ART
John Russell Q & A
/ Gean Moreno
09.27.07
Caught in one of those unforgiving Chicago winters that not only chap the skin but ruin things deep inside, I find sanctuary and solace in the only place we natives of tropical latitudes usually do in such inclement conditions—a seedy, out-of-the-way bar. I intend to review, over a beer or two, some notes for a Q and A I just conducted, but things quickly go south.
The entertainment tonight comes courtesy of two loud burly union guys, working on their tenth or eleventh Blue Ribbon and future strategies for the labor movement. One, the traditionalist, calls for a re-fattening of the ranks, mobilizing a new generation, returning to the pre-Hoffa halcyon days. The other, the visionary, uninterested in old solutions, talks of the need for new flexible models for the union to match the flexibility of multinationals. Spewing some of the best blue-collar theorizing I’d ever heard (or, at least, that’s how it seemed to me, also working on my tenth or eleventh Blue Ribbon), there is a mixture of eagerness and exasperation in his tone. He's willing to wipe the slate clean and try to start from scratch, because really what’s the point of working with broken equipment.
John Russell, the subject of my Q and A, is kind of like that second burly union guy, beer-breath and all. He’s sick of doing things the same way. He wants to know what else art can do. We know that it can serve as a critical tool to probe some of the unseemly aspects that have accompanied the entrenchment of capitalist structures; that it’s a great tool of rhetorical opposition, even if it has never really been all that good at furthering real, practical changes. But art has served this function for so long that these days it seems as if it is merely putting on a show that it can perform, Wayne Newton-like, more out of habit than out of desire or disgust.
Without putting on the clown suit of willful ignorance, Russell wants to know what is it that paintings, artists’ books, exhibitions and things of the sort can be, if we forget all the uses that they have been put to and the standardized narratives that accompany them. For instance, what happens when 19th century French historical painting is recast as a back-lit digital billboard with sexy automata and shinny sports cars? Or, when a Pollock is rethought as an ornamental meatscape? Or, when Clement Greenberg with his unrealizable idea of pure flatness is recast as the first conceptual artist? What happens, in short, when we return the art object (or anything, for that matter) to some ideal virtual state and apply the pressures that will shape it from unexpected sides and skewed angles?
In the last few years, Russell has been compiling the strange Frozen Tears anthologies, which have been brought into the world in the guise of 800-page horror paperbacks with foil and embossed covers. Although perhaps at home in the same bookshop aisle as pulp slasher novels, they may ultimately earn their place at the margins of the mainstream less for the blood-and-guts fests in them than for the weird collision of views that they manage to capture. Heavyweight conceptualists Art & Language are mixed with the sticky formalism of Dennis Cooper with the weirdness of Jeffrey Vallance and Kevin Killian and Benjamin Weissman and Trinie Dalton with inimitable dispatches from the Gulf courtesy of the tweaked worldview of Reza Negarestani with the pop darkness of any number of neo-goth young artists. And all this woven with Marx and Artaud and the all-verb torrential textual currents of Pierre Guyotat. It’s less a mosaic and than a dirty coleslaw wrestling match of hefty worldviews, a jumble of active forces that somehow explains the world in its mind-tweaking multiplicity better than any prim-and-proper dissertation could.
-Gean Moreno
The entertainment tonight comes courtesy of two loud burly union guys, working on their tenth or eleventh Blue Ribbon and future strategies for the labor movement. One, the traditionalist, calls for a re-fattening of the ranks, mobilizing a new generation, returning to the pre-Hoffa halcyon days. The other, the visionary, uninterested in old solutions, talks of the need for new flexible models for the union to match the flexibility of multinationals. Spewing some of the best blue-collar theorizing I’d ever heard (or, at least, that’s how it seemed to me, also working on my tenth or eleventh Blue Ribbon), there is a mixture of eagerness and exasperation in his tone. He's willing to wipe the slate clean and try to start from scratch, because really what’s the point of working with broken equipment.
John Russell, the subject of my Q and A, is kind of like that second burly union guy, beer-breath and all. He’s sick of doing things the same way. He wants to know what else art can do. We know that it can serve as a critical tool to probe some of the unseemly aspects that have accompanied the entrenchment of capitalist structures; that it’s a great tool of rhetorical opposition, even if it has never really been all that good at furthering real, practical changes. But art has served this function for so long that these days it seems as if it is merely putting on a show that it can perform, Wayne Newton-like, more out of habit than out of desire or disgust.
Without putting on the clown suit of willful ignorance, Russell wants to know what is it that paintings, artists’ books, exhibitions and things of the sort can be, if we forget all the uses that they have been put to and the standardized narratives that accompany them. For instance, what happens when 19th century French historical painting is recast as a back-lit digital billboard with sexy automata and shinny sports cars? Or, when a Pollock is rethought as an ornamental meatscape? Or, when Clement Greenberg with his unrealizable idea of pure flatness is recast as the first conceptual artist? What happens, in short, when we return the art object (or anything, for that matter) to some ideal virtual state and apply the pressures that will shape it from unexpected sides and skewed angles?
In the last few years, Russell has been compiling the strange Frozen Tears anthologies, which have been brought into the world in the guise of 800-page horror paperbacks with foil and embossed covers. Although perhaps at home in the same bookshop aisle as pulp slasher novels, they may ultimately earn their place at the margins of the mainstream less for the blood-and-guts fests in them than for the weird collision of views that they manage to capture. Heavyweight conceptualists Art & Language are mixed with the sticky formalism of Dennis Cooper with the weirdness of Jeffrey Vallance and Kevin Killian and Benjamin Weissman and Trinie Dalton with inimitable dispatches from the Gulf courtesy of the tweaked worldview of Reza Negarestani with the pop darkness of any number of neo-goth young artists. And all this woven with Marx and Artaud and the all-verb torrential textual currents of Pierre Guyotat. It’s less a mosaic and than a dirty coleslaw wrestling match of hefty worldviews, a jumble of active forces that somehow explains the world in its mind-tweaking multiplicity better than any prim-and-proper dissertation could.
-Gean Moreno