tom moody
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Irritants of the Day.
1. Jonathan Lethem's descriptions of art in Fortress of Solitude. Don't know if the Abraham Ebdus character is based on Lethem's father, or if Lethem's father is an artist, but the book feels like an elaborate revenge by a son who essentially hates art against a father wholly dedicated to it. Lethem knows just enough about his subjects to be dangerous. He can imitate the style of an Artforum review, describe an avant garde film screening, or string together a narrative of what is happening in an abstract painting or film well enough to make these things sound completely pointless and ridiculous. The book is filled with fake reviews, of art, music, etc--no one can respond to these because they are pure fiction, straw men for the writer's contempt. Lethem has a vicious wit--one wishes it could be turned on people and things that deserve it (Republican politicians, Judith Miller, etc)
2. Minus Space. If Lethem's imagined world of form-only art existed it might be found on this space. A website devoted to "reductive art"? Surely "reduction" is just one technique or strategy an artist might use to get at some significant content--not an end in itself. One might as well create a blog called Blue and only blog blue things. Yet in fact a longstanding cult persists around this "reduction," which has little to do with minimal art practices as described by Robert Smithson or Sol LeWitt (or even Peter Halley) but instead provides a safe haven for late Greenberg disciples proudly entrenched in painting's own greatest area of competence--itself--while the world changes all around them. Not everything on Minus Space is that simplistic, they've added a fair amount of "painting as architectural critique" since the site's inception, but one yearns to pluck the better things one sees there out of the limited context. Many pieces are succulent but the photos are too small; half the time you're not sure what you're looking at and the pleasures you could get from staring at monochrome and shaped canvases are stanched.
Afterthought: Minus Space has changed in the last year or so. It added a blog [wrong--see here] but no longer hosts a deep archive of its past online exhibits. Instead it features links to artists' websites (some of which are Flash--yech.) A link I made to a show they put up online last year (Daniel Gottin) is now dead. Also, the site says it is no longer taking submissions. Perhaps "reductive art" as an organizing principle is petering out. Or Petering to the extent Halley is a mentor for any of these artists.
Update: This quote from Salon's Laura Miller, writing about Don DeLillo, also applies to Lethem: "The weaknesses of Falling Man are DeLillo's long-standing ones. Most of them spring from the fact that he is an essayist at heart, who presumably chose the novel because it is the most exalted and revered literary form of our time -- and DeLillo is not the sort of writer willing to risk being insufficiently exalted and revered." It's so stupid. But it does work. Lethem's Fortress was lauded as the Great American Novel because we need such novels and young writers to write them. Whether or not the form is outmoded or the best vehicle there is a myth machine, an industry, behind it. The art world equivalent is painting, which you have to do, no matter how bad or irrelevant, to be a playa.