We all learn it early. It is a primary survival skill prerequisite of liquid modernity. One of the few determinations of perception we all hold in common. The ability to pick out the essential from the camouflage forest of advertising enables us to negotiate our way through a vampire world of print ads, infomercials, junk mail, spam, etc. It brings to mind the art of Liu Bolin.
Recently I had the opportunity to briefly peruse the latest copy of Sculpture magazine. I deftly navigated my way through the pages focusing my attention only on what the International Sculpture Center currently considers significant (at least prior to publication); that is, what entices the viewer to part with their money as opposed to what the ISC has deigned to include in order to get vendors to part with theirs. Later, I couldn’t remember seeing anything that was figurative within the magazine’s specific “content,” yet I distinctly remembered an image of a Marylyn Monroe piece, and of several other figurative works prominently presented. I double checked. Sure enough, within the category of works deemed currently significant in the estimation of this esteemed international organization, there were no figurative representations to be found. Yet the vendors of materials, services and educational opportunities gushed forth profusely in representative splendor, primarily hominid.
This all evoked the spirit of House. House is often confronted with the fact that he doesn’t even know (or care to know) his patient’s name. When his recovering patient expresses personal gratitude, House has been known to say he doesn’t find the patient interesting anymore. Here, in stark contrast on the pages of the International Sculpture Center’s publication, is the clear dichotomy of the professional disposition regarding contemporary art, and everyone else. Just as House is obsessed with diagnosing the problem through the efficacy and efficiency of science (and logic) while “humanity” swirls around him in the subjectivity of Cutty, Wilson and the various patients with their families, so with this issue of Sculpture, we find professional, “problem solving” 3D art surrounded by the subjectivity of human form. Our communally shared “survival skill prerequisites” inconspicuously entrap us and promulgate this distribution of sense (that the understanding of certain matters must always necessarily be deferred to those designated as “professionals”). It does this by dismissing anything with a face or a name. This separate “professional” aesthetic swims within the subjectivity of the vendors with their de facto preference of promoting their wares and services through human representation.
One reading of this issue of Sculpture would have the viewer believe that representative figurative sculpture is simply not done within the contemporary. Another reading would have that it is done, but it is plebian, too uncouth for patrician tastes. A third reading, the one haunted by House, is that within culture, the arts can only reveal what is already integral to the culture, what comprises the distribution of sense. The International Sculpture Center’s publication clearly reveals this within the contemporary aesthetic, what is promulgated as “real” art and what aspires to be considered as such.