Exhibition dates: 23rd June – 22nd September 2013
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Life (like).
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“For the French theorist Jean Baudrillard, this consciousness of construction finds its most powerful expression in the concept of hyperreality. To appreciate Baudrillard’s view, recall the treatment of literary deconstruction… Deconstruction therorists propose that words gain their meaning through their reference to other words; literary works gain their significance by the way they are related to other writings. Thus language does not derive its character from reality, but from other language. Now consider the media – newspapers, television, the movies, radio. For Baudrillard, media portrayals of the world are not driven by the way the world “is,” but by the steadily emerging histories of portrayal itself. As these histories unfold, each new lamination is influenced by the preceding, accounts are layered upon accounts, and reality is transformed into hyperreality. For example, Baudrillard asks, what is the reality of the “Holocaust”? One cannot deny that certain events took place, but as time goes on these events become subject to myriad re-presentations. Diaries become subject to redefinition by television and movies; biographies influence the writing of historical novels; narrated history is transformed into plays, and each “telling” lays the experiental groundwork for subsequent retellings. Realities accumulate, accentuate, interpenetrate, and ultimately create the world of hyperreality – itself in continuous evolution into the future. We feel we possess an intimate acquaintance of the events in themselves; they are sharply etched in our consciousness. For Baudrillard, however, this consciousness moves increasingly toward hyperreality.
And thus the culture opens to the possibility of selves as artifacts of hyperreality. As political events, health and illness, and world history slip from the realm of the concrete into the domain of representation, so a commitment to obdurate selves becomes increasingly difficult to maintain. What, after all, is the reality of our motives, intentions, thoughts, attitudes, and the like? …
As we find, the current texts of the self are built upon those of preceding eras, and they in turn upon more distant forms of discourse. In the end we have no way of “getting down to the self as it is.” And thus we edge toward the more unsettling question: On what grounds can we assume that beneath the layers of accumulated understandings there is, in fact, an obdurate “self” to be located? The object of understanding has been absorbed into the world of representations.”
Gergen, Kenneth. The Saturated Self: Dilemmas of Identity in Contemporary Life. New York: Harper Collins, 1991, pp.121-122.
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Many thankx to The Blanton Museum of Art for allowing me to publish the artwork in this posting. Please click on the photographs for a larger version of the art.
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Paul Sietsema
Untitled ink drawing
2009
©Paul Sietsema
Courtesy Matthew Marks Gallery, New York
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I agreed to have my picture taken by a photographer who was shooting Los Angeles artists… I forgot about the image until I came across it while looking up another LA artist. My photo popped up next to theirs, and I dragged it to my desktop without thinking. I opened it at some later point and zoomed in as I usually do when looking at clipped images, as I’m always interested in the pixel/ grain structures. I found the pixel formation to be compelling and almost immediately saw that the form could easily be building blocks for something that is handmade. I liked the idea of making a self-portrait that was actually an image taken by someone else, put into the slipstream of the Internet – a highly public and arguably impersonal place – and then appropriated back by me… The drawing was built up, based on the structure of the pixels, and it was pieced together and not laboriously so, probably more meditatively… For me, any form of rendering is simply about invisibility, about having 100% variability in where you place information in an image. (Text from the Walker Art Center website)
Paul Sietsema
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Ron Mueck
Crouching Boy in Mirror
1999-2000
Broad Art Foundation, Santa Monica
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Daniel Douke
Ace
1979
Acrylic on masonite
8 x 8 x 12 1/4 in.
Courtesy Minnesota Museum of American Art, Saint Paul
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Evan Penny
(Old) No One – in Particular #6, Series 2
2005
Silicone, pigment, hair, aluminium
40 x 32 x 7 1/2 in.
© Evan Penny
Courtesy Sperone Westwater, New York
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Vija Celmins
Eraser
1967
Acrylic on balsa wood
6 5/8 x 20 x 3 1/8 in.
Collection Orange County Museum of Art, Newport Beach, CA
Gift of Avco Financial Services, Newport Beach
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Robert Gober
Untitled
1997
©Robert Gober
Courtesy the artist, New York
Photo: Erma Estwick
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At the time that I made this sculpture my psychiatrist was a child psychiatrist. The waiting room or hallway was borderline crummy but also wonderful because there were an equal number of adult-size chairs and child-size chairs, evoking an equanimity that frequently moved me. As is often the case, I didn’t realize this sculpture’s real life source until well after its completion. I am convinced that for me the visual decisions or ideas happen in oblique, semi-conscious ways. This image or object was the silent companion to my talking cure.
Sometimes the tissues were on a side table or the couch, but the chair, a small wooden one, was always here next to me. In putting the two objects together I thought I was placing adult-size burdens on a child, magnified yet again in the large drain underneath. One time in San Francisco someone asked me what the piece meant. I responded that he should understand what it is physically before worrying about meaning. When you know that the painted tissue box is bronze, you know that it is unnaturally heavy and then the meanings start to flow from the physical thing itself. (Text from the Walker Art Center website)
Robert Gober
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Maurizio Cattelan
Untitled
2001
Stainless steel, composition wood, electric motor, electric light, electric bell, computer
23 1/2 x 33 5/8 x 18 5/8 in.
Courtesy the artist and Marian Goodman Gallery, New York
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Keith Edmier
Bremen Towne
2008
Installation dimensions variable
Courtesy of the artist and Friedrich Petzel Gallery
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Bremen Towne was an idea I’d been thinking about prior to [my 2008] show at Bard College. It had been floating in my head for a number of years based on the sales brochure of my parents’ home I had obtained around 1999 off of eBay. It was just one of these things I had around… I didn’t really have the idea of constructing this house back then… As it turned out, the interior dimensions of my parents’ home from the original blueprints fit directly into one of the galleries at the museum. At that point I started considering it more as an art object, or as a sculpture more than an installation… The main visual references were family photographs, mostly taken during critical events or holidays or birthday parties. My process involved going through the photo album – everything. They were all pictures of people posing, so I started looking at the spaces [in the background]… I ended up buying the whole decade of both Sears and JCPenney catalogues up until that time, the early ’70s. Through that I was able to identify some products based on visual descriptions or in the family photographs… I initially went to a place that has all kinds of wallpapers and floorings from other periods, used a lot for movies and things like that. I heard they had thousands of wallpapers. It turned out I couldn’t find the exact wallpaper that was in the house. I guess at that point I started thinking it was more interesting for me to remake it, and to remake it more or less new. I wanted to represent the time element, the moment before the day of the family moving into the new house. It wasn’t supposed to look lived in.
I think I was initially interested in doing that to have some kind of separation from taking a real object that was loaded with personal history or some sentimental thing. It was a way of moving from a subjective to an objective position… [I was interested] in just thinking about the whole interior of the house itself as a cast, or this negative space. I thought about how the house is essentially the space that shapes us, that shapes oneself… I think that my reason to make it, or to make almost anything, went beyond just the visual aspects of it, or the idea of re-creating an illusion of the thing. I’ve always been more interested in a certain level of representation or pictorial literalness… I like words or descriptions like “actual” or “actual scale.” I like the idea of “what is real?” (Text from the Walker Art Center website)
Keith Edmier
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“The exhibition Lifelike, on view at the Blanton Museum of Art at The University of Texas at Austin June 23 to September 22, 2013, invites a close examination of artworks based on commonplace objects and situations, which are startlingly realistic, but often made of unusual materials in unexpected sizes.
Organized by the Walker Art Center in Minneapolis, this international, multigenerational group exhibition features 75 works from the 1960s to the present by leading figures in contemporary art, such as Andy Warhol, Gerhard Richter, James Casebere, Vija Celmins, Keith Edmier, Robert Gober, Ron Mueck, Mungo Thomson, and Ai Weiwei, and illuminates artists’ enduring fascination with realism.
Avoiding the flashiness embraced by 1960s Pop Artists and the slick urban scenes introduced at that time by the Photorealists, the contemporary artists in Lifelike investigate often overlooked items and moments as subject matter: a paper bag, an eraser, an apple core, a waiting roo, an afternoon nap. Favouring a handmade, labour intensive practice rather than technological enhancements, the works in the exhibition – including painting, sculpture, photography, drawing and video – transform the seemingly ordinary into something beguiling, loaded with narrative and metaphor.
The exhibition explores the many ways artists have pursued realism through a range of media. Some artists featured, such as Vija Celmins, Chuck Close, and Peter Rostovsky, paint from photographs, creating works that exhibit an astonishing degree of likeness and detail. Others work in sculpture often fashioning objects from materials that belie the pedestrian nature of the subject – Ai Weiwei’s jar of hundreds of sunflower seeds, hand painted on to cast porcelain, or Tom Friedman’s bee, made out of clay, plastic, and paint. In photography, artists including James Casebere and Isaac Layman play with the hyperreal, through fabricated scenes or clever layering of images. In video, artists including Thomas Demand and Jeon Joonho create moving images that at first seem familiar, but deceive us through sly use of animation.
Conspicuously absent in most of the works in Lifelike is a reliance on technological intervention. Instead, in seemingly inverse proportion to the ease of producing goods for the marketplace, many artists are slowing and complicating their own working methods, remaking banal things into objects of fixation and desire: Catherine Murphy’s details of textured fabric on the seat of a chair, or Ron Mueck’s strikingly “real” sculpture – down to the last hair and pore – of human subjects. Frequently these artists work from photographs, but just as often, their inspiration is the observed world, and the notion that a tangible, perhaps ephemeral object or moment can somehow be brought back to life – reinterpreted through the artist’s hand as re-made readymades.
To address the nuances of this subject, the exhibition presents several key conceptual sections:
Common Objects gathers a group of late 1960s and early 1970s works that borrowed strategies from Pop, but rejected that movement’s brand-name emphasis in favor of conceptual, more process-oriented approaches to subject matter.
Another section presents the notion of The Uncanny, which features work by a generation of artists in the 1980s and 1990s who inflected realism with a psychologically-laden, surreal sensibility, such as Robert Gober’s child-sized chair and flower-covered box of tissues, resting mysteriously atop a floor drain; or Charles Ray’s disarming photograph of himself as a mannequin.
A third section entitled Realism into Abstraction presents a range of works by artists such as Peter Rostovsky, Catherine Murphy and Tauba Auerbach, in which lushly painted surfaces such as velvet curtains, the seat of a chair, and other ordinary items are cropped in such a way that they resemble abstract paintings, their original sources difficult to discern.
Handmade Sleight of Hand, the fourth section, presents work by artists who make objects that are indistinguishable from their real-life counterparts, but made with the traditional techniques of painting, sculpture, or drawing. Highlights include Jud Nelson’s trash bag carved from Carrara marble and Susan Collis’s checkered plastic shopping bag painstakingly rendered in ballpoint pen on paper.
A fifth section, Special Effects: The Real as Spectacle, presents artists making work that engages an instant response – be it astonishment, fear, confusion, or delight – through their surprising size or unusual installation.”
Press release from The Blanton Museum of Art website
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Kaz Oshiro
Dumpster (Flesh with Turquoise Swoosh)
2011
Private collection Family Hunting, the Netherlands
Courtesy galerie frank elbaz, Paris
Photo: Kaz Oshiro
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This dumpster for Lifelike is the fifth that I have made… I like the dumpster because I can experiment with the idea of abstract painting. I am always interested in the painter’s issue… I have been trying to find an area where representational painting and abstract painting coexist. With the dumpster, I can simulate or manipulate the idea of abstract painting directly on its surface. The work appears to be representational painting, but I am always thinking of it as abstract painting, with the details of paint drips, dust, and rust… I see myself as a still life painter who’s trying to be an abstract painter; I think the dumpster kind of shows this transition.
When I paint, I don’t use photographs as a reference… Everything that I want to paint is done from memory. Since the dumpster is a functional object, there are some important elements that I have to be aware of. I have to take measurements in order to know the physical volume. But sometimes I encounter problems when I try to replicate the shape exactly as an existing dumpster. So I try to combine the details and sometimes I find myself having to simplify the parts… I don’t know if it is noticeable, but usually dumpsters have metal channels that a forklift can insert into. I’ve omitted that detail from the piece because it was hard to make. For me, as long as the object I make has a physical volume that is close enough to the real object, then it serves its purpose. (Text from the Walker Art Center website)
Kaz Oshiro
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Vija Celmins
Night Sky #6
1993
Walker Art Center, Minneapolis
Purchased with the aid of funds from Harriet and Edson W. Spencer and the T. B. Walker Acquisition Fund, 1995
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I ended up doing this extremely detailed work that I detest, but I have somehow worked myself into this space and I am hoping to work myself out. But I hate to abandon the work that I have cared for for so long… I am leaving out the comet [from the source photograph] because I can’t stand an event that exciting in there. I had the comet in there but now it is maybe millimeters under [the surface]. I have redone the image many times, on top of each other. I paint it and then I sand it off… Each time I try to articulate it… If I lose it, which I often do, then I paint it again, on top of itself. Somehow I think that the image then begins to have a sort of memory in it, even if you can’t see it. It can build up a kind of dense feeling toward the end and then it makes me happy… I am very suspicious of illusionism, so the space is flat and I like that… What I’d like for it to do is give a little, so that it makes you want to go in a little bit. (Text from the Walker Art Center website)
Vija Celmins
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Peter Rostovsky
Curtain
2010
Oil on linen
72 x 48 in.
Courtesy of the artist
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What does it mean in Warholian fashion to “want to be a machine,” to long for a kind of inhumanity that has to be constantly performed and repeated? Is this not a radical disavowal of an all too human vulnerability? Can we not read in the mechanical appeals of photorealism a kind of excessive sentimentality, a naïve expressionism that uses the camera and the photograph as a shield against trauma?
And likewise in expressionism’s hyperbolic restatement of its humanity, is there not a silent concession to its opposite, a founding anxiety about inauthenticity, a mortal dread regarding the total triumph of simulation and technology?
However, it is important to stress that these are unfulfilled desires. No photorealist painting completely fools the viewer into the fact that it is machine-made; it entertains the fantasy, much like electronic music. And each autonomous artwork is only a temporary escape, a utopian space, “an orchid in the land of technology,” to borrow a phrase that Walter Benjamin applied to the illusion of reality in film.
What these two positions in fact represent are two negative theologies that stand as sentinels, forever pointing to and away from a traumatically unresolved subject position – a position of the never sufficiently technological, and the never completely human. They are both Romantic positions and should be read as such: as positions of longing and disavowal, not of identity.
Why would this be important to emphasize? Because it answers the familiar question asked to every painter painting photographs. It’s not about the ends, it’s about the means. It’s about the performance of painting that re-states the position, not the photolike product that it yields. In other words, it’s about trying and failing to be a machine. Therein resides the futility and poetic nature of the practice. The failure marks the fragility and evanescence of the subject negatively, knowing that the alternative is to misname, to misrepresent, to conjure the opposite. This poetic is more latent, and seldom acknowledged in art that aspires toward indifference and inhumanity, but I hope that I have shown that every tin man has a heart, just like every photorealist hides an abstract painter. (Text from the Walker Art Center website)
Peter Rostovsky
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Jud Nelson
Hefty 2-Ply
1979-1981
Carrara marble
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Gavin Turk
Nomad
2001
Painted bronze
Collection Ralph and Peggy Burnet, Minneapolis
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Robert Gober
Untitled
1993-94
Beeswax, wood, glassine, and felt-tip pen
9 1/2 × 47 3/4 × 40 in. (24.1 × 121.3 × 101.6 cm)
Edition no. 1/2
Whitney Museum of American Art, New York
Purchase with funds from Thomas H. Lee and the Contemporary Painting and Sculpture Committee 94.134a-d
© Robert Gober 1994
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Matt Johnson
American Spirit
2010
Paper, plastic, foam, paint, and magnets
1 x 3 1/2 x 2 1/4 in.
Edition of 3
Courtesy of the artist and Blum & Poe, Los Angeles
Photo credit: Joshua White
© Matt Johnson
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Ron Mueck
Untitled (Seated Woman)
1999
Silicone, acrylic, polyurethane foam and fabric
25 1/4 x 17 x 16 1/2 in.
Collection of the Modern Art Museum of Fort Worth
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Alex Hay
Paper Bag
1968
Fiberglass, epoxy, paint, and paper
59 1/4 x 29 x 18 in.
Whitney Museum of American Art, New York
© Alex Hay
Courtesy of the artist and Peter Freeman, Inc., New York Photograph by Jerry L. Thompson
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Jonathan Seliger
Heartland
2010
Enamel on bronze
103 x 29 x 29 in.
Courtesy of the artist and Jack Shainman Gallery, NY
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Ai Weiwei
Kui Hua Zi (Sunflower Seeds)
2009
Porcelain sunflower seeds and glass jar
Height 6.3 in.; Width 4.3 in.; Depth 4.3 in. / Height 16 cm.; Width 11 cm.; Depth 11 cm
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I think people will have the impression that they are real sunflower seeds, but they are fake seeds. It takes them a while to adjust their minds. They would always say, “Is that possible?” Then they would pick up a few. Some would even want to put them in their mouth to try. I always think art is a tool to set up new questions. [Creating] a basic structure [that] can be open to possibilities is the most interesting part of my work. I want people who don’t understand art to understand what I am doing.
Normally porcelain production requires around 30 stages. You cannot really escape from it. The sunflower seeds are made in a town called Jingdezhen; it is about 1,000 kilometers from Beijing. In the old times, the whole town made porcelains for the emperor’s court. For generations people refined the shape of a bowl or a vase; it was a very fixed language. We have been working here [in Jingdezhen] for five or six years, to try and find out the possibilities of applying the old technique to modern contemporary language. Because of the quantity – it takes 1,600 people and more are involved in the project in this town – that means almost everyone knows someone who is making “sunflower seeds.” Even the taxi drivers talk about it, but nobody understands it. If you tell them it is for an exhibition, nobody understands why you have to accept this.
The actual production is very much like the old times. You have a group of people working together – different people take different positions. When it comes to painting, it needs the most people because on every seed, each side takes three to four strokes. The most skillful ones take three strokes; for some it takes four or five. In the political arena, the paintings always had sunflower seeds. Whenever Chairman Mao comes out there are sunflowers around him. That means Chairman Mao is the sun and all the ordinary people loyal to the party are the sunflowers. Sunflowers supported the whole revolution, spiritually and in material ways. (Text from the Walker Art Center website)
Ai Weiwei
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Yoshihiro Suda
Weeds
2008
Painted on wood
Size varied according to site
© Yoshihiro Suda
Courtesy of Gallery Koyanagi, Tokyo
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The Blanton Museum of Art
The museum is located at the intersection of Martin Luther King Jr. Boulevard and Congress Avenue and is open Tuesday though Friday from 10 AM – 5 PM, Saturday from 11 AM – 5 PM, and Sunday from 1 – 5 PM. Thursdays are free admission days and every third Thursday the museum is open until 9 PM.
The Blanton Museum of Art website
Filed under: American, beauty, black and white photography, colour photography, drawing, English artist, exhibition, existence, film, gallery website, intimacy, painting, photography, portrait, psychological, reality, sculpture, space, time, video, works on paper Tagged: actual scale, Ai Weiwei, Ai Weiwei Kui Hua Zi, Ai Weiwei Sunflower Seeds, Alex Hay, Alex Hay Paper Bag, american artist, American artists, American Spirit, an orchid in the land of technology, Baudrillard, Bremen Towne, Charles Ray, Common Objects, Crouching Boy in Mirror, Daniel Douke, Daniel Douke Ace, disavowal, Dumpster (Flesh with Turquoise Swoosh), ephemeral objects, Evan Penny, Evan Penny (Old) No One – in Particular #6, Gavin Turk, Gavin Turk Nomad, Handmade Sleight of Hand, hyperreal, hyperreality, illusionism, Jean Baudrillard, Jean Baudrillard hyperreality, Jingdezhen, Jonathan Seliger, Jonathan Seliger Heartland, Jud Nelson, Jud Nelson Hefty 2-Ply, Kaz Oshiro, Kaz Oshiro Dumpster (Flesh with Turquoise Swoosh), Keith Edmier, Keith Edmier Bremen Towne, Kenneth Gergen, Lifelike, longing, Matt Johnson, Matt Johnson American Spirit, Maurizio Cattelan, Maurizio Cattelan Untitled 2001, No One – in Particular #6, Paul Sietsema, Paul Sietsema Untitled ink drawing, performance of painting, Peter Rostovsky, Peter Rostovsky Curtain, photorealism, Photorealists, Pop Artists, positions of longing and disavowal, re-made readymades, readymades, Realism, Realism into Abstraction, Robert Gober, Robert Gober Untitled 1993-94, Robert Gober Untitled 1997, Ron Mueck, Ron Mueck Crouching Boy in Mirror, Ron Mueck Seated Woman, Ron Mueck Untitled (Seated Woman), Special Effects: The Real as Spectacle, Sunflower Seeds, surreal sensibility, surrealism, the observed world, The Real as Spectacle, The Saturated Self: Dilemmas of Identity in Contemporary Life, The Uncanny, utopian space, Vija Celmins, Vija Celmins Eraser, Vija Celmins Night Sky #6, Walter Benjamin, Walter Benjamin an orchid in the land of technology, what is real, Yoshihiro Suda, Yoshihiro Suda Weeds
