The 57th Carnegie International: The Aesthetics of Borders

by
Jane Swanson

The 57th edition of the Carnegie International emphasizes the voyage without traveling much beyond the paradigmatic borders of contemporary art. It does so in a partially tongue-in-cheek way with a special knowledge designed to tell its contemporary art audience: “This is our way of poking fun at modernism while trying to co-opt the 19^th century European Romanic phenomenon of visiting unknown, exotic lands for the first time.” This of course, is a presumed knowledge, a trope or a theme done with cuteness and in extensive fashion that encompasses a book, verbiage about the exhibition, and the way the show is presented on the official website.

Curated by Ingrid Schaffner, a Pittsburgh native, with a touch of intellectual insouciance and confidence, this colorful display of contemporary art taking place every four years in Pittsburgh’s preeminent art museum is the second oldest recurring exhibition in the world (after the Bienale di Venezia). In a perhaps fitting display of insouciance bordering on arrogance, Ms. Schaffner’s initial public presentation of the show at a press conference to open the exhibition began in a somewhat combative spirit since she did not take any questions from those in the audience. Of course, it may be maintained this gesture was undertaken in the spirit of mockery or parody of certain press briefings at a certain white house in Washington D.C.

Traditionally the Carnegie International hires an outsider, an up-and-comer in the contemporary art ranks if you will, to curate and mastermind the show. Many previous curators, from Laura Hoptman to Madeleine Grynsztejn would go on to more prominent roles with major museums upon completing their duties at the Carnegie Museum of Art. The magnitude of the task is gargantuan and because the role of curator at the International is ephemeral, it has often been utilized as a stepping-stone from a career perspective.

What makes the Carnegie International unique is not only its history however. The Carnegie International is the only exhibition in North America of such a grand scope without explicit ties to specific galleries. As such it is meant as a gift to Pittsburghers, and thanks to easy travel today, Art-Lovers everywhere. It was first conceived in 1896 as a way for Andrew Carnegie to present his collection of modern art to the mostly-blue collar and partly old-money societal elements that together composed most of what was then an exceptionally industrious and prosperous American city at the turn of the century.

With today’s proliferation of art fairs making art tourism a newly global phenomenon, the spectre of money and wealth are never far behind. With the Carnegie International one can still maintain the illusion of an art and aesthetic experienced removed from the trends and demands of the art market and the vainglorious purchases of the hyper-rich. This is an illusion worth fighting for and a necessary aspect of the phenomenon with which one safeguards one’s relationship to creativity and making. It doesn’t matter if you are a casual observer, a dedicated artist, a curator or a critic, the central importance of the Carnegie International is the illusion of critical distance from the nefarious and cynical aura of the art market. Only a museum can provide the space for such an illusion, however elusive it may be.

The list of artists and participants to this edition of the esteemed exhibition is as eclectic as ever. Here is the official roster:

• Yuji Agematsu
• El Anatsui
• Art Labor with Joan Jonas
• Huma Bhabha
• Mel Bochner
• Mimi Cherono Ng’ok
• Lenka Clayton and Jon Rubin
• Sarah Crowner
• Alex Da Corte
• Tacita Dean
• Jeremy Deller
• Kevin Jerome Everson
• Han Kang and IM Heung–soon
• Leslie Hewitt
• Saba Innab
• Karen Kilimnik
• Zoe Leonard
• Kerry James Marshall
• Park McArthur
• Josiah McElheny with John Corbett and Jim Dempsey
• Ulrike Müller
• Thaddeus Mosley
• The Otolith Group
• Postcommodity
• Jessi Reaves
• Abel Rodríguez
• Rachel Rose
• Beverly Semmes
• Dayanita Singh
• Lucy Skaer
• Tavares Strachan
• Lynette Yiadom–Boakye
• Dig Where You Stand by independent exhibition maker Koyo Kouoh

The official verbiage of participating artists also includes this:

• 1 independent exhibition maker
• 6 art collectives and collaborations
• 13 individual artists who use the pronoun “he”
• 17 individual artists who use the pronoun “she”
• 20 artists who live in the US
• 3 artists who live in Asia
• 5 artists who live in Europe
• 2 artists who live in Africa
• 1 artist who lives in South America
• 1 artist who lives in the Middle East

National affiliations by residence and birth for participants includes Austria, Bahamas, Cameroon, Cherokee Nation, Colombia, England, Germany, Ghana, India, Japan, Jordan, Kenya, Korea, Kuwait, Lebanon, Navajo Nation, Nigeria, Nonuya Nation, Pakistan, Palestine, Scotland, Senegal, Switzerland, United States of America, and Vietnam.

Note the phrasing regarding pronouns and the number of men and women represented therein.

An installation by Saba Innab, steel, plaster, 2018

This is an exhibition whose trope of travel also includes an explicit aim of including or “diversifying” the make up of show by using typologies as diverse as sexual orientation, skin color, nationality and sex. Missing from these typologies however is the perspective that challenges the ideology of contemporary art, the last taboo of art-making ignored and never spoken of in galleries and fine museums today.

Regardless of the so-called “inclusionist” scope of the exhibition’s history and the 57th edition’s attempts to honor this original vision, make no mistake, this show is a contemporary art exhibition. I use the term “contemporary” not as a marker of time or temporality to denote the present but rather as an ideological standard-bearer. For contemporary art is as much an accumulated system of values and signifiers as it is about art of the current day. Indeed, one may make the case that regardless of an artist’s national or ethnic identity and origins, once he/she chooses to make work for an American or European audience, art market and its resident gatekeepers (critics, curators, other artists) one thereby abdicates the identity of ethnic independence in favor of the ideology surrounding contemporary art: extreme wealth, the prevalence of ideas over images, the erasure of national identity and cultural heritage, irony, cynicism; and the forfeiture of aspirations toward beauty, truth, and wisdom. It is paramount upon us that we understand and problematize the notion of the “contemporary” to safeguard the sanctity of criticality when coming upon phenomena like the Carnegie International or the Venice Bienale so we can pierce the hallowed myths that ground such displays of art and their ties to capitalism, culturally negative-theologies, the erasure of piety and the turning away from beauty, from awe and from humility from which all truth emerges.

It matters little that El Anatsui’s sculptures exude much of the Ghanaian heritage in which the artist operates as a maker with his recycled bottle caps and metal detritus, once a gallery in New York sells them and once the work is made for the consumers known as art collectors. Such a phenomenon, the buying and selling of “artworks” as commodities, is wholly alien and inconceivable to the creative psychodynamics and ethos of people and makers outside of the European and North American cultural spheres for whom making can never be removed from the sacred context of ethnic/tribal/cultural production and practice, from rite and ritual, from piety and community.

It matters greatly that Mr. Anatusi has displayed a magnificent fusion of his cultural heritage with the conceptual practices of Occidental art. That he has utilized this fusion so effectively in his gargantuan sculpture on the exterior of the main faced of the Carnegie Museum of Art makes for a grand and somewhat jarring introduction to the problematics of the “contemporary art” paradigm as much as it enchants those who arrive at the International. It takes an especially vigorous and brave artist to counterbalance the ugly depressiveness of the Carnegie Museum’s exterior with a fresh and dare-I-say “optimistic” work of poetry, song and color.

Within these problematic investigations what matters is the matter of placement and context, of appropriation for contemporary art’s money class and intellectual guardians who render such work “saleable” and “exhibitable” in galleries because of, in the case of El Anatsui and many artists from Africa and Asia, the inherent exoticism and neo-colonialism involved in the dynamic of their placement within contemporary galleries and exhibitions like the International in the first place. Such artists from far off distant lands like Taiwan, Morocco, or Brazil are nothing other than new exotic producers of new exotic art products in the eyes of the art market. The intellectual and material grounding of their work is irrelevant for the purposes of those who collect and profit from the buying and selling of such work.

Alex Da Corte, Rubber Pencil Devil, 2018

It matters greatly that Mr. Anatusi has displayed a magnificent fusion of his cultural heritage with the conceptual practices of Occidental art. That he has utilized this fusion so effectively in his gargantuan sculpture on the exterior of the main faced of the Carnegie Museum of Art makes for a grand and somewhat jarring introduction to the problematics of the “contemporary art” paradigm as much as it enchants those who arrive at the International. It takes an especially vigorous and brave artist to counterbalance the ugly depressiveness of the Carnegie Museum’s exterior with a fresh and dare-I-say “optimistic” work of poetry, song and color.

Within these problematic investigations what matters is the matter of placement and context, of appropriation for contemporary art’s money class and intellectual guardians who render such work “saleable” and “exhibitable” in galleries because of, in the case of El Anatsui and many artists from Africa and Asia, the inherent exoticism and neo-colonialism involved in the dynamic of their placement within contemporary galleries and exhibitions like the International in the first place. Such artists from far off distant lands like Taiwan, Morocco, or Brazil are nothing other than new exotic producers of new exotic art products in the eyes of the art market. The intellectual and material grounding of their work is irrelevant for the purposes of those who collect and profit from the buying and selling of such work.

It matters greatly that the rise of the global art fair circuit corresponds perfectly with the advance of Neo-Liberal globalist economic and political practice, where national, cultural and vernacular customs and borders are ignored, wiped away or violated in favor of the “opening” of new markets for both production and consumption.

This is an especially apt notion considering the theme of travel for this iteration of the Carnegie International. One may wonder at the mad ironic genius behind Ms. Schaffner’s choice of the travel theme as a potential form of reflective critique of art’s neo-globalist paradigms. It appears to me to be a cynical or even naïve notion that begs the question concerning the origins of colonialism in the 18^th and 19^th centuries all the way to today’s proxy wars and globalist capital plantations in India, Sri Lanka, China and other faraway lands that produce those consumer goods so essential as economic drivers for purchasers in North America and Europe.

For most of the contemporary art world however, such artists outside of North America and Europe are simply new markets/products to channel and distribute to the tired and weary buyers of North America and Europe who have grown fatigued and bored with the same cynical approach to making things that passes for art since 1945.

The irony of this version of the International and other shows that attempt to broaden dialogues, erase their American hegemonic perspectives, and “diversify” their holdings is that there is no real diversity once a work enters the bloodstream of the contemporary art consumer complex, which is by its very nature totalitarian from both an ideological and financial perspective. Work from Chinese, Brazilian, Ghanaian and other artists from faraway exotic lands is forever tainted, devoid of its aesthetic and cultural purity by necessity, once it is removed from its physical and spiritual sources. It becomes tainted once it is given the label “contemporary art”. Look no further than the cynicism, textual-obsession, and anti-intellectualism that predominates in the work of contemporary art’s grandest professors: Damien Hirst, Kehinde Wiley, Jeff Koons or Takashi Murakami.

This is the lie, the dirty little secret of identity nobody dare acknowledge: for all its claims of conceptual expansiveness and cultural inclusion, the institutions of contemporary art (art schools, museums, publications) have become ideologically tone deaf to critiques of identity, capital and aesthetics, to the ideals and ideas they dare claim to safeguard and expound. Contemporary art’s fundamental paradox is one of identity and the relationship between time and thought, between tradition, place and globalist impulses in both the cultural production sphere and capitalism at large.

Within this understanding El Anatsui is no more a Ghanaian artist than Chris Burden is a real outlaw. For no Ghanaian, or African, or Asian could ever be a true contemporary artist because of this cleavage and distinction in what is called “art.” Once we understand this lie and the myths of inclusion and diversification that contemporary art tells itselt to appease its guilty conscience as the stepchild of globalist exploitation, then we can begin to critique the conceptual and aesthetic underpinnings of exhibitions like the Carnegie International.

wood sculpltures by Thaddeus Mosley, 2018

The same applies to questions of gender, sexuality and other distinctions that attempt to enrich and fetishize the question of identity, whether they emerge from Kara Walker or Nan Goldin. Once activism and awareness take the detour into the gallery and the art market their message is nothing more than a novel way to sell a product. Their political power is rendered null and the purity behind the intentions of those who produce images and objects with “messages” must be put to rigorous scrutiny and questions.

Real concern, genuine passion, authentic advocacy need no art. They require only actions of the quotidian, kindness and political policy.

How very ironic that those most obsessed with the question of identity are themselves utterly blind to their very own identities and their ties to the war machine, capitalist hegemony, the politics of fear and the fabrication of hate that all underwrite the contemporary art commodity complex.

With respect to the neo-globalist leanings of contemporary art’s sensibilities, the Carnegie Internationa’s choice of the travel theme is worth a deeper reflection.

The concept of travel appears to be an idea that envelopes the show in a somewhat nineteenth century way, replete with tongue in cheek pseudo-innocence, a travel guide for purchase at the bookshop and a “Travelogues” title for a series of lectures about the exhibition.

It remains to be seen and it is certainly a question to examine whether or not the travel theme is meant as a form of critically distant irony in light of the explicit attempts at inclusion/diversification being made in the participants of the show.

It is a complex phenomenon between adhering to the line of politically correct identity ideological considerations and making evaluations of artists based on criteria that do not require an inquiry into the color of their skin, their gender, or their sexual orientations. No amount of politically correct sophistry can deny this fact.

What is most cynical in the larger scheme of contemporary art’s fetishism of the other and identity is the false consciousness of inclusion of the other when the sector of sphere of influence of inclusion is one of codified anti-aestheticism and anti-intellectualism, itself a form of totalitarian soft power similar to the elite country club or university.

A view of El Anatsui’s Sculpture on the facade of the Carnegie Museum

With regards to this edition of the Carnegie International there was a good deal of work to redeem the experience of visiting the show and to counterbalance the cynicism and pseudo-intellectualism of most of what passes for painting, sculpture, and creative gestures today. Indeed, much of the work, despite the obviousness and naivete of its conceptual and political leanings, offered much in the way of reflections on many of the above issues.

Lynette Yiadom–Boakye’s gloomy mostly black and very low-contrast oil paintings represent a highlight of the International. While some of her work may beg for a bit more completion, there is always a delicate balance of culmination and openness in the British painter’s pictures. Ms. Yiadom-Boakye’s portraits of so-called “fictional characters” are often touchingly bleak yet strangely accessible and humble. Hers is an oeuvre that owes a debt of gratitude to the paintings of Luc Tuymans as it ventures into travels independently without a chaperone or the need for the cloaking devices of ugly painting and cynical irony that so often seduce contemporary painters who have become entranced by the Belgian’s casual genius. The works by Yiadom-Boakye in the International ore larger in scale and serenely compelling, making them among the most impactful and poignant of the entire exhibition.

Saba Inaab’s sculpture, What Is Unseen Cannot Be Broken, in the Hall of Architecture is easy to overlook, as I did during my first tour of the show. It is not really an artwork on display so much as a conceptual architectural fragment made out of steel and plaster that resembles at once an overlooked component of a cathedral that was forgotten during construction and left as an artifact; and an architectural fragment for a building destroyed after an earthquake and being retro-fitted for an imaginary edifice in which Thomas Houseago and his friends would throw elaborate parties amidst quintessentially elegant candle light while Brad Pitt makes an un-announced visit in the character of Westray, his exquisitely-dressed drug kingpin middleman in Ridley Scott’s The Counselor.

Ms. Inaab’s piece is by far the most poetic and materially eloquent of this somewhat chaotic show. It is eloquent for what remains unspoken in it and it is memorable because of its humility in the face of and next to so many other contrived works of cynical kitsch.

Postcommodity, a Pittsburgh “collective” (whatever that means in 2019) built what may be the most theatrical of all the sculptures in the 57^th International. The work, with a title I cannot find anywhere and not referred to as “Untitled,” is a sprawling floor installation in the venerable marble-clad gallery within the museum called The Hall of Sculpture. Consisting of ground glass, rusted steel, and a variety of other metallic components laid out like some torture garden from a 1940s horror film in which the heroine, played by Gene Tierney, dreams she is being ogled to death by her fiancé, played by John Garfield. In the dream she is drugged and dragged along the pathways of this sculpture that lead to nowhere…

I presume, cautiously, that the work is meant to address the history of Mr. Carnegie’s checkered labor practices, the city of Pittsburgh’s slag heaps made from the detritus of steel fabrication, and many other early 20^th century industrial phenomena. While a bit too manicured and didactic to function as a poetic work in the manner of say Mario Merz, it is nonetheless a visually-provocative sculpture, particularly in this setting.

There is much to be learned from and provoked by the 57^th edition of the Carnegie International. If nothing else, one can contemplate the state of contemporary art through the eyes of the guest curator Ingrid Schaffner. It is a truism of the phenomenon of repeating exhibitions that each guest curator interprets the ideology of contemporary art and articulates this interpretation in a way befitting of their vision. Some curators more than others, have succeeded in dismantling or at least challenging the borders of the paradigm that makes up this ideology. In the case of Ms. Schaffner one may argue that the most radical choice in the show is the inclusion of work by Thaddeus Mosley, the long-time and well-respected Pittsburgh sculptor.

Mr. Mosley’s work speaks to an aesthetic where making is central to the conception and manifestation of the work of art. He is a sculptor in the beautifully classical sense that carves wood and makes abstract pieces that are often monumental in scale and sublime in their stature. It is easy to entertain the thought that Martin Puryear would be influenced by Mr. Mosley’s sculptures. The 93 years-young African American artist’s work was granted a position of honor in the grand lobby of the museum and right in front of a series of floor-to-ceiling large glass windows that made them look like they were seeking refuge from the grey and damp Pittsburgh weather while their sorrowful brethren trees in the garden outdoors and a few feet away were left to experience the elements in a nakedly elemental way.

“Elemental” is a very good word when describing Mosley’s work and the Carnegie International is made that much stronger, more memorable and more grandiose thanks to these sculptures.

The responsibility of the curator of such a grand and historically prominent exhibition is exceptionally laden with expectations by both the public and the art world. It may be that, like with the Venice Bienale, the tasks and expectations of the Carnegie International are simply too numerous, too multifarious, and too fluid to offer any singular statement on the state of contemporary art at any given moment.

Exhibitions of this scope and with this history should at best hope to achieve a memorable experience as phenomenon and this 57^th edition of the International mostly succeeds on this level. Whether you are a contemporary art skeptic, layperson, artists, a casual observer or a seasoned curator, this exhibition will unfold with a number of interesting intellectual and philosophical pathways upon which you can take pauses for reflection or follow along with a travel companion. It really is the journey that matters as much as the destination when it comes to thought and creativity. For contemporary art is a landscape both known and unknown, one too fluid and ever-shifting to ever be mapped and totalized, even when contemplating its ideological borders. In these travels it is important to remember the arbitrariness of the borders that distinguish “the contemporary” and that often separate themselves from truth and beauty, however we may experience them.