Thirty Afternoons
Paul McCarthy A&E, Adolf/Adam & Eva/Eve, 2021 Performance, video, photographs, installation
Initial thoughts on mediocrity, 1996
Programming Note: This is an outlier in terms of the things I wrote while I was at Kingston, and this had been put together in preparation for a lot of the postgraduate applications I was going through at the time. I’d increasingly become interested in the ideas of stupidity, mediocrity, and failure in art practice, something that was very relevant and timely in 1996, and highly influenced by the Post Human body artist practice, especially from Paul McCarthy, Mike Kelly and Matthew Barney that was coming out of America.
My initial sense was to inform my postgraduate studies with a two year exploration of these ideas, culminating in a large-scale written piece, and I was accepted into Central Saint Martins and Goldsmiths colleges to undertake this effort, something I was very excited about, but eventually declined. In looking back at a lot of my writing from that time, it’s now so clear how uncertain I was about so many of the points I was trying to make.
This ultimately didn’t come to pass as I discovered the computer room at The Jan van Eyck Akademie, and never came back, but it’s something I sometimes think about, and I’d love to return to one day. The title comes from the Popguns song ‘Can’t Ignore The Train’, which I only recently discovered was actually a cover. Stupidity as destiny indeed.
With the advent (and perhaps subsequent demise) of instinctual artistic value judgements tending to polarise around the generic dichotomy of either good or bad, perhaps one of the more interesting approaches to both art production and confrontation concerns a celebration of the mediocre. In short, that which might be described as neither good nor bad, but seems fairly indicative of bad.
What might this be? How could a work consciously laden in mediocrity be realised without itself becoming mediocre?
Perhaps as a result of late Sixties and certainly Seventies Conceptualism, it would appear that most of the linguistic signifiers employed in the description and appraisal of art practice have been thrown into the proverbial blender of rhetoric and furiously liquidised. This in recent years, has resulted in a persistent flourishing of the misuse of terms such as installation, gallery space or even the infamous label piece.
To subsequently then attach some manner of either verbalised or written interpretation to these descriptions seems only to complicate matters one stage further. In striving for moments of critical clarity, what results is a muddied confusion of jargon, witty soundbites, and ultimately meaningless and impenetrable rhetoric. A fine example of this current trend of cultural criticism might be found with Tony Parsons, Daily Telegraph columnist and Television broadcaster, who seems so in love with the language of what he's saying or quoting that, in effect, he ends up saying nothing at all.
This is perhaps symptomatic of mid-nineties programming, and by no means do I feel Mr. Parsons's criticism is mediocre, purely a lumpy blend of things known and unknown.
Yet given this somewhat celebratedly ambiguous linguistic context, how might we either:
a) Situate the mediocre in order to clarify the situation, or
b) Situate it in order to consciously confuse matters further
The first step upon what will probably prove to be an indeterminate track, must be to define by whatever means available, the mediocre. This term, however useful, appears on a superficial level, to be so symptomatic of what contemporary cultural programming in the media has become (this, admittedly, is an unresearched, generalised and blinkered view).
The absolute volume of, for example, chat shows, lifestyle programming, visual white elephants and non-things, in striving to provide choice, merely results in no choice at all. Yet according to purely Greenbergian terms, it cannot be described as kitsch. There seems to be a conscious languishing in the concept of filling time for either little purpose (moral or otherwise) or attempts at pure escapism. Either way, we tend to empathise with both. I do, however, concede as to whether or not my own opinions have been formed after a particularly Anglocentric manner, as some type of attempt to come to terms with American Cultural Imperialism. Is the United States the real bastion of the mediocre, or is it more culturally widespread than this?
In stating that my premise is to somehow celebrate that which we might term mediocre, is it in fact, already being celebrated in a phenomenal way the world over anyway? Perhaps, my intentions should be to consciously devise a formal system, either visual, written or something else, in order to celebrate this theme in such a way that knowledge of my source material / subject matter is made transparent. In other words, the construction of a technique to consciously appraise that which is neither good nor bad.
There is, perhaps, an emphasized, or doubled duality at play here in that whilst pertaining to be neither good nor bad, it is in fact entirely dependent upon these terms for its own definition.
Therefore, in some respects, we have the linguistic kernel of the problem inherent in this discussion - the relationship between good, bad (although these seem somehow to be the wrong terms altogether), and the floating and intangible mediocre.
To return to my point concerning the misuse of ambiguous artistic labels, the mediocre might also join these ranks as one of those words which seems consciously and constantly misused. So often associated with negative intentions, the term of mediocrity has thus become indicative of, or fused with, a complete and overwhelming sense of indifference.
To borrow a soundbite, is the mediocre something enjoyed by some of the people all of the time, or all of the people some of the time...?
To be continued.
Matthew Shadbolt
April 1996
