Luis Jacob

The best critique of contemporary art shines a light on it — data-driven observation. Postmodernism is the urge to shock; we’re repeatedly told it’s the most exciting art of our time, yet  doubts remain. When we deny tradition no one knows what art is anymore; that leaves us clueless, so pioneers carve out new paths while others follow.

For example at the 1976 Venice Biennale, Michael Asher filled a corner of the empty Italian Pavilion with twenty-two folding chairs. He wanted the space to be a “functional” lounge where “visitors communicate with each other on a social level”.  29 years later Luis Jacob filled a room at the Art Gallery of Ontario with old furniture. Jacob wanted the space to be a “functional” lounge where “visitors communicate with each other on a social level”.  The artist said his work was important. Some were thinking echo chamber and copycat, while the curator is certain it’s great work because no one would think it was art unless they were told.

Geoffrey Farmer in a later cut pictures out of art books and glued them to sticks, legitimizing superficial art.  Luis Jacob followed with pictures cut out of art books  “to destabilize your viewing conventions”, where the word destabilize can be read as  “to confuse the viewer”. Imitating Farmer is the sincerest form of flattery but not “the most exciting art of our time”. Postmodernity brushes such critique aside with commissioned scholarly articles  to praise the unpalatable. It is said the less effort, the more conceptual the work.

Tom Wolfe satirized this pose in his novel Back to Blood; “The artist… had no hand at all in making them. And if he touched drawings or photographs, it was just to put them in an envelope and FedEx them to those hired to produce the work, although I’m sure he has an assistant to do things like that. No Hands—that’s an important concept now. It’s not some artist using his so-called skills to deceive peo­ple. It’s not a sleight of hand. It’s no hands at all. That makes it conceptual, of course. That way he turns what a manual artist would use to create…an effect…into something that compels you to think about it in a deeper way.” (1)

This is eerily reminiscent of Plato, who banned artists from the Republic because they cheat, through use of mimesis, conveying an imitation of the reality created by Gods.  Plato used  the mimesis of writing to convey his ideas, so he obviously hadn’t thought that one through.

Museum of Contemporary Art, Tornoto

An artist does not use skill to deceive people, any more than doctors use skills to deceive patients. Skill takes so long to learn, requires such deep commitment and dedication, that anyone able to make the grade will not waste their life deceiving anyone.  It’s those lacking skill who need to deceive. Nor does a skilled artist creates an effect when in reality it’s visual language, one of the non-verbal languages such as body language.

Which brings us to that “deeper way” the artist would compel us to think. We wonder where’s the art – if the artist is MIA?  This is the art of selling, not the art of art. There is no art here, just dubious marketing; even the pretence is faked, and that’s a postmodern strategy.

“Faking depends on a measure of complicity between the perpetrator and the victim, who together conspire to believe what they don’t believe and to feel what they are incapable of feeling…”  so Roger Scrutton writes in Aeon. “ Anyone can lie. Faking, by contrast, is an achievement. To fake things you have to take people in, yourself included. The liar can pretend to be shocked when his lies are exposed, but the fake really is shocked when he is exposed, since he had created around himself a community of trust, of which he himself was a member. Understanding this phenomenon is, it seems to me, integral to understanding how a high culture works, and how it can become corrupted.” (2)

In Europe during the period known as the Enlightenment, (1685-1815), individuals used reason to question contemporary practice. It is a shame postmodern thought discards reason  as it did with skill, in order to overleap tradition. When Luis Jacob  bringing chairs to a room at the A.G.O., he’s  worth every penny; compared to the working class janitor who brings chairs to that room with small change in his pocket, Jacob does it with an artist’s fee in his wallet. The rejection of skill  is problematic since whatever lacks skill is shoddy. That shoddy art is counter-aesthetic is a big things these days. That makes Luis very conceptual. He wouldn’t be nosing the feedbag if moving furniture wasn’t the most sophisticated step in Canadians arts. Being an artist and curator is no easy life they say, one needs to be noticed; one needs to shock.

In his BBC article “How modern art became trapped by its urge to shock”, Roger Scrutton wrote that “The fake is a person who has rebuilt himself, with a view to occupying another social position than the one that would be natural to him. Such is Molière’s Tartuffe, the religious imposter who takes control of a household through a display of scheming piety…(3) So powerful is the impetus towards the fake that it is now rare to be a finalist for the Turner Prize without producing something nobody would think was art until they were told.” In Canada we won’t be left behind, the Sobey prize was awarded to a 2m long metal fence rented from home hardware.  Soon after, an artist exhibited a few fences bunched up at A Space gallery, a  few months later an artist put up a fence at Clint Roenisch as “the most advanced art of our time”.  You can put a corner store or a beauty parlour inside an art gallery but it will never be more than a circus, an elaborate pretence, counterfeit pretending to meaning. When art is fake, it’s about the artist’s power and influence with curators.

University of Toronto 2018 curated by Adam Lauder

Making art purposefully incomprehensible is a postmodern strategy. Duchamp set that precedent with the Large Glass, the Bride Stripped Bare by her Bachelors.  Duchamp intended the Large Glass to be accompanied by a book, in order to prevent purely visual responses to it, (4) but the notes and diagrams in the book explain elements not present in the work. Marjorie Perloff suggests “Large Glass is also a critique of the very criticism it inspires, mocking the solemnity of the explicator who is determined to find the key”.(5) There was no key. The strategy of the Large Glass is that it pretends to meaning: there’s nothing to get except the suggestion that there’s something to get.

Duchamp wanted to deny even his own inclination, his own taste. The only problem was that lacking taste, a work is common. Personal taste is what gives art meaning.  If we didn’t know the Large Glass was by Marcel we might look away after a minute, yet it is seminal; for the first time Duchamp made work that strategically pretends to meaning without having any.  Luis Jacob and his curator produced something similar,  shock the spotlight. Bet everyone expected hidden meanings and superior intelligence.  Marjorie Perloff says  you got owned.

Pictures at an Exhibition 2011

Luis Jacob today at TPW.

Ten years later in Toronto, Luis Jacob cuts pictures out of art books, then frames them and hangs them without further explanation “in order to destabilize your viewing conventions”. That means “in order to upset you”.

Luis will later destabilize the budget of the Art Gallery of Ontario or the National Gallery; curators were already at the opening sniffing the burnt offering… after all, these were pictures cut from art books!

Destabilizing is this year’s word at the National Gallery, they use it till it wanes superficial and fades to a cliché. Jacob has a budget for writers to explain why you were destabilized once again (yawn) … as if 40 years of destabilizing weren’t enough… please… can’t you just give it up… just let it go? These strategies provide Jacob with a now unstable (destabilized) audience who are fed their own ignorance as humble pie, followed by a hefty dinner bill.

Luis is a high-earning artist and I hear a  professor at the Daniels Faculty of Architecture, Landscape, and Design, and he’s also a well paid curator at the National Gallery of Canada…so none would dare question his OCADU lecture fee for an evening titled “What’s Your Disruption?” Sounding like a grasp for street credibility, is he asking for disruption or is it about him disrupting others?

Jacob as a curator should appreciate my article; it’s Foucault’s parrhesia, a hot disruption of Canadian art history. But I’m humane, I don’t want to hurt his feelings so I didn’t disrupt his evening at OCADU or TPW. I didn’t rain on his parade, nor did I make him cry at his party even if he wanted to, but enough!  When artists and curators call for disruption they mean exactly this level of scholarly activism… so any touchiness at my words is obviously misconstrued and surely inappropriate. Roger Scrutton explains how a high culture gets corrupt, and boy, our times are swampy as it gets. But let’s say something nice about Luis.

If you read anything he’s written you’ll know that Luis Jacob is a literary genius.  I’m astonished how well he weaves ideas, themes, and metaphors in a beautiful tapestry of words and thoughts. His writing puts mine to shame and if he restricted himself to writing books I would buy every one to enjoy late at night by the fireplace. Unfortunately Luis Jacob writes exhibition proposals.

They persuade juries his work is something special when  it’s his writing that’s special; Jacob’s art feels like  juvenilia.  As a University of Toronto fine arts professor, National Gallery of Canada fine arts curator, trendy rebel lecturer, and art world networker, it could be he’s too busy for studio time when art is anything you can get away with, and if anyone gets away with it, it’s Jacob.

When pictures are cut from art books it’s not a viewing convention that’s destabilized but the public’s faith in whoever jerks their leash. Our viewing conventions were developed over 500,00 years so replacing them with the superficial is a loss, not a gain. Conceptual art is about the idea, like the idea of turning the tables on an audience expecting sublime art, to shame  a gullible public for  old-fashioned ideas. Of course insulting your audience earns their respect, as do lectures on how important this work would be to us… if we but knew what it meant, which we don’t, again proving the artist’s superior intelligence. This curating by low self-esteem must stop

Some believe art is mostly the idea but that has to be wrong; only a narcissist would assume we’ll admire every thought passing through their head. Art has always been about work, as in a work of art. As the researcher K. Anders Ericsson has shown, becoming an expert  requires the development of neural patterns that are acquired through much practice and repetition. Surely if he locked himself in the studio for a year like performance artist Tehching Hsieh, Luis Jacob might produce something, a physical trace, a subliminal  unfolding, a process of mastering and making art.

Canadian art is post-truth, postmodern, and post mortem… If we believe a room with a few chairs is art,  or pictures cut from art books, then we may need to revisit the movie “Idiocracy”.

Endnotes

On July 3, 2020 I received the following note. “Luis Jacob. Sure wish he’d been there when Francoise Sullivan saw the video that was his version of her 1949 filmed performance.  When it was over she jumped up and started cursing his name, LOL. I didn’t witness the actual event, but she was still extremely agitated when I saw her, about an hour later or something, still pretty damn angry, still tearing into the guy, and everybody was going on about how much she’d calmed down..”

I’ve seen numerous projects by Jacob, and none have been original, every single one is a copy of what someone else has done.  This anti-originality strategy is explained as part of the counter-aesthetic movement, which consists of the denial and negation of art, a process requiring almost no effort compared to the creative activity of making art.

In my opinion Luis Jacob could be a charlatan, not out of malicious intent, but perhaps as a instinctive strategy for status and the financial rewards involved. He is not a liar, for he has convinced himself that he understands art and makes art, he even commissions articles agreeing with his work and ideas. When art is anything you can get away with the worst you can get away with is always the most exciting strategy, leading to a steady degradation of the field.

Luis belongs to literature, he should write books. Following Lucian Freud’s maxim Luis Jacob should “act like a gentleman and leave art alone”.

Miklos Legrady

____________

Nota Bene

This article was banned by Akimbo.ca, a Canadian art news media whose huge email collection of subscribers gives them a monopoly in reaching the Canadian art world. Akimbo being a monopoly, their apparent support of  vested interests censors what the Canadian art world gets to know of current events in Canadian art. This could be corrupt and is rather the opposite of diversity.


sources

1- Tom Wolfe, Back to Blood, p352, Little, Brown, and Co. N.Y.
2– Roger Scrutton, The Great Swindle – A Cult of Fakery has taken over what’s left of high culture
https://aeon.co/essays/a-cult-of-fakery-has-taken-over-what-s-left-of-high-culture
3-Roger Scrutton, How modern art became trapped by its urge to shock, BBC Magazine                                           http://www.bbc.com/news/magazine-30343083
4- Tomkins, Calvin: Duchamp: A Biography, p. 297.
5-Marjorie Perloff The Poetics of Indeterminacy: Rimbaud to Cage p34, (Princeton UP: 1999).
   https://books.google.ca/books?id=bMfSI29lNoUC&pg=PA34&lpg=PA34
6- Joan Bakewell, Joan Bakewell in conversation with Marcel Duchamp Late Night Line-Up, 1968 BBC ARTS. at 17m20s
http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/p04826th

Miklos Legrady, Toronto Editor

Volume 32 no 6 July/August 2018 pp 23-25

12 thoughts on “A decade too much, Luis Jacob 10 years later

  1. Hi Miklos,
    Excellent review! I loved when you wrote, “Which brings us to “the deeper way that artist would compel us to think”. That deeper way wonders where’s the art – if the artist is MIA? We’re compelled to deeply think that this is the art of the salesman, not the art of the artist. There is no art here, only clever marketing; any pretense to art is obviously fake, and that’s a postmodern strategy.” It made me think of an antique furniture showroom with the chairs on display, but of course not for sitting on either, just display.

    http://www.sellingantiques.co.uk/photosnew/dealer_ygray/dealer_ygray_highres_1531480542391-8878690104.jpg

    1. If Luis Jacob’s ” filling a room with chairs found throughout the Art Gallery” is considered art, what’s the difference between a second hand furniture shop and an exhibition of chairs in an art gallery? Is it only the difference of venue, one with the approved title of “art gallery” and the other maybe just known as a junk shop or a Goodwill store. Does putting any object inside an artistic venue make it art? Once this object leaves the gallery, is it still art?

      1. Tamara,
        Junk is always junk; it’s just that some people can’t part with their old stuff and so hang on to it. Then an artist or art dealer comes along and takes this stuff and puts it into an exhibition in a top rated gallery, and then it becomes recognized as art. It’s the venue that counts, not what the venue contains. What happens to this “artwork” afterwords is another story ……

      2. Hi Tamara,
        That’s a good point, “Does putting any object inside an artistic venue make it art?” and “Once this object leaves the gallery is it still art?”
        It seems just the fact that an object is physically displayed in an art gallery or in an art museum gives the object artistic value and the right to be classified as a work of art. This right would probably go on to extend to objects being virtually displayed, as even their representation inside the venue gives them presence and validity as artworks.
        Once an artwork leaves the exhibition it has a history, thus being a piece of art that was once displayed in such and such museum or gallery. It has gained credibility and now has some sort of value. It is of no matter if this same object can also be found in a used furniture shop or hardware shop; it’s the place where the object, real or virtual, has been on display which counts.

  2. I received this note from akimbo, an online ad agency to the Canadian art world, sending email ads of exhibitions, events, publications: “Hi Miklos, I’m writing to let you know we won’t be sending out an akimbo for you for this content. I’ve read your blog posts that this content points to and we don’t publish or promote personal ad hominem arguments like these. Regards, Kim”

    Isn’t that refusing to bake a cake for gay couples? Obviously there’s no ad hominem, evading discussion by attacking people’s character. Kim did not reply. Now it’s about institutional censorship and internet freedom. Do the powerful own the conversation online? When it’s a monopoly, the only art email service in Canada, does anyone have the right to dip into the mailbag, censor the contents? Then how can the worker’s voice compete with wealthy institutions and their enormous budgets?

    First they came for the others… and someday it will be our turn, so when it’s your turn… let’s hope we made a world where your voices can be heard instead of silenced. I suggest readers respectfully email Kim info@akimbo.ca with a short note to protest censorship and to support internet freedom.

    1. Annie Markovich wrote very appropriately in her editorial, “Art must grow beyond parameters of the Academy, outside museum norms and auction house shams to include voices of dissent, healthy dialogue and examination of culture.” When dialogue ends and censorship takes over, people become apathetic, unaware and silent. We must not be silenced, which is also what the New Art Examiner is about. Well done for exposing what took place with Akimbo and your email from Kim Fullerton. I, and hopefully many others, will write an email to Kim at: info@akimbo.ca and voice my support of your position.

  3. I found this article quite confusing at first because it went back and forth in time and also touched an array of arguments with a logic all its own. In the end, though, it all began to make sense. It made me wanting to know Luis Jacob’s side of the story; I was wondering if it would be possible for the author to interview him, as it would make a nice followup to this article.

    1. Hi Anthony, You can google Luis Jacob and get quite a few insights. Here’s an interview. http://www.modernfuel.org/node/757 He is totally convincing, since his writing, as I said, is a work of genius, whereas his visual art, not so much.

      From the start of that interview, we’re overwhelmed by intelligent and academic words that strut upon the stage signifying nothing, for behind that there’s nothing more than a blank canvas covered in one colour of paint. Or there’s a picture cut out of an art magazine to disrupt your viewing conventions, since he doesn’t explain why he chose it or what it means.

      To me, the fact that he’s a curator at the National Gallery of Canada, one of Canada’s best paid artists and a full professor, speaks volumes of the corruption of Canadian Art.

      1. Thank you Miklos for the link to the interview. Your observations say it all, especially the last one. I’m amazed at the courage that you have to speak out, but then again, you’re not in the US.

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