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Bone fide trier
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Content
Bona Fide Trier
By
Jake Freilich
A Thesis Presented to the
FACULTY OF THE USC GRADUATE SCHOOL
UNIVERSITY OF SOUTHERN CALIFORNIA
In Partial Fulfillment of the
Requirements for the Degree
MASTER OF FINE ARTS
August 2019
Copyright 2019 Jake Freilich
i
Acknowledgements
Andy Campbell
Edgar Arceneaux
Jennifer West
Karen Moss
Keith Mayerson
Mary Kelly
Nao Bustamante
Shannon Ebner
Suzanne Hudson
Suzanne Lacy
Thank you.
ii
Abstract
This text is a written component to a visual project, both of which question how
language, in its many forms, performs.
iii
Table of Content
Acknowledgements i
Abstract ii
Corridor 4
A Given If You Let It 8
Suddenly History, So Says You 18
Bona Fide Trier 23
Epilogue 26
Bibliography 28
4
Corridor
A hallway of paintings ends yet extends at the convergence of a
perpendicular plane.
1
Incandescent light leads to a LED configuration of exposed
flame that flickers towards fluorescence. (How are we supposed to make sense of
anything with such volatile light sources?!). At its front and center, a digitally
rendered fire burns atop an abstract (or just indecipherable) painting whose lip
kisses the edge of the projected image’s frame. Warmth emits from the blaze, more
seen than felt, texturing the two most neighboring paintings hanging from either
adjacent wall. The space within this instance of action quickly gives way to cooler
tones of blank white light that coalesce to a vanishing point.
The figurative painting just left of the burning one reads flat yet illustrative in
a thumbnail kind of way. Upon closer inspection, this painted depiction really
protrudes from the wall with considerable depth: the plane of the painting’s
subject’s shoulder and the hand yanking or comforting it wrap around its physical
thickness. Skewed construction both real and represented concedes to parallel lines
pinching perspective in and away so as to force anamorphosis. The figure’s sullen
eyes gaze down at the action sadly, yearningly, wonderingly, witness to perpetually
failed degradation.
Visually opposite sits a painting whose square blankness seemingly mirrors
the facing figure’s downward gawk. The empty image proffers a void not so much
1
The plane of a wall defines the two-dimensional, though whatever gets hung in front of it—also
considered two-D—paradoxically extends into three.
5
from compositional reduction as from feeble mimesis. Unlike its tangible
counterpart, this simulated object’s dimensionality arises from a corner, shadowed
irrespective of its light source. Crisp lines blur at the cusp of ascertainable
signifiers, leaving one wondering: Does it matter what’s said? Or how it’s said? The
easy answer would be both, but it’s not that simple. The medium is the massage in
an endless massage train. If a Russian drops a proverbial bomb in 1915 but no one’s
around to feel it, does it still hurt?
2
Grasping for straws you turn to the immediate, the real. There, pictured
people defined by wispy lines concurrently contemplate the effect of the scene of the
crime or punishment. The individuals’ mutual contemplation provides a critical eye
to their otherwise inanimateness, granting them agency that questions your own.
Their posturing implies their mode of inception: drawn looking. Made from paint to
resemble a sketch, a confluence of mediums confers temporal juncture.
Speaking of lapses, a fourth (or sixth) painting incongruously breaks rhythm
with the juried ones, begging the question: Is style ever natural? A central convex
shape echoes the outlined quadrangularity of the image two paragraphs prior.
Diacritical marks bend to simultaneously evoke subjugation and insincere flatness.
Overextended, the form’s underlying structure is revealed, uncovering the original
2
In 2015, conservationists at the Tretyakov Gallery in Moscow discovered a racist joke in one of two
underpaintings found beneath the surface of Malevich’s canonical work, Black Square (1915). The
joke references an inscription written for what some consider to be the first monochromatic
painting. By French writer and humorist, Alphonse Allais, the 1897 joke reads: “Negroes fighting in a
cellar at night.” Henri Neuendorf, “X-Ray Analysis Gives Shocking New Insights Into Kazimir
Malevich’s ‘Black Square,’” artnet news, November 13, 2015, https://www-
chicagomanualofstyle-org.libproxy2.usc.edu/tools_citationguide/citation-guide-1.html#cg-
news
6
image’s false edifice and the sign of (real) emptiness: a checker of neutral gray and
white.
Pulling back and around sits singly an image of a used calendar that’s been
scanned, painted in oil paint on a sheet of steel. The incongruity of the image on the
calendar with the banality of the days that fill it, marked by the imaginary things
that need to get done, the meetings that have to be met, the events that should be
attended. But all of this is placed in the not so distant future; not so far ahead (a
year or two later) from when the painting was made that one can imagine the
penciled appointments as being plainly real, though whoever plans that far in
advance must have some kind of extreme form of scheduling OCD. It’s a close
enough future, however, that the dates could foreseeably become the present and
then quickly the past. But because this object—one that’s used to organize and help
annotate the details of a life within a specific period of time, that would otherwise be
thrown away as so many other things that become apart of the minutiae of a life
do—is made up in paint on steel, it’s solidified in a concrete instant that its arthood
defines. Not precisely because functionality falls victim to the pointlessness of art,
nor exactly from an irrelevance similar to that of an old newspaper, per se, but
because the individual brushstrokes signify a moment of/in time the same way the
individual squares and numbers that mark the days on a calendar do. When these
brush strokes and appointments in boxes add up to form a singular image of a
month, the image is not only of a calendar, but a subject. Now the question is: Is that
subject me or you or us or them or all five?
7
Bona Fide Trier installation view, Roski Masters of Fine Arts Gallery, 2019
8
A Given If You Let It
The philosopher of language, J.L. Austin, performed ten lectures at Harvard
University in 1955 introducing the idea that certain phrases emphatically enact
what they imply. In these lectures—later turned into the book, How To Do Things
With Words—Austin defines what he calls performative utterances. He describes the
performative utterance as a proclamation that “is not to describe my doing of what I
should be said in so uttering to be doing or to state that I am doing it: it is to do it.”
3
While he exemplifies performative utterances with ardent phrases such as “I
promise,” “I bequeath…,” “I christen…,” “I sentence you…,” “I dare you,” “I bet…,” we
may now consider a broader definition of performative language to include less
overt illocution and more nuanced action.
4
What’s important in each circumstance is the configuration of the particulars:
i.e. who is performing the utterance, if the utterance is received and accepted, and
the context in which the utterance is made. Implicit in these verbal contracts is the
presumption of mutual understanding: an agreed social dynamic. Ideally there
exists cohesion between what someone says (what they outwardly promise) and
what they intend (how they inwardly feel). If a promise is made in bad faith—if a
speaker does not mean what they say—however, their statement cannot be
objectively considered a lie or even false, but merely misleading. The effect of the
3
J. L. Austin, How To Do Things With Words: The William James Lectures Delivered at Harvard
University in 1955. Edited by J. O. Urmson and Marina Sbisà. Second ed. (Cambridge, MA: Hard
University Press, 1962, 1975), 6.
4
I am more interested in considering language in an expanded field, where gesture, syntax, context,
and a number of other variables are invaluable factors in defining the meaning of an expressive act.
Austin’s use of the term “utterance” pertains to the verbal, per it’s linguistic definition, but I
implement it to mean much more.
9
utterance is dependent upon the recipient’s interpretation as much as the speaker’s
intention: expectation works both ways.
Conversely, Austin’s definition of the explicit performative utterance is
distinguished from what he refers to as constatives: statements that may be deemed
true or false, descriptive of a past completed action. Since the performative
utterance is not a constative, it does not pertain to the past and therefore does not
concern itself with truths or falsehoods. Austin regards these expressions simply as
“happy” or “sad,” in that they are either fulfilled or not, hence the requisite of
expectation.
After having explicated the particulars of performative utterances and
constatives in the course of the prior ten lectures, Austin ultimately disqualifies any
clear delineation between the two categories. He explains: “in general the
locutionary act as much as the illocutionary is an abstraction only: every genuine
speech act is both.”
5
His demurral, however, does not utterly undermine the
philosophy he spends the previous chapters (146 pages) developing. The capacity
to qualify the context by which words obtain value beyond their mere
signification—to the point of becoming full-fledged signs—is invaluable. In his
concluding inference Austin concedes that the “total speech situation” must be taken
into account to deduce an expression’s essential genuineness. With that in mind, we
can start to surmise the elusive value of expression in images and objects beyond
the lingual.
5
J. L. Austin, How To Do Things With Words: The William James Lectures Delivered at Harvard
University in 1955. Edited by J. O. Urmson and Marina Sbisà. Second ed. (Cambridge, MA: Hard
kmkjjkkjkjUniversity Press, 1962, 1975), 147.
10
The clearest and most common use of the performative utterance occurs in
legislation. Law defines what people can and cannot do. By drafting what they
consider to be objectively moral and just, legislators explicitly decide the fate of
those who fall under its purview (everyone, supposedly). While certain variables
such as judges and jurors are situated throughout the legal system to foster
discretionary influence over its outcome, written word ultimately provides guiding
principle. Judges are intended to defer to legislation written by members of
congress who follow doctrines set to paper by authors of the constitution. When a
judge utters the words “I sentence…” in a court, what a defendant can and cannot do
is effectively determined thereafter. As Austin outlines in his lectures, the operation
of the context—by who and where the action occurs—ordains the execution of the
illocution. The space of a courtroom leaves no room for empty statements; there,
both locution and illocution cause and effect tangible action.
Everything placed in a courtroom is viewed factually: debris and witnesses’
accounts get scrutinized as evidence in the interest of some kind of ascertainable
truth driven by moral code. Oddly, however, representation of these proceedings is
historically restricted. The operation of photography as an objective medium would
seem on par with the judicial system’s interest in objectivity, but after the passage of
Canon 35,
6
the use of cameras in courtrooms was made illegal. The American Bar
6
After the sensational Hauptmann trial in 1935, where Bruno Richard Hauptmann was found guilty
for the kidnap and murder of the 20-month-old son of Charles Lindbergh (the first person to
complete a solo trans-Atlantic flight from New York to Paris), the American Bar Association instated
Canon 35 under the ‘Canons of Judicial Ethics;’ somewhat ironically, given what would later become
one of the most common cameras, the 35 mm Canon. Wayland B. Cedarquist, Televising Court
11
Association deemed the presence of cameras degrading to a court’s decorum and an
obstruction to a fair trial. Transcribed in 1937, Canon 35 of The Code of Judicial
Ethics reads:
Proceedings in court should be conducted with fitting dignity and de-
corum. The taking of photographs in the court room, during sessions of
the court or recesses between sessions, and the broadcasting or
televising of court proceedings are calculated to detract from the
essential dignity of the proceedings, distract the witness in giving his
testimony, degrade the court, and create misconceptions with respect
thereto in the mind of the public and should not be permitted. Provided
that this restriction shall not apply to the broadcasting or televising,
under the supervision of the court, of such portions of naturalization
proceedings (other than the interrogation of applicants) as are
designed and carry out exclusively as a ceremony for the purpose of
publicly demonstrating in an impressive manner the essential dignity
and the serious nature of naturalization.
7
The members of the ABA House of Delegates that instituted Canon 35 in 1937
clearly viewed photography as a sensational medium used to proliferate biased
opinion. As a window to the outside world, photography seemingly chips away at
the unattested authority that the legal system is founded and dependent upon,
allowing every photographer and viewer to become her own judge, affecting
Proceedings, a Plea for Order in the Court, 36 Notre Dame L. Rev. 147 (1961). Available at:
http://scholarship.law.nd.edu/ndlr/vol36/iss2/3
7
Ibid. 148.
12
potential dissidence. The canon permits photographic usage only when in support
of the court’s legitimization. If the pervasive weight that the legal system carries
relies so heavily on its image as inherent—not a collectively ascribed indulgence—
then so too might we think of other systems of authority and value as conditioned
by capricious idiosyncrasies.
Despite a pervasive narrative of Modernism that entails the forward
momentum of technology—of innovation and causal antiquation—law demanded
an unprecedented reversal of representational technique. Regarding photography’s
advent, Walter Benjamin writes, “For the first time in the process of pictorial
reproduction, photography freed the hand of the most important artistic functions
which henceforth devolved only upon the eye looking into a lens.”
8
The newly
appointed prohibition of photography counter-intuitively provided the space and
demand for the presumed obsolete hand of the sketch artist. The courtroom sketch,
however, performs, evincing the capacity of an expressive gesture to become
objectified documentation. As it enacts emphatic representation rather than
metaphoric depiction, the courtroom sketch demonstrates how circumstantial
language can drastically alter the basis of an object or image. While virtually no
discernable difference exists between a figure drawing and a courtroom sketch,
disparate expectation produces invers value. Loose lines help highlight the
haphazard nature of equating vividness with truth. To believe in the function and
value ascribed to a court sketch seems an absurd act of faith; not simply from its
masquerade as photography, but also as it obviates the deficiency of practically all
8
Walter Benjamin, “The Work of Art In The Age of Mechanical Reproduction” in Illuminations, ed.
Hannah Arendt (New York: Schocken Books, 1969), 2.
13
Elizabeth Williams, Artists at the DeLoren Trial, August 16, 1984, Porous point pen,
Prints and Photographs Division, Library of Congress.
Hans Namuth, Jackson Pollock painting in his studio on Long Island, New York,
Gelatin silver print, 1950
14
other methods of representation, inevitably failing to solely capture the whole
picture.
Perhaps the outmodedness of the hand decried by Modernism was
misplaced. Perhaps the decorative uselessness anointed to relatively more
expressionistic media was a condition less of obsolescence than transferred
expectation, which, in the end, is always negotiable. Deleuze writes, “A society is
defined by its amalgamations, not by its tools.”
9
The constant revision of law’s
authority proves such elasticity. “The activities which make up the professional life
of the lawyer and judge,” James Boyd White writes, “constitute an enterprise of
imagination, an enterprise whose central performance is the claim of meaning
against the odds: the translation of the imagination into reality by the power of
language.”
10
When considered as an operation of translating concept to material
fact, the task of a lawyer doesn’t sound so different from that of an artist.
Queer and critical theorist, Eve Sedgwick, succinctly defines Austinian
performativity as, “how language constructs or affects reality rather than merely
describing it.”
11
She argues that linguistic performativity can cause productive
“antiessentialist” change. Judith Butler writes:
If the temporality of linguistic convention, considered as ritual, exceeds
the instances of its utterance, and that excess is not fully capturable or
identifiable (the past and future of the utterance can not be narrated
9
Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizofrenia, trans. Brian
Massumi (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1987), 90.
10
James Boyd White, The Legal Imagination (Canada: Little, Brown and Company, 1974), 758.
11
Eve Sedgwick, Touching Feeling: Affect, Pedagogy, Performativity (North Carolina: Duke University
Press, 2003), 5.
15
with any certainty), then it seems that part of what constitutes the
“total speech situation” is a failure to achieve a totalized form in any of
its given instances.
12
Butler fingers the fickleness of illocution, insinuating that its basis falls to an
arbitrary construct. If a “total speech situation” is to some extent defined by its
deficiency, then so too might we embrace every and all statements—spoken or
visual, small or large, intended or accidental and otherwise—as capable of potential
autonomy.
In 1984 Michel Foucault published an essay theorizing the existence of
something diametrically tangible to the impossibly aspirational space of utopias:
heterotopias.
13
Foucault describes heterotopias as places that are “a kind of
effectively enacted utopia in which the real sites, all the other real sites that can be
found within a culture, are simultaneously represented, contested, and inverted.”
14
He exemplifies these in-between spaces as cemeteries, museums, libraries, brothels,
and few others. He writes:
And perhaps our life is still governed by a certain number of oppositions
that remain inviolable, that our institutions and practices have not yet
dared to break down. These are oppositions that we regard as simple
givens: for example between private space and public space, between
family space and social space, between cultural space and useful space,
12
Judith Butler, “On Linguistic Vulnerability” in Excitable Speech: A Politics of Performativity (New
York: Routledge, 1997), 3.
13
Translated from a lecture he gave in 1967, this essay surmounts to Fouacult’s reaction to
Modernism’s ideological root in idealism left over from the 19
th
century. Michel Foucault, “Of Other
Spaces: Utopias and Heterotopia,” Architecture/Mouvement/Continuité, October 1984.
14
Ibid. 3.
16
between the space of leisure and that of work. All these are still
nurtured by the hidden presence of the sacred.
15
As space now extends increasingly into the virtual, the invisible barriers between
those ideological spaces to which Foucault refers blur. These propositional spaces
might be thought as the antithesis of the sanctioned locations Austin deems as
legitimizing the perfomative utterance; antithetical less as an effect of their non-
sanctification (there are plenty of those) than of their intermediacy.
While language operates on multiple levels from the poetic to the plain,
Austin’s definition of the performative pertains most plainly to the literal
implication. But under the inclusive rubric proposed by Sedgwick, Butler, and
Foucault, the efficacy of artistic expression may equally yield real change. Whether
it occurs on the culturally vernacular level, as with Marcel Duchamp’s Fountain
(1917) that obliterated the conceptual frame of art, or weaponized to propagate
national ideals, as Abstract Expressionism was in the 1950’s to promote freedom of
expression under American democracy,
16
or simply utilized to draw attention to the
often forgotten labor that goes into a city’s maintenance, as Mierle Laderman Ukeles
does in her piece, Touch Sanitation (1979-80), by shaking the hands of over 8,500
employees of the New York Sanitation Department and telling them, “Thank you for
keeping New York City alive,” the nebulous value of art comes from its ability to stir
reaction. Jonathan Crary writes, “Vision and its effects are always inseparable from
the possibilities of an observing subject who is both the historical product and the
15
Ibid. 2.
16
Eva Cockcroft, “Abstract Expressionism, Weapon of the Cold War” in Pollock and After: The Critical
Debate, ed. Francis Frascina (New York: Harper & Row, 1985), 125-133.
17
site of certain practices, techniques, institutions, and procedures of
subjectification.”
17
If social contracts are an indulgence as Austin formulates, we
have to learn to identify when we’re indulging and when we’re neglecting. As
autonomy falls to presence, and presence moves away from the bodily, we have to
renegotiate the terms of the context that circumscribe performativity.
17
Jonathan Crary, Techniques of The Observer (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1992), 5.
18
Suddenly History, So Says You
When the official presidential portrait of Barrack Obama was unveiled on
February 12, 2018, I was confused by my reaction. The 84
1/2
by 57
7/8
inch painting
first presented itself to me as a 2 by 2 inch (or 1080 by 1080 pixel) image on my
phone in the form of an Instagram post. As a digital truncated version cropped just
below the figure’s feet and above the head, the image looked more like a photograph
composited and then graphically rendered in Photoshop than a painting. The
absence of any visible brush stroke and a flattened background were indicative of
the painting’s source but not of any hand. The historic significance of the painting’s
placement in the National Portrait Gallery seemed somehow remote from the
material condition of what I was superficially confronting.
Seeing the image of the painting over and over again unanimously praised
across various social media and news outlets caused me to reconsider my initial
aversion. Aside from forcing me to confront the fact that I felt insecure
contradicting the undisputed opinion of those that I otherwise consider peers,
18
the
sudden dissemination of this image made me aware that there is a form of art that
supersedes taste. All of the painterly details I’d been accustomed to qualifying in an
artwork became irrelevant in the face of this particular piece’s immediate
historicity. Critiquing the lack of depth, the saturated color, or general stagnation of
the composition became trite next to the significance of the first African-American
18
My source of information, the spoon that feeds me.
19
Barack Obama’s official presidential portrait by Kehinde Wiley on Instagram, 2019
20
president’s consecration in history. Regardless of my or anyone else’s opinion of
Wiley as an artist, Barack Obama was now the subject of a portrait deemed official:
it was owned by the National Portrait Gallery in Washington D.C. (along with the
forty-three previous presidents’ portraits); it was commissioned by the recently
seated president; and it was painted with oils on canvas.
The notion of presidential portraiture is as innate to national identity as the
constitution—presidential portraits have been an American tradition since the
country’s origin. Gilbert Stuart’s painting of George Washington from 1796, now
named the ‘Lansdowne’ portrait, was originally commissioned by the then senator
of Philadelphia, William Bingham. Bingham had the painting painted as a gift for
William Petty, the “first Marquis of Lansdowne” (hence the painting’s title), and
previously the prime minister of Britain at the time of the signing of the Treaty of
Paris in 1783 that effectively ended the American Revolution.
19
The ‘Lansdowne’
portrait was Stuart’s third painting of Washington and second commission. The
first, made in 1795, simply depicts Washington’s upper torso and head against a
dark monochrome background, and now only exists by its reproduction. The
second, commissioned by Martha Washington, was never finished supposedly so
that Stuart could keep it as reference for future commissions. The unfinished
portrait—now known as the ‘Athenaeum Portrait’—ended up accruing exponential
value by becoming the basis of the image now found on the one-dollar bill.
With a right arm pointed outwards and the left resting by his side,
Washington’s pose in Stuart’s ‘Lansdowne’ painting is what I would call feigned
19
Ellen Miles, Gilbert Stuart Paints George Washington, National Portrait Gallery.
https://npg.si.edu/blog/gilbert-stuart-paints-george-washington
21
oration: a lack of emotion in the subject’s face contradicts the exclamatory posturing
of his body. From Washington’s theatrical gesturing to the books casually resting on
and under the desk to the rainbow hinted at in the top right corner to the
inoffensive brushstrokes that are just expressive enough to appear natural, every
detail of this painting’s design sanctifies and mythologizes its subject. The narrative
formed in and outside of its frame invokes value, not necessarily in financial terms
(though that follows), but historically, contributing to a myth of national identity.
Seated on an ornate wooden chair attentively leaned forward with folded
arms rested on each knee surrounded by surreally abundant flora, Wiley’s portrait
of Obama abides by convention while simultaneously subtly diverging. Although the
floral background might appear as the most prominent compositional detail, nearly
every previous official portrait contains an abstracted or fictionalized environment
as its backdrop. The casual seated posturing intended to signify Obama’s
exceptionally personable demeanor conspicuously resembles Abraham Lincoln’s,
along with nearly half of the other forty-three previous portraits. The two most
distinguishing aspects, I would argue, are Obama’s loose collar absent of a tie and
the picture’s overall tone.
Green leaves work less to conceptually individualize the painting than
compliment the reddish brown tones of the skin: the most significant feature of the
painting. Despite all its flourishes, the painting remains conservative. I certainly do
not mean to downplay the significance of the first African American president’s
concretization in the annals of history, which was unequivocally felt during Obama’s
victory speech in 2008 and clearly why his unveiled portrait prompted such
22
vociferous response. I wonder (and hope), however, if room for criticism remains to
question why and how something is deemed “good” or not, or to determine if it is
even worthwhile to ask.
With some retrospect, I can begin to identify the unease felt by the
unquestioned appraisal of Wiley’s painting. For the first time that I can remember I
was plainly confronted with the process of painting’s hegemony. The process did
not occur insidiously over the course of generations, but instantaneously
throughout numerous media (the first being paint) in a single day. History had
forsaken time.
20
But the hegemony was not as much a result of Wiley’s painting, or
American tradition even, as the present condition and dissemination of images. The
anxiety I felt arose from my own implication in the painting’s instantaneous
affirmation. No matter how passive, sheer participation on social media forced me
to position myself. Inaction speaks equally as loud as action. When vision translates
into something traceable it begins to lose its autonomy. It wasn’t that I necessarily
disliked or disapproved of the painting, but that I had no choice in the matter, or so
it felt.
20
Of course history is composed of periodic momentous moments that change its course, such as the
end of WWII, JFK’s assassination, or 9/11. I do not mean to imply that the debut of Obama’s portrait
constitutes one of those moments, necessarily. But at least in regards to the history of art, the
irrefutable significance of this painting is exceptional for a contemporary work of art.
23
Bona Fide Trier
“Bona fide” is a legal term that gets frequently and flippantly used to describe
someone as an official of something. Black’s Law Dictionary defines it as: “In or with
good faith; honestly, openly, and sincerely; without deceit or fraud. Truly; actually;
without simulation or pretense. Innocently; in the attitude of trust and
confidence…often used ambiguously.”
21
While certain professions and titles are
clearly bona fide—sanctified by a degree or certificate from quantifiable aptitude as
a result of experience and training—an artist is not. The status of an artist is fickle.
No amount of schooling or sales necessarily indicates talent, or for that matter,
success.
In her essay, Critical Hegemony and Aesthetic Acculturation, Adrian Piper
outlines the process by which oppressive aesthetic values are formed and
perpetuated by a system that promotes and depends on a specialized division of
labor. She writes:
…if the community’s standards of aesthetic excellence are not
independent of economic pressures, then the critical approval and
economic reinforcement an artist receives for doing economically and
critically viable work encourages that artist to produce more
economically and critically viable work, even if it conflicts with his
creative disposition to do so.
22
21
Black’s Law dictionary, “Bona fide,” Byles, Bills, 121, accessed April 28, 2019,
https://thelawdictionary.org/letter/b/page/65/
22
Adrian Piper, “Critical Hegemony and Aesthetic Acculturation,” Noûs 19, no. 1 (March 1985): 37.
24
Piper’s succinct synthesis of the cyclical nature of culturally dominant taste
ultimately concludes by proposing we slow down; abandon the need for immediate
and maximal return; take charge of the discourse around our own work: write about
it, teach it.
23
The artists’ artist (or at least the type of artist I aspire to) is one who
never stops experimenting, who can change styles or ideas, not for any plea of
relevance, but from perpetual self-reflection and criticality. (Of course some artists
remain doggedly consistent, not for marketable reasons, but as conceptual points of
practice, such as On Kawara). As Piper adroitly explains, a good artist gets easily
misconstrued with a popular one, i.e. an artist who frequently sells and exhibits
work, which more often than not simply indicates refined managerial and sales
skills. I do not mean to bitterly dismiss market success, or intend to suggest that
social repudiation signals purity or superiority; but rather, a healthy dose of
skepticism remains essential for meaningful longevity when it comes to art. (If
nothing, this serves as reminder for myself.)
Duchamp opines, “…such an abundant production can only result in
mediocrity. There is no time to make very fine work. The pace of production is such
that it becomes another kind of race, not a rat but I don’t know what.”
24
He said that
in 1967: before the proliferation of the Internet; before social media; before the
boom of the art market in the 80’s, which has only since grown. With an ever-
expanding generation of artists, there only becomes more and more trash to sort
through, which you yourself may well be contributing to.
23
All as Piper herself has done—she leads by example.
24
Calvin Tomkins, Marcel Duchamp: The Afternoon Interviews, (New York: Badlands Unlimited,
2013), 25.
25
How then does one determine another’s (and sometimes even one’s own)
motives? What standard may an artist be held up against to genuinely verify their
title? As virtually everyone becomes an image-maker, the distinction progressively
saturates. The social signifiers for artistic professionalism and proficiency are
entangled with increasingly decentralized and unreliable sources of authority. We
might simply be better off relying on a self-generated, inner conviction as the only
truly dependable sign of propensity. What exactly that might look like, however, is
another question. Piper’s career, which includes extensive writing amidst expansive
installation and stoic isolation, is one model, though certainly not the only. Without
getting caught up in the myriad of choices, questioning is a start.
26
Epilogue
Partly what precipitates the direction of this writing is the 2016 election.
Whereas politics formerly felt like an incessant buzz forever happening somewhere
else it was now glaringly close. Astonished by the country’s pervasive misogyny,
xenophobia, racism, sexism, and bigotry—what previously seemed distorted and
overemphasized from a hyper accelerated, easily dismissible news cycle—quickly
became a realty that the election’s outcome made painfully clear. Speechlessness
triggered by bafflement led to introspection that forced me to reflect on my own
positionality, subsequently causing serious scrutiny over the relevance of the
painterly practice I’d been unwaveringly committed to. I suddenly felt a deep sense
of my idle passivity. I found it difficult to justify—to myself, and more importantly,
all the people coping with the very real effects of an increasingly xenophobic
government—devotion to an activity so isolated and solipsistic such as painting.
Seeing exhibitions organized around artists’ responses to political turmoil—like the
group show We Need To Talk… at Petzel consisting of overtly political work (some
blatantly made in response to the current political climate) or Philip Guston’s Nixon
drawings at Hauser and Wirth, both in January of 2017—allowed me to
acknowledge one possible mode of artistic catharsis that still personally felt too
reactive. I wanted to locate a sense of purpose that could reassert my agency in
effecting affirmative action. Rather than passively add to separatism, I wanted to
attempt to do something that might encourage empathy, regardless of how
overwhelmingly diametric perspectives seemed. The solution, I reasoned for myself
and am now in hot pursuit of, is education. The type of direct communication that
27
pedagogy fosters appears as a clear remedy to mutual misunderstanding. Without
sounding nauseatingly altruistic, I want to engage in a process with traceable affect.
Yet I’ve remained engrossed by painting. Despite all its recognizable faults
and follies, I hold strong to a belief that painting does something. So I’m now looking
to somehow place painting’s purpose, admittedly searching for justification. For me
that exploration entails contemplating painting in the round, playing with the
expected distillation of conceptually and materially flat images. What precedes is
my attempt to reason the existence of things supposed purposeless. This text is a
written component to a visual project, both of which question how language, in its
many forms, performs.
28
Bibliography
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Harvard University in 1955. Edited by J. O. Urmson and Marina Sbisà. Second ed.
Cambridge, MA: Hard University Press, 1962.
Benjamin, Walter. “The Work of Art In The Age of Mechanical Reproduction” in
Illuminations, ed. Hannah Arendt. New York: Schocken Books, 1969.
Butler, Judith. “On Linguistic Vulnerability” in Excitable Speech: A Politics of
Performativity. New York: Routledge, 1997.
Byles, Bills. Black’s Law dictionary, “Bona fide,” 121. Accessed April 28, 2019,
https://thelawdictionary.org/letter/b/page/65/
Cedarquist, Wayland B.Televising Court Proceedings, a Plea for Order in the Court, 36
Notre Dame L. Rev. 147 (1961). Available at:
http://scholarship.law.nd.edu/ndlr/vol36/iss2/3
Cockcroft, Eva. “Abstract Expressionism, Weapon of the Cold War” in Pollock and
After: The Critical Debate, ed. Francis Frascina. New York: Harper & Row, 1985.
Crary, Jonathan. Techniques of The Observer. Cambridge: MIT Press, 1992.
Deleuze, Gilles, and Félix Guattari. A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizofrenia,
trans. Brian Massumi (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1987).
Foucault, Michel. “Of Other Spaces: Utopias and Heterotopia,”
Architecture/Mouvement/Continuité, October 1984.
Kelley, Mike. “Foul Perfection: Thoughts on Caricature (1989)” n Foul Perfection:
essays and criticism. Massachusetts: Institute of Technology, 2003.
King, Stephen. The Dead Zone. New York: Viking Press, 1979.
McLuhan, Malcolm. The Medium is The Massage. Berkeley: Gingko Press Inc., 1967.
Miles, Ellen. Gilbert Stuart Paints George Washington, National Portrait Gallery.
https://npg.si.edu/blog/gilbert-stuart-paints-george-washington
Neuendorf, Henri. “X-Ray Analysis Gives Shocking New Insights Into Kazimir
Malevich’s ‘Black Square,’” artnet news. November 13, 2015. https://www-
chicagomanualofstyle-org.libproxy2.usc.edu/tools_citationguide/citation-guide-
1.html#cg-news
29
Piper, Adrian. “Critical Hegemony and Aesthetic Acculturation,” Noûs 19, no. 1,
March 1985.
Ranciére, Jacques. The Future of The Image, Translated by Gregory Elliot (London:
Verso, 2007).
Sedgwick, Eve. Touching Feeling: Affect, Pedagogy, Performativity. North Carolina:
Duke University Press, 2003.
Shuy, Roger W. “Discourse Analysis in the Legal Context” in The Handbook of
Discourse Analysis, ed. Hamilton, Hedi E., and Deborah Schiffrin and Deborah
Tannen. Massachusetts: Blackwell Publishers, 2001.
Sontag, Susan. “On Style” in Sontag: Essays of the 1960s & 70s. New York: Literary
Classics of the United States, Inc., 2013.
Tomkins, Calvin. Marcel Duchamp: The Afternoon Interviews. New York: Badlands
Unlimited, 2013, 25.
Weinberg, Tom. “Media Burn: What’s in a Name?” Journal of Film and Video, vol. 64,
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Abstract (if available)
Abstract
This text is a written component to a visual project, both of which question how language, in its many forms, performs.
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Soft openings
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Creator
Freilich, Jake
(author)
Core Title
Bone fide trier
School
Roski School of Art and Design
Degree
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Fine Arts
Publication Date
07/30/2019
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