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From: blp
Category: Art
Date: 14 November 2006
Time: 05:51 AM
Review:
Apt blankness aside, here’s what I meant to say: No one else writing on this yet? I went two days ago and did 'em all. I was
incredibly excited when we were able to get our (free but timed) tickets, partly because the last day I went, early afternoon, there
were no slots left, partly because, you know, I was about to go on some massive slides. I feel excited again thinking about it and
really want to go again. It was just fucking incredibly fun.
In between our half hour slots we went round Fischli and Weiss, dearly loved old faves, and fifties ab-ex metal sculptor David
Smith, who was clearly going to need fuller attention, but didn't really get it from us, clockwatchingly eager as we were to head
off for our next rush down the shiny metal shoots. I did make some effort to engage with the early, semi-surrealist abstracts,
mainly because I found them so unengaging. If a perfect afternoon at the Tate was marred by anything - and it wasn't really,
much - it was by my companion's seeming inability/refusal to engage. She rushed, ungenerously I thought, past those
unengaging early Smith abstracts and later in the café when I asked her what made the slides art she shrugged and said
something on the order of 'As soon as I saw them I just knew they were art', as if that ended the question.
Later we met up with a young gallerist with an interest in 'event structures' (no, me neither) who hadn't seen the slides yet, but
was expecting to love them, and an art critic who hates the slides, seeing them as an intrusion of entertainment into the art
arena. I sat next to the art critic and we faced off the non-sceptics across the table. The debate was sort of artificially polarised,
less by the seating than by the refusal of half the party to be troubled about them at all. I like the slides, but people having no
problem with them was a big problem for me and I was the one who ended up accused of extremism. Can you get away from
polarisation in this debate? Not really. Even though I like the slides and liked the harder art too, in the end, it seems, I want art to
be hard or I want to engage with the hard part of art. If the slides are interesting, I think it's because they're about this polarity.
They're only really challenging if you want them to be and want art to be challenging, but, partly, they're a challenge to your
desire for art to be challenging, which is a bit of a dumb, damp squib really. They're an intrusion of children's play into an arena
of adult play. They pose a deeply worthwhile, if not particularly complex question about why we abandon the one for the other.
And that's not bad, but, as far as they go as art, that's about it. Other than that, they're sort of good design. They look nice, but,
you know, so do a lot of things. And they only look quite nice.
Why (shrilly) shouldn't it be enough to look nice? Why am I being so rigid about what I think is art? Why is it supposed to be hard
or challenging? Do you know what I mean? Oh look do fuck off with your sludgy, supposedly anti-elitist relativism. It's childish.
Oh sorry, 'But what's wrong with being childish?' (said in a childish whine) 'It's good because I like it.' 'It's art because the artist
says it is.' This latter was actually offered as a retort to my inquiries á table, but please, please; you don't have to stop liking
Duchamp or Rauschenberg's 'This is a portrait of Iris Clert because I say so' to find this maddening do you? The the slides are
highly acceptable to me is as an adjunct to the experience of hard art. It was superb to have the hardness and the exuberance
all in one day. I loved it. And the gallerist later tried to say pretty much that when I was arguing for hard art - 'But why can't you
have both?' You can, but it's remarkably, surprisingly difficult. For one thing, just for questioning the slides status as art, I was
being accused of narrow-mindedness. I would say, and did, no, I'm arguing for broad-mindedness. If you have an experience
that you know beforehand is fun and find it fun, how has that broadened your mind, especially if you don't even think about the
one thing that's complex about it, which is the nature of the experience itself? If you start from the position that anything a
(famous) artist says is art and then accept that a particular piece by them is art, ditto? Whereas if you go see some dated looking
forties sculptures that seem like tired old abstract surrealist clichés now, but take some time to do that odd, quiet, old fashioned
thing of walking around them and looking and suddenly have a ping moment, you've moved a teensy bit beyond your
contemptuous pawn of late capitalist overgrown adolescent disco fuss-budget subjectivity and engaged with history, difference
and otherness and resuscitated something marginalised. You've had some dialogue. Haven't you? And isn't that a deeply
fragile thing that many people are barely even aware is possible and isn't fun art something of a threat to that? I mean one of
Elmgreen and Dragsett or Dragstreet or whatever they're called gave an interview a while back on Art Safari saying they made
sculptures you could sit on because, and I'm quoting, it was more 'groovy' than the experience of ones you could only look at.
So some of the proponents of this stuff are NOT saying, 'Why can't you have both?' They're being phillistine. They set up
situations that are overtly experiential and overtly about direct interaction, often with other people and, with apparent blinding
stupidity, miss the less visible engagements with seemingly less dynamic, more static art. It's dumb. It's as if they think nothing
can be invisible and still work - yet it does. Because, just as quiet, awkward art so often yields wonders, irony of ironies, in the
work where the duty to engage and have fun is made didactically explicit, the flatness, disengagement and dullness that isn't
supposed to be present is often all you're left with. If these artists ever just set out to disappoint idealistic, utopian expectations,
this would be pretty interesting, but I've never had the impression this was what they were trying to do or seen anything they've
said that suggested it.
I'm thinking of Elmgreen and Dragsett and, particularly, Rirkrit Tirvinja's shows at the Serpentine recently, but this doesn't quite
apply to the slides, except in so far as they don't really do much. They're sort of wonderful in the immediate, but that, oh boy, I'm
going to be totally unashamedly 'judgemental' now, is NOT AS GOOD as the experience of finding wonder where you didn't
expect it and where the only way to do it was give the thing time and attention. I nearly said I was going to be subjective, but no,
I don't think judgemental and subjective are the same. Exercising judgement is something good that we can do when we're a bit
educated and a bit experienced. Being subjective is a refusal of education and experience. But the taboo against being
judgemental is couched as a critique of subjectivity ('But that's just your opinion!') by precisely the people who dignify
subjectivity above all possible criteria ('You have your opinion and I have mine.') along with the defensiveness born of mistaking
critique for damnation.
Are the slides art? Claus Oldenberg said that he always left the room when this question was asked about sixties happenings
and I don’t blame him really. But the context is different now. The uncoolness of the question has been generally agreed, and I
think that makes it really worth asking.
My main point is that not being able to ask the question, or having the question answered with mysticism, doesn’t even give you
a chance to figure out what might be good about the slides – beyond the experience of whooshing. Why should there be
something beyond that? Well this is the question that really makes me want to leave the room.