New York City September 22nd, 2010

Dear Unidentified To DKS List Recipients,

I really only have two big shows to recommend for tonight, (even though I'm know there are other worthy ones.) One is uptown at Marian Boesky's upper East side four-story brownstone unlovely tree-lined street, "Paolozzi, Nutt, Furnas” put together by Marianne Boesky, David Nolan, and Todd Levin at Marianne Boesky uptown, 118 East 64th Street, betw Lex. & Park, 6-9

The other not-to be-missed greatest shows ever in the history (and I only slightly exaggerate) "Paul Kasmin Gallery and Vincent Fremont (of the Warhol Foundation?) are pleased to announce a new exhibition of paintings by Deborah Kass, "more feel-good paintings for bad times" at Paul Kasmin Gallery, 293 Tenth Avenue at 27th Street, 6-8. It is a public opening in everyone's invited, I misspoke, or misunderstood, or something? There'll be a catalogue, featuring an essay by Robert Storr, not too shabby.  I love him.

Pictures are available. If you go to the DKS List website at dks.thing.net you will see at the top of the page the invitation. Click on it and you will go to a page called "Deborah Kass "After Louise Bourgeois" which is a Bruce Nauman-esque tribute to America's greatest sculptor, who recently passed.  In the upper left of that page you will see seven small links with titles of some of the paintings in the show.

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The Gallery Invitation Just Arrived: "Expanding the ideas of her exhibition in the fall of 2007, Kass continues to mine the fields of post war painting, language, and music to explore the intersection of politics, popular culture, art history, and the self. Kass’s new paintings, while more circumspect, still sing. But the songs are of a more ambivalent nature, reflecting her reaction to the uncertain state of current affairs. Her vibrant texts can be read as an emotional barometer of our times.

The American Songbook, Stephen Sondheim and Laura Nyro take star turns in the paintings, as do Andy Warhol, Ellsworth Kelly, Frank Stella and Ed Ruscha in tribute to their impact on our collective psyches. Embodying these influences, her new neon sculpture, titled “After Louise Bourgeois,” reworks Bourgeois’s highly charged quote, stating “A woman has no place in the art world unless she proves over and over again she won’t be eliminated” in the bright lights employed by Bruce Nauman and Broadway.

In addition to the gallery exhibition, Kass’s paintings will be presented in “Shifting the Gaze: Painting and Feminism" at The Jewish Museum in fall 2010, “Hide/ Seek: Desire Difference and the Invention of the Modern American Portrait,” at The National Portrait Gallery, Smithsonian Museum, Fall 2010, “The Deconstructive Impulse” at the Neuberger Museum, January 2011, and “Seeing Gertrude Stein: Five Stories at the Contemporary Jewish Museum in San Francisco and The National Portrait Gallery, Smithsonian Museum, Spring 2011.

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A General Disclaimer.

Despite these accolades it is still my humble opinion that Deborah Kass, as popular and influential as she is, is nevertheless still one of the most undervalued artists in the world. Obviously I'm a fan.

I am not an art critic or even an art historian, even though I have interests in both. Mostly my interest in art is strictly from the point of view of being an artist, and so when I write about Ideas, Trends and Key Individuals Shows, Galleries and History, I feel I am in a collaboration with all of those things. It's sort of a one-sided collaboration, because I never let people read what I'm going to send out with the list beforehand, because that's an invitation to editing and rewriting the material, and the unhappy fact is that I don't consider writing that easy to want to do it over. In fact I find it damn difficult, (I can't understand how critics and art historians by Jerry and Roberta, who I idolize, crank it out by the pound?) So I feel it's always necessary to begin with a blanket apology for any errors, omissions, mistakes or mischaracterizations of people's words, history, politics, quotations or People's personal or private's subjectivities I write about. All opinions are strictly my own and definitely should not be considered representative of the opinions of any individuals mentioned. I'm extremely confident when I am expressing my own opinions, prejudices and ideas, or when I am drawing freely upon the work of someone like Simon Critchley, who I quote freely, because I feel he expresses my ideas better than I do. (That, in addition, to being my biggest influence currently.)  I'm planning to use a lot of quotes of his and take my time bringing everything full circle. because in addition to talking about Ms. Kass, I plan on introducing my new personal philosophy, the global art manifesto, and political agenda to save the world, that I have tentatively titled as being: “Synthetic Speculative Surrealistic Anarchistic Otherism," or SSSAO or "Otherism" for short.

These essays are going to be an ongoing weekly project, and I plan to add more maternal about Deborah Kass in the weeks going forward, because this year I want to write about only a few artists whom I think of as values artists. Individuals whose work I feel will be an interesting commentary on our present times 500 years hence.

For those you who don't know Professor Simon Critchley, he is a New York-based, British born Philosopher, who is the philosophy chair at The New School For Social Research. Who is a fan of art, and a popular  speaker at art fairs, who has in the past discussed some of the contemporary contradictions in the relationship of art to theory.  I am going to mix some his remarks, with my remarks, and maybe with some remarks by Deborah Kass. Here is some of that,  little of his ‘terroristic’ model of theory, (in which he real reassures artists they should stress too much about it) as he explains how perhaps that art and theory have not become divorced. We might even say that in some cases they have merged, or perhaps both become attached to a third term, perhaps art and theory have adopted a form of triolism, a ménage a trois?

Negotiating art and theory through a third term is extremely relevant to Deborah Kass's work.  whether it's politics, feminism, the Jewish intellectual tradition, Broadway theater in musicals, our many other things, everything has something to do with her relationship with the intellectual Jewish life of New York City.

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Simon Critchley: I want to begin with some more methodological remarks about how I see the relation between art and theory at the present moment and the way out of a dilemma that might allow us to work in another way, collectively we might say.

The ‘Terroristic’ Model Of Theory

Let me begin this way: I think a certain top-down model or ‘theory as legitimation of the artist’ model of the relation between theory and practice has grown old and I think that’s a good thing. Without wanting to insult anyone in particular, but wanting to give a practical example, I saw this in action in places like Goldsmiths College in London in the 1990s, where students on the famous BFA and MFA Program, with more celebrated artists that it is decent to list in mixed company, were cowed into submission and driven in some cases to distraction and quasi-nervous breakdowns where they lost all confidence in their artistic practice through a certain - what I would call - ‘terroristic’ model of theory. They were simply made to feel stupid by their inability to master ‘Theory’, capital T, by which was meant a stack of texts, usually translated from French, with authors often beginning with D, sometimes with F or B, and they were usually terrified of writing the papers they were meant to write because they had little experience doing it. The worst of it, to my mind, and I don’t want to sound arrogant, was that the people who were teaching them theory weren’t that good. People like me used to go in to Goldsmiths or wherever and be expected to explain Lacan or Deleuze at a pretty high level to teachers that really didn’t have much of a clue and in front of students who were simply nonplussed and intimidated by the whole thing. I didn’t enjoy the experience much and neither did they. It seemed pretty pointless at the time and still does.

I’ve always been interested in people that do something that I don’t do and that I can’t do. I’m interested in heart surgeons, cartographers and tap dancers, but I am also interested in artists, particularly in those who are anxious about the word ‘artist’. The issue here is with different modes of articulation, or different modes of thinking. My conviction is that art thinks, just as film thinks and music thinks. Philosophy as a largely conceptual enterprise or meta-practise is thinking about thinking. The question is trying to find a way (not a method, but a way, there is certainly no such thing as a method) of approaching how and what art thinks in its own medium in a way that doesn’t drown art in theory.

Let me expand this point a little. To try and understand or read whatever it is that we call art from the standpoint of some theory is invariably to miss the phenomenon. It is to reduce a visual, spatial (as visual art - the title of this festival - is a sort of anachronism) or medial language to a theoretical metalanguage. It is usually to engage in some sort of cod-philosophy with a lot of useless jargon that is meant to intimidate the uninitiated (and many theoretical discussions of art are simply sadistically intended to do exactly that: to intimidate, to befuddle, to cow, to obscure). To put this in Stevensian terms, this is to reduce art to ideas about the thing, but not the thing itself. What interests me, what always interests me, is the thing itself in its truth (I mean truth as creation, as innovation, not logical or empirical truth – this is truth as troth, as a kind of fidelity) and how, say, the specificity of a thing – an installation, a performance, or whatever – might be approached in its own terms and not translated into the blah blah blah of some theory. By the truth of an artistic thing, I do not obviously mean propositional or empirical truth, but truth as creation, the creation of a singularity whose reach, appeal or revealing power extends beyond itself. This is what I will call in a while ‘anarchic creation’.

If a work of art is the illustration of a theory, or the example of a theory then it is either bad art or, more usually, bad theory. We could get into the whole question of exemplarity in art’s relation to theory if we liked, which has haunted philosophy from Hegel’s obsession with Sophocles to Merleau-Ponty’s obsession with Cezanne and Badiou’s obsession with Beckett and so on. Philosophers love their examples. So, in place of a top-down philosofugal model of the relation of art to theory, I’d like to suggest a artopetal model where theory finds some affluence, some contact with the thing and thing finds some contact with the theory which is being used to elucidate it.

Broadly, I see the relation between art and theory as dialectical: art needs a theory that needs art. I don’t see art as standing alone or as being for its own sake. The act of elucidation, of reflection, of conceptualization, is essential. All art is conceptual, we might say. But art is not simply conceptual and the concept should not exhaust the percept, we might say. It shows the concept’s need for a moment of sensuality or, better, spatiality, which stands apart from the concept. Art needs a theory that needs art. It’s a two way street with all the traffic in the middle.

Maybe artists are less entranced with theory or with a certain kind of top-down theory than they were a generation ago, you know in the distant days when no exhibition catalogue was complete without a quotation from Derrida. But, of course, we should never underestimate the vanity of artists or their desperate need for legitimation from philosophers and theorists. But, of course, I am vain too and also a prostitute and will happily legitimate artists in exchange for the appropriate amount of flattery, money or both. The less said about that the better. After all, I’m here aren’t I?

But let me look at things from another perspective. From this perspective, we might say that art and theory have not become divorced. We might even say that in some cases they have merged, or perhaps both become attached to a third term, perhaps art and theory have adopted a form of triolism, a ménage a trois, as we say in Brooklyn, where art and theory might be said to get together collectively around a third term. We have to learn to count to three, then. Maybe even four and five.


One Third Term - The Political is

An obvious third term here, that I’d like to discuss, is politics, not in the sense of governmental politics, but in the sense of Unipolar Moment and The Obama Era:, where so much art is concerned with the problem of community, of being-in-common and in particular with certain utopian experiments in community that belong to the memory and in some cases the present of radical politics. It is extremely interesting to note the way in which a concern with experiments in community lives on in the institutionally sanctioned spaces of the contemporary art world, where forms of what Hans-Ulrich Obrist calls ‘collaborational promiscuity’ are responses to the question: how to give a community of artists a social structure? And by implication: how to give any community a social structure?

Of course, the problem with such experiments in collectivity is twofold and perhaps obvious: on the one hand, they are only enabled and legitimated through the cultural institutions of the art world and thus utterly enmeshed in the circuits of commodification and spectacle that they seek to subvert; and, on the other hand, the dominant mode for approaching an experience of the communal is through the strategy of reenactment. One doesn’t engage in a bank heist, one reenacts Patty Hearst’s adventures with the Symbionese Liberation Army in a warehouse in Brooklyn, or whatever. Situationist détournement is replayed as obsessively planned reenactment. Fascinating as I find such experiments and the work of the artists involved, one suspects what we might call a ‘mannerist Situationism’, where the old problem of recuperation does not even apply because such art is completely co-opted by the socio-economic system which provides its life-blood.

I like the phrase, ‘mannerist situationism’, you know mannerist in the way Caravaggio stands to Raphael, exaggerated and bloody, but ultimately decadent, compromised and slightly nihilistic; but in many ways, much more attractive.


A Fruitful Exchange Between Art And Philosophy Around A Third Term

Despite these slightly obvious criticisms, I think there is something to the idea of the relationship between art and theory becoming orientated around a third term. Despite the whole business of art fairs, and I’ve been to too many of them of late because, as I said, I’m a cheap intellectual whore, despite that and despite the art market and the commodification of art, I think that the artworld has become a key space in culture for the thinking through of the nature, the possibility, the limitations and, most importantly, the memory of resistance.

So, in my humble view, the hugely compromised space of the artworld, at least in certain localities, is much more interesting than what is taking place in universities, maybe because it is so compromised. What I’ve always liked about the artworld is the nakedness of its mediation by capital. Yet, because of this nakedness, perhaps there is always the possibility for the aesthetic articulation of some outside of the logic of capital, close to Hakim Bey’s delightful idea of the TAZ, a domain of what Liam calls, and it’s an interesting word, semi-autonomy, listen to that: semi-autonomy. Maybe we could come back to that. This outside is always mediated by an inside, compromised by it, recuperated by it, but resistance should always persist with its logic, and persist with its ever-compromised creation of enclaves, of pirate utopias, or whatever. The artist is a pirate, both at a willed distance from the law and wholly parasitic and dependent on it. A doomed character, no doubt.

Of course, to stay with the idea of reenactment, maybe the meta-thought here is that it is not an objection at all. What was the Renaissance but a reenactment? They found all this wonderful Greek and Roman stuff and said, come on let’s do it again, it looks great. Look at those domes, terrific! Plato’s dialogues, awesome!

Or again, the history of the left is a history of reenactment, think of the way in which the history of 20th century radicalism from Lenin to anarchism to Maoism to 1968 to contemporary insurrectionism like the Invisible Committee turns on the status of their relation to the Paris Commune and the question to which radical memory can claim the truth of the commune. Maybe new wine is always poured into old wineskins.

Staying with the idea of the third term, maybe there are other third terms. Another example is the concept of work. (Let's take) as our starting point in the observation that today the artist—defined by creativity, unconventionality, and flexibility—appears to be the role model for contemporary workers. Always creative, full of unconventionality and flexibility, the bohemians in general and the artists in particular are the perfect entrepreneurs. The questions we asked in each event, each of which included an artist and a theorist, were: how did this strange situation arise, where the artist becomes a career model, an aspirational figure in a fairly conventional sense, namely that they appear to be rich, don’t work hard and get to have lots of fun. We asked, more generally: what is the good of work? How and why did the future change from the sixties and seventies vision of a leisure society, that was sold to people like me (I was told at school that I would live to 120 years old and spend my life lounging around in brightly colored polyester clothing), to an exhausting life of increasingly purposeless work?

Furthermore, why is work valorized in contemporary society? What happened to the critique of labor and its radical potential from the Middle Ages (Franiscans, mendicants, mystical anarchists, Free Spirits) up through the strategies of the Situationists, the autonomists and others? As unemployment becomes an increasing reality, how might we think of unemployment as an artistic and philosophical category? This is a good example of how to organize a fruitful exchange between art and philosophy around a third term. There is also no doubt that questions of didacticism, pedagogy and education are strong candidates for such third terms.

For me the question of the relation between Art, capital A, and Theory, capital T or Philosophy capital P, misses the point entirely. These terms are just too big and clunky for me in relation to the work I try and do, in relation to the way I try to look, to think and to write. Let me explain how it usually works. For whatever reason, usually by chance, as I am not such a big gallery rat, I develop a liking for someone’s work. (Me too.) Sometimes I don’t know them, but sometimes I do. Sometimes I get to know them quite well and we begin to work together. This is what I’ve been doing a little lately with Philippe Parreno. When I talk to him or look at what he does, it is clear that it is not what I do, that is, his mode of articulation is very different, but our concerns are tightly related and we’re reading the same books and looking at the same things. When I was writing recently on his films, I wasn’t trying to impose a theory on them. I was trying to listen, to attend to something that I thought was going on there and then begin to articulate it in my way. We are dealing with different modes of articulation for the same matter, the same matter."

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I met her at her studio last May and looked at some of this work, and  we have exchanged e-mails. I saved one which, though very brief, I thought was extremely direct and to the point.

The DKS List for:

Thursday September 23rd

Friday September 24th

Saturday September 25th