speciAl focus
w
hatever hat you wear in the artworld, the contemporary situation is certainly
difficult to navigate with value judgements about artistic significance. The hurly-burly
landscape of junkyard installations, political imagery, materials that cost the earth, found
objects and so on reflects a time in which art is in the position of constantly having to
redefine itself on its own terms. Consequently, in an environment where everything can
be considered art and anything can sell for a bucketful of cash, looking for something
of lasting rather than monetary value is a speculative game.
The market is in the ascendant: art fairs are not only centres of commerce but
of research, where you’re as likely to find critics and curators sniffing out ideas and
museum acquisition bodies going shopping as you are private collectors. In a talk at last
Banks Violette, Not Yet Titled
(Stage with Dropped Ceiling, blank version),
year’s Frieze Art Fair, cultural commentator Dave Hickey wryly observed what a great 2007, steel, wood, epoxy, 282 x 244 x 122 cm
time it was to be twenty-five and under, implying that much of the spending is going on
unproven talents. But is this freewheeling, money-soaked world a problem for artists?
And if so, how are some of those newer names making sense of it?
One formal characteristic that seems to be forever casting a shadow in the corner
of one’s eye, anchoring certain works to this moment, is a prevalence of black. It’s a
tendency that gained momentum with the work of predominantly New York-centred
artists who are now old familiars, such as Banks Violette and Gardar Eide Einarsson,
to whose orbit you could add occasional dabblers in darkness like Slater Bradley or
Adam McEwan, to name but a few. Their various practices have been both formally
and thematically ‘dark’, perhaps exploring cultural disenchantment or what is loosely
considered Gothic, an ever more slippery notion gathering together work that taps the
morally and/or theatrically dark, be it teenage nihilism, death metal bands or horror
movie tropes.
For obvious thematic reasons, black is the mono-palette of choice for this kind of
work, for which the traditional decor is as dark as the Grim Reaper’s cloak. At the same
time, black’s long history in art, used variously as reductive surface or conveyor of infinite
depth, has been mined accordingly. In Violette’s increasingly slick-looking sculptures,
for instance, the traditional Gothic romanticism of wasted youth and the glamour of
death, inherent in references to death metal subcultures and their murderous drives,
corrupts the pure language of Minimalism.
In his recent show at Gladstone Gallery, New York, the artist’s signature black
resin-covered geometric shapes, rendered with a shiny surface both as flat and as deep
as a mirror, were coupled with fluorescent tubes – classic minimalist forms. Though
not explicitly referencing a real act of violence, as previous work had done, these
black rectangular beams were scattered across the floor in a haphazard arrangement
suggestive of general cultural carnage. Where Frank Stella’s Black Paintings (1958–60)
negated colour in an attempt to reduce painting to the thing itself, beyond subjective
interpretation (an act that anticipated the work of his peers in Minimalism, like Donald
Judd and Carl Andre, whose sculpture used a plain veneer to convey the purity of
objecthood), Violette’s use of black invites the metaphoric.
Eide Einarsson uses black and white to quite different effect. Best known for
the canvases in which he appropriates slogans and soundbites – as with his Outlaw
Logos (2004–5), which appear to be lifted from T-shirts – the artist points to political
disenchantment and the disposability of signs. For example, in his recent series of
paintings on wood, images of American power, the flag and the Statue of Liberty are
coupled with the words ‘ADD YOUR TEXT To Personalize’. Here the reductive palette
suggests an absence of meaning.
Loris Gréaud, Nothing Is True Everything Is
Permitted, 2007, 380 cm (height), edition of 3
Artreview 66
ART TRENDS 2.indd 66 6/12/07 15:27:50
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