the self-knowing vertical desktop

I was struck by how much of the art we saw in Chelsea demonstrated the kind of preoccupation with self-knowledge and self-reference that Liam Gillick attributed to contemporary art in his essay and and how important that way of understanding them seemed to be in making sense of their value as art.  Many of the artists we looked at seemed to be using their art’s status and identity as art object, particularly in its position in a gallery space, as the conceptual material for their work.

Efrain Almeida, for example, in the CRG Gallery, carved small wooden statues of himself (presumably) in the nude and positioned them around the rooms at different levels and surrounded them on the walls with watercolor depictions of himself (naked) standing in a bare planar room or with his head “sitting” on a rectangle “podium.” These objects seem very much to be about spectating, art-making, and exhibiting. They seem to create a sense that, as the gallery visitors stare at his work, the artist is staring back from them, positioning art as a literal objectification of the artist who makes it and a vulnerable sort of “baring” of himself/herself for public consumption. Though in the way some of his sculptures stare up or down at each other from different positions in the gallery, he also seems to suggest that a gallery exhibit is a sort of airtight box where a sterile if clever idea (produced by the artist) bounces back and forth from wall to wall without admitting anything that might displace it or creating something that would change anything in a significant way.

Along similar lines, Walead Beshty’s reflective copper desktops hanging around the gallery walls served effectively as mirrors, reflecting each other, the people viewing them, and the gallery space in a sort of infinite mise-en-abyme of the Petzel gallery.

Much of the work we saw seemed to only be intelligible in its position as art objects in a (specific) gallery—sometimes the press releases seemed to be just as integral a part of the show as the art.