"The work has to exist on its own terms for its own reasons," the Los Angeles artist Liza Lou told the New York Times in a May 7 story.
This is a preposterous thing to say about a work of art, and it is said all the time. Nothing exists on its own terms for its own reasons, except a totalizing God. Art is connective, not isolated.
Lou said it to describe why she omitted from publicity materials that she hired 20 poor Zulu women to glue glass beads to the barbed-wire cage she showed at White Cube Gallery in London. She wanted the piece to be aesthetic, not social, not tainted by the rags that came before the riches.
"Art has two lives, the process and the finished product," she said. "What an artist goes through to make the work is not necessary for understanding the finished work."
This is a common refrain from artists who hire anonymous fabricators to make their work, and it makes them sound embarrassed about their choice when they needn't be. So much of contemporary life is factory-made; why not whole sectors of contemporary art? Then again, if an artwork is spoiled by the knowledge of how it was made, then maybe it shouldn't have been made that way. Complicating things is an unspoken division between art insiders, who often know how a work was made, and casual viewers, who often do not. It's as though anonymous fabrication is kept a secret because the regular population is not sophisticated enough to understand it.
Dale Chihuly is a perfect example. Art people say his production methods are inconsequential, while regular folks are often shocked to discover he doesn't blow glass. The former ignore what's right in front of them, while the latter refuse to move beyond it. Chihuly's art is more interesting because of the way it is made, not less. He sometimes tells his manufacturers exactly what to do; he sometimes doesn't tell them anything. Last week, the glass blower that Chihuly is suing for copyright infringement (Bryan Rubino made Chihuly's glass, then made pieces for another employer that Chihuly says are knockoffs of Chihuly designs) filed a countersuit. Rubino submitted a delicious fax from Chihuly with scribbled drawings on it. It says, "Here's a little sketch but make whatever you want."
Some people are exploring these issues instead of talking jive. This month at the New York gallery Triple Candie, curators Shelly Bancroft and Peter Nesbett and other fabricators made imperfect copies of works by the stubbornly reclusive artist Cady Noland, detailing their production in wall labels that compare them to the real works. How these are made is more important than what they are. The terrific Village Voice critic Jerry Saltz registered his ambivalence about the show, calling it "challenging," "radical," and "fascinating" before suggesting Noland get herself a lawyer. "In a way, Cady Noland Approximately makes one believe in artistic aura again," he wrote. Aura is like God. We desire it as much as we doubt it.
