Colleen Asper holds Platypus up to see Marianne Vitale’s Patron.
Photo: Peter Harkawik

Colleen Asper: Platypus held up well in the face of Marianne Vitale’s horrid shouting. I can’t say the same for the other things in the room. Wait, what were the other things in the room?

Justin Lieberman: Worst. Room. Ever. Platypus could barely conceal his terror. But wait. Aren’t we jumping ahead a bit? Can we start with something great that was near the beginning? R.H. Quaytman’s installation of paintings relating to the window in the room was subtle and hilarious in its insistence on an expansive context from within the frame of the image. The dedication to place seems almost impossible and simultaneously a matter of course. The use of glitter too, I can’t help but read as something just out-of-fashion enough to produce a feeling of disgust. Maybe that one was the best room? Who was the naked woman in the painting?

CA: K8 Hardy. She was posed after the figure in Edward Hopper’s A Woman in the Sun, owned by the museum. Only the composition is reversed, as if seen in a mirror. I appreciate that the context is expansive toward other works situated within the museum rather than the Biennial (I am thinking here of how Cheyney Thompson’s piece did this last time around, among others). Pointing to the conditions of the Biennial doesn’t do much for me, but Hopper—with all his pictures within pictures and rectangles within rectangles—is a nice reference for the framing and reframing in this work. It is a good room. But I am not disgusted by the glitter.

Colleen Asper, Justin Lieberman, and Platypus in front of a Sarah
Crowner painting. Photo: Peter Harkawik

JL: Oooh. That makes it even better. I definitely agree with you about the registration of context. Quaytman’s is historical rather than bluntly political. It opens up a sea of possibilities rather than presenting an endgame, as does an insistence on the “reality” of current conditions. It seemed like in the last Biennial a lot of artists were really trying to find ways to recoup some kind of political agency for themselves, and that led to some gestures with about as much subtlety as a sledgehammer. It continues in this one. The Hearse by the Bruce High Quality Foundation this time around was pretty blunt. It seems that certain types of gestures stake themselves on causing a rupture through desublimation. And this inevitably leads us back to ego. The desire of the artist to be the one who pulls back the curtain. It can start to seem like a pissing contest. Everyone is trying to be the smartest one in the room.

CA: Absolutely. Have you noticed how many reviews of the Biennial end in ejaculatory praise of BHQF? I don’t get it. Or I do get it and it bothers me. Everything about that piece that purports to be critical seems to me disingenuous. The appeal of BHQF is premised on a romantic notion of Americanism. Their outlaw’s song is already a mediated image. It’s a bunch of vain strutting. Peacock feathers are not the arrow you shoot into the heart of the monster of excess. They only make that monster bigger. It’s like movies about drugs—no matter how compromised the characters become or cautionary the tale, they just make you want to do drugs again. Quaytman’s historicism is certainly available to the political. Jo Nivison, an artist married to Hopper, was the model for many of his paintings, including, I believe, A Woman in the Sun. When she died she left Hopper’s works and her own to the Whitney under the condition that the museum maintain them both; they promptly discarded her work. They have even sold off some of Hopper’s work in moments of financial crisis. Institutional manipulation of history, that is in Quaytman’s work too. Without any pissing.

Colleen Asper, Justin Lieberman, and Platypus observe The Bruce High
Quality Foundation’s We Like America and America Likes Us.
Photo: Peter Harkawik

JL: They’ll do the same to my work, if I am lucky. More likely, collectors will just alter it to suit their purposes. All my sculptures will eventually be converted into lamps. All my paintings will become carpets. That is (unbelievably) a much more common scenario to my mind than the one you’re describing. It happens to me all the time. Meredith James told me a story about Michael Heizer’s battle with MOCA LA to have Double Negative restored, and I thought it sounded as though he had set himself up for problems in the first place by making big, complicated work whose meaning was contingent on its own preservation. I like George Brecht’s axiom: “If something breaks or is lost, replace it with something similar, or something different, or nothing at all. No catastrophes are possible.” I like this very much.

That said, it was stupid and evil for the Whitney to throw out those paintings. As far as selling off the Hoppers, that seems like the stupidity and evil of a much larger institution than the Whitney. It seems strange to throw away paintings. They don’t take up that much space. I think that the political irony in Quaytman’s work is predicated on the portability of these small, beautiful paintings that can be easily subsumed into a field of exchange. It helps to ensure their preservation. But they nevertheless insist on an attachment to place. They are funny in this impossible insistence. They are subversive. On the other hand, we have to acknowledge that the place to which they are attached is the Whitney. So there is a certain opportunism there as well. There is a little bit of pissing.

CA: I make things that, sometimes small and sometimes beautiful, always have a relationship to craft that certainly inspires preservation. But it seems to me the goal is not to make works that survive with their physicality intact, but works that remain useful. Though your paintings strike me as rather coarse material for carpets. Quaytman. Opportunism? Hmmmm. Do you know that her dad is Harvey Quaytman? His work is owned by the Whitney and he was in several Biennials. One could say she was born with an attachment to that place. Now we are talking about legacy instead of pissing. But the work seems to me generous, so I am inclined to be generous with it. The artist and her work, like us all, begin from a place of compromise. The daughter of a well-known painter, a grouping of works that have to be considered within the context of the show everyone loves to hate: the Biennial. With this as a start, they recoup political agency for themselves precisely because they do not set themselves up as falsely oppositional to their origins. Instead they use those origins in a way that is expansive. And funny and subversive. Shouldn’t we talk about other works in the show though? You had, uhhhh, a strong reaction to Nina Berman’s photographs.

Colleen Asper, Justin Lieberman, and Platypus in front of
a Charles Ray painting. Photo: Peter Harkawik

JL: You are right. Expansive, generous, totally great. That’s how I felt in the beginning anyway. The Berman photos. I am not taking that bait. What I will say is that every time I am with a pretty girl, I feel like that guy. The wedding photo is incredible. What about the Charles Ray flowers? I can’t remember how many people told me I was going to shocked by those, but I wasn’t at all. It does not seem to me to be out of sync with his other work. How can it be shocking for an artist to paint flowers? Reminds me of Thomas Schütte.

One thing I thought was interesting was the amount of dance. I remember a time not that long ago when it might have seemed unthinkable for choreographers like Martha Graham or Yvonne Rainer to be referred to directly. If an artist was going to engage with work like that, it was a matter of course that this reference would be third hand at least. Through Hollywood’s depiction of performance art or something. A lot of the dance videos in the biennial seemed to be returning to the source. I think I felt this way when I first saw Catherine Sullivan’s videos.

CA: I’ll take my own bait then. The gruesomeness of Berman’s and Stephanie Sinclair’s photos was abrupt amidst so much pretty painting. I don’t see this as an innate problem with the individual works—I don’t look towards art to provide one type of experience—but I do see it as a problem with the curation. It sets up a division between mediums. To take up one of your favorite subjects of late, it seems to say painting can only access “the real” through a quiet contemplation of materiality and photography by exposé—by a documentation of horrific circumstances. Even the inclusion of George Condo is undercut by the choice of a subdued work. I don’t like this. Painting can be gruesome. As for Charles Ray’s watercolors, I agree they are not shocking. If they looked more like Schütte’s work I think that would be interesting. More like an old man splashing around in his studio on a Sunday afternoon. Instead they seem to me as careful and premeditated as any of Ray’s sculptures, to follow neatly his formula of populist imagery made strange by dysmorphic construction. Regarding all the dance—yeah. The third floor was downright aerobic. Why was that all on the third floor? One of many strange pairings of like with like in the show. The references in Catherine Sullivan’s work go towards film at least as much as dance or performance though. When she uses dance it is only to point to the construction involved in any presentation of the self, while the dancers in Rashaad Newsome’s or Kelly Nipper’s videos seem to have a much more straightforward relationship to expression.

Platypus dances to Kelly Nipper’s Weather Center. Photo: Peter Harkawik

JL: This is a complex issue. I can see the reasoning, even though I don’t agree with it. Paintings have a relationship to what Yve-Alain Bois refers to as the “image of labor.” This is the way in which the rhetoric surrounding the political paintings of Anselm Kiefer or Jörg Immendorf continues today. It reacts against what is perceived as a fetishistic treatment of the political. There are a million other examples of the ways in which this results in kitsch. So the logic follows that images of destruction and violence can be “seen” only when the image of labor is not itself present. I guess that is why Luc Tuymans’s paintings are acceptable. They seem to have been done very quickly, and yet they are gruesome. Condo himself flirts with kitsch. I doubt he would discuss his work in terms of politics though. Unless it was a politics of taste. It is very difficult to reconcile having Quaytman and Condo together in a single exhibition. Condo’s painting was in a room with Robert Williams, who was also poorly served by the inclusion of a few subdued watercolors.

I think the whole show had a feeling of doing penance for past excesses. And so work that flirts with excess is being curtailed a bit. I don’t think this is totally unwarranted though. Certain ideas about excess and desublimation (like those of Bataille) seem almost non-functional now. Like they have been proved wrong by the way in which they became the rule of the culture. So now, with a few exceptions (concessions?), we have a very serious and austere Biennial. Of course, these are the vicissitudes of fashion. As soon as austerity and a “Bartleby” attitude becomes the norm, there will again be a need for a desublimatory interrogation of unquestioned ideology. If I’ve learned anything by watching contemporary art, it is that ideologies can make sudden shifts beneath the surfaces of aesthetic forms. These things are never static. I don’t mean to say it is a cycle. Just that overcompensation is inevitably the rule when group shows try to establish a zeitgeist. But I would like to point out Josh Brand’s work, the abstract photographs, which certainly take a very different approach to photography.

Colleen Asper, Justin Lieberman, and Platypus speak.
Photo: Peter Harkawik

Platypus runs from Aki Sasamoto’s Strange Attractors.
Photo: Peter Harkawik

CA: But when we’re talking, not about the labor that went into producing an object—which we also have to recognize takes more forms than that of craft—but about certain forms of representation that are recognized as labor and others that aren’t, the fundamental critical mistake seems to me not to explode such distinctions. Because it is not just that there is an insistence on the inseparability of the image of labor and political content, but a political content that dictates what we recognize as labor. And I agree that it is impossible to contain or bracket fiction, but I would say it is precisely for this reason that it is also impossible to say, to use one of your examples, that Houellebecq denies himself “political agency through employing a Nietzschean/Freudian insistence on the division of society and the individual.” His book The Elementary Particles begins with the story of two brothers, both disenfranchised individuals at odds with society for sure, and ends with a story about cloning a super race. The end is a disavowal of individualism and the core of the story, the sad tale of the brothers, could be read as an illustration of its failures. But the ending is such an abrupt break from the empathetic relationship the readers have been asked to develop with the characters that I, at any rate, certainly did not get to the end of the book and think, “Oh yes, here is the solution—case closed.” I don’t want to get too sidetracked, I just want to make the point that it is precisely because the implications of any fantasy this complex are resistant to a singular read that they are always open to political agency. It is not just that fantasy absorbs and restructures reality, but that we absorb and restructure fantasy—to suit our needs. We return to the idea of the work that remains useful here. And because what we need from a work changes, the story is always the story of the work’s production, its location, and our experience of it—and these things are not stable.

But wait, isn’t this a review of the Whitney Biennial?

JL: OK, you’re right, you’re right. The Whitney Biennial. This year’s Whitney Biennial was full of delightful surprises. It was a no-frills, tight-belts show. Everyone was doing their best. It is thoughtful, human in scale, and delightfully low on hype. All the art has room to breathe. Something about touchstones. It is a mixed bag. Art shows otherness. Everyone is sincere. Hooray for America. Your turn.

Colleen Asper, Justin Lieberman, and Platypus laugh.
Photo: Peter Harkawik

CA: Now you’ve got it! The premier American art exhibition. A major, temperature-taking survey of what’s going on. A cross section of contemporary art. The 2010 snapshot. It’s been decades since there’s been a prevailing style or practice in art any more than there is in ice hockey. Spectacle is out. Smaller and more fun this year. Not to be missed. I left the museum with a giant burst of happiness for the infinite creativity of America.

Click image to enlarge.
 

Kay Rosen, Waiting for Michael Asher, 2010

Looking for the perfect dress. As someone else might primp for an event—what to wear for an opening, a party, a wedding? —I dress for videos. In the same way as searching for the perfect frock for a once-in-a-lifetime occasion, I look for the perfect dress for a one-time-only shoot.

Color, form, texture, movement. How the piece will “pop.” Determining the color palette of the architectural setting in combination with what I will be wearing is an integral part of the process in structuring my installations and videos.

“Standing Here,” my contribution at the Whitney, focuses on a woman in a red and white polka dotted dress. The perfect dress…

“Drag” (made for the Highlights) no longer uses the dress as a dress; it is a material, a color, a form. It is wrapped around a generous male volunteer (Ishmael Randall Weeks)—no longer exhibiting the specific female characteristics it has in “Standing Here.” It has become something else, totally transformed, gender neutral, material.

A dress can make the girl. It also can make the boy.

Van Hanos’s studio in Harlem, New York

Ryan: Did you see the cover of the October issue of ARTnews?

Alex: Ya, I just did.



Ryan: William Eggleston does them. 



Talia: Oh no!



Alex: Well he paints them, but they look exactly like Ryan’s. I was heartbroken when I saw it.

Artnews cover, October 2009

Ryan: I know, I saw them on the cover a couple of days ago and thought well there he goes…



Alex: You got beat to it.



Ryan: But he’s supposedly been making them his whole life. They’re really good.

Alex: (Laughs) I know.

Ryan Kitson, Scratch Pad series, 2008-2009, watercolor on paper

Ryan: They look exactly like my scratch pads, but he’s doing exactly the opposite of what I’m doing—that’s what the funny thing is. They look the same, but they’re exactly the opposite. He’s actually making them, whereas I’m finding them. It doesn’t matter because he already did it; it’s on the cover of a magazine. Ha ha. No, I’m fine with it.

Talia: It’s also about how it fits within the context of your work.

Ryan Kitson, Figure Sculpture, 2007, denim, cast resin, plastic, styrofoam

Ryan Kitson, Lock Loop, 2008, Tempered steel, rubber

Alex: That’s true.

Van: I think your scratch-pad paintings bring up really interesting issues about ways of working and keeping in mind your outside sources. You’re using the readymade, but then it goes through this filter where you remake it, creating a second generation, but not a pure translation. It also seems to be centered around the notion of permission.

Talia: I think this conversation really gets to core of our relationship as artists, because we are all, in a sense, borrowers. We take from history and play with the tropes that have been laid out for us.

Alex: It’s kind of a generational thing, us trying to find personal expression while being free from our predecessors’ concerns about appropriation. We are all using ideas of stock imagery or cast offs and appropriated techniques. And this battle is so clear in our generation—our relationship to reference and historical context is very different.
 

Alex Hubbard, Video Still from Weekend Pass, 2009

Alex Hubbard, video still from Lost Loose Ends, 2008

Van: It’s tied to the Internet and our ability to see everything and anything. We register things without footnoting them.

Ryan: If you forward an e-mail of a good joke, people know you didn’t write the joke, but you forwarded it so it becomes yours.

(Everyone laughs)

Van: When we were kids my dad would wake us up in the middle of the night to play us a song he was listening to. It was so urgent; he’d want us to connect with it right then in same way he was. He would say “I wrote this for you.” We, of course, knew it was Jobim or whoever, but it said what he wanted to say perfectly

Alex: When you find something really good that expresses it for you, it’s yours.
Van: It brings in the artist’s choice as a really relevant tool.

Talia: It feels like choice and intuition are being reintroduced (and accepted) into our practices after a long hiatus. Maybe as a backlash to Conceptual art, now we are free to be scientists in our studios again. 

Alex: It’s personal.

Van: It’s interesting; a friend of mine just e-mailed me a bunch of images of Andy Warhol’s silk-screened abstract expressionist paintings, which I hadn’t seen.

Ryan: That was such a different time to be expressive.

Van: I think the fact that the market is having such a dominant role marks a dramatic change in the history of art and has really isolated this time.


Alex: I feel like when the market demands this much work from that many artists, they are stopped from progressing in their work. That’s a very cynical way of breaking everything down, but linking things to the demand is hard to ignore.

Van: Well, the issue of overproduction in art is really important and relevant. It’s in line with all the other forms and conditions of production. The acceleration that it causes, some would say, gets in the way of an artist’s true potential. Like designing a building—if you had no restraints in terms of time or money, you’d get more buildings like the one we’re sitting in now.

Prentis Hall, Location of conversation

Alex: Or something crazy like the Watts Towers. There was no need for it, and there was no restriction on time or labor.

Watts Tower

Van: And right now we can’t measure the effect of these new pressures, but I can only assume it would be negative.

Alex: Yea, it fucks you up. Then the people you are exposed to and the people who are influential are the ones who are being driven by these demands, more than just the average guy in his studio. People are looking at them for guidance and picking up these techniques. But then there are always people who do produce things in really creative ways within those constraints. Being broke is a good restraint on art; it can really lead to the biggest moves forward.

Van: And having a budget can be really good too.

(Everyone laughs)

Alex: Look at the new Mike Kelley / Mike Smith at Sculpture Center, those are guys with a budget and that’s a great show.

Ryan: Well at least one of them does. I don’t think Mike Smith has much of a budget. I think the urgency and the pace that you’re talking about, Alex—that the people who are dealing with this pressure are the people who are influencing all the younger artists—are the people that have a sense of urgency in their work. I like that look especially if it has that quality aesthetically of “let’s make this as fast as we can.”  That’s one of the divides between Van’s work and Alex’s work (points around the circle). When I think about your work, Van, I think of your father making really intricate cigar boxes. Van was born from that.

Van: He was a rock and roll musician actually. But yes he did that too.

Ryan: The difference between your work is time and immediacy. Like in Van’s paintings that are really labored, like this painting of Talia, and then I think of Alex’s videos, even if it takes you hours and hours to edit these videos they have an immediate quality. If you need to make a shape, then you set up a board and cut it out. AND you videotape it! You don’t even have to ship the thing. That immediacy is where the divide is. And I don’t think the ramped up speed of production is a negative thing. I think it’s the natural progression of things. That’s just what’s happening. There will always be good and bad things that develop out of situations. If we all had to make art out of stone there would be the same amount of good shit and the same amount of bad shit. It shapes an aesthetic.

Van Hanos, Portrait of Talia Chetrit and Portrait of Talia Chetrit (Pressed),
2009, oil on linen

Alex Hubbard, video still from The Paranoid Phase of Nautical Twilight, 2009

Alex: You give people more credit.

Van: I guess there’s a flow that happens with production, and I’m interested in maintaining that flow: consecutive days, making quick decisions, letting things sit and not fussing. Having the “moment” present in the work. I think certain pressures can help that, but I guess the problem I foresee is in trying to sustain this unrealistic condition. We have different speeds, say I move between 0–80mph, but when an artist is expected to move at 140mph everyday without slowing down, then you see artists making consecutive lame shows.

Van Hanos, White Marble, 2009, oil on linen

Ryan: Where they move horizontally, not vertically.

Van: Exactly, so I think that a flow of capital is a positive thing, but not when the art world is this glutinous monster, eating its young. That’s part of why people were so excited about this economic crash, people know something is wrong and hoped it would cure it. We need different speeds, a day in the park can bring out the best in someone. That being said, I think artists function differently, and some are only happy when they are overworking.

Alex: And there will be people that will excel in this way.

Van: Definitely, but it depends on the individual. I think it’s an important thing to be conscious of and either engage in or not. 


Alex: One of  the most interesting things I’ve seen lately is Takashi Murakami’s new painting. It’s so good, and it’s totally different than what he’s done before. He was briefly broke, and maybe this has nothing to do with it, but maybe it’s an example of someone who used a shift to make a big change.

Talia: There’s a lot of expectation for artists to make a ton of work and have several brilliant ideas in one lifetime. I started to feel a lot of sympathy for the struggle to reinvent yourself as an artist during Cindy Sherman’s show this past year.  You know, she’s Cindy Sherman! She’s done so much for art and contributed to the expansion of photography in so many ways. People were so quick to discredit her show but she’s only one person.

Van: But within that, I think what Alex just said is interesting, about shaking things up. Murakami is not going to stop unless something interrupts him. I think as an artist, one of the few obligations we have is that interruption. Everyday we have to show up with a wrench and throw it at the work… well, sometimes not throwing a wrench is the wrench.

Talia: Like how not having a system can become a system.

Ryan: I got great advice from this guy Nayland Blake, whose work spans a whole bunch of different things: drawing, video, sculpture, performance—it’s all over the place. He said that if you get caught going horizontally and making the same work over and over again—because of demand or simply cause of a rut—after you finish a body of work or a significant piece, make one piece that’s going in the same direction as the last piece you finished, one piece that is completely the opposite, and then one piece that fits in between. And he’s not saying show any of this stuff. He’s just talking about growing in the studio.

Virtual model of The Suburban 1 featured on The Lives of Objects

Installation view inside The Suburban 1, work by Wade Guyton and Henrik Plenge Jakobsen

Installation view inside The Suburban 1, work by Wade Guyton and Luc Tuymans

Installation view inside The Suburban 1, work by Kirsten Stoltmann

Installation view inside The Suburban 2, work by Jan Van der Ploeg,
Sharon Engelstein, Konsortium, and Rochelle Feinstein

Installation view inside The Suburban 2, work by Konsortium, Michael Krebber,
and Bernard Frize

Installation view inside The Suburban 2, work by Konsortium, Jan Van der Ploeg,
and Rochelle Feinstein

Courtesy of Laurel Nakadate

I am writing this at the edge of a Shell station, just outside of Fort Dodge, Iowa. It is ten p.m., and I am watching a twenty-year-old girl pump gas as she stands in the middle of the fuel island.  She is the kind of girl lucky enough to have had to say, “Eyes up here.”  It is late fall and the crickets are chirping hard in an attempt to hold winter back. This girl is underdressed in a yellow bikini top, short shorts, and flip flops. She needed something and had driven out into the night, unprepared in these scraps of her uniform of youth and summer, to get it.  Her face appears luminous and childlike under the island light, and her hands fumble as she tries to secure the strap behind her neck that won’t stay tied. Beyond her, the highway is a whirl of Doppler effects and thanksgivings she’s not part of.  Part of me wishes I could join her under the diving mermaid tails of the lamps as she waits for her tank to fill; the Shell sign above her like half of her broken bikini. We could dance in slow motion to her car stereo and pretend to be video stars. We could be BFFs. But I cannot join her, because I do not know her. It’s hard to make real friends in transient places. And so, after she disappears into the station, I walk to the island, and stand in the spot where she was.

After the long trip through the Badlands, you leave the West and enter the Middle. And you come to a gas station and you pull in. And you are tired and lonely and hypnotized by the highway, and you stumble out onto the concrete island of the fuel station. The fuel station that saved you from more of the same. And there, in the middle of nowhere, under 1,000 watts of commercial light, you are a movie star. It doesn’t matter that the ground below you is stained and scarred like the surface of the moon, It doesn’t matter how humble your beginning was or how tragic your ending will be; you are in a dream sequence, time is remapped to 80 percent, and everything is possible. You are safe, and alive.  

In this sequence, you play the scene like everyone before you has. Like an open call audition where every hopeful is exactly right for the part, where everyone lands the job. In this shot you pump the gas, and you think about where you’ve been and where you’re going and you stare off into the darkness. The darkness beyond the wrong side of the highway, the side that, thank God, has nothing to do with you. And then, you look at your hands holding the pump, and then you look up and witness the numbers on the meter grow. You do the math on what this will cost you and what you could possibly have left. And maybe here is where you lean against your car and give it a little pat and say, “Good job girl, let’s keep going.”

Courtesy of Laurel Nakadate

It is easy to fall in love with this island light, this light that makes moonlight seem like a fairy tale. This light that is brave and means what it says. This light that illuminates the grease-stain action paintings on the ground of the service station.  It is, after all, an island of sorts, that concrete stage where travelers disembark and tumble onto land. Land that holds steady and accepts everyone. Island light never needs a forwarding address; it is exactly where it wants to be.

I love this light, because it is one half of an amazing romance between cement and sodium.  I love this light because that romance is a love story about a lamp loving a bit of ground.

From fifty-five feet above, filaments send love notes through lumens to their baby below. That humble patch of concrete is fiercely embraced in a light that spares no expense—spends it all. It would mortgage the moonlight, it would max out the credit card and move money around at three a.m., just to keep it in pearls and milkyway diamonds, like a pageant mother who lies and spends everything to support her little princess with so much possibility. Goodbye husband, goodbye marriage. Nothing matters more than baby turning in her tutu, smiling with her milk teeth, under that loving spotlight.

I don’t mean to say that there isn’t another sort of light that could break your heart and will; I have nothing against halogen. There is, after all: The light that breaks your heart because you don’t live there anymore. The siren light that seduces fireflies and gnats and moths with faces on their wings, in suburban summer heat, the zap-zap that breaks the rules and stops all hearts. The light that comes on when you are not home to tell the masked men to keep moving, the light that has your back. The lights on the Christmas tree that blink on and off, the ambulance of their red pointed plastic hearts, and of course, the light left on above the front door that tells you someone is inside who still loves you—despite all your failures.  

But this is not about that light, though perhaps you wish it were. This is about the light that reassures you: You are headed home as you inch across America. This is the light that keeps you awake, talks you though it, with an open heart, and signals you to start the countdown clock when you begin to recognize familiar islands. And the closer you get to home, the louder the voice gets, reassuring you that there are indeed impermeable bread crumbs that have not scattered or been eaten by the lovely and motherless forest animals. And these crumbs have been laid out for you. Everything is in its place. You may be in the Middle, but you are almost home.

Courtesy of Laurel Nakadate

Courtesy of Laurel Nakadate

Courtesy of Laurel Nakadate

Landmark’s roots reach back to a group called est that was founded by Werner Erhard in 1971. EST, an acronym for Erhard Seminars Training, took place over two weekends, and was meant to allow participants to achieve a sense of personal transformation in a very brief time. Est was extremely controversial, even in the live-and-let-live days of the early 70s. Stories of psychological manipulation and intimidation abound. In those days, you didn’t even get to leave the building, let alone catch a catnap. Having undergone several curricular and philosophical transformations, Landmark has developed a modern identity that is decidedly more business luncheon than Heaven’s Gate.

I am a Yale-educated artist in my early thirties. I enrolled in the Landmark Forum the weekend of November 6th, 2009. My father had died, recently and suddenly, from a “massive coronary event.” My girlfriend had just left for graduate school in the Midwest. I was preparing, a little too late it seemed, for my first solo show. I was plagued with anxiety, and obsessed with thoughts of the meaninglessness of existence in the face of an inevitable death. But I was also obsessed with making it in New York as a professional artist.

Many of my friends from California had taken the Forum and loved it. Few could help themselves from jabbering on about it every chance they got. It creeped me out. But I thought the Forum could perhaps give me a much-needed shot of adrenaline at this particular crossroads in my life. Might there be a way in which corporate networking and greater “authenticity” could enhance my rank within the incongruous gears of the artworld?

I made a commitment to carry out all of the assignments and to listen to everything that was said in the Forum with an open mind. The following essay details my experience. 

DAY ONE

“None of what you are about to hear is the truth,” Rudy, my Forum leader, announced. “We made it all up. Just think of this as one possibility.”

An ex-professional dancer from L.A., in his late fifties, Rudy was the first to point out that he had “no eyes,” but a full set of wide teeth to compensate. Squinting at us from the front of the windowless, 100-seat conference room in the basement of 317-A West 33rd Street, he resembled a shaved rat. I walked in late, but a padded folding chair was placed before me along one of the three aisles covered with industrial-strength grey carpet. Every chair was filled and meticulously arranged. Under each, a single wooden pencil and information form had been placed, all pointing toward Rudy.

“It is possible,” Rudy continued, practically lying sideways in his director’s chair on stage, “that what I will talk to you about over the next few days, makes sense. Anything is possible. And anything you want out of life is possible out of your participation here. By Monday morning, you guys will not be the same people. And let me tell you, I’m excited for you.”

I was already trying to back away from Rudy in my seat. I snorted audibly. Rudy’s cocky demeanor didn’t help my belief in what he was saying. He was flanked by an Indian man in a sharp suit, who, Rudy explained, was training to be a seminar leader. “You’ll hear from Manish, later,” Rudy said. “You’ll be hearing a lot from both of us. But let’s get started, you guys, I’m so excited I can hardly wait!”

After an ambiguous explanation of the curriculum over the coming days, Rudy offered us all a chance to leave, and get our money back, which I considered. This offer, of course, was well-rooted in public humiliation theory, as Rudy asked anyone who did not wish to continue to “please stand up.” Not surprisingly, no one stood. “Can I get a show of hands of the people who are choosing to be here? I want you to realize this is a choice you’ve made.” All hands went up. “Fantastic!” chortled Rudy, “Then I would like to take this opportunity to welcome you to the LANDMARK FORUM!”

Applause is big in Landmark, and this was no exception. We thundered enthusiastically as Rudy began to articulate the first of many Landmark “distinctions”. 

“Do you know what all of life consists of?” he beamed. I did not. “Do you know what the most basic need in life for every human being is?” A few hands went up. Safety. Sex. Money. Survival. Fear. Love. Domination. Power. Rudy looked like a man about to reveal a marvelous secret. He showed his teeth. “Looking good and avoiding looking bad,” he said. “Looking good and avoiding looking bad.”

Would I end up a Landmark drone like my cronies back in Cali? After a couple of days without sleep and this weird rat-man half-yelling at me, would I succumb to the hypnosis that already seemed to be numbing the gazes of my fellow participants? No, I decided. I am an artist–an intelligent observer immune to evangelism and pyramid schemes. I was here to superimpose these ideas, this “technology,” onto a career in the arts. The artworld, with its unsettling menu of social waltzes and hyper-sensitivity to hustling, was about to meet its match. I was here to pinpoint artistic success.

DAY TWO

After a sleepless night of paperwork locating the areas in my life in which I was “lacking power” (I lacked financial independence; my art dealer was a bully; my relationships with my brother and sister needed work), I fumed visibly the next morning as Rudy suggested that Landmark could cure incurable diseases, reverse the aging process, and bring an end to alcoholism. People lost weight because they “altered their relationship to food.” They fought off cancer by “refusing to accept its power.” He trumpeted that if everyone in the world took the Forum, no more war. “This is powerful, powerful stuff,” he said. “This is cutting-edge technology.” After all, war was simply “I’m right; you’re wrong thinking,” he said, and in Landmark we would learn to circumvent that.

The Forum is punctuated with participants sharing their successes, fears, and failures over one of three microphones situated around the room. My jaw dropped when one woman about my age tearfully recounted her early childhood as the victim of sexual abuse. Rudy asked her what she had had for breakfast that morning. “Cheerios,” she sniffled. “I had Cheerios.”

“O.K. You were molested and you had Cheerios for breakfast,” said Rudy, with a lazy smile. “Say it.”

“I was molested and I had Cheerios for breakfast!” the woman sobbed.

Rudy told her to sit down. “See? No big deal. You guys are living with your pasts in front of you. Just let it go. Put the past back where it belongs. In the past.”

I was becoming more disillusioned as the hours dragged on, but this woman would stand up the following day and tell all of us how light she felt, how free.

How you behave in the Forum, they claim, is how you behave in life. “How is that working for you?” they ask. If you are suspicious and doubtful here in this drab seminar room, chances are you are suspicious and doubtful in life. In other words, built into every objection you might have to Landmark Education as an entity, is your own failure as a human being. In the moments of frustration or anger that many of us experienced, Rudy would intone: “Wherever you are in the Forum is exactly where you are supposed to be.” How do you argue with that?

Another Landmark tenet is that you are personally responsible for absolutely everything
that happens to you. If your marriage is in freefall, what are you doing to cause that? If your job is making you miserable, you are thinking about it the wrong way.

Thus, we were encouraged to use our fifteen-minute breaks to make effusive calls to loved ones, and to anyone else with whom we were not “complete.” We were told to phone up three people who we felt had wronged us in some way, and apologize to them.

I called my art dealer in Berlin and tried to explain how I was sorry that I had once led him to believe that I wanted to make a certain type of marketable work, when really I didn’t want to make that type of work at all. It was a bad connection and he seemed not to understand what I was talking about. We hung up and I went back inside. 

DAY THREE

From Day One, Rudy had been prepping us for Sunday afternoon, by which time we were all expected to have “popped.” Some of us were to have begun popping as early as Saturday morning, but by Sunday at 5:20 p.m., popping, it seemed, would be pervasive. By this point, I wouldn’t have been surprised if Rudy had showed us his horns. I was completely fed up with his tireless promotion of the Advanced Course, the twice-as-expensive sequel to the Forum. My brain felt mushy. I kept shaking my head and catching my jaw slightly slack. I was annoyed with how blissful everyone seemed and was hoping for a summation that would tie the whole weekend together so I could get the hell out of there and back to my stumbling life. So far, none of the ideas presented in the Forum had seemed that revolutionary to me. As my girlfriend put it later after I’d described the whole affair in detail, “It’s like a weekend philosophy course for people who’ve never read a book.”

“You’re all wondering when it’s going to happen, aren’t you? It’s 5:20, you’re thinking. He’s got another 25 minutes. This better be good. This is what I paid my four hundred and forty dollars for. Well, guess what.” Rudy paused magnificently, baring his teeth in a triumphant grin. “There’s nothing to learn! Life doesn’t mean anything.It doesn’t mean anything. And YOU keep making it mean something!” He stomped his foot on the stage to emphasize his point. “You want to know what life is? I’ll tell you what life is. Life is you sitting in a room in a basement with no windows, devoid of sleep, in a cheap uncomfortable chair, while a man with no eyes and all TEETH IS SCREAMING AT YOU! THAT’S WHAT LIFE IS!” He went on to speak for the umpteenth time about the Advanced Course. “You can take it,” he said, “but there’s nothing to learn there either. There’s nothing to do and nothing to learn.” I filed this away somewhere.

But then, at last, came Rudy’s signature dizzying performance of the weekend, where he runs laps around the room, panting, pretending to be a hamster on a wheel, dangling his microphone in front of his nose, pretending it is different goals in life. First, the microphone is college. He speeds around the room, tongue dangling, and catches up with college, only to find “that’s not it.” Then the microphone is career. More panting, more running. Life turns out not to be career either. Then the microphone is a beautiful spouse, sex, and then money, and then kids. It turns out definitely not to be kids. Then it is a big house, several sports cars, grandchildren. But happiness, much to my chagrin, is none of these. “And then,” Rudy announces, “you die.” And Rudy makes the awful skreeching sound. “We are the hyphen separating the two dates on our gravestones,” he says. Our lives are a hyphen! He gestures in the air the length of the hyphen, and it is not long. “Nineteen-oh-eight to nineteen-eighty-five. Screeeck!” I hadn’t thought about it like that before. “And YOU’RE going around UPSET because you THINK your FATHER doesn’t want you to SUCCEED!” The whole thing took about ten minutes. I was stunned. If that were all I had paid my money for, it was worth every penny. 

LIVING LIFE POWERFULLY

Along with the price of your Forum, you get a “free” ten-week seminar. You meet once a week with most of the participants who were along for your weekend ride, and revisit the concepts you learned in the Forum, most of which make sense to me. One should develop relationships with people, as opposed to tenuous networks with the powerful few who might someday reach down a hand. It is necessary to “keep action alive” through scheduling. Don’t be a flake. Do what you say you will do. “Who you are is your word.” Show up for things on time. I agree with all of this, but don’t always do any of it. Still, did I need to throw bags of money at Landmark to remind me? I’m about halfway through my seminar, currently. Still, I am not aware of having had my “breakthrough.”

Breakthrough is common parlance down in 317-A; it seems to preface nearly every participant’s speech. “I called my Dad and had a breakthrough…I talked to my boss and had a breakthrough…I think I had a breakthrough with my dermatologist…” It was so common I was beginning to wonder if something was wrong with me. Was this specific to being an artist, I wondered–mindfully observing from the sidelines, note-taking for the final critique? A familiar pang of envy rose in my stomach.

I remember having had a similar experience as an adolescent, at Bible camp. We were constantly invited to ask to be saved, and were asked to raise a hand if we accepted Jesus into our hearts. Someone up front was playing songs on a guitar. People around me were crying and speaking in tongues; whatever it was seemed intense and I wanted some. I ended up saving myself again and again, under various circumstances, because I never felt anything when Jesus was supposed to come in.

My trouble with Landmark is its collapsing of my success onto the success of the enterprise. Not one Forum hour went by without Rudy reminding us to bring guests to the next meeting: “Do it for your friends and family! Don’t you want to share this with them?” Thus far, I did not. We were encouraged to be vehemently persistent in our attempts to “enroll” others. “The first response to a new possibility is the word ‘no’,” Rudy proclaimed. “Embrace that ‘no.’” Week after week, new faces appeared in the room as my classmates were lauded for their brazenness at bringing, for example, the entire office en masse to one of the meetings. 

Now, you can’t just go around asking art dealers to accompany you to the Landmark Forum. In the artworld, these corporate hard-sell techniques do not apply. If you’re talented, and lucky, and If you attend the right school, and manage to get picked up by the right gallery, and the market is good, and a couple of good museums catch onto to your work, then,If the stars align, you will be relevant. And then you will have critical attention and fame and the hole in your heart and stomach will be full. But if you’re over thirty, like me, and you weren’t already in the Whitney Biennial, or Younger than Jesus, or, for heaven’s sake, at least Greater New York, its time for Plan B. Or so my logic went. Or still goes, depending on the day.

Landmark’s logic goes like this. If you want to get somewhere in life, you can’t do it alone. You need other people’s help. You are also encouraged to help other people as much as possible, without any expectation of reciprocity. According to Landmark, those who’ve taken the Forum are more likely to help other people. So, logically, the more people in your network who have taken the Forum, the more likely you are to succeed. Landmark gets more participants and more money, and you get more support. Everybody wins. If this argument holds water, then the only thing holding back your life from falling into place, is you.

If I fully embraced the tenets of a Landmark Education, what would my artistic life look like? If I gave up looking good (read: avoiding the shame of inviting guests to the Forum), would I be living more powerfully? Or was it possible to embrace my life and my artistic career using the tenets of Landmark, without embracing the corporation itself? And was drawing this line really worth the trouble? There are worse companies out there, to be sure. Christians are doing a lot more socio-political damage than Landmark ever did.

At a certain point in my seminar, Rudy’s subtle disappointment at my not having brought along guests each week became downright disapproval. If I really took on dragging in ten befuddled friends to sit with us each Monday night, instead of quietly resenting Rudy every single time he suggested I have an “enrollment conversation,” would I have the support I needed? What was I really doing down there each week anyway, spending life’s precious moments in that dingy basement, if I wasn’t participating? Perhaps this was how I took on life in general, passive as the boat drifted downstream. Curious, but reserved; open-minded while quietly judging.

I never shared at the microphone, nor did I ever get around to having an “enrollment conversation.” I did not emerge a smiley convert like my California friends. But love it or hate it, Landmark gets people riled up. For some of my classmates, this meant signing up for more courses and spreading the word. But paradoxically, what I found most inspiring about Landmark was my own resistance to it. In this, perhaps, Rudy was right after all—maybe my stubborn reserve was “just where I was supposed to be.”  Once I identified my resistance, I did not want to give it up—but I was also ready, perhaps, to acknowledge some of the self-protective reservations that had been holding me back in certain areas of my career as an artist. Why, for example, did sending out invitations to my shows always make me a bit queasy? Why was inviting people to my studio so painful?

I have a close artworld friend who claims being an artist is about one thing: hustling. I think this is half-true. Being an artist requires the balance of several simultaneous impulses: the impulse to create, the impulse to share, and the impulse to weigh and to consider. This balance, this tempering of the hard sell with stepping back, is something I feel I have an innate sense of, and something that cannot be overvalued in the artworld. While networking certainly can get you some things here, the Landmark doctrine is that it can get you everything, everywhere. I would like to believe in this, in much the same way as I would like to believe in prayer, but experience has shown me that faith can only go so far.

Landmark provides no space for an artist’s careful tempering of self-promotion with subtlety. There is no room for etiquette. It’s all push, push, push. One assignment we had was to collect fifty “no’s” over a weekend (try it sometime—it’s harder than it sounds). Besides proving that a lot more is available to you than you may have imagined, something else emerges from this exercise. You annoy people.

I decided I would take from Landmark what I could use and discard the rest. I have since—subtly—adjusted my stance toward self-promotion. The word “no” no longer seems like such a dead end, nor as inevitable as it once did. With the knowledge that as a professional artist, I cannot make it alone, a newfound resiliency has crept in around the edges of my thinking. I feel better equipped to spring back from my recent difficult circumstances.

At Rudy’s behest, I have “invented a possibility” for myself: it is that anything that was “possible” out of my participation in the Landmark Forum, is also possible without it. 

EPILOGUE

I showed up on the final evening of the ten-week seminar to find I had been demoted. As I searched for my crisp nametag on the familiar table of pin-backed laminated cards, I could not locate my own. I asked the nametag volunteer what gave, and he told me to write my name down on a list. He handed me a sticker wet with the inky all-caps letters of my first name.

“What is this?” I asked.

“Well, you know, you missed five classes, so…you’re a visiting graduate now,” he explained. I thought I caught a hint of embarrassment on his face. I lowered my head and shuffled into the room, where, I discovered, a third of my fellow participants wore the same ignominious stickers.

Alan Reid, The Despondent Babysitter, With Red and White Button,
colored-pencil on canvas, 2009, digitally manipulated with accessories,
for The Highlights, 2010. Courtesy of Alan Reid and Lisa Cooley Fine Art

Through facilities, reminiscent of 16mm film, the artist camps with us at the edge of a mysterious and theatrical universe, where we, in turn, bring to the backstage, enigma. Here, in a hotel outside of time and Monte Carlo, our man tries to convince a woman they lived a love story last year in the same place and route. Memories real? Fantasies? Around the couple, other clients of the upscale hotel behave like automatons. A stubborn suitor prowls. Bobbinet torn. The disturbing husband does not escape. * Here a DVD is inserted in a book with two film loops taken from a hotel’s security sector, this is brilliantly silent. And can we see why!

Alan Reid, The Despondent Babysitter, With Hammer,
colored-pencil on canvas, 2009, digitally manipulated with props,
for The Highlights, 2010. Courtesy of Alan Reid and Lisa Cooley Fine Art

Mostly through memories of photos of fashion—from sessions for the type of multilingual documents found in VOGUE, ELLE, MARIE CLAIRE, QUEEN, NOVA, LINGUA ITALIANA, JARDIN DES MODES, but also pictures of Americans—sophisticated giving expresses the results of unfettered imagination, in low luster. As the title suggests, the audience seeks to remove the star and to retain only fragments of abortive emotions. The artist, by contrast, seeks to fulfill this.

This exhibition is quite interesting, and widely unknown views are taken up in luxury places—not for nothing, somewhere the artist said he generally does not move away from hotels (or, more than a few hundred meters)—but boy, he can find inspiration in all circumstances. This does not include trips to and from the subject, who has neither head nor tail—and as phones call, he receives ongoing presage of a sordid outcome forthcoming. Nothing reaches its climax; everything remains open. The deletion is coupled with a loss of identity and meets the benchmarks that cross multiple ailments, almost schizophrenically. Here, as part of the artist’s carte blanche, one cycle presents Girls in Uniform, (1931); this is seen projected onto the credenza with some period shit. We enter the world of Hermes, to issue him a suite.

A name vacuum comes across not as an absence or failure, but as something penciled by the artist. The emptiness of penciled images on which the artist moves in, here and there adding touches, little shades, is the receptacle of differing expectations. A window appears to separate us from those petrified moments. The inner dummy is observed at a distance, as if made from bamboo. It then proposes our own experience via singular anecdotes. The artist raises a particular narrative, an interior monologue like a dialogue.

Alan Reid, The Despondent Babysitter, With Toggle,
colored-pencil on canvas, 2009/ digitally manipulated with framing quadrant,
for The Highlights, 2010. Courtesy of Alan Reid and Lisa Cooley Fine Art.

Systematizing the results of this is part of one’s life-practice; this is selfless-analysis—words exist outside of words. The answer appears to be yes; likely, our objects of focus are often absurd. As recently one has been thinking about Grey Poupon and Ricola, for example. Their Old World, Eurocentric brand of advertising seems so disjointed in today’s advertising climate, with the quiet insistence of the aristocracy’s stony penchant for decorum. Rather than give space, Sonia Delaunay textile designs are enlarged: reendowing non-objective avant-gardeism to the cardboard maquette historiosophy.