SHARKFORUM: OPINION WITH TEETH

In a rational world, Currin's mousy imitations of old-master portrait styles would not earn him a freelance gig as a magazine illustrator, but we are living in a very different kind of world, where Currin and his ilk are showcased at the Pompidou Center in Paris, accompanied by an essay of Folie's titled "Meta-Trash," in which she observes that "there can no longer be any painting without trash." She hastens to add that "This observation does not exclude seriousness of intent.... The more everyday 'trash' invades and contaminates our pictorial worlds, the greater is the potential for the 'magical' quality of a work to emerge." I would take the lunacy of Folie's argument for a parody in a novel about the contemporary art world, except that this winter some version of Folie's turgid mix of hipster metaphysics and academic aggression has been circulating in just about every corner of Manhattan where people are talking about the paintings of John Currin.

Currin is a symptom. He reflects the cracked values of an art world where most of the people in charge no longer know what gives a work of art life. The unease or confusion that greets Currin's portraits of suburban matrons and young cuties and gay couples, which are larded with allusions to old master paintings and pop culture, is said to mark the emergence of a freshly off-kilter sensibility. Currin's lounge-lizard gambits are hailed for giving classical values a modern ironic twist. Robert Rosenblum and Peter Schjeldahl, writers so suave that they pass as something other than the connoisseurs of fashion that they are, marshal all their formidable erudition and literary ingenuity to make the case for Currin as a major player in the art historical games. In the catalogue of the Whitney show--which was organized by the Museum of Contemporary Art in Chicago and the Serpentine Gallery in London--Rosenblum announces that "Currin knows his old masters inside out," and tells us how much he enjoyed touring the Metropolitan's permanent collection with the artist. Last year Currin himself curated a selection of masterworks at the Boston Museum of Fine Arts, thereby proving that he likes Velázquez as much as the next guy. Currin certainly knows how to spritz ideas. He's got a line on everything, from photographs of models in Cosmopolitan to Cranach's Venuses and Eves. He dabbles with misogyny, but slyly, so that it registers as nouveau masculinity. And of course this pleases the guys in Tribeca, with their fashion-model girlfriends and steak dinners and cigars, among whom there might be somebody with the half-a-million bucks that you now need to buy one of Currin's paintings.

His admirers read the limpness of his work as a new brand of world-weary sophistication. I think the paintings are merely ill-focused. Whatever the knowingness of his allusions, classical structure and modern skepticism are for Currin not grand principles to be grappled with, but intellectual accessories, attitudes to be tried on for size like the latest rags from Jeffrey's. As a dissent from modernism Currin is a joke. The critique of modernism's rage for purity, which is as old as modernism itself, requires a gravitas that is beyond the reach of this prime-time buffoon. Currin's oft-admired "technique"--he is said to paint fur and hair especially well--would not have earned him an entry-level job in a painter's workshop three hundred years ago. Many of the poverty-stricken girls who painted flowers on porcelain plates in nineteenth-century French factories were more talented than he is. He is merely the latest sharpie to make a killing with the sodden heap of gimmicks that Eric Fischl and David Salle used to bulldoze their way to SoHo stardom in the early 1980s. His work is toxic--art pollution."

From "Beyond Belief" by Jed Perl. Originally printed in The New Republic

When some time ago the subject of John Currin as a painter was broached, I suggested the article Beyond Belief which can be found on The New Republic site – or, in its entirety here - after further consideration, it seems to me that more interesting than wasting any energy discussing “this flyspeck of a painter,” would be to begin a discussion on why SHARKFORUM has come into being, and how it is that all of you are here, without being eaten alive! (not that being eaten alive is necessarily a bad thing)

I'm wanting to talk about two sentences from the above:

“Currin is a symptom. He reflects the cracked values of an art world where most of the people in charge no longer know what gives a work of art life.”

And let me add to this with - and I want you all to consider this - how have we come to a place where so many of the painters who are touted as being ‘important' are so flat out bad? I mean bad at this thing called painting – as in creating drama via simple and sheer plastic invention on a canvas? Every time I hear someone like Luc Tuymans (who by the way is a completely lovely man) talk about Julian Schnabel’s bullshit I just have to laugh. At least as a painter Julian on occasion actually takes chances and tries to do interesting things with the actual language of paint. You know that stuff that’s kind of oily and has pigment in it (or as Perl noted, “the hellbent fury of oil paint.") Maybe I just don’t get it, but it looks to me like Luc (or Elizabeth Peyton, with her amazingly mediocre, student level, illustrative confections depicting somewhat recognizable rock stars at up to $600,000.00 a piece) all done to the accompaniment of a chorus of cooing critics - that these people as painters, along with Currin and company, all kind of suck. So for me, the question is, how did they get to where they are? If they're so good, who says so?

Let me rephrase – and if you get nothing else from what I’m saying here, ask yourself one question: just how did we get from the heady, tumultuous and yet halcyon days of High Modernism, when "what is painting- and what painting is, the ‘thing’ itself, in all of its raging thinglyness, welling up," was being so brilliantly addressed, recapitulated via works like Pollock’s Autumn Rhythm, or de Kooning’s Easter Monday or Excavation, or Woman One, or Door To The River... how did we get from work of this ontological magnitude and artists of this kind of towering integrity and grit to say, Currin’s painting ‘Snow-bo,’ a painting that is nothing if not a second rate Norman Rockwell-esque piece of trite cutesy-pie smut that looks not unlike a poorly rendered Hallmark Christmas card. How did we get from someone as genuine and real as Willem de Kooning to this simpering, smug careerist, shoving his new born son’s scrotum in Richard Avedon’s camera lens, leaving only enough room for his pouty, petulant bad boy scowl? Hilariously, Mr. Avedon, even at the end, was at the top of his game and captured perfectly the seemingly not very bright Mr. Currin in fine, and revealing form. The picture in The New Yorker is indeed worth a thousand words.

(As a side note - for all of the musicians here at Sharkforum who may or may not be conversant with the topic here, its kind of like the question "what exactly is the path that leads from say Bob Dylan to a creature like Britney Spears," in all of her towering badassedness for instance.)

Its interesting: in Norman Rockwell’s illustration The Connoisseur – a mocking and somewhat condescendingly snide picture of a balding man in a suit contemplating a Pollock-like abstraction – we can now see a harbinger of what was to come. How the art world has indeed come full circle. How the mostly upper-middle class university trained denizens of all that is art, have managed through “a turgid mix of hipster metaphysics and academic aggression” to reassert what for them is comfortable, i.e.; certain plebian conceits and middleclass values as to what is ‘good.’ The urban equivalent here in Chicago could be something like the cultural criminality of razing the birthplace of that great American art form known as modern blues, Maxwell Street, and replacing it with a shit mall so all the northshore kids wouldn’t get too homesick while they are studying how to be artists at UIC, learning how to do what they are told. Indeed, a collapse in belief, a failure of imagination on a societal level or simply, The Revenge Of The Philistines.

I guess since they tore down his home, it’s only fair to ask, with all of their no doubt wonderful facilities and resources, has UIC produced even just one artist the caliber of Muddy Waters? Sorry, don’t think so. It’s kind of like MacDonalds –billions and billions served –but have they ever made a good one?

Lets face it, it takes a special and particular kind of stupidity, or mere cynical ambition perhaps, to think for instance that a maker of rather dead-in-the-water illustrations (done from photographs and made to be re-photographed for magazine covers, as almost all Rockwell’s were) can be compared to a technically brilliant painter like Soutine for instance, or Freud, or Kossoff. And yet today we have ‘critics’ like Dave Hickey for instance, smarmily suggesting that we should take Rockwell, hence Currin seriously in terms of painting. As Mr. Perl said, in response to this unfortunate and completely suspect concept (I paraphrase) “who told Mr. Hickey he knows anything about painting?”

But I digress. Now that we have this thing called the internet, we need to ask ourselves, do we really need the so called arbiters of what is important anymore? Their infrastructure, their being keepers of the gates, their angling for position no matter how inane or insipid their argument, as long as it means some form or another of influence and power are to be conferred upon them.... or shall we begin as artists to decide for ourselves what we think is cogent and relevant? I know it’s a tall order in an art world populated with so many chicken littles, but perhaps the idea of ‘question authority!’ is an idea whose time has come, and has some currency for the times and ground we inhabit.

I don’t know. Maybe its just me, but as a painter, I am really not so interested in some dried out hack of a department head at some institution (any institution), or anyone else for that matter, telling me what ‘the issues’ are, if you know what I mean.

Am I advocating some form of noble savage? Errr...of course not. But I am advocating for a world in which people know their places, and that artists, not art educators, not curators, not critics, should set the agenda. I know – what a concept huh?

Sharkforum is about artists, and others, creating their own context – both cyber- and site-specific. We have gotten this thing up and running, and that being said, The Shark is going to do exactly what it is that sharks do, which is swim around and chomp on things.

To be continued...