In the comments to an earlier post, Aaron Yassin says: "Although I don't mind a few New Dumb Little Paintings here and there (some of them can be pretty cute) I'm not as sympathetic as you or Jerry Saltz are to the genre. I'm actually more mystified by the continued proliferation of the form and view it as one more sign that we are really in the midst of a mannerist period." He asks what I think is important about the genre.
First, don't give too much weight to Saltz's opinion since he has what art historiographer James Elkins calls a "positionless position" on art. The brief for bad painting, however, has remained fairly strong since it was first identified by Marcia Tucker and others in the late 70s. Here's the gist of an argument: Technological developments in "imaging" (first photography, now digital tools) are in the process of making painting as historic as hot lead typesetting, whether we like it or not, and there are only two ways it can go now. It can merge into technological practice and/or it can be the most idiosyncratic, unco-optable form of personal expression. "Mannerist" implies decadence but idiosyncratic personal expression is absolutely vital and essential in a world dominated by mass-(re)produced media. Jim Shaw's "Thrift Store Paintings" show at Metro Pictures was a landmark because it harnessed the power of many individuals' "one good painting" (good meaning punchy or hard-to-forget) and also presaged the role of the artist as curator of such phenomena, an increasingly common practice on the Web. I could go on but that's it in a nutshell. To me, "mannerism" is the postmodern AbEx painting at Von Lintel gallery in Chelsea.
In that they are everywhere--you look recently, here too--these not so new dumb little paintings hardly signal an error in the machine. Quite the contrary, the words 'new' + 'dumb' +' little', are what the machine is very proud to order in--budget savvy + novel--not to mention neat little clashing symbols--you know the one's--invigoration () degradation. Some of this elk is good. But it's rare!
If you can't construct an image that will send you off, or give you the experience that you haven't had before, that can't create a tension both in visual content, and perhaps more sensitively , in the use of the materials, that can't work a conceptual leap, and still keep you on the train, then, the hit and miss works--and sometimes--works just fine. However, the 'this is a new experience' usually is little more than a jumble of bottom to top shelf randomizing--memory--throw-you-off-convenience-store-stratagem. Grudge was more sculpture based, back then, wasn't it?
Really agree, Tom, about the very safe, visually boring, despite the employment of disjunctive visual cues, evened-out painting, at Von Lintel--
trouble is I'd say that about many of those dumb little things that you seem so mad about, too.
The city I live is overloaded with this ( some of it oh so cutsey, a very few really good) so maybe I just pedantic, But I figure, that good drawing is always good no matter how bad it looks to an untrained eye, and I figure that especially the traditional arts where an individual can have the skill to execute a work or idea themselves, the goal is, unequivocally, to head above the machine, not callow under it.
I think the argument you provide is a decent one. In fact, I agree with it, but I don’t think it makes a case for “New Dumb Little Paintings (NDLP)” as a viable genre. I think your point about the vitality of idiosyncratic personal expression is of specific importance. It is exactly my point because I would argue that much of the NDLP that I see looks alike or at best its far too similar (of course I have to exclude Rot Gut from this). As far as I’m concerned most of this work doesn't provide much idiosyncratic personal expression. So much of it rips off fashion, illustration, and design from the 70’s and 80’s. The result is that this work is dominated by mass-(re)produced media. I keep seeing things that remind me of the drawings from the 80's music video for the Ah-Ha song "Take on Me" among other media influenced sources. The gimmick is that the NDLP are done by hand. Generally what that makes me think is: oooh neat!
Now don’t get me wrong. I actually like some of this stuff. Joe Wolin’s show at the Drawing Center last year of the Royal Art Lodge was great. It’s just that it seems like it’s all over the place, most of it looks similar, and often the subjects are juvenile. Put all of these things together and it feels like a mannerist moment to me.
In addition, I would disagree with the characterization of David Row’s show at Von Lintel as mannerism. Instead, I think it is more appropriate to call it mediocre. On the other hand, the Pipolotti Rist show of video works at Luhring Augustine packs quite a punch of idiosyncratic personal expression; she uses various types of technological imaging systems to great poetic effect.
My link to Von Lintel gallery wasn't meant to single out David Row--it's just that he's on the front page. Ideally I'd link to the entire artist list, but it's a frames site and I can't.
I think you're going a bit far afield in your NDLP critique. (I'm not really sure who it's aimed at, since I'm not sure what was in the video for that damned Ah-Ha song.) I realize it was my fault for invoking Marcia Tucker, but I originally put a specific artist lineage on the table: Owens/Kilimnick, then Shutz, then the MatCh-Art group. Very little of that is about mass (re)produced media. The Jeffrey Lutonsky image I posted is a good example--and I don't think it's mannerist, if by mannerist you mean the repetitive, calcified, or bizarre dead-end of a tradition.
I re-read Walter Benjamin's "The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction" a couple of weeks ago, and copied this quote that got under my skin:
"The simultaneous contemplation of paintings by a large public, such as developed in the 19th century, is an early symptom of the crisis of painting, a crisis which was by no means occasioned exclusively by photography, but rather by the appeal of art works to the masses."
Seems to me that spectacle plays a big role in the proliferation of NDLP. Of course there is also the market. In my town there is a "funky gallery district" with plucky Mom-and-Pop commercial galleries that show NDLP in spades. Also a little NDLS (New Dumb Little Sculptures). The art market here (Toronto) can't bear much work on a more amibitious scale. That's fairly obvious and pragmatic, and I actually thought at first that the genre was specific to Canada, where there are tons of artists and hardly any collectors. I've been suprised in the past years to see NDLP proliferating around the world! What gives? I think it comes back to spectacle. These paintings are like groupies, trying to get a good seat at the big art show, but not aspiring to play on stage. They are "good enough" to get some action. Of course there are individuals who see themselves as outside all of that art amibition, whose drive and integrity and utter absorption in their art keep them personally in an isolation bubble, who make small gritty honest things that may or not ever be shown. But that phenonmenon is unusual, and maybe (?got to think about this more) the artists' feelings on the matter are not really relevant in the big picture.
As I hope my timeline makes clear, the artists I'm talking about are showing in New York and have been at or near the center of discourse here for a couple of decades. Their aims are ambitious and the "dumbness" often disguises a sharp intellect. Jim Shaw's Thrift Store Paintings show was one of the few overt nods towards the larger demotic or demographic of real amateurs (or the middleweights you're describing), but then, it had Shaw's curatorial brain at the core.
is there something of an a list b list structure to this critique? ndlp is a b list medium with potential to launch a list artwork. shaw moved outsider b listers inside. a list being art which deserves appreciation for its unique merit and b list being derivative and lacking merit.
Yes, but the line between a and b is razor fine, which makes this an interesting but hard-to-manage discussion. Often the difference between good bad and bad bad hinges on a highly refined smartass urban irony, which is hard to quantify in art historical terms.
I realise the term ambition is a bit ambiguous. There's career ambition, and there's also the ambition an artist has for the functional, communicative agency of their work. I suspect that neither the hinterland NDPL-ers nor the NYC NDPL-ers doing their sassy thing in the middle of discourse-land have tons of ambition for the operative impact of the artwork. Or maybe I'm just missing the keen contemporary cultural relevance of quirky portraiture in pretty pop colours. (By the way, we have smartass "urban" irony in Canada too. Royal Art Lodge, for example, is from Winnipeg.)
1. "Career ambition, and...the ambition an artist has for the functional, communicative agency of their work." Same thing.
2. "I suspect that ...the hinterland NDPL-ers [don't] have tons of ambition for the operative impact of the artwork." Can't say.
3. "I suspect that ...the NYC NDPL-ers doing their sassy thing in the middle of discourse-land [don't] have tons of ambition for the operative impact of the artwork." Strongly disagree. The goal is to succeed intellectually, and financially too if you can swing it. Some are doing it. It takes tough SOBs to do it.
4. "Or maybe I'm just missing the keen contemporary cultural relevance of quirky portraiture in pretty pop colours." My timeline is only half in jest. Do I need to annotate it?
5. Royal Art Lodge, from what I've seen, is more in the "sensitive, drawerly" category than what I would call dumb.
"Do I need to annotate it?" ...maybe ... it's your blog. I'm not getting the point, but I am just one old crank in the wilderness and I am willing to let it drop. I'll go do some research and get back to you.
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In the comments to an earlier post, Aaron Yassin says: "Although I don't mind a few New Dumb Little Paintings here and there (some of them can be pretty cute) I'm not as sympathetic as you or Jerry Saltz are to the genre. I'm actually more mystified by the continued proliferation of the form and view it as one more sign that we are really in the midst of a mannerist period." He asks what I think is important about the genre.
First, don't give too much weight to Saltz's opinion since he has what art historiographer James Elkins calls a "positionless position" on art. The brief for bad painting, however, has remained fairly strong since it was first identified by Marcia Tucker and others in the late 70s. Here's the gist of an argument: Technological developments in "imaging" (first photography, now digital tools) are in the process of making painting as historic as hot lead typesetting, whether we like it or not, and there are only two ways it can go now. It can merge into technological practice and/or it can be the most idiosyncratic, unco-optable form of personal expression. "Mannerist" implies decadence but idiosyncratic personal expression is absolutely vital and essential in a world dominated by mass-(re)produced media. Jim Shaw's "Thrift Store Paintings" show at Metro Pictures was a landmark because it harnessed the power of many individuals' "one good painting" (good meaning punchy or hard-to-forget) and also presaged the role of the artist as curator of such phenomena, an increasingly common practice on the Web. I could go on but that's it in a nutshell. To me, "mannerism" is the postmodern AbEx painting at Von Lintel gallery in Chelsea.
- tom moody 9-25-2004 8:36 pm
In that they are everywhere--you look recently, here too--these not so new dumb little paintings hardly signal an error in the machine. Quite the contrary, the words 'new' + 'dumb' +' little', are what the machine is very proud to order in--budget savvy + novel--not to mention neat little clashing symbols--you know the one's--invigoration () degradation. Some of this elk is good. But it's rare!
If you can't construct an image that will send you off, or give you the experience that you haven't had before, that can't create a tension both in visual content, and perhaps more sensitively , in the use of the materials, that can't work a conceptual leap, and still keep you on the train, then, the hit and miss works--and sometimes--works just fine. However, the 'this is a new experience' usually is little more than a jumble of bottom to top shelf randomizing--memory--throw-you-off-convenience-store-stratagem. Grudge was more sculpture based, back then, wasn't it?
Really agree, Tom, about the very safe, visually boring, despite the employment of disjunctive visual cues, evened-out painting, at Von Lintel--
trouble is I'd say that about many of those dumb little things that you seem so mad about, too.
The city I live is overloaded with this ( some of it oh so cutsey, a very few really good) so maybe I just pedantic, But I figure, that good drawing is always good no matter how bad it looks to an untrained eye, and I figure that especially the traditional arts where an individual can have the skill to execute a work or idea themselves, the goal is, unequivocally, to head above the machine, not callow under it.
- brent (guest) 9-26-2004 4:17 am
I think the argument you provide is a decent one. In fact, I agree with it, but I don’t think it makes a case for “New Dumb Little Paintings (NDLP)” as a viable genre. I think your point about the vitality of idiosyncratic personal expression is of specific importance. It is exactly my point because I would argue that much of the NDLP that I see looks alike or at best its far too similar (of course I have to exclude Rot Gut from this). As far as I’m concerned most of this work doesn't provide much idiosyncratic personal expression. So much of it rips off fashion, illustration, and design from the 70’s and 80’s. The result is that this work is dominated by mass-(re)produced media. I keep seeing things that remind me of the drawings from the 80's music video for the Ah-Ha song "Take on Me" among other media influenced sources. The gimmick is that the NDLP are done by hand. Generally what that makes me think is: oooh neat!
Now don’t get me wrong. I actually like some of this stuff. Joe Wolin’s show at the Drawing Center last year of the Royal Art Lodge was great. It’s just that it seems like it’s all over the place, most of it looks similar, and often the subjects are juvenile. Put all of these things together and it feels like a mannerist moment to me.
In addition, I would disagree with the characterization of David Row’s show at Von Lintel as mannerism. Instead, I think it is more appropriate to call it mediocre. On the other hand, the Pipolotti Rist show of video works at Luhring Augustine packs quite a punch of idiosyncratic personal expression; she uses various types of technological imaging systems to great poetic effect.
- Aaron Yassin (guest) 9-27-2004 8:39 am
My link to Von Lintel gallery wasn't meant to single out David Row--it's just that he's on the front page. Ideally I'd link to the entire artist list, but it's a frames site and I can't.
I think you're going a bit far afield in your NDLP critique. (I'm not really sure who it's aimed at, since I'm not sure what was in the video for that damned Ah-Ha song.) I realize it was my fault for invoking Marcia Tucker, but I originally put a specific artist lineage on the table: Owens/Kilimnick, then Shutz, then the MatCh-Art group. Very little of that is about mass (re)produced media. The Jeffrey Lutonsky image I posted is a good example--and I don't think it's mannerist, if by mannerist you mean the repetitive, calcified, or bizarre dead-end of a tradition.
- tom moody 9-27-2004 11:17 am
I re-read Walter Benjamin's "The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction" a couple of weeks ago, and copied this quote that got under my skin:
Seems to me that spectacle plays a big role in the proliferation of NDLP. Of course there is also the market. In my town there is a "funky gallery district" with plucky Mom-and-Pop commercial galleries that show NDLP in spades. Also a little NDLS (New Dumb Little Sculptures). The art market here (Toronto) can't bear much work on a more amibitious scale. That's fairly obvious and pragmatic, and I actually thought at first that the genre was specific to Canada, where there are tons of artists and hardly any collectors. I've been suprised in the past years to see NDLP proliferating around the world! What gives? I think it comes back to spectacle. These paintings are like groupies, trying to get a good seat at the big art show, but not aspiring to play on stage. They are "good enough" to get some action. Of course there are individuals who see themselves as outside all of that art amibition, whose drive and integrity and utter absorption in their art keep them personally in an isolation bubble, who make small gritty honest things that may or not ever be shown. But that phenonmenon is unusual, and maybe (?got to think about this more) the artists' feelings on the matter are not really relevant in the big picture.
- sally mckay 9-29-2004 5:20 pm
As I hope my timeline makes clear, the artists I'm talking about are showing in New York and have been at or near the center of discourse here for a couple of decades. Their aims are ambitious and the "dumbness" often disguises a sharp intellect. Jim Shaw's Thrift Store Paintings show was one of the few overt nods towards the larger demotic or demographic of real amateurs (or the middleweights you're describing), but then, it had Shaw's curatorial brain at the core.
- tom moody 9-29-2004 6:06 pm
is there something of an a list b list structure to this critique? ndlp is a b list medium with potential to launch a list artwork. shaw moved outsider b listers inside. a list being art which deserves appreciation for its unique merit and b list being derivative and lacking merit.
- bill 9-29-2004 6:56 pm
Yes, but the line between a and b is razor fine, which makes this an interesting but hard-to-manage discussion. Often the difference between good bad and bad bad hinges on a highly refined smartass urban irony, which is hard to quantify in art historical terms.
- tom moody 9-29-2004 7:12 pm
I realise the term ambition is a bit ambiguous. There's career ambition, and there's also the ambition an artist has for the functional, communicative agency of their work. I suspect that neither the hinterland NDPL-ers nor the NYC NDPL-ers doing their sassy thing in the middle of discourse-land have tons of ambition for the operative impact of the artwork. Or maybe I'm just missing the keen contemporary cultural relevance of quirky portraiture in pretty pop colours. (By the way, we have smartass "urban" irony in Canada too. Royal Art Lodge, for example, is from Winnipeg.)
- sally mckay 9-29-2004 9:37 pm
1. "Career ambition, and...the ambition an artist has for the functional, communicative agency of their work." Same thing.
2. "I suspect that ...the hinterland NDPL-ers [don't] have tons of ambition for the operative impact of the artwork." Can't say.
3. "I suspect that ...the NYC NDPL-ers doing their sassy thing in the middle of discourse-land [don't] have tons of ambition for the operative impact of the artwork." Strongly disagree. The goal is to succeed intellectually, and financially too if you can swing it. Some are doing it. It takes tough SOBs to do it.
4. "Or maybe I'm just missing the keen contemporary cultural relevance of quirky portraiture in pretty pop colours." My timeline is only half in jest. Do I need to annotate it?
5. Royal Art Lodge, from what I've seen, is more in the "sensitive, drawerly" category than what I would call dumb.
- tom moody 9-29-2004 11:03 pm
"Do I need to annotate it?" ...maybe ... it's your blog. I'm not getting the point, but I am just one old crank in the wilderness and I am willing to let it drop. I'll go do some research and get back to you.
- sally mckay 9-30-2004 12:14 am