I've been criticized lately for what has been perceived by some as a "fixation" (intérêt excessif) regarding the young art critic and curator Spark Boon. One reader, reminding me of an 'intérêt excessif' of recent American vintage called me a "bully," while another incautious subscriber had me publicly baptized as a "post-modern parvenu," (Journal of the Association of Art Editors, Where the Meek Minds Dwell, Dorothy Pankaj, Spring 2013/ V. xxvi, No. 1).
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| Conté crayon and watercolor on paper, Spark Boon, 2013 |
I feel that I am forced to respond.
The case of Mr. Boon is an interesting and disturbing one. After earning his masters at CalArts, the prestigious southern Californian powder keg of Delphic convolution, Boon made a minor name for himself curating the now justly forgotten New York exhibition Lyotard in Leotards: Transgender Meta-Narratives in an Age of Mechanical Self-Gratification.
His recently published masters thesis, Châtelet, Pandémie and Foucault and the Decline of Imagery in Post-Colonial France argued eloquently if not ponderously in favor of what he called "an imageless ur-art of perpetual subversion". Now, after meeting my good friend, David Schoffman, Boon has supposedly found religion in of all things, figure drawing. His very public Road to Damascus moment is a self-congratulatory mea culpa of titanic narcissism.
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| Pastel on paper, Spark Boon, 2013 |
His presumption toward continued legitimacy within the very discourse that he currently mocks is based on a slight and feeble group show at Brooklyn's Launch/Red gallery where he exhibited a few collages based on his studies of artistic anatomy. This type of ironic dodge is precisely why I dismiss both Boon and Schoffman as reactionary, recidivist Romantics clinging to the tired values of beauty and craftsmanship.
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| The Shoulder Girdle: Front View, mixed media on paper. Spark Boon, 2013 (Courtesy of Launch/Red, New York) |
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