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On the Arts: Carnegie International celebrates artifice, not art
Sunday, January 30, 2000 By Charles Jackson
I'm interested in the Carnegie International - not as much as I used to be, but I still go and see what's there.
Charles Jackson is a Pittsburgh artist who visited the Carnegie International seeking inspiration. What it inspired was this column.
I remember the show when it was the Pittsburgh International Exhibition of Paintings, Carnegie Institute, 1950. Homer Saint-Gaudens made the selections. Gordon Bailey Washburn was director of fine arts. I was exposed to a wide diversity of paintings: Braque, Matisse, Burchfield, Kokoschka, Hopper, Levine, Kuniyoshi, Bacon, Dufy, Magritte ... even Peter Blume's "The Rock." Wow.
In 1950, I was just 21 and impressionable. As a junior at Yale, I changed my major from painting to architecture because the academics had nothing to teach in the brash days of abstract expressionism. I figured, at least I should be able to eke out a living doing drafting. But I've long since returned to painting, and for the past 20 years have done little else. Television was new in the '50s; it would be years before couch potatoes replaced art lovers and museums would begin to imitate multiscreen theaters.
Somehow, I've retained the idea that paintings are important - that they can provide pleasure, expand your knowledge, even expand your understanding of human beings. Even the French.
So, I'm a painter - one who doesn't wish to produce images by machine. I find the results richer when done by a human mind and hand. Talent and craft play roles in painting that are not needed in conceptual or camera art.
With my background, given the fact that I make art, you would think every Carnegie International would inspire and inform me. Sadly, there's no longer much of a connection. As long as people live in houses and apartments that have walls, there will be demand for paintings. Unfortunately, paintings aren't central to those who arranged this year's International.
Instead of a show of objects made by people for people, the show has become the work of display designers who remodel large areas in the hope of achieving some special effect. Many of these effects are commissioned rather than discovered, so what is presented is not an artifact of life but an artifice influenced by the patron - the museum. They are built and subsequently dismantled at the end of the show. As such, these exhibits are not part of life as it is lived but constructions ordered and paid for by the museum.
As a consequence, this is a show of uniformity at the expense of expression and interest.
Frankly, this International is pure, white-walled pretension - immaculate, maybe even virginal, sometimes silly, but with no guts.
My view, of course, reflects my age, 70, and the fact that I'm a painter. But my view also is the result of the competition that exists among international art shows. Competition inspires imitation. To compete, you have to offer everything your competition offers. Does the International summarize the state of art in the world for the study and edification of the visitor? No. It copies the Venice Biennale.
In The New York Times year in review package (Dec. 26), Michael Kinmelman wrote:
"The organizers of the Biennale finally figured out how to deal with the circus atmosphere of the big international survey: accept it. No summing up of the state of art in the world. The new strategy is to cater to the appetites of people who want to snack among hundreds of different works, people who might prefer to be contemplating a steaming bowl of spaghetti with clams or drinking pink Bellini at Harry's Bar. The result: user-friendly, quickly digestible, easily forgotten videos, installations, and sculptures."
So you don't have to travel to Venice to see the shrunken attention span, the video, the simplistic installation. We have it all here.
Quick and easy doesn't result in memorable or meaningful content. Duplication without invention is boring. Case in point: How many were there, each as embarrassing as the next, of John Currin's nudes? All with the same smirk, a Coca-Cola commercial silly girlish look that says "how cute I am without my clothes" but implies no further reason for taking them off.
Any art, if it works, doesn't need to be explained. So the explanations in the International's gallery guide are unneeded, but worse, employ art-talk jargon intended to canonize the pieces. The descriptions become so unintelligible as to obfuscate rather than enlighten.
The guide says of Ann Hamilton's weeping wall: "The body in all its vulnerability is recalled in Ann Hamilton's 'welle,' a wall that weeps barely visible beads of water, as if it were a functioning body rather than an architectural element." Well, I have a cellar wall - stone with porous mortar - that weeps after a rain. It is not a body, nor is it living in any way - it is fully defined as a leaky wall. I see Ann Hamilton's wall as a pretentious fraud, mostly because of the silly hype in the guide.
Why would a wall cry? Good walls, like good roofs and ceilings, don't leak. Should they drip, they self-destruct. Time will tell if Ann Hamilton has informed us - about herself.
Now, lest I be judged a killjoy, I liked Sarah Sze's construction, even on second view. Lights, appliances, matchsticks and fire extinguishers are all playfully assembled in a fantasy that is neither cute nor silly, just fun. But Sze's work is an oasis of enjoyment in what is overall a desultory phenomenon - an easily forgotten accumulation in place of a summing up of world art.
It's not fun to have a clogged roof drain that allows water to accumulate on a flat roof. To see Olafur Eliasson's installation, unfortunately, is to see that and nothing more. Objects may serve as symbols, but only awkwardly, and certainly imperfectly. If you want your art to convey vague and uncertain ideas, you may couch it in symbolism. But, if you communicate this ineffectively, chances are it is because you had nothing much to say. The adjacent scaffolding and chain-link fence in Eliasson's work say as much as the water: that something was put where it didn't naturally fit, and an inaccessible dark space was created below the water pool.
Perhaps that's what the guide is referring to: "[Eliasson's] work navigates a space between nature and technology, the organic and the industrial." Well, what with rough weather and all, navigation can become tricky. Some navigators get lost.
I went to the opening of the International and was enlivened by the hordes of people who created a human mobile presence against the white walls. People are always good for a look. I stopped by a few weeks later for a more careful look at the art. But as frustration and fatigue thwarted any pleasurable experience, I walked through the permanent collection - and then walked out.
The permanent collection is quite pleasurable, a contrast to the limp International. I left thinking if things were that good years ago, there is a chance the years to come will bring good things also.
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