ConsecutiveMatters (a.k.a. jonathantdneil.com)

ArtReview Blogs | Art news & Exhibitions | An artist sees signs of Neo-Orientalism in industry’s restless search for a new boom to promote / artreview.com.

Excellent piece by Kamrooz Aram on the rhetoric currently being marshaled by the auction houses in the service of promoting the next ethno-market in contemporary art.

Note: A modified version of the post can be found at artreview.com

Saturday evening during Art Basel Miami Beach, really the final evening of the event, is often given over to more measured reflections upon the circus one has just passed through.  “Good” seemed to be the universal assessment from the dealers (though this was quickly recognized as an elastic term, signaling everything from bravery in the face of financial destitution, to just this or the other side of breaking even, to turning a small profit but not wanting to gloat).  “Good” seemed to do it for everyone else as well, except, that is, when it came to the Rubell Collection, the Rubell family’s private museum, which has now been open to the public since 1996 and is nearly universally regarded as one of the more exceptional contemporary art exhibition originators and venues in the US.  The Rubell Collection was not “good”; it was “great”.

But then it always is, isn’t it?  Quickly I found myself asking, “Can anyone be against the Rubell Collection?”  My question was more rhetorical than interrogatory, because it didn’t seem to me that anyone could be–against the Rubell Collection, that is.

I don’t shy away from admitting that it is the current show, 30 Americans, which raised the question.  It is a show of art made by African-American artists, and it is a strong one, strong because it foregrounds the complex problem that identity is–and also, apparently, the problem we still have in using identity to identify people (or to identify ourselves), as this closing statement from the exhibition’s introductory wall text makes apparent:  ”As the show evolved, we [the Rubell Family] decided to call it ‘30 Americans’.  ’Americans’, rather than ‘African Americans’ or ‘Black Americans’ because nationality is a statement of fact, while racial identity is a question each artist answers in his or her own way, or not at all.”

On first glance there is nothing false about this statement, of course.  In fact, it looks to get the problem of identity perhaps more right than it wants to, because as a “statement of fact,” nationality has nothing to do with the “question” of “racial identity,” just as it would seem to have nothing to do with the question of “national identity” either, insofar as these terms indicate something of what it is like to be a certain race or of a certain nation.  As a statement of fact, “he’s an American” applies as much to an eight-month-old boy of Pakistani descent born in Dearborn, Michigan, as to an 88 year-old, decorated World War II veteran born in Fresno, California, as to, say, Christopher Hitchens, now a naturalized US citizen born in the United Kingdom.  Each, of course, is an “American,” though I don’t doubt that each has, does and will “identify” with that concept in very different ways, but this has nothing to do with the facts.  And here we see that the notion of being an “American”, in contrast, say, to being a “US Citizen,” is loaded with more than just factual content anyway.

In naming their show 30 Americans, then, the Rubell’s want identity both ways; they don’t “identify” the artists they’ve gathered together in their show, because the “question” of “racial identity” is one each artist answers (or doesn’t) all on his or her own; yet rather than using how the artists answer that question (or don’t) to make the decision about who to include, the Rubells have nonetheless used identity, “black” or “African American,” as a necessary (though obviously not sufficient) criteria for their selections.

Now, pointing out the specious logic behind the Rubell’s decision to name their recent show 30 Americans rather than, say, “30 Black Americans” is not what I mean to get at when I ask “Can anyone be against the Rubell Collection?”  What it does point out, however, is the problem of “identity” that attends the Rubell Collection (as much as it attends other publically accessibly private collections as well).  Here the distinction is not between the “fact” of “nationality” and the “problem” of ” racial identity” as it is between the problem of identity itself and something like the “fact” of “ownership.”

As the Rubells state, this time at the outset of the same introductory text, “We only show art we own.”  This of course means that, without exception, all of the art is theirs.  And thus, in some way, to criticize the art is to criticize the Rubell’s themselves.  Of course it will be objected that this is not to be against them, the Rubell’s, so much as it is to be against their “tastes in art” or their “intellectual interests” or their “curatorial conceits.”  But one can have such things without the intermediary of private ownership.  This is what museums do after all: show a wide range of work, some which they own (and buy with both private and public funds), some of which they do not.  And there is a rich history of people being “against” museums, to which the codification of “institutional critique” itself attests.

Perhaps the problem arises then when institutional identity, “The Rubell Collection,” becomes so closely aligned with personal identity, “the Rubell family,” and the explicit “fact” of “ownership” becomes a revolving door between the two.  Here, criticizing the Rubell’s Collection is seen as petty as criticizing someone’s choice of home décor; we do it of course, just not necessarily in public, because to criticize someone’s personal choices is tantamount to criticizing them.  But to criticize the “Rubell Collection” as an institution is seen as petty as well, because as a publically accessible but fundamentally private museum, it stands as a supremely generous gift, and so remains beyond reproach.

This is what I mean when I state that one cannot be “against” the Rubell Collection, at least in any justifiable sense, because such justification will always be aiming at a moving target, and one will always risk appearing petty (as I may be doing now).  My point of course is not to finally find a place from which to stand “against” the Rubell Collection, but to explain how this conflation of personal and institutional identity keeps one from taking a stand at all.

Sciencedebate 2008.  For anyone who is tired of the “lipstick” and “kindergarten sex-Ed” and “how many houses I own” idiocy of the campaign coverage, this is a breath of fresh air: 14 questions on science policy with answers from BO and JM presented side-by-side.  Read it.

As a fellow Parsons instructor I feel it necessary to help spread this: From Boing Boing: GRL’s James Powderly detained in Beijing for planning pro-Tibet “L.A.S.E.R. Stencil” art protest.

Whether it was a “smart” idea to provoke the Chinese, given the incredibly conciliatory and turn-the-other-cheek coverage of the Olympics, it seems reasonable that someone should push the boundaries. Kristof in the Times took a different tack, suggesting that the fact that Chinese officials are even paying lip service to the idea of protests is a step in the right direction, even if the persecution of dissenters of any stripe remains both tenacious and completely hidden from outside scrutiny.  Let’s hope that James finds his way home unharmed.

We’ve initiated a new series of discussions over at AWS called “Considerations.” The first one asks readers and commenters to consider Tino Sehgal’s work.

From my own perspective, there’s an interesting copyright issue–i.e. none of Sehgal’s work is fixed in a tangible medium in any way, either the work itself or documentation of it–which means that it stands solely as an idea. You can’t copyright an idea, of course, so Sehgal’s claim to authorship, or ownership, of any of his works, relies almost exclusively on the strength of his own personality, or identity, insofar as these are recognized by others. In fact, one could argue that that strength is a function of its recognition by others, which would seem to resonate nicely with his work–i.e. they pressure that moment of a viewer’s recognition that what they are seeing, or participating in, is not just some random encounter with other people in other places.

After his film Standard Operating Procedure, and its accompanying book, co-written with Philip Gourevitch, it’s quite possible that Errol Morris may be responsible for having initiated the next sustained meditation on the cultural status of photography and the photographic image. This dialog with Hany Farid certainly suggests that Morris may be next in line to inherit the legacy of Barthes, Sontag, Bourdieu, Solomon-Godeau and others who have addressed photography as a complex theoretical object with no insignificant political dimension (perhaps even one that outstrips its aesthetics).

It may seem sacrilegious to say for someone who has invested so much time and energy in the academy, but this piece by Charles Murray in the WSJ, which argues for the replacement of the 4-year, BA-track college education with certification tests of every variety, makes no little bit of sense. One wonders what administrations will muster as a defense, undoubtedly something along the lines of: “College campuses foster communities of critical thought and creative production which certification testing could never possibly quantify.” True. But then again, that’s an argument of thinking for thinking’s sake, and though I’m sympathetic to the idea of finding realms of experience that cannot be instrumentalized by career or market forces, it would seem to me that “college,” especially at the undergraduate level, has already lost out on that front. Why else would so many people (myself included) find themselves returning to the academy for “advanced” degrees, and there finding the intellectual engagement they either missed or squandered over the course of that first four year try?

Go to Artworld Salon for a discussion on Steve Powers’ The Waterboarding Thrill Ride and the art and politics of torture.

The estimable E. O. Wilson, in a recent piece for the New Scientist, offers what is to my mind an essential tripartite distinction between religion and science:

In the more than slightly schizophrenic circumstances of the present era, global culture is divided into three opposing images of the human condition. The dominant one, exemplified by the creation myths of the Abrahamic monotheistic religions - Judaism, Christianity and Islam - sees humanity as a creation of God. He brought us into being and He guides us still as father, judge and friend. We interpret His will from sacred scriptures and the wisdom of ecclesiastical authorities.

The second world view is that of political behaviourism. Still beloved by the now rapidly fading Marxist-Leninist states, it says that the brain is largely a blank state devoid of any inborn inscription beyond reflexes and primitive bodily urges. As a consequence, the mind originates almost wholly as a product of learning, and it is the product of a culture that itself evolves by historical contingency. Because there is no biologically based “human nature”, people can be moulded to the best possible political and economic system, namely communism. In practical politics, this belief has been repeatedly tested and, after economic collapses and tens of millions of deaths in a dozen dysfunctional states, is generally deemed a failure.

Both of these world views, God-centred religion and atheistic communism, are opposed by a third and in some ways more radical world view, scientific humanism. Still held by only a tiny minority of the world’s population, it considers humanity to be a biological species that evolved over millions of years in a biological world, acquiring unprecedented intelligence yet still guided by complex inherited emotions and biased channels of learning. Human nature exists, and it was self-assembled. Having arisen by evolution during the far simpler conditions in which humanity lived during more than 99 per cent of its existence, it forms the behavioural part of what, in The Descent of Man, Darwin called “the indelible stamp of [our] lowly origin”.

Too often are the failures and atrocities of communist history laid at the feet of those who hold to an atheistic worldview, even if that atheism is simply a byproduct of a more firm commitment to what Wilson calls “scientific humanism.” But I believe that it is this division between scientific humanism and monotheism which is the dominant ideological struggle of our time, and it is one which requires a significant rethinking of the multiculturalist positions (or ‘postmodernism’ more generally) which, to be sure, forged great gains over the past thirty-five years, but which, as Wilson points out, may be seen as a variant of “political behaviorism.”

To push this further, the ideological lines that supposedly disappeared sometime around 1989 or 1991, those dates which mark the end of History for Fukuyama (or the end of Art for Danto), have been redrawn, not between civilizations, between East and West, between Islam and Judeo-Christianity, between Islamo-fascism and Liberal democracy, but between religion and science, with humanism–that means the Arts; for what better testament to humanist values can there be?–firmly on the side of the latter. By which it follows that a commitment to humanism, to human achievement and creativity, without recourse to a belief in supernatural agency, is the banner under which our art–our contemporary art–must march.