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The Velvet GrindSelected Essays (1980-2004)

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Introduction
Lionel Bovier & Fabrice Stroun
(p. 9-15)

This fourth volume of the “Positions ” series —which aims to question artistic and curatorial practices from the singular position of an artist who writes both on his /her own wor k as well as that of other artists —stands out in more wa ys than one . This anthology includes short fictions alongside the essays and interviews that have been the series' fare to date, and is structured as to produce an experience akin to reading a novel. Through the progression and interplay of the texts, the author gradually emerges as a character in a kind of real-life Bildungsroman, set in a world of specialized image-producers.
Selected for their narrative gist as much as for their keen critical analysis of the makeup of American culture, taken together these writings yield a coherent narrative of the profound transformation of Robbins' artistic itinerary from downtown New York post-punk-DIY conceptualism in the early 1980s, to, today, a willing participant in the research-and-development branch of a hyper-lubricated, market-driven, all-encompassing entertainment industry. Divided into two distinct thematic and chronological poles, “The Children of Barthes and Coca-Cola” and “Intellectual Showbiz,” the anthology reproduces the above indicated evolution of recent American art history and the profound transformation of the status of the artist that it implies. At the same time, this coming-into-being “fiction” is not another account among many of success (or failure) in New York City. As its title indicates, The Velvet Grind points to a much slower day-to-day equilibrium between privilege and discipline, between decadence and weariness on the one hand, and industriousness, deliberation, and long-term commitment on the other.

Producing images (mostly photographic) and objects (imbued with a comedic quality rather than any stylistic or thematic consistency) alongside texts, Robbins' practice concurrently develops two lines of investigation. Occasionally the two tracks do converge, yielding direct correspondences between words and actions, but for the most part they remain essentially independent productions.
Like many other artists of his generation, at the onset of his career David Robbins posited mass-media entertainment as the definitive perspective of American culture. Andy Warhol, who broke ground on the edifice that would come to occupy Robbins' work, is thus a recurring presence in his texts. That Robbins' first job in New York was as a Warhol Factory assistant partially explains why he did not seek to duplicate Warhol's revolutionary self-legitimization strategies in any way shape or form. (1) Rather, his brief Factory stint, little more than a year of service, gave him a head start toward “my own thing—whatever that might turn out to be. At Andy's, I saw what art-world glamour was. Talk about starting at the top! You didn't get bigger than Warhol. And seeing it up close liberated me from having to pursue that experience. I could look for something else, build another model.” (2)
“Let's not be afraid to make something that isn't art,” Robbins would write in 1993. “There will always be plenty of slaves to the superego of art—a fact that should free the rest of us to risk the pursuit of new territory. Actually, this pursuit is almost an obligation, if we take seriously the idea that, at this point in history, art, the widest cultural aperture, is less about the invention of pictures and objects than about the invention of behavior.” (3) His rejection of the art-world star system exemplified by Warhol didn't stem, then, from a purist neo-conceptual posture or a puritanical aversion to the market. Instead, as is evidenced from the texts collected here, it was a logical outcome of the artist's idiosyncratic use of mass-media culture as a horizon of the Great American Imagination. (4) Why be content to be a great American artist or a great American entertainer, he asks more than once in this volume, when one could possibly embody the Great American Imagination?

As the sum of hopes the spirit can spatially (geographically) conceive of, the notion of the Great American Imagination has always implied some kind of physical spanning of the American vastness and so, in 1995, after residing in Europe (Brussels, Cologne, Graz, Naples … ) during most of the previous seven years, Robbins repatriated not to New York but to his native Midwest. (5) The Midwest is known as the place where American artists come from, certainly not where they move to. Yet, halfway between New York and Los Angeles, the Midwest, a place that stands on the margins of dominant cultural production, geographically incarnates the hybrid “third option”—neither art nor entertainment— advocated by the artist from the very beginning of his public life. Writing from Milwaukee where he currently resides, the artist states: “The most highly evolved Midwestern imaginations are quite conscious that they represent and embody an alternative to the dominant models of culture making celebrated in and promoted by the magazines and TV shows produced in the current centers. Being officially ‘out of it' and in the middle of the country, Midwesterners enjoy a natural, deep-dyed perspective on the seamlessly managed professional culture of the often dubious commercial product that is ceaselessly lobbed at them from the coasts. The model of emergent Midwestern contemporary culture is based in part on plasticizing, activating, and exploiting that perspective to risk something new.” (6) At the end of the day, the Great American Imagination appears within the following pages as a structural—and ultimately political—paradigm rather than an existential one. The narrative that can be garnered from this anthology is one of a progressive move away from the centers of cultural production, and toward marginal territories that exemplify the day-to-day usage of this said production; a move away from the mediated images of the individual as envisioned by pop culture—“the expressive side of marketplace culture” (7)—and toward works that not only investigate but also produce social, or rather socializing, events. (8)
Yet, if The Velvet Grind does provides a narrative of the transition between the most sophisticated picture-based practices of the 1980s to the “relational” 1990s and digitalization's promise of expanded behavioral freedom, Robbins' Midwest—which the artist likens to a kind of American Scandinavia—bears little resemblance to Dominique Gonzalez-Foerster's Brasilia, Pierre Huyghe's neo-modernist outskirts of Paris, Philippe Parreno's images of the deep sea, or the collectively-conceived decors for the appropriated Manga character Ann Lee. Contrarily to his younger French forebears' colonization of liminal territories, Milwaukee, or for that matter, Brussels, do not set stages for any kind of romantic projection. This, deflating side of his sensibility had shown up early, in the most well-known piece from his days in New York, Talent (1986). A series of 18 photographs of a generation-and-a half of up-and-coming New York-based post- Conceptual artists taken by a professional headshot photographer whose lens was usually directed at hopeful actors, Talent already stood in sharp contrast to Jeff Koons' Luxury and Degradation portraits of a fresh bourgeois-class-in-the-making shown in New York that same year. Freedom, which Robbins repeatedly couches in terms of “full access to my own imagination,” never emerges in his work as a known quantity, as an internalized socio-cultural allegory of success, but as a concrete, physical provision for action. What he does with this freedom, liberating creative forms from fixed contexts and positioning new contextual horizons for artists' productions, is only hinted at by this book: it happens here and there, today and tomorrow, in the art world and elsewhere.


Postscript
Fabrice Stroun

On the morning of Saturday November 12, 2005, I set out to return from New York to Geneva. On the way to JFK, I asked the driver to take a detour through Chelsea in order to see Robbins' latest piece of theater. A few days prior, I had received a public notice from the artist's gallery announcing that he was taking his leave of the art world, and that all of those works still consigned to his New York gallery would be placed on the sidewalk for the taking, free of charge. A compulsive collector myself, I had at first imagined taking something. But once on site, rather than join the fray, I strangely found myself unable to do so. What is it really necessary to burden myself with one more object? Why not instead unload all of my suitcases full of artists' books and editions and leave them on the sidewalk as well? Yet, contrarily to Huebler's famous statement about the fact that there are too many objects in the world as it is—so why bother adding new ones!—Robbins' flyer doesn't so much embody a “radical” position as a satirical one. It didn't call for a critique of the art system, be it for its fetishism or the ever-expanding comedic character that regulates the incestuous commerce between artists, critics, curators, collectors, and dealers; rather it produced (as in theater) a comedy. In the end, the joke is on me. I should have taken something. I didn't—an exhilaratingly funny and liberating thought that has nagged me ever since.


1. There is no doubt that Warhol's successes and failures in the matter far exceeded those of his 1980s followers, whether they were acting from within the art world (Jeff Koons), or outside of it (Robert Longo). In “Pops” (a short version of which appeared in Artforum, October 2004, as “Biz Kid”), an autobiographical reminiscence of the artist's days at the Warhol Factory, Robbins concludes: “Warhol's art, occupying an intersection of the trajectories of formidable social and technological forces, happened to be about a society then in the process of discovering its modern scale … Hoping to replicate Warhol's impact is as foolhardy as expecting the repetition of modern mass culture's Christopher Columbus phase of self-discovery.”
2. From a conversation with the artist, May 25, 2006.
3. “The Dr. Frankenstein Option” reproduced in this volume, p. 209–227.
4. To reinvest in earnest in the concept of the American imagination, while fully engaging in the most radical transformations undertaken by his generation to the status of artist, the work of art, its institutional validation, and its concomitant exchange value—transformations that we have come to categorize under the general category of “postmodernism” (and which include the loss of aura of the work of art, the critique of “authenticity,” the ironic deflation of the grand narrative of the historical avant-garde, etc.)—may seem strange, so much have we come to identify this decade as one of an anxiety-ridden désenchantement. Yet, this historical construction excludes a gamut of artists for whom the collapse of modernism's utopian principles has been experienced as joyous and productive comedy. As it turns out, the majority of these artists started their careers at Nature Morte, a gallery run by two artists, Peter Nagy and Alan Belcher, and for whom Robbins acted as a kind of in-house writer. The fact that, with very few exceptions, almost all of these artists had stopped producing art altogether or had moved out of New York by the mid- 1990s accounts for their absence from today's descriptions of the ideological debates of that era. Reflecting back on this decade in the pages of Artforum, Robbins wrote: “the most lasting contribution of the East Village conceptualist, intangible, but appearing everywhere since, may turn out to have been a discourse of happiness— affirmation of the present and receptivity to the future.” (“ABC TV,” reproduced in this volume p. 103–112).
5. By the time Robbins reached New York, the Great American Imagination had deteriorated, after its hedonistic transformations in the 1960s and its subsequent embodiment of the deception of that decade's unrealized dream (Hunter S. Thompson's Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas), into the resulting self-alienation and psycho-pathological obsession with greatness (Tom Wolfe's 1972 essay “Why They Aren't Writing the Great American Novel Anymore”) that characterize our collective memory of that decade's self-serving excesses. Robbins' earnestness, of course, is steeped in critical irony: any possibility of self-transformation, of personal growth, can never be experienced apart from the chain of associations that lead back to the mass media's exploitation of it. Consequently, Robbins is able to de-psychoanalyze this whole narrative of ideological disintegration, or more precisely, to put in quotation marks the pathological “feelings” that accompany it.
6. From “Notes on a Midwestern Makeover.”
7. See note 3.
8. This two-step progression is made evident when one compares, for example, “Art after Entertainment,” a prospective text written in 1989, when Robbins was still making photo-based work (“I am calling for the planting of the flag of a third culture that might draw upon the virtue of both contexts, art and entertainment. By processing entertainment through the sensitive faculties of art, we can discover the patterns of entertainment culture in order to determine those aspects of mass media culture most worth preserving. And by injecting the experimentalism of art into entertainment, we can produce more satisfying models of entertainment and eventually blackmail our irresponsible entertainment culture into becoming a civilizing force,” reproduced in this volume p. 129–142,) and the latter writings related to his Ice Cream Social project (1993–onward), republished by JRP|Ringier in 2004, and which serves as an addendum of sorts to the present volume.
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