George Baker – The Other Side of the Wall [PDF 1000Kb]
Okay, I just deleted a very long, rather breathless paragraph about how much I love George Baker’s writing, how I don’t care who calls him and old-guard reactionary, how he could probably convince me of anything, if he put his mind to it. It may or may not have ended with me detailing a fantasy of skipping along a beach at sunset, hand-in-hand with him and Miwon Kwon. But there are limits to how much nerding-it-up is really appropriate, even here.
Instead, suffice it to say that his article on Tom Burr from the most recent issue of October is absolutely fantastic. The link above is to a copy of the PDF. By posting it, I’m probably violating every term of my subscription, but I do not care. It’s really, really good, and I, for one, will be reading it over and over again, this summer.
I’m hesitant to summarize it, but, briefly, briefly: first, Baker traces the history of Burr’s appropriation/reconstruction of Minimalism and demolished gay cruising grounds as a means of queer politics, which is the standard reading, but here he does it all by way of Freud’s conception of melancholia and the “Fort/Da Game*.” He goes on, in a really very sweet passage, to talk about how the self-abnegation (a characteristic of Freudian melancholia) can be thought of, in Burr’s work, as both a means of asserting a political and as an act of love and care. The second half of the paper talks about Camp as it relates to Burr’s appropriations (most of this is borrowed from Sontag), about the generosity of Camp, how Camp appropriation can perhaps reconcile the implosion of sculptural practice in the 70s. And it ends with a blistering, blistering tell-off to Jeff Koons and, especially, to Matthew Barney **. I don’t know that I agree with it, but I always, always enjoy it when a critical essay can actually make me clap my hand to my mouth and whisper “oh snap!“
I’m going to be revisiting this, and, for the time being, I’ve just finished reading it, and I’m still kind of buzzed. But oh my god, oh my god, it is good.
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* The Fort/Da business blew me away, as I’d never heard of it before: the central metaphor is of a child taking masochistic pleasure in repeatedly throwing away his toys and then retrieving them again: for Freud it’s a continual reënactment of the moment of abjection as a response to the mother’s physical absence. This alone, in and of itself, could stand as a statement for my birds, and, indeed, my other tempera paintings. To the point that I’m beginning to question whether or not I, in fact, read about it before, internalized it, forgot it, and then unwittingly made a whole body of work about it–and not even metaphorically. I actually, repeatedly absented [by gessoing] and retrieved [by repainting] actual toys as a response to the actual absence of my actual mother. It’s kind of spooky, to be honest.
**
Barney’s Cremaster project is in fact not only too Oedipal to be Camp, it is too murderous as well (which is of course linked to its Oedipal logic). Indeed, in my opinion, Barney’s work represents a violence more insidious, much more sinister, than mere kitsch. [...] But this specific kind of evocation runs throughout the entirety of the Cremaster cycle. For this is a work obsessed with turning all of the now-canonical signifiers of Camp sensibility, or even a distinctly queer sensibility—S/M, Art Deco, porn, Busby Berkeley musicals, feathers and boas and drag queens—into something like a new archaic mythology. Of course, myth—especially fraudulent myth—is not fun, nor is it frivolous; it is, instead, tragic (if not deeply tiresome). [...] More distressingly, one might even claim that Barney’s work can only be read, in its strict fetishization of the entire panoply of Camp signification, as part of a much longer and deeper social abhorrence of the Camp sensibility. In the incessant, obsessional cataloging of every form of Camp experience in these films, we witness a chilling phobia, an increasingly desperate battle to eradicate the tender social challenge of Camp and of the queer [...] I will go so far as to say: Cremaster is the holocaust of the aesthetic that once produced Flaming Creatures.
And this violence also points to why artists such as Koons, or now Barney, seem to engage with sculpture in their work, only, ultimately, to render the medium desiccated, if not to destroy it altogether. (Cremaster is also the holocaust of the historical medium of sculpture.)
to wit, oh snap!
