Postmodern wit parades around in a historicist coat of many colours. It toys mockingly with the original sin of believing you can be original as an artist. We find it in art’s reflexiveness toward its own history, its own objecthood, and its own institutional settings. Marcel Duchamp’s pissoir of 1917 was the prototype for a century’s-worth of postmodern punning and aphoristic ingenuity. The “Fountain” sits enthroned in undergraduate textbooks as Mr. Mutt’s inspired stunt, while in the real-life settings where I’ve seen it, i.e. museums, it lives on in second-edition replicas as the copy of an un-original.
Tous droits réservés.
Wit is now the wild card in a well-developed conceptual tradition. The line that ran from Duchamp and Dada into Surrealism came to a head in the 1950s and ’60s. This is the point at which wit became an intellectual device integrated into installation strategies and institutional (i.e. the gallery and its white cube spaces) critique. Duchampian wit thus re-emerged as a cool, conceptual mordancy in the theatrical strategies of Minimalism and in the stutter of serial reproduction that became one of the hallmarks of the art of that era. Linguistic puzzles and verbal themes were also explored. We’re now forty or fifty years after the fact, but some of our up-and-coming artists such as Zeke Moores are still feeding off the sportive humour and the deconstructive wiles of the likes of Jasper Johns, Mel Bochner, or the N.E. Thing Co..
The locus of Moores’ wit is the object and its art-historical associations. This object is usually a sculpture that replicates the appliances of our commercial and industrial worlds. Recently, Moores put up an eight-foot stack of cast-aluminium storage coolers (the portable kind that people load into their cars and take on trips) in an area adjacent to the Thames Art Gallery in Chatham, Ontario. A visitor who knows the story of modern sculpture will grin immediately at what stands before her. Moores’ coolers are intended to elicit a knowing chuckle as they recall Brancusi’s « Endless Column » of the 1920s and ’30s.
The work grew out of a walk in downtown Chatham in the summer of 2007. Moores saw a large group of people fishing in the Thames. Their equipment included the cheap, flimsy styrofoam cooler, which Moores quickly realized could serve his commission for an outdoor installation at the Thames Gallery. Moores cast the coolers and produced their faux-styrofoam exteriors through sandblasting. The coolers were then piled up in an alternating top-bottom/bottom-top order held in place by internal rods.
The standardized detailing on the original coolers now stood out as an acknowledgment of the architectural ornamentation along the roofline of the gallery building itself. An observant viewer will admire the sculptural eye-rhymes and congratulate Moores on his smarts. He was taking his bearings not only from crowds fishing in the Thames or the compact hilarities of modern and postmodern art history, but from a simple site-specific context that a lesser artist might have overlooked. If all these decisions, taken together, don’t convince viewers that Moores has impressed a perfectly calculated compression of postmodern wit onto the tradition of the readymade (Duchamp) and the ready-assemblable (Brancusi), then the title of the work is sure to do so.
What could one call such a sculpture but « Cooler Column »? A « no brainer » it would seem, but it makes for a wide-ranging joke that’s as closely-packed as an epigrammatic phrase from Alexander Pope. A mere utilitarian thing, a mass-produced commodity, has been elevated into something quasi-totemic and pseudo-dignified. The title wags its jest in our face and pairs up with the trompe-l’oeil finish to conflate a number of themes: the ontological duplicity presented by the Duchampian readymade; the question of the simulacrum as handed down by Warhol’s Brillo Boxes; the homage to Brancusi’s cast-iron obelisk of replicated, rhomboid folk motifs; and the ethos of many a party-hearty, beer-gorged « May 2-4 » fishing weekend.
Moores says that he « admire[s] the role of the working class, who are often pawns in the process of production » and that he is interested in « exploring hierarchical systems of value that exist within the objects that surround us. » Such concerns are backed up by a quotation from Foucault’s The Order of Things:
« [Why] are there things that men seek to exchange; why are some of them worth more than others, why do some of them, that have no utility, have a high value, whereas others, that are indispensable, have no value at all? »
Interesting anthropological questions these, with lots of implied economic moralism and social critique. But they really lead nowhere (or everywhere) unless the artist first addresses the beam in his own eye. It’s fine to have one’s art serve up considerations on the political economy and the sociological profile of the cooler, which is useful for storing fishing bait or beer containers. But one can just as simply hold a mirror up to oneself and ask why does a metal replica of a cooler or a plastic milk crate have « value » at all as fine art, and how does that make one an « artist »?
Moores is more invested in this latter question than he might assume. When the humble cooler, so low in the hierarchy of objects, perhaps lower on the utility scale than the plastic spoon, is raised to the level of an aesthetic artifact, we are folding Foucault’s questions onto a plane where postmodern wit is exercised. The specialized artifact becomes, in one and the same instant, a clever theoretical construct. Not everything that is postmodern possesses this wit, nor is every parent that casts their child’s baby shoes in bronze a postmodern artist.
Postmodern wit is not a stylistic principle or a structural device like the heroic couplet. Instead, we find it ‘in action’ when art surrenders some of its intellectual self-infatuation or steps back from grave ideological denunciations and outbursts of political righteousness. Intellectualismis still there, but it also manages to rise above its own solemnities. The artist positions himself in the gap between art and life. He plays the part of a trickster stranded between two worlds, two force fields: art’s specialized autonomy and the inroads being made into all areas of culture by commercial forces and industrial practices. His (or her) ironies, his cleverness, his humour, and his ingenuity—in short, his wit—are all good indicators of how he feels about the unique professional position that he occupies.
The all-important wit quotient in “Cooler Column” allows us to distinguish Moores’ approach from the kitsch of someone like Jeff Koons. Both Moores and Koons appropriate and refinish what’s out there in the culture, but Koons prefers to magnify consumer goods and sentimental bric-a-brac into something outlandish. He employs dozens of assistants and copies vinyl toy bunnies into perfect, stainless steel imitations or aims to turn vintage locomotives into colossal monuments. Yet for all that, his work remains emotionally earnest and humourless on the conceptual level.
Moores, by contrast, wants to be politically earnest after a left-wing fashion peculiar to the art world, but he succeeds rather better on other fronts. I admire his poetics of the working class vernacular object. But, as with some of his other sculptures (cast aluminium axes and milk crates, chrome and steel trash cans, bronze t.v. remotes on silver trays), I don’t think that the primary thrust of « Cooler Column » is a social critique of capitalism and working class entrapment or a celebration of populist leisure as against the grinding rationalism of the work day.
The real strength of his sculptures has to do with how he ratchets up the wit. Through meticulous workmanship and calculated choices of metal media he redeems rote objects and transvalues the world of industrial processing that lies behind them. This in itself wouldn’t be witty enough if it wasn’t also knowingly infused with a self-conscious postmodern posture. But the fusion happens, and quite flawlessly, in “Cooler Column.” The outcome is an installation that acclaims the fishing idylls of working folks while cleverly shifting our attention back onto itself and its own comic autonomy.