For our last week we read an interview with Leo Castelli, the once prince of New York's art scene, and Modernism at large, for the influence he garnered through his gallery. There he showed the likes of Warhol and Lichtenstein and other pop art elite. He was as much a social phenomenon as an artistic one, and single handedly shaped the art world of the 1970's and 1980's. This was a time of the Great Ego, where artists relied on what Castelli called confidence. The absence of this confidence was not humility according to Castelli, but more of a kind of existential crisis, a crippling sense of reality. I think that this lack of confidence is the number one obstacle to my own work as an artist. Throughout our reading of Suzi Gablik, she has been crushed by the weight of realization of ecological crisis. Personally, I am too busy being crushed by the local and global socio-economic crises, in addition to the ecological and spiritual crises, and don't even get me started on aesthetic or ethical crises, that I have succeeded in not being wholly crippled by any of them. Yet.
Without an ego that can withstand the knowledge of global suffering, it is often hard to find motivation to keep working. The egos of Warhol and the like allowed them the comfort of treating life kind of like a big joke, but one to which only they knew the punchline. By not sharing this little secret (or in fact pretending that they indeed held this secret), they were spared the responsibility of responding to the world's strife, unless it was convenient for them to so.
But what has happened since artists decided that maybe they should give a fuck? That their audience certainly needed to give more of a fuck than they did before. What we have found in the interim is kind of reactionary art, where artists no longer feel able to make art without shouldering some of the world's burden. This makes artists way less fun and less likely to be paid bazillions of for having fun.
I find that Donald Morgan has found a kind of elegant solution to these two sides. Instead of needing to pull off the big hustle, the inside joke of the pop art scene, and without the obligation to have a greater cause to his work like so much of the 1993 Whitney Biennial, he is satisfied to present a personal take on a much smaller joke, one he shares with the audience. There is attention to craft that undermines the urge to write the work off entirely as a one liner.
Throughout the term we haven't really broached the subject of humor in art, or in politics for that matter, but it seems a strange topic to avoid. I think that the "traditional" art world frowns upon the use of humor, that satire may cheapen the value of sentiment, but from what we have discussed in this class I fell like the art world could use a little cheapening. I think it's ridiculous that no one saw any humor in a bunch of screen printed soup cans. I have always thought it strange that every one took a lot of modern art so seriously, that the artist themselves felt obligated to fill the role of tormented genius.
I was recently watching a documentary on Ron English, and he started as this really funny, outlandish street artist and then ended up on a knock off of Donahue being told he needed to settle down. His wife wanted him to make more money (fair enough), so he started turning out more paintings, but they just weren't as funny, and for that I found them less meaningful- perhaps because they were being designed with the gallery in mind. Conversely I think that Morgan's Drunk Robot is so funny especially because of it's gallery setting, but I may find it less humorous once I see the price tag.
***Above is Ron English's take on Andy Warhol's take on Marilyn Monroe (with a little help from Disney). Funnier is better.
