Relevance relapse?
Missing in action: ARTnews overlooks The Art Guys in its Dynamic Duos list
Michael Elmgreen, left, and Ingar DragsetPhoto by Emanuele Cremaschi
The Art GuysPhoto by Mark Seliger
Claes Oldenburg and Coosje van Bruggen, "Spoonbridge and Cherry"
"Stop Repair Prepare. Jennifer Allora and Guillermo Calzadilla," GladstoneGallery in New York
When Super Size Me! director Morgan Spurlock strode out in a logo-emblazoned suit at Sundance, Houston-based creative collab The Art Guys cried foul, claiming the filmmaker had lifted the advertising-meets-fashion idea from a 1998 work of their making. Now, The Art Guys, which consists of Michael Galbreth and Jack Massing, are receding in an effort to detach themselves from the argument.
In a statement dispatched to CultureMap, The Art Guys write: "We believe that Mr. Spurlock has plagiarized our project "SUITS: The Clothes Make the Man" by wearing a dark men's business suit that has been covered with embroidered corporate logos from companies who have paid for this advertising space in an effort to engage the media and the public about the topic of the pervasiveness of advertising, marketing and branding in our culture."
They are seeking no monetary reward in disputing Spurlock's originality, pointing out that spurring any additional press would only give increased views for Spurlock's advertisers. When confronted about the possibility of stealing the idea, the filmmaker argued that The Art Guys' work was too obscure for him to have ever encountered, to which the Houston duo retorted that "SUITS" had been covered in multiple national media outlets, from CNN to the New Yorker, along with having appeared in exhibitions and books.
While admitting that their work has an "intellectual heritage" attributable to such predecessors as the Dada and Fluxus movements, Joseph Beuys' "Felt Suit" and Andy Warhol, as well as NASCAR bodysuits, The Art Guys maintain that they have been plagiarized, stating, "We believe that the companies who have advertised on Mr. Spurlock's suit have been deceived into believing that this was an original idea conceived by him. It is not."
When CultureMap first investigated the "SUITS" scandal, MFAH curator of contemporary art, Alison de Lima Greene, noted that the debacle brought a rare return to national media attention for the Art Guys. Yet the pair was noticeably left out of a feature in the current issue of ARTnews, Dynamic Duos, which details the phenomenon of artists working in twos.
The article, written by Hilarie M. Sheets, was sparked by the first-ever artist collaborative, the Puerto Rican-based team of Jennifer Allora and Guillermo Calzadilla, being chosen for the United States Pavilion at the Venice Biennale. Sheets suggests the decision "reflects how far the model of collaborative, idea-oriented art making has come, moving from the fringe to be on par with the traditional archetype of the artist as a solitary genius."
The author details more than a dozen art duos working in the United States and abroad, both from the 20th century and today. There's the Surrealist sensation of Luis Buñuel and Salvador Dalí, the post-Pop aspirations of Andy Warhol and Jean-Michel Basquiat, Gilbert & George, and Central Park orange gates-famed artists, Christo and Jeanne-Claude.
Sheets also explores cutting-edge contemporary art pairs, such as twins Mike and Doug Starn, who most recently collaborated with a group of rock climbers to construct a monumental architectural structure from bamboo poles lashed together with rope on the roof of the Metropolitan Museum of Art. Then there's Wade Kavanaugh and Stephen Nguyen, who collaborated on an "immersive and organic-looking environment made entirely from paper," recently on view at MASS MoCA.
Type A, which consists of Adam Ames and Andrew Bordwin, recently performed a work commenting on the competitive nature of men, which included a handshake lasting half an hour, a race to scale a wall and an actual peeing contest. Like The Art Guys, several of these duos are men working on themes of extroverted humor. "The Art Guys Agree On Painting," a 1983 work in which Galbreth and Massing dipped their hands in paint and shook hands over a piece of paper, resulting in a splattered-paint piece, preceded that of Type A.
Indeed, The Art Guys' conceptual forays, such as their marriage to a tree at the MFAH Cullen Sculpture Garden and Contemporary Arts Museum Houston in 2007, match the intentions of work by Type A — except that The Art Guys remain rooted in their hometown. Where Sheets' hand-picked duos are exhibiting internationally, The Art Guys's most recent work, "Phone" was displayed in a small space at Texas Woman's University in the town of Denton, Texas. It's not that The Art Guys suffer from a lack of conceptual rigor — they're content with being world-famous in their own town (and Denton).
Another notable pairing is that of Anthony Aziz and Sammy Cucher, who (like The Art Guys) met in school, and (unlike The Art Guys) repped Venezuela at the Venice Biennale. Aziz and Cucher use digital media to create political satire about censorship. For a 2012 show at the Indianapolis Museum of Art, they have made a video documenting quotidian tasks at the studio, although they are dressed as clowns, working as music and radio reports on conflicts in the Middle East broadcast in the background.
Notes Aziz in the ARTnews piece, "Today, as the tools for creating all different kinds of conversations — through cell phones, e-mails, Facebook, blogging — are fostering more collaboration throughout contemporary life, and teamwork is taken as the norm in the spheres of theater, filmmaking, and television, our notions of artistic authorship are multiplying and becoming more complex." The statement applies seamlessly to The Art Guys' "Phone," which invited anyone to call a cell phone which was stationed in the TWU gallery, where they could leave a message or potentially speak live with a museum visitor.
Perhaps The Art Guys should take the Spurlock swipe and ARTnews overlook with a grain of salt. Based on their fitting in with contemporary art currents, the pair is on the right track.
