ARCHITeCTURe, DISPATCHES ART, MUSIC, ARCHITeCTURe, FILM, SHOPPInG, neWS AnD THInGS TO MAKe AnD DO… ART, MUSIC, ARCHITeCTURe, FILM, SHOPPInG, neWS AnD THInGS TO MAKe AnD DO…
Tales from The ciTy: New york
words JOnATHAn T.D. neIL
Back in May the blogosphere lit up quality, one can assume, of the Obama
briefly, with charges of ‘censorship’ image machine. But the drawback, of
flying about, when the advance team of course, is that with the promise of the
US Senator and democratic presidential unexpected comes a virtual guarantee
candidate Barak Obama asked a Richmond, of the predictable and the pedestrian.
Virginia, art gallery, the soon-to- This is what Obama’s campaign got;
be site of a 500-person fundraiser, to they should have grinned and accepted
either cover up or remove two paintings it. Whatever miniscule controversy
by artist Jamie Boling, both of which might have bloomed from some loudmouth
were deemed inappropriate for the latching on to the guilt-by-association
‘image’ that the Obama campaign wanted model of political commentary could
to project. The primary offender in have been confronted outright.
this case was a 6-by-10-foot painting Regardless of one’s political stripe,
after the now-infamous paparazzi running away only caves to the grim
picture of an underdressed Britney expectations of the opposition.
Spears stepping out of a car driven by
Paris Hilton; the second offender saw Yet this, what we will inevitably
Boling reproduce an image from the teen and euphemistically call an ‘error in
comedy Fast Times at Ridgemont High judgement’, offers us an object lesson
(1982), in which a character is wearing in the new set of conditions that
a ‘Kill Lincoln’ T-shirt (the ‘Lincoln’ obtain for both art and politics in
in this case referring to a rival high the digital age of the image. The
school). Though the first painting recent tragedies of state intervention
bore all the anatomical correctness of into the world of artistic endeavour
a Barbie doll, it was covered up; the – in the US these go by the names of
second was simply removed. Robert Mapplethorpe, Andres Serrano’s
Piss Christ (1987), Richard Serra’s
First, an aside: I am adamantly in Tilted Arc (1981) et al. – may soon
favour of freedom of expression. I appear by rights at once quaint and
find myself reluctantly acknowledging grandiose. Those interventions at
that in an open society even those least took as a given, even as they
who hold the most putrid opinions or took to task, the fact of the artwork,
beliefs have at least a basic right to and of art itself. Today, however,
them, and to air them out, just as we image and work are divorced. Walter
have the basic right to dismiss those Benjamin’s old diagnosis that, in the
opinions as stupid and be done with modern age, ‘the work of art reproduced
it. But I confess that I would like becomes the work of art designed for
nothing more than to see both Britney reproducibility’ no longer holds when
Spears and Paris Hilton just go away. works of art can no longer outrun
That said, though I sympathise with reproduction – which is to say, can
no longer outrun their own image.
Works of art can no longer
This is a fact of which political
candidates in the US are acutely and
outrun their own image…
often painfully aware (sometimes too
aware, as with the Obama example), but
a fact that seems
it is a fact that seems increasingly
lost on artists. Here I am not talking
increasingly lost on artists
about an artist’s awareness of his or
her own image (indeed, a good number of
artists seem to be making quite a nice
business out of that) but an awareness
the campaign handlers who took one of the work’s image, of how it becomes
look at Boling’s Britney extravaganza legible once it enters into a digital
and decided that either it or they realm (as picture, video or text) where
would have to go, why couldn’t they very little just goes away.
have chosen the latter option? Sure,
an art gallery conveys an image of
sophisticated cosmopolitanism along
with – and this is essential – the
potential frisson of the unexpected,
of the ‘next’ thing, which transforms
the stale and the staid into the
young and promising: a much desired
ArTrEvIEw 50
Dispatches_columns_Oct NY.indd 2 5/9/07 10:33:00
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