In the
corner of the third floor gallery stands a re-appropriated old Yamaha organ,
bedecked with towering bamboo “fingers” leaning in a teepee formation above the
altered device. The work, Pipe Organ (2009-11) emits strange
sounds intermittently, reminiscent of Allora and Calzadilla’s ATM organ, Algorithm (2011) for the American
Pavilion at the 54th Venice Biennale. Only next to the organ can you find information about another
work, by the same artist, which sends a subtle message throughout the biennial
experience, one that resonated with me as an inherent ‘return’ long after
exiting the museum.
Lutz Bacher’s work is seen around every
corner of the biennial. Eighty-five
framed offset-printed book pages, taken from found copies of the mid-century
astronomy book The Celestial Handbook,
are scattered on every floor next to other works and tucked in corners. The work, Selections from The Celestial Handbook (2011), describes the unimaginable
vastness of space, but due to its contextual usage where the pages are
singularly displaced around the museum, the work ultimately emphasizes the
distance in relationship between text and image. The questioning of originality through Walter Benjamin’s essay,
The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical
Reproduction, discusses how mechanical reproduction has destroyed the
authority of art. Since the
function of art is ritualistic and cult-like, the indexical quality of the
printed pages strips the tradition of ritual in order to challenge its
authenticity, which changes our notion of what art is. Authenticity
cannot be reproduced, thus through appropriation, described by Douglas Crimp,
this piece follows a rule set imposed by questioning the notions of authorship,
originality, and uniqueness. The
endless retreating into the horizon of quotation is exemplified in Roland
Barthes The Death of the Author, from
which the ‘real’ author disappears.
To Arthur
C. Danto in his book Beyond the Brillo
Box: The Visual Arts in Post-Historical Perspective, the problem of
everything being art is the question, is it possible to distinguish art from
non-art? A solution would be to
place the artist at the center of this space of modernity. Losing control of the meaning of the
work, decides if it is an artwork by way of having meaning through a cognitive
realization, since art is to be witnessed. Or, if it is merely a thing, which has no meaning, it is
thus an object. Through the Warholian
model of reproduction, and linking past Duchampian modes of the ready-made,
Bacher calls upon the appropriation of tradition to blast apart the original
context and challenge the way in which the museum revitalizes the original
history of the image, and occupies a broader knowledge within history and
tradition. Here we reach Danto’s
solution, where it is the job of philosophy to define the boundaries of the
universe into the things that exist within it.
As proposed by Hegel and further enunciated by Vasari, after arts historical
ending, it continues by applying the same solutions over and over. By way of
questioning its own identity, art turns to philosophy to define it after
reaching its historical end, “not for the purpose of creating art again, but
for knowing philosophically what art is.” What Danto refers to as an “afterwash
of a narrative,” our post-historical period in art is one without a narrative
of present, a post-narrative period of art where it has become pluralized and
no longer bounded by a master narrative.
In George
Kubler’s essay The Classing of Things,
in ‘The Shape of Time: Remarks on the
History of Things,’ as humans we desire to return to known patterns at the
same time as escaping by way of variation. It seems we are stuck in the proverbial rut, where “the wish
to repeat the past has prevailed over the impulses to depart from it. No act is ever completely novel, and no
act can ever be quite accomplished without variation.” However, he also poses that every copy
has an adhesive, which holds together both the present and the past. In this way, this work as a ‘return’ at
the Whitney Biennial acts as a continuation of a dialogue that is repeating
similar problems and perpetuating an endless progression of altered uses of
appropriation and the ready made.
The unsolvable problem within it’s own nature as the copy, will always
remain in constant dialogue not with art history, but with art philosophy.
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