You’re Human Like the Rest of Them*

‘The staggering number of creative-class 20-year-olds on the L train with full-sleeve tattoos should have indicated to us that we’d finally, inevitably, overextended ourselves.’
Jason Murison, ‘Black Bleeds Red: On the Art Market’s Nervous Breakdown’, Paper Monument, issue three, 2010

Last week saw the launch of the third issue of Paper Monument. Published annually by the people behind (intellectually dashing to some, infuriating to others) politico-literary review n+1, this Brooklyn-based art journal is edited by James Bae, Christopher Hsu, Naomi Fry, Dushko Petrovich, Prem Krishnamurthy, Jessica Slaven and Roger White, and elegantly designed by the prolific Project Projects studio (of which Krishnamurthy is also a founding member).

I first came across Paper Monument last year, when they published a slender book with the droll title I like your work: art and etiquette. With contributions from 30 writers, artists and curators (and the odd dealer thrown in too), I like your work… speculates on what the place of etiquette is in the ‘socially professional and professionally social’ art world, and the ways in which ‘social mores establish our communities, mediate our critical discussions, and frame our experience of art’. Unafraid to admit that many situations encountered professionally in the unregulated art world are shaped not in some effortlessly cool exchange of perfectly intuited social niceties and informed small-talk but for the most part by a kind of awkward muddling through, what appeals about I like your work… is its intelligent-without-being-smart-assed and endearing-without-being-cutesy admixture of humour and honesty. It is a little like chatting over a drink with a friend, asking them, ‘is it me or was that meeting with my gallerist/conversation with that curator/studio visit with that artist completely fucking weird?’ and your friend replying: ‘Yes, it was. Don’t worry. You’re not alone.’

Paper Monument‘s purview is broader than that of I like your work…, but it makes similar use of humour and sharp social observation. Issue three opens with an co-authored editorial made up of short vignettes; for instance, an artist giving studio tutorials at an art school (‘A painter told me that his work was about the difference between good and bad energy, and that to make the paintings he entered a trance state where he could see auras around people and objects. The paintings were all blue’), or the fate of an artist’s collective (‘There were six of us in the collective to begin with: Stephanie, T.K., Karl, Olle, Sang, and me. Karl was the first to go; he was offered a show right after graduation, and said he needed to focus on the studio. T.K. left on ideological grounds, citing our “reproduction of problematic hierarchies at the organizational level of the collective.” (Technically she kicked everyone else out […])’. But the journal is not all wry satirical sketches about the lives of young, full-sleeve-tattooed middle class MFA grads. Amongst the other highlights of the issue are Roger White’s essay ‘On the Aesthetic Edutainment of Man’, which situates the total immersion installations of artists such as Christoph Büchel, Mike Nelson and Gregor Schneider at the confluence of art and property development (turning ‘incomplete or derelict spaces into culturally validated destinations ’); a piece by Jessica Slaven that looks at how artist Matt Mullican’s socially awkward alter egos, assumed under hypnotic suggestion, can rattle ‘the unspoken covenant of professionalism’ that binds the specialist art audiences who watch his performances; and a straight-talking piece by Christopher Hsu, the title of which rather bluntly asks: ‘Did Anyone Understand Chinese Art?’

Timothy Aubry’s ‘How to Behave in an Art Museum’, compares different generational attitudes to looking at and understanding art; how older orthodoxies of respect for the institutions of art compare to today’s reflex ones of deconstruction and distrust (‘if you don’t believe in high culture, then what are you doing in a museum?’). In ‘What is this Art World You Speak Of?’ Naomi Fry takes a witty, post-crash, long view on Sarah Thornton’s 2008 book Seven Days in the Art World (a title I always thought would be more accurately rendered as Seven Days in An Art World, since there are many, and the razzle-dazzle, deep-blue-chip one described in her book doesn’t bear much resemblance to the ones inhabited by most people I know who work in contemporary art). Asking whether Seven Days in the Art World is ‘a Hollywood Babylon for our more methodologically-responsible times’, and finding little that’s Babylonian about it, Fry observes that ‘what comes out strongly in the book, over and against its internationally-tinged sophistication, is the deep sameness of the contemporary art world’ and that in reading Thornton’s book, ‘we come to see the art world as a place whose self-involvement is its most radical attribute’.

What Paper Monument appears to be trying to do is react against such self-involvement. It uses satire, anecdote, and a little healthy distance to articulate how the experience of inhabiting the art world (or, indeed, art worlds) has a tangible effect on its products and workings. It directly addresses the foibles, hopes, neuroses and other manifestations of messy subjectivity that usually get hidden behind the white-painted walls of all those post-industrial buildings converted into galleries, pushed behind the scenes of high-powered conferences with titles like ‘Art and Social Responsibility’ or ‘Curating Badiou’, kept well away from the pages of art magazines, or are reserved only for the long dark nights of the soul spent alone in the studio. Quite how much mileage there ultimately is in Paper Monument‘s approach remains to be seen – there’s a danger that it’s self-deprecation could curdle into its own kind of self-involvement – but where it’s valuable is in cautioning that, as philosopher Nina Power has put it, ‘the art world is not the world’.

(*The title of this post is taken from a short film  made in 1967 by writer BS Johnson)