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In the '90s stretch of a time line featured in the handy primer Art Since 1960, the steady march of minimovements-YBA, "art post-medium," "live art," "context art"-is rudely interrupted by an upstart newcomer, "abject/slacker art." As the volume's author, Michael Archer, plots it, the tendency first showed up at the butt end of the '80s and burned out by about '96, though the influence of its lax affect is felt still. Centered stylistically around a shabby-chic variant of Pop, abject art marked a transition (at least in the art world) from the '80s careerism of American Psycho (Bret Easton Ellis's book hit stores in 1991) to the jaded slackerdom of Kevin Smith's 1994 movie Clerks.
The label "abject art" suggests a fittingly belated use/abuse of Julia Kristeva's essay on the scatological impulse, "Powers of Horror: An Essay on Abjection" (first translated into English in 1982), and curator/ movement maker Ralph Rugoff confirms that Kristeva was indeed "very important for critics and curators interested in the abject." Of his own exhibition "Just Pathetic," he offers, "Georges Bataille was closer to the pathetic spirit; that also comes from a history of philosophical thought that deals with the roots of comedy, including Baudelaire's notion of 'satanic laughter.'" Nevertheless, to the academic mandarins such theoretical borrowings felt promiscuous. Denis Hollier bristled in the pages of October; in response to "Abject Art," a 1993 exhibition at the Whitney Museum of American Art organized by Independent Study Program fellows Craig Houser, Leslie C. Jones, and Simon Taylor, he complained, "What is abject about it? Everything was very neat; the objects were clearly art works. They were on the side of the victor."
At the cusp of the decade, three exhibitions mapped out abject art's overlapping territories: Rugoff's "Just Pathetic" at Rosamund Felsen Gallery in Los Angeles along with "Work in Progress? Work?" at Andrea Rosen Gallery and Vik Muniz's "Stuttering" at Stux Gallery in New York. All three opened in 1990, and between them they introduced a handful of artists who would become this antimovement's major players. Mike Kelley and Cady Noland were Rugoff's key protagonists, while Karen Kilimnik and Gary Leibowitz (aka Candyass) were the divas of Muniz's drama. And at Rosen, the then twenty-eight-year-old Scan Landers launched a rigorous...