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Bloggeration

From: El Cap
Date: 08 Jul 2010
Time: 02:17:14 -0500

Review

Wow no sooner am I blacklisted from the ContemporaryArtDaily.com blog than the site goes down! Can I just say for the record that I DID NOT DO IT. Whatever it is. I made a perfectly civil observation about Wade Guyton's current show at the Ludwig Museum and the house ruled me, rather rudely out of order. The thread ran like this - 1.CAP Says: July 5th, 2010 at 4:50 pm I don’t see that printing on canvas makes the work a painting. There is a vast industry dedicated to printed textiles – do you count them as paintings if they happen to choose canvas as a support? Guyton’s work may be mono-prints, but that still does not make them paintings. Not even printing them with some notion of paint will make them painting. They are still prints. This is not to say the works are not art of course, only that we need to observe our categories with care before judging the work for its merits. 1.Forrest Says: July 5th, 2010 at 7:05 pm It’s certainly a part of Guyton’s project to produce mechanically created paintings, and I’m sure he intends all of the “but is it a painting?” conversations that come out of that. But, in my view, many more controversial things have been forwarded as paintings than these, which are, after all, pigment on primed canvas, stretched over a wood frame. 1.Heart Says: July 6th, 2010 at 12:17 am CAP, Your post is regressive. Get with it. Yours is lame criteria upon which to judge this work. Forest is right on, and lets leave the “is it a painting” discussion behind. To which I replied, in my spontaneous, spirited way - - Ooooh sowee. Did my questions get a liddle bit hard for the cwitik wif a quacker bwain? Get with it SFB – that’s what criticism IS. Guyton comes in late and lazy on a conversation generated by Warhol and Polke that died sometime in the 80s. You want to dance on the grave of safe and sorry issues like ‘painting’ (and I didn’t introduce the term to the discussion) then doing more than sticking them in some lame flatbed’retired pinball tray is needed. This meager exercise in interior decoration may pass muster in Ludo-land but you can’t hide forever. The artist himself refers to other works as ‘printer-sculptures’ or ‘drawings in space’ yet for some reason questions about painting go in the too-hard tray. So why does the PR bother mentioning how ‘…they also redefine their medium’. They may ‘lend something three-dimensional to paintings and graphic prints’ but we won’t be able to say very much about what that might be unless we understand the differences BETWEEN paintings and prints. Guyton’s ‘ elementary geometric forms’ and ‘classical monochromes’ (after ‘classics’ like Alexander Rodchenko or Robert Ryman, snigger) show that he’s still hostage to Minimalism and the sad cul-de-sac of Amerikan modernism. That died in the 70s – for any curator who bothered to stay awake or do their homework. Well that might be something for the Germans to celebrate, but it’s not so much How Germany Stole Back Modernism from Amerika, as how short-term, lazy and self-serving Amerika’s turn at the helm of globalist culture turned out to be. Guyton is the perfect epigone to the postmodern dither that began in New York and ended in Leipzig. Bite me. Predictably, they did not allow that comment to stay published. Nor indeed for me to post even the most innocuous comment on the following post (Lothar Hempel @ Modern Art). But now they're so mad they've pulled the whole site. That's low man. Nathan and The Bagman are gonna have to build their playhouse all the way up again. Boo hoo. Should I have demolished Dan Barren-baum for featuring him in his Venice Biennale as well? I'm saving the Viking Prince for a rainy day....