INTEGRITY IN THE WORKPLACE – A GENERAL-INTEREST POLITICAL LECTURE FOR RUTGERS UNIVERSITY UNDERGRADUATE STUDENTS
1- INTRODUCTION
Being an artist is a profession for which strict and specific training is required. This training extends far beyond the fundamentals of technical and historical scholarship that might, you’d reasonably think, form the backbone of higher education. A few important lessons that aren’t being taught are the ones that contemporary artists need most.
Today, it is profoundly risky to spend one’s college years–four, six or more–in the hopes that this apprenticeship will yield an artist’s career of any kind. I’d like to tell you about some things I’ve seen in pursuit of contemporary art around the globe in the last six years. I’ve usually taken these journeys alone, and they are usually very lonely times, pricked and buoyed throughout by a pleasing, adolescent angst. It has always been my wish that these experiences would count for something, so I am delighted to have been invited here to share, with you, my thoughts on 'integrity in the workplace'.[all as cool as possible]
2- A DAY TRIP TO A COSMOPOLITAN LEISURE CENTER
Here we are at our first stop. The chic, free, village of art inside a cosmopolis. If it is the magnetic majesty of the museum that inspires the child to care about art above other things, it is the day trip to Chelsea or equivalent cosmopolitan leisure center that compels the adolescent to pursue a career as an artist. Art, there, becomes an easy instrument for a modern adult to learn, a worthwhile way to spend one’s life.
To illustrate. Last December the 34-year-old Swiss artist Urs Fischer presented an exhibition whose only component was the deep and messy industrial excavation of Gavin Brown’s New York gallery. The piece cost as much as it costs to excavate and replace maybe 50 square feet of concrete, plus some days and some dirt. It was a bluntly strong work, too hands-off to be bullying, but irresistible. It was fluent, clear in its execution, and joyful, messy exciting fun. The pleasure of time spent in it etches the project into the memory.
It was a gritty experience (the last thing you’d think you’d want on a harsh winter evening) and completely mundane, no different from a scene a New Yorker ignores many times a day. It was at Gavin Brown’s for 6 weeks. It was easy as pie for everybody involved, even all of us.
Another season, another week. Last Summer, past cramped alley thoroughfares in the sprawling markets around Brick Lane in East London, past stalls selling Snoop Doggy Dogg t-shirts with the words Sqnop Doggh Dogg printed underneath the rapper’s face, you found Coppermill, an industrial sort of hangar that was rented by Zurich’s Hauser & Wirth gallery as their second London space. Most folks speak in hallowed tones of Paul McCarthy’s pirate ship that filled the mega space in 2005, as if London had, commercially speaking, seen nothing scaled in such a way before. I still hear about it. I looked at Martin Creed’s works there that June, and they, too, were brave and oversized.
Three at least 25-foot steel I-beams of varying gauges stretched across the floor, an easy yet hefty and imposing work of art, with a lifetime thousands of years long. Bafflingly powerful and spooky. Like Fischer’s hole, this work photographed extremely well. [get the narrative going]
On the other side of the gallery, perhaps every ten minutes, the lights went out and a fixed-angle black-and-white film projected 15 or 20 feet wide on a back wall showed a guy’s shaved middle section having sex with a smooth ass, cropped tightly. It is hard to tell if it is a man’s or a woman’s ass or which orifice is being penetrated. The space grows very dark while the film runs, and it’s hard to do anything else while this tableau, which is very repetitive and lasts about as long as a pop song, runs its cycle. Though it speeds up a little after the halfway point, its beginning is the same as its end.
Fischer and Creed’s 2007 environments were effortlessly satisfying, wonderfully dumb (as in mute), and instantaneous in their appeal. Such nimbleness pleases young people because it pays off so quickly. More importantly though, to young eyes, here is superstar art, movie star art, pop star art! The drama and glamour infusing these environments is incomparable. Last June a young man in a sharply cut bespoke suit–with the sort of sallow architecture that suggested he’d never had to eat spicy food in his life–was the caretaker of Creed’s exhibition in Hauser & Wirth’s enclave of cool sobriety inside East London chaos, while over in New York at Gavin Brown’s an influential Swiss curator, grinning in the December chill, entered Fischer’s adventure as we were leaving. Any visitor will be fully seduced by these places. Here is art, the atmosphere bellows, that is both highly regarded and highly successful, a force that is as exotic as it is fully functional! Being a professional artist, making your outlandish fantasies realities, with emotional and financial security to spare, could not, it seems, be easier or less risky. How could one not be seduced? [keep a cliffhanger, keep moving the narrative]
3- THE ULTIMATE VACATION
How about a vacation. Refined in Switzerland in the Sixties [anecdotal description of Swiss personality] as a means of formalizing, streamlining and strengthening the international art market, the international art fair allowed the world’s top collectors to congregate, have a fun vacation, and cherrypick from the world’s top galleries, who for their part brought the best work they could get their hands on to sell. It was an affair that increasingly grew to favor the strong, an experience that ever more powerfully got the blood boiling by design. Temerity is needed on an exhibitor’s part; they must use their elbows. If they can get in to the fair, through a mystifying and needlessly expensive process whose secret coded workings are known to very few, the gallery can expect an upfront investment of at least $50,000 for a booth and, as the fair rolls, a flashy and cavalier attitude towards spending. A strong showing at an art fair can establish a gallery and its artists’ reputation on the world stage, or it can bankrupt and embarrass everyone involved. Directly and indirectly, success at fairs intensely affects every single aspect of an artist’s and a gallery’s financial outlook for the next year. [brief explanation of the untold extravagance required to operate a world-known gallery] So far, so boring.
The last decade, however, has brought about seismic change in the topography of such fairs. Art Basel Miami Beach, 5 days in early December, has turned the international art fair into a lavish riot of social anarchy, like Bourbon Street, like new year's eve, like a packed, throbbing chemical dance way past midnight. Anyone can party there, and every young artist with a few leads and a few dimes can hitchhike to the Miami jam and have the most glamorous, celebratory time of their life. The art fair now is a ritual where everybody wins because everybody is a star. The kid with no chops can be a star, and the sleazy old man with bags of money can be a star. You can pull back the curtain (sometimes literally) and reveal something crass and banal, expose something meaningless, but the sheer euphoric voice of the ultimate party drowns out the bland realities beneath. No one is interested in the quiet truth: it needs to speak up, and if it can’t, it isn’t there.
It is here that the novice declares himself, here that regular folk are converted to worshippers of a life of consequence-free play. They join the club at every level–artists, their producers, and their consumers–and everyone hops on board. There's always room. Art, there, feels like a mighty political and social force, it feels like everything. I could expand on my experiences at these bacchanals, [expand in a brief, frothy fashion] but my experiences are no weirder or more extraordinary than anyone else’s. It is a rollercoaster ride, and I behave, there, like I behave nowhere else.
4- DISCLAIMER
At this time I must tell you that I make a living in the art world, and clarify that at this moment art is all of my job and a big part of my life. I fear for young artists, and am profoundly suspicious of the wealthy, but I am a lover of art and choose to surround myself with it. The Fischer and Creed exhibitions were among my very favorite shows of last year. I believe in what they make, I believe in their brains, yet I must point out, for the sake of this lesson, that the innocent passion of the young (that ambrosia containing most everything beautiful in the world, and a big part of Creed and Fischer’s art) can be warped and manipulated when art is as strikingly warm and simple as this.
And I have puttered along the Rhine in a speedboat in the summer sun courtesy of the party in Basel, an urban experience for which I will ever feel lucky. I will not deny luxury its gifts and will not cock a snook at the absurd, for it is a valuable and often sorely unattainable state of being. And I have met delightful, singular folks from every part of the earth there. It is just so easy to get carried away if you’re not careful, and if you aren’t careful, you may lose sight of your path. [illustrate dicey moments in exaggerated drama – go into forbidden and satanic if desired, comedy if needed]
5- INTEGRITY IS SILENT, INTEGRITY IS SILENCE
Here is our conclusion. Young people, in their thousands, are being tricked into becoming artists, becoming recruits for the art world army. They do not know what they are signing up for. Why let yourself be pushed into behaving on the terms of the privileged? Why embrace their rules for their games, games that they have created for their own amusement? Why pretend that canned applause is as good as the actual thing? Why, for the sake of glamour, take your health for granted, when it is your most precious possession? Why fall in love over caught eyes across the aisle in the liquor store, when you know it’s the easiest thing in the world? Why choose a masochistic religion?
Integrity is silent, the silent industry that is propelled by the knowledge that the artist is doing the right thing for herself and her peers. Integrity is silence, denying the wealthy leisure classes their treat, not letting them lick their lips and devour your essence as a course of hors d’œuvres in their feast of whimsy and entertainment. [expand if necessary, inserting one more slowing in pace]
The writer and critic Peter Schjeldahl carefully advised a few students in the late ’90s that success in the contemporary art world was a combination of a ‘gang’ and a ‘game’, and at that time he had it pegged, for things then were much more balanced, up-for-grabs. In the years hence–the years in which the Miami convention was born–the gang has taken charge, and it is becoming harder to play the game the way you want to play it. The bourgeois art world prefers stiff, constrictive rules of engagement, and they are calling the shots.
Now, they needn’t restrict your being or your ambitions. You may still grow and you can take charge. But start quietly, work quietly, and make your foundations strong. Art is yours to make, and your integrity will be ensured by the landmarks that signpost your quiet evolution as a human being. [pump up or scale back with ex tempore thoughts on such landmarks if crowd seems confused or unhappy] Only you know what these landmarks look and feel like, but if you work this way, miraculously, before too long, you will leave lessons that’ll last. [talk of revolution if the mood strikes, talk of teaching, leave it in a comfortable place]
6- QUESTIONS FROM THE FLOOR
7- VALEDICTION
There is a pamphlet available on your way out that will summarize the fundamentals of our hour together. It includes some outside points of interest, some artists and resources, though this material may not be of interest to all. [speak of subjectivity and storytelling, ask forgiveness, appropriate gratitude here]
To you all: I don’t want you to waste your time and energy, and your money, when you graduate from university. The art world, or indeed any rarefied world of elite thinking and grotesque muscle, will rob you blind if you let it. And no one deserves that sort of oppression and misery.