Too Much: The Triumph of High Production Values

Originally published in C: International Contemporary Art, Vol. 75, Summer 2002.

Solemn Gerhard Richter came to New York this spring with a ponderous retrospective at MoMA so staggeringly fraught as to scare the bejesus out of anyone with a regard for the depth of their own experience and a pair of functioning eyeballs. I spent several hours on each of five different days at the exhibition – by my count, two and a quarter hours of my life thus far have been absorbed by Betty, 1988 – and by the final exit, ecstatic and devastated at once, had not yet managed any kind of closure or communion, which, I suppose, was precisely the point. Grand and traumatizing as it was overall, however, the whole affair maintained its intractable power within each individual handmade painting, stoic upon the wall, demanding your examination and completely immune to the same. I repeatedly felt the queasy sensation I’ve had at the base of mountains, when, alone, you look upon a thing and tremble at its undeniability.

After choking down such a substantial steak, I needed to balance things out with a light, sweet dessert, a sort of mental palette cleanser. Word of the Fischerspooner saturnalia scheduled at Deitch Projects passed on to me, and so it was that after some phone calls, a few visits to the gallery, and a raft of e-mails to the overbooked reservations address, I was the lucky holder of four passes for the last of several performances that would shape up to be the menagerie’s biggest media triumph to date. “Passes” is the right word: they were these shiny laminated things on cheap chains you wore around your neck, just like the backstage passes VIPs get at concerts. I really had no idea what I had gotten myself into.

Spooner et. al. stuffed so many knowing, glib conceits into their concentrated poison you really had to feel pretty guilty for coming along on the ride, which was something like Britney Spears at Jonestown. And no, it wasn’t how crass they made pop culture out to be that prompted such quickly dawning disgust (something so obvious by definition can never be so revelatory), but how seamlessly successful they were at supplanting genuine creative rigor with indulgence—albeit of a strenuously engineered variety—and a couple dozen stagehands.

You might presume from my allergic reaction that I disliked the entire spectacle. You would be completely mistaken. If Fischerspooner were only mediocre they’d hardly merit the kind of dread and ecstasy they reflexively provoke. Of course they’re completely revolting, and absurd beyond definition, but only because they have their slick, stylistic cues down pat, and know how to push every button that propels desire beyond reason. I was feverishly euphoric the whole goddamned time. The hype was unbearable, the after-party a blast, and the crowd was every bit as sexy as the performers. I was incapable of sleeping for three full days afterwards. How was the music, people keep asking me. What music?

On the second sleepless night I had the idea that a walk around my neighborhood might tire me sufficiently to put an end to the insomnia. Turning a corner in the East Village I watched some guy stumble five or six steps along the sidewalk, bend over at the waist and fill the gutter with vomit. Exactly, I thought to myself.

In an article for the New York Times Magazine that ran concurrently with the MoMA exhibition, Michael Kimmelman described Richter’s sober and sobering work regimen, a practice as seemingly filled with gravitas as the heady labor involved in encountering the finished works themselves. Reflecting on the Abstract Expressionists as much as his own deeply conflicted history, the painter acknowledged the fundamental human need for essential meanings while simultaneously shooting right through any possibility of attempting such a reach today as “pathetic behavior,” the pointless result of “absurd feelings.” In case you didn’t get it the first time, Kimmelman laid out the bottom line: “Richter knows he is a great artist.”

Nice for him!

As for the rest of us who haven’t had the misfortune and benefit of living through the crushing nexus of the last century’s most significant political and existential crises, you might ask how exactly we’re supposed to proceed from here towards any meaningful generative momentum. If every society gets the art it deserves then I suppose the bloodletting we saw onstage at Deitch that night was your answer. There’s nothing novel about Situationism but that certainly never stopped anybody from signing a £2-million record deal!

I’m 32, American and white. No Dachau, Rwanda or even Vietnam for me. Lots of great 80s TV, though! Onstage, Fischerspooner’s dancers kept a running commentary going while they changed in and out of various camp-vamp get-ups. Those dancers featured largely in my wide-awake nightmares for the rest of the week, all Kabuki makeup, Madonna biceps and camel-toed. Who do you suppose made those fabulous costumes? Jeremy Scott of course, as they kept reminding us, and sure enough there he was up in the front by the stage, fashion’s idiot-savant, watching what must be the only appropriate use for his sort-of clothing. Jeremy certainly knows his 80s TV, and he’ll tell you so if you give him half a second’s chance! At some point confetti cannons shot off and thousands of mylar ribbons filled the spot-lit air like a phantom, room-size disco ball. The snow machines came about three outfit-changes later.

Bigness itself is not the issue here (the effect of majesty in the work of Richard Serra and Andreas Gursky is achieved precisely because, all appearances to the contrary, the reckoning it precipitates occurs within, on an intimate and internal scale) but rather that prodigality without a backstory comes at the cost of the personal meanings one can assume we set about trying to define through these efforts in the first place.

Been to Fischerspooner’s Web site yet? It’s filled with all these sexy, meaningless, baroque flowery things that swell and sway when your mouse touches them. Neat! You can hear their music-product there too. One song on the site starts off with what sounds like some fearsome jet turbine starting up, low and quiet at first, then rising and rising up along the tonal scale, gaining in volume and pressure, like something big and giddy and gaudy that’s going to burst all over you. Naughty Casey Spooner says he bought most of these sounds prepackaged and royalty-free at a Times Square record store where a lot of music producers get their stuff cheap. You can too!

Recently, photographer Tod Papageorge was asked why most of his instruction at the highly professional Yale MFA program revolved around color photography. Principally identified with the black-and-white tradition himself and seemingly at a loss for an explanation, he offered the somewhat resigned response, “that’s just the way the world is going.” Over at the Luhring Augustine gallery just a week before the Fischerspooner show, Papageorge’s younger co-instructor at Yale, Gregory Crewdson, had a host of his hyper-constructed photo-products up. The six pages of credits at the end of the hardbound book published by Abrams to coincide with the exhibition (listing some 120 people and businesses that worked under fifty-nine separate titles in the process of creating Crewdson’s final product, including mentions for “sod,” “pyrotechnics” and perhaps most tellingly, “gaffers” and “documentary photography,” both of which suggest that Crewdson was not in fact directly responsible for lighting or even photographically recording his own creative process) was supplied, presumably, for those who failed to make the inductive leap from the works on the wall to the world of movies, which, as anyone knows, is the universal apex of cultural aspiration today. Apparently Crewdson himself didn’t fully get it, or maybe he’s just waiting for his deal to come through, because he has yet to drop what must surely seem to him this whole reactionary photo gig and take up his rightful place in Hollywood, or at least at MTV.

If the common response to Richter’s enigmatic intensity is a spellbound sort of speechlessness, the most frequent reaction I overheard to the quick payoff of Crewdson’s blockbuster features was “oh, wow.” The median age of the overflow crowd at the opening was, I would guess, about twenty-three.