The Apartment
Projects
Blood Bath.
Nov. – Feb., 2009
The Apartment is pleased to present Blood Bath a group exhibition selected by Julian Myers.
Blood Bath, is a group exhibition selected by San Francisco-based art historian and writer Julian Myers. Comprised of works in various media by Adrian Piper, Suzanne Lacy, Aviva Rahmani, Sandra Orgel, Judy Chicago, Richard Hamilton, Gee Vaucher & Crass, Sothira Pheng & Crucifix, Ernst Friedrich, Nick Blinko & Rudimentary Peni, and the Guerilla Art Action Group, the exhibition puts forward some ideas about the demands that radical politics place on committed art practice in the Twentieth Century.
In his 1935 essay “The Artwork in the Age of its Mechanical Reproducibility,” Walter Benjamin described a theory of art “useful for the formulation of revolutionary demands in the politics of art.” Under the banner of “Fiat ars — pereat mundus,“ — “let art be created, though the world shall perish” — fascist Futurism imagined incendiary bombs and gas warfare as beautiful. The left, he argued, must respond by “politicizing art.”
Blood Bath wants to know what, exactly, this politicized art might have looked like: which media and modes of dissemination it embraced, and what forms of picture-making it pursued. Embracing frank depictions of bodies decimated by war, starvation or rape, extreme or ritualistic forms of presence, and an approach to language that is at once reductively aphoristic (a slogan like “War Against War!”) and logorrheic (the dense fields of words inside a Crass record), the artworks presented here are transformed in every way by their leftist aims.
The transformation of aesthetics for the purposes of politics is sometimes imagined — by Theodor Adorno among others — as the ultimate travesty. Against that pessimistic conclusion, Blood Bath claims that these works have a complex visuality of their own: a sophisticated, ruthless, anti-aesthetic verve that rewards close looking and thinking.
Julian Myers is an historian and critic whose writing has appeared in Documents, October, Art on Paper, Afterall, frieze, and elsewhere. He received his PhD in the History of Art from the University of California, Berkeley in 2006. He is an assistant professor at California College of the Arts.
Please join us for an opening reception for Blood Bath Fri, Nov 28th, from 7-10pm. The exhibition will be available for view by appointment through February 2009.
