Amalia Ulman at Jenny's
Marcel Duchamp’s Fountain became the ultimate alpha-to-omega act of artistic appropriation in April 1917 when he submitted it to an unjuried exhibition held by the Society of Independent Artists in New York… it was refused. From there, it would leap straight to the finish-line of avant-gardist telos, as it has come to be understood by critics like Peter Bürger in his 1984 summation of such end-game-bound artistic activity, Theory of the Avant-Garde. The humble urinal marshaled the focus of critical attention not to the autonomous work of art itself, but to its surrounds—the space in which it sits and the networks of power that confer its status as art. By the 1970s, artists like Hans Haacke—whose installations, Frederic Jameson wrote, acted, like “invisible spiders, whose net contains their own containers and turns the private property of social space inside out like a glove”1—would go a step further in intertwining those institutions and networks directly with a body of prior conceptual art practices that had thoroughly plumbed the extremes of whatever meaning the self-contained art object could present on its own.
A decade after Duchamp's volte-face, Vincent Sardi Sr. opened Sardi’s Restaurant on West 44th Street in Manhattan’s Broadway Theater District. The establishment soon became the gastronomic center of New York’s theater scene. Colorful caricatures of the restaurant’s most notable showbiz-star customers, drawn by “in-house” artist and Russian émigré Alex Gard, quickly filled the space’s walls. His handiwork was freely bartered for all-you-can-eat access to the restaurant. At the Chinatown gallery Jenny’s, Argentine-born artist Amalia Ulman has herself interwoven these two practices—Haacke’s institutional critique and the Sardi scenography—into a single body of work. She has commissioned a professional caricaturist to execute the likenesses of several dozens of New York City’s present-day “downtown” notables. The subjects include well- or maybe not-so-well-known artists, writers, performers, podcasters, and even a restauranteur known for running this circle’s eatery-cum-social-hub. They are also portraits whose subjects might be familiar only to those in-the-know, the middling zone occupying the slightly dimmer side of the Rumsfeldian epistemological axis (the “unknown knowns”), for which a term like “z-list” would hardly be applicable, seeing as this is a side of New York far far removed Hollywood’s industrial “talent” factory.
The survey of an art/social scene that takes the form of an installation of taxonomic portraits is certainly not without precedent. David Robbins’s Talent (1986), for instance, consists of 8-by-10-inch headshots he had commissioned of eighteen of New York’s most buzzed-about artists of that time, including Jeff Koons, Cindy Sherman, Robert Longo, and Jenny Holzer. Most striking, perhaps, is Robbins’s uniform approach to stylizing each photograph—a slick yet exceedingly approachable visual manner that commercial actors employ to create their stock-and-tradable self-simulacrums for casting calls. Each face, overdetermined, exudes eagerness, personal ease, and hire-ability. Yet the happy-go-lucky looks that pervade the series belie the otherwise rather ruthless jockeying for preeminence or persona that had, in many ways, come to characterize that art world, and it is this slightly cynical act of exposure that becomes the crux of the work. More so, Robbins’s installation does what, according to Jameson, Haacke and his contemporaries, specifically “photographers” and “videomakers"—“the most political and the most innovative”—did best: “undermin[e] the image by way of the image itself … [plan] the implosion of the logic of simulacrum by dint of [ever] greater doses of simulacra.”2
Ulman's update of the Sardi caricatures nods to the time-honored practice of establishing a visible connection between a well-loved establishment and its most notable and equally loved regulars. (My dry cleaner does just as much, albeit in the form of signed headshots.) As in Sardi’s itself, the personified and peopled history of a scene is constructed and documented, nailed down to a specific establishment—one of institutional import (to that scene)—and hung up right on the wall, as it were. The half-loving, half-mocking gesture Ulman performs here is to call our attention to a “scene” in as much as it otherwise might go unseen. But what constitutes a scene and from where is the underlying significance of the personalities that populate it derived? Is the telos of a scene strictly a retroactive construct? Does “a scene” even need to have a shared aim, or even a plausible concept of practice—to say nothing of tangible products—to be operative as such a formation? And what is a talent? Does one even need to have “it”—that is, visible talent—to be notable? In the final analysis, did “Dimes Square” (as a scene, and Ulman’s scene of choice) ultimately offer anything more than the Dimes Square think-piece? Is this the legacy so-called institutional critique has left us: in as much as “the institution” is always active—at arms- (or alms-) length—as an omnipresent source of financial support, is its critique now reduced to mere navel-gazing (perched at the outer steps of the museum or gallery entrance)? Is there anything left to do beyond hanging the portraits of that networks’ “self” creation on the wall?
If that is the case, the missing connection is opaque but implied—allegory, here, would certainly be on par with the times—and can be found in terminology borrowed from the financial sector: “underlying significance,” might be better rendered as “the underlying of the significance,” as in derivatives trading. This would, moreover, implicate capital (quite broadly) in observable social transformation, implying a material movement toward exchange and ultimately toward alienation—which, for Bürger and others of his persuasion, was the foundational historical development preceding modernism and the avant-garde. Depending on who you ask—Jameson, perhaps, and Adorno, certainly—this movement has become nothing if not totalizing. In this respect, Haacke's installations check-mated the social systems in which art is inextricably embedded, and the figuring of "private property” in his work is central to this operation. (Haacke thus checks Adorno’s most important box too, on the list of aesthetic criteria for an art of “dialectical reversal”3 [Schönberg plays in the background]. Formally—and I am paraphrasing here—the artist must use their materials at the “most advanced” level of their development in society. Novel in Bürger’s analysis was his demonstration of how the avant-garde differed from modernism in its approach to such reversals: the forms of art's dissemination became the targets of its formal attacks.) The rest of this lineage is in many ways then left to recede into the backdrop and have a fun party—“relational aesthetics.”
Warhol’s Screen Tests might be the ur-gesture of this off-shoot lineage of artistic inquiry, occupying a position somewhere between Duchamp and Haake in the lineage/legacy of the avant-garde: by plumbing the anatomy of a filmic scene, reducing it to almost nothing (among other, simultaneous aesthetic operations) Warhol revealed the basic sinew of a social scene. It is to Andy, the early sage of the late-capitalist lifeworld, that we should credit our culture’s most potent, reflexive figuration of fame’s inherent nature: its ephemerality. In this cutting reduction of the duration of cultural significance—a mere fifteen minutes—we begin to see how far this culture can go, at times, in cleaving social import from something like excellence.
Amalia Ulman
Jenny’s
January 28 - March 4, 2023
9 Pell Street
New York, NY 10013
jennys.us
Fredric Jameson, Postmodernism, or, the Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1991), 409.
Ibid.
See Susan Buck-Morss, “Criticism of Surrealism: Atonality as Model,” in The Origin of Negative Dialects: Theodore Adorno, Walter Benjamin, and the Frankfurt Institute (New York: The Free Press, 2021), 127–31. Buck-Morss does a service in not only explaining Adorno’s dialectical approach to composition and form (as in his discussion of Schönberg); but also locates this approach in Adorno's critique of his friend and intellectual compatriot, Walter Benjamin, and his writings on surrealism. She shows not only how Adorno carried this critique, or “correct cognitive … ‘model’” over from form to philosophy, but also into an analysis of idealism in Husserl—idealism's “most historically advanced form.”