The 'Undoing' of Wade Guyton

Adam Lehrer discusses Wade Guyton's new embrace of anti-Trump art, six months after Trump has left office...

Wade Guyton’s Undoing is the undoing of Wade Guyton. Why do all the artists do this to themselves? Guyton’s abstract paintings, produced with an inkjet printer and minimal physical labor (a technique that was unquestionably radical when he came on the scene back in 2004), regularly fetch $1 million at auction. We can safely assume that he is, compared to the majority of other artists, fabulously rich. So, what benefit does Guyton see in signaling to the art world progressive elites that he's one of the “good ones” by appropriating the images of the fake news NY Times into his otherwise narratively opaque art works? Why would this giant of contemporary art feel that now, many months after the queen himself Donald Trump has left office, was the time to signal his concern about the Capitol “Riots”? In Guyton’s otherwise rather “Guyton-esque” new exhibition at Matthew Marks Gallery’s Los Angeles location, the artist sources one of the NY Times’ fear mongering headlines about Donald Trump and the January 6 storming of the Capitol. And though Guyton has sourced NY Times headlines for a few years, one can’t help but detect a certain deliberateness within Guyton’s choice to use THAT headline, of all the headlines (that is, the one that was used to manufacture consent for a new era of Patriot Act 2.0 and “domestic terror” fear mongering). Perhaps from the perspective of the typical art world denizen, Guyton’s turn towards the political rings courageous: “Oh, how wonderful it is to see Wade Guyton addressing the evil of the big mean scary fascists!” But from my perspective, Guyton’s visual choice is cowardly, conformist, and a heartbreaking rejection of what made his art so fascinating in the first place.

Guyton’s acquiescence to the status quo of reductive art world liberalism is yet another defeat for a culture industry riddled in contradictions and in decline. At this rate, it’s near fucking impossible to imagine a future in which ALL artists aren’t forced to signal the kind of asinine politics that Hyperallergic peddles in its redundant content. There will be no diversity of thought. There will be no thought, at all. Guyton’s anti-Trump art is an omen portending the true end of artistic freedom. If it isn’t here already, it’s closer than any of us could have imagined. Even kings bend the knee to the ideological monolith eventually, or so it would seem.

Guyton’s rise to prominence, even if its rapidity earned warranted skepticism, was indicative of a lingering interest in both rigid formalism AND progressive, conceptual thinking in contemporary art at the turn of the 21st Century. His success, to whatever degree, proved that formal experimentation and conceptual innovation were still characteristics to be saluted in visual art. As Peter Schjeldahl remarked about Guyton’s stellar 2012 retrospective at The Whitney, Guyton’s works aren’t really paintings or drawings, per se. They are canvases and torn pages from notebooks sent through the miasma of 21st Century technology and emblazoned with Guyton’s signature marks, symbols, and visual gestures – not to mention, all manner of visually appealing glitches. “They sure look like paintings and drawings,” says Schjeldahl. “The work is moving, as a counterattack of the spirit on a culture whose proliferating technical means disembody imagination. By making machines do lovely things that they weren’t designed to do, Guyton scores comeback goals for primitive wonder.”

That well summarizes what I’ve always found to be so thrilling about Guyton’s art. Its existence is a potent deconstruction of notions of authorship, artistic genius, and the preconditions of modernism. Because largely absent the rigorous handiwork inherent to the masterpieces of Motherwell or de Kooning, Guyton’s inkjet prints still often manage to evoke all the transcendent energy of those abstract canvases. They are formally complex, and often deeply beautiful. They defy narrative, but elicit wells of ambiguous emotion. And in their utilization of the liquid modern aesthetics and technological processes of now, Guyton’s art inherently rebuked the idea that modernism could not take root in this cultural climate. He accepted the reality of the technological society that he found himself within and he responded to it aesthetically, all while conjuring the kind of formal mesmerism that often feels like it’s absent from our culture all together.

It was comforting to know that an artist like Guyton — a conceptualist that manages to make work that evokes that of the pure fucking formalist — could manage to attain that level of success in this artistic climate. While so many of the artists who fetch similarly obscene prices at auction — whether Kehinde Wiley, Elizabeth Peyton, or whoever — make art that does “the work” of activism (that is, allow bourgeois collectors to morally launder their wealth harboring through the purchase of images that signal social justice, BLM, #metoo or whatever other bullshit they’re selling these days) – it’s easier to imagine the collector who buys a Guyton as an unashamed, decadent aristocrat driven by a fetishism for beauty and machines. Guyton’s work is a kind of mechanophilia; he entrusts his vision to the robots. To purchase a Guyton is to come to terms with our inferiority against the perfection of our technological creation. McLuhan once told us that as one medium becomes re-mediated and hybridized into the next, the new medium might be that which fulfills the duties of the old. Guyton’s works, while not paintings, function as paintings. There is an appealing cynical realism to accepting Guyton: we are powerless in the face of technology.

This is perhaps why it’s so fucking vulgar and contemptuous for Guyton to emblazon his work with the signifiers of the anti-Trump hysteria. In doing so, not only is he condoning the fundamentally false consciousness of left bourgeois ideology, he’s disrespecting his own creative genius. He’s pissing on his own vision. To Guyton’s credit, his art has never previously signaled politics – and certainly never has it sought the political approval of its art world peers. His works have historically been politically blank, or at least rather neutral. There are geometric markings, symbols, and those beautiful and evocative flames that appeared on his pieces printed in 2006. And yet, here he is in 2021, with the centerpiece painting of his show fear mongering about the Capitol “Riots.”

Guyton’s entire practice was developed in response to his inherent discomfort with artistic labor. At the beginning of his career, he remarked how stupid and awkward he felt when drawing or painting. He wanted to make art that required no skill or labor. And he did. But is there anything more belaboring than trying to appease the ideological fervor of a set of rich, propagandized, moral snobs? What a disappointment. Another great one bites the dust. There’s just no fucking end to the political erosion of art and culture.

When Matthew Barney and Brandon Stosuy installed the “Trump countdown clock” — a clock was installed outside Barney’s studio in Long Island City that counted the minutes down to the end of Trump’s first term — a friend of mine asked: “There’s absolutely no way that Matthew Barney actually buys into this hysterical bullshit, is there?” And honestly, there’s no way to be sure. My assumption is that: no, Barney doesn’t care that much. But at least he had the good sense to signal his “good liberal values” and get the rabid art world leftists off his back in a way that didn’t compromise the complexity, beauty, and independence of his art. But Wade Guyton, and his new show at Matthew Marks Gallery in Los Angeles, shows no such restraint. The rest of the show, however, actually looks quite beautiful. It’s appealingly more visual and photographic than the artist’s previous exhibitions. And then there’s the New York Times piece, and it ruins the entire fucking show. It might even ruin an entire career.

The art world convinced itself that it had new relevance under Donald Trump. It told itself the lie that it had a duty to combat this rise of “white nationalism.” The problem with that, of course, is that Trump’s rise was the truest artistic expression of an alienated under class that we’ve seen in decades. Trump’s presidency itself was the greatest artwork of our lifetime, which means that all the anti-Trump art works were actually inherently anti-art. I’d love for real political art to rise to the fore. I’d love for there to be a political art that attempts to reconcile these gaping contradictions between what the art world claims to represent (radicalism) and what it actually represents (basic bitch corporate oligarchy status quo neoliberalism). But that’s not the political art we’re given. We’re given BLM art. We’re given feminist art. We’re given anti-Trump art. We want truth, but all they ever give us is more propaganda. Enough already!

Especially now — when Biden has entirely continued the policies of the Trump admin that art world leftists fear mongered over the most (namely immigration and Israel-Palestine, which were of course the same policies kept in place from the Obama admin), all while destabilizing markets far worse than his predecessor did, and pursuing a foreign policy agenda that can politely be described as a fucking disaster hellbent on starting a new World War — it is almost a pathetic joke that the art world continues to pretend that Trump was some extraordinary evil, and not a welcome cathartic moment for ordinary working people suffering through an empire in decline. “What is the argument for electing the Democrats,” asked Chris Cutrone in Summer 2020. “That they will restore “civility” to American life? In other words, the same conditions, but with a comforting smile instead of an irritating smirk.”

The art world, so lost in the abyss of moral vanity, could not allow itself the distance to step back and contemplate what the Trump movement actually was. The Trump movement was an art movement. It was a sublime expression of proletarian rage! All those normal people: white, black, latino, Asian. They had been abandoned by their rulers, and they answered that abandonment with performativity. The hats, the shirts, the barbecues, the rallies: “LOCK HER UP, LOCK HER UP!” It was beautiful. It was so deeply aesthetic. Trump’s base had the preconditions for a real radical class consciousness to rise to the fore – and surely if we had real communists in this country, they would have seen that, used it, and weaponized it against the brutality of this broken bourgeois state. 

Alas, no. Our “radicals” are tragically almost entirely urban liberals desperately clinging onto the comfort of the world that they knew prior to 2016. But Guyton, I thought, stood above this embarrassment. I thought he was an artist dedicated to his process and to formal beauty above all else. And here out he comes, making a political statement. But instead of a statement made in favor of expression, truth and progress, he makes a statement against Trump. A statement, that is, against art itself. Against beauty. And against the truth. He joins hands with his bourgeois brothers and sisters atop the castle as they look down upon us all, the misbehaved peasants, and they laugh. They laugh at us because they won! Guyton’s anti-Trump painting is not a “critique of fascism,” or whatever, but instead it’s the boisterous victory howl of the feudal lord who has successfully silenced the joyous rage of his land’s peasants. It’s a painting that taunts us. It’s art that rubs our own helplessness in our fucking faces, like the shit in SALO.

But maybe I’m reading this piece wrong. Perhaps Guyton is actually attempting to critique the ways that technology and mainstream media get to decide the narratives that will be (tragically) written into history, regardless of whether or not those narratives are consistent with anything resembling the truth. Is it possible that what Guyton is doing in this piece is what I call a “crypto-transgression” (full article of mine on the concept will be published in AS/SF, a new magazine being published by Amphetamine Sulphate)? By that, I mean that maybe there’s some possibility that Guyton meant to encode his transgressive political statement into an artwork that, on its surface, would seem to appeal to the hegemonic political ideas of the art world. But I shouldn’t delude myself. Most likely, Guyton is signaling his virtue, looking for easy accolades, and flattering the idiocy and self-deception that has become the art world liberal’s modus operandi. Guyton has joined the ranks of the anti-Trump artists. Thus, he’s now a member of the anti-art artists.

This is what Wade Guyton’s anti-Trump painting at his new exhibition means to me. 

ILLUSTRATIONS

1. Painting from Wade Guyton’s 2021 exhibition at Matthew Marks, The Undoing
2. Wade Guyton Untitled (2006), Untitled (2006)
3. Wade Guyton Untitled (2011)
4. Matthew Barney’s Trump countdown clock
5. Wade Guyton Untitled (2006)
6. More from The Undoing