Retrospective?

I think that one of the more apt reviews of Shep. Fairey's work is by n+1. I think if individual people want to like his posters/t-shirts/ephemera good for them. Art is something that people don't agree on. You can like it, I don't have to. But when the ICA decided to mount a "20 year retrospective" of his work, they should expect someone to raise the criticism that this artist is not even 40 yet. How could everything he's ever done since he was 18 be considered worthy of the intellectual weight of the ICA? Did making a sticker and selling a lot of t-shirts earn him a place in their schedule with Louise Bourgeois, Anish Kapoor and Tara Donovan?

Compared to the Street Level show from a few months back, his work has not evolved into mature work as Mark Bradford, William Cordova, and Robin Rhode's work has. They call this a retrospective, a selection of work that looks back and looks again at an artist's work. But the ICA did not take this opportunity to place his work into a historical construct. There can't be a discusion of growth, as he is utilizing the same tired steal other people's work and wheatpaste in public method his whole career. There is nothing at all looking back about this exhibition. To discuss his shortcomings and his pitfalls. His influences. To understand his place in the lineage of artists. None of this is done by the ICA. Instead they mounted a fluffy piece of propoganda for an artist who already has a large ego.

One would expect at least a mention of the ever present question of his sources and what his work's real political value is. Instead the ICA didn't question anything other than by mentioning that his work sometimes could be read as mass-market and that he is daring and provocative as he flouts a Marxian high/low Art/art reading. Who cares? Where is the intellectual curiosity about him? Just like the numerous blogs that parrot his self-assertion as a Phenomenologist the ICA didn't question his version of his work or his self.

Phenomenology?

As Mr. Frank S. Fairey is the talk of the town, I'm going to explore his work and statements from a few different lenses. First up his manifesto:

The OBEY sticker campaign can be explained as an experiment in Phenomenology. Heidegger describes Phenomenology as "the process of letting things manifest themselves." Phenomenology attempts to enable people to see clearly something that is right before their eyes but obscured; things that are so taken for granted that they are muted by abstract observation.

Kind of. Even a mass market source like Wikipedia doesn't think that Phenomenology is able to be distilled down to a single thing. First let's use the modifier that identifies Heidegger's version of Phenomenology and let's call it Existential Phenomenology. Now, if memory serves me right, Heidegger's impetus to write Being and Time was a reaction to psychologism and Kant's epistemological refinement of metaphysical inquiry. Through the writings of his teacher Husserel, Gadamer, and others who were exploring the realms of fact and knowledge Heidegger was well versed in how we understand, ontologically speaking, our selves and who we are. Heidegger decided to add to this knowledge by exploring the vocabulary used by philosophers to explain being. Something he thought that was overlooked since the Greek philosophizers were discussing things.

So, a guy whose major work gives Ph.D students headaches over the complexity of his writing and his thoughts, who discusses the complexities of the independent subject and sensory apprehension, who was arguing against empiricism and positivist science as philosophy, who asked how we know we exist in an ontological sense-- his major contribution to philosophy was that we should look at stickers in public, that we don't understand where they come from or what they mean, if they mean anything at all or are just quasi-advertisements or actual advertisements for something, and we should be able to disagree if we want to? That Heidegger wanted people to put up random acts of confusion for people in public to make them question things?

And since when did Hediegger not want to discuss things via abstract observations? I'm pretty sure he wanted to discuss abstract things like existence, knowledge, thought, connection, history, aesthetics, culture, expression and other things that were profoundly observable through his Existential Phenomenology, which is, rest assured, an abstraction utilizing observations. But I'm sure that Mr. Fariey is well versed in the Hermeneutic of Facticity and Aristotle's use of phronesis, the differences between ready-at-hand and present-at-hand (which would radically alter his sticker "experiment") and Hediegger's use of alethia in aesthetic criticism. The one about disclosure and the history of world vs. the history of earth? That olde chestnut.