3:AM Magazine

Disorientations, Travis Jeppesen’s one-man art magazine, on the recently-departed Robert Rauschenberg:

It’s hard not to fall into the trap of thinking about Robert Rauschenberg from a historical perspective. Like two of his lovers, Jasper Johns and Cy Twombly, he is frequently seen as a transitional figure, and perhaps more than the others, he was the artist whose work formed a bridge from the Abstract Expressionism of the 1940s and 1950s to the Pop Art of the 1960s. By circumstance, he was also the first artist to introduce the enfant terrible notion into the American art world, becoming infamous - if not openly despised by the critical establishment - with his first exhibited works, which no one could make sense of at the time. For many, that struggle continues.

One typically becomes the establishment by resisting it for the vast duration of one’s life. Rauschenberg got “in” early, then went back “out” as soon as he could, living for much of the latter half of his life on an island off the coast of Florida in relative isolation from the rest of the so-called art world. He never really evolved much as an artist - his work either stayed the same or grew less interesting as he got older. He kept making it, though. I haven’t seen enough of the later work to pronounce judgment on it, but perhaps some enterprising institution will throw together a definitive exhibition of the later work, from 1970 up to 2008, to allow the public to decide.

My own relationship to Rauschenberg’s work is so personal that it makes it difficult for me to trust my own judgment. I wasn’t able to start looking at art seriously until 1997, when I moved to New York for college. Wandering through that city’s great permanent collections, Rauschenberg’s combine paintings had a strong impact on my developing sensibility (which some might call an anti-sensibility.) There was something jarring and anti-aesthetical about his work from the 1960s that I most likely related to through punk rock, my sourceless anger. Rauschenberg assumed the role in art that Kathy Acker assumed in literature. I tried - unsuccessfully, of course - to imitate both, because imitation is what you do early on in life when you have yet to find your own way.

As I grew up, traveled, and looked at more art, I began to have severe doubts about my initial estimation of much of Rauschenberg’s work. The problem for many, of course, is the fact that Rauschenberg’s work rarely looks good. I could never wholeheartedly subscribe to a blanket denunciation of his work (such as Jed Perl’s), because some of it does cohere on a visual level. There are a lot of failed experiments out there, but there’s a quality of motion and rhythm in a lot of his larger paintings that I find completely compelling, even when they make me dizzy and nauseous. A lot of his paintings seem like anti-design. In actuality, I think they represent total design - by going back to foundational design principles.

Still, what remains the most disruptive feature of Rauschenberg’s art is its brutal lack of definitionality. He famously quipped that he wanted to erase the artificial barrier separating art from life, and thus became an ambassador of openness - the American equivalent to Joseph Beuys, but with a markedly different way of going about it. Just as he once erased a de Kooning, he might as well have erased himself, because he wanted his art to be viewed by the world as a creation of the world. The world in its comeuppance, its severe vision of things. He started out as a naïve outsider from a provincial nowheresville, and graduated back into the obscurity from whence he came. With Rauschenberg, it is perhaps still too early to assess the true value of his work.

“Calling all loiterers and urban explorers, artists of all kinds, walkers, talkers, map makers, historians, Situationists, space invaders, dreamers, mischief makers, moochers and anyone who is interested in looking at Manchester in a different way..”

Get Lost, Manchester’s second “accidental international festival of psychogeography” is now in full swing. For the next month the Loiters Resistance Movement, in association with Territories Reimagined: International Perspectives (TRIP), will be taking over the Royal Exchange Theatre and other city spaces to “cause a spectacle, have fun, tell stories, redraw maps, ignite debates, go for walks, uncover treasure and loiter with intent to make Manchester wonderful”. A full brochure is available from TRIP and events include ‘Pigeons Street’ lead by Jane Samuels and Lee Johnson, ‘Urban Camping’, ‘Joyce Walks‘—James Joyce’s Ulysses mapped out for any city in the world, not just Dublin—’Postcards from Nowhere’—Max Livesy’s art made from GPS systems—and Kickball Jesus.

Burning Shore Press host a dialogue between writers Rob Woodard and Tony O’Neill:

What do you think the poet’s role is in America in 2008?

Tony O’Neill: I suppose it is to question everything, to push boundaries, to challenge preconceptions. Poetry is so marginal at the moment, but I feel that this is changing as the technology is changing. Poetry is actually becoming the perfect artistic vehicle for the digital age; it is compressed. It is a way of communicating a thought, a feeling, in a miniature form. I suppose our job is to make sure that this unassuming looking vehicle is in fact packed with incendiary devices.

Rob Woodard: The poet’s role is what it has always been: to challenge authority, not in the rebel-without-a-cause sense, but as part of the antidote to the inevitable corruption that grows out of too much accumulated power. The poet’s job is to explore and find meaning in real life, not the consumer comodification ritual that governments, corporations, and the more cowardly individuals among us try to convince us is reality. The poet’s job is to call out politicians, academics and anyone else perpetrating falsehoods in our society. The poet’s job is also to somehow have fun while doing this. Life is rough at times, but it’s also amazing and beautiful. Poets, more than anyone else, need to keep their finger on that pulse at all times.

The name Robert Mapplethorpe conjures up cool, slick, faultless photographs of the human body, rendered in marmoreal black and white. It also connotes the explicit but exquisitely composed X-rated pictures that excited intense political scrutiny in the early 1990s. What the name does not usually suggest is tenderness, imperfection, or spontaneity – which is why the Whitney’s small but packed little show of the photographer’s early Polaroids comes as such a welcome shock.

Many of these instant photos have never been shown, and the rest only rarely; together they reveal in Mapplethorpe a very different sensibility, one that had yet to form its mature, glistening carapace. Here, naked men lounge on rumpled sheets or pose on scarred wood floors, but they have not yet achieved the serenely masculine magnificence he would give them later on. They are friends, lovers and colleagues – people, in other words, rather than ravishing arrangements of long, lean limbs.

[..]

These early portraits of himself and [Patti] Smith project a sense of looseness and a willingness to be driven by his subject’s whims, by shifts in light, and forces outside his control. He turned his camera towards the world beyond the regulated environment of his apartment/studio, catching moody glimpses of the city at night, surreal shop windows, and sculptures that flaunted forms of timeless grace.

Mapplethorpe’s classical bent was there at the start, but in the earliest Polaroids he inflected it with Hellenistic drama. A Greek bust, for instance, enters the picture at one corner, thrusting diagonally into the frame. The sense of movement doesn’t inhere in the sculpture itself, but is injected through Mapplethorpe’s asymmetrical composition. Here, he opted for theatrical verve, subjugating a preference for symmetry that would later become an obsession.

The FT on Polaroids: Mapplethrope that’s running at the Whitney Museum, New York, until September.

Related: The Patti Smith Retrospective at the Fondation Cartier, as taken in by R.E.M.

if you’re in NYC, you’ve still got a few days to catch Richard Hell and Christopher Wool’s collaborative show — Psychopts — which ends on 4 June:

“The project emerged out of a friendship Hell and Wool share and focuses on their mutual interest in experiences associated with reading. Hell, a writer and avid reader, has for some time been assembling two-word groupings drawn from personal reading experience. Using a selection of these pairs he and Wool worked together making visual combinations of the word couples. They settled on 57 separate designs from which they developed six unique drawings in various media on paper, and nine silkscreen prints which will be published in a portfolio. …The word associations suggest a process of subliminal connection. The reader, in a moment of peripheral observation, may have unconsciously summoned the word ‘incest’ where the word on the page read ‘nicest’. It is a common enough reading experience and points to the relentless realm of the unconscious and its bid for acknowledgement at the expense of the conscious and ever-censorious ego. In a similar way, the artists’ prompts to view readable signs as merely formal, visual phenomena ask that we relax the ego drive and its penchant for rational interpretation so that we might experience more directly the impact of their compositions.”

Christopher Wool and Richard Hell are interviewed here:

“We first got acquainted when Christopher called me up about using some words. This was 1997 or 1998. He wanted to ask my permission to use the words that I’d written on my chest on the cover of my Blank Generation album, as the text for a word painting. Which of course he didn’t have to do. I mean, that was really courteous. It’s not like I own those words. …I went over to Christopher’s and saw his painting. On the original album cover I’m standing there holding my jacket open, and I don’t have a shirt on underneath. And in Magic Marker I have across my chest, in all caps: YOU MAKE ME–. It was just a blank. An underscore. Anyway, when I saw the painting, Christopher had filled up its entire surface with ‘YOU’ on top of ‘MAKE’ on top of ‘ME.’ And I said, ‘Wait a minute. Where’s the ‘blank’?’ And he said, ‘Well, how about I just leave a space at the bottom?’ Which is what he did. There’s an empty line below the last word. So it worked out great. I was impressed by how casually he was willing to make what seemed like a major change. It seemed gallant. And like … self-confident, and suave. The guy was a gentleman and an artist.”

John McWhinnie at Glenn Horowitz Bookseller and Art Gallery: 50 1/2 E. 64th St., NYC

[Check out 3:AM's 2002 and 2005 interviews with Mr Hell.]

An exhibition at the Amuti Gallery by Simon Thompson that explores the mixed metaphor and throw-away comment:

“I’m unsure what people are trying to say with repeated subversions of Mona Lisa or Ben Day prints of newspaper pictures in pretty colours, has edgy become a byword for the banal? Is this what Warhol was really saying in his exploration of the everyday or are both viewers and painters just lazy. I think maybe the latter and that this infatuation with the reproduced image rather than an original piece has run its course. Sorry folks but Warhol is over (If you want it - that is).”

Warhol is Over! If You Want It, 29 May–13 June, The Amuti Gallery & Bookshop, London

by Andrew Gallix

Imagine Jamie Reid stealing the Sex Pistols’ thunder or Linder Sterling upstaging the Buzzcocks: this is pretty much what happened in France at the end of the 70s. The Jeunes Gens Mödernes (”Mödern Young Things”) exhibition, curated by Jean-François Sanz at the Galerie du Jour in Paris, showcases most aspects of local post-punk culture from badges to paintings through record sleeves, fanzines, photographs, videos and films. A totemic synthesizer, an old-school keyboard and a couple of guitars propped up against diminutive amps take pride of place at the centre of the main room. Cigarette butts have been studiously littered around the pretend stage for added authenticity. This installation of sorts embodies the ghost of gigs past, but it also draws attention to the deafening sound of silence. Visiting agnès b’s labyrinthine gallery is not dissimilar to attending a concert wearing earplugs or watching television on mute — and, frankly, it is all the better for it.

The title alludes to a label coined by trendy magazine Actuel in 1980 to describe a short-lived local scene — revolving around nightclub Le Rose Bonbon and bands such as Suicide Roméo or Modern Guy — that was unashamedly incestuous and elitist. Sanz is eager to explain that the reference is simply an “excuse” to gauge the far wider cultural fallout from the 1977 explosion. Like New York’s No Wave, this was indeed a fully-fledged cultural revolution involving writers, filmmakers and fashionistas as well as musicians and, of course, artists like the seminal Bazooka collective.

In many ways Bazooka provided a blueprint for all other post-punk art collectives which followed in their wake. They celebrated everything modern in a knowing retro-futurist manner that was, in fact, typically postmodern; they rejected the traditional highbrow-lowbrow dichotomy, shunned museums and attacked the cultural establishment. They are also very much the forefathers of the current Street Art movement.

The exhibition is complemented by a book, a double CD compilation as well as a documentary which reflect the movement’s inherently multimedia nature and exuberant originality. The album contains the cream of the local post-punk crop (Marquis de Sade, Taxi Girl, Elli & Jacno, Etienne Daho, Lizzy Mercier Descloux, Marie et les Garçons…) but also a few covers by contemporary bands who take their inspiration from this period. This is a nice touch as one is left with a distinct sense of unfulfilled promise. The early cultural maelstrom gradually gave way to a more somber mood as the Socialist government’s policies failed and AIDS started taking its toll. As Dominique Fury — an artist once described as the Parisian Edie Sedgwick who graduated from Bazooka — puts it, “Death was disco-dancing beneath the plush red velvet of Le Palace nightclub”.

Des Jeunes Gens Mödernes exhibition ran from 3 April to 17 May 2008 at the Galerie du Jour agnès b, Paris

Further: France’s pre-Banksy art provocateurs [Guardian] / Jeunes Gens Modernes in Paris [Dazed Digital] / Sexy Eiffel Towers [Flux]