A lot of what was being praised by teachers and discussed back then was really about what was selling. So this show was a response to that? What was in the show? One was good, two were horrible. And so the two bad ones I just turned into a merch table with the mural facing down so you didn't see it. It sat on two saw horses, which I "commandeered" from the sculpture department.
And then I put all of these posters on top of that, maybe also a print or two. And then you put photo prints in frames right? I was thinking about this tension between rough, austere work and the framing that happens in institutions.
I had this meeting with the Dean at one point, I think just to get the alcohol for the opening. Anyway, in his office I saw all of these framed artworks. It was work by the good students. I thought: fuck these good students. I wanted to pickle my work in these same frames. What were the images you framed? They were like half analog, half digital photo collages. Some of them were hideous as fuck, and others had a more artisanal, sophisticated touch. I framed and hung all of them on the drywall and throughout the space.
There was so much pressure on those shows I remember. I was just having fun. I think I just had a chip on my shoulder that didn't want to conform. For me it went from: why the fuck am I in school? To: why do I want to be an artist? To: why am I in school to be an artist? And finally: how do I find an effective compromise? How do you find pleasure in being subjected? I felt pinioned by this gargantuan school that just wanted my money.
Everything is about learning. You got to school, you learn. Does that make us get more jaded about the universe? Or do we get more absorbed in the Veils of Maya, to speak like a hippie? I wanted to make work like that. That was what I liked.
I mean, I do have four eyes. Like a fucked up dork? Yeah, basically. How was that? It wasn't an easy job. It felt like getting paid to go to grad school. I learned a lot. You don't learn anything in college. What were you learning at the gallery? I learned how the fiction of contemporary art is created. I learned how to write a press release in an hour. You wrote them in an hour? I mean, not really anonymous, but anonymous enough. I think my best writing has been press releases.
How come? I like when writing is instrumentalized. Why did you start your blog, Jerry Magoo? I was trying to become a better writer. I felt that I better start thinking about what I want to be doing as an artist or something like that. It was totally self-serving. The whole blog form is made to market. Every brand that exists has a blog to promote themselves. Everyone knows it. Jerry Magoo started out around the same time as Contemporary Art Daily.
And the difference was simple: one blog wore white clothes, and one blog wore black clothes. One was a prep, and one was a despondent goth, or something like that. In a way, it all came out of listening to noise music. I like listening to negative feedback as a thing that comes out of my speakers. I love the positive feedback too, sometimes—nice harmonic scales.
But in the end, it's all low level cybernetics, volunteer police work to point fingers toward the writing "better" behavioral procedures. You fielded a lot of negative feedback for the blog.
The criticism was always like this: you should be more discursive. You should be more self-reflexive. This was coming from people that studied at the Whitney ISP program. I adapted my writing to the form. I wanted to make writing that was halfway between a shitty emo reaction to the world around me, and all the back talk that clogged up my brain after working at a gallery for a few years mixed with the now commonplace habit of looking at too much art online.
It was like irresponsible criticism. One person compared me to a terrorist, which maybe I am. You once told me Brokencyde was an influence. I remember first seeing that band online and thinking: is this what these fucking kids are doing these days? It was just disgusting, horrible. It seemed imbecilic. It also had this rough quality that was completely unpolished, completely unsophisticated. Its affinity with Magoo should be obvious. Your first show at Real Fine Arts.
It was about Hogg. Can you tell me about that? I based that show on what I was seeing people we went to school with doing online at the time—people had these blogs and they would just spend hours posting images on myspace and facebook.
It was utterly pathetic. Now that I think about it, the show was kind of laid out like a blog scroll. The narrative of the show was Hogg —the story of this little child who just gets fucked by this group of people. The first image in the show is an angelic boy, and the last image is a sculpture of an angelic boy in a cemetery. Hogg is going to take this boy to the middle of nowhere and just turn him into a dog, a sex slave—so the boy walks away.
It's just porn. Why did you decide to illustrate it with these photo collages? Again, to throw these two names together is to recognize my stake in a complex, complicated body of knowledge, the MoMA one sees behind the MoMA, at least the one that crowds flock to on free Friday nights sponsored by a department store chain.
Calling out people on their complicity to the market in such a context is like seeking the abolition of money itself. It is a liturgy we all know, a comforting rite that fails to take into account how to begin to untangle the social relations of capitalism.
What if I liked money, exactly for its alienation properties that free me from having to interact with everyone in society on a ground zero basis? And what if, nonetheless, I was committed to a violent, painful project of the restructuring of the system of distribution of wealth in that society?
Rather, Krebber performs the idea of art vampirism in its most exemplary form, with all the Twilight teen seduction to back it up. The vampires of Twilight are not dominant pigs; they are stealthy survival heroes, with flaws, hiding and assimilating their power, a model of resistance molded in an ancient, decadent framework of human ethics. Topicality in a well-meaning, general sense, like bloggers who identify with being bloggers. But for the semi-anonymous bloggers, with poisoned pen-names, called upon to unwillingly furnish content for a Krebber show—they find themselves suddenly represented by their objects of ridicule: commodities, paintings even.
Somewhere there must be a bitterness even stronger than whatever useful resentment they had in telling it like it is, in saying the things no one said openly in the congenial fraternity of contemporary art. This illusion alone proves that Michael Krebber is a brilliant tactician of complicity. Antek Walczak is an New York-based artist. He is also an active member of Bernadette Corporation. Greene Naftali , New York.
November 10,
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