

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