Supervert Essays

Supervert Essays: Contemporary Art; Technology; Perversion and Terror

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Supervert Essays

Many of the essays collected here — particularly those about art — stem from the period 1992 to 1996, a critical phase in the prehistory of Supervert (which was not officially incorporated until 1998). This period saw Supervert collaborating with Swensonia to produce the acclaimed series of BLAM! CD-ROMs, and it also saw Supervert publishing criticism in the major New York art magazines.

Far from being an ivory-tower enterprise, art criticism for Supervert was like going to art school in the school of life. It was not in the tomes of French theorists that Supervert learned about art but in artists' studios, gallery offices, cafés, night clubs, openings. That's really the way to learn about art: to go to a pastry shop off Times Square with Rita Ackermann or to sit at a bar discussing Knut Hamsun with Sean Landers. Or if you were ever inclined to demonize gallerists as capitalist entrepreneurs exploiting hapless creative geniuses, it would be hard to maintain that attitude when someone as bright and kind as Andrea Rosen tells you, over Thai food, that she runs a gallery for love less of art than of artists.

Accordingly, it was during this period that Supervert formulated many principles which remain in evidence even in the essays and works written afterward. And really they're very simple principles. First, Supervert has always strived to write about things that inspire love or admiration. After all, why be a bitch if you don't have to be? Even in the most seemingly pathetic creations, you can usually still detect effort, sincerity, and intention. Why piss on somebody's parade just for the sake of pissing? Besides, in this day and age, everybody knows that even bad press is good press, and thus the greatest criticism is to pass over something in silence.

Second, whether writing about art or technology or perversion or whatever, Supervert has always sought to be as empirical as possible. Intellectually, this just means that you try not to approach things with preconceived ideas. You try to describe, to understand, to weigh. You try to comprehend things on their own terms so that, if you do end up thinking something is a failure, it's not because the work couldn't satisfy your own taste but rather because it couldn't live up to its own ambitions. It's not my philosophy that's failing me, as Andy Warhol once said, but me that's failing my philosophy.

These first two principles — to love what you write about and to write as empirically as possible — coincide very nicely, since it is much easier to be empirical about something if you enjoy it. And if you add to these a third principle, which is to write as clearly and as charmingly as possible, then you may just be able to transmit your passion for something to someone else. And isn't that a fine benchmark for any sort of writing?

Which is not to say that Supervert has always managed or manages to achieve this noble goal. Some of the art reviews collected here are rather failures, and if they're made available online it's less for their writerly than their documentary qualities. Still, though, the best pieces here — Matthew Barney and Beyond, John Currin's Nudes, Vanessa Beecroft: Classic Cruelty, Animal Sex Machines, and reviews of exhibits by Joel-Peter Witkin, Rudolf Schwarzkogler, and Rita Ackermann — may hopefully inspire the same admiration that Supervert feels for their subjects. And perhaps they may also, through their frequent conjunction of art and perversion, point the way toward Supervert's own aesthetic, an unnatural marriage of vanguard aesthetics and novel pathologies.

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