Dan Colen

Poetry

Gagosian Gallery NY

Vast Abstract Expressionist canvasses made with chewing gum and confetti, a skateboard half-pipe, a toppled row of Harley Davidsons, and a large brick wall fragment propped up by huge steel I-beams, move aside Damian Hirst, Dan Colen is the new bad boy of the downtown Chelsea art scene.

Predictably, the naysayers are out in droves with the usual outcries; disgust or at best polite dismissal. But Larry Gagosian has done it again! Master of ‘Art as Spectacle,’ he seems to have cornered the enfant terribles market, those still capable of shocking the gallery going public, just when most thought we are all shock-proof by now. Not that Colen’s outing here is really much of a shock, it’s more an adolescent prank writ large on Gagosian’s monstrous walls. Or is it? Well there is a strong stench of adolescence as you walk through the gallery. One can’t help comparing the current art world to what used to be known as the rock world, essentially a world of institutionalized adolescence. Now, much of the art world addresses the same issues of youth culture. Art stars are molded and hyped in the same way as rock musicians, or I should say Hip Hop stars. Admittedly, the audience is much smaller, but the analogy still holds.

The main buzz are the ‘paintings’. To an unsuspecting viewer they might look like one more tired round of AbEx painting. But no, wait. These are not just bad rehash Pollocks, they have the added twist that their stringy Pop colored skeins are actually chewing gum. There, how’s that for irony!

What does this say for Abstract Expressionism and the triumph of American painting? What does it say about Colen and his generation’s attitudes about art and life. Is it an homage to that most revered era of American art by way of gentle teasing? Is it a swipe at abstraction by Pop made by a third party?

Or is it a kind of dismissal of a generation’s accomplishment delivered with the arrogance of youth? Maybe it is all these things and more.

Of course there is a vast difference of intent between a Pollock, say his Number 31…. of 1950 and Colen’s work. There is undoubtedly a sense of humor at play here that struggles just a little to overcome a self- congratulatory giggle at it’s own joke. Abstractions out of gum, although hilarious for a moment, nevertheless lapse quickly into weak one liners even a bad comic might think twice about before delivering to an audience already jaded by it all.  A kinder take on these works might be that Colen is indeed posing serious questions about the demise of High Brow culture in an age of media overload and tabloid hype. Of course this becomes hard to take when Colen is the direct beneficiary of the hype, to the tune of a rumored $300,000 price tag for a single canvas. Still, when given the benefit of the doubt, Colen seems to be asking:  can we take these things seriously? Does painting mean anything to us anymore, never mind a Jackson Pollock?  And if you want to stretch it further, do we have faith in art anymore? Can it lead to transcendence? Do we even care?

I can’t help thinking that Colen is directly challenging Hirst as a the pre-eminent commentator on Life and Death and everything in between, at least in the art world. Even his titles have the same epic, or longwinded if you prefer, contrived construction.  Though Hirst is guity of excesses in the past I’d still give him the edge, at least for now over Colen. Some parallels can be drawn between the two. Hirst has obvious debts to Bacon and Minimalism, especially Judd’s boxes while Colen is drawing on AbEx  and in his photo realist work, Gerhard Richter. His candle paintings, although derived from Disney call to mind Richters beautiful renderings of candles.

Hirst has addressed deep issues with dark means. His meat and flies are much more disturbing than fallen motorcycles. Colen on the other hand attempts to face big issues about existence with a lighter touch.

There are of course precedents for Colen’s antics or perhaps we should call them strategies. Lichtenstein’s Pop comic book brushstrokes come to mind as do Larry River’s offerings in the form of diner menus and history paintings served up as gestural painting. 

So what’s the big deal? Do these works leave a bad taste in the mouth of some viewers because they think this kid and his buddies chewed gum for days and then simply smeared the stuff all over pristine white fields with a middle finger prominently stuck up in the public’s face.

What irks folks most about Colen? Is it because he seems to be a brat, thumbing his nose at art and everything else? Is it because he seems to be just one more hyped up art star ‘challenging’ our assumptions about what art is or should be? There’s probably truth in both these statements. Let’s face it, Mr. Colen is a product of a bubble gum culture. Is he a manufactured Pop idol like the Monkees or the Archies? Those shaking their heads in disbelief should be reminded that Last Train to Clarksville and I’m A Believer have at least become classics.

Is Pop culture the only game in town? We have a very uneasy relationship with how we live, our dependence on that way of life and our hypocrisy at critiquing it at the same time. It begs the question: if we are so critical of our lives why we live the way we do. Do we get the culture we deserve?

Gagosian is the Disney of the art world. His gallery spaces are malls where people go to be entertained. It is this value of entertainment that is such an affront to many art lovers. Art as spectacle, art with mega production values cannot help but be compared to a Hollywood aesthetic.

As for the bubble gum, we all remember as kids when the bubble bursts it has a nasty habit of coming back in our face.

Jenny Saville

Anyone familiar with contemporary figurative painting knows the formidable work of Jenny Saville. For the past thirty years, beginning as a peripheral YBA, she has steadily climbed the ladder of contemporary art stardom to sit somewhere near its pinnacle. She emerged through the collector, Charles Saatchi, in the early 90’s with a gift for figurative realism, somewhat in the style of Lucian Freud and from there expanded her range to documentation of Bacon-esque deformation of the human head, either through injury or because of plastic surgery. The wounds and disfigurement along with corporeal bodies announced her consummate mastery of painterly realism on a scale that took on the big boys of painting. But it’s the taking on of the big boys that has planted the seeds of doubt in this writer’s mind.

I’ve already named two big boys, Bacon and Freud. They were formative influences and for a young painter just finding her voice, wholly expected. In her recent work she has obviously been watching the strategies and methods of Abstract Expressionism, De Kooning in particular. Her building up of flesh has taken on greater gestural authority over a lengthy period. The substance of paint itself, a stand -n for flesh or even by transubstantiation flesh itself. At least this is a noted aim of Saville’s. Her scale has remained enormous which flirts with the problem of overblown importance. The grand scale, ubiquitous in contemporary art brings up art as spectacle and worse, entertainment. Extremely large scale announces ahead of time its importance. The viewer is robbed of her own sense of discovery. It’s as if the painting tells you what to think before you draw your own conclusions. Since Pollock et al. introduced the painting as mural, this sort of scale has become an issue people accept and avoid at the same time.

With scale, authoritative facture, unimpeachable skill, and shock firmly established tools of her trade Saville has in the last decade aligned her practice with the titans of painting. This not only includes those already mentioned but the Old Masters and the explicit introduction of abstract gestural painting. This new stage exposes her work to new criteria and reassessment. It’s one thing to paint heroic figures in a de Kooning manner in a spirit of irony and as a possible feminist stance, but then the introduction of Old Master composition and technique opens the work to another level of fragile exposure.

The recent paintings are more obvious in their construction. She begins with a frenzy of abstract gestural tropes and then superimposes her trademark realism over the top being careful to leave strategically placed passages of the underlying abstraction. The ploy has become a series of quotations rather than the unified statement of her earlier work. Maybe she tired of the body as site for disruption by elective surgery which provided her with a subject and the topical content of women under societal pressure to conform to the male gaze. Now her work has in some ways become purely formalist. She’s interested in how paint behaves, how style performs; if I fuse one style with another will my scale be justified, can I make tradition and modernism work together.

These recent quotations announce importance because work as pre-emptive strategies in the same way scale does. Out of One, a pastiche of old master draughtmanship, pentimenti, coupled with Abstract Expressionist calligraphy, evident in her recent large-scale drawings, compounds her vulnerability as an artist losing her grip on what she has been very good at, using her unquestioned ability with paint to honestly and sincerely state her truth as a painter. Now she’s wandered into a post-modern maze where she is quoting all the important influences, in this case, Twombly-esque scribbling, doing a mash-up to evoke a grand unified statement. The results while superficially impressive, can appear hollow. It’s a terrain that has been cushioned by the comforting knowledge that quoting old masters such as Leonardo protect the work from scrutiny by its association. All risk is diminished and the danger is a dull safety pervades the work leaving its pallor of mastery a pale diaphanous veil.

I have no doubt of Saville’s sincerity. It might be said her development echoes that of any number of highly successful artists of the last forty-five years. The art market itself, its hype, its wealth are contributing factors to the rise of reputations often ill-equipped to deal with  extreme pressures of investment and commercial gain. Saville appears to have her head firmly on her shoulders but has strayed somewhat to feed the discourse. This pressure to present something new, while understandable, can tempt an artist into territory not their own. Saville is better when she addresses her concerns. It is always dangerous to embrace fashionable strategies and theories belonging to others. It can easily slip into a pose. Saville is better than that.