Flogging A Dead Horse: Site Santa Fe Biennial, 2006

If Site Santa Fe is a Citadel, I'd Rather Pray Outdoors

My Review of the 2006 Fe Santa Fe Biennial (the straight-from-the-hip version):

If someone were to decide to give me the curatorial title for the next Site Santa Fe Biennial, my vision is as clear as day - I'd skim 15% off the top of their $600,000 budget just for my fee, then pull an additional $100K as a show budget. I'd fabricate a four foot by ten foot rubber stamp emblazoned with the word "HUBRIS," then hire a crane for opening night and train some fancy New York artist (Jenny Holzer springs to mind) to operate the crane. We'd hire Kim Jones to reprise his rat-decor on the front end of Site from Biennial 2004 onto the crane, and on opening night, the doors of Site would be sealed shut with super glue and everyone would settle in under the tent to watch the performance, Fancy Artist in rat-crusted crane stamping the word "HUBRIS" over and over again on the exterior walls of Site. We'd spend the rest of the budget on cheap jug wine and seriously bad punk rock bands to entertain the assembled throngs, and for the following six months, Site would be shuttered closed and everyone who works there would have to write their press releases and other institutional drek from their laptops in the front seats of their cars, while graffiti artists and "outsider" artists would have complete carte blanche over the rest of the walls and the entire grounds of the museum.

Now *that's* the Biennial I'd like to see. As you can see, it's a bit reactionary in regards to the current Biennial, but bear in mind that while it's roughly equivalent to what Site 2006 has been all about, it's at a fraction of the cost *and* we end up with a six-month installation tent city of gutter punks and ex-convicts who might actually make work we'd wanna see.

My Review of the 2006 Site Santa Fe Biennial (the sober and clear analysis, made possible by three heavily emotional argument/discussions with my dear friend Zane Fischer):

Dear Zane:

I'm only going to say this once.

I burned my Site Santa Fe card tonight. It was given to me as a gift by my mom, and though I don't particularly need it because I seem to have made the list of press important enough to be sent an email and given a little kit complete with a Valet Parking permit, I burned it anyway because it's symbolic of how I feel about the *place* - not the show, not the art, but the *place* itself. If the conversation that has been had about this show and all of the other shows in town is about presentation, then my feelings about Site and the work it shows won't ever change until they raze the building and present art as something I know it to be - as something fun, spontaneous, exhuberant, and maybe even a little Dionysian.

While Site Santa Fe hasn't always lacked that possibility, and has, in fact, delivered on it on several occasions, it is, as I said earlier, a Very Citadel of Contemporary Art - and all those capital letters have always left me feeling rather cold. The glossy brochures advertising "deluxe" tours of Biennials for the very well-heeled collector don't really help either, though I do understand that there is a difference between downtown warehouse guerrilla art-spaces, and an uptown institution that needs all the contributions it can get to keep hosting high-end cocktail parties for all those well-heeled johns who discretely keep the place open for the sake of their fancy collections of work that needs stacks of press releases in order to be understood.

I like to think that there are two kinds of people in the art world - those who gravitate to Art History departments, and those who gravitate to artist studios. I am one of the latter folks, and I am mostly a sucker for anyone who makes Damn Near Anything - from wax-resist painted eggs and santero carvers to wack-job theorists who make models of the universe with a single prism and a bowl full of water. Makin' stuff is cool, and since I don't make a whole lot more than a few scribbles on a page, people who can create form out of anything seem like deities to me, most of the time. I'm such a true believer in the making of art-things that I once travelled across two states to visit the Museum of Bad Art, and I was really really sad that I couldn't buy a couple pieces off the wall - until I made something even *worse.*

I tend to feel - and you can correct me if I'm wrong, but note that I said "feel" and not think and these are deeply different things - that the kinds of folks who gravitate to Site and stick around are of the former variety. Site's very building implies a certain kind of churchliness about "what you are about to see" and all that hushed and quiet tip-toeing from one piece of work to the next has always reminded me of spending a Sunday afternoon in the Hirschorn (my mother's favorite gallery) as a child. The whole process says, "This stuff is important. Please be quiet. People here are in quiet contemplation of beauty. Don't talk." And above all, of course, don't touch the art.

But I want to touch the art. And, of course, I'd like to be touched *by* the art without having to read a goddamn thing about what kind of ideas went into either it or the decision to select it for the particular room or space that I'm seeing it in. You seemed really ticked off that I hadn't bothered to read your preview before I went to the show - but I also didn't read any of the great big packet of press releases that Site was so gracious to provide me with. I wanted to experience the art, as they say, "in an unmediated fashion," and the fact is that it mostly just confused and bored me. And perhaps that's because, having been to a couple other Biennials, I was expecting some kind of blockbuster event - instead, I saw work left in quiet contemplation for me to pause and reflect upon, there in that Citadel of Contemporary Art. And I rushed off in search of richer content quite quickly, over to Evo and James Kelly and Victoria Price, and with the exception of Price's nifty Native American artifacts collection, didn't really find it at all except in the marvelous to-and-fro of tout le monde, who seemed just as happy to not be inside Site as I was.

Once I started reading those releases today, after our third argument/discussion about this show, I realized that behind all the art that had bored me were living breathing people - the artists - who have probably read a lot of the same books as I have and have probably had all the same wild thoughts as me, and who've probably wandered through dozens of cities around the world smoking hash and drinking wine and thinking about all the cool shit I do. And of course, at that point, I knew I couldn't dis the show - because there were artists inside of it, and people who make stuff, and as I think I've made clear throughout my life, I'm a sucker not just for art-stuff and art-people, but also for madness and frivolity and a damn good time. And all these folks just looked like fun - but the presentation of their work wasn't quite about *fun* - it was about the seriousness of it all, and there was (quite honestly) nothing in there that struck me as particularly serious - other than the space it which it was shown. And I'm just not serious enough for Site Santa Fe.

In the meantime, the rest of the city was teeming with interesting events, that taken as a whole and contrasted against the serious of Site, just seemed to suggest that anyone seeking a good time out of art could find it - providing they were willing to step outside of that building. In the course of the weekend, as you know, I saw authentic Hawai'an hula dancers invoking their gods in the Allan Houser Art Park to bless the Indigenous Dialogues show, drank beer and danced to techno at the Feral Art Gallery with two to three hundred other wanna-be art stars, ate hot dogs with the Renters, and caught the tail end of the Folk Art Market, where hundreds of artists and participants jostled one another in a Congo line to the beat of a half-dozen hand-drummers over at the Museum of International Folk Art.

What struck me as interesting about all of this, as you also know, was that *the* Site for "contemporary art" was without question, (in my meager brain) the dullest part of the whole weekend. And yet, what received the most coverage and what seemed, from the press perspective, the most important thing happening, was the Biennial opening. And all of that struck me as strange in terms of what we think of when we think of the word "contemporary" and what we think, in our little universe of contemporary art, as what is really important about the art we look at, laud, and make important.

Timothy Leary propagated the idea that taking LSD was all about "set and setting," and after this weekend, I would argue that viewing art is all about "set and setting." What puzzles me is why contemporary art, which seems to consider itself so important, cutting-edge, avant-garde, etc. is so often presented in spaces that seem more appropriate for a networking party than actually viewing something as interesting as "art." If contemporary art really isn't "your father's modern art" then why is it so often shown in places that seem about as interesting about my father's cocktail parties?

For years now, I have implored you and everyone within earshot to believe me when I tell you that Burning Man is the most fascinating and relevant contemporary art show in America. Its set and setting create a deep and rich visual and theoretical lexicon that is incredibly satisfying - and you can even show up to the "viewing" half-naked or painted blue, if you like. Compartively speaking, since Burning Man is *not* about sales, commodity, or collectors, it only makes every other space for viewing Contemporary Art seem less like a place to "experience art" than like a brothel where everyone is for sale. And while Site is not specifically set up for the sale of work, the indirect and behind-closed-doors sales that do take place seem so much more whorish to me than the actual sale of items at places like the Folk Art Market, because at least there everyone is aware that sales are an important part of the action.

When it comes down to what I really want from art, personally, what makes a work interesting to me are ideas and inventiveness. Accessibility is nice too, and if I can get my head around the work just by looking at, without having to be seduced by the bios and the press releases that I've written more of than I can count, then all the better. This is why I am delighted by such objects as carved soap boxes made by prisoners or fork-tine and polished stone necklaces made by travelling hippies, as well as the kind of stuff that hangs at Feral, the craft objects that can be found at Indian Market or Spanish Market or Folk Art Market, or the truly weird monumental works like the giant bronze sacred heart that spits fire out of the top that shows up on the Playa every August.

But when I come across a show that actually has a mission, a thing to say, a burning urgent desire to raise consciousness in the way that Bob Hoazous' Indigenous Dialogue show does, then I am tempted to blurt out, in a fit of pique as I did the other night to you, that Site's show blows by comparison and Indigenous Dialogues is *the* show to see right now, because it offers the same quiet contemplation that Site might want to offer, but it actually has in mind a coherent conversation that it would like us to participate in. That conversation has a lot less to do about informing whitey that Native Americans are here to stay than it is about calling all the tribes and asking questions about what they can do to get over the divisiveness between the tribes, but it's *still* far more interesting to an outsider like myself to that community than it is to me, a more or less "insider" in Contemporary Art, to what's happening over at Site Santa Fe. It has substance and urgency and spiritual components - and most importantly, there are high and important stakes about how that conversation turns out.

Site Santa Fe's Biennial, on the other hand, wants to pretend that art is just about stuff, and that the stuff that is presented can be "totally disconnected" (my quotes) from each other, and that the artists that have been selected are just there to be viewed on their own merits, without mediation. But the mediation is an a priori condition made real by the fact that the work is *in* Site, the Citadel, as I have said, of a certain kind of discourse without discourse, a clean-up crew of Art History majors and curators and artists who are more or less invested in little else than the language of Contemporary Art. Collectively speaking, there's no underpinning historical or philosophical agenda other than the agenda of Contemporary Art. It exists primarily to propagate itself and the spaces where work of its kind is shown. And the real beauty of that agenda is that if you don't get it, you just don't understand it, so if you were to bother to state the obvious and say the emperor has no clothes, you'd be ejected from the club because clearly, you don't understand that the point of the club is to propagate the form, not to actually generate discourse about anything but itself, a strange loop-tape, a mobius strip that is always turning but never really going anywhere in particular.

Though I am well-aware that labelling one's self a "Contemporary Artist" is important for those artists who'd like to vie for such prizes as a show in the Chelsea or a spot at the Whitney, Venice, or Site Santa Fe Biennials, I'm coming to a place where the very phrase Contemporary Artist makes me want to retch and run for cover. The pretense of the thing is just astonishing, as if only a few artists making work At This Moment can actually claim the title. Having spent the past few years roaming around looking at Native American/indigenous work of both a "contemporary" and "traditional" nature, as well as "folk art," "craft-objects," "outsider art," and making inquiries as the histories of these "traditions," I'm finding that very often traditional work is just a template of sorts that the "current" craft/folk artist can use to project his or her own visions, and a lot of things that get produced are very "contemporary" indeed, despite the fact that they may have a historical function that might disenable them from being viewed within the Contemporary Art world.

But this sort of thing is really just so much conceit, a means to separate "people we think are cool," and "people we don't know and don't want to deal with." And that's certainly fair for the members of the club - but something tells me it will be a really long time before I, personally, will feel comfortable in that club. For one thing - I never feel like I have the right shoes.

cheers
gregoryp(tm)

ps: Unless you have any strenuous objections, I'm going to post this to my blog as an open letter so that other people can get involved in the conversation, if they so choose.