Perfectly timed for Frieze Week Los Angeles 2024, Kenny Schachter says “I Object!” and puts up a solo show in the former MOCA satellite space at the Pacific Design Center in West Hollywood. The show mainly features sculpture, but also videos, prints and paintings. In this video, Kenny Schachter takes us on a tour of the exhibition. If you would like to see the show for yourself: The exhibition is open daily from 10am – 6pm February 13 thru March 3, 2024, then by appointment thru April 6, 2024.
Exploring the art ecosystem and broader societal issues since 1993, Kenny Schachter critiques the art market’s opaque workings with humor and satire. The exhibit includes NFTism stools showcasing satirical films, inspired by Joseph Beuys’ teachings. Schachter coined “NFTism” during the NFT craze, highlighting blockchain’s potential for art authentication and trading. Futuristic busts of artists, including avatars and real-life figures, are also featured, along with self-reflective sculptures like “Selfie-man.” Schachter’s exhibit challenges norms and embraces technological shifts in the art world.
I Object! Kenny Schachter: Sculpture / Pacific Design Center, Los Angeles. February 23, 2024.
Exploring the art ecosystem and broader societal issues since 1993, Kenny Schachter critiques the art market’s opaque workings with humor and satire. The exhibit includes NFTism stools showcasing satirical films, inspired by Joseph Beuys’ teachings. Schachter coined “NFTism” during the NFT craze, highlighting blockchain’s potential for art authentication and trading. Futuristic busts of artists, including avatars and real-life figures, are also featured, along with self-reflective sculptures like “Selfie-man.” Schachter’s exhibit challenges norms and embraces technological shifts in the art world.
I Object! Kenny Schachter: Sculpture / Pacific Design Center, Los Angeles. February 23, 2024.
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CreativityTranscript
00:00 [silence]
00:24 I strictly believe in touching the art. Art should be touched, smelt, played with, thought about.
00:39 It's not a static thing. It's alive. It's alive!
00:47 Roberta Smith, my hero. She would have a heart attack if she saw this.
00:55 Welcome.
01:00 This is my show called "I Object." It has a double meaning.
01:05 "I object" is something typically a lawyer would say if they have complained about something.
01:12 But it's also me as an object.
01:16 You want to hear something about the show.
01:23 Nothing in this exhibition is 3D printed.
01:28 But every single work derives from a digital file.
01:34 What I'm interested in is a digital 3D file, a digital photograph, or an idea that's conceptualized
01:45 and then rendered digitally.
01:48 However, like I said, nothing is 3D printed.
01:52 One piece is made out of clay. I call it the "Chubb Venus."
01:57 I recently lost a lot of weight. This is a piece I made out of clay.
02:01 I was going to fire it, but then I decided it was too fragile because I wanted to 3D scan it.
02:08 So from this piece, which is made in a manner that could be... I modeled it after the Venus of Willendorf,
02:16 which is a 25,000-year-old fertility sculpture.
02:20 This is the anti-fertility sculpture because it's me as a fat person, overweight person.
02:26 And then I took a picture of the process of sculpting it and had it rendered as an oil painting in China.
02:35 And then I scanned the clay sculpture with the 3D scanner, made a mold, which was 3D rendered,
02:45 but then made a hand-painted aluminum sculpture.
02:48 So everything had a digital origin, but ultimately was made in the most traditional forms of sculpture,
02:57 in bronze, of Roberta Smith.
03:00 The famous composer John Sibelius made a comment in 1937 that he doesn't care,
03:08 he doesn't give a damn about criticisms of his compositions
03:12 because no one had ever erected a sculpture, a statue of a critic.
03:16 Well, Roberta Smith is probably the most profound art writer alive today, or among them.
03:23 I revere her. She renders me speechless, if you can imagine, and instills me with fear.
03:29 But she's an extraordinary, profound human being as an art writer.
03:36 And now there is a statue of a critic that I've created.
03:40 My work spans writing. I would call it performance.
03:47 What we're doing now, as far as I'm concerned, is an artwork.
03:50 I teach, I write, and I make art. I've also dealt art to make a living.
03:57 Marcel Duchamp thought he would make a fortune creating children's toys.
04:02 So he rented a booth, not in an art fair, but in a toy fair,
04:06 and he sat there with these little toys he invented that sat on a turntable,
04:11 and he thought that would be the key to his financial insecurities.
04:15 Of course it wasn't, and he lost all his money, as I often do.
04:19 But I don't differentiate between teaching, curating, writing.
04:26 I often illustrate my articles with my own videos.
04:31 I created my own platform to see my art when nobody else cared to.
04:36 I've made art out of my words, out of my writing.
04:39 These are two prints published by a young British printmaker called Oliver Clatworthy.
04:45 There's furniture. When I had a show in Austria, in Linz recently,
04:50 there's a book in production now at the Francisco Carolinum,
04:53 run by the great Alfred Weidinger, who should be a sculptor as well.
04:58 He's such an incredible iconoclastic museum director, curator, writer.
05:04 He's an authority on Klimt, and also does a body of work on photography
05:11 and documentary work in Africa.
05:14 But I created a classroom based on Joseph Beuys,
05:18 who created the Freedom International University.
05:22 Beuys said that his teaching was the greatest contribution of his artistic legacy
05:28 because he left something physical in the minds of his students.
05:34 So I created seating elements.
05:36 They said NFTism, which is a dumb word that used to mean like collaboration,
05:44 communication, and communities of people banding together with a like mind
05:51 until NFTs became overrun with greed, cynicism, and speculation.
05:59 Then I changed my tattoo to post-NFTism.
06:02 But like these are cubes, which is a classical modernist form in art,
06:08 and yet I turned it into the word NFTism, and it's a piece of furniture.
06:12 So for me, I created a classroom in Austria, and my teaching became my performance.
06:17 I gave half a dozen lectures there over the course of the show.
06:21 And again, like I've--to make a living, I'll do anything I have to
06:27 to afford myself the fulfillment of my life's work,
06:31 which is my lifelong curiosity to learn and to discover
06:37 and to share whatever it is that I learn,
06:40 whether I think people want to hear it or not.
06:42 It doesn't typically bother me.
06:44 But so like I made art out of my teaching.
06:48 I have a sale every year at Sotheby's to sell my craft.
06:52 It's called the hoarder.
06:53 So the hoarding is a pejorative term, which is critical of materialistic people
07:02 that collect too much art.
07:04 So for me, I'm materialistic because art is a material function,
07:11 but at the same time, I'm very ascetic.
07:14 Asceticism is a philosophical pursuit of ideas at the expense of materiality.
07:21 Art is giving material form to thought.
07:24 But I'm addicted to things inasmuch as they convey an idea.
07:31 But I could live or die without my things.
07:34 I just love being surrounded by art.
07:36 That was really rambling on about what to do about nothing.
07:40 But every single day in my house, I touch a sculpture.
07:44 I smell a painting.
07:46 I engage with artworks like pieces of a board game.
07:50 I would say chess, but I'm not smart enough to even know how to play it.
07:53 But I don't know.
07:54 This is Selfie Man, which is a not so flattering depiction of myself
08:01 with impaled like Saint Sebastian with all these selfie sticks.
08:06 And this piece was inspired one day when I was in Miami
08:10 to see some dumb art fair.
08:12 And I was walking on the beach, and everybody was on the beach,
08:17 but nobody was experiencing the sand or the sea or the sky.
08:21 They were experiencing it through this buffer of their telephone.
08:24 And that to me is I am addicted to my phone firmly clenched in my hand
08:31 like most people smoke a vape.
08:33 I made a piece with a baby grabbing the vape.
08:37 I'm addicted to the phone like most people,
08:39 but I use it to learn and as a means of communication.
08:42 So really, what is art?
08:44 Art is a reflection of the social, political, economic,
08:48 and technological times we live in.
08:51 So for me, I'm compelled to work with technology
08:55 and different modes of expression through computers and fabrication
08:59 as well as using my fingers to make a clay sculpture
09:02 because it all reflects our time profoundly so.
09:07 And these are the things that engage me and that make me lose sleep.
09:15 I would live for my art, and I would die for my art.
09:18 It gives me sustenance in a way that nothing else has.
09:22 It helped me through the tragedy of losing one of my kids.
09:25 If it wasn't for art, I wouldn't be here boring the crap out of you,
09:29 this run-along, run-on sentence monologue, but this is it.
09:34 I mean, I would never under any circumstances--
09:38 I shouldn't even be bringing this up,
09:40 but a famous civil rights activist, Malcolm X,
09:43 said he would achieve equality and parity in the world
09:48 for people of color at any expense.
09:51 If violence was necessitated, he was willing to kill for it,
09:55 and he made this comment, which just stuck in my head,
09:58 "Any means necessary."
10:00 And even though in no way am I demeaning anything he did or said
10:05 by referencing this historical activist,
10:10 but this notion of "any means necessary,"
10:13 we have one life, life is very short,
10:15 no one will ever stop me from doing what I've been put on this planet to do,
10:20 which is to fulfill my creative curiosity.
10:24 And art can't exist--a Van Gogh painting or a Joan Mitchell painting
10:30 or a Louise Bourgeois sculpture can't exist in a vacuum in a forest.
10:36 Art is completed by an audience,
10:41 by sharing and communication and expression.
10:45 So yes, art is a means of self-expression,
10:48 but it's also a channel of communication.
10:52 It's one of the few things that differentiate the species of human beings.
10:58 And if there was more art in the world,
11:00 we'd have less assholes destroying the planet.
11:04 Take your pick of President Xi, Trump, Putin,
11:09 these men that are beyond their years,
11:14 that are grabbing on to power, making a fool of themselves,
11:20 causing untold misfortune, bloodshed,
11:25 and, yeah, subjugation of peoples. It's tragic.
11:29 If there was more art, more compassion, more generosity of spirit,
11:35 we would be in a lot better place,
11:37 and art is one of the few things in the world that could do that
11:40 besides a nice pet or child.
11:44 And with that, I bid you adieu.
11:48 I'm happy for you to look around some more or for me to show you,
11:52 but this is it. This is what gives me joy.
11:54 I don't do this for money.
11:56 I don't have an audience in Los Angeles.
11:58 I used to hate Los Angeles until I got here two weeks ago.
12:02 I'm not a movie person. I like documentaries.
12:05 I was always fat, skinny, fat, skinny, like what this sculpture is about.
12:11 Hollywood wasn't going to do it for me.
12:13 It held no sway, no attraction,
12:15 until I've recently come back in a more self-actualized position
12:21 of coming back on my terms, and it's art that took me here,
12:25 and it's been a revelation.
12:26 The city of Los Angeles, the people I've met,
12:31 it's this spirit that really moves me, touches me,
12:35 and inspires me so profoundly to this day.
12:39 Nothing has changed over 35 years of my enthusiasm for what I do.
12:44 The people I've met and the experiences I've had.
12:48 I'm very, very, very fortunate and grateful.
12:51 Life is short, and I pursue my interests in an extreme fashion.
12:58 Now I'm really finished.
13:01 [BLANK_AUDIO]