Transactions
Blanton Museum of Art
- Eric Zimmerman -
Christine Hill, Care Package [Volksboutique Products Division], 2003; installation; dimensions variable; courtesy Galerie EIGEN + ART Leipzig, Berlin
Emily Jacir, Sexy Semite, 2000–02; personal ads placed in the Village
Voice and displayed on a shelf; dimensions variable; photo: O.K. Books, O.K. Center for Contemporary Art Upper Austria; courtesy Alexander and Bonin, New York
For the artists included in Transactions, the system of distribution characterized by commercial galleries apparently means very little. Their work consists of actions that take place within the public sphere: magazine advertisements, personal ads, interventions, the Internet. Their gestures are intended to question the way in which we identify art, conceptualizing systems of exchange in order to highlight, in curator Kelly Baum’s words, “alternative systems of distribution.” Perhaps actions are the truest forms of public art: they are social, performative, intended to snap us to attention—to shake us out of our hypnotic expectations of art and remind us of our responsibility as viewers.
The radicalism tied to conceptual art has long since receded. Its contemporary practitioners, however, are left to parse its successes and failures, manipulating language to define their individual practices. As a part of this historical lineage, Transactions does succeed. Conrad Bakker (who is also currently showing at Lora Reynolds Gallery in Austin) embraces e-mail spam and e-commerce as methods of distribution. After inviting people to participate in his projects, Bakker spams them, offering handmade replicas of designer objects delivered with a brief passage from Karl Marx’s Capital. Once you receive the entire set—ten pieces of spam—you get the punch line: a specific political position on the relation of capital to commodity to fetish.
Bakker’s imprecise and clumsily crafted objects are charming. For instance, the crudeness of his grass-green Rolex box, replete with a real watch struggling to free itself from its carved-wood quagmire, is actually quite humorous. Intended to point us towards the criteria by which artworks are given value and the relationship between them and “real” commodities, Bakker’s objects hold up in both contexts.
For her project, Emily Jacir deftly asked members of the Palestinian diaspora in New York to place a series of personal ads in the Village Voice from 2000 to 2002, with taglines such as “Leggy Palestinian Semite” and “You Claimed our Falafel.” At once parody and the ultimate form of political provocation, Jacir’s project points out the hypocrisy behind a piece of legislation that grants every Jew the right to settle in Israel yet denies this right to Palestinians. It is by far the most captivating work in the exhibition.
In a sense, Jacir’s project realizes the limits of conceptual practice—the narrow space within the work allotted for interpretation and the often dry, tongue-in-cheek statement that waits for those willing to parse references and read requisite wall labels. Jacir, on the other hand, gets to the point quickly and without obfuscation. As a political act, the work is ideal; yet, if this gesture goes beyond this, I remain uncertain, and the artist does little to help me along.
Seth Price, Digital Video Effect: Editions, 2006; video projection; duration 00:12:00; courtesy the artist, Friedrich Petzel Gallery and Reena Spaulings Fine Art, New York; distributed by Electronic Arts Intermix, New York
Zoë Sheehan Saldaña, Faded Glory Mix & Match Reversible Hat (Red), 2005; left: purchased item on custom-made Styrofoam mannequin head on plain white shelf; right: framed photograph of duplicate; courtesy the artist
In Vietnam War Ads; or, your bibliography is our sculpture, Ben Kinmont faces similar problems. Reprinting antiwar advertisements from the sixties and seventies in various contemporary art rags and newspapers, Kinmont dredges up our activist history, forcing us to reflect on the current state of war. But in a culture overwhelmed by images and words, the shock of these ads is minimal at best. Moveon.org’ s recent ad in the New York Times stating “General Petraeus or General Betray Us?” is more jarring and ultimately more effective as a political act. The irony of Kinmont’s project is that while it may operate outside the walls of the museum, it cannot compete with real political activism. In an art context it is dull, and in the political arena, ineffective. At best, it raises the important question of the effectiveness surrounding political gestures within artistic practice. Ultimately, art seems unable to effect any sort of real social change; its audience is simply too small. A former professor of mine was fond of saying that “art is the safety valve for social action,” and projects like Kinmont’s do little to dissuade me from accepting that statement.
Zoë Sheehan Saldaña’s Faded Glory Mix & Match Reversible Hat (Red) also exemplifies this problem. Saldaña purchased a hat from a Connecticut Wal-Mart for $3.23. Taking it back to her studio, she proceeded to duplicate it by hand down to the most specific of details. Upon completion, the hat was returned to the rack in Wal-Mart, again for sale at the staggering price of $3.23.
What is most engaging about this piece is not how it is supposed to open up a dialogue regarding Wal-Mart’s offensive labor practices, or the difference between the handmade and mass-produced, but that it fails as both a true mass-market commodity and as a piece of art in the traditional sense of the word. The action itself, while seemingly poetic, lacks complexity and is a tired strategy for infiltrating the big-box machine. Faded Glory is part commodity and part art object, blurring the boundary between separate value systems in order to make us more aware of them, but to what ends?
Wandering through the exhibition, I was reminded of Francis Alÿs’ provocative exhibition title Sometimes Doing Something Poetic Can Become Political and Sometimes Doing Something Political Can Become Poetic and realized this sentiment is exactly what this show lacks: a sense of the poetic. Without it, much of the work becomes an exercise in ironic tongue-in-cheek finger-pointing that quickly becomes tiresome. There is little to hold us visually, little that is poetic or intellectually engaging. The exhibition merely points to many assumptions that art-world insiders are already highly aware of.
No matter how hard the artists in Transactions might try to break from traditional systems of distribution, they are ultimately inescapable. These sorts of conceptual practices reach out into the social ether yet remain dependent on the art world’s structure and context in order to be understood. In a touch of irony, it is the very structure these artists critique that grants these projects relevance and legitimacy, ultimately activating their communicative potential. Contemporary conceptual art practitioners, like those in Transactions, have inherited both the liberating ideas and—with little exception—the problems conceptualism has never been able to outrun.
Eric Zimmerman is an artist and writer based in Austin.