Liminality in Art (1)

This is meant to be an attempt in coining a new term in the Art Theory field.

Curiously enough, the term Liminality continues not to be recognised by the modern dictionaries of English; even though numerous (stated below) researchers have been using it in academic papers. It doesn't exist as an aesthetic concept or any distinguished phenomenon in the contemporary fine art. Yet, what I would like to claim and what is the reason of this article is my knowledge that this very notion has been persistently influencing the way of defining and interpreting art of the last decades at least. Though never or very rarely (in its adjective form of the liminal) applied as such by the art critics and scholars it has been circulating in the air each time the hybridity, borderline qualities, formlessness or intersemiotics of the Postmodernism has been loathed or admired.

From Latin limen meaning threshold 'liminality' is an existential (metaphysical) subjective, state and realm of hovering 'between and betwixt' of two (or more) different planes, spaces and/or existential qualities. First described in anthropology (Arnold van Gennep, Victor Turner) as a social theory of the liminal states - spaces of a 'temporary outcast' when an individual or a group is being placed by the society on its margin in a ritual of purification and/or recognition. It has got also its usage in the contemporary psychology where the liminal means sub- or unconscious state with one's sense identity being 'hold' or dissolved to some extent. In contemporary philosophy J. Derrida has been called the 'philosopher of the liminal' due to his deconstruction attempts of the integral and solid tissue of materiality (more about it in the next parts of this series).

In visual art the 'threshold's ' aesthetics has been described on the theatre, cinema and performance field (notably S. Zizek, S. Broadhurst) and some curatorial and critical attempts has been made to embrace the liminality of the contemporary artistic expression done by more or less traditional media. Yet, it's basically the 'no man's land' when painting or sculpture is considered - those realms remain, for the today's critique and theory (and not surprisingly, by any means) immune to any 'revolutionary' 'new' aesthetic refurbishment; it became a sort of an ideological cliche - that it's more convenient to blame painting for its impotency (it's 'dead' anyway, why bother then?...) than to inject any potent conceptual spirit into it by an affirmative reflection.

When J-F. Lyotard has called Postmodernity the nascent state, the state of a permanent 'becoming' (The Postmodern Condition, 1979) he basically admitted its innate liminal character; and those artworks that seek to address this condition (both deliberately or not) are probably best recognised for their aesthetics (or anti-aesthetics) of incompleteness - sculptures/installations look as if the artist ran out of the materials to finish them to a decent level; paintings seem to be painfully 'hanged' by their own guts with indescribable forms, unidentifiable colours and freaky techniques; videos cry out for any structure, even a hint of a narrative. Their 'becomingness' is the only existence they know and it comes invariably as disquieting or even disturbing for the audience. No without a reason the primitive societies considered the liminal states as dangerous, unclean (Turner); and those affected were isolated 'pro publico bono'.

As hazardous and monstrous in moments as the liminality in art (and beyond it) seems to appear it is also probably the only truly creative state, which - if used wisely - can result in some profound discoveries and metamorphoses. This fructile chaos and the storehouse of possibilities (Turner) is a goldsmith's workshop of the contemporary art; even though some purists rise an alarm that the state of the constant flux and indeterminacy (where 'everything goes') will annihilate all the miserable bits of art that left - let's be positive... Art is best cared for if it's accepted just as it appears and shapes itself through the mill of the human spirit; even if refuses to 'become' and fit any new uniform - so what?... As far as minds and hearts are enflamed by it, even with a doubt, even with a turmoil - it fulfills its calling of the 'fifth element' - the force of life and death, possibility and danger, sanctus and profane...

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In the further studies on Liminality in Art (being a part of my studies on the Contemporary Art) I would bring closer the views of the scholars, philosophers mentioned above, as well as I will try to illustrate the theory with some artworks.

Peter Doig or 'Viva la peinture!'

A friend has challenged me to pick out one artist, whose work will still 'matter' in 40 years time. Well, imagine we've got 2050; the number alone looks pretty surreal; doesn't it? The same can surely be said about the quantity of the imagery out there - buzzing, flashing, tempting, repulsive, genius and rubbish... But - what will be there considered as the great 'classic' - something that had been created at the turn of the centuries? Will be there any need for the 'classics' at all; who knows, maybe the 'classic' will actually mean the 'clutter' of no other than an abstract, historical value?

Well, we are we?

An artist important for my children' children, for generations with a different sense of time, space, culture (presumably); with a changed view on the 20th/21st century... That all makes the guessing game a pure shot in the dark really...

I put Peter Doig in the title as a sort of a 'tease' and a challenge. I do consider him influential and important now; I would risk stating that his particular vision of painting (notably - changing/being modified all the time) will survive through his own generation of artists - let's say - 10 more years; as well as I can predict than many of the painters from my 'class' will carry Doig's 'germs' with them for some time. Yet - to tell - that P. D.'s impossibly romantic and surprisingly (in comparison with the majority) well painted magical landscapes will break the price records in 2050? Simply impossible - and - a bit pointless perhaps... Because, why to bother with that in the first place in the era of the flux? Let's enjoy our present time - future is nothing more than the act of accepting, respecting and giving the foundations to the 'here and now'...

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Peter Doig (b. 1959) - Scottish-born painter, brought up in Canada and art-educated in London. From 2002, living and working in Trinidad (studio at the Caribbean Contemporary Arts centre) . Professor at the fine arts academy in Duesseldorf, Germany. Considered as one of the most important and influential painters working today.

Doig is both acclaimed and criticized for his paint-handling - carefully layered, with the impressive sensitivity to the colour scale (his landscapes look like there is 'every colour' in it; a reason for clapping or doubting?) - his paintings are a triumph of the contemporary painterly technique. Even if his concepts seem for some to be too 'eerie' to be true; in moments strangely sweet-ish and naive; he's managed to capture hearts and imagination of hundreds, both from the 'professional' and the 'spectators's side...

What I find especially compelling about his older (late 1990s - early 2000s) works is their ongoing chase for the uncanny - there is, in some of the landscapes that extremely difficult to create moment, where a beautiful on its own, sophisticated yet 'just' - mark-making transforms into magic - the very essence of all art; the moment when you feel you hair raising at the back of your head - because you've just spotted and experienced the unsaid, the inexplicable, the horrific enchanted into a 'lovely' scene.
Other thing is - if this all was really meant there to be or 'came by' as a 'happy accident'?

Anyway, and despite of all - Doig is one of those artists who made me to believe in painting again...

To review P. Doig's recent retrospective at Tate - click the Exhibition.

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Intimate spaces of becoming - Douglas Kolk

Douglas Kolk, Nurse City, 2007, Collage on paper, 189.2 x 189.2cm

Douglas Kolk, Where You Went, 2007, Collage on paper, 188 x 210.8 cm

Douglas Kolk, Help me Nasal, 2005, Collage on paper, 97 x 81 cm

Douglas Kolk (b. 1963 Newark, New Jersey) lives and works in Boston. He seems to be preoccupied with the notions of identity and the contemporary experience of the visual/mental overload. His collaged drawings hover somewhere between the finished artworks, huge posters and the studies torn out of a sketchbook. Although their visual impact, highly individual language and emotional/conceptual intensity (touching the level of an intoxication) makes them the independent, strong artistic statements, the media used (paper on paper, some drawing, some painting) stress the fragility and the provisional nature of the subject.

Drawing influence and the original images from pop art, TV imaginary (commercials, cartoons), newspapers, popular stories/mythologies Kolk's fragmented, troubled yet intimate works appear as the 'organized anarchy' and a 'fructile chaos' - the space of possibilities and becoming. The confusion, the lost innocence and the verge of a collapse constitutes the expressive negativeness of the language, yet - with the relatively generous patches of the white space left and the general impression of indeterminacy the propositions seem to 'open up' towards the new/different (desired?) state, which they are pioneers to.

The artist work has been shown internationally at galleries and museums including the Kunsthalle Mannheim in Germany, and The Royal Academy in London. His work features in several prominent collections including The Falckenberg Collection and the Saatchi Gallery. He is represented by Arndt & Partner in Berlin and Zurich.

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David Altmejd - the purposeful audacity

David Altmejd (b. 1974 Montreal) is a Canadian artist - a sculptor/installation artist - who shares his work-place between Montreal and London. Since graduating with his MFA (2001), he has taken part in many high profile group shows at important spaces as impressive as Artists Space and Deitch Projects, both in New York City. In 2007, he was Canada's officially selected national artist for the Venice Biennale at the Canadian Pavilion, curated by Louise Déry. Altmejd is represented in New York City by Andrea Rosen Gallery and Stuart Shave/Modern Art, London.

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Altmejd's grandiosely-scaled sculptures and installations are like the Hitchcock's celluloid narrative and the High Baroque poems embodied: they're monstrous, formless, excessive, bizarre, creepy, impossible - they seem to be hanged on a very thin line of the common sense, the postmodern 'hybrid-werewolf' aesthetics and the boundaries of the laws of physics.

They have grown out of the artist's existential need to create 'huge, super-intense objects in this world' (Altmejd in one of the interviews) that would work as a shock therapy - I do exist! Using random, both fairly grotesque and quite 'common' materials, such as decapitated werewolf heads (for which he 'earned' the 'werewolf man' nickname), stained Calvin Klein underwear, faux hair, towers made of mirrors, plastic flowers, electronic and steel elements etc. he awakes the fairy-tales, mythology and horror-movies most atrocious, deadly 'aliens' and 'beasts' that would keep us awake in beds in childhood and sinisterly amused throughout our entire, adult life.

Altmejd's purposefully audacious propositions are bizarrely seductive and irrationally convincing; they possess the energy and dark charisma, which provokes mind-teasing dilemma like: why, generally speaking, do we find those beastly incarnations so alluring (just think about the evergreen pop-cults of Dracula, Alien - series or Hannibal's story), why do those monsters keep coming back through ages in different forms/concepts? Is it maybe that we need them to be more 'human', or - perhaps they do us a favour of symbolizing and abstracting those of our 'persona' that our conscious, sensible mind would have never admitted to be existing in the first place...?

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Polish Theatre gets the 'oohs'...

I just couldn't miss this great opportunity to dive in the memories of my family town - Krakow ('Cracow' as it is misspelled sometimes).

The annual, intensely energetic festival of theatrical performances - the "Divine Comedy" hosted by Krakow's stages has made the arts news in the Irish leading newspaper. In the recent edition of the "Irish Times" Peter Crawley reports from Poland in all the acclaiming terms, tinting the relation with a bit of jealously ('why something similar cannot be done here, in Ireland?' - one can read between the verses).

To emulate the success of the cultural event is equally difficult like - I guess, to gamble if a transplant will be accepted by the 'mother'-body or not. In Krakow, as far as I can remember, there were at least three major national theaters (independent companies) functioning all year long and few minor ones - all employing the set of full-time and excellently prepared professionals - actors, directors, stage design artists and so on. To be a respected theatre personality in Poland has meant to be more than the talented painter, even some of the writers didn't get the same devotion; some of the poets only (mainly Nobelists and other great-s) would equal or surpass the actors and directors on the Pantheon of the 'moral' and 'existential' guides. The most famous academies for the future 'theatre people' have got the magic aura around them; fine art centers only rarely could have matched them in the sky-high level of the artistry in their principles and the artworks produced.

Above that, Poland's social, political and cultural life has been always evolving around the drama-comedy sweet-sour swing - it's been full of a struggle, bloodshed, brain-washing, oddities and bizarre elements, hate and vanity - a bit like in Ireland, yet - in Poland there is ten times more hands to meet the challenge of becoming a professional playwright or a performer. Adding to it the long tradition and the comparatively recent excitement with the 'showing Europe who we are' (Poland joined the EU in 2005) - and you got a high-quality international festival, prepared and 'powered' mostly by the young generation and - what's important - getting the claps!

Well done Krakow. Looking forward to hear more good news.

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Read the original article here.

Saatchi's Art-World-View

It's a story that has been cherished in British artistic circles. Charles Saatchi in one of his rare interviews (The Art Newspaper) has been asked how he sees the contemporary Art World. He answered, in his usual way, with a teasing, sharp-edged tale about a game, he would like to play with his friend, an art critic...

The game goes like this: Considering, that you are stuck on a deserted island with a representative of one of these: the critics, dealers, collectors, curators and artists circle - who would be the least welcomed companion of yours? And the answer goes, respectively - from the least welcomed:

- The Dealers: Pompous, power-hungry and patronising, these doyens of good taste would seem to be better suited to manning the door of a night-club, approving who will be allowed through the velvet ropes.

- The Critics : The art critics on some of Britain's newspapers could as easily have been assigned gardening or travel, and been cheerfully employed for life. (these) critics swooning with delight about an artist's work when its respectability has been confirmed by consensus and a top-drawer show - the same artist's work that 10 years earlier they ignored or ridiculed. They must live in dread of some mean sod bringing out their old cuttings. However - when a critic knows what she or he is looking at and writes revealingly about it, it's sublime.

- The Curators: With very few exceptions, the big-name globetrotting international mega-event curators are too prone to curate clutching their PC guidebook in one hand and their Bluffers Notes on art theory in the other. (...) These dead-eyed, soulless, rent-a-curator exhibitions dominate the art landscape with their socio-political pretensions. The familiar grind of 70's conceptualist retreads, the dry as dust photo and text panels, the production line of banal and impenetrable installations, the hushed and darkened rooms with their interchangeable flickering videos are the hallmarks of a decade of numbing right-on curatordom.

- The Collectors: However suspect their motivation, however social-climbing their agenda, however vacuous their interest in decorating their walls, I am beguiled by the fact that rich folk everywhere now choose to collect contemporary art rather than racehorses, vintage cars, jewellery or yachts. Without them, the art world would be run by the State, in a utopian world of apparatchik-approved, Culture-Ministry-sanctioned art. So if I had to choose between Mr and Mrs Goldfarb's choice of art or some bureaucrat who would otherwise be producing VAT forms, I'll take the Goldfarbs.

- The Artists: If you study a great work of art, you'll probably find the artist was a kind of genius. And geniuses are different to you and me. So let's have no talk of temperamental, self-absorbed and petulant babies. Being a good artist is the toughest job you could pick, and you have to be a little nuts to take it on. I love them all

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Guess, that affection is reciprocal. It's more than extremely difficult to find an authentic art passionate these days, who - with an intelligence, insight, devotion and talent takes care of the art as it is 'now', supporting the 'new' and 'emerging'; some of Saatchi's choices and moves made him 'persona non grata' in all the circles of the artistic world - from dealers to artists; yet - what is undeniable and impressive is the strength of his belief and love for good art, for which he will be known beyond his lifespan.

Visit Saatchi's Gallery web-page - one of the most welcoming, professionaly kept pages of this kind.

Elliot Hundley

Elliot Hundley lives and works in Los Angeles; right after finishing his MA in Fine Art in 2005 he had rocketed to a sort of a local celebrity (see the appraisal of the artist in the Herald Tribune). Yet, his talent has been noticed beyond the 'family' ground and he enjoyed few interesting projects/exhibitions in 2006 and 2007. Especially the one in Andrea Rosen's Gallery in New York has captured my attention due its unconventional, fresh appeal (visit the show here). In 2008/2009 program of the Saatchi Gallery in London Hundley's work has been placed into the "Upcoming exhibitions" and "Abstract America: New Painting from the US" section and one can see his works with this pleasant critical brief:

Mining the nostalgic and sentimental qualities of his eclectic materials, Elliott Hundley’s collages create condensed ‘dreamscapes’, entwining the personal and symbolic into friable mythologies. Hundley engages with the dramatic in the staged emotiveness of his structures and in the performative element of their intensive making process. (...)Using formalism as a platform for narrative structure, Hundley’s exquisitely delicate consternation transforms the act of looking into an adventure of exploration and discovery. (see the artist's page at Saatchi)

Well, fair for him. Looks like the recently lost in flesh and body Rauschenberg's spirit lives on (R. Rauschenberg has died in May, 2008;) and its rebelliously exuberant impact continues to inspire artists of the youngest generation (either consciously or via different mediate sources).

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