A402 Gallery, California Institute of the Arts, March 2006
Essay by Audrey Chan
Jason Kunke, Unfinished Essential Reading (bookmarks view).
Imagine a flock of birds.
Open your eyes and recall the exact number of birds.
The mind of God is that which knows the number.
– Borges’ proof for the existence of God
The exhibition, “Joint Rolling and Witchcraft” consists of five sculptural objects, a hand-drawn diagram, and a video on a monitor presented in A402 Gallery , a fluorescent-lit, white-walled gallery space in California Institute of the Arts. The constructed objects are painted white to match the formal qualities of the gallery like camouflaged fixtures. By way of these objects, Kunke sublimates his obsessive impulses unto the figure of CalArts and the specter of a hungry contemporary art world that awaits the school’s annual crop of young artists. As an institution rooted in 70s conceptualism, CalArts is also known for its early history of pedagogical hijinks. An uneven mix of documentation and heady campfire lore exacerbates nostalgia for this era of conceptual unruliness. Regardless, the power of art world hearsay, while superficial, hangs heavily upon the mind of a MFA student.
During a critique discussion, the artist coyly orchestrates the terms of verbal interpretation of the works, choosing to reveal the “truth” or “fiction” of a given work at his discretion. CalArts is the prism through which Kunke manifests his own anxieties about recognition and the threat of disappearance. In that Kunke takes on an investigation of the institution as a site of identity construction, “Joint Rolling and Witchcraft”, is reminiscent of a more cryptic and fragmented Mike Kelley’s “Educational Complex” (1995). However, the works resist legibility and the artist denies the viewer access to the back-story that constitutes the works’ meaning. Given the absence of guiding information, the viewers’ frustration generates a “lack” and a desire for resolution. The artist’s concomitant lack of disclosure can be seen as a strategy, ploy, or hoax. These are gestures that bespeak a condition of cynicism and play into the notion of art as an insider’s game.
At the entrance of the gallery, the artist has drawn on the wall an explanatory floor plan of the exhibition diagramming the works’ locations and titles. Beyond this map drawing is “The Name of What Cannot Be Taught”, a white pedestal topped with a self-feeding water fountain. A plastic tube connects two sections, which are modeled after the floor plans of A402 Gallery and the artist’s studio in CalArts’ Annex studios.
Jason Kunke, The Name of What Cannot Be Taught (view from above and detail).
“Truths, Half-Truths, Quarter-Truths, Falsehoods, Non-Sequiters, and Syntactically Correct Sentences That Have No Meaning Whatsoever” is a word-processed letter from Dean Houchin (Vice President for Administration at CalArts) addressed to the artist concerning the latter’s alleged acts of public nudity on campus. Although the letter is printed on official CalArts letterhead and presented in a clean white frame, it calls into question its own authenticity by virtue of its crude print reproduction.
“Unfinished Essential Reading” consists of a wall-mounted ledge on the far wall of the gallery containing a row of books (primarily academic and theoretical) marked with customized laminated bookmarks. The bookmarks contain quotes and images of a variety of subjects, including: “The Texas Chainsaw Massacre”, Nat Tate, two Russian PhD students, and a painting by the first female recipient of a MFA degree. By marking the page at which Kunke had last stopped reading a given book, the bookmarks locate the point separating knowledge acquired and the yet unknown, or unread.
Jason Kunke, Unfinished Essential Reading (detail).
The hand drawn wall diagram, “Chapter One”, contains clusters of textual information connected by lines that take the form of a pentagram. The writing has been crudely erased as to be illegible. During the discussion, the artist explains that he erased the names of people from the diagram because he did not want to offend or implicate individuals currently working at CalArts. He elects not to name the source of information for his diagram: Richard Hertz’s book, Jack Goldstein and the CalArts Mafia. The anecdotal book is based upon conversations with the circle of friends and colleagues of the late Jack Goldstein, an artist who graduated from CalArts’ MFA program in the early 1970s.
The video, “As He Knows, He Speaks”, is presented on a monitor low to the ground on a custom-built white pedestal. The DVD player is similarly presented on a custom-built pedestal with a small white maquette perched atop. In the video, the artist sits on a chair in his white-walled studio as a female voice from behind the camera asks him questions about art world minutiae. She dares, “Name a living contemporary artist for each letter of the alphabet.” Kunke dutifully recites the answers to the questions without visible aid. As the game continues, he and the female voice behind the camera start to laugh and crack jokes.
Art School
Publicity image for CalArts MFA Open Studios 2006 event. Location: Chouinard dormitory swimming pool. Photo credit: Amy Oliver.
The title of the exhibition, “Joint Rolling & Witchcraft” references a pull-quote from a 1989 article in VOGUE Magazine entitled “Liberal Arts,” in which critic Ralph Rugoff described the so-called excesses of art education at CalArts, where traditional courses in drawing were supplanted by courses in ‘joint rolling and witchcraft’. The characterization of Rugoff’s article was a major point of contention between Charles and Jason during the Reconsiderations meeting. Charles asserted that the article was not lampooning CalArts’ curriculum, but was rather promoting CalArts as an important art school that produced many famous artists in the 1980s. The historical role of Rugoff’s magazine article was that it introduced “art school” as an acceptable topic of conversation within the art world and it put CalArts on the map. (1) By referencing Rugoff’s article, Kunke reasserts the mythology around the Institute’s reputed Los Angeles brand of conceptual decadence. It also points to an ongoing debate regarding the ‘proper’ education of artists. Is art teachable? Do art schools actually teach or do they primarily facilitate careers? Art critic Howard Singerman, himself once an MFA student, articulates these concerns:
…beginning with Ralph Rugoff’s “Liberal Arts” published in Vogue in 1989 about Cal Arts; to Dennis Cooper’s “Too Cool for School,” which was published in the music magazine Spin in 1997, about UCLA, to “Surf and Turf” by Andrew Hultkrans published in Artforum in 1998 about UCLA and Art Center; to Deborah Solomon’s New York Times magazine article on “How to Succeed in Art” from 1999. None of the authors, it seems, quite trust the school, the art school. And why should they? There’s a very old and still quite strongly held belief that artists, if they are real artists, are not made in school. That they cannot be made there. In earlier times, artists were born.
The commentators on Cal Arts, UCLA, and Art Center-and indeed on art schools in general-clearly don’t trust the phenomenon they are describing. And it’s interesting that at some point in each of these articles…a certain version of the unschoolable artists, the irrepressible, unteachable real artist is rescued, whether in the halls or studios of school, or precisely outside them. For a couple of the articles, because the schools are schools, their graduates are in a real sense not artists-or at least, not yet. The LA art schools may be able to produce careers, and in that sense to make artists. But, for these authors, the very fact that these artists now come fully packaged, if not fully grown, out of art school and spring into galleries, is used as evidence of the shallowness of contemporary art, its lack of culture or maturity, its aesthetic, or even its moral emptiness. (2)
Kunke’s ambivalence regarding these assertions could be interpreted as a subject of the exhibition. However, he is less invested in a value judgment upon modes of art education than in an investigation of the psychopathology of systems as experienced by the art student. The wall drawing “Chapter One” takes as its subject the first chapter of the book, Jack Goldstein and the CalArts Mafia, in which artists (CalArts alumni), gallerists, and other art world personalities are introduced. However, the book is never explicitly named as the source, and the names of the individuals are erased. It is a modest act of self-censorship, a gesture towards not wanting to “step on anyone’s toes”.
Paradox & Pathology
Jason Kunke, As He Knows, He Speaks (installation view), video. Photo credit: Scott Groller.
The material and formal specificity of Kunke’s sculptural objects are secondary to their function as “discursive ice breakers”. However, the strategy of the exhibition relies on insider knowledge of the concept of the institution, CalArts’ early history from the 1970’s, and personalities within the art world. So do the objects themselves generate discussion or rather the sets of information and strategies used to deploy the information? The process of unpacking these strategies in a critique setting with the artist reveals the works’ reliance on a constructed discursive space. The exhibition is not meant for the casual viewer, who understandably misses the oblique references to arcane institutional history.
The battle between recognition and disappearance of the self plays out in his sculptures. Personal detritus taints the objects’ formal relationship to Minimalist sculpture. His pseudo-autobiographical gestures sully the clinical aspect of the white box gallery lit by unforgiving fluorescent lights. The viewer searches for traces of the artist’s self—a stand-in for the increasingly remote idea of the artist’s hand—in each piece but is frustrated upon finding that the artist has covered his tracks. A coat of white paint masks a poorly-repressed neurosis.
By placing masked markers of the self throughout the works, the artist draws a relationship between the paradox of the institution and the pathology of the individual. Kunke based the design of his sculpture, “The Name of What Cannot Be Taught” on the floor plans of A402 Gallery and his studio in the Annex (the building that houses most of the first-year MFA Program in Art graduate students’ studios). Kunke appears as the subject of address in the letter from Dean Houchin in “Truths, Half Truths…” A selection of his personal collection of books and his reading patterns are displayed on a shelf in “Unfinished Essential Reading”. The viewer is advised not to change the position of the bookmarks so that Kunke will not lose his place if he is to resume reading in the future. His presence in the wall diagram, “Chapter One”, is primarily apparent through his act of erasing text, which is visible because it is done in such a way that it blots out information rather than cleanly removing it. Finally, the artist appears in the video “As He Knows, He Speaks”, interviewed by a voice off camera.
The paradoxical relationship between the individual and the institution is such that although the institution is a collective entity, the individual must recognize that he or she in some way manifests the values and theoretical priorities of the institution in himself or herself. This renders the notion of autonomous will at best problematic and at worst false. The artist proposes that if the self is a place, that location may lie within cultural institutions. However, the pieces pose a viewership independent of knowing the artist as an individual. All the pieces point back to the artist, but as a type with generic conflicts and concerns. Rather than critiquing the institution of art education, the artist is participating in the mythology of artistic development as persona assumption and group affiliation.
The video, “As He Knows, He Speaks”, reveals an interest in codifying the ever-expanding contemporary art world through an incessant cataloguing of personae, names, and dates. On the one hand, by obsessively reciting arcane facts about the American and European art world, the artist proposes a complex system of knowledge and organization, and on the other hand manifests his own struggle with the subject of the contemporary artist. His recitations are a parody of the anxieties of an MFA student. Who does one need to know? What does one need to know? And for what end, artistic success and/or social navigation? The exhibition is a theoretical surmise and existential inquiry into the nature of things, and the thing in question is the struggle of an individual simultaneously tangential to the art world and participant in an institution of art education.
Truth & Fiction
Jason Kunke, Truths, Half-Truths, Quarter-Truths, Falsehoods, Non-Sequiters, and Syntactically Correct Sentences That Have No Meaning Whatsoever (detail), 2005. Click image to enlarge.
Another prevailing theme in the exhibition is the slippery nature of truth and fiction. ‘Truth’ and ‘knowledge’ are arbitrary systems constructed in the mind of the producer. Kunke takes liberties with the system of rumor and writing of himself “into the story” of CalArts. The framed letter, “Truths, Half-Truths, Quarter-Truths, Falsehoods, Non-Sequiters, and Syntactically Correct Sentences That Have No Meaning Whatsoever” could be genuine as plausibly as it could have been fabricated. The question is posed: would Kunke really have been so bold as to go nude on campus or would he have instead enacted a wish fulfillment of public brazenness via a forged facsimile on CalArts letterhead?
The controversy surrounding “the reveal” of fictionalized elements of James Frey’s Oprah-promoted memoir, A Thousand Little Pieces, is an example of the tenuous relationship between truth and fiction, and a notion of “fairness” to the reader (or viewer of art). It provoked anger, resentment, and betrayal in readers and Oprah. It was a news-worthy occasion. The memoir model asserts a kind of factual accuracy and “telling of the truth” and it also assumes an implicit relationship of trust between the reader, the author, and a set of facts or events. Frey’s readers were emotionally invested in his harrowing personal narrative and Oprah fervently promotion of the memoir on her television show, which rocketed him to great financial success.This is distinct from a work of fiction, which is understood to be a fabrication of characters and events. In the case of the memoir, the degree of a narrative’s construction is not transparent, and can rely heavily on the tropes of literature.
In “As He Knows, He Speaks”, the context of the gallery exhibition locates the reveal within the site of representation, already at a degree of removal from reality. The reveal in “As He Knows, He Speaks” is subtle and the stakes are much lower. The audience likely doesn’t know enough about the body of knowledge invoked in order to judge whether Kunke is being truthful or not. In such an ambiguous situation, the simple response is to play along. The trickster gets away with pocket change. The video rationalizes fakeness. The ‘truth’ on display is Kunke’s ability to spontaneously answer arcane questions about contemporary art trivia from memory. The artist’s project of cataloguing contemporary artists in “As He Knows, He Speaks” is a potentially infinite task such that the resulting condition is the pathology of infinite accumulation rather than knowledge.Kunke states an interest in sociology, particularly in symbolic interactionist theory and the looking glass self. In this model, your self-perception is based on how you perceive others to perceive you, like facing mirrors reflecting ad infinitum. As the video progresses, the setup is revealed when the script passes in front of the camera. Multiple takes reveal that the question and answer session has been rehearsed and memorized.
Borges envisioned the Library of Babel as housing every conceivable item of knowledge that has been and will ever be produced. The Borges library can really only be negotiated in the mind. It stands for a structuring of types and a structuring of infinities within the limitations of typeface, pages, and information. In the Library of Babel, there is a finite code (e.g. the alphabet, which has 26 letters) and a system (e.g. language) whereby the codes are combined in an infinite number of permutations that may occasionally order themselves by chance into a piece of literature like Hamlet but most of the time will result in unintelligible gibberish. Models and subsets are thus finite representations of the infinite. There is no such thing as coherent knowledge in the context of Borges’ library – if thought comes together, it comes as a result of statistical probability, not intentional design. This unimaginable expanse of knowledge (and gibberish) is a postmodern construction of the sublime. The role of pathology is implicit within this structure because the structure itself is so rigorously symmetrical that playing out all the infinite possibilities would require a pathological dedication if one were to prioritize thoroughness over mediation/meaning (breadth over depth). The autonomy and distancing produced by the Borges model places the self within a labyrinth of systems to obscure the self or to camouflage identity, to place the self (or artist) in the privileged position of the spectator, looking without needing to be seen. (3)
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Footnotes:
(1) Jason expressed that he was more interested in the hearsay and rumor around the article as parlayed to him through other CalArts professsors. He was less concerned with the actual content of the article itself, which he had not read. Charles calls this “bad scholarship” and a “pornography of history.” Jason thought of it as an exercise in examining the slippery nature of truth and fiction. Charles replies by giving Jason a copy of an essay that he had written in response to the Rugoff article.
(2) Singerman, Howard. “The Master of Fine Art.” Lecture presented at California State University, Long Beach, Saturday, September 23, 2000. From Contemporary Discovery I: The Shaping of the Artist in the Institution, a symposium exploring how art is taught in the contemporary art world.
(3) Gaines remarks that Kunke’s artistic strategy is a form of passive aggressiveness masquerading as vulnerability.
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Note: This essay was written as an exercise for artist Charles Gaines’ critique course “Reconsiderations” at CalArts. Students partnered to write accounts of each other’s critique discussions. The writing served as a vehicle enable a following reconsideration of the artwork in private conversation with Gaines. This essay incorporates aspects of both the critique and the conversation. My partner was Jason Kunke, who presented his first-year MFA solo exhibition, “Joint Rolling and Witchcraft”. Special thanks to Jason and Charles.
Images of artwork courtesy of Jason Kunke.
