special focus
a nyone familiar with the landscape of the American educational system over the
past 25 years will surely be familiar with what we might as well call ‘the great levelling’.
It goes by other names too: ‘grade inflation’; ‘institutional mediocrity’; ‘special culture’
(‘special’ as in ‘everyone is…’). What these variants of the great levelling hold in common,
of course, is the enshrinement of ‘effort’ (as in ‘A for…’) within the ranks of self-evidently
positive values. As such, effort has become the stuff of semi-mindless platitudes: ‘Put
in the effort and you will be rewarded’ or ‘Better that you made the effort’. And soon
enough, the reason any kind of effort is made in the first place is beside the point.
It should come as no surprise, then, that effort as an indication of value has taken
up residence within the precincts of contemporary art. Faced with the loss of one or
Tara Donovan, Untitled (Mylar), 2007,
dimensions variable. Photo: Stephen White.
another ideological commitment – be it modernism, anti-aestheticism, institutional
Courtesy the artist, Stephen Friedman Gallery,
criticism, avant-gardism, naive politicism, rear-garde academicism, etc – artists must
London, and PaceWildenstein, New York
find a reason to keep working, a reason to keep making art. But when those reasons are
not forthcoming, the least one can do is simply keep working, keep making and hope
that somehow one’s artistic means will become ends in and of themselves. How else to
explain the recent tendency towards compulsive repetitions and accumulations? – think
Ingrid Calame’s tracings from the LA River or the Indianapolis Motor Speedway, Carlos
Amorales’s swarm of paper moths, Black Cloud (2007) or Tara Donovan’s profusion
of tape rings, Untitled (Mylar) (2007), which stand as exemplary indexical, iconic and
symbolic modes of this kind of ‘effortful’ aesthetic signification.
But effort for effort’s sake need not appear as the compulsion to repeat; it
also manifests as a mimetic impulse, which replays the traditional artistic strategy of
material translation in order to gain aesthetic traction. On this side of things we find
Chris Gilmour’s Aston Martin DB5 (2006), a full recreation in cardboard of James
Bond’s truly tricked-out roadster from the movie Goldfinger (1964). In the same vein,
but more self-reflexively, David Ersser’s show at Roebling Hall this past September,
Nothing But Heavy Duty, recreated the artist’s studio-cum-woodshop – replete with
power tools, table saw, extension cords, folding ladder and other assorted items,
detritus and materials stock – entirely out of balsa wood. These are genuine feats of
material mastery, but they quickly appear formulaic, in the most literal sense: take the
form of some complex object, select an unsuspected and somewhat resistant material,
add labour, add time, add a little more time (for time is of the utmost importance: if
‘time’ is not legible, neither is ‘effort’), and there you have it: some ‘thing’ made out of
something else.
(To set these comments in sharper relief, it’s worth noting that figures such
as Chris Hanson and Hendrika Sonnenberg could easily fall in with this company if
it weren’t for their favoured blue and green polystyrene, which one can assume was
selected at least in part for the effortlessness with which it may be manipulated. Which
is to say that Hanson and Sonnenberg are less interested in the viewer’s apprehension
of the magnitude of their endeavour – ie, in the legibility of their efforts – than in the
signifying potential of their constructs.)
Of course the legibility of effort is nothing if not dialectical – indeed, this is what
moves it from a mere theme into a particular problem for contemporary art. For in
what other way are we to understand the offerings of artists such as Gedi Sibony or Ian
Pedigo? – works that ask how few moves one can make and still render a ‘work’ of art
legible as such. Here materials are equally important, though not for their pliability or for
their significance, but for their utter evacuation of content – an evacuation which does
not quite result in, does not quite purify or reduce to, any kind of form. One hesitates
to think of Pedigo’s or Sibony’s art as some kind of physical manifestation of Robert
Morris’s Statement of Aesthetic Withdrawal (1963), though that is certainly its effect:
Gedi Sibony Chatterer, 2007,
wood, Plexiglas, plastic sheet, dimensions variable.
a gesture that simultaneously negates and produces value; it’s the laudable failure, a Courtesy Greene Naftali Gallery, New York
artreview 76
ART TRENDS 2.indd 76 6/12/07 15:38:49
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