by Jon Lackman | 14 February 2007 | Conferences, Contemporary, Modern, News
About 120 people are here for the “Reframing Modernism” panel in the Hilton’s rather unmodern Trianon Ballroom, where bad lighting is making the slides near-impossible to see. One speaker, Jenny Anger, considers it still necessary to contest Michael Fried’s concept of “theatricality.” Among other things, she believes that there is a fascist element in modernism that a more refined notion of ‘theatricality’ can help us identify. “I’m not saying modernism was fascist but that it could be.” Speaker Karen Kurczynski addresses Asger Jorn, who sought ways to go on painting despite the death of painting and the death of the avant-garde. He employed the help of Situationist principles, despite the antagonism toward art demonstrated by many Situationists, who finally kicked out all the artists in 1961. (They didn’t much like critics either, whom they dubbed “partial, incoherent and divided imbeciles.”) Shortly after Clement Greenberg declared the fundamental incompatibility of avant-garde and kitsch in 1939, Jorn embraced them both equally, if equally ironically, parroting contemporary styles as he scrawled his brushes across ready-made cheap academic pictures, to which he also added graffiti (or something like it). His unashamed “love for sofa painting” led him to call for the establishment of a “department for the improvement of old canvases.” One canvas he “improved” was that featuring Raphael’s famous cherubs, which was as subsumed by kitsch in the 1940s when Jorn painted as they are now (“they would fit perfectly in this room,” Kurczynski noted). Jorn had a sly, relatively noncorrosive sense of irony and an irrepressible enthusiasm. One 1962 painting he titled, “The Avant-Garde Won’t Give Up.”
In the airless Clinton Suite, some 60-odd badges turn towards “Artists’ Periodicals: 1945-1990.” Gwen Allen discusses Aspen, which attracted contributors from Warhol, John Cage, Mel Bochner, Dan Graham, and Tony Smith to Marshall McLuhan, George Kubler, Susan Sontag and Roland Barthes. It took up the modern, high-tech, multimedia culture that it found newly all around it, but the magazine had an anarchic primitivism that gave it a critical edge. Sections demanded actions on behalf of the viewer, and an issue certainly could not be taken in as a whole in quiet contemplation – in other words it partook of the “endless temporality of minimalism.” (Enter Fried, again.) Reference is made at one point in this paper to a “hyphenated neologism,” a phrase that would probably aptly encapsulate several papers here at CAA.
Benjamin Lima (an Art History Newsletter contributor) discusses Wolf Vostell’s Dé-coll/age, which included a George Maciunas “composition,” in which a performer was exhorted to “place a dog or cat inside the piano and play Chopin.” Lima notes that Dé-coll/age sought to assault its readers in the way that Happenings confronted their audiences, to replace passive contemplation with active engagement. It sometimes blew up photographs and presented them in a chaotic jumble with little explanatory text. The magazine’s title derived from a newspaper subhead that the young Vostell had encountered in France; after announcing a recent plane crash, the paper added the words “peu après son décollage.” Vostell found himself obsessed by the incident, seeing in it all the banal and violent “propulsive disintegration” (in Lima’s words) of modern metropolitan life.
Emily Hage discusses Dadazine, The West Bay Dadaist, and the New York Correspondence School Weekly Breeder, three zines by Bay Area Dadaists. Unlike the neo-Dadaists, who largely rejected their association with Dada (one artist complained, “we were [considered] just a remake, reheated coffee”), these artists embraced their heritage, spreading stamped stickers all over that announced “Dada is Everywhere.” They now claim to have been particularly influenced by Zurich Dada, although an argument could also be made for Berlin Dada, generally considered to be more political, as the Bay Area Dadaists sometimes were as well. Their zines, now largely forgotten and discarded (“sleeping in landfills,” as one surviving contributor puts it), gleefully introduced images of Richard Nixon for one. Nixon at one point leans in to FBI director Hoover, who declares, “Everybody in here but you and me is queer and I’m not so sure about you anymore.” Below another picture, of zebras mating, we find the words, “Nixon is up for a Nobel.”
During the Q&A, one woman asks if any of these zines challenged not just the institutions of society but also art institutions. Panel chair Stephen E. Perkins asserts that zines do this necessarily, that they are inherently alternatively spaces. Lima responds that there is a paradox here – as with happenings, somebody has to organize the zine, someone has to pay to print it, someone has to distribute it and market it. It immediately becomes an institution of its own. Hage notes that the Bay Area Dadaists are now quietly placing their works in museums. Another audience member notes that zines are often held up as more democratic than the traditional art market – since they are cheaply and widely distributed – but asks if in practice they circulated much outside an art-world coterie. Another asks if zines are now doomed to become an outmoded nostalgic medium, and wonders if the Internet is adequate to replace them.
Attire runs from t-shirts to suits. One woman knits. Amazingly enough, not a single cellphone rings.
