A few days ago over at ArtCal Zine, Deborah Fisher posted a review of the new Liz Craft show at Marianne Boesky, where she, with a gulp, posited the idea of not liking the latest offering from one of her artist heroes. My regard for Liz Craft’s work is almost equal to that of Fisher’s and for many of the same reasons.
The edge in Craft’s work comes consistently from doing what artists should never, ever do. Instead of resisting artworld cliches like seventies stuff, unicorns, or what would become “Banks Violette Gothic,” she charges into them. Instead of distancing herself from the language and materials of traditional sculpture, she depends upon them. Instead of relying on irony, she commits to a vision. The result is work that is fantastically fresh, but in no way “new.” It’s fresh because it’s wrong; because it obviously delights in fights against art history and tradition, against cliche, against what sophisticated art viewers expect to see.
However, I find myself, and this being on the basis of the image above which was originally posted alongside the review and not having seen the show nor being likely to, remaining excited about the installation precisely because it does the things that she claims it lacks.The criticism is that this avoids the usual tendency towards risk and by implication that it is too academically correct and succumbs to the conventions of a particular style and therefore that it lacks “freshness”, that it weakens its fight against art history, tradition and cliche. It seems to me that it revels here abundantly. Particularly with the Tim Burton-esque gothic tentacle flourishes that that append the otherwise austerely minimal white cubes.
It is perhaps, or rather because of, the implied narrative structure of the installation that really clinches it for me. This is of course an area that I am particularly interested in and this possibly leads my reading of it, but to me it seems to be akin to a three-dimensional and walk through comic book in which all the pictorial and figurative items deposited in the niches of the “architectonic forms” serve to create a wonderfully askew landscape. And one in which all these elements pull together and become an adventure. And that is the sort of artworld cliche that that you have got to charge in to.
But of course I have not seen this work and this should be read at best as speculation. And like Fisher maybe I am “finding that I have to muddle through my hero worship to arrive at a place of opportunity”.
Expandable and modular – Little Switzerland on a scale of 1 to 1
Reading Paddy Johnson’s interview with Dan Levenson in ArtCal Zine a few days ago I was reminded of the essay by Umberto Eco: On the Impossibility of Drawing a Map of the Empire on a Scale of 1 to 1. Levenson’s Little Switzerland project – the topic of discussion in the interview – is a similar semiotic and cartographic exercise to Eco’s in that it attempts a perfect representation of that which it replicates. So, using Eco’s map, here is an attempt to find Little Switzerland.
Listed below are Eco’s preliminary rules for creating a map on a scale of 1 to 1 and description of how Little Switzerland adheres to these rules –
1. That the map be one to one and coextensive with the territory of the empire.
2. That it be a map and not a copy.
3. That the map must exist in the empire which it represents.
4. That the map depict not only the natural reliefs but also the artifacts of the empire.
5. That the map be a map and not an atlas with partial pages.
6. That the map be a semiotic tool.