Against "knowningness"

My friend Gesine and I went to the Guggenheim to view the exhibition How to Work Better, which surveys the oeuvre of Swiss artists Peter Fischli and David Weiss. As the Guggenheim brochure indicates, it is "the first comprehensive overview of their 33-year-collaboration in a New York museum." If you are looking for "art" in a traditional sense, for instance, an object that you can feast your eyes on, that you can "dwell" with, that makes you consider how its craft has been achieved, then this show is not for you. This is art that can only be viewed in an institutional setting: at large museums or at international biennales. It represent a kind of "Gesamtkunstwerk." You can't pick up a replica for your book shelf, although postcards are available.

The walls of the winding, ascending galleries of the Guggenheim are filled with "replicas" of ordinary objects, with videos of "chain reactions" utilizing everyday objects, large monitors showing still photographs, slide installations with ponderous questions ("Why Does the World Turn Around Once a Day"). There are also innumerable small constructions composed of two figures, of unfired clay, to which are affixed a "concept": e.g., "High and Low." The goal is "to confuse traditional hierarchies and value systems."

Small and Big

A five-year-old could produce the figures, although, of course, a five-year-old would not be so "knowing" as to dream up the concepts. Come to think of it, maybe Fischli and Weiss had kids prepare the objects: it is hard to believe that they actually immersed their own hands in clay, like in a preschool. But what do I know? The show is for people who are "knowing," for whom the contraries represented by the objects represent some kind of wisdom.

Gesine and I had different reactions to the show. She liked the whimsicality of the small objects, contended that they make you think. I always feel like a disapproving chaperon on such occasions, for my response to such shows is always of "the emperor has no clothes" variety. And just as with emperors, an astonishing amount of institutional resources have gone into maintaining the deception. The description of the artists' methodology in the the brochure produced in me the proverbial gag reaction. Take this one: "Tischi and Weiss shunned the authoritative voice of the artist and acted instead as whimsical philosophers who pondered all questions, great and small."

But the subject of my post here is "knowingness." The appeal of such "art" is to people who are in the know about the latest cool things, people who are ahead of the curve and who express their knowingness in being able to get what the artist is doing, unlike the rubes who wonder what the fuss is about. Of course, I recognize what the artists are doing. I have a Ph.D., and I am au current about the contemporary art scene, but my rube background also makes me aware of the gimmicky aspect. Indeed, I suspect that the artists themselves know that they are not philosophers and that what they are doing is a gimmick. It is a gimmick, however, that has led to a career, to prizes, awards, exhibitions, magazine covers, and the like. That is the artistic world we live in now. Art requires craft, and while there is much craft in what has been installed at the Guggenheim -- people with various skills, especially technicians, are required to pull it all together -- in the end its purpose is to satisfy a small crowd of connoisseurs. In the process, it confirms a conformity of taste,  the taste of people in the know.