I Will Not Write Any More Boring Newsletters
I don’t know whether you’ve ever seen this short documentary about John Baldessari. If you haven’t watch it. If you have, watch it again. Whenever I feel particularly dejected about art (or about what I do – mostly not the same thing), I watch it. It makes me laugh, and it makes me love art again. Well, some art maybe. John Baldessari’s, for example.
For the most part, I have control over my book-buying impulses. But when I came across Martin Herbert’s Tell Them I Said No, I ordered a copy right away. The description was too tempting. In part, it reads that the book “considers various artists who have withdrawn from the art world or adopted an antagonistic position toward its mechanisms”. For a number of reasons, I wanted to learn more about that.
To begin with, there are some photographers who withdrew from the art world (or at least photoland). Chauncey Hare handed out pamphlets against the corporate sponsors of a show he was in at SFMOMA. A little later, he quit and became a therapist (I thought there was a book about Hare in the making at MACK, but I can’t find it listed on their site). Marianne Wex published an incredible feminist survey about gender differences and power (“Let’s Take Back Our Space” – you can download a pdf of the book here), only to then turn away from what she had made. She also became a therapist.
Furthermore, as you might know I wrote a short book entitled Photography’s Neoliberal Realism. In the book, I argue that a number of artists have essentially become handmaidens of the economic system we live in (or rather under), producing little more than propaganda that props it up. After the book was published, some photographers got in touch and asked what one could do to avoid that problem. How would one photograph the structures erected around us without producing neoliberal realism? It’s a good question. I don’t have an easy answer.
That question can be extended to cover more or less the rest of what photoland produces: How does one go about critically engaging with the world in such a way that the outcomes reach not only fellow photographers and the well-off people that form the rest of photoland? I’m not arguing that every photographer should think about this. For sure, I wouldn’t want to impose my thinking on anyone. If as an artist you’re happy to produce luxury goods then I think that’s cool. I personally couldn’t do that. But I also don’t want to judge anyone for their personal choices (at least not as a public critic; what I think of them privately might be an entirely different matter).
You could extend the question even further: how does one engage with the world around us in such a fashion that one does not contribute to the many problems that have become very obvious? What can one do to reduce one’s carbon footprint, say? Should I feel guilty about using disposable paper cups every once in a while, even as there are people who are members of airlines’ million-miles programs?
You could spin this out further and further, and the outcome probably would be overwhelming and depressing. But one might start somewhere. So artists dropping out of the art world sounded very interesting to me. Tell Them I Said No arrived in the mail the other day, and by now I’ve read a third of it (the introduction and three artist profiles).
Once I started reading it, I remembered why I don’t read much serious art writing. I find it hard to deal with. Sentences are overly long, and they’re stuffed with pretentious adjectives. I feel like I’m being talked down to, a sentiment mirrored by a Polish artist with whom I had a brief chat on Instagram (I had posted a picture of the book in my “Stories”). At the same time, the writing doesn’t actually deliver as much insight as it purports to do.
That aside, having just finished reading the article about Charlotte Posenenske (who dropped out of the art world to become a factory worker), I also realised what I think the limits of the book (and possibly of the art world in general) are: it’s unable to deeply question its own problems, given that the many strategies used by artists and critics alike prevent it from ever going beyond exactly the point where things get interesting.
I’ve seen this mechanism in place in photoland as well. There is that border that when crossed takes you outside, and nobody wants to go there. You essentially question your own system only to the extent that you can make it clear that you’re aware of what’s wrong. But you don’t rock the boat too hard.
Of course, you can rock the boat, and you can even do it successfully (please note that “success” here means more than one thing). But there will be consequences. Just watch Hans Haacke talk about what happened to him when he installed an art piece at MoMA that was critical of the institution.
Anyway, I need to go back to finishing a commissioned essay now. These days it feels like that wherever I look, there’s material to be written about. I often get a little bit stressed when I’m in this type of situation. But I also know of those other moments when inspiration just won’t arrive.
I also feel that there is more material to be written about aspects of the above. I’ll leave that for another email.
As always thank you for reading!
– Jörg