IN
Ghosttown is typical
of Red76, a self-described “arts group” founded In 2000 with shifting membership
that (this time around) Included Sam Gould and Khris Soden. Red76 has enabled
similar exchanges through projects like Dim
Sum, 2002— (a show-and-tell buffet of in-progress artwork served with a sit
down breakfast), Little Cities, 2005—
(cut-and-paste poles to make model cities), and Laundry Lectures, 2003— (talks given at Laundromats), both inside
and outside art Institutions In North America and Europe, including the Drawing
Center in New York, Southern Exposure in San Francisco, and the Autonomous Cultural
Center In Weimer, Germany.
Like much of the most
trenchant art In Portland, Ghosttown
was exquisitely half-assed. If only a few people showed up, it didn’t matter;
Sam and Khris were psyched. When someone had no dish for the potluck, he or she
stall ate. Ditto at the store: You could get what you wanted with a promise
(though no one would ever take your money). Sam said Ghosttown was art; Khris said It wasn’t. This ease with the malleability
of form, the contingency of relations-let’s Just say “winging it”—had its
material corollary In the disposable news circular and the miscellaneous
detritus of the project (cardboard clothing tags, dinner sign-up sheets penned
directly on Sheetrock at the store, Xeroxed hand- scrawled flyers for the
jukebox playlists). It gave a hum of lightness and optimism to the whole
project, a take-it-for-granted sense of abundance and possibility that disabled
any programmatic readings of the work as a site of struggle, whether social,
political, or artistic.
Such ease can also be read
as shallowness or a failure to engage real politics, and the charge is probably
fair. But lack of depth is also this work’s greatest accomplishment. Ghosttown was a rigorously attenuated
enactment of surface, one that produced a particular political space quite
unlike that which we arrive at through digging deeper. Red76 evacuated depth by
becoming hauntingly present on the surface. Old hierarchies of meaning
(hallmarks of modernism such as irony, repression, revelation, and subtext)
were rendered absurd, a strange effect that marked every interaction in Ghosttown. To put it simply: The face of
Ghosttown wore a benign, foolish
smile and bright eyes-the blank stare of the fully evolved hippie. Anyone who
looked behind it or beyond it was missing the point. To stand in the warmth of
this regard was to become, de facto, awesome.
The high-wire act of
becoming the engine for such a redemptive gaze is ultimately much more than a
politics; it is a metaphysics, a commitment to skate eternally on a surface of
immediate presence because that is where we are, together, and it is really
real and really,
really great here right
now. Pragmatic critiques—that, for example, such projects are luxuries we cannot
afford in divisive times—may be politically salient, but they are artistically
conservative, restricting artists to relations they abhor and obliging them to
abjure their most far-reaching propositions.
The ascendancy of surface
and complete unintelligibility of depth goes some way toward explaining why art
practices, once comfortably confined by conceptual and even formal boundaries,
now spread ravenously outward, indifferent to locale, staging themselves
serially across a vast horizontal plain of interchangeable opportunities: The
museum, a storefront, your bedroom, online, even a toilet—all blossom as sites
of meaning when the artist arrives, bringing his beaming face with him. These
actions leave little trace and have generated corresponding crises in the
discourse around them.
In these pages last month,
Claire Bishop nicely described one such crisis when she compared the thinness
of ethically driven projects such as the Turkish artists’ collective Oda
Projesi’s neighborhood picnics with what she called the greater conceptual
density” of Thomas Hirschhorn’s interventions in the Turkish communities of
Kassel. Bishop is not alone in her preference, and so groups like Superflex or
BANK, a British collaborative, or individually authoring artists such as
Hirschhorn or Philippe Parreno often deliver a raft of textual materials, in
the form of wall texts, catalogues, or other normative media of traditional art
criticism, that, among many other things, enact the desired conceptual density.
But Red76 or Learning to
Love You More, 2002— (the collaborative project of Harrell Fletcher and Miranda
July), or Dynamite (a broadly traveled live/work collective from Grand Rapids,
Mic higan)—artists who, with the exception of Fletcher, have little or no formal
training—tend not to add depth but, instead, obsessively broaden their reach.
Critics compensate by restoring depth to the image of the artist, enacting a
shadow play of romantic heroism that concentrates meanings in the shell of
these artists’ sensibilities and inner lives, which are then targeted as sites
of critique. This misreading is almost unavoidable wherever the task of art
criticism is taken at all seriously-as it is here in this essay.
The search for depth
exacerbates a related disjunction between art-critical discourse and projects
like Ghosttown, and that is the
problem of authorship: How to sort out the ambiguity of authorship in projects
that enlist the creative energies of nonartists under the unifying banner of a
single creator? It is foolish to propose an equivalence between mists and the
community they work with, where no such equivalence exists. Authorship is never
a fact; it is politics, a negotiation of power. And so, while it might be
progressive politics to map this ecology as rigorously as possible and give
names and credit to everyone involved, it is sometimes pragmatic to draw the
line sharply and claim sole authorship. Neither of these strategies is any more
virtuous than the other, but both presume that the drama of authorship is an
interesting one, the consequences of which are at least desirable enough to
fight over. In this they exist well within the normative strategies of
contemporary art.
But there are other positions,
including that of Red76 or the dead rock star who kept shifting the spelling of
his name from Kurt to Kurdt to, beautifully, Curdt. These are not pseudonyms.
They, and such related nominal ants as the “Museum of Jurassic Technology,” “Ethyl
Eichelberger,” “Hakim Bey,” and “The M.O.S.T.,” are more akin to drag arts,
wherein the proposition is sufficient in itself, a moment when you become, as
Charles Ludlum said, “a living mockery of your own ideals” (adding, “if not,
you’ve set your ideals too 1ow”). These propositions are unwieldy and do not
yield clear narratives of authorship. They play out contingently in the realm
Portuguese poet Fernando Pessoa called the “drama
em gente” (the drama of people)—the negotiated, decentered social space
that, not coincidentally, is the very same one within which projects like Ghosttown take place.
Pessoa wrote under
different names, which he termed heteronyms, treated them as autonomous
persons. They cannot be resolved the way pseudonyms can (as further evidence of
the author’s potency), but instead muddle the field with paradoxes. To insist
on an alter- native spelling like “Curdt” is to oblige those who would venerate
you to also obscure you beneath an error. Today’s most interesting social
practices employ the Pessoan heteronym and abjure the pseudonym. They propagate
themselves by repetition and serial naming while never constructing the
architecture of concealment and revelation. They are not liars so much as they
are lies. But art history prefers a liar to a lie.
Red76 further complicated
the problem of authorship by claiming everyday exchange as their own, creating
the arena In which to perform its theater of redemptive good tames by looking
for the most common and widespread activities. And so cooking and eating a
meal, swapping clothes, or sharing time at a movie or a bar became the “work.”
As Sam and Khris devised more and more ingenious ways of integrating their art
into the varied terrain of the social, the less and less obvious were any “ruptures”
or “transformations” that could be
easily accounted for and credited to them. The most perfect dinner party at Ghosttown would be the one that
transpires without the host’s ever knowing it was an art project.
Yet Ghosttown was an art project, very much like earlier ones by Group
Material, or more resonantly, Darrell Fletcher, the Portland-based artist who
brought neighborhood garage sales into a borrowed storefront and asked the
people running them to write stories on the price tags. What sort of claim
should Red76 make for borrowing from a Fletcher project that, in the first
place, was cobbled together out of the preexisting impulses and actions of his
neighbors? If the neighbors feel ripped off, this would be a matter of ethics.
Artists and art institutions face a different question: How does authorship
affect the meanings and value of art? Without knowing their origin, how can we
trace the lineage of these ideas and locate them meaningfully in relation to
others? Red76’s general indifference to accountability or formalization poses a
final affront to the needs of art discourse. Content to occupy the present, the
group took little care to honor art history or make plans for the future—i.e.,
long-term commercial viability. No doubt the seductions of the art market will
continue eliciting any trace of material it can from these practices, but I
suspect that the primacy of this residue will recede as artists become more
confident of their own priorities and values. Certainly materials will remain
instrumental, but their presence in relation to the work of art will be recast
as one of many textures composing an infinitely varied terrain, rather than as
a vault in which all meanings and value are stored.
The ascendancy of the
horizontal—and note the absurd paradox of this formulation--is a turn that
completely changes the possibilities and conduct of meaningful artistic
practice. If we are witnessing the complete repudiation of depth or verticality
as modes of making or interpreting art, this marks an important shift in art
history, one with enormous political implications. Ghosttown’s indifference to struggle or the enactment of political
and aesthetic depth suggests that this is, in fact, the new territory we are
faced with.
MATTHEW STADLER IS A