Cohan and Leslie Gallery’s press release of Tim Lee: shame!

The following is a press release by Cohan and Leslie gallery about Tim Lee’s solo show. Afterwards is our response:

Tim operates within the loose confines of an artistic-social laboratory/studio experiment in order to offer a complex inquiry into the connection between highly charged socio-political movements and their transformative impact on the artistic avant-garde. With sources ranging from Alexander Rodchenko, Ad Reinhardt, Bruce Nauman and Public Enemy, the artist combines the templates of varying artistic entities into one cohesive body of work – including video, photography, sculpture and painting – in order to glean a greater (or askance) knowledge of each.

In Party For Your Right To Fight, Public Enemy, 1988, the artist simultaneously re-visits the conventions of early video art as practiced by Bruce Nauman in the late sixties, and Public Enemy’s landmark hip-hop album “It Takes a Nation of Millions to Hold Us Back” from 1988. Lee’s two-channel video installation features the artist’s head reciting the rap lyrics of Public Enemy while flipped upside-down and spinning in both clockwise and counter-clockwise directions as the camera records the performance in a stationary position. By actively re-engaging the strategies of one artist while immersed in the vicissitudes of another, the combination of two autonomies – classical conceptual art and radical black empowerment – flattens both philosophies in order to gain a deeper understanding of each. Accompanying the video is a large-scale two-sided mirror that features the title of the song. With the text appearing in transparent type within the reflective mirror, the entire structure is turned, flipped-over and reversed sideways so that the words appear to be illegible, thereby formally upending the promise of a social revolution.

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art militant’s response:

To the author(s) of the press release for Tim Lee’s second solo exhibition:

I object to your press release. Although I doubt you are trying to be offensive, and are, in fact, simply moving along the well-worn groove of pompous and meaningless promotional art writing, I feel moved to object.
You are just doing your job and I’m sure that you are well rewarded by displaying your ability to “talk the talk.” But please give your audience some respect. We are not all so weak-minded and conformist as to be dazzled by a few hyphens, slashes and parentheses.
If you cannot write about Tim Lee’s work without phrases like “the loose confines of an artistic-social laboratory/studio experiment” or “combines the templates of varying artistic entities,” then I suggest you take a closer look and not worry so much about employing empty phrases whose purpose is to bewilder, whilst conveying your trendy vocabulary and impressive academic pedigree. I have an impressive academic pedigree too, so I can decipher what you’re saying. But do we have to talk in our own language like this? Or can we just talk?
I know what the purpose of a press release is and that it is not an analytical piece of writing, a critique, or an investigation. It is a description, designed to lure a large audience, preferably one that will further the artist’s (and gallerist’s) career. Fine. You don’t need to promise radical revelations (a deepened understanding of flattened philosophies?) or recycle tired sound bytes (ah- so the art world again weeps for the false promise of social revolution). I ask you to cease such irresponsibility. The artist, your audience, and your integrity deserve at least that.

Thank you,

Your Editor at Large