Robert Garnett
Perryism: Art out of Fashion
from the catalogue ´Perry-ism´, Revolver Verlag, 2005.

It is most likely that the laurel wreath design was originally selected as the logo for the Fred Perry sportswear company because of its use as a token of victory, bestowed to the winner of a sporting pursuit in a tradition stretching back to ancient Greece. For just as long though, it has symbolised the precise inverse of ‘Olympic’ vitality: namely Death, in the form of its use as a funerary wreath. In style culture it has also represented dramatically different meanings at different times. In the 60s, this symbol of traditional British sporting values ­ Fred Perry was back in the 30s the last British winner of the Wimbledon tennis contest ­ was appropriated by Mod culture and came to symbolise a new different kind of ‘Britishness’. It was subsequently re-branded by Right-Wing Skinhead culture in the 70s with rather more sinister connotations. Later it was knowingly and ironically re-appropriated by Gay Skinhead culture as part of a process of semiotic inversion/subversion. In the 90s, this once untouchable symbol was redeemed by retro-culture, before the company capitalised upon its street credibility and re-branded its range so that it is now a popular mainstream fashion label.

…All artists are fashion victims in spite of themselves…
Curiously, and not completely coincidentally, the vicissitudes of this popular symbol might be seen to echo the fate of the chosen medium of these artists, namely painting, and its relations with popular culture over a similar period of time. Painting has gone through its ‘Mod’ phase of 60s ‘cool’ abstraction, during which it was frequently plundered by style culture, only for fashions to change and for it to be pronounced dead by the radical anti-aesthetics of Conceptual art, only to be revived again during the 80s, often in terms of National schools/brands, before it was again prononced dead by Postmodernism. After this it became the prevailing fashion to view painting as being only viable as a form of the mourning of its own impossibility, in works that were nevertheless always very hip-looking.

...Some of hippest looking art is very often made by the archest anti-aesthetes…
So, what are we to make of paintings recent revival - is it yet another phenomenon of the fashion cycle? Well, a response to this could be yes and no. 20 years ago we were told that painting as we knew it was dead because there was nothing outside of the text, nothing outside of representation. However, an inevitable corollary of this is that in our media culture there can be nothing outside of the fashion system either. So, does this mean that it is game over?
Not long the answer would have been yes. Postmodern culture amounted to a level field of ‘signifying practices’, which precluded the possibility of art possessing any autonomy; all art could be was work in and on representation. But, what this left out of the equation was the a-signifying dimension of cultural practices ­ the very thing that makes us consume art, music or film in the first place. Contrary to Pomo fashion, affect wasn’t on the wane ­ as if the whole world suddenly stopped being moved, suddenly stopped laughing - it was simply repressed. And, like any repressed phenomena it has returned ­ or rather has been returned within new artistic practices. Mostly for the above reasons, most art that takes an ascetic stance that distances itself from popular pleasures today seems a mannered affectation, seems palpably repressed.

…Why is it that ascetic, anti-aesthetic,’ critical’ artists and curators always wear black…
New art keeps theory alive by presenting it with new problems. New art answers questions that have not yet been raised by theory. This is not a case of cosy Neo-liberal relationality/interactivity ­ it’s often a case of art fucking the critic up the ass.

…Theory’s out of fashion but it’s not dead…
The event of the New is the practice of un-mourning. New art is made by drilling holes in language to open onto the outside of thought/representation ­ onto the 4th Personal ‘anonymous mumur’ of collective desire that is rendered visible in art.

…The New Expressionism is collective and political…
In contemporary media culture and its fashion system - art is also made out of fashion ­it uses it to exceed it, to go elsewhere…

…Last exit, fashion…
So, it is no longer a question of thinking about art’s autonomy; rather art’s specificity lies in the fact that it is always already going elsewhere, making connections with fashion, design pop, its always in the middle.

…Its easy to be serious…
It’s far more difficult to sense when something cannot be taken seriously any longer, to use one’s sense of humour to detect when a problem is not a problem anymore, and to create new problems. New problems are often a bit embarrassing to the viewer, particularly the critic or theorist. But, this is what makes them think. The really new is never quite ‘cool’, and never will be. The New is that which can only be sensed ­ but only if you’re open to the encounter. This is where the Ethics of the aesthetic begin. Doing this can be risky; it means putting your mask on the line. No Ethics without the aesthetic.

…Collaboration: a relationality of non-relation…
Collaborative practices are today so widespread that we take them for granted. It’s no longer an issue for criticism for two or more people to work together, so normally we just go straight on to discuss the products of this ‘collaborative’ enterprise as if they were the work of one author. In the case of the work of Bouvy and Gillis, however, we are forced to pause, because the kinds of fissures that inevitably emerge in, and the kinds of antagonisms that are constitutive of, any forms of human ‘relationality’ that entail a division of labour are not here painted over and rendered seamless. Rather, these works are the product of the artists’ refusal or inability to mask over the cracks and contradictions that emerge in such a practice. The paintings are literally the work, or working out of collaboration, consisting of the making of a successive sequence of enunciations that do not, perahaps cannot cohere into a right configuration. They are not, and again probably cannot consitute ‘good’ paintings, if we can think in such terms anymore anyway. But neither are they wilfully bad. Rather they are simply indexes of the process of a working ‘relation’ that cannot conceal the fundamental, inevitable assymetry that nonetheless animates the work.
The works are in another sense made out of an interplay of disjunctive faces, gazes, voices and images. A number are concerned with the phenomenon of seduction, of being transported by the Other even to the point of hypnosis. Most theoretical explanations of the phenomenon of hypnosis see it as proof of the power of language over consciousness, of how the signifier can transform the taste of a lemon into that of a peach. But, isn’t it the case that the tone, the nuances of the ‘voice’ of the hypnotist count for more here? Does not the ‘truth’ of a joke lie just as much in its telling? Is it not the comportment, the accumulation of gestures that produces the hypnotic effect? This forces us to approach these works in a different manner, to tune into their attitude.

…There is no secret here. The meaning is written right across the face of the work…
It is much more difficult to be superficial than to hide behind apparent complexity. And, the works here are utterly superficial in another sense. Many are concerned with the surface details of style, with recurring motifs of fashion.

…In fashion, as in art, a centimetre can be a million miles…
As a Nineteenth-century philosopher once said. It’s only the most superficial people who don’t judge by appearances. Which is more or less to say that the deepest space we have recourse to is the sur-FACE.
There is no ideal point from which we can see, or be seen by the other. This is what makes any relation ­ between a couple, between the artwork and the viewer, between the image and the word ­ paradoxically ‘impossible’. But this is not the end of the story. We need not necessarily resign ourselves to the pathos of a perpetually deferred satisfaction of an impossible desire, founded on an essential lack, a forever lost object. Popular culture, more than art these days, shows us that there is indeed a space between the ‘impossible’ ideal and the actual. This is the space-time of the collective going for ‘It’, where the It is the pre-post-erous no-longer and not-yet-ness of that which is ‘happening’. Here it’s not the object or destination that counts, it’s the intensity of the going for It, the Superabundance of the Full-lack.

…Every time we masturbate we REAL-ise this…
With the supposedly ‘transgressive’ moment of ‘pleasure-discharge’ the intensity simply dissipates, and we start all over again…