'Defamation of Character' at P.S.1 Contemporary Art Center

Thursday, 14 September 2006 10:12

Long Island City, NY – P.S.1 Contemporary Art Center presents Defamation of Character, an international group exhibition exploring the iconoclastic impulse as an engine of recent creative progress.  It draws primarily from work created in the post-punk era by approximately thirty artists, and explores the relationships between face and fame, notoriety, disclosure, and erasure.  Some of the artists mine popular culture to produce scathing or defamatory indictments of consumer mores; others take the moral corruptions of public and political acts as their defamed subject; and others practice detournement—using elements of well-known media to create new work with a different or opposing message—to elevate injury and injustice into the realm of high art.  Defamation of Character will be on view in the first floor Main Gallery from October 29, 2006, through January 8, 2007.

The cradle of much of this aesthetic impulse is England, where pop culture and anti-establishment attitudes have thrived concurrently.  The progenitor of this position may be the British artist Richard Hamilton (b. 1922) whose body of work created in response to the so-called dirty protests in Northern Ireland speaks to the political defamations of the notorious Maze prison in the stylized language of pop.  Fed through the language of punk and the graphic design of Jamie Reid (b. 1947) such attitudes became the form of the Young British Artists generation, represented here by works from Jake and Dinos Chapman (b. 1966/62), Sarah Lucas (b. 1962), and recently Adam McEwen (b. 1965).

In America much of this confrontation took place with modernism itself.  Key moments include Andy Warhol’s oxidation paintings which had the artist literally taking a piss on the flat mantle of Modernist abstraction, Richard Prince’s (b. 1949) painted jokes which literally made a clichéd joke of painting, and Christopher Wool’s (b. 1955) self-effacing erasures of his own facility.  Incorporating the perspective of feminism in their work Sue Williams (b. 1954), Kathe Burkhart (b. 1958), and Karen Kilimnik (b. 1962) take celebrity and the name of the celebrated father in vain.

Defamation of Character also features Matthew Barney’s (b. 1967) Vaseline portrait of Julianne Moore as a Mirabella magazine zombie, Hélio Oiticica’s (1937-80) cocaine Hendrixes and Glenn Ligon’s (b. 1960) dead neon America.  Documented actions and interventions such as Gordon Matta-Clark’s (1943-78) BB gun window blow out, Gianni Motti’s (b. 1958) appearance at the VIP box of the French Open wearing an Abu Ghraib-style hood, Chris Burden’s (b. 1946) TV hijack, and the K Foundation’s (1993-95) legendary burning of a million pounds, royalties from their successes with the KLF, will be seen alongside works by Dan Colen (b. 1979) and Nate Lowman (b. 1979) whose hijacked landscapes have become vehicles for the slanders and libels of a malignant culture of pollution, racial slurs, and tarnished reputations.  Defamation of Character is organized by P.S.1 Curatorial Advisor Neville Wakefield.

P.S.1 Contemporary Art Center

P.S.1 was founded in 1971 by Alanna Heiss as The Institute of Art and Urban Resources Inc., a non-profit organization dedicated to the organization of contemporary art exhibitions in abandoned or underutilized buildings.  P.S.1 became an affiliate of The Museum of Modern Art in 2000 and now operates two internationally acclaimed spaces for contemporary art: P.S.1 in Long Island City, featuring museum-quality galleries, and The Clocktower Gallery, which now contains the radio studio for P.S.1’s online radio station WPS1.

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