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     dissent                    G. ROGER DENSON      sexuality

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     Passage, 2003                                                                                                                                                     © Shirin Neshat   

                                                                     Criticism,    

"Because there are so many models of reality and identity existing simultaneously, because there are so many societies and cultures converging in a global community, because discourse is being negotiated among them, and because we are recognizing multiple histories of the world, we require a critical attitude that rides with the shifts in civilization's discourse. The best of today's critics are ready to visit the models of any given community—ideological, spiritual, political, economic, technological, scientific, aesthetic—at any given time without obstructing communication and insinuating personal models on them. This doesn't mean that we must have expertise in those models or even accept them personally, but we must be ready to defer and then adapt all personal criteria responsively in acknowledgement of the world's diversity. ...When two or more ideas conflict, the temptation often is to reconcile them. Nomadic criticism doesn’t require this. We needn’t reconcile an idea to any other, including the model of nomadism. We can simply migrate among them, using them when we need their information, deferring them when we don’t. The nomadic ideal doesn’t position two or more models in opposition. We think only of two or more ideas as being opposed if we think we hold a more comprehensive, singular, or foundational truth; nomadism holds that there is only difference, and among that difference, shifting and contingent models that are as temporally relative and contingent as the condition among individuals, communities, and environments that produce them." 

                                     — G. Roger Denson, "Going Back to Start: Playing the Nomadic Game in the Critical Reception of Art, "

                                                                                                                                                                 Parkett No. 40/41, 1994

Bijutsu Techo (Tokyo), Vol.43, No. 636, April 1991                                           Selected Publications

G. Roger Denson

 Parkett No. 40/41 (Zurich/New York), 1994 Snakes & Ladders

Bice Curiger,  Louise Neri, Dave HIckey, G. Roger Denson, 

Joan Simon, Holland Cotter, Boris Groys & David Rimanelli

Snakes & Ladders at Amazon.com 

Contains the essay, "Going Back to Start: Playing the Nomadic 

Game in the Critical Reception of Art"

Dennis Oppenheim

G. Roger Denson, Bernardo Pinto De Almeida

Fundaceo De Serralves (Portugal), 1997

Dennis Oppenheim at Amazon.com

Foreign Affairs: Conflicts in the Global Village 

Cultural Nomadism      It was in the late 1980s that I first recognized a renewed but globally spreading tendency among significant artists to nomadically peruse and reoccupy the signage and models of earlier and distant world cultures.  It at once reminded me of the art-without-boundaries myth that has a cherished place in the narrative of Western modernism. Who can forget the quaint accounts of small coteries of European avant-garde artists who, in the late-nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, appropriated formal elements of Japanese ukiyo-e prints and African masks in their painting and sculpture?

Of course, nomadic cross-fertilization is as old ancient as the trade routes.  And we can't afford to forget that the history of artistic cross-fertilization comes with a tragic world narrative following the course of empire building and genocide. Think of Islam's medieval armies sprawling from the Indian to the Atlantic Oceans depositing their geometrically interlaced ornamenture and caligraphy along routes carved out by swords. Consider the conquistadors of Christian Spain erecting polychrome crucifixes and santos over the ruins of Teotihuacan and Cuzcuo, while holding ornamented monstrances of pristine silverwork over the corpses and captives of preColumbia. Think also of the scourge of Mongol hordes cultivating the Chinese scroll painting and cloisonné, Persian minatures, Indian architecture, and Tibetan Thanka paintings they seized in the east while both arresting and prolonging the development of Byzantine iconography for centuries in the west. 

More recent occupations—the British in India; the Americans in Japan and Korea; the Soviets in Eastern Europe; the Europeans in Africa; the Israelis in Palestine—have generated their own cultural crosscurrents, some yet to peak, flourish, or be accepted by the (formerly- or still-) occupied populations. Oh, and yes, those African masks that Picasso so loved came by route of the slave trade, many with their association with female genital mutilation euphemistically parlayed by ethnologists and curators as "coming of age" rituals. And those figurative ukiyo-e prints (literally "of the floating world" of geisha, courtesans, prostitutes, and queer samaurai and kabuki actors) beloved by the impressionists and their ilk as often as not chronicled the last gasp of indigenous pan-sexuality that moralistic Western states demanded the Japanese purge themselves of in order to benefit from their much-needed trade.

Fortunately the cultural nomadism that has manifested today is exceedingly more benign.  It is also globally ubiquitous. I first noticed it's growth in the mid-to-late 1980s among Western artists.  Philip Taaffe began to incorporate centuries of Islamic motifs and ornamenture in his paintings and prints.  Sarah Charlesworth rephotographed, isolated and recontextualized media images of culturally indigenous signage and iconography. Pat Steir looked back to Sung and Tang Dynasty Chinese Landscape Painting.  Renee Green and Carrie Mae Weems reclaimed the iconography of African societies arrested by colonialism. SIgmar Polke composed an aesthetic and conceptual alchemy from historic media and myth,  These were only  the more  renowned and Western varieties that were spreading. 

I would soon after learn that the new cultural nomadism was revealing itself to be a globally multilateral transaction superseding and renouncing the colonialisms that once informed yet simultaneously divided artists along ethnic, religious, and economic fault lines.  The groundbreaking yet controversial 1989 exhibition Magiciens de la Terre, installed at the Centre Georges Pompidou and the Grande Halle at the Parc de la Villette in Paris, stands as the first significant assimilation and equilization of traditional and contemporary artists assembled from around the globe while simultaneously confronting historical colonialism and ethnocentrism. By the early 1990s the art markets of North America and Europe were innundaded by artists from the indigenous cultures of South America, Asia, Africa, and Australia. Hiroshi Sugimoto, Shirin Neshat, Moriko Mori, Shazia Sikander, Do Ho Suh, Yinka Shonibare, Ai Wei Wei, Vik Muniz, Rirkrit Tiravanija, Sokari Douglas Camp, and Nari Ward are among the first artists since the Mexican muralist and surrealist painters to significantly redirect aesthetic and conceptual inquiry beyond the eurocentrism and canons of the Western art markets while inspiring artists, collectors, and museums around the world to reprise and reinvigorate indigenous cultural production and exchange.

                           Making art a language has given it an unlimited capacity it never before had: to signify everything between and including itself and the world, from the singular and uniform to the infinite and heterogeneous.  And now Western art is greeted by the many languages of other arts, some hailing from far parts of the globe which are as yet not well known.  Although this expanded capacity has been exploited by Western artists for decades, critics of contemporary art in the 1990s still seem constrained in their interpretations.  Few enter the ocean of reference at points other than those of immediate and direct concern to the Western modernist or postmodernist positions.  We have perhaps become so enamored of the small vein of history flowing through a mere four or five generations of Western European and American production that we often cite its texts and paradigmatic works rather than search the annals and excavations and living cultures of the hundreds, perhaps thousands of world societies extant, just as we often and habitually apply the received ideologies of authorities to life's problems rather than work out specific solutions of our own design.  If popular culture to generally shun the world of texts, intellectual culture too zealously insulates itself with them. — G. Roger Denson, Capacity: History, the World, and the Self  in Contemporary Art and Criticism, 1996.

Capacity: History, the World, and the Self  in Contemporary Art and Criticism. Essays by Thomas McEvilley.  Commentary by G. Roger Denson, 1996. (Discusses at length the notion of a Critical Nomadism and the formation of indigenous global art markets distinct from the Western mainstream.)    Capacity at Amazon.com

"What sets Thomas McEvilley apart from other critics in art and culture is his direct knowledge of the newest art and theory, and his comprehensive understanding of classic art and ancient civilizations. In McEvilley's view, modernism's present was the future, and postmodernism's present is the past. He distinguishes himself from both of these positions, and—Janus-like —simultaneously scrutinizes past and present in order to facilitate the production of future discourse. G. Roger Denson brings singular insight to Thomas McEvilley's writings. As an art writer he has explored similar theory, but from the point of view of a nomadic ideologist.  He addresses the issues of pragmatism, historicism, and cultural relativism. In so doing, he effectively dismantles the need to establish a master narrative." — Saul Ostrow, series editor.

"The unusual antiphonal structure of the book proves to be an interesting as well as novel way to reframe and 'add value' to previously published material.  G. Roger Denson, a curator and critic who is McEvilley's commentator throughout the book, perceptively analyzes the relativist attitude.  Denson's observations provide a particular edge to McEvilley's critique of Clement Greenberg's determinist interpretation of painting's evolution toward flatness.  Exposing Greenberg's myopia toward ancient and non-Western cultures, he points out that 'In extending Greenberg's historicism and avant-garde logically in space and time, McEvilley takes us to societies that were the originators—the true avant-garde—of flat painting.'" — Michelle C. Cone, Art Journal, College Art Association.

Poetic Injury: The Surrealist Legacy in Postmodern Photography

Alternative Museum (New York), 1987

Rosalind Krauss, G. Roger Denson and Suzaan Boettger

Poetic Injury at Amazon.com 

"The late 20th century has absorbed the avant-garde.  There is little in its practice that can continue to shock our sensibilities, little  that will strike us—the avid consumers of culture—as scandalous.  Which is why my encounter with surrealist photography was surprising: the exhibition I mounted in 1985, called  L'Amour Fou, provoked scandal."

— Rosalind Krauss in her preface to Poetic Injury: The Surrealist Legacy in Postmodern Photography  

"Nearly seven decades after the onslaught of the European Surrealist 'revolt,' a generation of postmodern photographers has matured, while others are emerging, who share the postmodern responsibility for recharging the eroded contents and forms of a seemingly 'lost' creative and critical system.  Just as postmodernism does today, Surrealism sought in the 1920s and 1930s to critique and transform the contents, logical operations and objects of representation."

— G. Roger Denson, "Grandchildren of the Storm,"  Poetic Injury: The Surrealist Legacy in Postmodern Photography

 "On a cultural scale, the 'entropy' of surrealistic style describes its diffusion into mass media images (the imagistic vox populi of advertising, film and television) as well as the general fracturing and merging of distinctions between fine art and craft.  But the  entropic quality of surrealism is even more germane to a psychological expression.  As Breton noted: 'Never has so precise a common will united us.  I think I can most clearly express this will by saying that today it applies itself to bring about the state where the distinction between the subjective and the objective loses its necessity and value.'" 

— Suzaan Boettger, "A/dDressing the Injury," Poetic Injury: The Surrealist Legacy in Postmodern Photography

In progress...

The Homosocial in Art

A two-volume set forthcoming in 2012, The Homosocial in Art documents the historical role of art in the legislation and perpetuation of the homosocial divide—the geopolitical halving of the world’s population based not on gender difference alone, but as well by the various same-sex attractions (familial, platonic, sexual) that cement alliances and constrict power and privilege according to a culture’s dominant XY (male) or XX (female) chromosome preference.  

Volume One: The Male Homosocial Millennia, establishes the historical backdrop for the contemporary art of homosocial critique, from the Paleolithic Venus figurines devotional to women and the cave paintings depicting gender behaviors to such masterpieces of civilization as Assyrian, Egyptian and Mayan steles and frescos, Greek, Roman and African sculpture, Chinese scrolls, Islamic minatures, and Japanese ukiyo-e.  Among European painting, discussion centers around such masterpiecs as Da Vinci’s homoreligious Last Supper, Poussin’s homotheatrical Rape of the Sabine Women, David’s homopolitical Death of Socrates, and Manet's implicitly homoerotic Le déjeuner sur l'herbe.  The survey is intentionally global in its survey of the crowning iconographies of a near-universal male insularity spanning four millennia and presuming an illusory yet performative polarization of genders.  

Volume Two: XX Chromosocial, Women Artists Cross the Homosocial Divide mirrors men’s homosocial masterpieces with women’s anti-essentialist iconography made between 1970 - 2010 by women artists and writers who chart out, cross, or work to level the homosocal divide. Chapters include 1: Women's Hidden Homosocial Past, an introduction followed by a consideration of work by Shirin Neshat, Laila Essaydi, Deepa Mehta, Marina Abramovic, and Angela Ellsworth.  2: The First Mappings of the Divide, Gender as Performance and Script. The art of Yvonne Rainer, Sarah Charlesworth, Cindy Sherman and Lorna Simpson, and the theory of Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick and Judith Butler.  3: Disseminating New Codes and Enculturations: Carrie Mae Weems, Vanessa Beecroft, Sharon Lockhart, Catherine Opie, and Lisa Yuskavage.  4: The Interior of Rape: Ana Mendieta, Nan Goldin, Kiki Smith, Janine Antoni, Kara Walker, and Sue Williams.  5: Women's Mythopoetic Power: Nancy Spero, Shahzia Sikander, Mariko Mori, and Claudia Hart.  6: Transposable Gender: Sherrie Levine, Deborah Kass, Collier Schorr, and Jenny Saville.  7: Narrating the Last Great Male Homosocial Preserves: Eve Sussman, Kathryn Bigelow and the women who write Mad Men. 

Artists have historically bequeathed the most capacious evidence for the evolution of societal values, norms, and cultural codification spanning tens of thousands of years--with the last three to four thousand comprising a near-continuous narration of human sexuality and gender.  A study of that artistic history indicates the notion of patriarchy proves insufficient as an account of the mysterious solidarity of men. It lacks comprehension of the features that bond men to men, let alone women to women. 

 

 

 

Looking back on the art of history, we can find clear evidence for the history of what in the last few decades has become conceptualized as the homosocial divide of civilization. By this I mean the cultural and geopolitical halving of humankind based not on gender difference alone, but as well by the presumed and often non-sexual, yet no less compelling, same-sex attractions cementing the alliances constricting power and privilege according to a culture's dominant XY (male) or XX (female) chromosome preference. In short, today's art is consciously being informed by what it always unconsciously reflected: the near-compulsory comfort found by men socializing predominantly, even exclusively, with men and women with women.

 

 

The most vital art by women in the 21st century is making a seemingly hard biological fact like gender appear as a pliable and transposable tool of the individual will.  That artists accomplished this well before the notions of "the homosocial divide" and "fluid genders" were embodied by compelling theory is testament that an artistic avant-garde not only still exists, but that women artists today own the propensity for being that avant-garde unto themselves.  We need only consider the reactions of

orthodoxies around the world to the homosocial art of women, whether it be the Hindu mobs in India who burned down the sets for Deepa Mehta's films; the condemnation by fundamentalist Muslims of Shirin Neshat's photographs and films indicting the male abuse of Sharia law to constrict gender roles; the Religious Right's abhorrence of Catherine Opie's photographs of well-adjusted lesbian couples with children; or the feminists who too quickly reprimaded Vanessa Beecroft for publicly parading and posing assemblies of female models nude but for the fetishistic trappings of make-up, wigs, and 6-inch pumps, while neglecting Beecroft's indictment of many women's homosocial complicity in the commercial exploitation of their bodies. 

 

The story becomes even more richly laid out when we consider world art as a whole.  Once key works of art made across the millennia and the globe are pieced together in chronological progression, we see with our own eyes the evidence for the two diametrically opposed yet inversely related narratives of power and gender that feminist historians of the last two centuries have been advancing as theory. And that's because feminist historians have themselves been deriving their hypotheses largely from the evidence of art that has been at hand. The difference in our study of the global homosocial history, of course, is that today we have the world's art extensively archived on the web. We are for the first time in possession of a world view that, though still far from culturally comprehensive on the level of indigenous societies, is at least representative of the dominant cultural powers that inform global civilization today.

                                                                                                    — G. Roger Denson, from "XX Chromosocial: Women Artists 

                                                                                                    Cross the Homosocial Divide," Part 1 of 7 on HuffingtonPost.

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