BIG VISION - Michael FallonBerkeley, CA: Counterpoint, September 2014 Seldom does a book about art...

$16.00 USD

Public Art ReviewIssue 51 • Fall/Winter 2014 • publicartreview.org

YOKO ONO’S EARTH PEACE | MAPPING | BERT BENALLY AND AI WEIWEI IN THE DESERTART VS. OIL | MARY JANE JACOB ON CURATION | LEXINGTON TATTOOS ITSELF

BIG VISIONJR talks about boundaries, limits, seeing

people, and being bold

T: 520.882.5572 M: 520.907.9443

[email protected] barbaragrygutis.com

Barbara Grygutis

South Park Bridge Entry Monuments and Pedestrian RailingSeattle, WashingtonRepurposed steel rocker arms from the historic 1930 drawbridge flank the approach.3200 ft. of artist-designed railing is inset with original gears and other salvaged components. Commissioned by 4Culture, King County Public Art Collection

Fabrication: Jesse Engineering, Tacoma, WA Photo:Spike Mafford

Grygutis South Street Bridge PAR FINAL.indd 1 10/18/14 6:34 PM

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BOOKS

BOOKSBOOKS & MEDIAPublications and reviews

Fiery Passion Why do 70,000 people trek into the desertfor Burning Man? It’s the art.BY SHAUNA DEE

BURNING MAN: ART ON FIREJennifer RaiserPhotography by Sidney Erthal and Scott LondonIntroduction by Larry HarveyNew York: Race Point Publishing, September 2014

Much of the focus of Burning

Man coverage in the media of

late has been the influx of high-

end trailers with extravagant

catered meals for the Silicon

Valley elite. But the art at Burning Man, still the focal point of the

weeklong annual festival, deserves documentation in a hardcover

art book filled with large, beautiful photos and compelling stories.

Burning Man: Art on Fire, by Jennifer Raiser, is just that book.

Covering more than 200 works of art created by Burners in one

of the most inhospitable of locations in the United States, the book

provides an experience second only to being there. Through inter-

views, stories, and photography, readers will witness the effort it

takes to create work in this singular setting and gain a greater under-

standing of artists’ motivations.

In a sense, the art at Burning Man is the very essence of the festi-

val, where individual works are pieces of the whole. The context of

each piece is a pop-up city in the middle of Black Rock Desert in

Nevada, a city with a gift economy and utopian ideals, which fosters

collaboration and true participatory art. There is no clear distinction

between audience and artwork here. In September 2013, the year

Raiser wrote about in her book, 68,000 people attended the festival,

each one a participant in the grand creation, and ultimate destruc-

tion, of the Burning Man. Whether you are one of the 68,000 or not,

you will appreciate the illuminating perspectives presented in Burn-

ing Man: Art on Fire.

Also included in the book is an artist’s perspective from Leo Villa-

real, an introduction from Burning Man founder Larry Harvey, and a

forward by Will Chase.

SHAUNA DEE is the information and communications coordinator at

Forecast Public Art.

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TOP: Duane Flatmo’s El Pulpo Mecanico (2011) was a crowd favorite. Ingeniously fashioned from reclaimed scrap metal and salvaged items, this charming cephalopod spewed 200 gallons of propane flame—on a good night—from its eight articulated trashcan tentacles. MIDDLE: The UK–based architectural design collective Warmbaby created The Wet Dream (2011) to bring a whimsical representation of cooling English rain to heat-soaked Black Rock City. The structure housed a canopy of umbrellas to protect from the heat of the sun during the day and a 24-hour background audio of thunder and lightning, illuminated at night with LED rope lights. BOTTOM: Over 40 feet tall and made from powder-coated steel and steel cable, Kate Raudenbush’s vision for Star Seed (2012) came almost fully formed. “I imagined it falling from the sky and taking root, or as little rockets, filled with Burners.”

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PUBLIC ART REVIEW | FALL / WINTER 2014 | PUBLICARTREVIEW.ORG

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TOP: At Burning Man, the suits Dadara’s “bankers” wore for the installation Transformoney Tree (2012) gradually shifted from dark blue pinstripe into painter’s overalls. BOTTOM: The Flaming Lotus Girls’ Serpent Mother (2006) was a 168-foot-long sculpture of a skeletal dragon-like serpent coiled around her steel egg, creating a protective circle inside which 100 people could gather. Most of Serpent Mother’s 50 vertebrae spouted six-foot-high propane-fueled jets of flame that could be activated in various patterns by participants at four separate locations, or activated at once by the artists using the “Wow” button.

That ’70s ArtA glimpse into the world of Los Angeles art and artists during a turbulent decadeBY CATHY MADISON

CREATING THE FUTURE:Art and Los Angeles in the 1970sMichael FallonBerkeley, CA: Counterpoint, September 2014

Seldom does a book about

art so fully capture not only

the ways in which history,

culture, geography, and person-

ality intersect to create art,

but also insight into how art

both defines and influences

our society. In this well-re-

searched, deftly told story of

a single decade in a singular

city, Michael Fallon reflects on

far more than what happened

in Los Angeles in the 1970s.

He sets the stage—the ebullient ’60s, when the sunny promise of

the California Dream colored an era of modernism, pop art, and

abstract expressionism—then escorts us through the turbulence of

the next decade, scarred by events such as the Manson murders, the

Kent State shootings, and Watergate, but enhanced by revolutionary

art that presages the future.

Los Angeles, long considered a remote art outpost by New York

insiders, “had a penchant for merging and connecting diverse

culture influences” and became “home to advancing pockets of

cultural activity, many of which were connected to the churning

local streets and its indigenous street-based cultures,” Fallon writes.

Highway underpasses and bridge pylons inspired Chicano artists to

embrace their muralist forebears. Women united in the feminist art

movement. Happenings and performance art made news. Desolate

industrial stretches became art parks; graffiti, surfboards, and hot

rods became art.

Fallon depicts the scene by profiling its artists, most of whom

came from somewhere else. We see how their art sprang not only

from their diverse backgrounds, but also from the unique, sprawl-

ing amalgam of L.A. itself. Time and place can’t be divorced from

their art; neither can their art be overlooked as a significant influ-

ence on both.

CATHY MADISON is a writer who lives in Minneapolis and Los Angeles.

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BOOKS

Painting the TownA Brazilian film explores street-artconflicts in São Paolo

GREY CITY(CIDADE CINZA)Sala12 FilmesDirected by Marcelo Mesquita and Guilherme Valiengo

In São Paulo, Brazil, large-scale murals have a formidable presence around the city, where

thousands of artists display their artistic talent in public spaces. Grey City gives viewers

a close-up look at one influential street-art crew (including OSGEMEOS, Nunca, Nina, Ise,

Finok, and Zefix) as they worked in 2007 to re-create a large work that had been painted

over by the city. The Clean City Law was in effect, with a small team deployed to deter-

mine which graffiti works were aesthetically pleasing and to paint over the rest with grey.

The film succeeds in addressing the tension that exists in cities with active street-art scenes

about who determines what is art, and what should be erased, while exhibiting the process

of immensely talented artists following their passion of creating art for their community.

—Shauna Dee

HOLUP,

The River

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Prairie Logic


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ZWEIG + EL DORADO INC., ZWEIG + EL DORADO INC., ZWEIG + EL DORADO INC.,

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ZWEIG + EL DORADO INC., ZWEIG + EL DORADO INC., ZWEIG + EL DORADO INC., ZWEIG + EL DORADO INC., ZWEIG + EL DORADO INC., ZWEIG + EL DORADO INC., ZWEIG + EL DORADO INC., ZWEIG + EL DORADO INC., ZWEIG + EL DORADO INC., ZWEIG + EL DORADO INC., ZWEIG + EL DORADO INC., ZWEIG + EL DORADO INC., ZWEIG + EL DORADO INC., ZWEIG + EL DORADO INC., ZWEIG + EL DORADO INC., HOLUP, HOLUP,

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TOP LEFT: DVD cover of Grey City. BOTTOM LEFT: Scene from the movie. ABOVE: Scene from the movie.

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BOOKS

Crossing Boundaries Though the artist is forbidden to leave China, Ai Weiwei’s works transcend international (and artistic) linesBY JESSICA FIALA

AI WEIWEI, SPATIAL MATTERS: Art, Architecture, and ActivismAi Weiwei and Anthony Pins, eds.

Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2014

Ai Weiwei, Spatial Matters:

Art, Architecture, and

Activism approaches the work

of contemporary artist Ai

Weiwei through broadening

levels of scale. The essays

begin by investigating single

gallery installations, then

expand outward to explore

Ai’s architectural projects,

video works that document

and map Beijing, and the global reach of his Internet-based activism.

As the scope of projects grows, the collection becomes increasingly

intimate, resting finally in the online comingling of personal

and public.

Ai has become known internationally for ambitious projects

and defiant gestures—installing 100 million handcrafted porcelain

sunflower seeds at the Tate Modern, dipping Neolithic vases in

vibrant industrial paint, and photographing himself flipping the

bird at monuments around the world. He has designed dozens of

architecture projects and consulted on the “Bird’s Nest” stadium

for the Beijing Olympic Games. Since 2006, Ai has cultivated a

considerable online following, drawing the attention of the Chinese

government, who shut down his blog in 2009 and imprisoned him

for 81 days in 2011. Although restricted from leaving the country,

his reach continues to expand online and through exhibitions

organized remotely. His current exhibition, for example, which is

not included in the book, is @Large: Ai Weiwei on Alcatraz, which

runs through April 2015.

This collection is not a standard chronology or overview,

but rather collages, with interviews, photographs, essays, and

republished blog entries—a portrait of the artist, his work, and his

ongoing struggles with surveillance and censorship. Akin to a spatial

encounter, the essays lean in, back up, retrace steps, and forge new

paths, with the range of Ai’s work emerging and unfolding en route.

The primary focus is material and spatial, emphasizing, for instance,

Ai’s incorporation of handcrafted materials and techniques into

his projects. But the human element arises as well, especially the

personal component of Ai’s activism which emerges through actions

such has his compiling of the names of school children who died in

the 2008 Sichuan earthquake, or his call for his Twitter followers to

announce their real names. Time also intersects the spatial. Antique

materials are reworked into new installations while Ai’s recently

built Shanghai studio is torn down by the Chinese government.

The story told is one of emergence in public spheres from

architecture to online communities, and simultaneous government

attempts to silence and restrict the amorphous strategies of a

contemporary artist. Viewed through a public art lens, the collection

offers a range of vignettes featuring distinct modes of working in the

public realm, while also getting at the impetus for such work—“the

search to satisfy the demands of human survival and…the desire to

transform people’s conditions of existence.”

JESSICA FIALA is a company member of Ragamala Dance and a

program and project associate at Forecast Public Art.

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TOP: Ai Weiwei’s Red No. 1 Art Galleries (2008). BOTTOM: Ai Weiwei’s Study of Perspective—Tiananmen Square (1995).

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BOOKS

PROJECTS

ARCHITECTURE

ELMGREEN & DRAGSET:Biography Edited by Studio Elmgreen & Dragset Berlin: Hatje Cantz, 2014

An artistic duo for nearly 20 years, Michael Elmgreen and Ingar Dragset invite audiences into their history and private life with this 600-page visual diary. Each full-page photograph tells the artists’ collaborative story since 1995. Previously unpublished pictures share behind-the-scenes views of artworks, as well as portraits of Danish-Norwegian artists and colleagues.

NICK CAVE: EpitomeAndrew Bolton, Elvira Dyangani Ose,and Nato ThompsonNew York: Prestel, 2014

Nick Cave: Epitome compiles the artist’s famous Soundsuits with his sculptures and related performances. From the first suit—an array of twigs forming body armor in response to racial unrest—to the most recent, his works are captured in arresting photographs, essays, and quotes. Cave’s evolution along the intersection of public and private, constraints and escape, is described in his own words: “I’m working toward what I’m leaving behind.”

THOMAS HIRSCHHORN:Deleuze MonumentAnna DezeuzeLondon: Afterall, 2014 Anna Dezeuze’s book examines Thomas Hirschhorn’s Deleuze Monument (2000), a sculpture, altar, and library dedicated to philosopher Gilles Deleuze. Designed as an artwork that never closes to visitors, the controversial monument was vandalized and dismantled early. The author examines the project’s timeline and reveals its vulner-abilities, along with larger, related artistic theory and practices.

WILLI DORNER:Bodies in Urban SpacesWilli DornerGermany: Hatje Cantze, 2014

Dorner’s colorful, locally cast dancers twist, move, pose, and repose around courses through dozens of cities world-wide. Strong photographs by Lisa Rastl, an appendix of participant names, maps, and “codes” of positions (flying, chimney, chaos bench, steps to heaven, and more) illustrate the story of these body-sculpture interventions.

ROCK THE SHACK: The Architectureof Cabins, Cocoons and Hide-OutsSven Ehmann, Robert Klanten,and Sofia Borges, eds.Berlin: Gestalten, 2014 Embracing the appeal of peace through min-imalism, Rock the Shack offers refuge for the individual burdened by too much space. Cover-ing structures built in as few as 12 days—some handmade, some inspired by sixteenth-century Japanese teahouses, others built with renewable and local materials, still more featuring surrealist influences, and most built with careful attention to landscape, light, and sky—this collection soothes with clean design and large color photographs.

TSCHUMI PARC DE LA VILLETTEBernard Tschumi, with texts by Jacques Derridaand Anthony VidlerLondon: Artifice books on architecture, 2014

Bernard Tschumi’s first project, The Parc de la Villette in Paris (1982–1998)—an “urban park for the twenty-first century”—is presented with nearly 4,000 archival drawings, as well as photographs, models, and other project documentation. These, along with essays by Jacques Derrida, Antho-ny Vidler, and Tschumi, provide the reader of Tschumi Parc de la Villette with a solid, broad understanding of the project throughout its de-velopmental stages.

VACANCY STUDIES: Experiments andStrategic Interventions in ArchitectureRonald Rietveld and Erik Rietveld, eds.Rotterdam: nai010 publishers, 2014

Churches, castles, hospitals, airports, prisons, post offices—empty buildings are everywhere. Vacancy Studies views these lonely sites and structures from an optimistic angle: as rich resources with potential for innovation and tem-porary reuse. The Rietveld Architecture-Art-Affor-dances (RAAAF) studio mines the intersection of architecture, art, and science to articulate possibilities within the international phenomenon of empty spaces.

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SCALE

ART & ECOLOGY NOWAndrew BrownNew York: Thames & Hudson, 2014

Through thoughtful prose and placement of more than 300 powerful color illustrations, Art & Ecology Now describes the expanding trend of artists to explore nature and climate change. The featured art offers a wide range of responses that include documentation, reflection, activism, and the use of the environment as raw material. Nearly 100 artists and collectives are included, all confronting current social, political, economic, scientific, technological, and ethical issues.

ECOLOGIES, ENVIRONMENTS, ANDENERGY SYSTEMS IN ART OF THE1960s AND 1970sJames NisbetCambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2014

More than an overview of earthworks, James Nisbet’s book explores the connections of ecol-ogy and art in the 1960s and 1970s. Focusing on land art, minimalism, and interconnected en-ergies, Nisbet features a reconceptualization of environmental art with work by artists such as Allan Kaprow, Michael Heizer, Robert Smithson, Robert Barry, Simone Forti, and Walter De Maria.

BIG ART / SMALL ARTTristan MancoNew York: Thames & Hudson, 2014.

Maintaining a sense of wonder and a wide aesthetic, this survey reveals a meaningful exploration of art ranging from monumental to tiny. After an opening essay devoted to scale and separate introductions, half the volume is dedi-cated to grand works, while the other focuses on diminutive pieces. With each section organized alphabetically by artist, clever and whimsical pieces are presented via 288 illustrations and extensive text.

XXL ART: When Artists Think BigElea Baucheron, Diane RoutexNew York: Prestel, 2014

XXL Art: When Artists Think Big shares stun-ning visuals and texts on almost 50 artists whose work embraces the adage “Go big or go home.” Featured artists include well-known names like Robert Smithson, Christo and Jeanne-Claude, Richard Serra, and James Tur-rell, as well as emerging artists like Mehmet Ali Uysal, Florentijn Hofman, Aram Bartholl, JR, and OSGEMEOS. All tackle size and scale across countrysides and cityscapes with spectacular, boundary-pushing results.

Exhibition Histories

Exhibition as Social Intervention‘Culture in Action’ 1993

Joshua Decter, Helmut Draxler and other authors

MISCELLANYENVIRONMENTS

EXHIBITION AS SOCIAL INTERVENTION: ‘Culture in Action’ 1993Joshua Decter, Helmut Draxler, and other authorsLondon: Afterall, 2014

Begun in the early 1990s and developed with community residents, eight projects formed Chicago’s “Culture in Action,” a collective challenge to the conventional understanding of public art and disengaged plop art. From the Ex-hibition Histories series, which explores contem-porary art that shapes the way art is perceived, Exhibition as Social Intervention documents and critically assesses “Culture in Action”; a new introduction and recent interviews are com-plemented by archived and contemporary texts.

NETWORKS:Documents of Contemporary ArtLars Bang Larsen, ed.Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2014

The latest installment in the Documents of Contemporary Art series on contemporary art issues, Networks aims at art and network theory from the 1960s forward. This volume unravels creative threads before the origins of the Internet and reaches beyond the Net’s current central status as dominant social connector.

V is for Veterans by Stephanie Jaffe WernerTown Hall of Miami Lakes, Floridamosaic and concrete 10' 7"h x 5'wwww.stephaniejaffewerner.com

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BOOKS

Totally Plugged InREVIEW BY PETER PLAGENS

Originally published in Art in America, September 2014,

pp. 71–73. Courtesy BMP Media Holdings, LLC.

YOUR EVERYDAY ART WORLDLane Relyea Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2013

In the “everyday art world,”

artists are always on the move,

disdaining not only art objects

but any kind of artistic finality

whatsoever, making putative

works out of mere schmooz-

ing, and turning the art world

into a string of floating cocktail

parties disguised as seminars

(and vice versa). This EAW (as

I’ll call it for short) has been

creeping up on us for the last 20 years or so. Now, according to Lane

Relyea, an associate professor of art theory and practice at North-

western University, it’s here in its full networking glory.

Once, most artists made art objects in their individual studios

and sold them through retail shops known as galleries. More

recently, many executed commissions for created-on-site physical

works (with re-creation licenses that could still be sold by deal-

ers). But today a large number of key figures—Rirkrit Tiravanija,

Tobias Rehberger et al.—perform cloyingly mundane public

services as, in the current argot, their artistic practice. French

curator Nicolas Bourriaud, in his 1998 book Relational Aesthet-

ics, essentially wrote the script for a thousand—for a hundred

thousand—social exchanges rechristened as artworks. “Artists

cook and serve meals or re-create bars and lounges in galleries

and museums,” Relyea writes, “in an effort to conjure an environ-

ment without marked-off frames or stages, only diffuse convivial-

ity and atmosphere.” The work of others, such as Jorge Pardo and

the late Martin Kippenberger, tends to envelop viewers in instal-

lations so pervasive as to be indistinguishable from “everyday”

nonart experience.

A possible first, proto-EAW salvo against the old, product

oriented, hierarchical, “fine arts” paradigm may have been inad-

vertently fired—Relyea cites Thierry de Duve as noting—by the

Museum of Modern Art’s 1959 show “Sixteen Americans,” which

included several of Frank Stella’s Black Paintings along with work

by Jasper Johns, Robert Rauschenberg and others. That exhibition

gave artists the go-ahead to start thinking in terms of a show as a

kind of meta-artwork. The next dominoes to tilt, if not fall—slowly,

over a couple of decades—were such “totalizing stereotypes” as

Finish Fetish and Light and Space in Los Angeles. Identifiable

movements of this sort gave way, as the semi-closed system of the

art world frayed into open, porous networks of itinerant artists

cobbling together ad hoc events as works of art. And while the

nearly universal white cube (artists’ studios, commercial galleries

and modern museum rooms) wasn’t entirely destroyed, big cracks

started to run through it. For example, Relyea cites a 1997 exhibi-

tion by Sharon Lockhart, Laura Owens and Frances Stark as a kind

of mutual help arrangement that boosted the international mobility

of all three.

With the advent of global networks, a different cultural role—

that of the glamorous slacker, akin to conventional showbiz celeb-

rities slumming on reality TV—began to appeal to some artists. At

the behest of organizers Maurizio Cattelan and Jens Hoffmann, for

instance, Elizabeth Peyton, Olafur Eliasson, Pipilotti Rist and other

well-known artists famously sent up the convention of the big inter-

national invitational show by turning the tongue-in-cheek 6th Carib-

bean Biennial (1999) into a group vacation on St. Kitts. Critic, cura-

tor and now gallerist Carl Freedman (one of Relyea’s many quotees)

wrote of a similar but more straight-faced event called “Traffic”:

Pleasure and enjoyment were not to be found in the exhibition

itself but in the week-long gathering of the 30 artists involved.

Under the auspices of an “exchange of ideas,” the artists talked,

drank, dined and danced together whilst creating, preparing and

installing their different works. . . . The gathering was central to

[Bourriaud’s] theme, awkwardly formulated as “the interhuman

space of relationality.”

Such intellectual and touristic indulgence is part and parcel of

the EAW, often (wishfully) conceived as liberation from—even

opposition to—old-fashioned cultural institutions and hierarchies.

Travel and talk, Relyea says, are replacing rooted, isolated artmaking,

as artists use the pub and the street (in both their literal and figu-

rative senses) to construct “platforms” from which they “offer up

their projects or shows as participatory architecture for other artists

to operate within.” Whatever solitary creative musing artists still

require can be got in transit: “Travel provides sanctuary, a prolonged

interval to collect one’s thoughts, summarize, piece together an over-

view,” Relyea says. (To tweak the great photography curator John

Szarkowski’s remark about lectures, this would have been a better

work of art had it been a longer flight.)

Traveling in the EAW is even more useful for networking. An

EAW participant must have not only someplace to go, but someone

to see when he or she gets there—preferably someone who can help

with career advancement by connecting the participant with other

people who can help with . . . and so on, into the night. That, in

turn, nudges the EAW toward the kind of faculty/former-student

old-boy cohorts informally operated by Ivy League law schools, and

turns the primary purpose of graduate school into mapping out

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potential networks. These days, an MFA degree might as well stand

for “My Fat Address-Book.”

But an art world in which “to go where the action is means to be

always on the go” turns out to be just as economically demanding as

one based on staying put in spacious studios, slick galleries and pris-

tine museum offices. Simply put, travel costs money. Another guest

expert—Marc Bousquet, the Emory University writing professor and

crusader for academe’s exploited part-timers—describes the unsalu-

tary life of the poor adjunct faculty member:

The network or flex-timer is in constant motion, driving from

workplace to workplace, from training seminar to daycare,

grocery store and gym, maintaining an ever more strenuous

existence in order to present the working body required by

capital: healthy, childless, trained and alert, displaying an affect

of pride in representing zero drain on the corporation’s resources.

Such, too, Relyea implies, is the predicament of a struggling, peripa-

tetic neophyte in the Everyday Art World.

The consolation prize for the EAW’s frenetically nomadic artists

is a revived romanticism, centered on the idea of just what, or who,

artists are: “No longer did their specialness need to be named as

such, declared out loud and up front. . . . It could just be, accepted

as some incontestable fact or mystery, a divine gift with which only

a lucky few are endowed.” No wonder, then, that at the art schools

where Relyea is invited to give critiques, “the painting students,

all of them, across the board, don’t say they’re painters.” More-

over, “they also don’t call themselves artists. ‘I do stuff’ is the most

frequent response. Or, ‘I make stuff.’ . . . All open-ended adaptabil-

ity and responsiveness, no set vocation.” Artists still make objects,

of course, tons of them—some selling for startling prices. But there

are also, more and more, signs and markers of conceptual projects,

or tokens of unfolding careers, rather than visual treasures that one

would want to live with and value, in and of themselves.

But only piecemeal, and seemingly reluctantly, does Relyea

declare how smoothly—yea, creepily—the EAW fits into an entre-

preneurial world stuffed with social media, smartphone apps, digi-

tal startups, on-demand streaming entertainment, blogs and MOOCs

(massive open online courses), yet populated by Dilbertish office

workers who sift through endless streams of business data, as

they labor without unions, without job security, without pensions

and without bargaining power. Granted, right up front on page

nine, Relyea writes, “The [Everyday Art World] network begins to

appear less like defiance and more like the latest answer to capital-

ism’s constant need to overcome and reinvent itself.” But he then

sheaths his sword and proceeds to speak of his disinterested interest

in “how [post-studio art procedures] align with and articulate new

social and organizational norms and positions.”

As chair of a prestigious art department with “theory” in its name,

Relyea is understandably careful to avoid a blanket condemnation

of the new EAW. Although he seems to want to make a felony case

concerning the ravages the EAW has wrought on the contemporary

art scene, he writes—like a doubting medieval philosopher in a king-

dom of belief—for two very different audiences.

One group comprises academic colleagues and younger artists

who might like to see an art world of finished products (whether

objects in inventory or custom-built for exhibition) largely decon-

structed, perhaps even replaced with an anybody-can-be-everything,

DIY network. For those readers, Relyea provides a narrative thread

running from MoMA’s “Sixteen Americans” and 1971 Mel Bochner

“Projects” exhibitions through the evolution of the big biennials into

avant-garde versions of old TV variety shows, Andrea Fraser’s video-

taped sex with a collector, talky artists’ cooperatives in Glasgow, L.A.

and Cologne, and the “new bricolage” of such artists as Lara Schnit-

ger and Rachel Harrison (where, ironically, a ramshackle physicality

might be turning things back just a bit toward objets d’art).

Relyea’s second audience consists of skeptics like me (and,

maybe, the author of Your Everyday Art World himself). For them,

Relyea occasionally shines a prosecutorial floodlight on the wider

consequences of the advent of the EAW:

Today’s claims of romantic defiance too often look past the fact

that our sense of expanded agency has been purchased largely

through an aggressive shattering and collapse of the larger social

structure. Falling progressively into ruin, this is a scene that

belongs not to romance but to tragedy.

He said it. I didn’t.

PETER PLAGENS is a painter and writer living in New York.

These days, an MFA degree might as well stand for

“My Fat Address-Book.”

BIG VISION - Michael FallonBerkeley, CA: Counterpoint, September 2014 Seldom does a book about art...

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