According to an old dictum, fifty years counts as history, twenty years is vintage. I don’t think that necessarily holds anymore, but because it feels like 2005 in America again, let’s suspend our disbelief and look at the vintage. (Thanks to “consignment specialist” Anna Feigenbaum for some of these correlations.)
What looks good today may not look good tomorrow: both the text of Michel Majerus’ best-known painting, from 2000, and the title of a recent symposium that has since been published as a book. Majerus predicted the aesthetics of the aughts and then died in a plane crash in 2002. Everyone loves this work now, but no one can tell you why. A Capri-Sun-soaked madeleine or “painting in the expanded field”? The little book from Sternberg Press is decent, but I’d recommend reading everything Daniel Birnbaum wrote about Majerus first.
Scooped: compelled by the conspicuous abscence of aughts-era artworks from the once widely-discussed New York Times article “The 25 Works of Art That Define the Contemporary Age,” I had intended to propose a tentative canon of art in the 2000s. The aughts are almost notoriously hard to pin down – blandly pluralistic and intentionally naïve, but also hyperconnecte d, jetset, post-studio, social, and collaborative (or collusive, most prominently with the fashion industry). Perhaps for this reason, the Times’ list passes from Lutz Bacher’s Closed Circuit, 1997-2000, to Michael Asher’s architectural intervention at the Santa Monica Museum of Art, 2008, with nothing in between. But it’s a new day, and there’s a new list. This time from Artnews, “The 100 Best Artworks of the 21st Century,” which includes a seemingly unending number of noughties entries. From their list, mine also included: Isa Genzken’s Fuck the Bauhaus, 2000; Christopher Williams’ Kodak Three Point Reflection Guide © 1968 Eastman Kodak Company, 1968 (Meiko laughing), Vancouver, B.C., April 6, 2005, 2005; and Harun Farocki’s Eye/Machine I, 2001. Others become a little boring cumulatively, but make sense: Luc Tuymans’ The Secretary of State, 2005; Paul Chan’s 1st
Light, 2005; Cao Fei’s RMB City, 2009; Mark Bradford’s Bread and Circuses, 2007; Cory Arcangel’s Super Mario Clouds, 2002; Steve McQueen’s Static, 2009; Emily Jacir’s Where We Come From, 2001–03; Matthew Barney’s Cremaster 3, 2002; Andrea Fraser’s Little Frank and His Carp, 2001; and David Hammons’ Concerto in Black and Blue, 2002. I never would have thought of Louise Lawler’s Big (adjusted to fit), 2002/03/16, but Lawler’s scalable image of Marian Goodman’s booth at the first edition of Miami Art Basel, depicting half-installed works by Thomas Struth and Maurizio Cattelan, is sort of a perfect document of its time. On the whole, “The 100 Best Artworks” is a somewhat sad, unadventurous anthology; it’s dominating energy is that of an exhibition at, like, a second-tier museum. No accounting for (collectively arbitrated) taste, although I would prefer to see more art reflective of the moment in which it was produced, like the Lawler image, rather than this collection of works slouching toward contemporary relevance. We all agree we’re living in bad art times, so why turn to the recent past to show us how we got here? (In that regard, a better list might include the bad objects.) A number of lifetime achievement awards and bizarre selections scattered throughout, as well...There are, of course, many points of contention with this format, but that’s also what makes it fun. My provisional list for the aughts became too long to publish here, and I realized this was becoming a long-term project, so I turned it into a spreadsheet on Google Docs. If you wish, contribute your own choices, just add your initials so I know they’re not mine. Democracy in action… For whimsy, I’ve included Jawed Karim’s Me at the zoo, 2005, the first video posted on Youtube. As evinced by many of my initial selections, it was a great decade for video, right at the precipice of video overtaking everyday life.
The 2000s were also the last decade before digital became the film industry standard. A few years ago, I watched Michael Haneke’s Caché, 2005, back to back with Haneke’s earlier Benny’s Video, 1992 – not an experience I would necessarily recommend! But the distinct treatment of the intertextual videos in each – the elaborate framing of VHS tapes in Benny’s against the seamless integration of camcorder footage in the digitally-shot Caché – got me interested in the specificity of digital video. Around the same time, BFI’s Sight and Sound (of poll fame) did a piece on early digital cinema(tography), featuring interviews with a number of major directors, and also Miranda July. Yet what happened to the long list of films accompanying the article, which included everything from Godard’s Éloge de l'amour to Adam Sandler’s Click? Luckily, I have it archived on my Letterboxd.
Revisit Dot Dot Dot (2000-2010), the magazine founded by graphic designers Stuart Bertolotti-Bailey and Peter Bil’ak. Some highlights: Howard Singerman’s essay on Mike Kelley and Alfred Barr; David Crowley on the applied fantastic; Robert Garnett’s feature on the art collective BANK; Paulina Olowska’s Bauhaus Yoga; and Mike Figgis on his first digital film Timecode. So many other things, too – articles on early AI text generators, twentieth-century pianists, postmodern graphic design, the aesthetics of protest posters, Michelangelo Pistoletto, Dutch magazines from the 70s… really makes you yearn for a lost world of experimental print media. (It also makes you appreciate smaller publications that are still extant, like May Revue – please support them!) It can be difficult to find physical copies, but I’ve generously compiled PDFs of each issue here.
Another charitable act: fellow reformed gallerina (current DJ) Spencer Hinson suggests looking at the fashion photographer Steven Meisel’s archive (1993-2014), which he assembled, and which, helpfully, he sent me. I agree things come into a sort of delirious focus around 2005, and the cultural commentary broadens: send-ups of WAGs and tabloid-baiting celebrities, shoots inspired by Sin City and In The Mood For Love, photos interspersed with boho-chic illustrations, no more riffing on Deborah Turbeville. The craziest (complimentary) is definitely the seventy-some page “Makeover Madness” for Vogue Italia, which centers around Meisel muse Linda Evangelista as she undergoes various cosmetic procedures while talking on her flip phone or smoking a cigarette; elsewhere, we witness her recovery in a luxury hotel suite. There are other models, too, who are all subjected to darkly humorous before-and-after pics. (In each “before,” the model dons gawky square-framed specs, like the kind Ben Gibbard used to wear.) If you want to download the entire archive, it’s 2.1GB of data, and you have seven days.
