Ladies and Gentlemen, bienvenue: we are the Artfag.

And since our last missive, the weather has changed somewhat dramatically. Pity: for a while there, we were hoping the apocalypse would involve some kind of Ice Age (at least that would be cozy). In this, our latest missive, we have decided to pursue a theme, and so we present, for your consideration, two rather lengthy essays on art-as-product, and the practitioners thereof. We live in interesting times, and while this particularly horrid strain of art making has always swam along quietly, now that art has become (and thus far, remains) the investment du jour, its forward crawl has kicked into high gear. The ubiquity of art-as-product is not some death-knell of the contemporary artistic imagination; merely the outward symptom of art sales fever. We find it morbidly fascinating. We hope you will as well.

What we like: shorts, somehow. We never thought we would, but there you have it. Perhaps a product of heat-stroke, perhaps the sign of an open mind.

How we are: coping. This is our perennial summer state. We cope, and that is all.

What we don’t like: global warming. What with the cold weather lasting until the fading days of May, we were all set to start fretting about an excess of global cooling, but the arrival of June has rather undone that, and now we return to our regular humdrum apocalyptic terrors.

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We remember, if not the specifics, then certainly the generalities of the moment when some kindly soul forwarded us the coordinates of a website of note. This was a sweeter, gentler time, before the invention of such dubiously useful phrases as “blogosphere,” before “YouTube” was a verb, and the world was new to the joys of Friendster. We dutifully typed in the URL, and up popped before us a page that was blank, save for phrases and titles littered like stars in a virtual sky, in various shades of pink, and more often than not having something to do with the word “bunny.” Each phrase was a link that took you to what could best be described as ‘web art projects,’ assemblages of photographs, sometimes a Flash animation, sometimes a wee Quicktime clip. They were charming little things, quick and dirty and easy, and amidst the organizational chaos, one could at least count on coming across a fair bit of nudity (which, to be frank, is really and truly what the internet is for).

We speak, of course, of asianpunkboy, which turned out to be, in fact, the first step in the international career of a young Emily Carr School of Art and Design student named Terence Koh, a career that has very recently turned 5 years old. Asianpunkboy predates this stellar arc by some time; it has been 5 years since his first showing with Peres Projects in Los Angeles, and the two entities have come so far so fast that one wonders whether this meteoric rise has given either Mr. Koh or Mr. Peres the bends. And if it has, they both are too busy making and spending gobs of money to notice.

We have been musing on this particular fellow for two reasons: the first is that those wise adjudicators (thank you, David Moos) of the now-annual Sobey Art Award have chosen Mr. Koh as their representative for Ontario, a decision analogous to one of those English 101 sentences where the grammar is perfect, but the sentence is gobbledygook. There is not one aspect of that ambassadorial selection that makes an ounce of sense: he has neither made his career in Canada, nor has he ever resided for any substantial length of time (as far as we’re aware) in Ontario. Simply put, before Mr. Koh was a New Yorker, he was a Vancouverite . Does he still even hold a Canadian passport? Is that perhaps too uncouth a question? Never mind. The message once again rings loud and clear from the moneyed institutions of the True North, Insecure but Free: the best kind of Canadian artist is made in the United States.

[June 25, 2008: we stand corrected, by none other than Mr. Javier Peres, as it turns out, who has informed us via email that Mr. Koh was raised in Ontario. In summary: we are being read by all the right people, David Moos' territorial selections stand as accurate, and the Sobey Award can flatter Mr. Koh unfettered.]

The second reason is that his latest magnum opus spent the 10 days of the Inside Out Gay, Lesbian and What Have You Festival screening at the Beaver. Without even seeing one nanosecond of it, its hubris grabbed us by our lapels and shook vigorously; it is a six-hour film entitled “GOD.” We didn’t make any particularly special trips Beaver-ward so that we might gaze exclusively on an LCD screen while 6 hours worth of partiers came and went. No, we happened upon it in fits and starts – sometimes at a meal, most often during a night of (ahem) socializing. And our curiosity was piqued. So we plied our various connections, extended our sundry tentacles, and managed to procure a 3-DVD affair that we could peruse at our leisure. And, like most things that require you to sit still for 6 hours without going or getting anywhere, it was most decidedly not worth the effort, either of sitting down, or hitting the ‘play’ button on our remote. In the interest of full disclosure, at about the 20 minute mark, we decided it was prudent to watch it on fast-forward, so only 2 hours of our lives were spent in a state of nauseated abysmal misery in which we would have gladly ate our own eyes.

The film is silent, and consists of a series of interwoven scenes shot in grainy black and white film (no, not video, film – the more budgetary-minded among us can now begin their mental tally of just how much this unqualified wreckage cost to produce). The bulk of the shots involve a group of naked, skinny young gay twenty-somethings (at least they didn’t spend a lot of money on costumes) lined up at a bar, substance abusing, and three young gays chain-fucking (the end of the chain being Mr. Koh). Then there are the rest of the little moments that pile up ad infinitum: Mr. Koh cavorting with what we’ve been assured is a wax sculpture, Mr. Koh in drag, Mr. Koh smoking, Mr. Koh in a black leather jacket, Mr. Koh hugging a white horse, Mr. Koh in a graveyard, footage of somebody dressed as “The Bishop,” according to the Inside Out program write-up. At first glace, we thought he was a Klansman (a white sheet can only convey so much – again, the costume budget seems to be the only place where any economizing was done). And that’s it.

What does it all mean? Nothing. This is yet another entry in the Cute Fag Art stakes, where pretty boys do naughty things, and because the lighting is patchy and the camera is shaky, this betokens metaphorical depth. Its images are too commonplace to be grandiose. And at six hours, edited like an amphetamine trip, it is far too frantic to be meditative, and far too easily ignored to qualify as an exercise in endurance. Thus, its actual content fails to live up to its hubristic intention. Its comprising scenes are either banal or trite, and when tied together, seem rote, conceived according to a shorthand of grittiness or depravity, and thus neither gritty nor depraved (we can’t imagine anyone in the art world in 2008 who’d be the remotest bit perturbed by cute guys ass-fucking). Just as its all-caps title is an empty gesture of authority, the film is an empty gesture of perversion. It comes across as pure product: beautiful to look at, and otherwise devoid of substance.

We’re sure some meat-headed queer academician will, with breathless enthusiasm, confuse content for substance, and apologize for this waste of celluloid by christening it Dionysiac and piling a great wet heap of blue-chip precedents all over it. No doubt Andy Warhol and Kenneth Anger and Jack Smith and Pier Paolo Pasolini will end up shoved into the lubricious gangbang of justifying cross-references. And perhaps this will fool the foolhardy. But the fact remains that this is in perfect keeping with the rest of Mr. Koh’s oeuvre: pretty, bombastic, and utterly meaningless.

The asianpunkboy website could accommodate Mr. Koh’s silliness and vacuity simply because the internet is, with few exceptions, a storehouse for shallow things that offer instantaneous rewards: pornography, shopping, 2 minute snippets of captured video, all a click away (we include our own endeavour under this umbrella – as of our last checking of our website statistics, over 80% of visitors spend 30 seconds or less there). But once Mr. Koh moved into the physical, this tendency became immediately apparent; what can one say (and what has been said) of Mr. Koh’s flour-filled gallery other than that it looks quite lovely? Of an installation of hundreds broken molds of the artist’s face, entitled “Crackhead,” natch, or a chandelier covered in a heap of muck and junk including, to quote the Saatchi gallery, “rope from a ship found after midnight,” what can one offer other than that it is visually arresting? In fact, ‘visually arresting’ (if we can congratulate ourselves for a moment) is le mot juste. These works are designed so that their physical splendour stops all thought; or more accurately, their visual splendour takes the place of thought. Again and again, in the face of this parade of mere products, we strike our refrain: content is not substance.

Similarly, “GOD” is a riot of admittedly beautifully composed images in stark black and white (for this, we have Koh’s photographer, Michel Balagué to thank) that have no real relationship to one another, clear or otherwise. One explanation for this project might be that Koh is, in fact, planning to produce pornography; perhaps this was a dry run that needed a bit of tarting up so that he could sell it to the art crowd. Or perhaps no explanation is necessary; the images are here together because he wished to enact a whim – he’s certainly wealthy enough to independently finance the procuring of all that film equipment, to say nothing of the boys and the white horse. Whatever the case may be, the most telling moment of “GOD”, both narratively and conceptually, is when Koh, surrounded by his bevy of boy beauties, leans down to do a line of coke. In fact, “GOD” is the fantasy of the cokehead: a self-deluded, grandiose cacophony of disjointed imagery that runs frantically and at top speed on its own exhausted fumes.

And now, ladies and gentlemen, more bad news: the awfulness of the film simply doesn’t matter. Too many people have too much at stake for him to flop. He is held aloft by a gaggle of A-List buyers – Saatchi, de Pury, to name two off the top of our head – whose investments need protecting, and so his star will rise ever higher. The purchase of prestige is not the only reality, but nevertheless a significant one in this, the art game at the dawn of the 21st century. So we shan’t be surprised when the hosannas emanate from the general direction of ArtForum, or when a luxuriantly designed boxed set, with an introduction by either AA Bronson (who, by the by, is doing a nifty job these days of marketing himself as God) or Bruce LaBruce, and liner notes by one of the damaged-fag writers – our money’s on either Dennis Cooper or Bruce Benderson – makes a commercially available appearance.

And here is the worst news of all: Mr. Koh is representative of the current state of art. Neither he nor his bloated and ever-burgeoning reputation are in any way exceptional. It is not as if one is flummoxed by just how it is that this young man and his silly (and increasingly expensive) art practice managed to outshine a vast field of astounding geniuses. No: he is another drop in a torrential rush tailored to meet the demands of an overexcited art market. He is another exemplar in a vast field of makers of art-as-product. The appearance of something is easier, more easily consumed, and therefore more profitable, than the thing itself. Furthermore, it is not for him to fret at the appearance of shallowness; the application of critical theory to anything that lingers in a white cube gallery has now become the established dogma of the process of art sales – expenditures are justified by a nimbus of academese attesting to the Relevance of this or that object. Perhaps this is the true crime: that no matter the levels of vacuity to which Mr. Koh descends, there will always be someone with a PhD there to greet him, spinning his dross into golden critical genius with reams of jargonified ad copy. Wherever the burden of guilt lies, for the present, the fact remains that he and scores of others like him have created fortunes and reputations out of shallow things that offer instantaneous rewards: a pretty white room filled with pretty white dust; or a pretty white gallery filled with pretty little sculptures; or a pretty film full of pretty boys that can simultaneously be the object of flitting attention in a crowded, noisy bar and be internationally lauded as a creation of significance by a hot young art star.

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Among the numerous things that pass across our visual and intellectual field that we choose to ignore, the Thrush Holmes Empire was, if not chief among them, certainly amidst that neglected pile. We thought it perfectly obvious what was going on thereabouts, and concomitantly thought that no comment was needed. But now, some time hence, people are commenting, and we have been noticing, with some amusement, others noticing: a blurb in this newspaper, photograph in this magazine, and now a smartly written profile article in Toronto Life. And now that we’re generally on the topic of parsing that wicked little phrase ‘objets d’art,’ and those who might weigh more heavily on the former of the two words, we have decided to stoop to analyze.

We shan’t (or at least shall do our level best to refrain from) criticizing the works themselves, if only because it seems gauche to criticize naïve art. For, ladies and gentlemen, let’s be blunt about things: that is what his work is. His tenure in an art school proper lasted a grand total of two weeks; he is untrained, save perhaps what few crumbs a high school curriculum can toss in the way of art tutorship. This naiveté is writ large all over his work, and its ever-expanding size and multitude, to say nothing of the ostentation of its display, only makes the writ all the larger. Although this is where the naïve art bit fails as an excuse. Mr. Holmes is not a schizophrenic janitor, or some similarly disenfranchised soul, pouring their hearts out on the margins of an indifferent world. He has the means to fund an exceptional education, but seemingly cannot be bothered.

What can one say of someone who attaches a light source, a neon light source no less, onto his painted surface? One can say that this is someone who can complete a circuit, but who has not the slightest clue what paint is and what it can do; someone who has not been taught that paint is in and of itself a light source, and thus, no neon is necessary for razzle-dazzle; someone who does not have the experience to realize that a neon light will cast its immediate environs in obliterating shadow. What can one say of someone who makes an 8-foot photomontage, and then covers it in sheets of Plexiglas? One can say that this is someone who has not had training enough to have confidence in the communicative properties of their own surfaces, and so heaps on the shiny-shiny willy-nilly in the hopes that it will do the communicating for him. These are the elementary missteps of someone who wants to make huge statements but whose material and formal knowledge lags far behind their declarative intent. These are mistakes that a good teacher would recognize as the hallmarks of ambition, and instruct and guide in order that one may have the tools to realize said ambition. But no such teacher was ever present, and to some desperate gullibles, Mr. Holmes might demonstrate that no teacher is needed. What Mr. Holmes himself believes not for us to guess at, but the fact that, according to the Toronto Life profile, he withdrew from OCAD after they denied his request to bypass the first three years of an undergraduate degree is surely a profound insight.

Of course, school is not the answer to everything, and often one is subjected therein to a host of embittering experiences, which sour the creative process (we would imagine, that were Mr. Holmes to engage in undergraduate studies now, he would be met with a wall of professional jealousy). But this demand of his to skip to the front of the line implies a certain attitude to one’s profession, and therein lies the problem with the Thrush Holmes Empire.

All other complaints are merely the griping of those who have a quaint, if dogged, fealty to unspoken rules and imagined due processes. The case could be made against his ostentation – after all, it’s not as if he simply bought himself a studio space in which to work quietly, sometimes poking his head out to see what his neighbours might be up to; no, he has set up his atelier so that it is in full view of the entire street. But however one phrases it, this complaint is underscored by envy; and let us never begrudge someone their honestly made income (yes: he has what he has because of honest hard work; what one may think of the aesthetic qualities of that work is, for this instance, immaterial). The invasiveness of his enterprise on the furiously overdeveloped Queen West strip is not palatable, but it is not The Problem. Nor is it the fact that he hasn’t Gone About It The Right Way, although this latter complaint is a symptom of The Problem of which we speak: impatience.

What the Thrush Holmes Empire broadcasts more loudly than anything else is impatience. It was broadcast in his sudden arrival, in his sudden reluctance to show other artists, and it is broadcast in the rate at which he produces his work. When an art school decided that, in fact, he did have something to learn from them, he apparently disagreed, and because he had the financial means to, he simply skipped it. As to the charges of Not Going About It The Right Way, Mr. Holmes, as far as we knew, made no attempt to insert himself in Toronto’s art scene. He merely arrived, with his grand pile of self-renovated real estate and self-made wealth, trailing his Atlanta gallery, and demanded acceptance via those bona fides, without having done the admittedly time-consuming things one does in order to make friends. We remember his press releases betokening his arrival, with their promises to promote Toronto’s art scene beyond its wildest dreams, as if the city had not existed before him. We also remember his press release announcing that no longer would he play host to Toronto’s artists, as we all did not appreciate his vision for us. Neither his bravado nor his defensiveness (which are, after all the very same reflex) is at all earned. They are merely the tantrums of one who has not been indulged to his satisfaction, of one who has never endured a critique.

It will be interesting to see what becomes of Mr. Holmes now that the novelty of his presence has waned. Certainly he will continue to do as he has done, and pump out the products that earn him his income. And that is what he makes, finally and inadvertently: products. We say inadvertently because he is most certainly not a huckster, and we don’t doubt the purity of his intent (we do, however, suspect hucksterism of his Atlanta gallerist). He simply lacks the depth of knowledge and skill to do otherwise. Is he successful? Only if one considers elevated tax brackets and ownership of real estate success. And it is his considerable talents as an entrepreneur that have landed him where he is, and not his artistic talents. So: he will make more objects, and show them with his gallerist, and sell them to anyone who will buy them. This is all that is required of a living as a product-maker. But to live as an artist requires an arc of growth, of expansion and improvement and maturity, which in turn takes a willingness to learn from others, to forgo one’s own ego, and a great deal of patience and suppleness. We should not and will not speak to his personal, private self, but Mr. Holmes, in his public, professional self, has demonstrated none of the above

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