The Rise of the "Crypto-Relic"

New Hoover Convertible (Jeff Koons, l980)

In a piece entitled “Traces of the Holy: The contemporary art work as ‘crypto-relic’” (TLS, 4/10/15), Matthew Bown makes the following comment, “The art market today is a market in crypto-relics, no more, no less. The dithyrambs of the experts—as when the director of the Tate art museums, Sir Nicholas Serota describes art objects as ‘symbols of optimism and renewal,’ as ‘objects of beauty and contemplation,’ or as ‘transgressive,’ 'raw and tender, brazen and subtle’—recreate the alluring discourse, the promise of miraculous potential, that sustained the original Christian relics in the public imagination.” How better to describe Damien Hirst’s “The Physical Impossibility of Death in the Mind of Someone Living,” the famed shark immersed in formaldehyde or Jeff Koons’ “New Hoover Convertibles” which might be subtitled “what you see is what you get.” Duchamp’s “Fountain,” with its R. Mutt signature, might as well have been a Kohler or Toto as it canonized the found object. But artists like Hirst and Koons have actually gone much further, in that the high demand almost requires an  iconography. Religiosity always had something in common with romanticism to the extent it was predicated on a belief in the unseen. What would the Shroud of Turin be without a higher love? The absence of value and/or meaning acts like a vacuum that creates the significance of Brown’s "crypto-relics." Everyone reads meaning into Chance, the main character of Jerzy Kosinski’s Being There. But Chance is just an idiot savant, a tabula rasa on which others paint their wishes for transcendence. And “so it goes” as Vonnegut famously says in Slaughterhouse-Five. Those who don’t keep the faith will say that the public is being Tartuffed.

Paris Journal lll: Marcel Duchamp. La penture, meme

Duchamp’s Fountain (photo by Alfred Stieglitz)

One of the most moving images in the current show of early Duchamp paintings, "Marcel Duchamp. La peinture, meme" at the Centre Pompidou, is actually the last work he ever did, Given (Etant donnes) 1: The Waterfall. 2. The Illuminating Gas. For an artist famous for trumpeting cold thought, it’s a memory of lost emotion, a fading and elusive eroticism in the form of a naked spread legged woman that conveys the ephemerality of physical desire. The piece at the Centre Pompidou is a model (produced by Ulf Linde) and when you view the original work at the Philadelphia Museum of Art you can actually see the naked torso through a peep hole. Duchamp worked on this from l946-66 and much of the accompanying text for the current show, ingeniously reflects the same wistful recalling of earlier impulses—in particular the artist’s one time desire to create conventional works of art (instead of the readymades, like Fountain, for which he would become famous) Here is what Duchamp says looking back on the most famous of his early paintings, “For Nude Descending (a Staircase), I wanted to create a static image of movement; movement as an abstraction, an articulated deduction within the painting, without our knowing if a real person is or isn’t descending any equally real staircase. Fundamentally, movement is in the eye of the spectator, who incorporates it into the painting.” The show begins by tracing a burst of interest in erotic drawing based on Cranach, Ingres and Courbet that occurred at the very end of his career and then goes back to his early work as a painter. Duchamp is quoted as saying, “I believe in eroticism a lot {…}It replaces, if your wish, what other literary schools called romanticism. It could be another ‘ism,’ so to speak.” In Duchamp’s eyes, eroticism was as much of a movement as expression and cubism. Besides unifying the concerns of Duchamp’s career, the exhibition of early work also demonstrates one of the reasons that the artist may have given up painting. Duchamp was a student of contemporaries like Kandinsky, Braque, Cezanne, Manet and Matisse. Yet he was plainly not in the same league. There who can do do and those who can’t do teach. Here one might iterate those who can do paint and those who can’t do conceptualize. As he remarked in l949, “The Large Glass (The Bride Stripped Bare By Her Bachelors, Even) in actual fact is not meant to be looked at (with ‘aesthetic' eyes). It should have been accompanied by a ‘literary' text as amorphous as possible, which never took shape. And the two elements, glass for the eyes, text for the ears and understanding, were meant to complement each other and above all prevent one or the other from taking on an aesthetic-plastic or literary form.”

Inventing Inventing Abstraction

Wassily Wassilyevich Kandinsky

There are sultanates in the Middle East and there is the sullenate of Manhattan which appears as midtown begins to empty out in the hours before Christmas Eve. If you are foolish enough to think you can avoid the crowds lining up for the newly installed Inventing Abstraction Show at MOMA by  going on Christmas Eve, you are left holding the bag, i.e. holding your overly salty perennially disappointing oversized pretzel in your hand as you are greeted by an unbeauteous yellow notice behind a closed grate, “Museum Closes at 3:00 P.M. Today." But you can enjoy the low definition approach by which the imagination fills in the space between the lines. Inventing Abstraction…who needs a show? You can invent inventing abstraction in your own mind. To begin with it’s not realism. So you don’t have to worry about illusion and therefore perspective. You don’t have to worry about the painting representing anything. Why? Because the painting is about itself. Admittedly you read these ideas when you were studying Clement Greenberg and you also read about people like Duchamp who said that art didn’t have to be a gilt framed portrait of the dauphin. It could even be a urinal. Though you’re making your way down Fifth Avenue rather than Broadway, you’re reminded of Mondrian’s Broadway Boogie Woogie. Yeah, art can be a little bit like music too, patterns interrelating for the sake of themselves. You’re still itching about not being able to see the new show. Secretly you’d also hoped you’d get lucky and have been one of the fortunate ones who didn’t have to sacrifice their lives in order to see The Clock (also on exhibit at MOMA. However, in your frustration in not finding something to fill the emptiness you always feel on Christmas Eve, you started to talk to yourself and in the course of talking, you leaned a little something about what you thought about art.

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Argo

You have to admire the intelligence of Argo. It’s The Producers meet the ur Arab Spring, the ur Benghazi, aka the Iranian hostage crisis. What’s even more brilliant is that it wasn’t even invented. It’s a Duchampian found object in genre entertainment form, a little jewel discovered courtesy of Joshuah Bearman’s 2007 article in Wired, Chris Terrio’s screenplay and naturally the work of the director Ben Affleck who also stars as a real life CIA operative named, Tony Mendez.  Run and see the film if you want to be laughing courtesy of John Goodman and Alan Arkin playing later day versions of the characters Gene Wilder and Zero Mostel immortalized and sitting on the edge of your seat courtesy of history. “If I'm going to do a fake movie,” Arkin says at one point. “It’s going to be a fake hit.” Here Argo reaches the realm of higher math and the cinematic equivalent of imaginary numbers. It’s a movie based upon a movie which wasn’t, as the original script for Argo, a sci fi fantasy set in the Westerner’s idea of the Orient viz Edward Said’s Orientalism, was exhumed from turnaround for the sake of the rescue mission that’s dramatized. Another great line from the movie is a comparison of the escape operation to abortion. “You don’t want to need one, but you don’t want to do it yourself.” It’s terrific fun to willingly suspend belief about something so unbelievable--that also happened to be true.