grafik affects

Upon laying eyes on Maurizio Cattelan’s Comedian (2019) myself, I was struck with the near immediate thought of the word “gimmick”. It is cultural theorist Sianne Ngai who put that specific term in my head, she being a personal favourite scholar of aesthetics, and the ways they are seized upon in an ever capital-hungry world. The aesthetic of the gimmick is a proposition that covers the ways in which “gimmicks are fundamentally… overrated devices that strike us as working too little (labor-saving tricks) but also working too hard (strained efforts to get our attention).” She describes them as “always dubious if never entirely unappealing”, and appearing in many guises, crucially including “labor-saving contraptions” and “readymade artwork that interprets itself”. Allegedly, the concept behind Comedian is an absurdist challenge to the (increasingly tired) avant-garde question, “what is art?” But it struggles to make good on the depth of this question, fizzling out as the notion tries to stretch beyond its own attempt to appear outrageous. The work, listed as a sculpture by the NGV, arrives with some historical context beyond this initial artist statement. First introduced in 2019 at international art fair Art Basel in Miami, the work immediately generated the expected audience controversy that it was conceived for. A front cover of the New York Post heralded “Bananas! Art world gone mad—this duct-taped fruit sold for $120K”, and became the “most talked about artwork of 2019”, a “viral sensation”, according to Art De Vivre and Artnet. Cattelan was accused of plagiarism by artist Joe Morford, resulting largely in more press for Comedian, and saw a secondary climax in 2023 in the incident of the artwork being taken off the wall at Leeum Museum of Art in Seoul, and eaten by a South Korean University student. Thusly, its arrival at the NGV is not purely on the basis of a conceptual question, but rather a proven track record of public controversy, perhaps even purchased with the hope that some similar event might occur to explode interest in the artwork’s new place of residence.

Firstly, two articles. Cameron Hurst’s excellent piece for Artlink, City of the gimmick: AI at Melbourne Now, effortlessly breaks down two works shown at the NGV exhibition Melbourne Now 2023. DataBaes (2022–23) by Georgia Banks serves as a crucial example of curatorial programming that presents contemporary subject-matter uncritically, allowing for the experience with the work to become one-dimensional and shallow, rather than contextualised and holistic. Hurst observes a mundaneness that emerges from her experience with the work: that, like Comedian, it promises more than it can ultimately deliver. What Hurst finds is that artworks that over-promise on their conceptual depth, and otherwise obscure the creative labour essential to the realisation of work, lead to disappointing experiences with that artwork. Disappointment, irritation, skepticism, are all emotional affects that are critical to the aesthetic of the gimmick. Dutifully however, Hurst is quick to balance her critique, stating “I’m not a reactionary conservative begging for the return of oil painting … New technologies—are an integral part of life today, thus they matter to art,” which she follows with, “Most artworks about new technology are, at worst, socially and aesthetically catastrophic, and at best, banal.” Understanding how to properly curate these emergent technologies and their intersections with art is a tricky process, but curatorial practice should first and foremost seek to choose work that contextualises these technologies with a critical eye, rather than presenting them purely at face-value. Importantly, Hurst makes it known that the NGV is well versed in taking advantage of gimmick art (something, something Yayoi Kusma…).

And, in a review for Memo Review, art historian Rex Butler hones in on the meme banana itself. Where he lands is a sensible critique: that it is yet another Insta-op at The National Gallery of Victoria. The NGV would hardly be ignorant of this notion; indeed, it’s likely precisely why the piece was folded into the gallery’s amorphous Triennial exhibition in the first place. A way to generate “numbers”, as Butler puts it, has become the most obvious motivation for the NGV’s inclusion of the work on multiple fronts: audience attendance, Instagram tags, TikTok “tourist-stops-you-MUST-check-out-in-Melbourne” videos (a kind of ubiquitous free advertising). It is starting to cement the cultural institution for what it really is: more a tourist destination than an art museum. So be it.

Cattelan himself does not need to commit any more labour to the piece — it is an artwork that fuels itself, moving from one hand of the avant-garde (the alleged questioning, challenging) to another (the self-referential, but sadly not yet self-critical), based entirely on the ideas surrounding the perception and history of the work. As we become more aware of what the work lacks (that the technical does not deliver to us the conceptual), we become increasingly ambivalent about its purported concept, which leads to our judgement: the work is trying too hard, and not enough, at the same time. This fits neatly into Ngai’s assessment of the gimmick. She writes, “If artworks transparently promising “ideas” seem particularly vulnerable to charges of gimmickry, this relation does not seem hard to parse… the gimmick is an “idea”, especially “one adopted for the purpose of attracting attention or publicity.”, Rather than pioneering a surrealist-modernist approach like artists Marcel Duchamp (with Fountain 1917), or even Yoko Ono (with Apple 1966), Comedian seems to only to be able to deliver an image of itself for the Instagramming public, rather than produce a genuinely transgressive question about art.

Gripes with the artwork itself aside, Comedian is a symptom of a larger problem with the contemporary curatorial approach of the NGV. Exhibitions like the Triennial want to convey big “ideas” through a complex range of contemporary art, but are stifled by adhering to those pesky “numbers” that Butler so keenly observed. With this caveat we can come to see how exhibitions like the Triennial can play host to artworks that seem to promise artistic ideas, but desperately strain to perform this conveyance. That straining is a key part of the problem, for as we become aware of that strain, doubt is introduced into our judgement of an artwork’s conceptual “success”. This is a rather clinical way of putting things, though I think it captures how the moment of experience with an artwork can function. An artwork’s conceptual success should supplement the aesthetic pleasure we might gain from observing that piece. If that relationship between aesthetic pleasure and conceptual appreciation deviates, we can be left in an awkward position.

For Comedian, without a deeper critical contextualisation from the curatorial team, or some kind of self-reflexive action on the artwork where it understands and plays upon its own inadequacies, the meme banana performs no great voice in the discourse of “what is art?” Once we find ourselves arriving as this kind of aesthetic judgement, there is inevitably the sense of being disappointed — as the promise of some kind of cultural evaluation, conceptual wisdom, or aesthetic affection proposed to us by a work of art or exhibition has not been actualised. While ambivalence can be a productive mode of reflection for an audience, when one adds the sense of being conceptually swindled, this negative association ultimately undermines and deteriorates an appreciation for a work of art or collection of art.

To walk through the rest of the Triennial exhibition is to be haunted by this failure — and to become skeptical of every other curatorial decision. How can I enjoy the exhibition experience in this state? I don’t expect aesthetic pleasure around every corner, but I do expect consideration, and a sense of being taken seriously by the institution, rather than seen as just another potential social media vector. The NGV is in a unique position to have “an opinion” on contemporary art internationally, given its resources to display art from around the world. For this Triennial however, the criticality is absent-minded, as getting people through the doors to take part in flaccid art memes has become the cultural role the gallery prioritises.