Thinking about graduation has in turn been making me think about the role that tradition, repetition, and cyclicality play in the way in which we all choose to work. Looking back over the years, the common thread between all of us, and perhaps the overarching direction of the art world at large, seems to be our shared sense of, and obsession with, indexicality.
Several have theorized that our present cultural landscape is the result of primary elements of Postmodernism, pastiche and irony, exhausting themselves. When we reference the referential, the original meaning is lost and replaced with something else; biting satire inevitability loses its edge, simple childhood fables are mentally rewritten as grand allegories, the archaic becomes quirky. Now, we remember the movie, not the source novel.
This acculturative re-appropriation as been with us for some time, but at the moment is responsible for some of the most interesting art being made today. While in great debt to the Pictures generation artists, these artists are in many ways taking those ideas and are redefining and elaborating on them.
While he has been getting a fair amount of exposure, Paul Slocum has for years been working within pre-existing systems; deconstructing video games, consumer electronics and internet culture, and in the process, exploiting inherent flaws to explore and rework our understanding of, and connection to, the media that saturates our lives.
In his last large work, You’re Not My Father, Slocum created a sequence of recreations of a 10 second scene from the television show, Full House, and overlaid the video with a set of sound loops from the scene’s original music. Crews were assembled to re-shoot the scene through Internet message boards and Craigslist, using a set of precise instructions that Slocum devised. In spite of the choreographed blocking and dialogue, the scene is never the same; perpetually out of sync and echoed with looping canned music, the scene and the basic premise of the show itself undoes itself before your eyes.
Along a similar, if differently angled path is the work of Mike Kelley. In 1995, Kelley created his best known work, Educational Complex, an combined model of every school he attended along with the house he grew up in, leaving out the parts he couldn’t remember. The piece, resembling a modernist architectural model that describes, as Howard Singerman, put it, “the failures of memory and the constrictions of fiction.”
Existing simultaneously as a compositional exercise and an autobiographical tableau, Educational Complex is in many ways an homage to artistic instruction. Trained in the tradition of abstract formalism, Kelley’s Complex is ordered accordance to Hans Hoffmans’s push and pull ideas of structure and appearance; Kelley is using formal language to echo is own artistic genesis.
Using that which you know is of course nothing new, but in a world in which information is instantly available and utterly decontextualized, this work seems more relevant and immediately accessible than it might have ever seemed before. It is this playful readability that makes this work all the more interesting.
Finally, in light of all of this appropriation, it seems quite appropriate-
-Collin
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