Scene I
Wade Guyton, “OS,” at the Whitney Museum
Roger
Don’t you think there’s a sense of punishment, James
an element of self-mortification in the way
Guyton has been embraced by the institution?
A recognition that contemporary art
can do no more than imitate
the mode of production outpacing it?
I’m talking about The Digital, of course
James
I don’t see it
Guyton is making sure
photographers will always finish second place
by using their technology and exploiting it
better than them
Roger
But it’s clear that his work validates a discourse
in which the painting is the symptom
and the painter the vector
of a mindless automatist disease
Just listen to curator Ann Temkin
Ann Temkin
Pollock flung it
Rauschenberg silkscreened it
Richter took a squeegee
Polke used chemicals
Wade is working in what by now
is a pretty venerable tradition
James
Guyton isn’t afraid to get his hands dirty
even if that means
keeping them clean
Unless an artist gets his hands dirty
he is a selfish asshole who adds nothing to the world
in my eyes
Wade Guyton
I never really enjoyed drawing or art classes
I would prefer to sit in front of the TV or
play video games
Scene II
Tacita Dean, “Fatigues,” at Marian Goodman
Roger
Tacita Dean?in a sentence please
James
Joyce’s “ineluctable modality of the visible” plus time
Everything in her work is about how time
lends itself to the bittersweet
Roger
That’s two, and her drawings
James
They’re from memory
Roger
Is she a modernist
James
She starts from point zero on everything
But everything in her work
feels like her work
because of her inherent negativity
Roger
Wow
Scene III
Caleb Considine at Essex Street
James
The main product of the MFA system is self-consciousness
a surplus of self-consciousness that exceeds the dialectic
creating an oscillation that tends towards agitated stasis
like being stoned and over-caffeinated at the same time
This is communicated here in a palette of icy blue-grays
and the white of latex paint
under fluorescents
Roger
These paintings aren’t so far from Guyton
They tackle the same structural issues:
the disappearance of the referent
the screen as landscape
the slippage between formats
the triumph of the copy
These are the great themes of twenty-first-century art
what Vanitas was for the Dutch Golden Age
Here the artist has couched them
within academic realism
James
In Patrick you look at the face and you think
Egyptian portrait mask
Then you look at the hair and think
Where did the artist study?
Gallery Attendant
Considine did his graduate work at Yale University
Roger
I see early Lucian Freud here
here and in the work of
Peter Stitchbury
James
There have been no decent British painters
thus far in this century
Roger
What about the 19th
James
Gwen John
Roger
Spencer is good, I like Spencer
I don’t like Sickert
James
At least Sickert was a murderer
Roger
Well he murdered Impressionism
Gallery Attendant
Can you please take this somewhere else?
Fin.
