Comments on Our Life and Times : Polite Agit-Pop exhibit in ‘A Forest of Signs’

Today the Museum of Contemporary Art launches an ambitious examination of an influential and contentious branch of contemporary art. On view at the museum’s agreeably cavernous Temporary Contemporary wing in Little Tokyo until Aug. 13, the survey is called “A Forest of Signs” and presents works by 30 American artists, including such luminaries as Jenny Holzer, Jeff Koons and Cindy Sherman. Even viewed during its installation, the exhibition clearly promised to be an event to be reckoned with.

Since the late ‘70s, artists of the stamp seen here have tried to revolutionize the way we look at art. Actually, according to this lot, we no longer look at art in the conventional sense--soaking it up through our eyeballs--we read art like a book. Actually we read it more like a somewhat cryptic advertising poster. If you happen to be one of those people who hates to read standing up, this can be tiresome.

If you also happen to be one of those conscientious souls who bones up before going to an exhibition, the verbal bunting surrounding this one is sufficiently intimidating to make your self-confidence shrivel up like an overcooked pea. The catalogue--with several refreshing exceptions--is couched in the kind of language seemingly designed to make the ordinary viewer who doesn’t much like the show feel that it is his own fault because he is just too dumb to understand it. Essays are laced with references to esoteric contemporary philosophical systems having to do with the analysis of language and punctuated with buzz-words like semiotics, deconstruction, texts and appropriation.

Not to worry. The actual exhibition is considerably more straightforward than the writing that is supposed to clarify it. Take just one example by Mitchell Syrop, a big painting-cum-poster which reads, “This is one of those great masterpieces that will go unrecognized in its own time. This is your once-in-a-lifetime opportunity to make a decision that will reward you in the future.”

Oh. That’s easy. Syrop’s work is a satire of the shameless commercialism and self-promotion rife in today’s art world. It is also very much a part of that which it satirizes.

Syrop is not the most interesting artist in the exhibition, but he is among the most typical. Another group of his poster-like images is united by a common slogan familiar from brassiere ads and instructions on how to open packages, “Lift and Separate.” Syrop combines this slogan with a variety of images--a slick ad photo of an enthralled symphony audience applauding, a workman’s lunch bucket, fancy silverware.

On the face of it, the recombination seems to demonstrate how the meaning of the slogan changes each time it is put up against a different image. On reflection, however, we realize that is always saying the same thing, namely that advertising always encourages us to better our condition, get richer and consume more. That’s the “Lift” part. The “Separate” part suggests that as we rise in the consumer hierarchy we are parted from any grass-roots group we might have come from and are thus less likely to act with them politically to improve the lot of the “masses.” Syrop is saying that in a capitalist society “Lift and Separate” means “Divide and Conquer.”

Aside from the mild intellectual fun of cracking Syrop’s “code,” it is hard to imagine who would find such tired Marxist cant revelatory. Understanding how his art works, however, does cast some general light on the genre--both the artworks and the intellectual fog surrounding them tend to act as a blind for social criticism or--given the markedly equivocal nature of much of the work--social “comment.”

Since when does art “comment”? Isn’t a comment a fairly minor reaction to the main event? Talk-show hosts comment. Cartoonists comment. Recently Doonesbury’s artist character J.J. was commissioned to paint the john on Donald Trump’s yacht with a faked-up Michelangelo mural. She decided this outrageous sell-out of her talent was a “comment” on nouveau-riche consumerism.

Does Michelangelo’s David “comment” on heroism? Tom Lawson presents a piece that juxtaposes a photograph of the standing David with a shot of the Forest Lawn version toppled by an earthquake. It is a quite wonderful comment on artistic authenticity in our time, but that’s all it is, a visual quip, a one-liner.

The show is full of them. Sara Charlesworth uses the front pages of newspapers to remind us that the same stories and images make up the daily news around the world. Getchen Bender puts her own captions on TV sets broadcasting the usual fare. Richard Prince letters smutty jokes on canvases.

Why does it all seem so flat and familiar?

The work, on the whole, does not react to human reality. It is a reaction to a vastly popular substitute for reality: The World According to The Media.

These artists work as if they have no friends, lovers or family. They work as if they never left the city or smelled the roses. I take that back. Chris Williams photographs flowers like a botanist. Most, however, work as if they spent their lives shuttling from reading Foucault and Derrida to staring at the telly, analyzing magazines, listening to their Walkmans and having paranoid fantasies about the coercions of the American Corporate structure (while plotting how to sell art to corporate collections and become art stars).

They have a love-hate obsession with big-league communications. They ape its objectivity and get stuck with its deadhead heartlessness. Sure, there are exceptions. Jack Goldstein’s paintings of electrical storms have a frightening cold passion. Jeff Koons’ art-vending machine and his kitsch knickknack sculpture betray bittersweet affection. Barbara Bloom’s neoclassical room gets beyond its own feminist “comment” and into a realm of brittle, wistful elegance.

“A Forest of Signs” gets one thing wrong from ground zero. The title is from a poem by Baudelaire that suggests that the job of art is to find correspondences between itself and life. He didn’t mean the kinds of intellectualized semaphore signals broadcast by this show, he meant correspondences between sensations. There is hardly a one to be had here.

All the same, the exhibition, organized by Mary Jane Jacob, is the most penetrating survey of its kind I have yet seen. It traces this art’s roots from Pop and Conceptualism in the ‘60s to its present estate as what? A kind of polite Agit-Pop, a sort of rococo impersonation of the social art of the revolutionary Russian avant-garde. It also reads as a strange mutant rebirth of middle-class 19th-Century narrative art, which appealed to its bourgeoise audience with anecdotes. You don’t have to know about art to get this work.

By negatives the exhibition proves that it is not enough for art to reflect its society because this surely does that. Art needs to leave itself room to express more than it intended. This work is too shallow and too much in control. It can only tell us what we already know. Maybe a little more. An amount of fear seeps out of Holzer’s wallpaper word wall. Longo’s contorted figures mean to broadcast ambiguous agony, but their detachment curdles into nastiness. There is considerable general anxiety around the edges which questionsthe whole artistic enterprise as if the artists are wondering if they are not wrecking a noble edifice from within.

Mike Kelley presents an installation in the form of a long, narrow corridor lined with giant portraits of artists, poets and assorted intellectuals. Each bears a quotation in which the subject identifies with violent criminals, destructive madmen and social outcasts. Jean Genet says, “I want to sing murderers and love murderers.”

Having set us up to wallow in this romantic rhetoric, Kelley then opposes it by ending the series with a small, barely identifiable drawing of an actual mass murderer. At the entrance to the hallway stand plastic containers soliciting donations to be given to a Victim’s Rights fund.

Kelley’s piece recalls that terrible incident when novelist Norman Mailer interceded to get a murderer released from prison because he was a gifted writer only to have his protege turn around and waste an innocent citizen.

A strange Populist literalism laces Kelley’s piece. It tends to make artists look like a pack of featherbrained crackpots because it fails to maintain a simple distinction between the imaginative and the real. In caving into the merely topical and the excessively prosaic, the artists of “A Forest of Signs” betray fear of the leap of imagination and threaten themselves with becoming as dated and disposable as, well, yesterday’s newspaper.

IN WARHOL’S FOOTSTEPS: Avant-Garde artists talk about the New Criticality. Page 90.