What Comes Next? The Peter Blum Gallery Looks to Young Artists Working Beyond Postmodernism

Kara Tanaka
Peradam (Holy Hermitage), 2011

By Daniel Solecki

The goal of “LANY” (“Los Angeles-New York”), the new show at the Peter Blum gallery, is to present, through the work of seven young contemporary artists, a new vision of art in the 21^st century—how a new artistic zeitgeist relates to a rapidly changing globalizing world. Instead of focusing on a unifying aspect that connects the works, the artists’ differences in style and subject are presented as the highlight the show, as gallery’s press release suggests:

“Coming of age after the acceptance of pluralism and post-modernist thought, this new generation of artists, rather than sharing a singular approach, employs very different practices in their art making. However, it is these disparate ways of production that unify them. As expressed by the philanthropist August Heckscher, “A feeling for paradox allows seemingly dissimilar things to exist side by side, their very incongruity suggesting a kind of truth.”

While it is debatable how much the 19^th century industrialist and mine-owner August Heckscher knew about defining zeitgeist, we go along with the gallery’s theoretical aims as we examine the work. There are around twenty pieces in the exhibition, representing the blooming careers of seven young artists—four from New York and three from Los Angeles. The works are in an array of mediums and tackle a variety of themes. There is cloth sculpture of upright-standing African fabrics rolled into roots with drawn-on faces of refugees (Luisa Rabbia). There are gigantic “neo-fauvist” paintings with allegorical figures and exaggerated symbolism (Andy Cross). Deerskins are partially-shaved into “holy maps” of mountains (Kara Tanaka) and lotus blossoms are abstracted into black origami forms (James Melinat). There are “post-post impressionist” and folk-art-esque quilt designs (Benjamin Degan), huge acrylic painterly abstract shapes over sepia photography (Kevin Appel), and staid paintings resembling architectural models (Daniel Rich). If this sounds like an eclectic mishmash of irreconcilable styles and approaches, it is.

Attempts to qualify contemporary zeitgeist in the process of its formation (exactly what the LANY curators are trying to do) are similar to quantum physicists’ vain attempts to capture rare subatomic particles that disintegrate moments after their isolation. Critics and curators who are able to delve through the white noise of modern artistic production and designate “zeitgeist” are hailed as prophetic. Today, in an age of artistic pluralism, contemporary curators can have the luxury of taking a simplistic method in tackling the daunting task of zeitgeist-definition—combine the work of vastly different contemporary artists into one pool and label it’s variety “zeitgeist.” It is indeed very easy to say, “Here, look! Everyone is doing something different! Anything goes!” While that isn’t exactly what the curators at LANY do—there is indeed a message behind the choices—it is dangerously close.

The “kind of truth” that the curators are hoping the viewers draw out of their choices’ “incongruity” is that all the works are significant departures from the nihilism of postmodernism. The works are free of irony and even, in some instances, seem to search for a sort of sincerity. Tanaka’s deer-skins aren’t a pastiche of Native American roadside kitsch, like a great deal of Native American-inspired contemporary art (see Jaune Quick-To-See Smith), they are sincere spiritual musings about the connection between the animal and the cosmos. Degan’s quilt-painting Actor, attempts a reconciliation between the high art of Aeschylus’ Orestia (the word is written in Greek and English in the background) and the quaint beauty of folk art (the quilt) with the human figure as the unifying factor. Its equally impossible to find any sort of postmodernist play in Andy Cross’ Walking Liberty, an enormous canvas painted bright indigo with all sorts of stenciled and painted columns, numerals, fires, comets, and geometric shapes swirling around a bold female allegory. As much as it seems unbelievable, it seems like Neoclassical female allegories have found a way into the 21^st century. Rabbia’s refugees are also sincere—they are portraits of real people undergoing real suffering. Her characters’ searches for meaning aren’t regarded obliquely—they are explicitly rendered in the work itself as their root like extensions seem to search for soil on the gallery floor.

But what can we make of all this? As a young person myself, I know well of the sentiment behind artists’ refutation of ironic postmodernism in favor of more “sincere” art. This is the same complaint I’ve heard all over—in off-handed discussion with other students and in the novels and essays of writers like David Foster Wallace and Jonathan Franzen and in this show too. Instead of ironically refuting and deconstructing the philosophies of times past—what is generally understood as the program of postmodernist art and theory—young people in the 21^st century yearn for meaning in what appears to be an increasingly meaningless world. Instead of ironically playing with the rubble of an old world and the pieces of a fragmented culture, these artists in LANY, like many young people, seek to build their own structures anew.

As I understand them, the philosophical ideas behind postmodernism—the incompleteness of language and mathematics, the inaccuracy of historical metanarratives, and others—have significant merit philosophically. But this, of course, doesn’t mean that good art has to stay true to these notions. Art should have the freedom to move and not be conservatively tethered to a particular philosophy. However, in examining this show, the movement away from postmodernism appears as a movement away from intelligent art. Rabbia’s refugee sculptures and drawings merely feel more like alternate versions of UNICEF posters than great political art—they embrace the abstracted image of the eternally suffering refugee as the truth of being a refugee, and disregard any notion of the refugee as a real, tangible, nuanced person who does things other than suffer. Tanaka’s new age maps of “holy hermitages” are little more than post-hippie kitsch that could be seen as outright disrespectful to the real cultures that their works rip off of. The Andy Cross paintings show a huge departure from contemporary styles, earnestly diving blind and headfirst back into the world of narrative painting and allegorical figures. While Cross’ vision is certainly bold, it is also outrageous. Why is Liberty wearing a swan as a hat? Why are there all these numbers and geometric symbols flying around? This is more than mere art historical referencing—it unconsciously forgets to account for a huge part of art history, namely, the modern era. It’s hard to see this as anything other than kitsch.

LANY presents us with a perplexing series of questions. Is all this really what the response to postmodernism will look like? Is this really what “sincere” art in the 21^st century will be—hopelessly naïve, unconscious of history and big ideas, and earnestly developing kitschy new aesthetics on the rubble of the old? I certainly hope not. I know these artists can do better. My generation’s artists and writers are set with a monstrous task of moving art to a new aesthetic, one beyond postmodernism, and, of course, still create works of fascinating beauty and ingenuity. I sincerely hope the generation is up to the challenge.