contemporary art magazine issue # sixteen december ... - Karyn Olivier

MOUSSE / LOS ANGELES-MILANO / PAG. 118
Anthony Burdin, KDOP Satellite Studio, Q.H.H.Q, 2006 - courtesy: the artist and Maccarone Gallery, New York
Academia has done a good job defanging would-be heroes,
so has the nasty bogeyman of the market. In LA, we’ve had a
professionalized avant-garde for over a generation, MFAs and
art schools churning out experimentation like the old European
Academies used to turn out landscape paintings, all of it into
the waiting hands of dealers. This is not the lamentation of the
avant-garde wherever it may exist, dead or alive, pumped full of
preservatives for dissection at art schools, or skulking about the
fringes as it once so famously did. Rather it’s how peculiar the
reaction to a new legend (believe it or not) when it hits cultural
awareness. Without probably even trying, artist Anthony Burdin
has become the stuff of legend.
Anthony Burdin: a mythological Western hero, transient visionary,
psychedelic cowboy, recording artist, lonely desert wanderer; or,
for his detractors, a failed rocker from a comfy suburban home
with a lame shtick, an egomaniacal never-was with a good angle,
his realness as fake as anything else purporting to be real, as one
late night infomercial huckster put it so famously, “a genuine fauxdiamond.”
If the art of Burdin has developed a cult of personality,
with a few inquiries, it hardly keeps a pace with the ego of the
artist himself. But being a self-important jerk were a crime, last
year’s Whitney Biennial would have been held in the Tombs and
it doesn’t necessarily make for bad art. Hearing about the ego
of Burdin (as yet personally unsubstantiated), feels a little like
the one time James Turrell’s studio tried to shake me down for
thousands to use a picture. Though I’m hardly an idealist about
the art industry, every once in a while I still feel a little morally
manhandled. But let’s keep on with the myth a moment longer.
Though the US government declared the Western frontier closed
in 1896, it does not appear that Anthony Burdin ever got that
memo. Though Anthony Burdin is officially degreed by one of the
schools that once protected the avant-garde just before ossifying
it, CalArts, one feels that as much as the art world is using him,
he’s using the art world. This isn’t to say that Burdin is taking
a free ride from the contemporary art in an underhanded way,
it’s just that lunatics and visionaries have very little use for any
network of distribution and its internal shams and politics, that’s
if we agree that Burdin is either a lunatic or a visionary.
It’s almost impossible to talk about Anthony Burdin without
talking about the legend that surrounds him. And it’s not a legend
that has been promulgated by the art world and its mouthpieces
and soapboxes (this magazine for example) though he’s gotten
coverage there and in an occasional mainstream publication,
it’s a legend that’s been passed around all good legends are,
word of mouth. I don’t remember who first told me about
Anthony Burdin, but it was around the same time that Michele
Maccarone, Burdin’s dealer, was moving like a tornado through
LA upsetting everything in her path. Talk of Burdin was around, in
the occasional anecdote, off-hand story: all of them outrageous,
strange, and ultimately fascinating. The itinerant artist living out
of his ‘70s Chevy Nova, and when the Nova went on view, his
dealer loaned him a black Prius only to have his dog’s humongous
cancerous sore burst all over the backseat. And he’s always in
the car as he refuses to fly (or have his picture taken for that
matter). Or another story where a stack of drawings worth
thousands of dollars a piece being blown out the window as he
drove to drop them off, only a couple out of dozens saved each
imprinted with a footprint. Or that he stills lives out of his car,
or in a desert shack, the rumors of a failed music career, with
Burdin spending the ‘80s bopping around unsuccessfully through
the hairspray and heavy metal of the LA rock scene. Or another
story, verifiable unlike many of the rest, of the infamous incident
at the Frieze Art Fair (which Jack Bankowsky’s writes about
so amazingly in “Tent Community: On Art Fair Art” published
in Artforum in Oct. 2005) where Burdin in an impromptu
performance in a shack in his dealer’s booth, played so loud
as to cause a ruckus which created the necessary clamorous
buzz through a fair, a PR coup which can mint an artist’s
reputation. It’s as if Chris Burden were shot in front of the whole
international cabal of the art collectors, dealers, and museum
workers instead of a bunch of UCI grad students in Santa Ana.
The famous act of bad-boyishness going instantaneously through
all quarters, likely published in The Art Newspaper or the Wrong
Times, and then perhaps on Artforum.com’s infamous and
imminently well-read “Scene & Herd” column (where I’ve been
known to scribe from time to time). The stories abound: lunatic,
charlatan, genius, all of the above? Who was this guy?
Before we start more mythmaking, let’s actually stop and talk
about the work, if we can separate the two. What is the hook
that we hang the persona on? Videos of Burdin in his Chevy
Nova doing radio karaoke to a number of classic rock hits, under
various voices and personas, the camera style shakey, mostly
POV with a bit Burdin’s hair peaking out over the frame. Or
another video features Burdin crawling through what seems
like a cave, cursing, pushing a dead crow, until he emerges out
of a pipe in the desert, ranting and raving. Another has Burdin
sitting in a parking lot, listening to Led Zeppelin full blast, singing
along with Plant, in a messy impasto of sound. Shacks of various
kinds built in museums, galleries, and gallery booths at art fairs,
sometimes lined with razor-wire. The work in many ways are the
detritus and evidence of the artist, and thus we’re back to where
we begun at the man, the myth, the legend.
Many articles cite him as a self-proclaimed recording artist, and
the few interviews out there, he paints himself as a musician
always, just using the art world so he can get the big break in
music. This kind of naïveté is strangely attractive another aspect
of the legend perhaps, the words from Ralph Rugoff to Matthew
Higgs to the LA Times and Artforum.com, the song remains the
same, all thing pointing back to as Higgs once said that Burdin is
“one of the most interesting maverick artists working anywhere
in the world – his work is so dark and gothic, yet it’s made
under the clear blue skies of California” (as quoted in New York
Magazine in Feb. 2006).
Either way you cut the myth of Anthony Burdin: genius or
charlatan, these same arguments could be made about any
number of distinctly Western characters. In fact I would say
that they are part and parcel, one and the same. Though it’s
doubtful that anyone could touch the stars in the same way
that the last generation of genius-heroes, lunatics and brilliant
self-promoters of the art hustle, Burdin still will likely become
one of these minor deities, rife with tall tales. Part mid-century
art hero and part ramshackle Paul Bunyan or Pecos Bill wrestling
with a new set of myths. Lumberjacks, gunslingers, and brooding
Modernists are hardly de rigueur in the twenty-first century,
and with a fractured mainstream, no one will ever be as big
as Warhol or Picasso. So amongst art-makers, we have a new
brand of Western hero (perhaps even anti-hero): a desert rat
and a failed rocker, galloping through the sprawling suburbs and
disappearing landscapes in a Chevy Nova, his fame as tattered as
the landscape, his legends tarnished, his madness our own.
cm-mousse.indd 1 22-10-2008 10:17:13