THE UNLIMITED PLAN
Copenhagen, June 4 2011
THIS IS THE EASY PART
The 15 or so men making the most expensive art in 1980s New York are, today, softer targets than ever. And they were, to be sure, soft targets before. About 20 years ago, after ten years in fashion, their work—usually loud and large, always declarative instead of inquisitive, and most of all male—took on a noticeable, more awkward weight in that art scene. Middle age, I guess, the gut and the gray. I do not mean to disrespect these men and their endeavors before and since, yet the immovable continued existence of your average Julian Schnabel plate painting, say, or the inarguably doolally Frank Stella pieces in the lobby of the Saatchi building in New York, served as proof that the 1980s were a freaky vacuum sealing many art-world consumers and producers in a bubble of taste unaccountable to everything outside. Today that work remains frozen and peculiar, pinned in its scene, trapped in its time, paralyzed by a context of ostentation and the sound of money talking. When one encounters this gigantic vibe in, say, the permanent collection of a museum that was buying in the 1980s—an Ashley Bickerton wall piece that resembles and seemingly boasts of being the world’s most demanding consumer hi-fi, or a David Salle that has no problem hoping to be every kind of painting at once—one might fruitfully conclude that this work is simply tasteless, or overexcited. From this perspective it’s easily forgiven, glossed over, or otherwise rendered unstressful to a viewer who wants to enjoy an afternoon in a museum. I’m mellow about this work, ultimately. It just stands out. It never made me mad before.
In 2011, however, a time of desperate, unfamiliar austerity, one cannot help but notice a new and different light cast over this work and these men in that moment. It used to feel like good-time art that had been gelded into period curiosity or kitsch. We used to be cool with that. Now it feels, from certain angles, to be actually wrong. What’s changed?
Let’s look to their motivations and the mentality.
The mentality was macho. Yes (exclamation point), Feminism via contemporary art has proven a true, ongoing answer, but it didn’t really disrupt the chauvinistic and penisy context of these artists. The boys were working at being hard adolescent boys in the company of other adolescent boys. Women were on the side. And machismo—a feeling as old as pride itself—is something that art has foregrounded as a primary means and theme since Picasso and Pollock, so it flew. And it’s still big, and it’s still uncontested.
What else. This mentality was imperialistic. Proud to conquer. This too is as familiar and fine as testosterone, for almost any highly evolved American enterprise will rediscover the certainty of the pioneer and the landowner. When something has the chance to grow in this country, and become empowered, it is difficult for that enterprise not to seek the status of an empire. It is not sexy close up, unless you’ve a particular fetish for muscle itself, but making something out of nothing is definitively American. It is cultural regression in the name of roots, usually pursued unconsciously. It cannot be helped here, where we are.
OK, so none of this is shocking. Indeed, the apparent mentality of this artist seems reassuringly quaint. Gigantic, rutting self-importance in American art feels harmless, anodyne at least. We neuter these guys when we render them silly, and this works. Yet, and this is where things get unpleasant and interesting, there is a third aspect to their mentality that today feels genuinely threatening.
It is a faith in things over ideas, and an economy that trades in things rather than ideas.
TALK TO THE HAND BECAUSE THE FACE ISN’T LISTENING
Eric Fischl was one of our ’80s beasts. A figurative artist with designs on a kind of Classicism in his work, he nailed the American underbelly stuff from the start—tract housing and adolescent desire and unforgiving bright sunlight—then moved on to Bonjour Monsieur Courbet-style discursive narrative painting when suburbia dried up as a source. Visitors to New York can always and most easily see his work, permanently installed in mosaic form, in the part of Penn Station near the A, C and E trains that smells like pee. He had a show of extremely brightly lit life-size bronze figures, arranged in 1909 Matisse ecstasy, at Mary Boone in Chelsea a few years back. One should always be wary of sculpture that asks for that much stage lighting. And one may safely say that his work has not evolved in the past 30 years.
Fischl has a new project brewing. It is called “America: Now and Here,” and it is a show of 150 artworks that will travel, in a bus, to second- and third-tier American cities. It is a blockbuster exhibition of American contemporary art billed as a traveling showcase for democracy, discussion and togetherness. The aim is to provoke the audiences of the American provinces in the best possible ways. Fischl reckons that his show—which just rolled up to its first stop in Kansas City—will help us all figure out what America is today. “America” is packaged with the crisp lines and apolitical weighting of public- or government-funded art programs, the stuff of PBS or the National Endowment for the Arts. It’s a slick move, piggybacking on the institutional sterility of government. “America,” a gigantic private initiative, picks up the slack for that America without quotation marks by making something wholesome and old-fashioned. Yee-haw, and let’s not forget that Fischl’s ersatz government work doesn’t have the actual government’s liquidity problems! “America” has the robust support of private millions (am assuming that this it is the Steve Martin I’m looking at on this list) and corporate partners (Toys R Us, among other baffling examples). Behold a battleship of commercial art product.
One of the exhibition’s many straplines calls it “a cross-country journey of art and ideas,” and here’s where we must pull back. For what exactly are these ideas that we’re talking about? Fischl is taking a bus full of art, which has mostly been made in New York, from New York: he is taking big-city art to the small-towns of America. Jeff Koons and Alex Katz and Chuck Close make some of America’s most popular and recognizable art, and there’s a decent chance that folk in Wichita or Tallahassee might enjoy looking at them, but why doesn’t Fischl use the tens of millions of dollars in play to find out about what the people in Wichita and Tallahassee are making, instead of bringing them something that the art-interested in New York already know more than enough about? Isn’t this journey of discovery being approached from the wrong direction? With all this power and freedom, those two desirable things that money buys, why teach when one could learn? Why talk when one has a rare opportunity to listen? This top-down approach to art’s value is grotesquely one-sided, a sneering manipulation behind the evenhanded populism, the “we” this and “we” that, of the show’s pitch. If a farmer in Idaho thinks Jeff Koons is cool, then we may publicize this news on the website. Perhaps run a picture of the guy in his overalls. If a farmer thinks Jeff Koons is not cool, then that hayseed doesn’t get it and he doesn’t matter. Ultimately, in whatever form this discussion of America takes, the art will retain its dollar value. There is no way that Eric Fischl would be having this cross-country adventure if he weren’t certain of that fact. In the economy in which “America” exists, the thing takes precedence over the idea. The thing is what’s most important.
This is the central idea of the thing-based economy. One defers to the thing—the painting, the exhibition, the website—and starts there. Ideas might stem from the thing, but they can never exist without the anchor of physical objects with ascribed value and stable, known positions in a hierarchy. Those are the rules. We need things.
LAISSEZ-FAIRE CAPITALISM AND HOPELESSNESS
The thing-based economy is an heir to what Ayn Rand perfectly called “laissez-faire Capitalism,” that American state of being we were sold after World War II. In that America you can do what you want with your money, just like everyone else, and you can make and have as much of it as you want. Importantly, this economy is based on the idea that all people want to have money. We boomed on this for several decades, and it looked good on paper. America is too huge and crazy for a unified Socialist model; at our scale and in all our diversity we need a common language, and that common language has grown to become things. Things are a nonverbal and easily recognizable bridge and a fuel between people, a means of understanding each other. He has this while I have this—this is how we understand hierarchy and class. I want that—this may guide our aspirations. I deserve this—we may recognize our accomplishments and begin to understand what we’re entitled to.
Things dwarf ideas in America because of their heft. It is easier to measure difference and change through cars, or through clothes, because their reinvention and renewal is constant, clearly marked and easy to monetize. Cost—the cost of a thing, the cost of the latest thing—keeps us moving into the future. Inflation is crucial to the thing-based economy. We have built the new thing on the old thing—that’s obviously more thing! You can measure that! Of course it must cost more!
Please indulge the tidy if well-worn example of the American automobile, the great parable of the thing-based economy. The American car business collapsed because it insisted for 60 years on building things on top of other things, a tower that tacitly encouraged ideas to live elsewhere and belong to somebody else as it grew further from the ground. At the time Detroit caved in during the last economic crash, other ideas about how to make cars and what they should do had evolved in other places, and the American car thing had lost its power. Pure ideas—about energy efficiency and cost of manufacturing, among other concepts we needn’t discuss in this piece—had trumped the thing, but the car industry couldn’t adapt. It could only speak in things.
Before everything fell apart in 2008 I used to watch two cars move around Philadelphia’s posh Rittenhouse Square, a place where on nice days I ate lunch and checked out girls. One car was the Hummer, an oversized consumer-grade truck derived from a military combat vehicle, and the other was the Crossfire, a car built by Chrysler to bridge the gap between a sports car and sedan. Only in an economy based on relentless, delirious and always measureable addition would there be a place for a city car that was built to fight if it needed to. Only in an economy where building thing upon thing had mutated production many degrees from the realm of simple and humane ideas could a car come into being that was named after a place where innocent people are killed in battle. Neither of these cars is made any more. That business, their business, ran out of room to grow on its preferred terms. The thing-based economy arrived at bizarre non-ideas such as these as it totally, desperately lost track of what ideas are. I often stared at these two grand cars as they circled the square and wondered how much further we might be able to go building a new thing on an old thing without arriving at anything more than a thing.
So. If the idea of true emotional and ideological evolution in a thing-based economy is a charade, let’s happily and without reservation apply that conclusion to Eric Fischl’s latest enterprise and the efforts of his peers. Those guys are fucked. Then let’s think about how an emerging generation of mature artists may make an idea-based economy work for both them and the people who care about the work they do.
THE UNLIMITED PLAN
Alex Da Corte and Kate Levant’s project accepts the things in the world. It accepts the effect of things in the world—the way that we must consume things to survive—and from that point of acceptance attempts to find its way back to ideas. They know that we cannot live in a state of pure energy, pure thinking, of course we can’t. They’re not blinkered dreamers, these two, far from it. But they do believe that they can prioritize and elevate an economy of ideas.
Alex Da Corte and Kate Levant are sending one another photographs of what their eyes encounter in their every day. They do so with cellphones, so the process is immediate. The lag between seeing, sending and receiving is no more than a few seconds. They don’t hesitate because they don’t have to. Telephone providers, satellites and hardware helps the transfer happen, but the process is essentially synaptic—the same deal as the electrical pulse from the eye to the brain. There are no rules and there is no schedule. Transmissions are unanticipated until they happen, just like all other neural activity. Their two brains share one pulse. Their eyes find things, and creates images, constantly. Between the two of them, the stuff of America and her thing-based economy is constantly in a state of digestion.
And this is not a negative stance, because they are living, and living openly. They aren’t grinding things up in punkish reaction; they are living in American cities, with an abundance of both mass-produced goods and contemporary art, an immediate and basic problem of there being too much garbage, and a constant connection to technology. They are not explicitly addressing the great struggle between things and ideas that has undone America in the past 60 years, they are just going about their daily business. Their business is digesting things through sharing them.
And Alex Da Corte and Kate Levant are also sharing their esophageal pulse with a third party. That third party is a phone. Every message they send to each other, every idea, every instant of inspiration and excitement, is also shared with this telephone. Between the two people and the third party we find our economy of ideas. It is a place where one can listen, an action where one harnesses the power and language of things in order to keep listening.
They’re gentle, too. Resetting America without belittling it. No contemporary American artist could attempt to do better or more. Try and defer to the thing of this project, this phone, indistinguishable from 100 million others. Try and put it first. When that yields nothing, consider building your own idea-based economy.
I think I might leave this here, guys. Just clip this section if the coda feels wispy, but I know for a fact that this project doesn’t need me saying it’s great and why. That wouldn’t make me that different from Fischl, and I think I too am hoping to do things differently.
This piece accompanied Alex Da Corte and Kate Levant's exhibition "The Unlimited Plan" at Cleopatra's, Brooklyn.