A Review of OLS in Los Angeles

“PROFESSIONALISM IS A HATE CRIME”

It’s always commendable when people try to efface or challenge the monolithic professional rigor of CAA. Even when those challenging presentations amount to nothing more than a recursive “Let me show you just how wrong your practice is by practicing that practice in front of you” joke by imitation, I commend people for doing it. I like to see the business of art history made fun of beyond gentle insular chiding. That’s the context for my reaction to Our Literal Speed, a group of artists presented as a “media pop opera” who do self-referential art historical performances (this is the content that I divined from skimming their website - mocking professional mandates of the field, pedagogy, etc etc) and who presented the last “paper” at Katy Siegel’s panel this morning, “An Age of Extremes.”
Siegel’s premise was that contemporary artists wrap their practice around “extremes” in order to neutralize the dialectics typically evoked in public or media discourse: disaster/salvation, boom/bust, protagonist/villain, and so on. After watching the well-groomed Chris Bennet’s well-delivered paper on Alighiero Boetti (whose quote about Boetti’s “high times with hardware” was well-played - thank you, Chris, along with fellow emerging Arte Povera scholar Claire Gilman, for bringing this movement out for further scrutiny), Our Literal Speed advanced on the podium and played recordings of rock music over speakers. They alternated between a lineup of comely suited presenters, who, among other things, mentioned “the strategic logic of the breakthrough” that dominates art historical scholarship. The breakthrough is something with which Siegel is not unfamiliar (her dissertation was on the modernist phenomenon of the artistic breakthrough), which was another recursion that I appreciated. And I hate to be the kind of person who says things like this, but Our Literal Speed’s presentation frontalized some of the things that I’ve always thought about Buchloh and other contemporary art history superstars: that they favor artists whose work reflects back on art history in some way - in other words, they like artists whose work points to the work that they themselves like to do.
Anyway, there was no question-and-answer session afterward, which I’m going to interpret as Siegel’s attempt to neutralize the peacocking that typically goes on during those after-discussions. And even though the presentation was overblown and favored, as a friend said, “style over substance”, my nerd-brain interpreted it as a searing portent projected on us all.