In many ways regionalism
is over as if it never existed. It began to wane thirty
years ago, and now much is gone for good. The Global Village
doesn’t
look as good as it sounds. Especially if you're in
your twenties.
All Dressed Up addresses the idea that history has
been discredited by a young generation and its artists in
favor
of a self-referential process of validation. "Perhaps
Warhol's thought that anything could be art was a
model, in a way, for the hope that human beings could be
anything
they chose, once the divisions that defined the culture
were overthrown. Beuys' claim that everyone was an artist
is a corollary to Warhol's sweeping egalitarianism,
or its pendant". (1)
Egalitarianism has killed the moral heroes and replaced
them with survivor heroes. Adults always knew that famous
ball
players were "hitting home runs" off the field too.
The kids didn't, they would understand as their desires
caught up. Doctors, lawyers, politicians, teachers and
others who
were once the heroes and role models of these children
have all been exposed. Survival reality accompanies image
in everything
from movies to literature to pop culture. Television families
that we once emulated are no longer role worthy, but who
have we substituted for them?
"Unstable times and economic depressions, by depriving people
of their satisfactions as well as their power and prestige
and habitual ways of regulating self-esteem, increase their
narcissistic needs and their oral dependence." (2)
Depression is no longer the exception. Being shielded from
life's "realities" at
one time, we now try to prepare kids for life as soon as
possible. It gets increasingly difficult to distinguish
adult concerns
from adolescent concerns. As a society we stress what's
right, no longer relying on the family to correct personal
deviation, to help us tell right from wrong. Children without
the benefit of traditional families tend to adopt society's
views without the normal tempering provided by parents
and siblings where they are taught to see the nuances and
ramifications
of decisions. Those times when they find out that it can
be okay and correct for the good to be bad, when understood
in
context. Parents are often separated and at odds during
the formative years of their children, making it harder
for them
to feel part of something. With a new sense of societal
induced value judgment it has become more important to
us that the
Mayor be virtuous than effective. Where do they look for
heroes? They look to themselves. But the heroes are reflections
not
images, and the desire is for recognition not assimilation.
The comfort of regionalism that placed people in sub context
no longer exists and the individual and traditional adolescent
investigation has been displaced by a uniform process of
creativity delivered by technology becoming more and more
"user-friendly." Where once with friends we pretended in
the woods to our
own
narrative now we have the universal narrative of the demographically
driven market. It should come as no surprise that this
form
of indoctrination should produce a different form of consciousness
in our youth with creativity becoming a reaction rather
than an action. Kids more depressed than ever before in
history
because they feel inconsequential. They are not individuals
unless they stand out and self-assertion is the index of
that reference.
With children becoming empowered and making more choices
comes the inevitable difference in the choices that a child
might
make versus those of an adult. When these choices are so
prescribed, then they become no choice at all. Answering
a question is
not the same a proposing the question. Important eye-hand
coordination, but what is "play" in a virtual
playground. The colors in nature are not as bright, the
images not as seductive,
the time not so controlled, the grass not as green as when
viewed on the "tube." Artists have traditionally
referred to or referenced history and art history in their
art making. This is a generation turning to itself for
that reference. On one hand return to romantic images of
past “movements” (hippie,
beat, dandy, etc.) without the original ideology, reinterpreting
intent, and on the other a sense of history’s irrelevance,
with the feeling that if it didn’t happen to them
they can't trust the interpretation or even its existence.
Hard to blame.
The desire is to be relevant, relatable, tribal, and truthful
making work by which they identify each other. Alienation
art with the universal "I", rather than the
universal "we." An
art to deal with a society of decreasing choices presented
otherwise. Not intended to be formal, precious or historical,
and if similar work has been done, no longer is it the
great taboo that it was, but rather a reinforcement of
substance.
It is the search for the question.
Mariko Mori's photographs take responsibility. Her
work places the ancient tea ceremony and its implied respect
for
the guest in the middle of downtown Tokyo. In a desire
to reference a romantic time that she was never a part
of, she
accepts the
traditional role of mother and nurturer traveling back
in time from the future to help. She comes with good news
and
promise,
to create order where she sees none, offering direction
to those executives who have lost their way. She has seen
where
they are going.
Scott Carpenter's videos and stills also place the artist
within the work. Having appeared in the audience asking
questions on daytime talk shows as Sally Jess Raphael, Phil
Donohue,
Geraldo Rivera and others he approaches that validation
that only TV confers. Being seen by perhaps 100 million people
in
combined exposure puts him in a very select group, again
emphasizing the individual. Only there is no talk on his “talk
show” and
his role reinforced by the inclusion of the shirt, which
he wore, the concrete evidence of radio waves and the spoils
of
fame.
Alix Lambert's concerns deal with reassessment of role
expectation and definition. In other works she has confronted
issues of what makes a woman a man, and what makes convention
a ceremony. Here she examines the essence of person by
reconfiguring her body with "plastic surgery",
existing as surrogate to society, externalizing values and
rendering
herself immobilized,
unable to see or function.
Camille Norment finds herself similarly outside the "world".
Estrangement, alienation, expectation and role issues are
also concerns in her work. Her work "Over the Rainbow" made
of white oxford shirt material with button down fronts
covering a pot "of gold", where neither the pot
not the gold is shiny. Instead, there's more "work"
to be done, and the goal never realized. The new equality
for women in school but not in the "real" world.
Wolfgang Tillmans is the chronicler of his generation.
He is the image-maker that while photographing others is
recording
his own life. Pointed in the banality of the images, these
are pictures of collaborations between the subject, the
generation, and the photographer. These are photographs
of tribal marking,
seminal in their insistence of person and egalite. Reality
felt. The insistence of recording as an index and context
of being, at the end of the century.
This work is important in that it represents more than
artistic vision. It speaks of a new generation that has
had to fend
for itself in a unique way, confronting the most influential,
self involved, generation in history, that will relinquish
control begrudgingly at best. A reluctant ruler stepping
down only when shown it is time.
Steven Rand
© 1995
1. Arthur C. Danto, Beyond the
Brillo Box, The Noonday Press,
1993, p. 4.
2. Otto Fenichel M.D., The Psychoanalytic Theory
of Neurosis, Norton and Co., 1972, p. 406. |