Means and Meaning: Painting for a Recession

The Economic Art of Sergej Jensen

Rebecca Ahrens

Review of solo show at MoMA PS. 1, January 23, 2011 - May 2, 2011

Denmark-born, Berlin-based Sergej Jensen (b. 1973) is a painter against the odds: in a time when critical theory favors post-object installations and abstract painting is decidedly out of favor within the art world, Jensen revels in the conflict between the real versus the virtual. While surrounded by an overall mistrust of materialism in the current economic climate, Jensen pursues immaterial tangibility. Jensen, who is the current subject of a monographic show at MoMA PS.1, produces “paintings without paint,” as he calls them. His “paintings” reflect the material collapse of our postmodern, informationalized society. Jensen acknowledges the rich creative activity of the past to produce its 21^st century incarnation through a recollection that is time-worn and timid. Following the same impulse that inspires the current make-due-with-what-you-have, recession sentiment and micro-utopian artistic communities, he creates artwork in relation to circulation and exchange. His paintings reveal the process of frugal consumption as a new form of artistic labor. Jensen’s consumption based art addresses these economic and cultural transformations through appropriating the strategies of the readymade and recycling the technologies of mass reproduction, allowing for the art object to persist.

At PS. 1 Jensen’s work hung quietly on the wall. Adjacent were voyeuristic, participatory works that sum up a large part artistic production in the last decades. His paintings are breathtakingly fragile and shy abstractions. A descendant of Post-minimalism and other process-based art categories of the 1960s and 1970s, Jensen de-emphasizes the surfaces on and with which he works- raw canvas, burlap, linen, wool, silk, denim- through subdued neutrals and secondary and tertiary colors and geometric forms. Rather than brushstrokes, we see attended to textiles; he sews and irons patches, applies pigment and diamond dust, joins remnants of fabric, crochets, bleaches, stains, and dyes. But his paintings are never over-worked. Instead they affirm a thrift of gesture.

Within Jensen’s work then is both a reference to high modernist painting and its dematerialization- its funeral. In a recent interview, Jensen states that his first experiences with the modern master painters was obscured by dust and decay- due in part to the poor upkeeping of his local art museum and in part to an early recognition of the inevitability of art historical time. Painting has perhaps come under the most metamorphoses, from early civilization’s wall paintings to minimalist hues and Jensen’s reference to painting is not to deny or create antagonistic affect, rather Jensen follows natural developments of the genre, to work with the remains of a neglected form, to re-stitch what is left after classical, humanist perspective and individualism have dissipated.

But Jensen is not working through the archaeological reconstruction of modernism's rack and ruin nor deconstructing works from the past. He is more concerned with the history of his materials. He reclaims fabrics to produce visual and reminiscent associations from the stains, holes, cracks and other traces of wear. Jensen’s studio is filled with scrap piles, strips of fabric and material for later use. Some may call the obsessive accumulation for a rainy day hoarding; let’s just call it frugality.

While there are obvious craft associations, his use of fabrics reference the fashion and other creative industries as much as they do the domestic sphere. The colored-dye dots on the selvage of manufactured fabric in Untitled, 2005, nods to the materials’ previous life in commerce. The burlap sacks sewn together in Tower of Nothing II, 2004, for example, are money bags used to transport cash. The title of Come on, let's make fifty-fifty, 2003, refers to the terms of the artist-dealer split. Untitled (Binary One) and Untitled (Binary Zero), both 2005, feature bills in various currencies affixed to raw canvas. The money on canvas is an obvious jab at the status of the art market. Here, the global economy is crossed with the economy of Jensen’s gesture. The bills themselves are arranged with attention- the colors blend in and out of one another, rescuing the works from being mere didacticism. The paintings’ use of binary code also speaks to the technologies that run our economy and our day-to-day lives. They map an analogy between the components of the digital and analog worlds. Also, the binary zero and one are allegorical signs for the similar recombinant programming of technology and the elemental materials of his practice.

Jensen boasts that he never alters the exhibition space in which he shows. Opposed to the universal no-places of utopian modernism, he grounds and localizes the sweeping aspirations in today's social world. Installation within the pre-existing conditions performs an economic use of actual space.

The reuse and recycle mentality is indicative of a greater cultural shift from the 1980s resurrection of painting (the art market and feel-good conservatism). Today is marked by the simultaneous rise of environmental activism and ecological consciousness, the current state of world-wide economics, and a post-9/11 reservation of cultural economy. Jensen’s paintings- their characteristic reuse and restraint- are absorbed in the recession of contemporary capitalism. Jensen’s work gives shape to recent reconsiderations of modernism’s utopias. His paintings remind us that it is not art that is on its way out, but the modern myths of painting and of American neoliberal capitalism.