Just pathetic: Michael Wilson on sore winners

ArtForum, Oct, 2004 by Michael Wilson

In the '90s stretch of a time line featured in the handy primer Art Since 1960, the steady march of minimovements--YBA, "art post-medium," "live art," "context art"--is rudely interrupted by an upstart newcomer, "abject/slacker art." As the volume's author, Michael Archer, plots it, the tendency first showed up at the butt end of the '80s and burned out by about '96, though the influence of its lax affect is felt still. Centered stylistically around a shabby-chic variant of Pop, abject art marked a transition (at least in the art world) from the '80s careerism of American Psycho (Bret Easton Ellis's book hit stores in 1991) to the jaded slackerdom of Kevin Smith's 1994 movie Clerks.

[ILLUSTRATION OMITTED]

The label "abject art" suggests a fittingly belated use/abuse of Julia Kristeva's essay on the scatological impulse, "Powers of Horror: An Essay on Abjection" (first translated into English in 1982), and curator/movement maker Ralph Rugoff confirms that Kristeva was indeed "very important for critics and curators interested in the abject." Of his own exhibition "Just Pathetic," he offers, "Georges Bataille was closer to the pathetic spirit; that also comes from a history of philosophical thought that deals with the roots of comedy, including Baudelaire's notion of 'satanic laughter.'" Nevertheless, to the academic mandarins such theoretical borrowings felt promiscuous. Denis Hollier bristled in the pages of October; in response to "Abject Art," a 1993 exhibition at the Whitney Museum of American Art organized by Independent Study Program fellows Craig Houser, Leslie C. Jones, and Simon Taylor, he complained, "What is abject about it? Everything was very neat; the objects were clearly art works. They were on the side of the victor."

[ILLUSTRATION OMITTED]

At the cusp of the decade, three exhibitions mapped out abject art's overlapping territories: Rugoff's "Just Pathetic" at Rosamund Felsen Gallery in Los Angeles along with "Work in Progress? Work?" at Andrea Rosen Gallery and Vik Muniz's "Stuttering" at Stux Gallery in New York. All three opened in 1990, and between them they introduced a handful of artists who would become this antimovement's major players. Mike Kelley and Cady Noland were Rugoff's key protagonists, while Karen Kilimnik and Cary Leibowitz (aka Candyass) were the divas of Muniz's drama. And at Rosen, the then twenty-eight-year-old Sean Landers launched a rigorous program of self-deprecation with which he has persisted, Morrissey-like, well into his middle years. "True Stories," at the Institute of Contemporary Arts in London in 1992, and "Abject Art" at the Whitney were arguably more definitive surveys, but it was this first odd trio that set the (low) tone.

[ILLUSTRATION OMITTED]

In "The Loser Thing," an early survey of the tendency (Artforum, September 1992), Rhonda Lieberman defines abjection as being "cast off, existing in or resigned to a low state--dumped by yourself, as you psychotically misrecognize yourself in ideals." Citing Marcel Proust (who embarked on the translation of Ruskin's art-historical writings despite being insufficiently fluent in spoken English "to order chops in a pub") and Samuel Beckett (who bought the same size shoes as James Joyce, literally walking "in the master's footsteps" until his feet got too sore), she characterizes these acts of high-end homage as "constitutionally abject," attitudinal precursors to their pathetic descendants. Leibowitz, Landers, and the rest are marked by their ability to translate inadequacy into art, throwing the previous decade's slick critiques of modern mastery into harsh relief.

Introducing his exhibition, Rugoff writes that to be "pathetic" is to be "a loser, haplessly falling short of the idealized norm," and that the art he identifies as belonging to this degraded taxonomy "makes failure its medium." It does so, he argues, in several ways. First, it exhibits a preference for lowbrow aesthetics and threadbare materials but pointedly avoids dignifying either one as metaphoric or poetic. Second, it veers away from established modes of art production toward a strain of base comedy more often experienced at the back of the school bus. Finally, it makes little or no attempt to align itself with art history, preferring an ephemeral and defensive association with the present--however lackluster that present might be.

The clutch of works by Mike Kelley that appeared in "Just Pathetic" filled the bill. Kelley had already staked out the thrift store and the yard sale as his domain. The pitiful assortments of mangled soft toys, grubby socks, limp baby blankets, and tarnished pet dishes that he contributed to Rugoff's show suggested that there was nowhere to go but down. In a tripartite memorial to a pair of dead cats (Storehouse, Mooner, and Ougi, all 1990), Kelley articulated (but barely) a commentary on emotional displacement and cultural inadequacy that in the immediately preceding era of cold steel and hard cash would have been laughed out of the gallery. Where Jeff Koons's Rabbit, 1986, is glamorous and erotic despite its kitsch origins, Kelley's mice look used and abused, utterly beyond redemption.