Hello everyone,
Just a small post for now.
Apropos of Vincent Lafrance’s show, something seemingly unrelated, which I think might still be suggestive: Willem De Kooning said of the famous art dealer Leo Castelli that the bastard could sell anything, two beer cans, anything (I’m paraphrasing). So Jasper Johns, whose sense of humor was (and probably still is) something like those theoretical solids with millions of sharp edges that don’t really exist, went to his studio and made a bronze sculpture of two beer cans from scratch, which Castelli immediately sold.
What De Kooning may arguably not have realized was the synthetically perfect, dialectical situation he had in effect proposed, staged and begun, of the kind that a High Structuralist like Johns couldn’t miss completing. The legendary Abstract Expressionist position of De Kooning (and Rothko and Pollock) apropos money contrasted the axes of existentialism vs. money where success is graphed as trending upwards the fewer sales there are (according to that myth of artistic integrity); which stands in direct contradiction with the artistic movement which followed it of Neo-Dada and Pop, where the foreordained success of artist and work depended to a real degree on sales. In the sixties, if it didn’t sell, (up to a point and somewhat like recently) it wasn’t good. Dialectical juxtaposition being a reflexive habit of art writers in this era, I feel moved to point out the following, given the historical nature of what seems to be occurring all around us economically speaking ; by us I mean the art world (some gallows humor may be involved, as well as the hope that all may still be well).
There are two beer cans in one of Vincent Lafrance’s photos currently showing here at Division Gallery. The artist is coy, in good Johnsian fashion, so I guess it’s up to me to say something about it. Encoded in the work indeed is the signifier ‘two beer cans’, in the complete postmodern sense; as if to prove the point there is even a Johnsian arm and hand coming from above and ‘questioning’ the ‘reality’ of this image after a fashion, along with an assortment of studio junk, all of which makes for a very well-phrased idea if you know how to listen to the argument. It’s very consistent, wonderful even, since as an analog photograph the work does depict empirical reality, despite the clear fact that the scene is not typically what one tends to encounter, or how one would expect to do so. At the same time, the De Kooning mantra of (again I paraphrase) ‘if we can’t do it that’s why we have to’, feels relevant too, with Lafrance squaring the Johnsian circle, and mocking the mocking. Full stop? A good zinger and then silence?
No, I don’t think so. Both De Kooning’s existentialism and Johns’ structuralism are nodded at in this photo; but rather than just referencing them, Lafrance reconciles them, like tying a Moebius Strip into a bow. Clever I’d say, and possibly touching on the kind of possibilities which need to be explored for the art of the future to flourish.
The photo is sold by the way.
