Lusya Kotlar Collages and Assemblages February 17 through March 13, 2003 Reception: Thursday, February 27, 2003 at 6 p.m. Essay by R. Sarkissian

Postmodern Dada?

Magazine cutouts, fake jewelry, feathers, toys, photographs, seashells, readymade plastic and tin frames, and materials that exemplify the myth of “low culture” are the ingredients of Lusya Kotlar’s works on display. These works, executed roughly between the years 2000 and 2003, have climbed on the white walls of the “modern” gallery—a synonym of “high culture”—unrolling with them a twentieth-century modernist legacy that includes such a series of names as Max Ernst, Marcel Duchamp, Hannah Höch, and, closer to us, Robert Rauschenberg, along with the early collages of Sherrie Levine. It is, however, such a work as Marcel Broodthaers' The Eagle from the Oligocene to the Present of 1972 that Kotlar’s output seems to bring in our minds—though this is more of a “conceptual” parallel than a purely formal one. And such a “conceptualism” resides within the reception of the viewer rather than the intentionality of the artist, for Kotlar’s eyes, mind and hands act as mirrors of the very world around us: supermarkets, department stores, magazines, households. In a sense, these works have brought mass culture into contact with a few segments of the unconscious: a face from a magazine cutout has been rearticulated through “eyes” that are themselves two different faces, a nose that is itself a female model, below whom there is the image of a dog “barking dollar bills.” Here is a picture of the mind. “You get the picture…” as the colloquial expression goes.

The “stylistic” parallels between and disjunctions of Marcel Broodthaers' and Lusya Kotlar’s works are somewhat in tune with the French psychoanalyst Jacques Lacan’s sentence: “An interpretation whose effects one understands is not a psychoanalytic interpretation." The terrain of the Globe Institute Gallery that opened in August 2002 has included a set of works bearing such lexical signs as “Post-Impressionism,” “Fauvism,” “Cubism,” “Suprematism,” “Dada,” “Surrealism,” “Ab Ex,” “Color-field Painting,” “Minimalism,” and so forth. Kotlar’s work here takes the stance of Broodthaers' in the context of forthcoming exhibits. And this context could perhaps be best stated through the last paragraph of “A Voyage on the North Sea:” Art in the Age of the Post-Medium Condition by art historian Rosalind Krauss:

One description of art within this regime of postmodern sensation is that it mimics just this leeching of the aesthetic out into the social field in general. Within this situation, however, there are a few contemporary artists who have decided not to follow this practice, who have decided, that is, not to engage in the international fashion of installation and intermedia work, in which art essentially finds itself complicit with a globalization of the image in the service of capital. These same artists have also resisted, as impossible, the retreat into etiolated forms of the traditional mediums—such as painting and sculpture. Instead, artists such as James Coleman or William Kentridge have embraced the idea of differential specificity, which is to say the medium as such, which they understand they will now have to reinvent or rearticulate. [1]

The extravagant cunning in the examples of Lusya Kotlar here, coupled with invitations and booklets from Mary Boone Gallery, The Guggenheim Museum, paintings reproduced by The Metropolitan Museum of Art, the 100^th issue of the journal October titled “Obsolescence” and such, echo the very extravagant cunning of Marcel Broodthaers, just as the upcoming exhibition of the works of Matvey Basov in the month of April will “rearticulate and reinvent” the phenomenology of mind, matter and psyche—that is to say, the physicality of the medium along and versus its “aphysicality.” –RAPHY  SARKISSIAN

What is Postmodernism?

Postmodernism is a school of literary and cultural theory that takes into account the characteristics of Modernism and views them in a more favorable light. Modernism is the movement that dominated the arts and culture of the first half of the twentieth century. What had become the old standards concerning how art should be constructed and what art is were being challenged and rejected. Traditional approaches to art forms were put aside in favor of different and opposing conventions such as the dissolution of harmony and melody in music, and the rejection of traditional realism in favor of experimental forms in literature.

When comparing Modernism and Postmodernism, it is readily apparent that the practices of each school of thought are largely the same. It is the attitude through which Modernists and Postmodernists view such practices that is the key difference between the two. Whereas Modernists view the break with tradition in favor of experimentation as mournful—as leaving behind a longed for past, Postmodernists celebrate the freedom of something new. Thus, the paradigmatic aspects of Modernism and Postmodernism are very similar, but the viewpoints are in direct opposition to each other.

A discussion of Modernism and Postmodernism would not be complete without some attention to culture—specifically, high and low or popular culture. In brief, whereas Modernists privilege 'high' culture such as literature and classical art and music, Postmodernists refuse to put any art forms on a pedestal and revel in combining the everyday aspects of popular culture with what has been considered 'high' art. Consider Andy Warhol's transformation of a Campbell's soup can into a piece of art and you can get the gist.

Dada 

New York and Western Europe, ca. 1915

One of the first large-scale movements to translate art into provocative action, Dada produced some of the most antibourgeois, antirational, anarchic, playful works to come out of the 20th century. It began in 1916 in Zurich’s Cabaret Voltaire, where expatriate artists, poets, and writers gathered in refuge from World War I. Dada started as an indictment of the bourgeois values responsible for the horrors of the war, and assumed many forms, including outrageous performances, festivals, readings, erotic mechanomorphic art, nonsensical chance-generated poetry, found objects, and political satire in photomontage. Over several years it developed in New York as well as many European cities—primarily Zurich, Berlin, Cologne, Paris, and Hannover—through the activities of such artists and writers as Jean Arp, Hugo Ball, Marcel Duchamp, Max Ernst, George Grosz, Raoul Hausmann, John Heartfield, Hannah Höch, Man Ray, Francis Picabia, Kurt Schwitters, and Tristan Tzara.

Neo-Dada 

International, 1950s

The term Neo-Dada, first popularized in a group of articles by Barbara Rose in the early 1960s, has been applied to a wide variety of artistic works, including the pre-Pop Combines and assemblages of Robert Rauschenberg and Jasper Johns, Happenings, Fluxus, Pop art, Junk art, and Nouveau Réalisme, as well as other Conceptual and experimental art forms. The unifying element of Neo-Dada art is its reinvestigation of Dada’s irony and its use of found objects and/or banal activities as instruments of social and aesthetic critique.

Collage

In their experiments with Cubism, Georges Braque and Pablo Picasso proposed a new art form in which the subject of the café collided with the surface plane of the painting. At once serious and tongue-in-cheek, they methodically reexamined painting and sculpture and gave each medium some of the characteristics of the other. In the process they invented collage.

It was Braque who purchased a roll of simulated oak-grain wallpaper and began cutting out pieces of the paper and attaching them to his charcoal drawings. Picasso immediately began to make his own experiments in the new medium. Their use of papier collé (a term used to distinguish cut and pasted papers from the more inclusive term collage) signaled the beginning of a new approach to art. Picasso and Braque placed great value on commonplace materials and objects and on subjects drawn from the everyday world: a newspaper, a bottle of ale, or a pipe are redolent with meaning. References to current events, such as the war in the Balkans, and to popular culture enriched the content of their art. The artists also extended their experiments to include sculpture constructed out of found objects and flimsy two-dimensional materials such as cardboard.

The Futurists and the Dadaists employed collage to protest entrenched values, while the artists of the Russian avant-garde used photomontage, an outgrowth of collage, to demonstrate their support for a progressive world order. For the Surrealists, collage served as a surrogate for the subconscious. Pop artists recognized it as a means of directly incorporating elements of popular culture into their work. Robert Rauschenberg expanded collage in his own way by creating Combines, assemblages of paintings and found objects that were intended, he said, to act in the gap between art and life.

Emphasizing concept and process over end product, collage has brought the incongruous into meaningful congress with the ordinary. With its capacity for change, speed, immediacy, and ephemerality, collage is ideally suited to the demands of this and the prior century. It is a medium of materiality, a record of our civilization, a document of the timely and the transitory. It is no wonder that today’s artists continue to use collage as a way of giving expression to the unorthodox, both in art and life. –DIANE WALDMAN

Kitsch

What is the quintessential icon of kitsch? Perhaps a plastic Venus de Milo statuette complete with working clock embedded in the stomach. An image such as this affords, among other things, a convenient reference point from which to draw a line between us, those who can be counted upon to know kitsch when they see it, and them, the untutored masses. Unfortunately for “us,” whoever we might be, the reliability of such distinctions is more often than not questionable, if not illusory.

It was Clement Greenberg who, in his 1939 essay “Avant-Garde and Kitsch,” strove to define the avant-garde as a last bastion against kitsch. In treating the vagaries of mass culture as a moral contaminant, however, he seriously underestimated its overall revolutionary potential and the extent to which traditional culture would be irrevocably transformed by the ongoing processes of industrialization. The dissolution of so-called high art was already well underway when the Dadaists incorporated imagery from popular magazines and newspapers into their photomontages. By the time “Avant-Garde and Kitsch” appeared, Surrealism, with its hybrid dream objects, had heralded an onslaught of Venus de Milo clocks to come. But beyond the progression of various art movements per se, Greenberg failed to comprehend how mass culture-as-spectacle enabled kitsch to gobble up authentic masterpieces, even the Venus de Milo herself. Charles Baudelaire foresaw this involution in his 1863 essay “The Painter of Modern Life”: “The world—and even the world of artists—is full of people who can go to the Louvre, walk rapidly, without so much as a glance, past rows of very interesting, though secondary, pictures, to come to a rapturous halt in front of a Titian or Raphael—one of those that would have been most popularized by the engraver’s art; then they will go home happy, not a few saying to themselves, ‘I know my Museum.‘” Pop artists grappled with this condition in an effort to keep their art from becoming too corny. They showed that artists must address how spectacle inexorably saturates everyday life; failure to acknowledge this truth only perpetuates kitsch. This marked a curious reversal of the accustomed battle lines. Ironically, it is purist aesthetics that then became most vulnerable to kitschification. –JOHN MILLER

SOURCES

Postmodernism: http://courses.lib.odu.edu/engl/cbrooke/aacra/pm2.htm

Dada through Kitsch: http://www.guggenheimcollection.org/site/concepts.html

[1] Rosalind Krauss, “A Voyage on the North Sea:” Art in the Age of the Post-Medium Condition (New York: Thames & Hudson, 1999), p. 56.