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Don’t Trust Anyone Over Thirty

Years ago, sometime in the mid 90s, I remember reading an article in de Volkskrant newspaper that caused quite a stir and is still sometimes quoted to this day. It was written by the artist Rob van Koningsbruggen (1948) who, undoubtedly due to his own career frustrations, said that there are only three types of artists: young, old or dead. In other words, according to Van Koningsbruggen, there was no such thing as a mid-career artist (as he was when he wrote the piece). The mid-career was a no-man’s-land, a desert, the equivalent of a black hole.According to Van Koningsbruggen, there was no such thing as a mid-career artistThe question is whether things have really changed since then. I feel that they have. I found some support in an article from The New York Times by Holland Cotter, entitled ‘Artists in Mid-Career and Beyond Are Showing That Experience Matters’, which the author concludes by paternally advising: ‘What can I tell young artists ready to dash out of school? Don’t just do something; sit there. Art takes time. Let your brilliant career have a middle, and a late period, and an end. Let it be long.’[1] This being too vast a discrepancy with van Konigsbruggen’s thesis, I needed to check with others to see what their take was. So I wrote the following note to an editor and acquaintance I respect in New York: Dear B., I’m doing a piece on mid-careers…I actually proposed it myself, in a strange mood, perhaps in anticipation of my own…. Anyway, I was wondering if you have also noticed (an ever-so slight) move towards the ‘mid-life’ bracket – or is it just me? What I mean is, it seems as though we’re finally more open to a non-scouting approach, we’re finally showing more interest in ‘riper’ artists. This might be – if the theory holds any water at all – a mini-rebellion against the capitalist drive to constantly renew the new. What do you think? Have you noticed anything? Any personal, subjective desire to sit back more, get into things deeper, listen to people who’ve been around longer? Kind regards, M.Dear M., answered B.,I think your thesis is sound – that mid-career and older artists are getting an increasing amount of attention these days — but I wonder if the explanation you give accounts for the full spectrum of possibilities as to why this could be. I don’t believe that the increasing interest in older artists is due to a complementary decrease in the amount of MFA program scouting that dealers undertake. Rather, I think the market is now so strong, so omnivorous, that it is able to accommodate artists both young and old. As we seek ever younger artists to fill our ever greater number of galleries, so too must we dig ever further into the darkest reaches of art history, resuscitating the careers of artists who in other times might be left behind. Best wishes, B. B. had a good point here, of course. Why would the market turn against itself and begin to shrink, why would things be slowing down, artists and others taking more time for themselves, when the logic of capitalism always dictates an increase in activity and production? Still, I wanted to believe the shift was due to something more ideologically-driven and less cynical or rational-minded. I wanted to believe it was some kind of conscious decision on the part of the consumer and the producer alike. After all, this is a time of ‘slow food’, a movement whose manifesto reads very much like any radical utopian manifesto that has gone before: ‘We are enslaved by speed and have all succumbed to the same insidious virus: Fast Life, which disrupts our habits, pervades the privacy of our homes and forces us to eat Fast Foods. To be worthy of the name, Homo Sapiens should rid himself of speed before it reduces him to a species in danger of extinction.’[2] As the critic Jerry Saltz defines it, ‘mid-career artists are individuals who would attend meetings and not be afraid to speak their minds’.[3] Precisely. But there are also other definitions. There are the accomplished mid-career artists – like Pierre Huyghe, Philip Parreno, Rirkrit Tiravanija, all about 45 now – who have enjoyed consistent praise and success throughout their working lives and maintained a high level of public awareness. There are also the mid-career artists who have worked consistently over the years, despite the fact that their audience awareness was anything but consistent – most likely, non-existent – until their mid-careers.[4] Then there are the mid-career artists who aren’t actually at their mid-career point in life anymore, but are experiencing a rejuvenation through their influence on a younger generation of artists – the German ex-friend of Kippenberger, Meuser, might qualify, as certainly does the 70-year-old Thomas Bayrle, who just recently had his first solo in the US in 25 years at Gavin Brown’s enterprise.

Mid-Career as Attitude

Can one observe latent revolutionary content in a construction of wood and laminate? I realise I’m pushing it, extending ‘mid-career’ beyond its commonly accepted definition, but the category is a strange one and not only related to age or life-span. On the one hand it’s defined by factors completely unconnected to the artist, literally beyond his control and quite divorced from his actual work, namely, the level of public awareness, of reception. And on the other hand, the idea of mid-career is very much a part of the artist’s production, linked to his product and dependent on the maturity of his work. Just as works can be ‘young’ even though made by an old person.If this is true, and mid-career is an attitude or a stance, then might mid-career not also be applicable to entire movements, ideologies, schools of thought? Take Postmodernism. Less trendy now than its earlier counterpart, Modernism, ‘PoMo’ as it was termed when it became more a style than a theory, is perhaps one of the last all-encompassing cultural belief systems that the West has experienced since the fall of the Wall in the late 80s. Exiled as it was to the realm of superficiality and gleam, a consideration of PoMo is less complicated now – and perhaps even justified.The short film Carlton (2006), by the British artist Simon Martin (1965) considers Memphis furniture as a ‘mid-career’ movement. Martin, himself a mid-career artist in many ways, in that he came to film comparatively late and seems to work slowly – has a female voice-over say in the film: ‘Memphis was less a group of products than a collection of philosophical notes and statements.’ Founded in Milan in 1981, the same year that the group’s leader, Ettore Sottsass designed his famous bookcase/room divider called Carlton, Memphis ‘was a vision of furniture composed of elements that were more emotional than functional, more artistic than commercial.’ Dry and expressionless, Martin’s camera pans the iconic Carlton bookcase, stopping sometimes at details of joints and edges, as the voice continues its story. Shots of the unit’s formica surface in colours like mauve, red and deep blue, close-ups of angled shelves, alternate with slow tracking shots and views of the whole. The ‘museological seriousness’ of Carlton makes the viewer contemplate the soothing historical narration and the bookshelf itself with utmost sincerity.[5] We come to believe that Carlton has transgressed its own status as a piece of furniture and become possibly the most significant vehicle for the ideology of a specific time. Above and beyond that, we accept its pertinence to society and culture at large, answering the narrator’s rhetorical question: ‘Can one observe latent revolutionary content in a construction of wood and laminate?’ with a wholehearted ‘Yes!’ One begins to wonder, while watching, why no one else has made this film and told this story before. In the second half of the film, the narrative moves away from the bookshelf towards the notion of time and what it means as an individual and as a society to realize time is passing. ‘How did we get to today?’ the narrator asks. ‘We need a moment for thinking about this. Nobody knows quite how to deal with it….Maybe today arrived with the closure of Andy Warhol’s Factory or with the return of melancholy in political art, or in a new way of talking about personal relationships. Possibly today is most likely to be found in the quality of reproduction in pizza flyers, free newspapers and in-store magazines. Or perhaps today is the point when one notices elderly people eating a McDonalds’ for the first time or realise you know the lyrics to West End Girls by The Pet Shop Boys by heart.’ Carlton, like us, like all things, takes on the traces of age that become inscribed in surface details…and there’s beauty in that, or could be, Martin seems to say. However, the ceaseless attempt at reading and analyzing our own time, from close up, without enough objectifying distance, can be difficult, even exhausting. With ennui, close to the end of the film, the woman states with a sigh: ‘The clues for today are everywhere, we should make a list of these things, if only lists didn’t seem so yesterday.’ Two important things are happening here. One is more obvious – we are watching something seemingly insignificant transform into something urgently topical. The other is less immediate – we are watching a work by a mid-career artist who is only now, at the age of 40, gaining a reputation. I must admit I cringe as I write this, for why does it matter at what age Simon Martin made this masterful work? And what does the level of public awareness he enjoyed before – or rather didn’t – really mean? I would suggest that Carlton’s quality lies in the very fact that it was made by someone in mid-career. That because of this, it takes its time, just as its maker has taken his. The film’s thoughtful approach is the result of a level of concentration which comes from resisting quick fixes and learning patience. Carlton, simply said, has stamina.

Finally

For some time now there has been increased public interest in digging up, investigating and unravelling the past. This quest for new information concerning the relatively recent past is also common amongst artists and critics, all looking for a new response to today’s culture through existing solutions – because, the argument goes, if it’s older, it’s weightier. A close cousin of the renaissance of the mid-career artist, here are some recent examples of this quest. At Art Basel Unlimited, the installation Cultural Ties (1979) by Jeffrey Vallance (b. USA, 1955) stole the show – and I wasn’t the only one who thought so.[6] Vallance was an unlikely favourite, he’s an older artist with a low profile (at least in Europe) but still, his work exuded a freshness and an urgency regardless of its obvious made-by date. Another odd but interesting marriage is the group show of kinetic art from the 50s and 60s that was up until the end of August at the influential commercial New York gallery Andrea Rosen, known not for historical reviews but for its progressive programme. Also recent and surprisingly inspiring was Artempo at the Palazzo Fortuny, a show predominately consisting of works by Lucio Fontana, Yves Klein, Man Ray and Alberto Giacometti, amongst others, and that was arguably the most fascinating exhibition at this year’s Venice Biennial. And, finally, though this is a person, not a show – the tremendous popularity of John Stezaker (b. UK, 1949), who in 2005 had his first solo show in almost a decade at The Approach in London. It’s not difficult to figure out the basis of this 58-year-old artist’s acclaim; he’s been doing for much longer what many others are doing now, and doing it much better. For over 20 years, Stezaker has been devotedly making collages, using found magazine illustrations (interestingly, all British), which he expertly splices together. And even though collage as a medium inundates the art market today, a Stezaker is easily pulled out of the pile. Stezaker’s work carries a profound psychological undertow, its resonance possibly the result of his long-standing dedication to his medium of choice.In a world where Sony Corp and its production studio, Sony Pictures Television, have launched ‘minisodes’ on MySpace – six-minute edited-down versions of episodes of old TV shows like Silver Spoons, Charlie’s Angels and Starsky & Hutch, time has become a disputed resource. The current notice for the mid-career, the space now being given to a ripening of ideas and works, could be a viable tool in a fight against the instrumentalization of art and its institutions as quick-fix, hyped hubs of leisure. Mid-career could be a welcome solution, with an added ‘finally’. Finally, we can enjoy something for more than six minutes. Finally, we can decide to turn off, sit down and listen. Not a quick answer but a slower, considered response, mid-career can be the most significant phase of an artist’s creative life. With no need to keep pace with trends and factions, no time to dwell on past mistakes or worry about an unknowable future, mid-career artists, whatever their previous successes and failures, don’t have to ‘just do something’. At the risk of sounding hokey, maybe it even comes close to wisdom.[1] The New York Times, April 21, 2006.[2] The slow movement began as early as 1986, in Bra, Serralunga d’Alba and Barolo, Italy, where the 62 founding members met to inaugurate ‘Arcigola’, the forerunner of Slow Food. The international Slow Food movement was officially launched in Paris in 1989 with a founding manifesto signed by delegates from 15 countries. The UK branch did not open until 2005.[3] See the article on: www.artnet.com/Magazine/features/saltz/saltz10-6-03.asp[4] Someone like Michaël Borremans might fit into this category: he was in his late thirties in 2001 when Frank Demaegd of the esteemed Zeno X Gallery in Antwerp picked him up and launched him into stardom. [5] As Micheal Bracewell put it in Frieze, Jan. – Feb. 2007.[6] Cultural Ties is a work which comprises the letters Vallance sent out to approximately 200 men and women in power, various leaders of countries, along with a necktie in which he introduces himself and asks for a necktie of theirs in exchange for his – all with the intention of helping to ‘strengthen the links between our cultures’.

Holland Cotter, ‘Artists in Mid-Career and Beyond Are Showing That Experience Matters‘, The New York Times, April 21, 2006.

Jerry Saltz, ‘At the crossroads‘, Artnet Magazine

Maxine Kopsa

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