THE NEW YORKER: "Would You Rather be a Loser or a Pig," in Goings On About Town
ARTNEWS: "Honey, I Shrunk the Collectors," by Rachel Somerstein
THE NEW YORKER: "Getting to Know the Neighbors" in Goings On About Town
ART ON PAPER: "Clinical Studies: Artist Jennifer Dalton Casts a Critical Eye on the Systems that Mythologize Artists," by Ana Finel Honigman
ARTFORUM: review of solo exhibition "A Task No One Assigned" at Plus Ultra Gallery, Brooklyn, New York, by Frances Richard
FLASH ART: review of solo installation "The Appraisal" at Steffany Martz Gallery, New York, New York, by Robert Thill
NEW YORK: article on ARTSURVEY, by Sean Kennedy
Nowadays, information about the art business is circulated and consumed like baseball statistics. Rather than becoming hamstrung by the onslaught, Dalton turns these tidbits into art. A wall of miniature action figures laden with shopping bags details the tastes ("old masters," "contemporary," "tribal art") of prominent collectors. A slide show of graphs and charts asks, "How Do Artists Live?" (Answer: twenty-five percent get money from their parents; eight-hundredths of a per cent report income from illegal sources.) A case filled with gray rubber bracelets offers viewers a chance to identify themselves as "losers" or "pigs," reiterating how, in the art-plus-business equation, no one comes out clean.
"You look at these people; you read about them in magazines. Their taste has such a huge effect on which art is popular or praised - yet they're inscrutable to us," says installation artist Jennifer Dalton of the collectors on the annual ART-news Top 200 list.
With last year's names in hand, Dalton made models of the collectors by affixing gold-painted action figures from DC and Marvel comics to wood bases, each covered to indicate the source of the collector's wealth - for instance, a dollar bill* represents inheritance. Tiny shopping bags dangling from their wrists show the type of art they collect, such as photography or Old Masters. Dalton placed them in five glass-fronted cabinets; a lone collector selected at random every day by her two-year-old son is featured in front on a pedestal. The result, The Collector-ibles (2006), will be on view at New York's Plus Ultra Gallery from September 7 through October 7 as part of Dalton's solo show.
Dalton debuted The Collector-ibles at the PULSE art fair in New York last March, an event attended by some of the collectors in the installation. "One teenager ran up and said, 'Hey Dad, it's you!" says Ed Winkleman, codirector of Plus Ultra, who manned the gallery's booth during the fair. Though Dalton says that she initially "wondered if collectors would be offended by being made small by these little, cheap figures," according to Winkleman, the only complaints were from collectors wondering why they hadn't been included.
"It's just like being an artist," says Dalton. "All these people are like, 'How come they're in, and I'm not?' - it's like their Whitney Biennial".
* Artist's note: This is a mistake. A dollar bill signifies wealth from the financial world; a base covered in gold leaf indicates inheritance.
The show "Getting to Know the Neighbors" has an ominous subtitle: "Every Building Listed on the Environmental Protection Agency's List of Regulated Facilities." Nearly four hundred snapshots taken in Brooklyn bear pencilled notations with each site's name, address and category of potential offense. Dry cleaners and auto-body shops might be expected; it's unsettling to find public schools (hazardous waste) and a community center (air releases). Through May 24. (Plus Ultra, 235 S. 1st St. 718-387-3844.)
At first glance, any big survey of contemporary art is likely to come across as an anything-goes mess of unrelated objects. But hang around in the art world long enough and you start to notice that a certain sameness, built around a handful of recurrent themes and strategies, underlies all that variety. In a witty PowerPoint presentation called "Contemporary Art According to Jen," screening Thursday at a tiny 14th Street space called Curator's Office, Brooklyn artist Jennifer Dalton has churned that sameness into a work of art. Over the course of a five-minute loop, a series of PowerPoint slides - complete with lame clip-art illustrations - sorts some our best-known artists into 32 convincing categories. Under the title "Tons of Little Things Become One Big Thing," Dalton lists famous accumulators Nancy Rubins, Tom Friedman and Sarah Sze. The heading "Being an Artist is Cool, but Being a Rock Star Would be Cooler" pulls in Old Master Modernist Andy Warhol, but also postmodern hipsters such as Mike Kelley and Rodney Graham. And then there's one of the most important, timless categories of contemporary art: "Something Really Important is Being Addressed, but It's Difficult to Say What." Matthew Barney leads that list, but Robert Gober, Douglas Gordon, Rachel Whiteread and lots of others get on it, too. If you want further boning up on who does what today, for $100 you can take home one of 100 CD-ROMs of Dalton's Piece. Full disclosure: I bought one.
"Clinical Studies: Artist Jennifer Dalton Casts a Critical Eye on the Systems that Mythologize Artists"
By Ana Finel Honigman
March/April 2004
Jennifer Dalton is the art world's private cardiologist, diagnosing its many disorders through an examination of its systems. Since graduating from Pratt in 1997, she has started two ongoing bodies of work that take a critical look at both the auction market and the influence of the press.
For her current, and as yet unexhibited, interactive project Artsurvey, she has been conducting market research on the top contemporary artists whose work appeared at auction in 2002. Postcards and an on-line questionnaire at www.jenniferdalton.com invite students, artists, art professionals, and art novices to rank artists such as Damien Hirst, Inka Essenhigh, and Gregory Crewdson according to a set of predetermined attributes including their "trendiness," "sexiness," and their value as a financial investment. The survey also asks participants to describe themselves in general terms by their gender, astrological sign, and relationship to art. While humorously investigating the often neglected issue of whether Capricorns look at art differently than Libras, on a more serious level Dalton seeks to gauge whether the auction houses reflect general taste or whether they perpetuate their own isolated, self-serving set of standards.
Dalton evaluates another seminal system of influence - the press - in What Does an Artist Look Like? (Every photograph of an artist appearing in the New Yorker 1999-2001), a version of which was installed at the Plus Ultra gallery in Brooklyn in 2002. For this project, she clipped images of writers, musicians, dancers, filmmakers, visual artists, designers, and architects profiled in three years' worth of New Yorker issues. Dalton then laminated the cards and mounted them in chronological rows separated by genre, so that one line consists entirely of artists and the next is either architects or dancers. In addition to genre, she color-coded the portraits by gender (white for women, black for men, and grey for co-ed groups) and then ranked the degree to which the image depicts the artist as either a "pin-up" or a "genius," according to her own criteria. The captions, written in Dalton's neat rolling script below the images, identify the subject and mark the extent to which the photograph, not the artist, represents intellectual accomplishment, glamour, or preening erotic allure. Iris Murdoch is portrayed hunched over her typewriter in deep concentration whereas Lil' Kim wears a bikini top and gazes blankly ahead. Through this simple juxtaposition, Dalton brilliantly exposes the mechanisms she sees as "either exalting or degrading the people the New Yorker portrays as embodying creativity."
At the Plus Ultra gallery show in 2002, Dalton accompanied What Does an Artist Look Like?... with its verbal equivalent, a hand-written booklet listing the adjectives used to describe male and female artists in Artforum's "the Best of 2000" issue. There is only one column describing women artists or their work (as "supernaturally sweet," or "nice," etc.), while the adjectives devoted to describing male artists continue on for pages. The egregious contrasts between the two are less striking than the sheer underrepresentation of women artists.
Dalton does not let her pseudo-bureaucratic projects become sterile or didactic. Instead, they are personal documents of her engagement with the art world's fashions and expectations. The pages she re-photographs from the New Yorker are not pristine, off-the-newstand copies; they are crinkled and worn, proof that she has carefully and critically read this publication targeted to self-defined sophisticates. Dalton states that "it is really important for me that I maintain a functional relationship with the object, instead of fetishizing it. I want to take a snapshot, instead of trying to get the best photograph." Dalton, who crafted and confronted her opinions about contemporary art as a freelance critic, writing exhibition reviews for publications including Tema Celeste and Coagula, concludes, "My criticism has melded into my work. Now my work is very art critical."
In her latest exhibition, "A Task No One Assigned," Jennifer Dalton responded to a comment by New Yorker critic Peter Schjeldahl characterizing art production as unmandated or self-commissioned effort. "What makes these exercises art?" Schjeldahl wrote of quot;Paradise Now," a group show at Exit Art in New York in 2000. "Well, what else might they reasonably be? They involve real work that is eally gratuitous ... [and] that's distinction enough." Dalton, quoting him in the press release, has accepted his dictates as both permission ranted and gauntlet thrown down. The three interlinked works here manifest the documentary obsession of both insider (elated fan) and outsider citizen watchdog) in a spiffed-up conceptual practice based on listing and archiving.
For What Does An Artist Look Like? (Every photograph of an artist appearing in the New Yorker 1999-2001) (all works 2002), Dalton has assembled, as advertised, every portrait of a writer, musician, dancer, filmmaker, designer, visual artist and architect printed by Schjeldahl's employer in the designated years. The mounts for her rephotographs are color-coded for gender (white for women, black for men, gray for mixed groups) and include handwritten captions rating the subjects on a sliding scale from "genius" to "pinup." Wall-mounted in tight horizontal rows, the 436 postcard-size mug shots quote the format of corporate personnel displays and missing-person picture galleries while evoking the ad hoc arrangements of touchstone images in artists' studios. The piece yields some surprises (musicians predominate) and some tediously persistent foregone conclusions (men predominate, too). What a strange celebrity culture is generated by fetishizing "creative talent," a je ne sais quoi quality Dalton rightly diagnoses as equal parts brilliant spirit and sexy vibe. Thus Lil' Kim, contriving to look forbidding in a platinum wig and ruffled pink bikini top, is clearly a "pinup"; Iris Murdoch, hunched at her desk in a Hemingway-esque cloud of cigarette smoke, is just as obviously a "genius." Young John and Paul, baby-faced and eager in a Frankfurter or Liverpudlian pub, occupy the exact middle of the scale.
While Dalton's New Yorker piece parses the "highbrow general interest" category of art appreciation, the "trade publication" and "private opinion" registers are represented by Artforum and the artist herself, respectively. In Every Adjective Used to Describe Artists and Their Work in Artforum's "Best of 2000" Dalton carefully records said modifiers in pencil on a long paper scroll. The terms are classed by the gender of the artist, and parity is achieved in praise. But the men's list is nearly three times as long as the women's, a devastating imbrication of qualitative and quantitative analysis: The long blank space filling out the women's column speaks volumes. The New Yorker and Artforum works are an implicit call to arms, which Dalton answers in a sharp but goofy computer presentation called Contemporary Art According to Jen. Decorated with painfully cheesy clip art, the PowerPoint windows cycle through a version of art-world categorization, with headings like THE ARTIST AS LOSER or THE ARTIST AS DOCUMENTARIAN. A notebook invites viewers to add names to Dalton's index or to invent additional categories.
"The Artist as Documentarian" includes the name Jen Dalton, alongside Danica Phelps, Elizabeth Campbell, Joseph Grigely, Mary Kelly, and others; we might also think of "chart artist" Mark Lombardi, who uses a conceptualist idiom to discuss relationships of money, influence, and visibility in the larger corporate landscape. And, of course, in taking up the task that Schjeldahl and the rest of us have tacitly assigned her, Dalton pays homage to a previous generation of art-media whistle-blowers. If the Guerrilla Girls styled themselves "the conscience of the art world," Dalton might be our superego--compelled by order and hierarchy, intrigued by power, locked in language yet unable to completely repress the desiring, self-referential, and expansive force from which artmaking springs.
Jennifer Dalton's project "The Appraisal" - an assessment and cataloguing of the contents of her dual-use apartment and art studio - engages far-reaching questions of perception, judgment, and representation.
Dalton's private property is electronically public at www.jenniferdalton.com, where an auction house's "fair market value appraisal" can be compared with the artist's personal evaluation. In addition, a fixed monetary value was temporarily established on representative lots by selling them to the highest bidder through the online auction house eBay.
The amusingly incongruous assessment of modest domestic possessions by an internationally known auction house turns tragicomical when Dalton's previous artistic productions of "fine art" are dispassionately evaluated. The artist's inclusion of "animals" within the inventory is reminiscent of the often unspoken cultural agreements that thrust living creatures - including people - into the category of property.
This portrait of the artist as a young estate highlights the interlocking ironies of value and possession. While the snapshots and written inventories that comprise The Appraisal were displayed as an installation at Steffany Martz Gallery in New York, their electronic representation seems to elude specific possession and valuation. At the same time, Dalton's ownership has become part of each object's provenance, her transformative - if unstable - authorship can now be considered when re-appraising their value.
If you've ever visited the Mary Boone Gallery and longed to scream "Emperor's new clothes!" but never dared, then keep an eye out for a new project called Artsurvey, which brings corporate brand-testing techniques to bear on the city's often over-hyped art scene. Visit the Website (artsurvey.net) or fill out a postcard to rate 44 artists according to categories such as Brilliant, Sexy, and Never Heard Of. Jennifer Dalton and Phillip Buehler hope to present their findings in a gallery in the spring using graphs and charts explaining each brand's relative market health. But just what does it say about the health of the Matthew Barney brand that he's leading the Sexy, Incomprehensible and Overrated categories?
Survey says:
Sexy: Matthew Barney; Elizabeth Peyton ("This is a great idea, but I kind of wish I was heading the 'brilliant' or 'inspiring' category," Peyton told us).
Brilliant: Andy Warhol; Bruce Nauman
Overrated: Matthew Barney; Damien Hirst/Julian Schnabel (tie)
Pretentious: Damien Hirst; Jeff Koons/Julian Schnabel (tie)
Incomprehensible: Matthew Barney (by a landslide); Bruce Nauman
Never Heard Of: Gregory Crewdson; Cai Guo-Qiang (wait, doesn't anyone remember last month's rained-out Central Park fireworks?)