Taking Back Art
CreditByron Smith for The New York Times
In the outdoor courtyard at MoMA PS1 stands a quartet of trash-hauling bins, each emblazoned with a word spelled in big block letters. Together, they direct visitors, “Throw your art away.” As of Thursday, a few people had accepted this invitation. Except for a slim pile of nondescript drawings in one, a small amateurish painting on canvas and some ordinary garbage, the bins were empty. But they could eventually be filled, as they will remain in place for another four months as part of “Art Amnesty,” an offbeat exhibition conceived by Bob and Roberta Smith.
Bob and Roberta Smith, it should be noted, is the cognomen of not two but one British artist who specializes in humorously mocking art institutions and the conventional attitudes they tend to promulgate. Born Patrick Brill in 1963, he adopted the name Bob Smith while unsuccessfully pursuing a career in art and performance in New York in the late 1980s. Upon returning to England in the ’90s, he briefly collaborated with his sister, Roberta, and so added and kept her name. He claims he never meant to refer to The New York Times’s art critic Roberta Smith.
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The ostensible idea of the show — or what would more accurately be called a long-running event — is to give people an opportunity to retire officially from making art and ceremonially to discard works of art they own but no longer want, whether made by themselves or by others. Those who prefer not to use the bins may bring the art to the main exhibition on PS1’s second floor, where they will be displayed for one last time (at the discretion of the museum) before being disposed of when the show ends in March. It sounds like it ought to be fun, but as it stands for now, as an exhibition it’s more dispiriting than entertaining. As a conceptual stunt, however, it’s a good conversation starter.
Works by Mr. Smith are sparsely distributed throughout the eight rooms of PS1’s main second-floor gallery. They include colorful, neatly hand-painted signs and texts painted on various found objects. Some are comical, but none are truly hilarious. A large fabric banner proclaims, “Joseph Beuys conclusive proof not everyone is an artist.” Numerous signs insult famous artists: “Michelangelo has lice”; “Georgia O’Keeffe is distasteful”; and “Donald Judd tells lies.” Some messages might be taken as sincerely positive. One of several painted on pizza boxes announces, “Art stands for stimulus, invention, investment and imagination.”
Anonymous discarded works are also distributed throughout, and much empty wall space remains for pieces yet to come. Herein lies the show’s big problem. So far, little of what’s on display is very interesting. There are many indifferent sketches and doodles on paper and a smattering of modest, slapped together sculptures. There are a couple of grotesque sculptures: a biomorphic metal horror and another resembling giant teeth of a prehistoric mammal. A painting of a mouse in a glass of water captioned with the question “Is the glass half full or half empty?” made me stop and think: It doesn’t matter to the mouse, because either way it drowns. (The creators of all of the works are unidentified.) But generally, what you see isn’t the kind of wonderfully bizarre or hideous work that, for example, the artist Jim Shaw has acquired for his “Thrift Store Paintings” collection. And there’s no evidence that any real professional has taken the event as the occasion to stop making art.
On the other, nonvisual, conceptual hand, the event does usefully prompt thought about art and the ways it’s valued and not valued in contemporary society. For that dimension, the show’s framework is worth considering in detail.
On entering the gallery, you approach a table where you may choose to sign one of three pledges printed on white cards. One is for those who have something to get rid of. It says, “I never want to see this work of art again.” If you’re in that group, you must sign an “Art Amnesty Participation Waiver and Release,” a document in which you certify that you’re over 18 and the sole owner of the work in question. It also indemnifies MoMA PS1 against any subsequent legal action in this regard. If it is in compliance with certain requirements — it must be under a certain size and not contain toxic or illicit materials — the work will be displayed with the pledge card affixed to it. The pledge reads, “I promise never to make art again.” Sign that one, and you get a button that declares, “I am no longer an artist.” Those who take the vow are invited to produce one last artwork using the drawing materials provided. Those drawings will be hung with their pledge cards.
On the face of it, the third pledge seems contrary to the two others. It states: “I will encourage children to be all that they can be. Choose art at school.” Children who come to the show with their parents can make drawings that will be collected along with the pledges and mailed to local politicians to encourage support for arts funding and education.
Taken together, the three pledges invoke stages in the career of the typical, uncelebrated artist, from hopeful beginning to more or less frustrated maturity to death. The exhibition’s introductory wall text quotes Mr. Smith: “The personal journey for most artists starts with enthusiasm and joy and ends, if the artist does not have huge success, in embarrassed children taking their dead parents’ work to the dump.”
That is funny, but all too frequently, painfully true. Arguably, so is this wry observation by Mr. Smith: “Many artists delude themselves into believing that they are promising, productive artists when they would live much more fulfilled and useful lives engaged in proper employment.”
Of course, Mr. Smith is a deep believer in art. Underlying his apparent skepticism is the soul of a romantic populist. That’s why he is driven to satirize all the usual bromides about art’s value and to peel away its sclerotic institutional and professional scaffolding. Implicitly, he asks: So what if most artworks fail by worldly standards, and most artists go unheralded to their graves? No matter, the creative spirit of art is ultimately a great and good thing. Without it, wouldn’t we be less than human?