Concerning Truth
It’s become a cliche to argue that such a unified vision is no longer possible in our doubting, secular, image-saturated age, and it’s true that we cannot return to a past based on a faith that few now share. But as I viewed the three-part “Concerning Truth” exhibition–curated by Pablo Helguera, a former Chicagoan who recently moved to New York–I found myself wondering if fragmentation, doubt, and the denial of originality and authenticity were not themselves becoming cliches. Not that the art on view is substandard; in fact, the exhibit’s eclectic mix of European, U.S., and Asian artists often provided thought-provoking, if sometimes irritating, examples of postmodernism. What I missed was a vision of the show’s theme–the denial of absolutes–that was as convincing as de Hooch’s unified vision, evident in his vividly still compositions.
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In six humorous photographs titled “Exposition” at TBA, Mart Viljus places mass-manufactured objects in carefully arranged scenes, some resembling museum displays. A Snickers bar and a brightly colored “Blend a Med” box sit on shelves that also display older, far more elegantly designed boxes and packages of consumer products, perhaps tobacco tins or cigar boxes. In another photo a cute blue mouse and a more realistic raccoon and badger share a mostly brownish forest diorama. In a third, a small jar with a bright label sits on a table by a sofa, just in front of a grandfather clock in a well-ordered Victorian room. These disparities remind us of how kitschy modern mass-marketing is–except we already knew that, didn’t we? In his statement Viljus wonders “which of today’s artefacts will end up in display cases a few hundred years down the road”; he also suggests, in familiar pomo fashion, that history is merely a “distillation” of received opinions.
Charles’s work stands out because most pieces in the show not only make no such judgment but instead equate the fake and the real, the representation of a thing and the thing itself, the useful and the useless. Ho Siu-kee’s delightfully perverse machines serve the dumbest of functions or accomplish the opposite of what’s intended: if two people were to use the gas masks connected to each other in Closed System, they’d breathe each other’s carbon dioxide. His To Melt a Frozen Lake has two metal arms heated by a small fuel tank; the video documenting the object’s “use,” displayed alongside it, shows the device melting holes in icy lakes–but to what end? Ho seems to be parodying technology, which made me wonder what he would think of the fact that the panels in the photo documentation for Walking Machine are peeling off the backing; it seems that the world of technology is exacting revenge on Walking Machine–which appears to make walking harder rather than easier.
Pomo art at its worst is as flat and affectless as a sitcom. And it can be as ignorant and illiterate too. Yeats, for example, is a curious choice of poet for Xu; I wondered if the artist knew that Yeats was an arch-defender of European culture who argued that Greek art “put down / All Asiatic vague immensities,” to the West’s permanent benefit. Other works in the show are similarly sloppy in their use of language. Boggs, for example, writes next to his tickets of seeing “a Bear’s win.” Steven Juras makes the title of his faked correspondence with Wallace Stevens Steven’s and Back–which might be OK if he’s referring only to his own first name. Some of the howlers in Juras’s “letter” to Stevens must be intentional–“adeas” for “ideas”–but his use of “personnal” for “personal” seems a genuine mistake. The point is, one can’t tell. Pomo artists’ kin in the world of language are the most extreme descriptive linguists, who argue that a native speaker can never make a mistake–whatever native speakers say is by definition the language. Were this principle accepted, no one would have any reason to take care with language–or anything else for that matter. In this direction lies the corruption of all values, the denigration of all real thought.
Postmodernists who want to claim, as Lynn and Redding do, that the “distinction between truth and falsity” is “nebulous” should examine the use of the word “truth” in Watchers of the Stars. But Moore’s book can have only the most “nebulous” of relations to Fontcuberta’s intent, because the artist didn’t select any of the books or magazines for this installation himself.
