Judd v. IKEA
From a cell phone memo:
Tommy Robbins and I are sitting out front of Swingers on Beverly Blvd., kitty-corner from Forum Gallery, the LA franchise outlet for Odd Nerdrum paintings and drawings. The Andy Warhol cow head wallpaper of my favorite diner was hurting Tommy’s digestion, so we moved our operation out here. We just polished off a couple of mind-blowing shakes and artery-clogging burger combos. The coffee’s on its way, & we’re talking Judd versus IKEA.
TR: So, it’s your contention that the dimensional art question is at a critical juncture.
PM: I spoke to Nick Terry of the Chinati Foundation several times for the article that I’m writing for Cantanker, and for the project “Transmissions from Marfa.” When I asked him to reduce the importance of Judd’s Marfa Dream to a sentence, you know the point Nick consistently reiterated?
TR: (burp). Excuse me: I ate too fast & that frickin’ Warhol wallpaper just baffles my intestines.
PM: Did you know that the DIA outfit created a space in Marfa to counterpoint the Chinati/Judd collection? It’s called the AYN Foundation, and the first major installation included an exhibition of Warhol’s “Last Supper” cycle. It’s really curious, that choice, given the history of the series – specifically the circumstances of its commission. Andy’s cartoony Da Vinci Code-stained “Last Supper” is a supremely odd marriage of ancient sacral content with fruity anti-authorial, anti-painter POP. The Old Country Euro-Christ meets Mr. Wig. The Big Guy of DIA wanted to inject “PAINTING” into the Marfa mix, according to the promotional narrative. I call that Strange Curation.
TR: Remind me not to eat a slice of ‘za at the Pizza Foundation before I drop by AYN.
PM: You never get out of Los Feliz, much less across the continent to Borderland Tejas. Anyway, let’s get back to the question at hand: “permanent versus temporary.” Nick Terry emphasized the value of permanently installing great art in a place. The Chinati and Judd Foundations are really beautiful examples of the value = permanence equation. The benefits to Marfa and American Contemporary Art are proved by virtue of Marfa’s success as a pilgrimage destination for artsies the world over. The town’s been transformed. It’s my contention that this phenomenon demands the “culture and cultural producer” to engage the hyper-art relevant topic of permanent versus momentary. Not that a lot of people in the USA know who the hell Donald Judd is, or have ever heard of Marfa.
TR: The “people” however know his work by proxy through IKEA. Didn’t your pal Mulvany mention they’re opening one near Austin? Now, the good people of central Texas will have access to lowest common denominator Big Box Judd-inspired functional art! Really, there’ll be no need for any Austineers to make the arduous trek south and west to visit Chinati. It’s marvelous!
PM: Good point, Tommy. IKEA sent me an email last week about a bed sale they were having. The subject line reads, “Dare to Dream.” The first line of the pitch reads, “Who says quality has to be expensive?” Contrast that mind-state to Judd’s, when he wrote, “Somewhere a portion of contemporary art has to exist as an example of what the art and the context were meant to be.” I think we have a neat Marxist spectrum to discourse on, with Judd at one end and IKEA at the other. Judd will represent the capitalist elite, and IKEA will represent the all-things-equal/serve-the-greatest good of the worker side. I realize this is all screwy, because IKEA is a giant multinational corporation (and we all know that makes them fundamentally a capitalist monster debaser of humanity). However, I think a strong argument can be made that, because IKEA originated in a socialist democracy, that it is a hybrid and not a monster.
TR: Okay. What’s in the middle of the spectrum, then?
PM: Good question! LA just hosted several major art fairs. The two I attended were Photo LA & the LA Art Show.
TR: I bet they reminded you of the West Virginia State Fair.
PM: True that, Tommy, they sure did. It was tough to not composite my memories of giant pigs and adorable bunnies in fetid cages onto the art in those booths. Also, I saw the Magritte show at LACMA, “A Bizzee Baldessari Production,” and I just opened the first AFH Gallery online exhibit, Joe Hiscott’s “Business as Usual.” Bear with me while I pull this all together for you.
TR: Good luck.
PM: Thanks. Now, I want to point out at this point that Grigori Perelman has advanced dimensional aesthetics significantly recently, & this must impact our current discussion. In a recent issue of Science, Dana McKenzie wrote this about Perelman’s profound discovery:
…Three-dimensional objects with 2D surfaces, however, are just the beginning. For example, it is possible to define curved 3D spaces as boundaries of 4D objects. Human beings can only dimly visualize such spaces, but mathematicians can use symbolic notation to describe them and explore their properties. Poincaré developed an ingenious tool, called the “fundamental group,” for detecting holes, twists, and other features in spaces of any dimension. He conjectured that a 3D space cannot hide any interesting topology from the fundamental group. That is, a 3D space with a “trivial” fundamental group must be a hypersphere: the boundary of a ball in 4D space…
and
…To experts, it was immediately clear that Perelman had made a major breakthrough. It was in the title of the first section of the first paper: “Ricci Flow as a Gradient Flow.” Perelman had spotted an important detail that Hamilton had missed: a quantity that always increases during the flow, giving it a direction. By analogy with statistical mechanics, the mathematics underlying the laws of thermodynamics, Perelman called the quantity “entropy.”
TR: Paul… Did you really just unfold a couple of newly grease-smeared pages ripped out of somebody’s Science Magazine and read paragraphs from them to explain what Donald Judd has to do with IKEA? What about the art fair versus state fair thread? What about Baldessari’s Magrittish artsy multi-collage with the prints on the ceiling & cutout doors & the cloudy carpet & haphazard curatorial juxtapositions (What the fuck was Barbara Kruger doing there?) & your Canadian pal’s movie art?
PM: I’m getting round to that. Now, you’re aware that for the past hundred something years artists, philosophers and critics have been wrestling with the absence or rejection of a common God in Western Art. Hegel, Emerson –
TR: Chris Ofili, Damien Hirst, Jeff Koons – the B-52’s –
PM: Umm…
TR: Dubuffet, Bob Dylan, the Sex Pistols –
PM: …
TR: Opie, Kruger, Warhol – DUCHAMP!!! JOY DIVISION!!!
PM: You forgot Marshall McLuhan. Tommy, the point is this (& would you please stop yelling!): The Internet is making this conversation irrelevant by welcoming millions of culturally active people into the discourse, and these people are not concerned in the least with this historical dilemma. Do you know what they’re interested in as primary sources for their cultural expression? Graffiti, illustration, music video, extreme sports, skateboard and surfer culture, anime, toys, movies, commercials, raves, technical manuals, documentary photography, vintage everything…
TR: In other words, they’re poor young heathens, punks, urchins who are more comfortable in front of a playstation or computer than they are at, what, the church social? Okay. Maybe so, but I don’t see how this is dovetailing into any discussion of Big A Art.
PM: I’ll give you three names: Banksy, Barney & Murakami.
TR: Alright - Banksy we talked about already. Matthew Barney, that neo-colonialist Yalie bastard, I know you hate. Murakami – I thought he was on your Short List of Despicables, too. Am I wrong? What am I missing?
(First published in Cantanker)
