{"id":1886,"date":"2012-10-10T02:33:30","date_gmt":"2012-10-10T02:33:30","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/thedorseypost.com\/?p=1886"},"modified":"2012-10-10T21:13:46","modified_gmt":"2012-10-10T21:13:46","slug":"ok-i-am-curious-yellowists","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/thedorseypost.com\/?p=1886","title":{"rendered":"OK, I am curious, yellowists"},"content":{"rendered":"
\"\"<\/a>

Rothko Homage 2 Yellow<\/p><\/div>\n

Remember when John Goodman, in The Big Lebowski<\/em>, discovered he was facing philosophers when he thought they were only three dweebs who used ferrets as weapons and dressed like Dieter hosting Sprockets<\/em> on Saturday Night Live? His reaction: Oh my god, not nihilists. We\u2019re fucked. <\/em>You best listen to Mr. Goodman if you\u2019re deeply invested in the world of contemporary art. It would be a sensible reaction to Vladimir Umamet\u2019s recent act of vandalism at the Tate Modern where he tagged one of Rothko\u2019s Seagram\u2019s paintings and thus, by his own philosophy, turned it into a painting about nothing but the color yellow. I find myself oddly amused and cheered by his act of Yellowism. I doubt that it\u2019s going to knock anything off the rails in the art world in the short term, but it may help free up some individuals to start making art without trying so hard to consciously make it mean<\/em> something. And it might get a few people out of the art game altogether. If you can be talked out of it (and you should be, trust me) you shouldn\u2019t be doing anything as nutty as making art to begin with. Art should be like the Zen monastery where they chase you away fifty times and then finally let you in out of pity because they finally realize you just can’t help it.<\/p>\n

Thanks to my Brooklyn friend Lauren, who is a bit of a yellowist herself, but is in denial about it (so far this evening anyway), I started reading up on Yellowism<\/a>. The manifesto is an interesting, monotonous and nihilistic incantation that keeps asserting its authors’ right to reduce all art to nothing more than a symbol for the color yellow. Umamets and Marcin Lodyga\u2014the founders of yellowism\u2014amiably claim their \u201cnew context\u201d for art nullifies everything in art so that all art means nothing but the color yellow. In the context of yellowism\u2014in a yellowistic chamber, as they put it\u2014all meanings, all diverse significance, all styles and shapes and mediums, signify nothing but yellow. By tagging the Rothko and then surrendering to police, Umamets was calling attention to his philosophy and also leaving behind a painting that didn’t feature much yellow but was about nothing but<\/em> yellow. Rothko may have thought otherwise when he was hard at work on his subversive painting, commissioned for the Four Seasons restaurant. He wanted it to be oppressive, part of a suite of paintings that would surround and envelope the restaurant\u2019s patrons with Rothko\u2019s especially unsunny weltschmerzen<\/em>. I stood in that Rothko room last year at the Tate Modern, when I had a painting in a London pop-up exhibition, and I didn’t stay in that place for long. The whole museum felt like a prison: cold, imperious, and impersonal. Rothko did the paintings, now hanging in that room, right before he killed himself. By putting his mark on the work, Umamets was claiming to make the painting about nothing but the extremely sunny color yellow. (Though there\u2019s nothing sunny or unsunny about yellowism itself. It\u2019s the color of what should have been swirling at the base of Duchamp\u2019s Fountain<\/em>, for one thing and Umamets claims to be doing to Duchamp what Duchamp did to art: recontextualizing. If Duchamp can say a urinal is art, then Umamets can say any work of art is about nothing but yellow, simply by surrounding it with a new context. That’s the logic, and it’s cleverly seductive, a bit of a chess move, which is also Duchampian.)<\/p>\n

Here\u2019s the thing, as Alec Baldwin says way too often now. These nihilists are basically threatening to get yellow on your ass. The act of vandalism was small potatoes. The philosophy behind it is saying art itself has reached a point of exhaustion, a dead end, where meaning and purpose is so fungible that it doesn’t really exist anymore. Hey, tell me about it, Vlad. The tract about Yellowism is something to enjoy and even skim with a bit of wicked glee–it’s very funny in places and the Russian accent is perfect. As you do, think, along with me, it\u2019s about time. \u00a0<\/em>They\u2019ve pushed postmodernism to a dead end, particularly postmodern criticism. What Yellowism leaves in its wake, if you recognize the absurdity of the kind of critical thought the yellowists are attempting to skewer and also to take to its ultimate extreme, is something only an individual artist can answer through the act of making art. A yellowist says all works of art can be reduced to nothing but metaphors for the color yellow and they can make art works mean yellow<\/em> by simply placing them in a \u201cyellowistic chamber.\u201d (Of their monomaniacal critical thought.) It\u2019s a quick and dirty deconstruction of art in the most simplistic way. In my view, whatever can be reduced to the color yellow in a work of art, when a yellowist gets done with it, was beside the point to begin with\u2014what actually matters will always resist interpretation as content. The yellowists don\u2019t go so far as to say this, but by taking all ostensible meaning in art and reducing it to the color yellow, they force you to realize that this is where postmodern criticism leads, the arbitrary domination of the critic over the work itself, as well as the tired dominion of the intellect over a mysterious, yet integral act of imagination.<\/p>\n

More on this tomorrow.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Remember when John Goodman, in The Big Lebowski, discovered he was facing philosophers when he thought they were only three dweebs who used ferrets as weapons and dressed like Dieter hosting Sprockets on Saturday Night Live? His reaction: Oh my god, not nihilists. We\u2019re fucked. You best listen to Mr. Goodman if you\u2019re deeply invested […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[13,14,11,12,10],"class_list":["post-1886","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized","tag-lodyga","tag-rothko-vandalism","tag-tate-modern","tag-umamets","tag-yellowism"],"yoast_head":"\nOK, I am curious, yellowists - represent<\/title>\n<meta name=\"robots\" content=\"index, follow, max-snippet:-1, max-image-preview:large, max-video-preview:-1\" \/>\n<link rel=\"canonical\" href=\"https:\/\/thedorseypost.com\/?p=1886\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:locale\" content=\"en_US\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:type\" content=\"article\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:title\" content=\"OK, I am curious, yellowists - represent\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:description\" content=\"Remember when John Goodman, in The Big Lebowski, discovered he was facing philosophers when he thought they were only three dweebs who used ferrets as weapons and dressed like Dieter hosting Sprockets on Saturday Night Live? 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