Kitsch, Camp, and the Anxieties of the Artworld
Fausta Facciponte’s six characters in search of a photograph offers a compelling examination of the borders and anxieties of contemporary art as a social and professional milieu. The series includes six allegorical portraits of archetypal art world figures and four allegorical images of art world events and situations including a representation of the opening reception filled with unicorns, sad clowns and painted ladies. The large scale photographs are stuffed full of ceramic figurines and other tchochtkes, some of which I remember from my grandmother's place. These objects have been removed from their culturally prescribed habitats on mantelpieces and in china cabinets and used by the artist in her studio in order to reflect on her experiences presenting work in public.
With deft humor, the artist arranges her second-hand collectibles, glassware, and mirrors to create visually complex dioramas that she photographs with a large format camera. The mirrors open a fun house logic in the work in which the surface we see is always in question. For example, in funding for the arts / cookie house the text on the cookie jar is reversed revealing that the mirrors are not simply used as bases for the objects but are instead part of a more sophisticated visual strategy in the works. We are not always looking at the scene straight on.
Once arranged, the figurines and mirrors are photographed multiple times so that multiple aspects of the scene can be in focus. Each work presents as single image what is instead a collage of moments which may be appropriate to the fragmented and sometimes fractious nature of the art world. Using a process known as focus stacking, each exposure focuses on a different aspect of the scene enabling the production of a composite final image in which everything is in focus. However, despite this photographic clarity, the scenes that the brightly coloured images represent can be difficult to decipher. In their presentation of dazzling and seductively disorrienting surfaces in which there is no single authoritative viewpoint , the works parallel the experience of their subject in how they function visually as well as in the situations they represent. Some clearly indicate their subjects, (the critic) while others are more difficult to discern (dealers and collectors -- the collectors are the couple under the light while the dealer is the pied piper figure in the middle). The difficulty of distinguishing the characters in these scenes parallels the difficulty many participants experience in trying to understand the workings of the art world.
The title of the series is drawn from Pirandello's early 20th century absurdist metafiction, six characters in search of an author. The reference speaks in part to the artist's sense that the characters found her -- that the various figurines that make up her main characters needed to be incorporated into works. Pirandello's characters (mother father, step-daughter, son, boy, child) were part of an unresolved family drama and sought a director to finish their narrative. Facciponte’s characters (artist, critic, curator, muse, collector, viewer) instead represent her unresolved relation to the art world.
The use of found figurines as her artistic medium is a point of continuity with her earlier series, sleepy eyes, were large-scale, close up portraits of dolls. Where sleepy eyes’ extreme close ups of single dolls highlighted the uncanny aspects of the dolls, six characters mass assemblages use a camp sensibility to activate the figurines’ kitsch qualities. These kinds of knicknacks are often sold as collectibles -- with their manufacturer often suggesting that their production has been limited to increase their potential resale value for those who purchase them. The objects' equation of aesthetic and market value and rejection of sophistication are taken as signs that they cannot be vehicles for higher values or cultural meanings.
Generally denigrated as pre-digested, mass produced, emotionally manipulative, and culturally vacant, kitsch objects try to look like art but lack art's cultural seriousness and significance.[1] They are all surface with nothing behind them but cheap sentimentality. Yet despite this analysis, Facciponte’s staging of the figurines reveals the overload of cultural work embedded in the objects. By taking up a camp sensibility that revels in surface and artificiality and ironizing their enjoyment of culturally suspect commodities the works point to a core anxiety lurking beneath the surface of art’s refusal of kitsch.[2]
For example, The Artist focuses on a waif figurine isolated on a mirrored tray and surrounded by a crowd that turns away from its performance. Dressed in 19th century garb, the young child plays an accordion and sings for the uncaring audience. His cherublike sadness evokes the myth of the suffering artist and references a hodgepodge of earlier representations. Facciponte's composition uses the figure of the pitiable artist singing for his supper to dramatize the isolation of the practicing artist -- reanimating the figurine's dead metaphors by knowingly taking on its overdetermined and trite sentimentality.
In contrast to the artist's isolation, The Curator places its namesake as the centre of attention. He is also centrally positioned and most of the surrounding figurines are turned to watch him at work including the artist who lurks over his right shoulder. The figurine who plays the critic is also a young boy, slightly older than the artist and dressed in a suit and bowtie from a more recent era. Originally attached to a piano, he perches on an overturned wine glass under the protective cover of a bell jar looking very much like a conductor gesturing to an orchestra. The jar could be interpreted as the institutional structures and supports which curators draw on to make their projects. The curator's centrality is also related to their constant engagement with the art world in contrast to the visual artist who produced a body of work in private before offering it to the public.
The idea of kitsch, while purporting to save real art from the depradations of commercial culture, introduces a profound anxiety into the art world -- there are things that look like art that aren't and liking those things is taken as a sign that the viewer has no taste. In other words, Kitsch is a spectre haunting the art world. The fear of kitsch creates a suspicion of visual representations that are too accessible or that look like they're trying too hard to look like art. The fear of kitsch is one of the factors contributing to a need for aesthetic difficulty -- challenging objects are not kitsch and difficulty comes to function as a stand in for aesthetic significance. Yet an overemphasis on challenging art works leads to an art world that excludes much of the public and turns its back on beauty.
This sense of isolation can be seen in her image of the Critic which places him in a glass bubble -- the implication being that he is only responding to his own preconceptions and not the world around him. He sits on a pedestal made from an overturned champagne glass reading newspaper. The critic is a small boy in short pants, too young to be reading the paper, perhaps just playing at being grownup? He is reflected by mirrors on both sides and surrounded by reading figures and bowls full of figurines. Overall, the image suggests he may be an Unreliable guide to the glittering surfaces of the art world.
The works began with the Artist letting her materials speak to her and working them until they could speak to others. I want to suggest that while the series expresses the artist's frustrations with contemporary art it also provides evidence that she has found a way forward. Embracing the materials that speak to her no matter how culturally degraded they might be and trusting that her engagement with them will sustain her. I'd recommend this strategy to her viewers as well.
[1] The classic formulation of kitsch is Clement Greenberg’s “Avant-garde and Kitsch,” Partisan Review. 6:5 (1939) 34-49.
[2] Susan Sontag; Notes on “camp”. Susan Sontag (Ed.), Against interpretation, Anchor Books, New York (1986), pp.275–292.