Make/Do

Notes

1. Deborah Sontag addresses the context for Orozco's early work: "At that point, after the crash of the 1980s art-market boom, Ms. Temkin said, there was 'a real disgust with art that looked expensive and monumental.' This created a particular receptivity for, as Mr. Orozco put it, 'a young rebel from abroad' who, reacting against what he called the 1980sʼ decadence, was experimenting with understatement." While it is important to acknowledge this context, this may simply underscore the idea that this work inhabits a cooperative position in alignment with dominate social mores. Deborah Sontag, “A Whale of a Return to MoMA.” The New York Times, December 11, 2009.

2. Deborah Sontag adds: “In a similar spirit the MoMA show followed, and then an exhibition at Ms. Goodmanʼs gallery in which Mr. Orozco, in Yogurt Caps, pinned four transparent Dannon yogurt lids to the walls of a bare room.” Deborah Sontag, “A Whale of a Return to MoMA.” The New York Times, December 11, 2009.

3. “Dodging commitments to mediums or styles, he took improvisation as his baseline method, and turned personal quirks into assets. Studios made him antsy, so he did without one. Instead he wandered, poked around, made art from what he found, often where he found it. Sometimes he created, added to or tweaked a situation. He photographed the results: a mist of warm breath on a dark wood surface; a pattern of circles traced by wet bicycle wheels; oranges, like little celestial bodies, placed, one per table, on a receding line of tables in a outdoor market.” Holland Cotter, “Slicing a Car Fusing Bicycles and Turning Ideas Into Art.” The New York Times, December 13, 2009.

4. Unmonumental was a 2008 exhibition at the New Museum “about fragmented forms, torn pictures and clashing sounds. Investigating the nature of collage in contemporary art practices... Unmonumental also describes the present as an age of crumbling symbols and broken icons.” The exhibition featured work that had “a distinct informality: conversational, provisional, at times even corroded and corrupted,” work that was ”un-heroic and manifestly unmonumental.”

5. Arguably the Sex Pistols are “bad,” but very important. Inarguably Sanjaya Malakar is “bad” and very unimportant.

6. “Goethe would argue “’The artist who is not also a craftsman is no good; but, alas, most of our artists are nothing else.ʼ Earls would argue that, ‘alas, most of our artists are neither craftsmen nor artists.’” — Joshua Ray Stephens.

7. Alice Rawsthorn, “The Designer Newson Teams Up with Gagosian Gallery - Style & Design.” The New York Times, January 21, 2007.

8. Plato. Ion (535-538).

9. Extrapolating on this idea, isnʼt the necessary implication that Orozco, Harrison and Newson are “Mediocre?” No, Orozco, Harrison and Newson are worthy of close scrutiny precisely for what their work tells us about our culture. The fundamental premise of critique is that all work can be called into crisis. The Techné of criticism involves finding fault lines within all work in an attempt to build a kind of feedback loop between Episteme (the domain of “knowledge”) and Techné (the concern of “craft”) in order to make better work. So if a primary criterion of an artworkʼs merit is fecundity, (and the author feels) that this essay raises difficult issues that are engendered by the work of these three artists, does that mean ipso facto that the artworks in question are fecund?