| The Maccarone Gallery, which was closed for a year, reopened on Greenwich Street in a cavernous space with an uninspired exhibition by the German conceptual artist, Christian Jankowski. Maccarone garnered her reputation as an underground gallery by showing above ground social realism with the enthusiastic support of the Village Voice art critic, Jerry Saltz. The fit between Jankowski and Maccarone is seamless. Jankowski titled his exhibition “Super Classical,” but it could have easily been called “Super Generic,” and it is. Christian Jankowski is a clever literary artist and he concocts his conceptual schemes on the interface of disparate cultural and social conceits in order to explore the nature and meaning of art and the role of the artist. |  |
Death of the Artist – E. K. Clark
The Maccarone Gallery, which was closed for a year, reopened on Greenwich Street in a cavernous space with an uninspired exhibition by the German conceptual artist, Christian Jankowski. Maccarone garnered her reputation as an underground gallery by showing above ground social realism with the enthusiastic support of the Village Voice art critic, Jerry Saltz. The fit between Jankowski and Maccarone is seamless. Jankowski titled his exhibition “Super Classical,” but it could have easily been called “Super Generic,” and it is. Christian Jankowski is a clever literary artist and he concocts his conceptual schemes on the interface of disparate cultural and social conceits in order to explore the nature and meaning of art and the role of the artist.
The exhibition consists of two projects: Living Sculptures and China Paintings. All the work has been outsourced and fabricated. In one room sit three life-size sculptures, bronze models inspired by Spanish street performers dressed as Che Guevara, Caesar and Salvador Dali’s female “cabinet figure.” In an exhausted Duchamp/Warholian gesture, Jankowski resuscitates a craft tradition that died even before coming to life.
For The China Painters, the artist selected a sweatshop in Dafen, China, which specializes in replicating Western masterpieces intended for European and American hotel lobbies. Delighted by the huge economic success of this enterprise, the Communist party recently erected a museum in the center of the village. Jankowski visited the empty museum and took pictures of the interior under construction. With these photographs in tow, he invited artisans who had never visited a museum to “collaborate” with him by suggesting paintings to fill the huge empty space. The selected images were inserted into his contextual photographs and were then copied as oil paintings. Not surprisingly, the eight “collaborative” works look like post-modern pastiches. They vary in content from “sublime” landscapes, to a political portrait, to “sexy” nudes after the French academic painter, Bougereau. The style varies from super realism to social realism. It’s even tedious to describe. The standout is La Liberte Leading the People, after Delacroix. It is set against a dark, moody background and seems to show a bit more involvement from the Chinese artisan. Also, the worker seemed to be attracted to the idea of liberty. Perhaps, La Liberte provided a convenient pretext to critique the Communist regime, obliquely.
It is unlikely that artisans in this Chinese village would have been, suddenly, struck by a post-modernist, appropriationist thunderbolt. The workers do what they know and what they have always done. So Jankowski’s premise of a collaborative project is somewhat disingenuous, in this context.
He, as author, was exploiting cheap labor and they were happy to comply, for a price. The exotic location provides novelty to his project. Appropriation, as a premise, has pretty much run its course and has become a stale joke in America. Still, clever artists discover new wrinkles all the time. Recently, an artist in Brooklyn, Benjamin Evans, who showed at Sarah Bowen, used thrift shop paintings as canvases to paint on. For a moment, his exhibition looked fresh and entertaining—he appropriates anonymous artists and collaborates with them, as well. At least, his enterprise is straightforward and honest.
If, by some ironic turn of events, Jankowski’s outsourced paintings are sold back to the Dafen Museum, in China; the poor snooks would be stuck with banal, hotel lobby art—and Jankowski, the professed redeemer of the Chinese sweatshop contingent, will run laughing to the bank without bothering to share his bonanza with his cheap labor—who, after all, are not considered to be genuine “artists.”
