"Present With Art Prostitute"
By Matthew Bourbon
One year ago, Art Prostitute started as a hip new magazine developed to showcase the work of young artists. Fabricated with an eye for detail, the thick journal positions itself in the intersection between art, design and music. In essence, the magazine strives to highlight artistic subcultures that exist parallel to the larger blue-chip art community. With the recent inaugural exhibition of the Art Prostitute Gallery in Denton Texas, there is a decided emphasis on variety, albeit with an illustrational focus. In fact, much of the work in the show could easily exist outside of the gallery setting, transposed onto giant billboards or transferred to t-shirt designs. This immersion into art that can flourish in various formats and multiple contexts seems to be the guiding principle with this first show, entitled Roll Call.
The exhibition, which brings together many of the artists featured in the pages of the magazine, is a bit like other group shows that revel in the mixture of disparate things. Ultimately, however, what’s interesting about the exhibition is the unabashed merging of a Wharol-like market savvy with a kind of lo-fi punk attitude. The artwork is affordably cheap, and the emphasis is on young artists who are making money with their artistic endeavors. This market driven approach is seen in both the magazine and in the gallery. In fact, the gallery space, also called "the store", offers artwork next to stickers, magazines, shirts and other paraphernalia. This kind of inexpensive merchandise fits with the tone of the artwork in the exhibition, where a "from the streets" attitude is pervasive. What’s curious about this combination is not the cheapness. In fact, although art that emerges from graffiti or other underrepresented formats is often positioned as counter to the main culture, the use of subculture aesthetics is not in itself interesting. Certainly not because of some supposed anti-elitist stance. For all things are materially corruptible—even Bob Dylan’s music is now heard on television commercials. What’s valuable about highlighting the rebellious underbelly of art is that it often leads to fractures in the ingrained ways that the larger art world functions. More importantly, the continual disintegration of genre specificity by the influx of underground material frequently helps foster fresh artistic areas, by breeding new avenues of experimentation and slightly off kilter visions. That’s how Raymond Pettibon found his way from Los Angeles punk zines to the Whitney Biennial. In today’s art culture it’s abundantly obvious that the barriers that once separated "high art" and "low art" are all but obliterated. In fact, even graffiti, which was once a very underground activity, has been co-opted into the mainstream. Think of the work of Barry Mcgee, Chris Johanson and Margaret Kilgallen. Coming from the San Francisco street culture of skateboards, sign painting and altered billboards, they each emerged in swanky New York galleries and museums. In the end, market forces prove too powerful. As soon as money starts to be generated, the market machine sweeps up one’s work. Money breeds money, and provides entrance into established avenues for making more money. Most claims to anti-establishment status in today’s art culture are quaint in their naivet�. Still, despite this hard truth, a gallery that is willing to allow the unknown artist to sit next to the established artist fuels excitement and can, in the short term, engender the feeling of stumbling onto a treasured indie band before they go platinum.
Understanding this search for distinct new voices, Art Prostitute keeps things fresh by highlighting unheard of artists, like young painter Vanessa Michel, next to more established names, like Shepard Fairey or Ryan Mcginness. In the end, the gallery is betting that simultaneity of artistic choices and the dispersion of defined disciplines can speak more directly to the ways in which we exist within the current visual culture. Most can agree that the saturation of visual stimulation that we experience in our day-to-day lives can be rather daunting. We watch television advertisements, we see billboards strewn with graffiti, we browse web sites, we enter galleries to examine paintings, and then we saunter to the local cineplex and take in six trailers before we see the latest film. All this imagery bombards us with forms meant to feed, manipulate and entice. How we sort out what we consider important is the difficult work we all face. Art Prostitute, with their premier exhibition, simply provides a one stop-shopping arena for us to absorb many of these experiences at once. And I, for one, enjoy the confusion that ensues. Even if like most group exhibitions, Roll Call proves inconsistent, the visual cornucopia is invigorating.
