Look. I'm a big fan of art as a truly serious force in society, as serious as science or anything else, growededed up as I am on Dewey's Art as Experience. But "skepticism towards the medium" of painting! Yllog! Drat' nrad! How "acerbic." How sexy and novel! How racy and randy and raw! (Pardon, one question: wasn't painting "dead," like, 30 years ago?).
I'm willing to go to the limit on what counts as "art." But I have no patience whatsoever with shit that counts as art because galleries have created a scene in which they bleed off each other like mud-caked leeches. Apart from the decorative utilitarian crap most galleries use to earn their feudal keep, the Utter Shit School began - arguably, of course - with Damien Hirst and Jeff Koons. It continues with idiots like Hurd. Oh, yes, but I hear your plaintive aesthetophilic cries. The art world thrives on denouncing those who don't get it. Yes, art world, many of us do get it. We are just waiting to be contacted when the artworld is over its Utter Shit Phase.
“Fucking Painters,” reads the headline in a typically acerbic oil-on-canvas in Steve Hurd’s new solo show at Rosamund Felsen Gallery. Or rather, “sretniaP gnikcuF,” as the entire lengthy text — a blogger’s review of a San Francisco Rachel Lachowicz opening — is reproduced backward, thus rendered illegible to all but the most diligent (or mirror equipped). The chatty text goes on to flatteringly characterize Lachowicz as “a seriously smart sculptor/painter who is best known for her elegant and hilarious send-ups of art by famous male artists” while name-dropping ’90s-L.A.-art-world where-are-they-now candidates Keith Boadwee, Kim Dingle and Kim Light.
The picture — cumbersomely titled Art Schtik Blog Made Conceptual by Painting’s Reflective Nature [or] Flipped Off — includes Hurd’s backward, dripping, purple rendition of Lachowicz’s eye-shadow imitation of one of Christopher Wool’s tiresome black-and-white word paintings, a sequence of appropriation and inversion layered just enough so as to teeter on the brink of ridiculousness. Or meaninglessness. There’s a formula in espionage that says once you pass the third generation of cover stories, the truth is anyone’s guess. Who exactly is being flipped off here? Lachowicz? Wool? Comy the blogger? The ’90s-L.A. art world? Painting itself?
This fierce ambivalence is typical of Hurd’s work. “Fucking Painters” pretty much summarizes a major subtext of his oeuvre — an unquenchable skepticism toward the medium and the often blatantly corrupt mechanisms in which it functions, as well as an entirely justified irritation with those whose doubts are more easily assuaged. But in spite of his confrontational attitude and deliberately, sarcastically mannered painterliness — or perhaps because of it — Hurd is among the best and most contemporary of painters working in L.A.
2 comments:
Who's read Carey's What Good Are the Arts??
Oh, yes, but I hear your plaintive aesthetophilic cries. The art world thrives on denouncing those who don't get it. Yes, art world, many of us do get it. We are just waiting to be contacted when the artworld is over its Utter Shit Phase.
Great line.
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