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Wednesday, August 03, 2005
I have a problem with so-called "lowbrow" art. By "lowbrow" I mean the street art, graffiti, and skateboard-post-punk culture that's so prevalent in the art scene (and beyond) here in San Francisco. While entertaining and "cool," it generally (and this is a huge generalization) lacks substance. I know it's the elitism of my art world education and my generation (coming of age in the 80s and making/critiquing art in the theory-laden 90s) that makes me look for something meaningful -- institutional critique, protest, identity construction or deconstruction, a CONCEPT -- in art. It's a hangover, a bias towards conceptual art; art that can send the mind spiraling down deeper and deeper wells of association, and is so insular to the art world that it leaves most viewers cold. When I see the graphic doodling of some bike messenger heralded as the next big thing, the most disparaging terms pop into my head: "illustrative" (i.e., simplistic) or, heaven forbid, "pretty" (one-dimensional, merely pleasing to the eye). Lowbrow art looks "cool" but it's ultimately superficial.
But lately, things have been coming together in interesting ways to make me re-think this assessment. I read an article in Artforum about the trend away from site-specific art (art that focuses on a particular physical or ideological "site" -- Fred Wilson's museological critiques, for example) to art that creates alternate realities or other worlds (Matthew Barney, let's say). A transition from the site-specific to the non-site, or at least the speculative site. In a world where we increasingly engage one another via avatars, and where what you do is more important than who you are (in the most optimistic scenarios, of course), it's easy to see how fantasy worlds, or worlds that are part real and part fake (my favorite binary) -- reality TV being only the most salient example -- are more appealing than ever. We want to lose ourselves in something that feels real, but that we know is patently fake -- Middle Earth, for example. The site has shifted. Rather than find our place in the world, we're creating our own.
In another context, it's the world of the otaku, or nerd. Today I attended a presentation by John Jay, a VP at Wieden & Kennedy, the huge, global advertising firm. His talk was all about what he called the "new originality" or "hybrid culture" coming out of Asia. Now, when I hear those words, I'm jaded, thrilled, and depressed, all at once. Jaded because isn't that what Homi Bhabha was talking about 10 years ago? Hybridity? It's taken that long for the concept -- something that Asian Americans, pre-post-modern Latinos and anyone else who's ever had to negotiate two or more competing systems of representation (i.e., most of the non-white world) have had to deal with every day -- it's taken at least 10 years for our experience to break into the mainstream culture to the point where advertising mavens are telling us this is the "next big thing." I'm thrilled because it marks my disparate worlds coming full circle -- theory (art school) and practice (design) -- although how to fit those two things together at the moment eludes me. But I'm also depressed because if I was so "ahead of my time" why didn't I capitalize on it? But that's a question for another post.
So anyway, back to lowbrow. In Japan, for example, there's Takashi Murakami's notion of Superflat -- the idea that there are no class distinctions in culture, no high culture, no low culture. One of the best things Jay showed us was Yayoi Kusama's designs for Coke vending machines in Tokyo. A Japanese national treasure designing vending machines for a global soda company. I love it! This "nobrow" idea is nothing new, but I had never thought about comparing Superflat culture with the home-grown lowbrow culture here, although the parallels seem self-evident. How could I love Hello Kitty, who is an empty pop cultural icon signifying nothing, and expect some deeper "message" out of last summer's Beautiful Losers exhibit (the apotheosis of lowbrow)? Although lowbrow positions itself as a rejection of high art culture -- the artists in Beautiful Losers claim that their involvement in everyday commerce is a rejection of the elitist commercialism of the art world (fight commerce with commerce?) -- it really makes more sense in a system where the boundary between high art and low is completely non-existent. So that Hello Kitty is just Hello Kitty, no more, no less. Nobody has to ask what Hello Kitty means; she just is. So it feels like a fundamental shift (to me, at least, late to the party, as usual) away from representation as a way to get at meaning and towards representation as pure expression, just for the sheer pleasure of creating.
My friend Joe let me borrow a DVD of an artist collective called Barnstormers, graffiti and mural artists who work collaboratively on huge floor paintings that are enacted over a period of hours and days and continually shift from one image to the next, morphing as the artists work, elaborating and riffing on each others' work, painting over parts and starting again. The whole process is taped and played back in time lapse video so that the artwork takes on a life of its own. In the end, it makes me rather sad to see each painting disappear forever beneath the layers of paint, but I know that's just my attachment to the object. The real work is the act of painting and collaborating, and the magical way that images appear and disappear or become something completely different. And the images just seem to bubble up, perhaps from some collective unconscious -- they don't mean anything, they just are. And perhaps that's enough.
9:48 PM
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