The Turn to Provisionality in Contemporary Art by Raphael Rubinstein

Author:Raphael Rubinstein
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing

7

Varieties of the Provisional

Michael Krebber: Painting Ridiculized Michael Krebber creates his shows at the last possible minute, and sometimes fails to produce anything at all (he has more than once had to postpone exhibitions because he couldn’t bring himself to produce the expected paintings). His emblematic work is Contempt for One’s Work as Planning for Career (2001). At first glance, the title of this seemingly inept, inconsequential painting appears to confess the cynical strategy behind Krebber’s art. But does openly confessing the calculated deployment of a cynical attitude render it more cynical or less so? As usual, Krebber dares us to invest time into work that seems incapable of repaying us with any kind of esthetic satisfaction. Some of his works Krebber deems as “unfinished too soon.” Chez Krebber what is unfinished is not a great painting that remains in progress because the painter has been defeated by the challenge of art. A painting that is “unfinished too soon” is like a loaf of bread that hasn’t been baked long enough. The artist breaks off the struggle because he is distracted, because time has run out, because, like the dandy who disdains the crude business of living, he doesn’t want it to look like he is trying too hard to make a painting. A precedent for Krebber’s “unfinished too soon” stance is Sigmar Polke’s Plastic Tubs from 1964, an enlarged version of what looks to be a page from a department store catalogue that the artist has left unfinished as if he couldn’t be bothered to spend any more time on the canvas

In 2011, Krebber had two simultaneous shows in New York: one at Greene Naftali titled “C-A-N-V-A-S, Uhutrust, Jerry Magoo, and guardian.co.uk Paintings” that consisted of canvases which roughly reproduced postings from blogs run by some his former students at the Staedelschule in Frankfurt. Here are some excerpts from the texts that Krebber transcribed: “I read a crit about a blake named Bloke Rayne, saying he’d be more harmless than Bjarne Melgaard and that guy’s a social tourist representing a ‘wild uncontrollable expressionist’ for rich people’s art collections. I also read about Cheyney Thompson, but I forgot all of it.” Another seems directed at Krebber, complaining “How dandyism is an excuse for every lazy idiot not taking care.” “Dandyism” is one of Krebber’s conceptual and historic touchstones. Elsewhere we read “Which art is the worst out of all the trash Michael Krebber has knowingly / unknowingly breeded? pt. I,” followed by a series of jpegs of Krebber-influenced work by young artists.

Nothing seems more pointless than making an enlargement on canvas of a blog. Reportedly, Krebber painted the entire show in a week or two before the opening in a studio space Green Naftali provided him. But his second New York show, at Real Fine Arts, a small gallery in Brooklyn, presented paintings that seemed even more pathetic. They were small canvases each with an insipid snail copied from a painting done in 2011 by Kate Middleton, Duchess of Cambridge, during a visit to an inner-city children’s program in Los Angeles.

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