What Does "Larger Than Oneself" Mean? | Open Thread

Roberta Smith gives Ryan Trecartin's exhibition at PS1MoMA the sort of review that legends are made of in today's New York Times. Since we launched Moving Image, more and more people have asked me who is an interesting new talent in video, and always at at the top of my list has been Ryan. He is an absolutely phenomenal artist, and although I have yet to catch his PS1 show, I knew first time I saw his work that I was watching something I would not soon forget.

The final thoughts in Roberta's review just happened to touch on something I've been mulling over since Jerry Saltz wrote an equally thought-provoking take on contemporary art in New York Magazine. I'll get back to Jerry's piece in a moment, but here's the last paragraph of Roberta's:

At the heart of Mr. Trecartin’s elaborate worldview is an aspirational faith in the potential of uninhibited self-expression, both individual and collective, as an active agent against the mounting materialism of everyday life. This is in a sense the story of his own hypertalented overexistence, now aided and abetted by a fluctuating crew of co-conspirators with gifts, charisma and minds of their own. What he has unleashed is larger than himself, which is why both his sudden appearance and continuing evolution are such cause for hope. [emphasis mine]

It would be easy to misinterpret that bolded statement as simply surrendering to the hyperkinetic, seeming word-salad-spewing intensity of the characters in Trecartin's work. After all, if you can't take it all in in one sitting, it's surely larger than your capacity to appreciate it. But I'll go out on a limb and suggest Roberta is very clear in what she sees here. (OK, so she hinted strongly at it earlier in the review):

This exhibition shreds the false dichotomies and mutually demonizing oppositions that have plagued the art world for decades — between the political and the aesthetic, the conceptual and the formal, high and low, art and entertainment, outsider and insider, irony and sincerity, gay and straight.

It's been becoming clearer and clearer to me (in no small part due to the dialog on this blog) that the dichotomy between conceptual and formal are false, and, well, PostModernism has pretty much demonstrated the truth of that statement for the other pairings in the list, but shredding them is only the first part of what Ryan's work does. The second part, as Roberta notes, is to offer hope.

Now we've just been through a firsthand lesson in how Hope is much harder to hang onto than it is to sell to people, and that has convinced me that its value lies not so much in being some destination as a loosening of the old ways of thinking, even if only to come back to them through a fresh point of view. The hope I take away from Ryan's work is that art can restore wonder, inspiration, and perhaps even some understanding of who we are here and now.

All of which brings me back to Jerry's article, "Generation Blank," in which he accurately (to my mind) diagnoses what ails so much of the other artwork out there:

There’s always conformity in art—fashions come in and out—but such obsessive devotion to a previous generation’s ideals and ideas is very wrong. It suggests these artists are too much in thrall to their elders, excessively satisfied with an insider’s game of art, not really making their own work. That they are becoming a Lost Generation.

Our culture now wonderfully, ­alchemically transforms images and history into artistic material. The possibilities seem endless and wide open. Yet these artists draw their histories and images only from a super-attenuated gene pool. It’s all-parsing, all the time. Their art turns in on itself, becoming nothing more than coded language. It empties their work of content, becoming a way to avoid interior chaos. It’s also a kind of addiction and, by now, a new orthodoxy, one supported by institutions and loved by curators who also can’t let go of the same glory days. [emphasis mine]

Here again, why Ryan's work is so amazing is the way it embraces interior chaos...exposes it and perhaps attempts to conquer it. To rule it, one must face it.

OK, so I am going to go out on a slimmer limb and indict myself in the process here, but I suspect that what has led to so many of today's artists drawing their histories and images form the super-attenuated gene pool is their mistaken assumption that the single most important part of what's "larger than themselves" is art history itself. After all, art history/theory/critique is the inescapable focus of the art schools most of our artists, with eyes on careers, feel compelled to attend. And in that, the crushing weight of what's come before is what all contemporary efforts are measured against. How can you do "that"? Don't you know your history? You're ingornig the chronology, the steady stream of paradoxically backward-looking innovations, the imposing majesty of the work collected in museums...and *gasp* the Canon.

And while I personally don't want to see a generation of young artists propping urinals up on pedestals and declaring it "new" (i.e., basic art history is still important to have a handle on), I am beginning to see how obsessing over it has possibly derailed a generation from making what more of simply observing their actual world, their actual contemporary circumstances, might have led them to.

Consider this an open thread on what "larger than oneself" means in the context of making contemporary art.