David Robbins (artist)

Last updated

David Robbins (born 1957 in Whitefish Bay, Wisconsin) is an American artist and writer who was one of the first to investigate the art world's entrance into the culture industry.

Contents

For three decades, in artworks and writing David Robbins has promoted a frank, unapologetic recognition of the contemporary overlap between the art and entertainment contexts. His work Talent , eighteen "entertainer's headshots" of contemporary artists including Cindy Sherman, Jeff Koons, Jenny Holzer, Allan McCollum and others, is widely credited with announcing the age of the celebrity artist [1] , and The Ice Cream Social (1993–2008), a multi-platform project comprising a TV pilot for the Sundance Channel, a novella, installations, ceramics, and performance, has been cited by curator Hans Ulrich Obrist as pioneering the "expanded exhibition." In its totality The Ice Cream Social represents an emphatically American version of some of the exhibition strategies employed by artists associated with relational aesthetics. His work is in many museum collections including the Metropolitan Museum of Art and the Whitney Museum, New York, MAMCO, Geneva, and Moderna Museet, Stockholm.

Progressively evolving away from the prevailing model of the professional contemporary artist, in his books High Entertainment (2009) and Concrete Comedy: An Alternative History of Twentieth-Century Comedy (2011) he identified and advanced other categories of imaginative endeavor. In 2000 he withdrew from active participation in the art world in order to discover how his imagination performed when not formatted to produce art, and began using the term "independent imagination" in place of "artist." Subsequently relocating to Milwaukee he aligned his work with contexts and formats historically forsaken by the avant garde, positing the suburb as a frontier for art production and creating TV commercials for galleries. In 2016 he produced "Theme Song For An Exhibition," a pop song created with musicians Evan Gruzis, Nicole Rogers, and Richard Galling, which was launched simultaneously on the websites of eleven museums, including the Serpentine, London, and the Hammer, Los Angeles.

Career

After attending Brown University, Robbins was employed in the early 1980s by Andy Warhol, George Plimpton, and Diana Vreeland, during which years he educated himself about art by interviewing emerging artists such as Richard Prince, Jenny Holzer, Keith Haring, and Allan McCollum. [2] Robbins began exhibiting his art in the mid-1980s in New York, where he was closely associated with the neo-conceptual Gallery Nature Morte.

In contrast to the Pictures generation (his immediate predecessors who maintained a critical distance from the mass advertising and entertainment imagery that fascinated them), Robbins pioneered an approach to art that unapologetically embraced entertainment culture. [3] His first solo exhibition, The David Robbins Show (1986) featured "guest" collaborators such as Richard Prince, Clegg & Guttman, and Jennifer Bolande. [4] He gained wider recognition for photographic works such as Talent and The Art Dealers' Optical Tests (1987), which treated the art context as material for comedy. [5] [6] [7] He actively promoted what he termed the "comic object"—an object made with sophisticated comic rather than aesthetic intent. In later works such as The German Reunification Public Sculpture Competition (1991) and The Ice Cream Social (1993–2008), Robbins looked at political content through a comic lens. [8] [9] [10] In other works of the same period, such as the Situation Comedies (1994–2003), he emptied his comedy of all narrative and topicality, creating objects that explored comedy as a subject in itself.

Robbins is also known for the theory and practice of what he refers to as "alternatives to art." Concrete Comedy is his term for a kind of non-fiction comedy of objects and gestures that surfaced in the early decades of the 20th century, first evidenced in the work of German comedian Karl Valentin and French artist Marcel Duchamp, and was subsequently recurringly manifested culture-wide, in fashion, architecture, music, film, television, art, advertising, and design. [11] In November 2006 Robbins' "Concrete Comedy" essay appeared in Artforum magazine. [12] [13] From 1996–2006 he taught a course in the subject at The School of The Art Institute of Chicago, during which period he wrote Concrete Comedy: An Alternative History to Twentieth-Century Comedy, the first comprehensive consideration of materialist comedy. The book was published in 2011 by Pork Salad Press. His other "alternative to art," known as High Entertainment, argues for a category of imaginative production that balances art's emphasis on form-discovery with entertainment's emphasis on accessibility. Born of the new production and distribution opportunities of the digital era, High Entertainment encourages the "independent imagination" to apply art's experimentalism to mainstream forms such as commercial film and television. [14]

Writing

Robbins was an early contributor to REALLIFE Magazine , Purple magazine, and Art issues. His books include Concrete Comedy; The Velvet Grind: Essays, Interviews, Satires 1983–2005, which collect several of his early interviews; a novella, The Ice Cream Social; High Entertainment; The Dr. Frankenstein Option; Foundation Papers from the Archives of the Institute for Advanced Comedic Behavior; and The Camera Believes Everything. In 2020 Accrochage, three scripts combined to make a single narrative arc and formatted as a book, was published in Berlin.

Video work

Video work includes Lift (2006), which screened at the New York Video Festival; The Ice Cream Social (2004), winner of the Sundance TV Lab competition; and Something Theater (2009–present), a broadcast television show created with Bobby Ciraldo and Andrew Swant. Since 2010 he has made television commercials for art exhibitions and galleries, occasionally purchasing time on broadcast TV to air them. His video Concrete Comedy: An Introduction premiered in 2014 as part of MOCAtv's Art + Comedy channel. That same year he created TV Family, a television show in Italian, for Museo MADRE in Naples, Italy.

Related Research Articles

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Hans Ulrich Obrist</span> Swiss art curator, critic and historian (born 24/5/1968)

Hans Ulrich Obrist is a Swiss art curator, critic, and historian of art. He is artistic director at the Serpentine Galleries, London. Obrist is the author of The Interview Project, an extensive ongoing project of interviews. He is also co-editor of the Cahiers d'Art review. He lives and works in London.

<i>Flash Art</i> Italian art magazine

Flash Art is a contemporary art magazine, and an Italian and international publishing house. Originally published bilingually, both in Italian and in English, since 1978 is published in two separate editions, Flash Art Italia (Italian) and Flash Art International (English). Since September 2020, the magazine is seasonal, and said editions are published four times a year.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Allan McCollum</span> American artist

Allan McCollum is a contemporary American artist who lives and works in New York City. In 1975, his work was included in the Whitney Biennial, and he moved to New York City the same year. In the late 1970s he became especially well known for his series, Surrogate Paintings.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Seth Siegelaub</span>

Seth Siegelaub was an American-born art dealer, curator, author, and researcher. He is best known for his innovative promotion of conceptual art in New York in the 1960s and '70s, but has also been a political researcher and publisher, textile history bibliographer and collector, and a researcher working on a project on time and causality in physics.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Pontus Hultén</span> Swedish art collector and museum director

Karl Gunnar Vougt Pontus Hultén was a Swedish art collector and museum director. Pontus Hultén is regarded as one of the most distinguished museum professionals of the twentieth century. He was the pioneering former head of the Museum of Modern Art in Stockholm and in the 1970s he was invited to participate in the creation of the Centre Georges Pompidou in Paris, where he was the first director of the Musée National d'Art Moderne (MNAM) in 1974–1981.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Michael Smith (performance artist)</span> American artist (born 1951)

Michael Smith is an American artist known for his performance, video and installation works. He emerged in the mid-1970s at a time when performance and narrative-based art was beginning to claim space in contemporary art. Included among the Pictures Generation artists, he also appropriated pop culture, using television conventions rather than tropes from static media. Since 1979, much of Smith's work has centered on an Everyman character, "Mike," that he has portrayed in various domestic, entrepreneurial and artistic endeavors. Writers have described his videos and immersive installations as "poker-faced parodies" that sit on the edge between art and entertainment, examining ideas, cultural shifts and absurdities involving the American dream, consumerism, the art world, and aging. Village Voice critic Jerry Saltz called Smith "a consummate explorer of the land of the loser … limning a fine line between reality and satire [in] a genre sometimes called installation verité."

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Roger Hiorns</span> British Contemporary artist (born 1975)

Roger Hiorns is a British artist based in London. His primary media is sculpture and installation, using a wide variety of materials, including metals, wood and plastics. He also works in the media of video and photography.

museum in progress Austrian art association

museum in progress is a private art association based in Vienna. The non-profit art initiative was created in 1990 by Kathrin Messner and Josef Ortner with the aim to develop new presentation forms for contemporary art. The projects are implemented in each case on the basis of co-operation between economy, art and media.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Sabine Moritz</span> German painter and graphic designer (born 1969)

Sabine Moritz is a German painter and graphic designer. She is married to Gerhard Richter.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Oscar Murillo (artist)</span> Colombian artist

Oscar Murillo is an artist working within the painting tradition. He currently lives and works in various locations.

Laboratorium was a contemporary art exhibition curated by Barbara Vanderlinden and Hans-Ulrich Obrist at Fotomuseum Antwerp, the Century City building and various other locations in Antwerp, Belgium, from 27 June to 3 October 1999.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Ed Atkins</span> British contemporary artist

Ed Atkins is a British contemporary artist best known for his video art and poetry. He is currently based in Berlin. Atkins lectures at Goldsmiths College in London and has been referred to as "one of the great artists of our time" by the Swiss curator Hans-Ulrich Obrist.

This is a bibliography for Hans-Ulrich Obrist, a Swiss art curator, critic and historian of art. He currently lives in London.

Joseph Grigely is an American visual artist and scholar. His work is primarily conceptual and engages a variety of media forms including sculpture, video, and installations. Grigely was included in two Whitney Biennials, and is also a Guggenheim Fellow. He lives and works in Chicago, where he is Professor of Visual and Critical Studies at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago.

Simon Castets is a French curator serving as the Director of Strategic Initiatives of LUMA Arles, France since 2022. From 2013 to 2021, he was Director of Swiss Institute Contemporary Art New York, then its Executive Chair through 2022, and continues to serve on its Board as a Trustee.

Lin Yilin is a Chinese performance artist.

Object-oriented writing is a literary and visual art practice developed by the American writer Travis Jeppesen.

Isolarii, stylized as isolarii, is an avant-garde media company founded by Sebastian Clark and India Ennenga. Launched in September 2020, the company is known for its political activity as well as the palm-sized format of its books.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Roomade</span> Brussels-based arts organisation (1996–2006)

Roomade was a Brussels-based arts organisation founded in 1996 by Barbara Vanderlinden, directed and curated until 2006 by Vanderlinden, it commissioned and produced a string of notable exhibition projects and publications.

Lucas Arruda, is a Brazilian painter living and working in São Paulo, Brazil. He received his Bachelor of Fine Arts from Faculty of Santa Marcelina, São Paulo, Brazil in 2009. He was at the forefront of a generation of artists in Brazil who reclaimed painting in an art scene then largely dominated by conceptual art. He is known for his atmospheric landscape paintings that exist at the border between abstraction and figuration, between mnemonic and imaginative registers. Characterized by their subtle rendition of light and a meditative quality, Arruda's landscapes are charged with visual as well as metaphysical questions.

References

  1. ↑ "David Robbins". The Brooklyn Rail. Retrieved September 3, 2023.
  2. ↑ D.A. Robbins, "Interview with Allan McCollum by D. A. Robbins", Arts Magazine , Summer 1989
  3. ↑ Salvioni, Daniella. (Review) Flash Art , September 1986
  4. ↑ de Bruijne, Ellen. "The David Robbins Show," Metropolis M, October,1990
  5. ↑ "On Talent," in Likeness: Artists' Portraits of Artists, CCAC/Wattis Institute, 2004
  6. ↑ Gasparina, Jill, “Le Cauchemar de Greenberg: Sur la massification de l’art contemporain,” Les Cahiers du Musee National d’Art Moderne, Centre Pompidou, Autumn, 2007
  7. ↑ Jones, Ronald, review, Artscribe International, November/December 1987
  8. ↑ Obrist, Hans Ulrich, "Good Humor Man," Artforum , November 2004
  9. ↑ Gilbert, Chris, "David Robbins: Ice Cream Social,” Trouble, #4, Spring 2004
  10. ↑ “Forming Fun: Hans Ulrich Obrist with David Robbins,” X-Tra, Summer 2007
  11. ↑ "Herr Karl Valentin," Art issues, April/May 2000
  12. ↑ Robbins, David, "Concrete Comedy," Artforum , November 2004
  13. ↑ Grabner, Michelle,"David Robbins," Frieze magazine , March 2001
  14. ↑ Interview with David Robbins," Bad at Sports , 2007
This page is based on this Wikipedia article
Text is available under the CC BY-SA 4.0 license; additional terms may apply.
Images, videos and audio are available under their respective licenses.