This clever closeout and indictment of commodity culture seems too cynical, however. While it addresses the complexity of resisting market mechanisms, the result leaves no space for the viewer or any utopian perspective. Hal Foster defends the critical value of artist like Allan McCollum from the more self-serving programs of Haim Steinbach and Jeff Koons, but finds even here only endgamings of a “capitalist nihilism” (Foster, 1996, p.123). This is the despair of communication; knowing the fate of any cultural product is co-optation, silence is the only alternative to complicity. “The cynic knows his beliefs to be false or ideological, but he holds them nonetheless for the sake of self-protection, as a way to negotiate the contradictory demands placed on him, “ (Foster, 1996, p.118). This rings true of much so-called critical art, described as the art of cynical reason by Foster. Anti-aesthetic has become an empty routine played out as but another stylistic sensibility, its supposed difficultness a test of connoisseurship and luxurious hipness. It is a despairing criticality that rehearses the negation tactics of the historical avant-garde but with an ever-narrowing outlook towards social transformation or growth. Foster points to two paths out of cynicism in his ‘turn to the real’ (Foster, 1996, p.124). One is an explicitly positioned political engagement with the real: an “extroversion of quasi-ethnographic fieldwork,” (Foster, 1996, p.124). While I am sympathetic of this outlook, I am skeptical of its appeal yet again to a centered (leftist) identity. The second path, which he devalues, “takes cynical reason to an extreme, pushes its pose of indifference to the point of disaffection, and challenges cynicism with abjection (Foster, 1996, p.124). Foster goes on to state that both these tendencies “present reality in the form of trauma and the subject in social depth of its own identity,” (Foster, 1996, p.124).

FOLLOW ME

This perspective can be compared to how the artist Allan McCollum works. His Perfect Vehicles are a kind of ubiquitous yet strangely invisible art world icon. Derived from a decorative object and painted in soothing designer colors they are indeed perfect vehicles. They are carefully pre-emptied and outwardly complicit while on closer examination are fully sealed off and repellent. They are multiple and solidly cast; sealed and unreachable in their core. McCollum’s vehicles function as the sign of the art object with out actually delivering the represented value; that is, as a symbolic currency, honest only in representing its use value. McCollum shows that the aura and value is not located in the actual object, but in the narrative of exchange. This is a Duchampian mode; where the object becomes art by virtue of its context. Where as Duchamp intervenes with a shock gesture, however, McCollum insinuates his objects quietly into the art space so that they continue to resonate beyond their initial introduction. They appear to disappear, while stubbornly recalling their coy presence. Like Warhol’s blankness, these perfect vehicles and surrogates seem to offer the viewer liberty to attach any story or identity to them. Ulrich Wilmes suggests that the objects’ near equality, but systematic minor differentiation creates and anxiety in the viewer (Wilmes, 1988, p.1). They offer the promise of a well-behaved art object, yet withhold satisfaction. It is not actually possible to identify with one or the other slippery objects on view (Wilmes, 1988, p.1). “For especially the option between alternatives is an important factor on which the consumer society is built up. It suggests to the individual the illusion of the freedom to define his individuality himself and thus find his identity,” (Wilmes, 1988, p.1).

INCLUDEPICTURE
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MERGEFORMAT
Allen McCollum, Perfect Vehicles, 1985/87