2008 SECA Art Award at the SF MOMA

Currently on exhibit at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art are the recipients of the 2008 Society for the Encouragement of Contemporary Art Award. Since 1967, the SECA Art Award has been bestowed by SF MOMA curators on a biennial basis to a small (3-6) group of up-and-coming artists. The criteria for selection is somewhat vague, but primarily the goal of the award is to showcase the work of Bay Area artists who have not yet received substantial recognition from the mainstream art world. Three out of the four 2009 Award winners are under thirty years old, and if this exhibit is any indicator, then there seems to be a clear trajectory in either the work being done by younger artists or, more likely, in what seems to be expected from younger artists by the museum gatekeepers and tastemakers: a bloodless, intellectualized, and ultimately cold art.


Tauba Auerbach seeks to uncover latent patterns in visual representations of communicative systems common to every day life - TV sets, clock radios, alphabets, etc. Some of the work was visually interesting, slyly referencing pop art and minimalism, and packing a The most prominent of her work, however, were 35 mm color close-up photographs of static-y television pictures, blown up to massive prints.

Auerbach seems to ask us to look closely at the colored grains in order to note the strange orderly-ness of "static", to see that patterns exists even at the microscopic level. Her choice to use still photography deaestheticizes the television, stripping the television static of the more interesting patterns that would have been generated by the waveforms of the analog broadcast signal, the see-saw effect of the picture floating in and out, in and out. The still photographs silence any voice the television signals may once have had, any life in them, and return the television to the realm of the cold, calculated, and pre-programmed.

Similarly, Jordan Kantor's paintings make use of images or events which are known and have been known for years, reproducing classic Manet paintings and optical processes like a lens flare. Kantor's goal is so pronounced that it becomes unclear: his palette choice, tone, style, and substance all reference x-ray images - he even includes a real x-ray of a canvas in case you didn't get it - and they all shout "i'm examining the what's underneath the surface value of commonly traded images."

Nevertheless, his images are striking for the way in which they reduce the human face to pure faciality - flat expressions pockmarked with deep, unknowing voids of pure black. Kantor is keenly aware that, as Deleuze and Guattari point out, it is the face that signifies recognition and primary signification, and it is the face that is produced in order to see the psyched made flesh. With faces reduced to nothingness upon nothingness, Kantor's subjects are disorientingly cold and inhuman.

Desiree Holman set up a room in which there were three video projections next to each other on the wall. On both the left and right videos, masked characters performed the rituals of the sitcom, estranged from any soundtrack or laugh-track or theme music except for occasional and unnerving bursts of sound. I was reminded of the rabbit-sitcom scenes in David Lynch's recent Inland Empire. Holman and Kantor must have taken classes together or read the same texts - Holman's actors wear masks that perform the same function as Kantor's thick paint strokes, reducing all facial expression to pure faciality, black voids where eyes and mouths should be. With live actors, however, the effect is startling and terrifying.

The mundane drama of the sitcom - a broken vase, dinner guests, etc. - are massively portentous when acted out by these dehumanized beings. Their actions threaten our very existence - perhaps they will soon enter our own homes and take over our own petty dramas. This frightening possibility is further suggested by the middle video projection, a blank green-screen through which each respective shows characters pass through on the way to the other show, the show which they never should have been allowed to enter.

Trevor Paglen's work continues the themes of estrangement and dehumanization, but does so in a much more nuanced, and perhaps more mature way. Paglen is the most accomplished of the four artists - he is well known and respected in the academic world as a historian and investigator of military secrets. He received a PhD in Geography from U.C. Berkeley, where he continues to work as a researcher. He has even been on the Daily Show to promote his book I Could Tell You But Then You Would Have to be Killed by Me, which examined the insignia created by and for military secret operations and projects. Some of the military unit patches examined in the book were on display for the SECA Award exhibit.

Primarily, Paglen showed photographs of secret military operations. Seriously, his work walks a fine line between legal and not, and might be considered by some to be treacherous. In some ways, Paglen's work struck me the least of all four - it felt the least personal, and for good reason: it was done from extreme distances, using telescopes in a process resembling astro-photography. Paglen literalized the distances conceptually generated by the other artists. And somehow, his work was far and away the only work in the exhibit that could be termed "beautiful."

Overall, I was struck by how - and I keep coming back to this word - how cold the exhibit was. It felt like work that was done by artists numb to the sentiment, artists raised to be skeptical and critical, to deconstruct, but not to experience or to be outraged or to love. Across the hall,

William Kentridge's geo-political work seemed to pump red-hot blood in comparison, filled with both historically grounded archetypes, real people, jungle and savannah animals, rich people, poor people, angry people, people fucking and fighting and cutting each others limbs off. And on top of that Kentridge is a technical master, ingeniously combining elements of painting, video, stage production, music, theater, and animation. His work shows a love, both of humanity and of the work. Obviously the four SECA Art Award winners are smart and talented people, but I walked out of their exhibit wondering why everything in it seemed so disappointed with life.