The Chronicle of Artistic Failure in America

Another tip of the failure hat to Rich for alerting the Chronicle of the exhibition called “Failure,” slated to open soon at the Belmar Lab just outside of Denver.

Subtitle to this exhibition?: “FEEL FREE TO HATE THIS EXHIBITION”

Dates?: “FEBRUARY 14 - WHENEVER”

And after reading Executive Director Adam Lerner’s statement for the show, I’ve decided I have to find a way to get out there and see the show, come hell or February snows.

Failure is an exhibition that considers the artistic implications of disappointment, rejection, malfunction and breakdown. Sounds implausible, right?

That’s what I would have thought until about a year when I went to visit a friend of mine who is now a professor at Cornell University. Jason called me on my cell phone the morning of my visit, “If you drive to campus directly from the airport, you’ll be able to catch Judith Halberstam’s lecture on failure as a political strategy.” “What? Yeah, sure.” And as I sped through the winding roads of upstate New York, I thought, “Wow, I must be really out of touch.”

Speaking to an eager crowd of philosophically-hip Cornellians, Halberstam presented the notion of failure as a means to affirm marginal voices in our society, people who missed out on the happy social and economic networks of family and work. But, as I listened to her wrangle a political theory out of the concept failure, a flood of images came to mind suggesting that that failure is a wide current hidden in plain sight at the very center of contemporary American culture.

Like its opposite success, failure runs deeps through the fabric of our society from the “Turn on, tune in, drop out” creed of Timothy Leary, to the aggressive nihilism of the punk rock generation, to the identification with the beautiful loser among skateboard and graffiti generation. It’s seems to be the theme of every other story on Ira Glass’ radio show This American Life and Dave Eggers literary magazine McSweeney’s. American dysfunctionality is the very subject of American’s longest running sitcom, The Simpsons.

When I shared my academically inspired insights with artist Ethan Janzer, he convinced me that visual artists have a great deal to say about failure, so I asked him to co-curate this exhibition with me. The works we selected for Failure suggest different ways of failing, and by doing so offer a critique of what we are told is right.

Right on, Adam. Failure does run deep through the fabric of our society. And, I’d add, through the fabric of art!

This entry was posted on Sunday, January 13th, 2008 at 5:10 pm and is filed under Friends of Failure, Belmar Lab, Art humor, Decline of human culture, What planet are curators from?, Artistic failure in America. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.