ABOUT US

The owner, Simon Taylor, was born in England and lived in New York from 1988 to 2003, working as a museum curator and art critic. He curated “Abject Art” at the Whitney Museum of American Art in 1993, and a series of exhibitions at Guild Hall Museum, East Hampton, NY, in the early 2000s, where he held the position of Curator. His writings have appeared in Art in America, Afterimage, Art + Text, Third Text, World Art, and in numerous exhibition catalogues. He has lived in California since 2003.

CAVEAT EMPTOR

In December 2012, I was contacted by a curator at the New Museum of Contemporary Art in New York, who is organizing a forthcoming exhibition on “NYC 1993: Experimental Jet Set, Trash and No Star,” opening in February 2013. To my surprise, the museum asked for permission to reprint my essay, “The Phobic Object: Abjection in Contemporary Art” from the Whitney Museum of American Art’s Abject Art catalogue, an exhibition that followed the notorious 1993 Whitney Biennial, and became a source of great controversy (for a multitude of reasons). I am not sure what the curators of “NYC 1993” have in mind, but it has the potential to be a real shit-stirrer. Like the return of the repressed, this exhibition keeps coming back to dog me, personally. On the one hand, it’s gratifying to know that an exhibition you curated twenty years ago is still being talked about; on the other hand, what’s being written, from some quarters, is sometimes badly misinformed.  

The main criticism leveled at the Abject Art exhibition is its strident tone, the way the curators “instrumentalized” the abject for political ends. We are all prisoners of our era and its limitations. I would have preferred to have been around during the sixties, which was a more progressive and experimental time, but the recessionary years following the October 1987 Crash (memorable for the Persian Gulf War, the beating of Rodney King and the riots in L.A., the AIDS pandemic and the callous treatment of people with HIV, etc.), was not a time of great optimism, and the visual culture of the period reflected that reality in ways that were often rude and in-your-face. I make no apologies, in retrospect, for letting my contempt for our political leaders, anger at patriarchy, and hatred of capitalism shape the way I conceived the exhibition. It was authentic and true to the times. My gallery-going confirmed that there was a lot of political art being shown, and much of it was body-related and scatological, fueled by anger at the social injustices of the world, highlighted especially by the AIDS crisis which cast a pall over the culture. My essay failed to unpack the concept of abjection coherently, but I connected the dots between the stuff I was reading in the seminars (with Rosalind Krauss, among others), the world of contemporary art, and a lumpen sense of how the underclass was faring after years of Reaganism.

As the person who initiated the exhibition and insisted on using the term “abject art,” I followed the critical reaction to the exhibition in the first year or two afterwards, but gradually lost interest and stopped researching the subject altogether. The denunciations from the Right (from people like Hilton Kramer and the Christian Action Network) were as laughable as they were predictable, but the criticism from peers and colleagues (notably Rosalind Krauss, Hal Foster, Martin Jay, Helen Molesworth, and Frazer Ward) was painful to read. Back then, it was necessary to browse the bookstores and magazine stands, or go to the New York Public Library to look up Art Index to find out what was being written. In 1993, the World Wide Web was invented, and within a few years, everything had changed. “Googling” has radically changed how scholars, not to mention the general public, go about researching topics of interest. In recent years, I have resisted Googling “abject art” (or my controversial tenure at Guild Hall), but the recent request to reprint my “Phobic Object” essay instigated a recent Google search that unearthed copious writings on the subject. There are dozens and dozens of references to "abject art" in books, magazines, journals, and in popular culture. Much of the criticism leveled at my writings and art-world activities, particularly concerning the Abject Art exhibition, is legitimate, if not always correct, but there is a whole lot of bullshit out there, as well … on the one hand, academic oneupmanship and political posturing … on the other hand, errors, distortions, mischaracterizations, and, in some cases, outright lies. 

Caveat emptor: Don’t believe everything you read on the internet.

Simon Taylor, December 11, 2012.