Not For Sale

Artist Santiago Cucullu has worked himself into a corner. In recent months, the twenty-something former Minneapolitan has struck proverbial gold in the art world—appearing in the Walker Art Center’s multinational blockbuster exhibition “When Latitudes Become Forms,” and also landing a one-year residency at the Core Artists Program at the Houston Museum of Fine Arts. So what could be wrong? Well, Cucullu wants to achieve material success commensurate with his venue success. That is, he dreams of making money even though he makes art that, by its very nature, can’t be sold.

“I go back and forth,” Cucullu said recently of his direct-to-wall applications of various tacky (in both senses) wood-grain or red-vinyl contact papers. “It takes money to make money, and given that ‘man makes the money to buy things from the other man,’ I also make drawings. I have not yet made a direct jump from one to the other—from the wall and the experience to something that is portable… I think that the market will come around, and that collectors will see that it is not a big jump.”

Despite its lack of commercial viability, Cucullu’s work is distinctive. He cuts shapes out of the contact paper and arranges them on the wall. The resulting image—of overlapping two-dimensional silhouette figures, landscape elements, indistinct shapes, occasional words—is a pastiche that calls to mind the fragmented collages of Kurt Schwitters, and the graffiti-inspired pastiches of Arturo Herrera and Lily van der Stokker.

Substituting the wall for canvas was an easy way to set his art apart from the mainstream. “I started doing wall pieces because it felt transgressive for me,” Cucullu said. “I had often felt a hesitation about taking away the physical support, although I am actually just replacing it.”

If such direct-to-wall art is truly “transgressive,” then there is a lot of transgressing going on in the local art scene of late. In the past year or so, dozens of local, national, and international artists have taken to tossing out the middle-ground—that is, the conventional canvas, paper, board, or other surface that allows someone to carry away an artwork—and putting their work directly on walls, ceilings, or floors. These trans-temporary murals, as I have taken to calling them, have appeared at Franklin ArtWorks, the Soo Visual Art Center, the Minneapolis Institute of Arts, Midway Contemporary Art, and the Walker with increasingly frequency.

Among the examples, heavily tattooed French artist Jean-Luc Verna applied tattoo-like images of vamping angels and skeletons to the floor and walls of Midway last spring. San Francisco artist Alicia McCarthy painted swaths of Midway’s walls with goopy plaid-like eruptions of color. Last year, Minneapolis artist Colin Gatling lived in the Soo Visual Art Center for three weeks, painting and repainting a black-and-white mural in the gallery through the run of a show. And four other artists besides Cucullu made direct-to-wall work in the Walker’s “Latitudes”; this included a stunning floor drawing by Jennifer Allora and Guillermo Calzadilla that would make Michel-angelo proud. Called “Charcoal Dance Floor,” it was a large charcoal image of dancing figures drawn with precise illusionistic “di sotto in su” perspective that was slowly erased over the show’s run as viewers walked directly on the image.

We can only guess where this temp-muralizing impulse comes from. Some people I spoke to cited the graffiti aesthetic of the mid-1980s as an influence; others mentioned strategies by minimalist artists of the 1960s to activate the architecture through their work. Philippe Vergne, the Walker curator most responsible for “Latitudes,” claimed that contemporary artists are interested in history—citing cave paintings, Renaissance murals, and frescos. I’m not sure I buy it, given the ephemeral nature of what these post-modern artists are doing compared to their forebears. I’m inclined to think it has more to do with simply breaking the rules.

Then again, the absence of money in the arts may be a more direct cause of this trend. While there has always been a sense that it’s difficult to make money as an artist—with the possible exception of Reagan’s tax break-fueled art market of the 1980s—we’ve entered a period of financial realism in the arts. Artists may have once imagined it was possible to make money by selling art to collectors, and they tended to avoid making ad hoc art. “I never think of it as highly salable,” said Thomas Barry, owner of the for-profit Thomas Barry Gallery in Minneapolis, of direct-to-wall art. “Moveable objects are always much easier to realize for people who are selling or are buying them.” With the arts taking an inordinate hit in the current economy, however, all bets are off.

Temporary art works thrive in an atmosphere where artists’ main goals are to get grants and university teaching positions. A line on the resume for a temporary work slapped on a wall is just as good as one for a well-crafted artwork that someone may or may not buy. In fact, the incentive not to have to cart around such work is strong. According to Suzy Greenberg, director of the Soo Visual Art Center, one artist chose to make her trans-temporary mural at Soo in order to save space in her studio. Temporary art is easily portable across time-zones and through strip searches. There are no shipping fees, no canvas or frames to buy, no insurance to purchase—what could be easier?

It’s unfortunate that the resulting art, made under deadline pressures by artists on the spot, often has a rather unappealing tossed-off quality and lacks the craft and grace of a more fully realized art work. For instance, Jean-Luc Verna’s photographic self-portraits of his sculpturesque body are more interesting by far than his gallery tattoos. And pretty as Alicia McCarthy’s goopy wall abstractions are, they’d be prettier still if it were possible to take one of them home.

In the end, we may have to live with this new aesthetic. In the post-consumerist art world of today, art is not precious, and it is made less for purchasing than for encountering. Or as Vergne put it, “There is a very sustained practice by artists who want to move away from painting as an object—that is, color on canvas—to embrace art that is more experiential.” One can only hope that this trend doesn’t go much further, or artists bent on sharing their experiences may skip making art altogether.