After The Perpetual Guest: A Compilation
A compilation of links of artists and their work in Barry Schwabsky's essay collection
I recently read The Perpetual Guest: Art in the Unfinished Present by Barry Schwabsky, published by Verso. It’s a collection of his essays mostly published on The Nation, where he is the resident art critic. I’m art-illiterate, and by that I mean that I am not learned on any other medium except film. Though I’ve always tried to learn the names of paintings and painters — the classics! — it’s mostly because it might be useful during trivia games (nailed the category once, lol). I have not kept abreast with contemporary art save for the usual suspects, like Basquiat or Duchamp or Warhol, ‘coz well, they’re plastered on Uniqlo shirts or coopted by some commercial project. In the local scene, on the visual arts side, I haven’t found anything fascinating that made an impact on me enough that I can remember it; maybe I haven’t really immersing myself that much. I’ve been to the last Mindanao Art Fair, and though I can probably comment on its “staging” I don’t have the “right” or “authority”, I guess, as someone who doesn’t have visual art background. I want to, though. At the back of my head, going there I imagined trying to write something out of that experience. I was with an artist friend whose taste — and criticisms — I tend to agree with, and we were trying to pick our favorites. There’s this painting from someone I know which is the only think I can think of right now—mountains draped in indigenous fabrics.
So going back to the book, I am familiar with only a handful of artists from around the 30+ Schwabsky has written about. Even the ones I know of, I know more by name — Matisse, Gauguin, Manet — but struggle to remember a painting of theirs. There are a couple from the contemporary side that I am familiar with. I had to google Maurizio Cattelan coz the name rang a bell. Indeed, he’s the artist that sold to a Chinese crypto tycoon the conceptual piece “Comedian” a.k.a the banana plastered to the wall with a duct tape. I also remember installation artist Thomas Hirschhorn from reading Hal Foster’s Bad New Days: Art in Emergency, another Verso-published book, which probably got me into reading more about non-film art. Featured under the archival art, I am fascinated by Hirschhorn’s work, particularly his public exhibitions and “monuments”.
But this unfamiliarity is what I think makes reading the collection enjoyable. I take in in the information about the art and artist, the exhibition, the context, their thematic curation into chapters by Schwabsy like a new student of a new, different but same-ish field, which in a way I’d like to think I am. I resisted from googling every time an artwork is mentioned or after finishing an essay on artist or subject. I wanted to be a reader a first, then a (digital) spectator.
This list is according to the book’s chapter-essays. I’ve only skimmed through the internet sites where the artists and their works are featured so I can’t gauge if this is a judicious resource, but since it is mostly for personal research and reference, the information here act as research prompts in the future.
I. Negative Theology
(a sort of theology passed on by whispers dealing with matters discredited and obsolete)
—Walter Benjamin, to Gerhard Scholem, June 12, 1938
Negative Theology: Diego Velásquez
An Ambiguous Medium: Lee Ufan
The Stone Dies Away Also: Jimmie Durham
Putting the World into the World: Alighiero Boetti
The Devil, Probably: Maurizio Cattelan
A Million Little Pictures: The Pictures Generation
A Makeshift World: Thomas Demand and Bettina Pousttchi
Showing, Saying, Whistling: Lorna Simpson and Ahlam Shibli
II. Faces out of the Crowd
There are some secrets that do not permit themselves to be told.
—Edgar Allan Poe, “The Man of the Crowd”
Faces out of the Crowd: The Renaissance Portrait
Daring Intransigence: Gustave Courbet
Extreme Eccentrics: Modern Art and its Collectors
Vacant, Limpid, Angelic: Willem de Kooning
Evasive Action Painter: Gerhard Richter
The Perpetual Guest: On Warren Niesluchowski
Love by a Thousand Cuts: Kara Walker
“You’re So Pretty”: Laurel Nakadate
The Complete History of Every One: Zoe Strauss
Heroism, Hidden: Ian Wallace
Hotel Artists: Henri Matisse and Ian Wallace
III. Old Vagabond
Old Vagabond: Paul Gauguin
No Images of Man: Nancy Spero
Dimensions of the Abyss: “Afro-Modern” and Chris Ofili
An Art of Time: Rafael Ferrer and Christian Marclay
Hubbub and Stillness: The 2009 Venice Biennale
Post-White?: “Blues for Smoke”
Monumental, Imperial, Historical: Ai Weiwei
IV. Unfinished Tradition
… that non-finito is the medium not only of synthesis but of a scattering or disruptive force that will lend itself to effects that mirror those of flood-water or of lightning.
—Adrian Stokes, Michelangelo: A Study in the Nature of Art
Unfinished Tradition: Édouard Manet
For and Against Method: Edgar Degas and Merlin James
Margins of Modernism: Silke Otto-Knapp and Lynette Yoadom-Boakye
Empty and Full: Stanley Whitney and Jacqueline Humphries
Breaking and Entering: Gordon Matta-Clark
Beyond Exhaustion: Dan Graham and the X Initiative
A Fan’s Project: Thomas Hirschhorn
Signs of Protest: Occupy’s Guerilla Semiotics
John Baldessari’s Everything is Purged from This Painting, 1968 Surviving the Moment: Christopher Wool and “Come Together: Surviving Sandy”
Permission to Fail: Art’s Educational Complex
