Lucid Dreaming

The Market for Genius

by Beth E. Wilson, August 25, 2008

What happens when there’s an inexorable demand for artists to be original—that is, to develop some indelible, personal “signature style” for their work, thereby differentiating themselves from the thousands of other artists currently at work? If you demur, thinking that someone making good work should be understood and accepted, regardless of whether the painting/sculpture/whatever looks a bit similar to something published in last month’s Artforum, think again. Art school critiques these days are frequently recitations of the various influences/similar ideas to be recognized in the student work.

Critic Rosalind Krauss some time ago wrote a famous essay titled “The Originality of the Avant-Garde and Other Modernist Myths,” which made a postmodernist point about the impossibility of absolute originality, holding that everything’s already been done, so the only thing left is to recycle the past. Thus, quite logically, followed her support of artists like Sherrie Levine, who (among others) launched the ironically “new” strategy of appropriation art in the late 1970s and 1980s.

But where does that demand for constant novelty come from? The market continues to look for that latest hook (like appropriation), making new art stars along the way with impunity. Now many of these big names really deserve the attention—they got where they are because they really do good work—and I’m sure that over time, the flash-in-the-pan types will fade from memory, as the depth of the others becomes more and more apparent.

I bring this up because of a show that opens this month at the Hudson Valley Center for Contemporary Art in Peekskill. “Origins” brings together an impressive roster of blue chip contemporary artists—30 of them, from Louise Bourgeois to Martin Puryear—focused on work that uses primal materials such as clay, fiber, wood, and stone. It marks a major step forward for the HVCCA as an institution, as its first show made up primarily of loans. (The center, which opened in 2004, was founded by Marc and Livia Straus, and their collection has been the basis for the shows organized there to date.) The show will be opening this month, along with the latest edition of the Peekskill Project installed throughout the city.

The show began with an invitation from the Westchester County Arts Council, to participate in its fall ’08 initiative “celebrating clay-based artwork.” Not surprisingly, the show quickly grew to include not only ceramics, but a wide range of other materials deemed close to nature. This move away from a purely media-defined show reveals another of the contradictions embedded in today’s art discourse—despite the supposed postmodern erasure of distinctions between high and low, or fine versus applied arts, maintaining one’s allegiance to a specific medium carries with it old-school connotations of craftiness, of a humble, less intellectual path into the work. The preference for a more polygamous relationship to various artistic media in contemporary art has been dubbed the “post-medium condition.”

Interestingly, there is no single curator for “Origins,” but, rather, a group of six or so people, recommending artists and/or works among themselves (and who prefer to remain nameless). Now the people associated with the HVCCA tend to be very smart (and very well connected), but this group process has produced an exhibition that seems closer to a market survey of the moment, rather than much in the way of a really unified curatorial theme. I can guarantee that there will be work that is well worth the visit, like Zhang Huan’s exceedingly delicate Ash Army, a bust of a Chinese soldier, modeled on Huan’s own features, made of the ash produced by burned incense. Going by the press release, I imagine this fragile beauty must fit within the rubric of “the human figure as a focus of expressive possibilities,” as opposed to the other main theme, work that presents its raw materials in a more direct, presumably nonrepresentational, fashion.