Sunday, 3rd December 2000, 12:23am
An opinion by: Rascal

 

Caterina: Why I Hate Art by Caterina, thwarted latina

But stilted openings are not the main thing that bugs me about contemporary art. Nor is it the required attitude of quiet and respect upon enterning galleries, Nor that you are asked to give your focus and attention without being offered so much as a chair from which to do so. What I hate about art is that so much of it is crappy.

Okay, there were a couple of pieces at the biennale that I quite liked. But as I stood alone in a bare darkened room, listening to two slide projectors and a sound loop clack away, I thought that if someone put this work together for the Web, it wouldn't be much. The piece needed the "podium" of the gallery surroundings to give it its significance. And I realized that was part of the problem for every blessed thing in there.

What about this huge blotchy speckly blow-up of a photograph on nasty paper? If someone wants to take a photo of their dying friend, go for it, but don't be so chicken-shit as to render it way too big for its resolution across a huge gallery wall. If its important enough, it doesn't need to be too big to prove it. I would have liked to see that photo snapshot-sized on that wall. Fuck it, if your friend is dying than just say so like a human being and stop tarting it up like an artist.

The law of same-junk-different-pile applies when I see a video loop of two airplanes in the air. Only artists think that packing very little content into an unending loop is a valid form of expression. On our TV wouldn't we switch channels? On our computers wouldn't we quickly click away? Why are they still plugging it into gallery walls and expecting people not to find it boring and old-fashioned? I felt tricked : I had come out of the house, so now in some way I was a captive audience.

"Who picks this stuff?" I asked my viewing companion. How do they choose amongst all the tons of artwork being made out there? What is the curator thinking when she's got a few rooms filled with books over here and another artist who's filled a room down the hall with record albums? I don't think both these perspectives - on an old idea - were absolutely critical to round out the show. Perhaps the idea of "gallery" is perverting artists' work. If it's not big, or an installation, then why should it go here? Or: it may not be much in my living room, but it oughtta go over with those who made a big effort to come and see stuff in a white box.

Someone with more contemporary art education could probably justify many of the choices made for this biennale exhibition. I'll bet those choices had more to do with the artists than the show's theme or the work that was actually shown. I know that each of these pieces was taken out of the context of a larger ouevre by the artist. Maybe its hard to step back and look at the thing itself for someone who knows. Why else would such a big show have so many bad things? Apologies to the couple of pieces that I liked but you were overwhelmed in number. Next time show on your own.

On the way home my viewing companion asked what I'd thought of the show. We'd been properly quiet and respectful in the gallery itself, of course. I'd thought that only visual artists would have the hubris to be so stingy with their message and so shoddy in their execution, or words to that effect. In turn I asked what she thought, a young tourist from the UK, just out of university. "Well," she said (and here you have to imagine her proper british accent) "I found it all rather basic I'd say." Basic, that's a good word for it; not engaging or absorbing, not something that might lift visitors outside of the space and take us somewhere more exciting altogether. But then that's another topic, that would be why I love art.