LG Williams Defends Himself Against Art Critics
This press release casts Williams as a besieged public official defending his studio record against critics, transients, and Hollywood malcontents. The borrowed town-hall language turns artistic progress into a policy platform, complete with complaints, blank-check demands, bureaucratic backlogs, and museum site visits. Williams claims to be working as hard and quickly as possible, while simultaneously insulting the Hammer Museum and invoking the NEA as if his unfinished projects were matters of public infrastructure. The piece's comedy depends on treating one artist's practice as a government program in perpetual crisis. Its polemical edge is that contemporary art often does operate like this--through promises, delays, site visits, institutional excuses, and the mythology of progress.
- DATE:
- October 15, 2009
- DOCUMENT TYPE:
- Essay / Critique
- NAMED ARTISTS / FIGURES:
- LG Williams; Susan Geileen; Gabriel Bordenave; Jay Oloff; Barack Obama
- INSTITUTIONS / VENUES:
- UCLA; Hammer Museum; National Endowment for the Arts; Los Angeles; Honolulu
- KEYWORDS:
- studio as government program in crisis; besieged official defending practice; museum site visits satirized; NEA as art infrastructure; art reform language; contemporary art as perpetual crisis; bureaucratic art mythology