Introduction
Lionel Bovier & Fabrice Stroun
(p. 9-15)
This fourth volume of the “Positions ” series —which aims to
question artistic and curatorial practices from the singular
position of an artist who writes both on his /her own wor k as
well as that of other artists —stands out in more wa ys than
one . This anthology includes short fictions alongside the essays
and interviews that have been the series' fare to date, and is
structured as to produce an experience akin to reading a novel.
Through the progression and interplay of the texts, the author
gradually emerges as a character in a kind of real-life
Bildungsroman, set in a world of specialized image-producers.
Selected for their narrative gist as much as for their
keen critical analysis of the makeup of American culture, taken
together these writings yield a coherent narrative of the profound
transformation of Robbins' artistic itinerary from downtown
New York post-punk-DIY conceptualism in the early 1980s,
to, today, a willing participant in the research-and-development
branch of a hyper-lubricated, market-driven, all-encompassing
entertainment industry. Divided into two distinct thematic and
chronological poles, “The Children of Barthes and Coca-Cola” and
“Intellectual Showbiz,” the anthology reproduces the above indicated
evolution of recent American art history and the profound
transformation of the status of the artist that it implies. At
the same time, this coming-into-being “fiction” is not another
account among many of success (or failure) in New York City. As its title indicates,
The Velvet Grind points to a much slower
day-to-day equilibrium between privilege and discipline, between
decadence and weariness on the one hand, and industriousness,
deliberation, and long-term commitment on the other.
Producing images (mostly photographic) and objects (imbued with
a comedic quality rather than any stylistic or thematic consistency)
alongside texts, Robbins' practice concurrently develops
two lines of investigation. Occasionally the two tracks do converge,
yielding direct correspondences between words and
actions, but for the most part they remain essentially independent
productions.
Like many other artists of his generation, at the onset
of his career David Robbins posited mass-media entertainment as
the definitive perspective of American culture. Andy Warhol, who
broke ground on the edifice that would come to occupy Robbins'
work, is thus a recurring presence in his texts. That Robbins'
first job in New York was as a Warhol Factory assistant partially
explains why he did not seek to duplicate Warhol's revolutionary
self-legitimization strategies in any way shape or form. (
1) Rather,
his brief Factory stint, little more than a year of service,
gave him a head start toward “my own thing—whatever that might
turn out to be. At Andy's, I saw what art-world glamour was.
Talk about starting at the top! You didn't get bigger than
Warhol. And seeing it up close liberated me from having to pursue
that experience. I could look for something else, build another
model.” (
2)
“Let's not be afraid to make something that isn't art,”
Robbins would write in 1993. “There will always be plenty of
slaves to the superego of art—a fact that should free the rest
of us to risk the pursuit of new territory. Actually, this pursuit
is almost an obligation, if we take seriously the idea that,
at this point in history, art, the widest cultural aperture, is
less about the invention of pictures and objects than about
the invention of behavior.” (
3) His rejection of the art-world star
system exemplified by Warhol didn't stem, then, from a purist
neo-conceptual posture or a puritanical aversion to the market. Instead, as is evidenced from the texts collected here, it was a
logical outcome of the artist's idiosyncratic use of mass-media
culture as a horizon of the Great American Imagination. (
4) Why be
content to be a great American artist or a great American entertainer,
he asks more than once in this volume, when one could
possibly embody the Great American Imagination?
As the sum of hopes the spirit can spatially (geographically)
conceive of, the notion of the Great American Imagination has
always implied some kind of physical spanning of the American
vastness and so, in 1995, after residing in Europe (Brussels,
Cologne, Graz, Naples … ) during most of the previous seven years,
Robbins repatriated not to New York but to his native Midwest. (
5)
The Midwest is known as the place where American artists come
from, certainly not where they move to. Yet, halfway between
New York and Los Angeles, the Midwest, a place that stands on the
margins of dominant cultural production, geographically incarnates
the hybrid “third option”—neither art nor entertainment—
advocated by the artist from the very beginning of his public
life. Writing from Milwaukee where he currently resides, the
artist states: “The most highly evolved Midwestern imaginations
are quite conscious that they represent and embody an alternative
to the dominant models of culture making celebrated in and
promoted by the magazines and TV shows produced in the current
centers. Being officially ‘out of it' and in the middle of the
country, Midwesterners enjoy a natural, deep-dyed perspective on
the seamlessly managed professional culture of the often dubious
commercial product that is ceaselessly lobbed at them from the
coasts. The model of emergent Midwestern contemporary culture
is based in part on plasticizing, activating, and exploiting that
perspective to risk something new.” (
6) At the end of the day, the
Great American Imagination appears within the following pages
as a structural—and ultimately political—paradigm rather than
an existential one. The narrative that can be garnered from this
anthology is one of a progressive move away from the centers of
cultural production, and toward marginal territories that exemplify
the day-to-day usage of this said production; a move away from the mediated images of the individual as envisioned by pop
culture—“the expressive side of marketplace culture” (
7)—and toward
works that not only investigate but also produce social,
or rather socializing, events. (
8)
Yet, if
The Velvet Grind does provides a narrative of the transition
between the most sophisticated picture-based practices of
the 1980s to the “relational” 1990s and digitalization's promise
of expanded behavioral freedom, Robbins' Midwest—which the artist
likens to a kind of American Scandinavia—bears little resemblance
to Dominique Gonzalez-Foerster's Brasilia, Pierre Huyghe's
neo-modernist outskirts of Paris, Philippe Parreno's images of
the deep sea, or the collectively-conceived decors for the appropriated
Manga character Ann Lee. Contrarily to his younger
French forebears' colonization of liminal territories, Milwaukee,
or for that matter, Brussels, do not set stages for any kind
of romantic projection. This, deflating side of his sensibility
had shown up early, in the most well-known piece from his
days in New York,
Talent (1986). A series of 18 photographs of
a generation-and-a half of up-and-coming New York-based post-
Conceptual artists taken by a professional headshot photographer
whose lens was usually directed at hopeful actors, Talent
already stood in sharp contrast to Jeff Koons'
Luxury and
Degradation portraits of a fresh bourgeois-class-in-the-making
shown in New York that same year. Freedom, which Robbins repeatedly
couches in terms of “full access to my own imagination,”
never emerges in his work as a known quantity, as an internalized
socio-cultural allegory of success, but as a concrete, physical
provision for action. What he does with this freedom, liberating
creative forms from fixed contexts and positioning new
contextual horizons for artists' productions, is only hinted at
by this book: it happens here and there, today and tomorrow, in
the art world and elsewhere.
Postscript
Fabrice Stroun
On the morning of Saturday November 12, 2005, I set out to return
from New York to Geneva. On the way to JFK, I asked the
driver to take a detour through Chelsea in order to see Robbins'
latest piece of theater. A few days prior, I had received a public
notice from the artist's gallery announcing that he was taking
his leave of the art world, and that all of those works still
consigned to his New York gallery would be placed on the sidewalk
for the taking, free of charge. A compulsive collector myself,
I had at first imagined taking something. But once on site,
rather than join the fray, I strangely found myself unable to
do so. What is it really necessary to burden myself with one
more object? Why not instead unload all of my suitcases full of
artists' books and editions and leave them on the sidewalk as
well? Yet, contrarily to Huebler's famous statement about the
fact that there are too many objects in the world as it is—so
why bother adding new ones!—Robbins' flyer doesn't so much
embody a “radical” position as a satirical one. It didn't call for
a critique of the art system, be it for its fetishism or the
ever-expanding comedic character that regulates the incestuous
commerce between artists, critics, curators, collectors, and dealers;
rather it produced (as in theater) a comedy. In the end, the
joke is on me. I should have taken something. I didn't—an exhilaratingly
funny and liberating thought that has nagged me ever
since.
1. There is no doubt that Warhol's successes and failures in the matter far exceeded
those of his 1980s followers, whether they were acting from within the art world
(Jeff Koons), or outside of it (Robert Longo). In “Pops” (a short version of which
appeared in
Artforum, October 2004, as “Biz Kid”), an autobiographical reminiscence
of the artist's days at the Warhol Factory, Robbins concludes: “Warhol's art, occupying
an intersection of the trajectories of formidable social and technological forces,
happened to be about a society then in the process of discovering its modern scale
… Hoping to replicate Warhol's impact is as foolhardy as expecting the repetition of
modern mass culture's Christopher Columbus phase of self-discovery.”
2. From a conversation with the artist, May 25, 2006.
3. “The Dr. Frankenstein Option” reproduced in this volume, p. 209–227.
4. To reinvest in earnest in the concept of the American imagination, while fully engaging
in the most radical transformations undertaken by his generation to the
status of artist, the work of art, its institutional validation, and its concomitant
exchange value—transformations that we have come to categorize under the general
category of “postmodernism” (and which include the loss of aura of the work of art,
the critique of “authenticity,” the ironic deflation of the grand narrative of the
historical avant-garde, etc.)—may seem strange, so much have we come to identify
this decade as one of an anxiety-ridden
désenchantement. Yet, this historical construction
excludes a gamut of artists for whom the collapse of modernism's utopian
principles has been experienced as joyous and productive comedy. As it turns out,
the majority of these artists started their careers at Nature Morte, a gallery run
by two artists, Peter Nagy and Alan Belcher, and for whom Robbins acted as a kind
of in-house writer. The fact that, with very few exceptions, almost all of these artists
had stopped producing art altogether or had moved out of New York by the mid-
1990s accounts for their absence from today's descriptions of the ideological debates
of that era. Reflecting back on this decade in the pages of
Artforum, Robbins
wrote: “the most lasting contribution of the East Village conceptualist, intangible,
but appearing everywhere since, may turn out to have been a discourse of happiness—
affirmation of the present and receptivity to the future.” (“ABC TV,” reproduced in
this volume p. 103–112).
5. By the time Robbins reached New York, the Great American Imagination had deteriorated,
after its hedonistic transformations in the 1960s and its subsequent embodiment
of the deception of that decade's unrealized dream (Hunter S. Thompson's
Fear
and Loathing in Las Vegas), into the resulting self-alienation and psycho-pathological
obsession with greatness (Tom Wolfe's 1972 essay “Why They Aren't Writing the
Great American Novel Anymore”) that characterize our collective memory of that decade's
self-serving excesses. Robbins' earnestness, of course, is steeped in critical
irony: any possibility of self-transformation, of personal growth, can never be
experienced apart from the chain of associations that lead back to the mass media's
exploitation of it. Consequently, Robbins is able to de-psychoanalyze this whole
narrative of ideological disintegration, or more precisely, to put in quotation
marks the pathological “feelings” that accompany it.
6. From “Notes on a Midwestern Makeover.”
7. See note
3.
8. This two-step progression is made evident when one compares, for example, “Art
after Entertainment,” a prospective text written in 1989, when Robbins was still
making photo-based work (“I am calling for the planting of the flag of a third culture
that might draw upon the virtue of both contexts, art and entertainment. By
processing entertainment through the sensitive faculties of art, we can discover the
patterns of entertainment culture in order to determine those aspects of mass media
culture most worth preserving. And by injecting the experimentalism of art into entertainment,
we can produce more satisfying models of entertainment and eventually
blackmail our irresponsible entertainment culture into becoming a civilizing force,”
reproduced in this volume p. 129–142,) and the latter writings related to his
Ice
Cream Social project (1993–onward), republished by JRP|Ringier in 2004, and which
serves as an addendum of sorts to the present volume.
