Neville Wakefield

Garage No. 1 (Fall/Winter 2011)
Pages 254-255

Good hand. Bad hand. In art, as in life, it’s not always easy to tell. Since art has become gambling for speculators and speculation for art producers, it’s become even easier to forget that it was once art itself that was the gamble. It offered the spectre of possibility, often delivered face-down. That you couldn’t grasp its exact nature was both its seduction and its challenge. Conceptual bluff or material flush, each was connected to the other by an exchange of faith. And so it goes that before there was a clearly defined market with blue-chip objects and poker indices, there were just talismanic objects valued for the magic and mystery that goes with having made something out of nothing. This, I always thought, was what artists did. They gambled on an outcome that made a virtue of their various derelictions, narcotic boredoms and other failures of productive integration. In many ways their mandate was the misuse of resources that others take for granted. But then again these times may have changed.

If this seems nostalgic – something like a post-market version of the same easeled philosophy that had artists in berets and poverty as the wellspring of all imaginative effort – in some ways it is. Art’s integration with the market, after all, is relatively new. And while it has always sought nourishment from the patronage of the wealthy, the new breed of art entrepreneur has created out of its market ambition an entirely different ecology of show and tell. Here the excitement is no longer in what the hand might reveal but rather being a part of the house. All cards are played face up and what you see is indeed what you get – or at least Good Hand Subbed by Neville Wakefield Garage No. 1 (Fall/Winter 2011) Pages 254-255 Rodney Graham Good Hand/Bad Hand, 2010 Two painted aluminium light box with transmounted chromogenic transparency 35 1/4 h. x 29 1/4 x 7 inches (89.5 x 74.3 17.8 cm) (each) Edition of six. something like it. But the underlying philosophy of buying retail and selling-out wholesale is form of price-fixing: a Ponzi scheme dressed in black light and PR.

It may be possible because the art that lends itself to this kind of presentation is itself without risk. Street art, which once inhaled the fumes of menace, is illegal in most countries for good reason: not because the street is an inappropriate canvas for this kind of expression but rather because most of it’s just not very good. Served in bulk with DJ’s doesn’t make it any better. Nor does the “laughing to the Banksy” retort really mitigate the fact that these are short-term gains reaped at the expense of art that plays a hand other than that of the market. Here the play, if there is one, is simply the mass deception that the Faile, Titi Freak or Retna that you’ve just spent the price of a 2011 Range Rover on, is actually worth more than the couch it now hangs behind.

Markets are driven by probability but art, I was always led to understand, is not. Unlike the market or casino it was never intended to be an aggregate of the known. Good art wagers on the unknown being more interesting than the known. It bets on the possibility that in the right hands, even an empty hand, may be better than anything the dealers or the house may have to offer. In this sense great art is a black swan born not of professionalism but of its failure. It confounds our predictions in the same way that black swan events confound history. Whether through bluff or through fact, artists create this rarity. Dealers do not. They create a grey market where white swans are sold as black. And what we see in the temporary pavilions and booths that lend their retail geometry to the art destinations of London, New York, Paris and elsewhere is simply a profusion of this mediocrity. It is a game played without stakes – one in which art product has become a substitute for art. Which is perhaps why with each consecutive market effusion’s spoils, artists, dealers and other aesthetic entrepreneurs return swathed in ever greater affluence, and yet the world itself doesn’t appear to be a richer place.

Growing up in a post-punk era, I was weaned on the milk of failure, on the idea that there was value to be had in not being taken seriously, in not conforming to the ideological and fiscal accountancy that had turned England into a nation of shopkeepers. Success, were it to be achieved, would be in spite of itself. It would be the aberration of cash out of chaos, a bet made on the idea that doing nothing at all, or doing it so badly that it was voided of all serious intent, could yield results that the shopkeepers and CEOs could never comprehend. Professionalism for us was a hate crime. It spoke only to conformity and the stereotype of success. For my own part I devoted considerable time and lethargy to this notion. I smoked a lot of weed, mixed with people I shouldn’t have mixed with, and tried hard to remain focused on the pursuit of aimlessness. And like others of my generation, I took seriously the notion that it was a distinction to be defined by what we didn’t do. To that end I scorned opportunity. I made of failure a spiritual vocation. In other words I gambled on the outcome of nothing being greater than that of something.

Of the many jobs I wasn’t offered during this period, most conspicuous was that of life-coach. I read philosophy but addressed the dissemination of that knowledge with disdain. I felt the same way about intellectual wealth that the footballer George Best did about his own acquired fortune. “I spent a lot of money on booze, birds and fast cars,” he said when asked to explain his bankruptcy, “The rest I just squandered.” Which is to say what I gained I kept to myself. Everything else – be it the ill-gotten fruits of entitlement or, worse still, the profession of actual talent – was spurned with the embarrassment of a lover seeking public affirmation of secret affection. Like anyone else, we all secretly wanted success. We just didn’t want our need to be visible. This predicament demanded a response, and mostly it was conspicuously squandering time and talent that was by birthright ours. Fearful of the successful mediocrity that came littered with personal, family and government health warning, we wagered on the long odds of misspent inactivity producing something more interesting than the known hand of a duly exploited aptitude. It was a bluff played against a stacked house. And so I began to understand that art that followed a similar vein – art that gambled on failure and in doing so transformed it into a creative act – was the art that I was drawn to.

The art that lends itself to this type of risk is not the art that shows up now in the flash sales or can be sold as trophy swag to strangers. When Bruce Nauman mounted infra-red cameras to record the nocturnal presence of his New Mexico studio he wasn’t, in all probability, thinking the same thoughts as those whose stock depends on their ability to create product that can simultaneously predict and satisfy the next visual need. Nauman was gambling on the possibility that what was going on at night – emptiness punctuated by the odd feral encounter – was more interesting than what was going on during the day. Daytimes had found him contemplative of his own inactivity. Nauman upped the ante of his creative block by making art of what wasn’t happening. By day the studio was an instrument of repression, but by night, freed of its obligation to create art, it was a blank canvas full of activity and endless fascination.

The playwright Samuel Beckett also knew a thing or two about creating stages on which not much happens. His most famous play, Waiting for Godot, is an absurdist meditation on killing time while waiting for someone or something better to come along. Vladimir and Estragon, the central characters of that play, were gamblers. Gambling, after all, is an activity that involves making a prediction, and trusting this prediction enough to stake something of value on whether or not it is in fact correct. The two characters in Beckett’s play stake their time and with it their faith on the idea that Godot will indeed appear at the crossroads. Their activity is waiting. They don’t go to art fairs. They don’t busy themselves with creating the visual soundtrack for luxury migrations. They don’t go shopping for black light and DJ’s. And like Nauman’s studio their stage produces nothing but the act of waiting and looking and the gamble that this itself is something of worth.

Blaming the market may be like Keith Richards famously claiming, “I don’t have a drug problem, I have a police problem.” It doesn’t change the fact that the art drug is creating an addiction that demands an inexhaustible supply of product, product that looks like, even if it isn’t necessarily experienced as, art. Waiting for Godot, like waiting for your man, is hardly the prevailing ethos of an economy that has a man on every street corner, a man more often than not selling street art. And defining yourself by what you don’t do is undoubtedly a hard sell in these sold-out times. But in a culture of relentless achievement, the real value of art may be precisely its ability to do exactly this, to champion failure and to make of it a paradoxical success. This is what artists have over dealers and accountants. It’s the bluff that only they can achieve.