June 2009, Franz West @ LA County Museum of Art

Here’s what happened. I hated the work immediately. It’s messy, convoluted, sometimes downright ugly, deliberately unresolved at times, overwrought at others, and often hypocritical. Here at last was the fountainhead of everything I rail against in contemporary art’s insistence on the false choice between craft and idea. West seems to have clearly chosen idea over form. When in the 1960s he pioneered Actionism in a German culture barely a full generation removed from WWII, I can see how he and his colleagues might have found breathing room in a non-objective, existential art form of individual autonomy that paid excruciatingly close attention to what the artist did when he was being a “regular citizen” in a traumatized society. The Nazis had used visual art as an irresistible strategy of propaganda and control, bent memes of art history to their evil, and poisoned the well of visual culture. And if ever there was a body of work that threw off the mantle of bitter beauty, refused to deliver a message, brashly sought to overturn the dominant paradigm, and amused itself by making people uncomfortable, this is it. And on top of that, the promised interactivity never really materialized—there were a few boring things that could be touched, a monstrously unsanitary shower cap that could be worn, a few other things about as interactive as tying your own shoelace, and little if any documentation of the actions, performances, and time-based mischief of which the objects in the museum’s galleries were, for the most part, the residual artifacts.