2024 CT+6: Guerrilla Girl Body Count

 Jurors: Eric Aho, artist and Brian Galloway, Owner/Director of the William Scott Gallery, Provincetown, MA

Work by 76 Women and 33 Men accepted

Essay: Art and Social Risk

 There's an increasingly troubling political weaponization of art shows. Numerous mainstream art media channels increasingly normalize taking advantage of the art ecosystem as an exclusive and private political echo chamber and sandbox for an intolerant cohort of "collaborators".

The opportunity for true terrorism to be staged in the subterfuge of a Contemporary Art show is growing and may be breaching a dangerous critical mass.

The concern falls into a number of categories;

• The use of art shows by political cohorts to communicate, co-ordinate, or orchestrate illegal or terrorist activity 

• The use of art shows by political cohorts to smuggle or otherwise exchange weaponry or other materials to disrupt social stability 

• The use of art shows as a means to trigger or otherwise alter the behavior of a patron that results in a spontaneous reckless act of aggression or trauma

 The show and artist who inspired these observations is Tania El Koury who talked about her work in a Brooklyn Rail "New Social Environment" zoom call event.  

There is nothing about Koury's art to indicate anything but sincere aesthetic considerations but the implementation of her installations is worth examining in the context of this essay. 

This piece, Cultural Exchange Rate, is of particular interest.  It consists of locked Cabinet spaces that are opened by patrons with a key that's distributed by whoever is responsible for sitting the show on any given day. Khoury's work deconstructs some personally archival material that is distributed piecemeal among these cabinets. 

The patrons pictured have a relatively autonomous and personal experience but, obviously, there is no transparency as to the contents of any of these containers.

Given the global aspects of shows such as these shows - international special interest groups promoting their own agendas - the potential for ethnic and geopolitical intrigue is certainly a consideration worth discussing. In a violent world, Contemporary Art shows that feature coded political agendas or provide hidden opportunities for the exchange of contraband, or can co-ordinate private, exclusive access to designated spaces is problematic.  The list of abusive examples is much longer than my shortlisted items.

The artistic ecosystem needs to re-calibrate its attention to artistic concerns and reject the normalization of art as politics as religion in a world so polarized as to promote mutual distrust and harm. 

 

The Avant-Grind - Making Sense of Juried Art Shows in the 21st Century

It is a long standing convention for Juried Art shows to solicit a call for artists to submit their entries to the show based on work realized in the past, say, three years. The temporal requirement will vary and may be based only years or social event such as the Covid social isolation period. 

I bring up this topic because of the assumptions that never are questioned about the practice.

In a society in which individuals are living longer and more capable lives, artists who are older often have a large inventory of material to choose from with the last n number of years representing but a small fraction of their intellectual contributions, curiosities, and development.

Last century which was dominated by the romantic notion of the "avant-garde" - the notion that each professional artist is willingly or unwillingly enrolled in a race that represented progress as establishing a unique stream of theory or practice both different and theoretically plausible than the next artist. Furthermore, the act of being a professional artist was neither as crowded an occupation as it is today nor as fiscally viable. Compound all of that with uncertain health and lifetime expectations and often artists of that time became hostages to the choice of aesthetic rabbit hole "ism" they decided to pursue and call their own.

And as a consequence, galleries, curators, dealers, and patrons became accustomed to uniformly demanding the latest, greatest progress along these lines.  The "new", the "cool", the avantiness of the work is what everyone was tapping their foot waiting to be delivered.

By the end of the last century though the avant-garde had largely run its course, intellectually burying with the widely hailed "Death of..."  all things Modern. And today with the smoking fumes of PostModernism still fresh in the air, galleries still cling to and promote juried shows whose metrics and expectations are artifacts of a culturally unfamiliar past.

Unlike museums, galleries that solicit calls for art are precisely where local communities can find and freely access the diverse cacophony of artistic talent our political identitarians claim to look for.  

Contemporary Art is a big tent that straddles fine art and everything else that somebody/anybody considers "art" and heaven forbid you question any of its worthiness.

The pretension of an avant-garde in the 21st century simply has lost its veracity. Art is less a matter of developing an "ism" as it is a cult like devotion to believing one's identity cohort is in need of a space so safe as to deny any and all forms of discussion or criticism as unwelcome or even an assault on their personage.

And this brings us back - in a roundabout way - to questioning the virtue of requesting that artistic submissions to juried art shows conform to a newness metric - something completed in the last n years.

Today, the result is not a harvest of originality or innovation.  The result is both politically correct and politically policed conformity. The galleries are aesthetic echo chambers of empty virtue and antiseptic craft competitions.  The temporal constraints on these shows artificially create a bubble of illiberal conformity.

If an avant garde exists today, it is practiced not with ideas but in aesthetic delivery systems - digital, virtual, and augmented technologies abound.  What is persistently a vacant opportunity is the ability to present new ideas, thoughtful  contradictory musings, or -gasp- original material that has no Contemporary comfort zone.

Let's spitball some alternative curatorial possibilities.  How about juried shows that ask for a current piece and a piece from ten years ago to compare and contrast. Or why pursue temporal bounds on show entries at all?   Long practicing artists have plenty of unseen and underappreciated work worth presenting.