Apropos: Every Age Has Its Artist
Tim Griffin

Nasdaq may be down or up, but there’s still a mood out there, a heady, volatile feeling. Well-known art critics are running around telling art students that recreational drugs are in. That Gavin Brown is Andy Warhol, his Enterprise the Factory. Chelsea’s impersonal cathedrals suddenly seem entirely natural. The question of cozy SoHo street traffic is long off the whiteboard. Local politicians are meeting with "installation artist” and pseudo.com executive Joshua Harris to figure out how to get hold of Internet soft cash. Taxi stands and car washes seem marooned only for dramatic effect in a district that is transforming, as unseen postindustrial forces remake the seen. The force of the unseen is all the more prescient as this economic revolution has not dictated that any actual architecture be torn down. You merely reinstall and realign. As for gallerists, there’s a whole new collector class: their neighbors working 70 hours a week in the converted Nabisco cookie plant next door. After a 12-hour stint in the start-up, they head over to
Brown’s for a drink, not realizing that the bar’s attached to an art gallery (not yet).
This is not 1992, when a generation couldn’t get a job (and no art gigs, either, because half the magazines and dealers had folded). Anyway, memory isn’t made for years when memories are being made. It has no use value when the rules are new, and the scene is a scene. To take a step back is at best to recall the pivotal sequence from _Once Upon a Time in the West_ (1968) in which Jason Robards recognizes the money the mad Irishman would have made off the train, had Henry Fonda not gunned him down. "_Thousands_ of thousands,” he says wondrously.
"They call them millions,” Charles Bronson replies, uttering a word then new
to the cultural vocabulary, known only by a few.
When the world changes, so do the words. They take on new meanings, or recombine. They dissolve. Take Chelsea: one of the ways the world and its words are changing is in Chelsea’s confluence of business, pop media, and art—and this results from more than mere urban proximity, and amounts to more than an ‘80s-style feeding frenzy. Literally, the people who do one often do (or use) the others. Artists have day jobs as online designers. Peter Seidler graduates from CalArts and starts his Web company, Avalanche, as an art project (real business in the early ‘90s being an artistic taboo, or at least a frontier aesthetic territory), which gets subsumed eventually by Razorfish, which in turn determines the online "look” of discount brokerage Charles Schwab. In this climate, it should be no surprise that the rhetoric and construction of The Brand approaches that of conceptual art; or that, conversely, Matthew Barney has logos for powerful companies such as Goodyear or Ford appear repeatedly as totems in his video fantasias. Myth is myth, and mystique mystique. Make it. Tap into it. But know that the boundary situation is not what it was; pop media knows (and needs) the language of pop and conceptual art, and is creating a new context for art as—bound as it is with
technological hardware that needs unique "content”—art expands.
Every age has its artist, Baudelaire says. Speculative times deserve speculative artists. Other spheres come into play. Media interact differently. _The Society of the Spectacle_ (1968) predicted that "in the second half of this century culture will become the driving force of the American economy, so assuming the role of the automobile industry in the first half, or that of railroads in the late nineteenth century.” The online business magazine _@NY_ reports that content will be the product most in demand in upcoming years, with the next, ubiquitous generation of handheld devices. The neighborhood of Chelsea is fueled by this. Venture capital flows into new technology that demands creativity and expertise in the production and structuring of images, information, and entertainment, so that the ties between commerce and culture become more pervasive and then subtler. They "feed” each other differently. Architectures and delivery systems around art change and multiply, contexts integrate; artists start to move in different circles, and operate on and across different platforms.
Put aside the artist as machine. Media and its fashioning are materials, bought and sold. I just got off the phone with the Acconci Studio last week and learned that, "Vito definitely doesn’t consider himself an artist anymore. He’s a _designer_.” This is _the_ artist of the ‘70s, the man who masturbated under a ramp, and who followed a complete stranger for a day at uncomfortably close range. He is the original body among actual walls. What has changed? It’s in what stays the same. According to his designer’s statement, "_What I’ve retained is: the construction of architecture equals the construction of meaning._” And everything has an architecture. To design is to enter a tactical dialogue with any given site, whether in clothing, kitchen utensils, airports, desk chairs....
What if the site is the proliferating visual culture of "information architecture,” where concept meets electronic and digital product under the guise of design, of brand, of content, while Chelsea gets retooled to produce? A new site, in which architectures literal and metaphorical (images, those immaterial things, are being treated by business as real territories to trade), concrete and abstract, shape each other. What _artistic_ dialogue is to be had there? In _The New New Thing_ (1999), Michael Lewis says off the cuff that SGI and Netscape creator Jim Clark at a certain point, "had ceased to be a businessman and become a conceptual artist.” That’s dismissed easily enough, initially. But revamping business and communications models fit Acconci’s criterion. Perhaps a conceptual artist is now any number of things by name, and the words are getting larger.
Within the traditional market perameters of art, fewer artists are identifying themselves as painter, sculptor, or photographer, individually and exclusively. Ours is a hybrid day. Many instead produce a horizontal economy of objects, with single projects crossing media in the production of videos, light boxes, drawings, photographs, multiple sculptures. Whereas conceptual artists in an industrial economy worked against a system of commodification by not producing objects to buy and sell, many in today’s postindustrial economy offer the flip side of ephemerality, producing an array of objects that continually map variegated modes of synthesis and distribution. Call it a kind of soft installation.
Some register a contemporary re-negotiation of media’s material values. Matthew Barney, to pick the big fish, calls his videos "sculptures.” How so? Branding strategies and sexual storylines aside, his gallery installations are secondary; the work debuts at Film Forum. A video (transferred to film for initial viewing) acts as a time-based container for exquisitely customized sets, motorcycles, exotic birds, emblem-bearing flags, and stills which are recast as C-prints for exhibition or sale. The video field is heterogeneous, involving music, fashion, sculpture, performance. One "broadband” medium dominates and contains the others that finance it; where for some artists that’s the unseen concept, for Barney it’s the seen video. (Some have the wall of a building, and others a wall of cash.)
Significantly, this distribution model asks audiences to link object and image intimately. Barney’s objects are supposed to function beyond the videos as they do within. The _Cremaster_ series privileges modes of entrance and exit, a hole in the floor, orifice, tube, or window that the camera approaches and passes through. Images provide a system of portals; beehives operate as imagistic, associative links to peripheral information. Barney’s editing technique then also enables the camera to move from macrocosmic to microcosmic scenario—from dancers on an open football field to grapes on a blimp’s claustrophobic compartment floor—and give them equal spatial value. It has the logic of a Web page, where images accrue the metaphors of space folded within space. And where the divide between the video image and the physical object exists is only one more editing cut. Acconci’s body walks in an electric field.
I have a dream about Herzog and de Meuron’s house for a pair of collectors in Napa Valley. The walls are glass partitions upon which you may project images at any time. The walls activate electronically. It’s like living in a mood ring. The image may become part of house architecture—just as the production of cultural images is becoming part of the economy. Technology is just part of the living condition. Turn on your Barney and let it operate, dissolving into the environmental background. Your living room is partially an image, through which you can see the bedroom, and then the world outside. All blend into one visual field (beyond ten feet, the human’s binocular perception of depth actually flattens), just as the collector is part of the technological industry that made the house, and then the art work, possible. Of course, I know there is a line between having a dream and being left with desire. The Situationist architect Constant wrote of a future where the artist would be "useless.” The artist would "disappear”—in essence, because the artist was everywhere. Design studios. Start-ups. Stars. This might be happening today, but not in the way Constant would have ever conceived.