Daniel Flahiff‒October 21, 1992‒The question is, how long must we endure the incessant proclamation, 'Painting is dead,' or worse yet, its reciprocal, 'The rumors of painting's death have been greatly exaggerated'?
Whether one subscribes to a linear [either cyclical or evolutionary] theory of aesthetic history or to an inclusive one--as do the works in this installation--the polemics do not change. For the debate over painting, or more precisely, "over the autonomous object which must include sculpture and other mediums as well" is rooted in aesthetic movements appearing nearly a century ago.(1) It appears that no matter what the ideology of the participants, the debate itself behaves (as so many before in the realm of aesthetics) like a limiting function; each new movement strides boldly half the distance to resolution, yet conclusive realization remains forever half the distance away; enigmatic ad infinitum. (2)
As early as 1914 Marcel Duchamp, spring boarding from Cubist and Futurist contemporaries, began setting the ground-rules for this debate with his first Readymades. Together with his subsequent abandonment of painting for a wry espousal of the 'primacy of the intellect,' Duchamp and his Readymades undermined not only the autonomous object and the concept of originality, but the validity of art itself. (4)
Co-opting this skeptical sensibility, the majority of movements which have dominated this century--Dadaism, Surrealism, Happenings, Fluxus, Pop Art, Minimalism, Conceptual Art and Arte Povera--have imitated, appropriated, questioned and asserted; constantly challenging the nature and validity of art and the "ever increasing number of things drawn into the eddy of new taboos."(6)
Today, as the exponential growth of technology begets a society of isolated individuals--each one nevertheless conveniently seduced into impotent conformity through the mass media--skepticism about the autonomous object and self-expressive originality reaches Orwellian proportions, provoking explicitly eschatalogical aesthetic challenges.
If it is true, as demonstrated throughout history and articulated by Theodor Adorno that "true art challenges its own essence," then it follows that an essential component of that challenge must include parody and satire, manifest primarily in imitation. (7) My works negotiate this realm.
Currently within this general area of agreement there exist two primary modus operandi: imitation as homage and imitation as reconstruction; the latter intentional, the former unintentional.
The former employs imitation initially as a form of parody. Invariably however, nostalgia overtakes original intent resulting in homage. Whether directly as in George Condo's Big White One; in sarcastic, soft-porn send-ups as in David Salle's work; or in mock-originality, as in the work of Sherry Levine, these artists 9despite claims to the contrary0 essentially eulogize the perceived death of modernism.(9)
The latter incorporates imitation as a method of reprocessing. Accessed through collective cultural memory, the body of modernism 'provides the fragments from which to build a new vision..."(10) Working in this way, artists such as Stephen Prina reprocess modernism in systematically limited imitations, attempting to construct 'qualitatively' new objects.(11)
Regardless of theoretical orientation, these artists work either from original to reproduction to homage or from original to reproduction to reconstruction. My work however, works from original to reproduction to imitation of imitations; or satire.
In a sardonic inversion of this by now all to familiar debate, these pseudo-scientific Odaleschatalogical Essays satirize the narcissistic preoccupations of much of my contemporaries art. Odaleschatalogy is a parody of the incestuous necrology and "soothsaying the end of everything" implicit in the eschatalogical challenges art brings on itself.(12) Seen as a body of work, this installation is a visual/painterly imitation of current linguistic deconstruction, employing from the body of western art icons, the odalisque as a bodily metaphor for the imitation of the body of current art as it imitates the body of western art production; narcissism ad nausium.
As is laid bare by these works, irony will have the final word in this debate, for hidden within the apparent tautological nature of the eschatalogical challenges art brings upon itself lurks an implicit eschatalogical aesthetic. A truly apocalyptic oxymoron, the exchatological aesthetic at once denies and confirms its own validity, originality and authority.
Notes
1. Bernice Rose, Allegories of Modernism (New York: The Museum of Modern Art, 1992), p. 19.
2. Mathematically speaking, the limiting function is [lim/n to inf. x/2n=0].
3. Anne d'Harnoncoult and Kynaston McShire, Marcel Duchamp (New York, Museum of Modern Art, 1973), p. 72.
4. Ibid., p. 105.
5. Doreen Ehrlich, Masterpiece of 20th Century Painting (New York, Mallard Press, 1989), p. 105.
6. The obvious omission of Abstract Expressionism from this account while admittedly open to some debate , is in keeping with the well-rehearsed practice of its categorization as the belated capstone of impressionism which itself culminated some 400 years of artistic development. See Arnold Hauser, The Social History of Art, Vol. IV (New York: Vintage, 1958), pp. 226 - 236. See also Theodor Adorno, Aesthetic Theory (London and New York: Routeledge & Kegan Paul, 1984), p. 1.
7. Theodor Adorno, Aesthetic Theory (London and New York: Routeledge & Kegan Paul, 1984), p.2.
8. Jeanne Siegel, "After Sherrie Levine," Arts Magazine (Summer 1985), p. 141.
9. For further discussion, see Rose, Allegories of Modernism, p. 64, 78, 87. See also Thomas Crow, "The Return of Hank Herron" in Endgame: Rethinking Representation (New York: The New Museum of Contemporary Art/Boston: David Godine Publisher, 1984), p. 209.
10 Rose, Allegories of Modernism, pp. 105 - 113.
11. "Art undergoes a qualitative change when it attacks its original foundations. Thus art becomes a qualitatively different entity by virtue of its opposition at the level of artistic form, to the existing world and also by virtue of its readiness to aid and shape that world." Adorno, Aesthetic Theory, p. 2.
12. Ibid., pl 5.
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