ART: Surplus value
Extra Art at the Institute of Contemporary Arts
Having been bored as much as annoyed by Lothar Hempel’s Propaganda, a show that recently finished at the ICA, my expectations for Extra Art: A Survey of Artists’ Ephemera, 1960-1999 were modest, not to say minimal. At their worst, ICA exhibitions can make pretentious inconsequence look like a highly-developed art-form in its own right. So I was slightly dreading the grandiose claims made for yellowed posters and dog-eared magazine adverts, the cod-philosophising over invitations to dreary ‘happenings’, the ritual invocations of Baudrillard and Derrida over some unsuccessful and dated bit of agit-prop.
The dread, I am happy to report, turned out to be unnecessary. Extra Art is a worthwhile and often fascinating show, attractively presented and helpfully curated by Steven Leiber. The ground-floor gallery and concourse at the ICA have been filled with approximately 500 works by 190 artists, some of them very familiar names indeed, created over the past four decades or so. These works, however — if that's the right word for them — were not intended for display in the formal context of a gallery, with all the preconceptions and normative expectations such display entails. Rather, this is the incidental, non-exclusive, throw-away stuff of artists’ lives and careers, which nevertheless often consumes a lot of creative energy: the posters and invitations, gallery adverts and flyers, the odd conceptual essay into ‘mailed art’ or documentation of some long-finished event. The posters are hung against white walls; the smaller works are placed in simple cases. The result? Not only the first-ever show of artists' ephemera per se, but also an engaging whistle-stop tour of the last forty years, never lingering anywhere long enough to become boring, and throwing up some pleasant surprises along the way.
Marcel Duchamp, godfather of conceptual art, quite properly sets the ball rolling. In 1965 he sent out dinner invitations decorated with the image of the Mona Lisa on a playing-card; the artist’s handwritten caption at once evokes and pokes fun at his famous LHOOQ of 1919. So the invitations were not exactly intended to be art, but at the same time they were items made and signed by Duchamp, flirtatiously asserting a connection with one of modernism’s canonical works. As the curator suggests, probably few of those who received these invitations would have thrown them away. When does something stop counting as ‘ephemera’? This is a tension that stretches throughout the exhibition, all the way to a mass-produced paper plate designed by Roy Lichtenstein (1969) and sold in packs of ten. The one on display was loaned from a private collection in the States. One senses it has spent more of its career in glass display cases than at picnics.
All of which confusion between disposable junk and collectable artwork sounds, I suppose, rather cynical. Still, there are several points at which the actual fragility and ordinariness of presentation breathes new life into some very familiar images. It was touching, somehow, to be reminded that the once-infamous issue of Artforum (November 1974), with its ‘centrefold’ showing artist Lynda Benglis doing the only thing she ever did that made the slighted impact on the public consciousness, is just a battered old magazine, or to see those Guerrilla Girls posters (1989-90) denouncing the racism and sexism of the art establishment as old posters, rather than crisply digitised images. Or to put it in a slightly more ICA-ish way, it brought home the scary inevitability with which anything in the art world can, given enough time, be aestheticised, commodified and tamed by its institutional context. If this is the case, it is particularly ironic, given the way in which so much of this art was created as an explicit challenge to the aggressive individuality, hand-make facture and steep prices that by the 1960s had become the salient points of Abstract Expressionism.
But this is an exhibition that stirs up reflections through the quantity and quality of its content, rather than insisting very strongly on any particular paths of interpretation. Therefore one is free to amble down memory lane, enjoying the sights and familiar faces along the way. Many of the artists represented here are household names — well, in some households, anyway — with a slight but not unpleasant US West Coast bias. (Extra Art was organised by the CCAC Wattis Institute for Contemporary Arts in San Francisco, which perhaps explains this.) In any event, there is work here by Joseph Beuys, Fluxus, Claes Oldenburg, Andy Warhol, Robert Rauschenberg, Richard Long, Carl Andre, Judy Chicago and Jeff Koons, to name but a few. The other agreeable surprise is how very attractive so many of actual items are. It is strange, in a way, because so much of the art of the last 40 years is actually quite unappealing, cold, theoretical, ugly and out of touch with the world around it. Could it be that, through the very nature of the medium — not gallery art or even conceptual art, but posters and advertisements — artists were forced to engage with the world that little bit more directly, and that the resulting engagement encouraged them to eschew esoteric visual rhetoric for more traditional eye-catching strategies involving design and colour? Did the demands of the mass market force them to raise their game? Or is this simply another fragment of the dialogue between high and low culture that has become so very much more vexed and confused over the past century or so? Who knows? Still, Sol Lewitt’s drawing built up through the accretion of hundreds and thousands of individual lines, or Richard Long’s ‘platonic walks’ card, or Gabriel Orozco’s poster for agnés b. with its elegant squares of pure colour, are notably better-looking and, for lack of a better term, more functional than most of the fine art of our unfortunate age. (None of this, of course, applies to the work in this show that was intended to function as conceptual art. The products of Fluxus, for instance, or the unpromising category of ‘mail art’ were perhaps doomed to look a bit dull and irrelevant — at any rate, that’s how they look now, although they have an undeniable curiosity value.)
Finally, amongst the further delights of this concise exhibition are its fund of historical oddities, strangely dated gestures and magnificent specimens of the graphic design conventions of our recent past. You, for instance, may have realised that likeable minimalist Dan Flavin designed a poster for McGovern’s ill-starred 1972 presidential campaign (slogan: ‘I believe him’), but it came as news to me, as did Andy Warhol’s amusing ‘bomb Hanoi’ cover (1966) for an art magazine and those Lichtenstein paper plates. I had never before seen Jeff Koons’ almost indescribably cheesy magazine adverts (seals with floral wreaths round their necks, porn stars, school children ... no, I can't bear to think about it any more either). The there's the famous image of Robert Morris that might or might not have inspired Lynda Benglis’ Artforum advert — an image that now looks so staggering homoerotic (greased naked torso, moustache, old German army helmet) that it seems hard to believe they were actually going out together. And at what is undoubtedly a cheap, superficial and wholly non-ICAish level, it must also be said that in our days of retro-adoration of the late 1960s and the 1970s and even aspects of the 1980s, some of this stuff suddenly looks fantastic in its own right in terms of pure period style. All of which takes a rather a long way from the intention of the show, I suppose, yet helps to explain why I found it so very likeable.
Once upon a time, artists like El Lissitsky, Alexander Rodchencko and Kasimir Malevich withdrew from easel painting in order — for ideological reasons as much as the internal logic of modernism — to work instead in more accessible, reproducible, ‘popular’ media. Dada followed suit, as did Pop Art, desperate as it was to chase off the spectre of Abstract Expressionism with its larger-than-life heroes and their sticky impasted anguishes, and then the landscape art of the 1970s with its passion for making something that no one could collect, that no one could monopolise. (That was before anyone realising that the ‘documentation’ for such art could be sold off for a fortune.) Nowdays, though, the successors to such art are the ‘pointes d’ironie’ which greet the slim, rich patrons of agnés b. concessions, or the knowing artists like Jeff Koons who control their brand images through expensive advertisements in glossy magazines. When Tracey Emin’s cat ran away recently, she put up the usual sort of ‘missing’ posters in her neighbourhood — only to learn with horror that these were being taken down and collected by people who hoped these ordinary, unsigned items would be valuable someday. Does the concept of artists’ ephemera actually have any currency any more? Perhaps no, but at very least, this excellent show provides a service in suggesting the distance the concept has travelled.
Extra Art: A Survey of Artists’ Ephemera, 1960-1999 opens on 15 November 2002 at the Institute of Contemporary Arts and continues until 5 January 2003. The galleries are open from 12 noon to 7.30 pm. Admission (i.e. day membership) costs £1.50 Monday-Friday and £2.50 on Saturday and Sunday. An eponymous exhibition catalogue (CCAC/Smart Art Press 2001) is available from the ICA bookshop.
Bunny Smedley, November 13, 2002 09:28 AM