The Public's Right to Own, Part II

My friends at Triple Candie are pushing the envelope again with regards to authorship and the public's right to own/view artwork, staging another exhibition about the art of an elusive artist, rather than of the art by said market-weary recluse. Last time around it was David Hammond, who has a coy-at-best relationship with the "art world." This time they're offering their take on the work of Cady Noland, not so much a recluse as a total refusnik, rejecting the art market outright and in no uncertain terms. And rather than simply offering images of Cady's work, this exhibition offers "approximations" made by four other arists, working from images:

They are approximations that have been handicapped by practical limitations (e.g. lack of money and technical expertise; insufficient information about scale, materials, or color; the obsolescence of certain ready-made components; and a limited time-frame). By deliberately falling short of its target, the exhibition is meant to incite the public's desire and curiosity to experience the real thing, which remains frustratingly elusive.

Triple Candie offer an intriguing rationale for the exhibition:

"Cady Noland Approximately" was conceived of conjointly with—and is meant to serve as a complement to—the exhibition "David Hammons: The Unauthorized Retrospective" that was presented at Triple Candie in February/March 2006. There are a number of important similarities between the two artists. Both are evasive figures whose art has been highly influential on younger artists. Both artists tightly control access to their work. Both have expressed dissatisfaction with the art world and have operated outside of it, on their own terms, albeit in different ways. The Hammons exhibition consisted of photocopies and computer printouts from existing reproductions; this exhibition consists of three-dimensional objects that are made from information gleaned from existing reproductions but which are not exact replicas. In comparing the two exhibitions, one question that arises is: "Which of the two compromised forms of replication is closer to the real thing?"

But as Brian Sholis points out, this approach leaves out a critical component of Noland's work and by doing so can't really hope to expose the viewer to an experience even remotely approximating the original. From Brian's blog:

Far be it from me to police what a gallery chooses to exhibit, but it seems to me that making an exhibition-of-photocopied-reproductions-as-homage in the spirit of one artist—an exhibition that leads even the Times to wonder if the artist is involved—is one thing. It is far different, and less malicious, than re-creating the artworks of an elusive artist, no matter how poorly and with how much transparency. As someone said last night at dinner, "This show cannot even begin to look like a Cady Noland show. Cady has very specific reasons for installing her objects the way she does; the relationships between them are of equal importance to the sculptures themselves. This cannot be re-created by others' hands." Hammons is enigmatic, and his relationship to exhibitions and the market can be seen, in some way, as part of his oeuvre; Noland's relationship with the art world is much closer to a categorical "no." In my mind, the differences between those stances outweigh the similarities described above.

However, that said, the value of these efforts for me is in the complexity of the questions they raise. As I've noted here before, one of the huge advantages of this age of pluralism in the visual arts is that it's providing a opportunity to really dig back into and flesh out the issues explored by the far-too-often prematurely assassinated movements of the 20th Century. The questions raised/answered about authorship by Post-Modernists were hardly exhaustive, and this exhibition most certainly illustrates that. Then again, I begin to wonder whether the issues can ever be exhausted and at what point we simply have to let the artwork do its job and speak for itself. [ok, so that was lame...let me try again] at what point we have moved too far away from what visual art can teach us and enter into what might be better off in written form.

Anything but dull, those Triple Candie kids.