My first blog post!!!

I saw Stephanie Syjuco speak at at the weekly (and free!) PSU art lecture last Monday, which may be eons ago for "Internet time". But, a lot of ideas and questions stuck with me. Her work has tended towards making cardboard, foam, and hand knit fakes of canonical and/or expensive museum pieces, designer bags, and imaginary sculptures made in Google's modeling program, and displaying the copies in gallery spaces. She talked a bit about grey markets; of course there's quite a bit of ideological content in her artist's statement: "uses the tactics of bootlegging, reappropriation, and fictional fabrications to address issues of cultural biography, labor, and economic globalization."

The presentation seemed at hit up until the Q&A, she's a charmer, but then, it turned dark, as things often do in the Q&A portion. There are a lot of intellectual vipers and insecure presenters out there. Here, the questions were particularly tough...

"Did you even give them credit for their work?" (In regards to a project in which she employed young artists to produce low-cost knockoffs of pieces for sale at the Frieze Fair, to be sold at a commissioned booth , known as an "Autonomous Manufacturing Zone.")
"Weren't the gallery owners and artists mad?"
"Don't you care about craftsmanship?"
"Isn't remaking Louis Vitton bags just advertising for the brand?"

The questioners picked away, and it was clear, even on the other side of a large room, she is not a master deflector. Looking back through the presentation, she spent much it accounting for and defending her art. She explained that she does have artistic skills, after all, she's got a background in sculpture and has made many an object in expensive and difficult materials such as metal, marble, wood. She explained that part of the point was access: poor people want to have nice things too, like Prada bags and Koons's, or they at least simulacra of nice things.

It seemed she wanted to show herself to be an authentic faker, but an Artist too, elevated out of the dismal and desperate hollows of the Fan. But, really, much of the ideological project of the work seemed as flimsy as, well, cardboard. What was really interesting to me about her art was that she is an art world fan operating in the art world, message being, isn't this stuff COOL? In a sense it becomes about remaking ( and, yes, remixing) the canon, not so much to interrogate it, as out of humor, and love. I was reminded of my favorite Oron Welles film, F For Fake, and his featured art-faker, Elmyr de Hory. Well, de Hory was certainly trying to pass off his knockoffs the sleazy way: as top-dollar originals, and he got tons of flack for it. But what stuck with me was his tricksterish, but seemingly earnest, admiration for the works... They were great the first time, so why not make another, spread the love? Or as Syjuco memorably quipped, "What happens when you put all the aura together. Do you just lose 'it', or do you add to 'it"?"

I don't know if asking a bunch of crafters to remake Gucci bags degrades or accentuates the brand's power, or what Styrofoam replica of an Oldenburg does to the original. An artwork's "aura" (in Benjamin's sense) always seemed a near-magic concept to me, almost too slippery to define. Also, this is 2010, anyone can buy a Mona Lisa mug at the Met- who knows what that does to Leo's original (though maybe we should now say "version.") But Syjuco's tactics are pretty funny ways to take an "owned" cultural symbol into one's hands. At the Frieze sale, people gave noticeably more attention to particular "original" pieces once they saw they'd been replicated. Somethings got to have an excess of value before it even is ripe for a knockoff, hence the second glances at works that must now be important.

So all those people hawking DVDs on Canal Street, that's not theft, really that's an homage.