Artist of the Week: Erik Wenzel

"In order correctly to define art, it is necessary, first of all, to cease to consider it as a means to pleasure and to consider it as one of the conditions of human life. Viewing it in this way we cannot fail to observe that art is one of the means of intercourse between man and man." - Tolstoy

I don't consider myself an art critic, and in fact the concept of an art critic is debatable in itself. However, I enjoy all that I consider art, but I feel that art is one of the more subjective creative outlets. There are some questions that seem so simple, but in reality are the most complex and fundamental questions we will ever ask. The question that never seems to be asked is, "What is Art"? The answer lays in your willingness to believe that art can be defined, and it is nearly impossible to define something without limits. Does art have limits? Is it, as Tolstoy states above, simply another form of dialog?

So, with all of these unanswerable questions swirling around I turned to Chicago's Erik Wenzel for a little clarity. Erik is an artist, writer, and blogger who consistently pushes the non-existent limits of art. He runs the art blog Art or Idiocy? and writes for Art Slant. His latest exhibit, Belief in Doubt in Painting, opens on Feb 20th at 65GRAND and runs through March 21st.

His response to my question could be a published essay by itself, and I am glad he valued my question and responded with thought and care. You can read his entire interview below, and feel free to comment and discuss because art is a dialog.

Orange Alert (OA): You have been running an art blog for over four years now, why did you start Art or Idiocy? and how has the goal changed over the years?
Erik Wenzel (EW): When I started it there weren’t a lot of opportunities to write. For writing about art, it is harder than getting your work shown as an artist. I was also frustrated with a string of experiences where I would propose something, write it, edit it and cut it to fit the word count and then wait months to see it in print if at all. I had no interest in starting a printed publication for a number of reasons. Another model had been to produce a photocopied zine, but that requires all sorts of effort to make and distribute, and all by hand. The blog seemed like the best idea for sustainability and distribution. Really, writing on the internet is the best way, it is completely free aside from the cost of time, and you don’t have to devote nearly as much time as if you were even to print a zine. Anyone the world over can see it. I’ve had hits from all over the globe. Except China, I found out that my blog is banned there, but not necessarily for the blog itself. If the Chinese government finds something “offensive” it will block the whole server that hosts the offending site, so it could be something I wrote, or something completely unrelated that just is stored along with mine at blogger.

The mission has always been changing. When I started, I tried to report on art in Chicago and beyond in an earnest way. I wrote extensively on the theft of the Edvard Munch in 2005 & 6 because there seemed to be a lot of inaccuracy in the news briefs. Another example would be getting a series of emails forwarded from artists and galleries in the middle of the night that Art Chicago 2006 was DOA in Butler Field one year. I learned that although I care about that stuff, my goals in life and art reach far beyond being the foremost art blogger. I’m just not an avid reporter or investigative journalist. Nor am I a gossip columnist. The process that works best for me is to either write quick posts or longer essays as I have the time and interest. It’s sort of organic, that is what is key. I find that if I try to have a schedule or plan ahead I just don’t get around to it. I do much better when I write something in the moment. I have general ideas of stuff I want to do, but I am always open to whipping out a quick note on such and such issue, exhibition or news item. I still write it in Word, edit and revise first, however. There is too much writing, and sadly too much that gets attention, that is just complete shit. Just because you can type it in a text box and click “publish” online doesn’t mean there is no need to edit and reconsider. This stuff is easy to correct too, its not like it goes to print. If you realize you said “they” when you meant “the” it takes less than a minute to correct.

OA: This may be a question with no answer, and in fact it is one that I have never asked before for that very reason, but what is art? I know you like to push the limits so I will also ask are there limits?
EW: Theoretically, there are no limits. But people often overlook the fact that way back at the beginning of this debate Duchamp maintained that not everything could be a readymade. I have been thinking a lot about taste. It is the heart of what art is in a given period. People never stopped making painting in the 1970s, but the taste was for dematerialized work, earth art, performance art, conceptual art. I just read Art After Philosophy by Joseph Kosuth for the second time in less than a year, so it is sort of on my brain. In it he attempts to make the case that aesthetics and art are not linked. I think he makes compelling arguments about the nature of art, for instance, the value of Pollock was putting the unstretched canvas on the floor and painting it from all sides, stretching it and hanging it on the wall sterilized it. He presses the case that art only exists in communication with other art. Cubist paintings in a museum are so much artifacts until for one reason or another something about the work or the project becomes relevant to art currently being made. What I find odd though, is that Kosuth is completely complicit in an aesthetic. His One and Three Chairs has a certain style. The idea to blow up definitions of words and then reproduce them in white on black, the negative of what you see in a Dictionary, the choice of the chair, how it is photographed and presented. Those are all essentially aesthetic choices. Maybe he is trying to make an aestheticless choice, objective, but like Duchamp’s readymades, there is obviously some sort of taste at work. That doesn’t really tell you what art is, though.

It’s been bothering me how to answer this question. Kosuth goes on to state that the job now (back in the 60s, but I think is true today) is for the artist to question the nature of what art is. It is very Modernist, but Kosuth’s idea is that every work of art made is a definition of art. I think it is an interesting mindset. “A work of art is a tautology in that it is a presentation of the artist’s intention that is, he is saying that that particular work of art is art, which means, is a definition of art. Thus, that it is art is true a priori [known independently of experience] (which is what [Donald] Judd means when he states that ‘if someone calls it art, it’s art’)”

I would say one characteristic that separates art from everything else is self-awareness and self-criticality. You might say astute comedy like the Daily Show or Tropic Thunder are examples of criticality in mainstream culture, but they are still not questioning their own validity. Certainly not to point of positing they as projects (comedy news or layered war movie parody) or medium (cable TV show or Hollywood movie) might need to undergo a radical paradigm shift in order to maintain their currency. Art is the only thing that really has a mental complex, which constantly champions itself and simultaneously takes itself apart bit by bit with the real possibility of reaching “the end”. This is true even for the postmodern moment; something that I think is giving way to a re-evaluation of the rubbish heap of Modernism. Postmodernism threw it all away, or tried to, now people are saying, there are valid ideas in there.

Another thing that separates art from creative actions that aren’t art is criteria. TV shows have to be entertaining, if they don’t entertain, they don’t succeed, they fail to perform a basic defining characteristic in their design. Art can be entertaining, but it doesn’t have to be. For me, I sometimes align my art in opposition to popularity. Something Clement Greenberg said was that, “anything that comes too far to meet your taste, or the established taste, you know it’s gotta be minor.” He was referring to Pop Art, and history has shown that is not the case. But I still think it is a valid concept in general.

I think another issue is that people should stop calling everything art. I see this in many groups, one in particular young adults that are sort of enamored with that power. I have friends that don’t consider themselves artists or part of the art… machine… And they will see an odd sort of simulacral moment on TV, in a speech, or the way a guest acts on a talk show, and they will call it “art.” Why does someone acting out of character or disrupting the TV status quo have to be art? Can’t it just be a weird moment? Can’t it just be some sort of inadvertent pause in the façade of media? Or maybe it is just really good comedy, like Andy Kaufman. Maybe we don’t need to categorize it.

Another symptom is artists wanting to do anything but art, as art. It becomes just as staid mannered and predictable—flat. At a panel discussion with Geof Oppenheimer, Deb Sokolov and Stephanie Smith, Tony Tasset recently put it well: “Stuff outside the museum is almost more elitist. It is saying, ‘I’m bringing art to you.’ It’s naming something art that is already out in the world on its own.”

I guess I’ll close by bringing that to my work, and relying heavily on a conversation I had with Matthew Jesse Jackson in my studio:

MJJ: You create work for the situation it will be viewed in. The real deal is the art world, and presenting things in a language that makes sense, within in the givens of the art world and saying this is what it is. It’s honest. Others are still trying to get honorable mentions and ‘this is good, good job with the work.’ You’re saying, ‘I can present anything and talk the talk and make it art.’ Which is what art really is.”

EW: It is important that the objects presented still are art. Act like art, they are not memories of art, or artifacts or souvenirs. They have to do for me in the art context what they do when they are producing that aesthetic experience. Out in the world, or where I find them, when I come across the object and it interests me.
MJJ: You are fully comfortable with acting in the art environment and with the outlets that have been presented to you. Pop psychology would say it is a healthy reactive attachment to the Chicago art world that wants it to be doing something, helping kids or giving poor people coffee. You are saying, ‘no, I want art to be art. And the things I want it to do is give the feeling you feel when you experience art, not when you are tasting food.

OA: You have a new show open this month at 65GRAND called Belief in Doubt in Painting. What can you tell us about this show?
EW: It is wrestling with all the things I’ve just been talking about. Kosuth again, says painting is a kind of art, and therefore can’t engage in the necessary project of defining art. “If one is questioning the nature of painting, one cannot be questioning the nature of art. If an artist accepts painting (or sculpture) he is accepting the tradition that goes with it.” I think that makes it the perfect case study, there is no other medium so time honored, so troubled so useless and so hard to give up. Daniel Richter has a quote that irritates me and I wish was wrong, but I think is true: “Painting is the most sluggish, unhurried and tradition-conscious medium, and the most difficult to broaden.” I don’t even know if what I am doing would be described as painting. It might not even be “painting as subject.” It’s painting as stand-in for a larger question.

OA: Do you feel that Chicago is a great place to be an artist? Are there enough opportunities out there?
EW: It’s better than a lot of other places, I guess. It is a bit stifling though. I think people need to embrace the world outside and try to establish a dialogue with art going on in other cities and places. There is a lot of “support your local grocer” mentality, a sort of pride of ignorance or willfulness to be out of touch. There are some good opportunities, and there are lots of interesting things happening, but there is room for improvement. How that will happen I don’t know, especially with the recession. Sometimes I see Chicago as a town littered with the carcasses of admirable attempts thwarted by a middlebrow populace that just doesn’t care very much about art unless it is in the form of a fiberglass cow decorated by retarded school children.

OA: As an artist do you find it difficult to honestly write about art?
EW: I always try to write exactly what I think. That’s the process of writing, sitting down and carefully figuring out what the hell I’m trying to say. I guess the problem comes if I am writing on something I don’t respond positively to and knowing that I will have to be honest about it. My problem with honesty is that I have trouble being anything but, a neurotic moral character flaw my parents instilled in me. I don’t really relish in being extremely critical, writing a bad review. The times I’ve written that way have always left me regretful. It seems more productive to spend a lot of work honestly describing work or an exhibition I am excited or interested in that on one I don’t like. Sometimes reacting negatively to an exhibition, though, results in a very useful conversation. This conflict seems more pronounced when I am writing for a publication as opposed to my blog. There is more at stake when I am writing for someone else and have the platform of a larger entity. But I don’t think it has anything to do with being an artist or not.

OA: What's next for Erik Wenzel?
EW: That’s great, it encourages me to fantasize about a fast paced art life in the public eye. And then I laugh at myself. I’m preparing for my MFA show this spring, which will be called “Warm For Your Formalism.” It is actually exciting to work on stuff like that, working with the other graduate students at the University of Chicago, coming up with the poster and scheduling artist talks. I like the early stages of a project and you can just imagine. You can make all this art in your head, pure fantasy. I’ll be doing a talk for the Contemporary Art Workshop—not to be confused the sadly defunct space—in April, I think. CAW is geared towards getting a dialogue going between the art practitioners and the art historians at U of C, but is open to anyone interested in hearing the talks usually. (Now you know why these answers are so fucking verbose, I have been brainwashed into instinctually writing obsessive tomes and then doubting the point of the whole enterprise). I have loads of photos from Prospect.1 in New Orleans and my recent trip to Minneapolis that I want to publish on the blog and just need to find time to do it. And by God I will!

Bonus Questions:
OA: If you could sit down to coffee with anyone (alive or dead) who would it be?