David Altmejd and Andrea Rosen @ UWO

Treacherous driving aside, I managed to make the journey into London and the University of Western Ontario to see David Altmejd and Andrea Rosen give a joint slide talk/dialogue as part of the Visual Arts Department’s 40th anniversary do-dah. This seems to be an emerging trend at Western, as I was just there last week to see James Elkins give a lecture - and that reminds me that an entry on his comments there is well overdue. Next week, perhaps.

I’ve been following Altmejd’s work with barely-suppressed glee since my MFA days when I discovered that there was in fact another artist out there working with werewolf imagery when I entered my own lycanthropic phase in the studio. Between all the research consequent of his role in my thesis paper and hearing Louise Dery drone on about the minutiae of planning, shipping and installing The Index at TIAF last October I didn’t mourn the lack of in-depth analysis in Altmejd’s slide talk - I think Andrea Rosen minded somewhat, and gently alluded to the breadth of issues David wasn’t addressing in his rapid-fire survey, but the audience was roundly won over by the casual honesty of his explanations for the work.

While it would be easy to disdain the child-like simplicity of Altmejd’s surface motives - his instinctive fascination with heads, the obvious fetish qualities and so forth - there’s no denying that the internal logic of the choices he makes have incredible results. In a climate where an artist is typically expected to overthink and analyze all of their choices and motivations, there’s something refreshingly authentic about an artist like Altmejd who exercises a great deal of faith and intuition in a process of making, and is able to discover the logic of that work out of the physical quality of what happens - for instance, in discovering a sort of disco-horror fracturing effect in mirroring the L-bending interior compartments of his early work, and the implications that has in his developing aesthetic. It’s the sort of thing that just wouldn’t have happened on paper or by reading your Barthes (although I can totally dig his professed love of Borges), and that strength of intuition - if you want to be more precise, we can also call it judgment-after-the-fact or good decision making - was clearly the envy of a few undergraduates I chatted with after the talk.

And occasionally Altmejd did, almost despite himself, let slip with an insight into his practice that certainly gave me pause, most notably his determination to make work that ‘intensely exists in the world.’ A comment like that carries the distinct possibility that a work’s existence in the world is, in fact, not a given, and is rather a state that needs to be earned; in Altmejd’s case, seemingly by hard, insistent graft. It’s good advice for us all, I think.

Credit is also due to Andrea Rosen’s own talk on her gallery, which in many respects was a separate entity to David Altmejd’s discussion of his practice; she effectively provided a context within which Altmejd’s rather ideal practice is currently situated, but didn’t shy away from asserting her role and that of her collectors as an inherently creative one in necessary alignment with the artist’s role. One can debate whether this can ever be true of the larger institutional construct of the commercial gallery, but her own conviction in that role was encouraging. In effect, the strength of her ideologies as a gallery owner and curator perform a similar function to Altmejd’s quiet determination in producing work - a parallel insistence on the individual’s drive and potential to act as an agency for change in a wider cultural context.

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