Eponanonymous

This show garnered much props earlier this summer, with reviews in all the major media outlets. I suspect that a second wave will arrive with end-of-the-year roundups in a couple months, so I humbly inject my two cents during this liminal pause in the dialog.

The elements that combined to create this exhibition – the personalities, the artworks, the histories, the references – amounted to a kind of artworld perfect storm. The stories behind each of those elements, as well as detailed descriptions of the show, can be found elsewhere, so I just want to focus on a couple interwoven themes: the photographic dilemma and the perfection of superficiality.

For the better part of a quarter-century, artists have mined Continental theory in search of guidance. There is something irresistible about the content of that theory – perhaps the ultimate absolution of responsibility it offers? – and like everything irresistible, there is much to be suspicious of. Baudrillard, for example, has always seemed too facile, too untested by actual experience, and at the same time, too widely applicable to really be false.

Furthermore, in the intellectual discourse surrounding any field – I’m thinking here of both art and politics – there is a tendency amongst the learned to feel that once an idea has made the rounds of their rarefied counsels, and once a consensus has been arrived at, then the issue can be shelved in pursuit of the next “problematic”. But the penetration of their conclusions into “mass consciousness” is a different story, later in coming, or never. Political talking heads seem to have a tighter grasp on this, and as a result we consumers of political news get bludgeoned by repetitious talking points in the hope that their psychic blunt trauma can elide their way into, as they say nowadays, “truthiness.”

Because tastemakers in art are so much less beholden to anything analogous to the electorate, there is little need to tighten and streamline declarations of theory, quality, and historical importance. Intense debates about the nature and role of photography, for example, have gone on now for decades, but really, neither the arguments nor their conclusions have had any discernable effect on mass culture or the worldview of your average Joe Sixpack with a point-and-shoot.

All of which is intended as a lead-in to thinking about the excellent, destabilizing photographic situation presented at Shafrazi Gallery. It is quite one thing to summarize and dismiss, while operating in the domain of verbal description, the “simulacrum” created by Urs Fischer; to be in the space and experience the installation, to try to “get your footing” and decode the visual field, amounted to quite something else.

The displacement was total. The actual artworks hanging over the wallpaper were visible almost exclusively in their relationship to the images they were obscuring. The depicted artworks had resonance primarily through the effectiveness of the illusion, negating any focus on the role of those actual works to function in either aesthetic or historical narratives. Technical questions of production and architectural support asserted themselves as the subject of theme-park entertainment. Each viewer in the gallery became a detective, taking pleasure in unraveling the little puzzles that inevitably marked a gesture at once so simple and so intricate. Photography was expanded to envelope itself, as nearly as possible, and its condition of always being primarily about its own surface has rarely been so clear.

With that realization in place, the next logical step is to suggest that the content of the exhibition, conventionally understood as the artworks depicted and exhibited, didn’t really matter.  I think this is true, with a caveat:  the mix-and-match, the 80’s graffiti scenesters, the whole edifice of artists skimming the surface of pop-culture waste-products in the hope of being the next Rauschenbergian savant, is the perfect content with which to fill this deeply contradicted container of an exhibition.  It was superficiality raised to the level of the profound.  There was a cost, of course, with everything subsumed, drained of what it only barely had to begin with.  It seems sweetly unnatural, in a historical sense and an economic sense, to claim that both Keith Haring and Francis Bacon are fully realized once they can be celebrated for the utter emptiness of their presence.  And yet, something raw, something terribly “truthy,” was to be found by giving form to this nothingness.

That something, to this viewer, was not located in the theoretical underpinnings one can easily identify.  It was not located in any updated notion of the “inconsequential” in the guise of existentialism.  It was, rather, that the pervasive itch that you can never reach was given a soothing scratch, and it was done with a blend of conceptual wit and theatricality that meant its appeal was broad, understandable in a multitude of inter-related ways…a mirrored signpost in the fork of the road, its directions written in a riddle, for all passers-by.