The subtlety of stupidity
Jesse Amado's Beauty Spot
Written: April 7, 2003
Jesse Amado's recent installation Beauty Spot at San Antonio's McNay museum is a perfect example of contemporary art's penchant for deriding intellectualism and unwarranted celebration of the artist's own cleverness. The unfortunate truth of Beauty Spot is that its visual experience falls flat leaving the viewer to put their hope in Amado's explanations. Granted, conceptual work such as Amado's cramped letter sculptures should be approached with a sincere attempt at appreciation, but this installation is neither well constructed nor well delivered. It is Amado's own lack of commitment to his ideas that is exposed here, not the validity of the ideas themselves.
"It was a matter of economics; I didn't have a lot of money to work with. If I had had the money, I would have hired someone who knew what they were doing to cut out the letters," Amado said.
Art is not an issue of economics, but an issue of using what you have to your advantage and respecting your audience's senses. With such minimal work, the artist has to expect that every detail of the work be scrutinized, for as he says himself, "I always expect the viewer to use his or her imagination to complete the piece." Is Amado's work truly effective post-everything or a celebrated sham of laziness? With this current installation I am begrudgingly leaning towards the latter for the simple fact that a collection of stolen words overly contextualized does not make up for a shoddy experience.
For example, his use of 6 foot high mirrors shaped into a small cubicle in the center of the space is nothing more than an affectation, used to solicit a "what could it mean...am i part of the piece" response. The flat panels would be more honest had they held pictures of Amado's own face, for his mirrors do not integrate the audience into the work, serving instead only to let his work admire itself.
And what would it see? Poorly cut wooden letters glued to the wall and pushed together. These phrases are to be understood as mental bookmarks from the artist's own knowledge collection. A few words from Duchamp, a few words from Adorno, and the always popular dictionary definition of the title itself, beauty spot. Falling in love with a quote, and sampling that quote to give your own work intellectual credence should not be confused as similar experiences.
"I wanted to reflect humanity and have the human figure in my work," Amado said when asked about the mirrors. My problem with this statement is its lack of self-awareness. Everyone is interested in humanity. The role of the installation artist is always to have the human figure in the work. These are prerequisites for the form. Why require from your audience or suggest that it is required by its use, any pre-knowledge of art historical texts for the full experience? Perhaps Amado's work would be better served in a book or magazine, possibly the year's hippest Art journal, for its audience would certainly appreciate his panning to their lust for art-historical allusions. To put it bluntly, why not just use your own words?
If the words are to transcend their meaning, then Amado must commit to this transcendence. His gap in craftsmanship exposes the art's shallowness and creates the opposite experience of his rhetorical aims. It steals the life out of you, draining your hope for the artist as humanity's representative and leaving you intellectually bored and emotionally cheated.