Backbone > Lucid Dreaming

Is Resistance Futile?
By Beth Elaine Wilson

How have we arrived at the point where the very idea of what’s good is determined primarily by who endorses it, where it is shown, what dealer handles it, what manufacturer makes it? The other day, I saw a television advertisement that posed the question, “What makes a computer chip dominate the industry?” or something to that effect, followed by a cut to the familiar Intel logo, accompanied by the signature bing-bong tones—except the logo read “Advertising” instead of “Intel”. So that’s what makes Intel chips better—an infectious ad campaign? I found myself taken aback that the company would allow the use of its image in such a context, so overtly embracing the importance of market dynamics over and above the traditional concept of merely making a quality product.

This is the point at which the stodgy idea of “making judgments of taste”—the aesthetic equivalent of determining quality—is vaulted from a low-stakes exercise in personal opinion to an overtly political act. Arguably the most important (as well as most maddening) art critic of the 20th century, Clement Greenberg, steadfastly defended the importance of judging art, and didn’t hesitate to denigrate work that he felt was not up to snuff. In his 1939 essay “Avant-Garde and Kitsch,” he outlined a model of culture in which the artistic avant-garde (at the time, people like Mondrian or Kandinsky, and eventually the American artists who shortly came together to create the Abstract Expressionist movement) would invariably be truly understood by only a handful of people—critics, dealers, other artists, and maybe even some of the collectors who bought the work—and that these radical avant-garde insights would then be systematically misunderstood as they were passed on down the cultural line, eventually arriving at the bottom of the heap as mass-produced kitsch. (Think 1950s splatter-print linoleum interpretations of Pollock drip paintings.)

As elitist as this argument is, it points to a significant cultural dynamic that persists today, although I think he was looking at it from the wrong end of the telescope. Perhaps the problem lies not in the bastardization of the divine insights of an elite core of artists, but in the very formation and manipulation of large groups of people through the operations of mass-media, a phenomenon that first came to light in the 19th century (ironically, about the same time that the idea of the avant-garde came into being!). All of us now live in a world in which advertising and public relations have become the primary ideological tools; unlike the old Soviet Union, where is was at least possible to identify the source of the “party line,” our contemporary society veils the propagandistic elements of its ideological message in the alluring cloak of desire itself. Advertising stokes unrealistic needs for immediate gratification, creating a fantasy world radically disconnected from the current reality. Real problems go wanting (universal health care) while imaginary ones mobilize enormous national resources (WMDs in Iraq).

What a puny tool art is in the scheme of things! The very notion of an artist making appreciable social change seems quaint these days. The machinery of the institutionalized art world itself advances beautiful-but-vacuous spectacles like Matthew Barney’s Cremaster nonsense at the Guggenheim earlier this year. (Quite notably, this is the same institution that once cancelled an exhibition by artist Hans Haacke that highlighted the slumlord real estate holdings of a number of the museum’s trustees. In that light it’s easy to see whose interests are being advanced by visions of excess like the Barney show.)

No stranger to David-and-Goliath confrontations myself (see my April and May columns this year regarding the dubious contributions of Dia:Beacon to the region), I will admit to having a soft spot for the underdog, even when the odds seem insurmountable. Artist Giovanna Feola, graduating this month with an MFA from SUNY New Paltz, has taken on just this sort of task. Opening at the Back Stage Productions space in Kingston on December 6 will be her installation “Disobedience Is a Losing Proposition,” which will include a number of her drawings and silkscreen prints, mostly in a sketchy, comic-book style. She has invented a female superhero, Super Simmo, who finds herself on the trail of someone who’s stolen Walter de Maria’s Earth Room (an actual artwork maintained by Dia in New York, consisting of a gallery room filled three feet deep with soil), eventually tracking it down and hauling large sacks of dirt back to the gallery. Other works feature “low” subject matter such as wise-guy dogs and cats who regularly pass noxious quantities of green “wind”.

For Feola, the comic-book aesthetic is a means of attracting more viewers, a point of entry for what she hopes to convey with the work as a whole. In truth, they are not great, “classic” works to be appreciated by comix aficionados; by contrast, they consistently defuse themselves as jokes that aren’t all that funny, presenting characters who seem to be more amusing than they actually are. In the spirit of John Flansburgh of They Might Be Giants, who once said, “People think we’re funnier than we really are,” the ultimate comedic failure of the work shines a reflexive light on the very means Feola uses to draw the viewer in. Failure is explicitly an option, as it always is. But what is more pathetic, in the end—honestly acknowledging one’s impotence, or erecting a happy-face façade that everything’s just fine?

The night of the opening (included on Kingston’s First Saturday gallery tour), Feola has planned a live performance-intervention in the gallery space, the details about which I’ve been sworn to secrecy. (One of the performers, I can report, will be poet Carl Weldon, of “Dances with Werewolves” fame.) The unexpected nature of the performance is something the artist hopes will provoke the gallery visitors to think more deeply about what is real and what is not—to disobey the fantasy of a system that couches everything in terms of seamless images of a perfect life, while disregarding the real needs and conflicts that surround us daily. It may be a losing proposition, but it’s one that we desperately need to attempt.

“DISOBEDIENCE IS A LOSING PROPOSITION” exhibition/performance by Giovanna Feola on December 6, 5-7PM (exhibition continues through December 31), at Backstage Studio Productions, 323 Wall St., Kingston. 338-8700.

“I STEEL HAVE OPINIONS,” MFA thesis show by Giovanna Feola, December 5-10, Samuel Dorsky Museum, SUNY College at New Paltz, 75 S. Manheim Blvd., New Paltz. 257-3844 or www.newpaltz.edu/museum.