DOWNTICKS: THE DAMIEN DULDRUMS: WHEN IS ENOUGH ENOUGH?
As evidence that there can be no strictly linear movement up in the art market without regard to quality and consistency, there has been a marked downturn and backing off with regard to Damien Hirst's auction performance in 2001. Though his last extravaganza at New York's Gagosian Gallery (Fall, 2000) sold out and was an unmitigated raging success, there has begun to settle in a re-evaluation of the value of Hirst's artistic output in all forms, i.e. paintings, sculptures, prints and multiples.
THE SECRET EDITIONS
In effect much if not all of Hirst's recent output has been the result of endless reiteration of a few ideas first put fourth in the early stages of his career nearly a decade ago. The obvious nature of this stratagem is the bottomless pit of spot and spin paintings that ceaselessly flow from Hirst Incorporated. Together, these works form a kind of non-authored aggregation that until now has continuously fed the hungry masses of collectors and institutions hankering to have a scrap of the Hirst enterprise to proudly showcase on their mantelpiece. The spots are offspring of early Bridget Riley paintings from the 1960's, augmented by titles that refer to pharmaceuticals, produced ad infinitum; and the spins, a simple Richter-esque formula with no discernable conceptual import. All in all, these bodies of works (two simplistic "ideas") amount to naked marketing panache. And guess what, the collecting world has begun to take notice as reflected by the fact that on many occasions no paddles were raised at the last round of auctions in New York and London when these works appeared. A humorous footnote to the machinations of the creation of these paintings, Christies tried to distinguish one of the endlessly repetitive spots by stating in its catalogue that Hirst had a hand in actually applying the paint to one of the early ones himself. Wow, what a reassuring signifier of value that a painting was allegedly touched by the author (which painting did not sell by the way).
THE MUTATING SCULPTURES
Like binary fission, Hirst's sculptures split off into reincarnations of themselves, sometimes a fact made clear to the public at large, and sometimes a deception hidden from full view: caveat emptor-let the buyer beware. An example is the flayed skeleton sculpture resting on a glass cross with floating Ping-Pong balls suspended from the eyesockets. In the Spring of2000 this work first appeared in London's White Cube Gallery's grand opening in Hoxton Square under the name "Rehab is for Quitters" (can't take anything away from Hirst's occasional brilliant wordplay), which sold in the vicinity of $275,000. In the fall of the same year in New York, the work appeared under the guise of a different name with no allusion to the fact that this was an exact replica of a previously created sculpture. An early 1990's medicine cabinet readymade, no different from a Hiam Steinbach, and Koonsian in spirit, failed to elicit a single bid in New York in the Spring of 2001 with a $600,000-800,000 estimate. Ten years later, Hirst is still shopping away in medical supply catalogues doing a great impersonation of himself. Great work for as long as you can get away with it. Further examples, and they are legion, are two gynecological offices submerged in water with fish (as stated in Hirst's own words to refer to woman who "smell like kippers") called "Love Lost", and "Lost Love", one with small fish, and one with larger fish. And, separated by four years from his last one person show in New York, two floating ball sculptures, one just a beach ball suspended by a jet of air (1996), and another ball similarly suspended but in the later work over knife blades. Could the life of excessive indulgence (rumors of rampant boorish behavior at the recent Venice Biennale ) be the result of guilt , and self-doubt over continuing to bamboozle the art world? Stay tuned.
UPTICKS: KAREN KILIMNIK HASN'T SCRAPED THE TOP
In the early 1990's Karen Kilimnik was a leading light of the movement known as scatter art which entailed the strategic placement of found stuff, crafted objects and assorted flotsam spread about the floor in a sculptural arrangement akin to a Carl Andre with a degree of three dimensional kitsch. When hard economics times hit in the early nineties, one suspects that Kilimnik's dealer, the 303 Gallery in NYC, had a hand in the gradual transmogrification in the body of work from these loose, barely confinable aggregations to paintings and works on paper. Though any time factors impacting on the work of an artist wrought from without may seem problematic, the work of Kilimnik has progressed into some of the most effecting, original two-dimension art currently being produced. This is especially apparent when taken into consideration with some of the outlandish prices for the works of her contemporaries such as Cecily Brown (over $100,000), Elizabeth Peyton (over $75,000), John Currin (nearly $350,000) and Chris Offili (over $300,000). In relation to the previously mentioned group of Kilimnik's contemporaries (all younger artists by the way), her work is downright undervalued. Recent auction performance for Kilimnik's drawings are in the neighborhood of $10,000 and oftentimes lower, and a record of $27,500 for a painting dating from 1996 (Spring 2001, Sotheby's day sale). Her work has yet to crack the evening sales of a major auction. The paper works often juxtaposes imagery and text with colored pencils and painted bits, detailing the worlds of fashion and celebrity in a mode not seen in others who tread upon this albeit familiar territory. The works on paper are in a language so distinct to the artist that one can imagine a scenario where these will be more favorably viewed over time than the paintings. In Kilimnik's hands, these themes become infused with a mannered romanticism, light and airy in the drawings, as the sculptures once were diffused on the floor, and lushly painted when applied to canvas. Kilimnik is transfixed by the ballet in an almost nostalgic longing for active participation in the realm of dance that has infatuated so many previous artists. In the end, the works of Kilimnik are like little gems (always small in scale, physically) with the paint luxuriantly applied, the text quirkily distinct, and prices that have not yet come close to approaching the top of their inherent value.
PERSONAL PICKS: IN THE DOMAIN OF THE UNKNOWN-ACCONCI STUDIOS
Vito Acconci seems to have found the secret of life transcending the everyday woes that drive the rest of the world at large, namely, the ubiquitous quest for prosperity that has recently spurred global acts of civil disobedience and violence. From his beginnings as a poet and early conceptualist in the 1960's, mercilessly exploring his body in his photo-based text pieces and performance work, Acconci has consciously cultivated a position outside the mainstream mechanations of the artworld. He famously lives a life of extreme asceticism without so much as a nod to the throes of conspicuous consumption that rule so many of our lives. His outfit is a regimen of black shirt and trousers, never varying from one year to another, yet from day to day. His studio is a threadbare office with gunmetal gray metal shelving units that could furnish the set for a 1950's accounting firm. Though he has worked with Barbara Gladstone Gallery for some years, among the most elitist venues in New York, his body of work has grown steadily unwieldy progressing from 2-D and video, to large-scale installations, to giant outdoor public works to the most uncontainable of art forms: architecture.
To date, Acconci has built architectural elements such as the futuristic walkway and entrance to a subway station in Shibuyu, Japan (2000) and a slowly turning ring set within an administative building courtyard in Munich, Germany, powered bya wind turbine atop the office tower. Such gyrations in the body of work of an "artist" are considered tomfoolery, or worse, career self-destruction. And, the extant pieces of Acconci popping up at recent auctions have been no exception to the inelasticity of the artworld when it comes to marked shifting in art making practice. A model for an outdoor work, a giant clam shell sculpture fetched all of $1,500 in the Spring 2001 auctions at Phillips. A fencing-mask festooned with video cameras as eyes and mini monitors to observe the din of life from a protected stance was for sale for $35,000 at Barbara Gladstone's summer 2001 group show. The early panel pieces from the late 1960's through the 70's, comprised of a photographic element and a text component, can be had generally for $5,000 to $15,000 at any given auction. Adivce: buy anything you can from this seminal master of the contemporary who only suffers from being too far ahead of his time with his quest for intellectual pursuit and experimentation at the expense of material and societal success.
Towards my unfettered belief in the ideas generated by Acconci Studio, I have commissioned Acconci and his band of disenfranchised young architects to design a permanent gallery space in New York's Chelsea, and while that project is being built, a temporary public exhibition space in the West Village, as well. The premise was to use Frederick Kiesler's design of Peggy Guggenheim's Art of This Century Gallery (from 1942) as a point of departure-to readdress the paradigm of the white cube as the monolithic, only viable model within which to show art. The results by team Acconci were as loopy as one would imagine: the void of the cube is to be filled with a giant, all encompassing, polycarbonate blob floating in the space like a slightly hovering blimp... There are no walls, when paintings need to be hung apparatuses appear from hidden structures in the columns like accordians. The biomorphic mass seduces people into the space where the facade is left purposefully open to blur the distinction between outside and inside. Clear your minds, withhold judgement: a new archetype is upon us to display and disseminate contemporary art and hopefully, just maybe, things will never be the same.
