Bereft of his mother at the age of four, Darger was raised by an alcoholic father in one of Chicago’s poorest neighborhoods, the Madison Street vice district. Growing up in the era that Upton Sinclair published The Jungle (1906), Darger’s life began in unspeakable circumstances and went from bad to worse. At twelve he was abandoned to the care state institutions, in which he remained until he escaped at sixteen. The places in which Darger lived from the time he was four until his early twenties exposed him to repeated traumas as victim and witness to rape, beating, torture and murder.

Young Darger’s life is full of shocking and upsetting details, and Ellidge connects them directly to his epic illustrated manuscripts, giving real life names to Darger’s fictional events and characters. He is shown to be not only a victim of a terrible set of circumstances but also a homosexual at a time when the word was not spoken in good company. An interesting facet to the book, Elledge’s expert knowledge of the gay culture of the time sheds an entirely new light on Darger and his world.

Though misinterpretations of his work have focalized Darger as a predator, Elledge disproves these snap judgements by exploring his history and traumas. He re-posits Darger as a man full of love, hope, and sometimes rage – a man who used art to express and cope with a truly tragic lot in life.

Reviewed by Alta Buden

This book is available from The Overlook Press.

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In San Francisco, the oft-overrated capital of contemporary American cultural “radicalism,” asking such questions is most pertinent for a variety of reasons. In a 1950 letter, addressed to his friend and poet René Char, George Bataille wrote, “Literature, when it is not indulgently considered a minor distraction, always takes a direction opposite the path of utility along which every society must be directed.” By “literature,” Bataille was referring not only to writing novels but also to all serious art which names the sovereign activity that “conforms to the devil’s motto”—“I refuse to serve” (Non serviam in Latin).

Defined rigorously, true art cannot be made to serve a “master.” That is why, as Bataille put it amusingly, art is “diabolical,” but above all, “sovereign” in character. Indeed, it is in the very nature of art to designate a “movement that is irreducible to the aims of social utility.” Admittedly, after the emergence of post-World War II consumer society, terms such as utility and consumption have acquired connotations that differ from how Bataille employed them in his 1950 text. Yet, Bataille’s essential point remains valid. That is to say, art cannot be understood adequately if its movement—which could potentially result in the creation of an object-work—is subordinated to an end other than that of be-speaking the supreme “privilege of humanity.”

Today, this means that all high art must actively contribute to the liberation of the self from the necessity of undertaking productive labor in the struggle to preserve one’s existence in an external world of homogenized objects. This movement of liberation from different sorts of limits (psychological, social, political, etc.) is what Bataille terms sovereignty and constitutes the ultimate aim of all human existence. In historical terms, this means that, in the wake of the decline of Christianity and the public execution of the its last absolute vicar, Louis XVI, the ultimate aim of each individual and collective will must be the joyful celebration of life’s fragile and free nature. After the death of Louis XVI and the abandonment of the “God-Head” whom he had traditionally embodied, high art no longer had, at least in principle, a “master.” Be it the king or anyone else.

After this shift in power, high art’s only legitimate ambition seems that of expressing man’s “measurelessly divine desire” for eternal being—a “deep joy in being” to echo Nietzsche’s famous poem. Can high art be expected, more than two centuries after Louis XVI’s dramatic beheading, to subject itself to what Bataille calls “downward pull of self-interest?”

The self-interest in question has been, historically, that of the traditional and oft philistine American and European bourgeoisie for whom art was either a minor distraction or a means of self-promotion. Yet, in present day Northern California, the historically illiterate nouveaux-riches, the intellectually under-educated, or upstart cultural actors have also managed to debase the inspiringly unproductive expenditure of excess wealth (which the exhibition of high art requires) by devising a system of “petty displays.”

In San Francisco, such petty displays are not necessarily those of expensive art objects. Rather, the term here denotes the stultifying overestimation of oneself and one’s actions, which frequently bedevils the entire socio-cultural context of the region. For example, a mere reference to the Franco-American artist Suzanne Husky on the much-hyped Wendi Norris Gallery’s website dared to style itself an essay whilst referring to the “sophisticated US media-cracy” as a “persistent topic” of Husky’s “media practice.” N’est pas intellectuel qui veut, a well-read observer might have thought after encountering such pretentious dabbling in a cultural context as allergic to serious theoretical reflection on high art as that of San Francisco’s vaunted art institutions.

Nonetheless, Husky’s work has the great merit of examining the contemporary sense of our productive relation to nature by placing that relation in the historical lineage of the “Physiocrats,” an 18th Century school of French economic thought. One might not share her fascination with the practices of those who purport to live “off the grid,” but her manner of underscoring the complexity of the contemporary sense of our productive relation to nature stimulated much-needed theoretical reflection on the inherent limits of all production. In a film entitled Wash, Husky portrays the unorthodox bathing practices of members of the so-called counterculture. The film portrays people who don’t use regular tap water and have drawn on other methods of heating and using it. As alternative as these methods might appear to outsiders, their profound implication was perhaps as simple as the French neoclassical painter François-André Vincent’s depiction of the 18th Century bourgeois’ education in his piece The Plowing Lesson, which Husky replicated in a work with the same name. Animals do not transcend nature and self-preservation. In contrast, our trajectory veers towards pleasure in self-transcendence. Only humans would heat water and wash themselves in a bathtub. Such washing is, above all, a pleasurable act of self-purification. Strictly speaking, washing in a bathtub filled with hot water is not just pouring water on oneself for it amounts to as uselessly indispensable a luxury as all high art. Yet, Husky’s fashionable, Northern Californian ecological “primitivism” (reflected in her over-emphasis on alternative objects made to address man’s needs) tends to obscure this unique trait of man’s creatively sovereign interaction with nature.

This same confusion permeated the display at the Legion of Honor’s important exhibition, “Treasures of the Louvre Museum: From Louis XIV to Marie Antoniette.” The well organized and historically informative exhibition featured objets d’art that the Louvre Museum in Paris has lent to the Fine Arts Museum of San Francisco. Among these, some have been displayed outside of France for the first time.

I thought it a pity that, despite its laudably detailed character, the catalogue of the exhibition made no reference to the “uniquely sovereign” character of the patronage of the art which Louis XIV’s boîte à portrait (the king’s portrait encircled by large diamonds and given as a gift to foreign diplomats) exemplified. Far from being a luxurious objet d’art used to impress the Sun King’s foreign equals, its highly symbolic construction was meant to convey a novel notion of royal sovereignty in Europe. Indeed, the image of Louis XIV at the center of the boîte à portrait suggests the equidistance of the King in relation to the surrounding diamonds (perhaps various rival factions of French society).

Of course, today, the absolutist kingdom over which Louis XIV ruled no longer exists. Yet, the profound signification of the objet d’art that celebrated it transcends its history. It reminds us that the movement of sovereign transcendence of man’s finite existence, namely high art, exceeds its historically specific utility. Much like the eclipsed but irreducibly contiguous backdrop of Louis XIV’s portrait, sovereignty oft lets itself be spoken by an objet d’art. Yet, no matter how spectacular or expensive the objet d’art may turn out to be, the transcendently sovereign movement of its creation—high art—typically exceeds its social value. For such is the accursed privilege of all high art. As the enduring expression of the appearance of sovereignty in history, high art must, as Bataille put it, “prevail over the political and the financial consequences of its manifestation.” Will the practitioners of tiresome petty displays of art ever begin to understand this simple truth? I would say, lucidly, that it is high time for them to do so. But when I say this lucidly, this also means, to quote Bataille again, “without the least hope.”

by Simon F. Oliai

The post On the Misunderstood “Privilege of Art” appeared first on NY Arts Magazine.

Image courtesy of JTT

Borna Sammak
March 9 – April 27, 2014
JTT
170a Suffolk Street
New York City
jttnyc.com

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Image courtesy of Bureau Inc.

Ellie Ga: “Four Thousand Blocks”
March 23 – April 27, 2014
Bureau Inc
178 Norfolk Street
New York City
www.bureau-inc.com

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Image courtesy of team (gallery, inc.)

Pieter Vermeersch
March 30th – April 27th 2014
Team (gallery, inc.)
83 Grand Street
New York City
teamgal.com

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Maybe it’s just that the sun is shining and there is the lingering promise of warmer weather that makes us want to leave the apartment, but it definitely helps that there are so many museum shows to go see. Here’s a list of the best shows we think are worth your valuable time:

A new work by Jasper Johns.

Jasper Johns: Regrets
March 15th–September 1st, 2014.
MoMA
11 W 53rd St.
New York City
moma.org

A work by Sterling Ruby

The Whitney Biennial
March 7th – May 25th, 2014.
The Whitney Museum of American Art
945 Madison Avenue
New York City
whitney.org

A futurist work by Fortunato Depero.

Italian Futurism, 1909–1944: Reconstructing the Universe
February 21st-September 1st, 2014.
The Guggenheim
1071 5th Ave.
New York City
guggenheim.org

A work by Xu Bing.

Ink Art: Past as Present in Contemporary China
December 11th, 2013–April 6th, 2014
The Metropolitan Museum of Art
1000 5th Avenue
New York City
metmuseum.org

A work by Pawel Althamer.

Pawel Althamer: The Neighbors
February 12th – April 13th, 2014.
The New Museum
235 Bowery
New York City
newmuseum.org

The post NY Arts Picks: It’s Still Cold, But the Museums Are Hot appeared first on NY Arts Magazine.

Image courtesy of Blain|Southern

Featuring: Bruce Nauman, Jannis Kounellis, Max Neuhaus, Lawrence Weiner, and Gilberto Zorio.

ANALOG
November 30, 2013 – February 1, 2014

Blain|Southern
4 Hanover Square
London
blainsouthern.com

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Image courtesy of Campagne Premiere

Featuring: Pep Agut, Eric Baudelaire, Matthew Buckingham, Marianna Christofides, Simon Fujiwara, Vittorio Santoro, Shira Wachsmann

Campagne Premiere
Archaeologies of the Future 2
November 16 2013 – January 4 2014
Campagne Première GmbH
Chausseestrasse 116
D-10115 Berlin Germany
campagne-premiere.com

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Image courtesy of Lisson Gallery

Featuring: Art & Language, Tony Cragg, Angela de la Cruz, Richard Deacon, Ceal Floyer, Ryan Gander, Shirazeh Houshiary, Peter Joseph, Anish Kapoor, John Latham, Richard Long, Jason Martin, Haroon Mirza, Jonathan Monk, Julian Opie, Richard Wentworth

Lisson Gallery
Nostalgic for the Future
November 15, 2013 – January 11, 2014
27 Bell Street
London
lissongallery.com

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Recent work by Adam Chodzko. Image courtesy of the Benaki Museum.

You’ll see; this time it’ll be different is a site-specific working by the renowned UK artist. It takes place within the framework of the series “Artists in Dialogue with the Benaki Museum”, a collaboration with the British Council, which started in 2011 and aims to bring together artists from Greece and Britain.

For his project, Adam Chodzko stages a retrospective exhibition of imaginary Benaki Museum posters from the near future, installed along the liminal space of the Pireos building’s ramp. Through this poster series, the Benaki Museum is seen to have spread into surprising and awkward venues across Greece, ending up scattered and yet whole. Accompanying this collection of future exhibition posters is a video which documents the various ‘private collections’ that have been custodians of these records of the museum’s activities. Revealing a series of ordinary domestic spaces where these posters have hung – and acquired their ‘aura’ from traces of age and use – we see that, rather than originating from official and national sources, they are on loan from diverse, remote and unexpected places.

Adam Chodzko considers the museum as an emotional and idiosyncratic living being, which becomes increasingly hybrid and integrates into daily life. He imagines the moment where it reflects on its recent activities and challenges us to reconsider and deconstruct stereotypes regarding both its audience and its exhibits. This process leads us to make assumptions about who a museum might be for and who defines the meaning and value of a nation’s culture and thus takes responsibility for preserving and promoting it.

In the spirit of the ‘Artists in Dialogue with the Benaki Museum’ programme, the installation You’ll See; This Time it’ll Be Different thus reflects on the role of the museum in the representation of history, memory, knowledge and tradition, as well as on the conditions of viewing and on the relation between artistic production and the institutional space of its reception.

Chodzko’s work is the third project realized in the framework of the ‘Artists in Dialogue…’ programme. In its inaugural year (2011), UK artist Andy Holden engaged with the context of the Benaki Museum’s ancient Greek and Roman sculptures, while in 2012, Greek artist Antonis Pittas created a sensory installation using the interior ramp of the Benaki Museum’s Pireos Street building.

Adam Chodzko was born in London in 1965 and today lives and works in Whitstable, Kent, UK. He studied Art History at the University of Manchester and Fine Art at Goldsmiths College. His context-specific works in a wide range of mediums, from videos to installations, performance and painting, focus on the intersections between fiction and reality and on the traces of reality shifts in objects, places, but also audiences and networks of people. For this particular project he was mostly interested in using archival material from the Benaki Museum to imagine a transposition of roles among the custodians of works of art, but also of their meaning outside a certain context, and speculate on the potential of the intuitive reactions they trigger.

Text courtesy of the Benaki Museum

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