Man without qualities.

From empty galleries and appropriated objects to paintings on canvas and artist's books, MICHAEL KREBBER's multifarious artistic output confounds easy understanding--let alone description. This elusiveness may in part explain why the Cologne-based artist has for many observers remained a mysterious, even cultish figure despite having participated in nearly one hundred exhibitions over the past twenty years. Following Krebber's recent solo outing at Vienna's Secession and a surge of interest in his work among a younger generation of artists, curators, and critics, Artforum asked DANIEL BIRNBAUM, JOHN KELSEY, and JESSICA MORGAN to survey this enigmatic artist's oeuvre and reflect on its importance today.

Secret Sharer

Michael Krebber's failures have turned out to be his greatest strength. First he failed as an art student, then he failed as an artist. He turned to acting and fell short. Returning again to art, he managed to transform failure, if that's still the correct term, into his own distinctive and undoubtedly attractive modus operandi. We are all surrounded by people we don't quite understand. But Krebber, my eccentric colleague since 2002 at Frankfurt's Stadelschule, is a special case: a painter who, as he says, is "fundamentally" no painter, and a teacher who, he maintains, has nothing much to teach. And yet shows of his open around the globe where there are things on display that look like paintings to me. And his teaching--a peculiar mix of screenings, informal meetings, and inscrutable gatherings around carefully selected books, magazines, catalogues, etc.--has become legendary enough to attract aspiring young artists from all over the world. It's strange. Has Krebber suddenly turned out a success?

[ILLUSTRATION OMITTED]

[ILLUSTRATION OMITTED]

Painter or not, there is no doubt about Krebber's real field of expertise. Hardly anyone knows the recent history of German painting from the inside as he does, having studied with Markus Lupertz before becoming the assistant of Georg Baselitz (he even moved into the artist's famous castle) and then of Martin Kippenberger, the most demanding of friends. "A double bind," Krebber tells me when I ask about this intense relationship: "Dependency in every way--artistically and financially ... but it was also a friendship." Krebber is indeed very much a Cologne phenomenon. He still lives in this city on the Rhine with Cosima von Bonin, the artist whom he got to know some twenty years ago. In the 1980s, when Cologne was Europe's undisputed capital of contemporary art, Krebber occupied a key place in the excessive circles around Kippenberger and Albert Oehlen, the leading lights of the moment. In those days, he was rarely acting entirely on his own. A fifteen-year-old photograph pictures Kippenberger's inaugural lecture as a professor at the Stadelschule. But the man reading the manuscript before the serious-looking audience turns out to be not the master but his compliant assistant. A ruthless operator, Kippenberger had delegated even this symbolic task to Krebber, who, one can understand, needed some years to recover and gain a sense of artistic independence.

Fritz Heubach, founding editor of the seminal German art magazine Interfunktionen, calls Krebber "an inverted Picasso," one who finds little but who is constantly searching. This untiring quest has yielded a surprising variety of strategies and styles. Krebber's art is a zone of contagion, a space for conversation rather than a mode of producing objects. In 1987 he showed a series of floor sculptures consisting of children's clothing sewn together--trios of conservative-looking trousers, a quintet of more-colorful shorts. Although abandoned immediately, this early project--which has been theorized in psychoanalytic terms and compared to the work of Mike Kelley--seems to stress the essential pluralism of his production: There will always be many branching limbs in Krebber's practice, and he likes to walk with others with whom he bonds in incestuous ways.

Before he could return to painting on canvas, several other moves were necessary. A number of exhibitions toyed with that old Conceptual warhorse, the empty gallery, but with an irreverent and even mysterious twist. In 1987, at Christoph Durr in Munich, Krebber left the gallery's exhibition spaces entirely empty and installed in the adjoining office only a postcard of Laurel and Hardy, a photograph of Georges Simenon by Marcel Broodthaers, and the text of an interview that the Belgian Conceptual artist had imagined between himself and Rene Magritte. For an exhibition two years later at Galerie Isabella Kacprzak in Stuttgart (the last she would present there before moving to Cologne), Krebber exhibited just an empty vitrine and two framed photocopies of works by Daniel Buren and Allan McCollum. To accompany the show, he made an edition of the vitrine and three photographs that pictured Kacprzak's still-unoccupied new gallery, with only a few black monochrome panels adorning the walls. But, like Broodthaers's conversation with Magritte, the image of the exhibition was a fiction, the work of a photo retoucher who inserted Krebber's unmade paintings in Kacprzak's unoccupied space--making the photographs a somewhat elegiac souvenir from an imaginary future. In yet another twist, for an exhibition the following year at Galerie Christian Nagel in Cologne, Krebber borrowed back the empty vitrines from their owners and filled them (and the walls) with newspaper clippings, catalogues, and other ephemera. These ranged from a stack of Dan Graham catalogues to a picture of James Lee Byars chatting with a dashing nineteen-year-old Krebber, whose natty appearance seems to anticipate both his later writing on dandyism and the often-repeated claim that he was working on his myth long before his paintings. Part Block Beuys, part Warhol Time Capsule, and part Broodthaers's imaginary museum, the Nagel show would be followed by an even more Oedipal object in the form of the 1991 book Sonne Busen Hammer (Sun Breasts Hammer). Advertised by its subtitle as the "Central Organ of the Lord Jim Lodge" (a mysterious arts society in Graz, Austria), the volume represents a kind of killing of the father: Half of the publication is filled with Lupertz portraits in various states of deletion, and occasionally a hole cut from the page removes entirely the teacher's face.

Since the early '90s, when Krebber made a series of monochromes in oil on canvas, he has systematically turned to painting. But this is not to suggest that he has finally found a technique or subject matter with which he feels authentically at home. "I do not believe I can invent something new in art or painting because whatever I would want to invent already exists," he has explained. Accordingly, he has created paintings that could easily be misunderstood as decorative Informel rehashes, and his works are occasionally intentionally quite close to those of other artists like Sigmar Polke. Sometimes there are even explicit quotes from specific paintings by Oehlen and Kippenberger. Often his canvases look barely finished, like the series shown at Maureen Paley in London in 2001 where a few lines and economic patches of color make us see faces, hair, or ordinary objects such as shoes. What look like paintings are often in fact altered readymades, as in the case of some naively exotic-looking cheetah pictures from 2003, which are actually found pieces of fabric put on a stretcher.

In order to understand Krebber one has to get a grip on his intellectual cosmos: Herman Melville and Paul Valery are always recurring references, as are Broodthaers, whom he got to know in 1977, and his friend Oswald Wiener. And then there are artist friends like Stephen Prina and Christopher Williams in the United States and Kai Althoff at home, as well as a long list of artists, literary figures, and musicians known only to the real connoisseur. This is no doubt an exclusive crowd of carefully selected people, just as the singling out of specific references is very much a part of Krebber's way of working. Quotations and ironic allusions legible only to the insider abound. If you don't get it right away, you probably never will. "Stupidity is not my strong point," is the first remark of Valery's Monsieur Teste, the antihero of Krebber's favorite book.

Already as a student Krebber knew pretty much everything, he tells me, but understood nothing. In a way, his studies were one large frustration, like being forced to write with your left hand when you know--and you try to make clear to everyone else--that you are in fact right-handed. I have a sense that much of Krebber's work is about gaining a kind of lightness. He avoids everything heavy and self-important and prefers subtle, almost invisible, gestures: an understated invitation card or poster rather than a gallery full of works; a display in a window instead of a pompous institutional show. He likes producing for art fairs. When asked about his sources, he refers me to texts he has written about other artists, such as a recent review of a Richard Hawkins show. Krebber writes best when he describes what he likes in other artists' works, which is basically what he does in most of his texts. And most of the time, he may also be writing about himself. The ambiguities and the sly moments of doubling that he praises in others are what he's after in his own work. This is not to suggest that Krebber has a particularly developed sense of self. It's more about seeing something that someone else has seen--and knowing that you both know the other has seen it too.

Daniel Birnbaum is a contributing editor of Artforum.

Daniel Birnbaum

Stop Painting Painting

"Gaps are my starting point. My impotence is my origin."
--Paul Valery, Monsieur Teste

Some say Michael Krebber doesn't translate to New York, but a painter who "prefers not to" isn't exactly going to meet the demands of a city powered by big dumb painting head on. All the paint in Krebber's last two shows here couldn't fill one small canvas by Dana Schutz or John Currin. With "Flaggs (Against Nature)" and then, only six months later, "Here it is: The Painting Machine" (both at Greene Naftali in 2003), Krebber demonstrated here and here again that the proof is not in the paint job but in the idea that puts it at a fresh distance. Just as Paul Valery called the poem "a prolonged hesitation between sound and sense," Krebber's practice could be described as an ongoing hesitation between repetition and interruption (or between having an idea and having no idea). It's never been a question of how well or hard he labors on a canvas, a show, or a style; it's all in the ways he uses painting as a strategy for extricating himself from the wrong kind of work--both the bad works that surround him and the bad works he, like anybody, is capable of--or from the demands of work, period. Krebber keeps finding ways of reminding us that it's not only that artists produce paintings, but that paintings produce artists (and viewers, reviewers, dealers, collectors), and this is the productive relation that must sometimes be interrupted if we too are to have a hand in our own making.

[ILLUSTRATION OMITTED]

[ILLUSTRATION OMITTED]

Whatever Krebber's intentions, his two New York shows and the mere half year between them were like the unfolding of a well-timed joke: the deadpan setup, the awkward pause, and then the offhand punch line. First he came up very short with a series of repeating, ready-made blankets and bedsheets on stretchers--and not a single drop of paint. And then--as if apologizing for this dry spell and promising to really come through next time for New York--he returned to the scene of the crime with still more bedsheets, this time barely touched with a few restrained dabs of acrylic. Just before the second opening, Krebber seemed to shoot himself in the foot by draping every canvas with the exhibition's poster invites, spoiling any easy view or easy sell of his new "paintings." It was an ambiguous move: at once an expression of shame or self-defense (covering his face) and brazen self-promotion (getting in your face). Also, he didn't hang the show; he leaned his work around the room so you'd almost trip over it as you came in looking for the products of the "painting machine" advertised on the poster.

[ILLUSTRATION OMITTED]

Like other machines, Krebber's repeats and sometimes breaks down. The painting machine doesn't always move forward, sometimes it only turns around on itself like one of Duchamp's hypnotically static Rotoreliefs. And by announcing and exhibiting the machine as such, rather than just the paintings it produces, Krebber relocated painting from the place where New York likes to find it (on the canvas, on the wall, in the collection) in order to make it wander from place to place (wall to floor, canvas to poster, blanket to bedsheet) and to show how this nonprogressive movement is what makes the possibility of painting return--differently now--without exactly seeming to arrive. Sometimes the machine stops suddenly, like one of Krebber's dandyish brushstrokes that travels across a blank surface for a moment and then abruptly quits. But you can't begin again unless you stop.

Krebber sets impossible standards for himself. He starts against the wall or in a deep hole of aesthetic and historical debt. Known for his vampiric appropriations of other painters (Sigmar Polke's experiments with readymade surfaces, Georg Baselitz's inverted figures, etc.), Krebber makes the condition of being stuck a key operating principle. He is a user--primarily of everything that freezes and stops him. Following in the footsteps of so many painter-kings, any Cologne artist is always already made and positioned before even picking up a brush. There is no escape from the influence of a mentor like Markus Lupertz or an ex-boss like Martin Kippenberger, and Krebber has famously declared his own lack of ideas, since anything good he might think of has already been thought before (his idea is not to have an idea). So he has devised two escape routes: First, don't escape. And if you do, turn yourself in. Because it's not so much by banging your head against a Polke that you're going to open up some new territory you can call your own, it's by refusing your own style in advance. Krebber has always been careful to work against himself whenever something too recognizably Krebber begins to take over. The consummate fan and disciple, his vampirism is of an entirely different nature than the appropriations and references by which most artists today position themselves and manufacture their own legible signatures. Krebber's approach underlines the fact that artists are readymades too, and that readymades can be unmade.

[ILLUSTRATION OMITTED]

As Krebber's painting machine stops and starts and displaces itself again, it exhibits its own materials as pure means, endlessly separating them from their normal ends. The canvas, the stretcher bars, the wall, the floor, the title, the exhibition invite, the archival photograph, signature gestures of other painters, the social world that painting serves, etc., are all possible materials--ways into and out of painting. We could say that Krebber is less a painter than a strategist, and that his strategy is to repeat and to stop painting in order to go to work on the wider system that makes painting what it is today, what it was yesterday, and what it might be or stop being tomorrow. We need a strategy if we want art to become possible again, now more than ever.

But to call Krebber a strategist is not to say that he's jockeying for a decisive, final position either for or against the medium of painting, for or against bourgeois conventions. (If he ever had a master plan he would surely discard it immediately.) An antibourgeois bourgeois, as Carter Ratcliff has noted, the dandy is defined precisely by how he empties out his own position. Rather than wasting his time and energy fighting over property or his own proper place, he gladly wastes them undermining himself. The dandy makes himself static and detached, and his endless de-centering of his own identity is the means by which he makes the world around him start to lose its grip. In the same sense that the classic proletarian strike suspends exploitative relations of production, the dandy interrupts the relations that position him as a subject: He wages a subjective or human strike. Like other strikes, this one interrupts a rhythm and opens up a gap. In this gap--in the very moment of interruption--one's own subjectivity becomes momentarily available again.

[ILLUSTRATION OMITTED]

If, as he did in New York, Krebber sometimes seems to make painting go on strike, it's by no means a total work stoppage, followed by total change. Krebber never stops stopping, always repeats this. His is a provisional suspension of productive norms with no other goal in mind than itself. It is a way of unlinking painting from the paint job (and, if we bothered to extend the analogy, resistance from official politics). It is an art of suspension and--as with repetition--a means of distancing oneself from any ideology of progress, whether bourgeois or radical. In Krebber's case, the important thing is to disconnect materials from functions, means from ends, in order to reconnect painting to its own potential, but differently now ... for a moment at least. And this moment will have to be repeated.

It is probably less interesting to interpret the meaning of a readymade checkered bedsheet or one depicting a moonlit, galloping horse than to realize that this throwaway image--in its very meaninglessness--is here being reclaimed as pure means. In other words, such a gesture doesn't care to fulfill any particular end, to succeed in accomplishing some ultimate significance or work. Filling the space as it does, it exhibits the place of painting, and returns this place to its own possibility. When Krebber hangs the readymade horse upside down, we might note that he repeats Baselitz, for example, but the important thing is that this repetition renews the possibility of Baselitz in the present moment, and thus also that of Krebber, stuck as he is. Such an "emptying appropriation" not only captures and claims the stolen gesture or image, it makes it return with a difference. Repetition, as Giorgio Agamben has said regarding both messianic history and cinematic montage, is a strategy of renewing the possibility of what was ("that which is impossible by definition, the past"), of disassociating an identity from its proper place in order to produce a transformation. Sometimes the only way to change is by doing the same thing over and over again.

Looking at a Krebber for the first time--one of those small, washy, "unfinished too soon" canvases--you get the feeling that there is maybe no Krebber behind it. There's not a whole lot to work with. For New Yorkers, Krebber is first of all something overheard, a rumor--maybe too good to be true. He's a story told by others (Germans, mostly) to each other. The story has no point and no end. It might begin with Krebber eating a beer glass at another painter's opening in order not to say something about it, or with him suddenly instructing his students never to paint again. Krebber is one of those artists they call an "artist's artist," and when you ask around, his story becomes impossible to extricate from those of the close contemporaries who are somehow or other implicated in his myth (Cosima von Bonin, Josephine Pryde, Albert Oehlen, Jutta Koether, Merlin Carpenter, Charline von Heyl, etc.). When pressed, friends and insiders begrudgingly supply half-answers ("it's a Cologne thing"), as if unwilling or unable to flesh him out in a decisive way. There are moments and contexts, certain jokes, things that are said to be "Krebberesque," the precise weight and thickness of a "legendary" opening night in somebody else's memory. Krebber is like a club you can't get into, until you realize the club was built for you and you only, and maybe you are in it now, trying to describe the view to somebody back in Cologne.

John Kelsey is a frequent contributor to Artforum.

John Kelsey

Formal Education

In his characteristically evasive fashion, Michael Krebber used his solo exhibition at Vienna's Secession this past summer to launch two books and present what appeared to be an addendum of just twelve framed works and a single slide projection of a pink sea anemone. The two publications--a catalogue following the Secession's classic template designed by Heimo Zobernig and an artist's book reflecting on the subject of dandyism--seemed to take pride of place. At least that was the impression I gained from a conversation with the artist, a sense that was reinforced on being offered both catalogues before entering the show itself. But then a practice of avoidance and deflection, of postponement, is precisely what one has come to expect from Krebber, an artist who has studiously resisted identification with any apparent aesthetic, style, mode of production, or, for that matter, even the appearance of studiousness itself. That the exhibition should take a backseat to--or at least share the wheel with--the printed material was entirely in keeping with Krebber's approach.

[ILLUSTRATION OMITTED]

For an artist whose work is so much concerned with diversion and lack of fixity, Krebber currently seems to hold a remarkable position of influence for a generation of younger European and American artists, an imprecise group that stretches from Samara Caughey in Los Angeles to Hayley Tompkins in Glasgow, from Wade Guyton in New York to Kalin Lindena in Cologne, and from Enrico David in London to Katja Strunz in Berlin, among many others. His work, or its affect, has been cited as the guiding force behind recent group exhibitions such as last year's "Formalismus: Moderne Kunst, heute" (Formalism: Modern Art, Today) at the Hamburger Kunstverein and "Deutschland sucht" (Germany Is Searching) at the Kolnischer Kunstverein. Krebber featured prominently in both exhibitions and was hailed as a source of inspiration by their curators and some of the younger artists they chose. The fascination appears to be mutual: In Frankfurt, Krebber's keen interest in the next generation has made him one of the most sought-after teachers at the Stadelschule. Indeed, Krebber has possibly replaced his friend Martin Kippenberger, for whom he once worked as an assistant, as the current reigning reference of choice among a particular group of followers. Which leads one to ask, why Krebber now? He has, after all, been exhibiting for some two decades, though arguably he only broke free from the Kippenberger association and established an independent presence in the past four or five years. Even now, one suspects that for many he still carries the appealing glow of proximity to the dearly departed antihero.

[ILLUSTRATION OMITTED]

Like Kippenberger's, Krebber's work functions as a seductive accumulation of corresponding activities or production (books, paintings, postcards, posters, and titles) that operate on near-equal footing as mutually affirming, complicating, and even negating chains of reference. For Kippenberger these multiple formats were among the many ways to practice his signature method of expressing simultaneously both ambition (to compete on a critical and art-historical standing with the legendary figures of his time and those of the recent past) and failure (in the face of an already-bankrupt notion of the avant-garde and originality). Although failure is also a trope for Krebber, the multiple elements of his practice perform at a considerably quieter pitch. Rather than wrestling noisily with issues of painting, historical relevancy, image production, and innovation, he carries out acts of subtle reversal, contradiction, repetition, alteration, and contextualization that require careful analysis in order to be deciphered or even discerned. And it is these observational riddles--posed by the various interrelated aspects of his work and its installation--that seem to hold the key to his appeal for the current generation, a generation under the sway of what has loosely been referred to as a return to formalism.

For the Secession exhibition, Krebber delivered precisely the type of exercise that has made him such an apposite father figure for this younger contingent. The thirteen pieces in the Vienna show comprised just six images, one of which was the slide of the sea anemone, taken from the cover of the artist's book and apparently chosen as an appropriately dandyish hybrid or hermaphroditic creature. The remaining five images, drawn from the Web and Krebber's archive, included a fashion photograph of a woman smoking, a book titled Athen (apparently a study of ancient Greece that might also serve as a reference to the place where Krebber and Kippenberger exhibited together), a skyline, a butterfly, and a picture of Saturn. Each image was presented between one and three times, framed, and in various states of reproduction. These versions included a print of the "original" found image downloaded from the Internet scuffed and worn from its life in the studio; a photo-copied duplicate; a photographed copy; an inverted image; and so on. The Secession's massive main hall was occupied only partially by these duplicate images, with more than half of the space remaining almost entirely empty aside from the hut-like open cubicle that housed the slide projection. After crossing the imposing expanse of the Joseph Maria Olbrich-designed hall and moving gradually from image to image, noticing over time the slight shifts in appearance among the multiple prints of the same subject, viewers were ultimately faced with the choice of retracing their steps across the fairly ominous empty space to confirm what appeared to be the slight differences in presentation, or trusting their questionable memory of images that were now too far away to discern in detail.

[ILLUSTRATION OMITTED]

[ILLUSTRATION OMITTED]

Was this some kind of observational test for lazy art audiences: three points for noticing that the images were variously reproduced; three more if you could recall the different modes of reproduction, etc.? Perhaps the repetition of the images, seemingly chosen for their relative facileness, was in fact intended to expose their import (Athens=historic significance), or the opposite (Athens=empty signifier), or both? Or perhaps Krebber intended to expose the institution itself, to make one aware again of the Secession's commanding architecture and the inevitable necessity for any artist exhibiting there to respond to it.

[ILLUSTRATION OMITTED]

Such formal, but also potentially critical, qualities are those cited as reasons to hail Krebber as the precursor and exemplary figure of the new formalism, one that is supposedly dialectically engaged with content or context. As Yilmaz Dziewior, curator of "Formalism: Modern Art, Today," contends, Krebber's work has always questioned how to achieve the "'right form,' albeit in full consciousness of the likelihood of failure in such attempts." Dziewior then goes on to state that Krebber's work "functions as a reference for a thematically oriented strategy whose visual results do not at first sight betray the fact that they are analyses of context." Following Krebber's example, then, this younger generation of artists approaches formalism as a type of discriminating connoisseurship that enables not only feats of perceptual acuity but also their extension into a work's institutional, critical, or architectural surroundings. This reading of Krebber's work, however, can be rather superficial, more reflective of a general tendency among many artists today to search for meaning in minute gestures of alteration and placement, sly or obscure references to modernist antecedents, and a hope that an awareness of these "subtle" gestures will constitute a critical apperception extending to the work's (and the viewer's) physical surroundings.

Krebber's installations have, of course, always been characterized by a heightened attention to what might be deemed formal issues: Walls intentionally left blank become as significant as those occupied by work; paintings are installed abutting each other at various heights or are carefully draped with the poster for the exhibition in which they hang. But some admirers might miss the fact that such deft attention to structure is only the underpinning of Krebber's broader conceptual approach (this is an artist, after all, who once devised an exhibition improbably pairing an empty gallery space with a postcard of Laurel and Hardy). Perhaps more important still for an understanding of Krebber's work is the artist's deep entrenchment in a particular historical context, that of the Cologne art scene. Krebber has, fairly uniquely, bridged the two most recent incarnations of the city's art world. In addition to the time he served with Kippenberger, Krebber was also an assistant of Georg Baselitz, a student of Markus Lupertz, and a fixture on the gallery-dominated Cologne circuit during the time of Max Hetzler and Paul Maenz. Following the decline of this generation of painters and dealers, Krebber continues to hold a central position in the new Cologne nexus consisting primarily of the Christian Nagel and Daniel Buchholz galleries and their respective stables of artists.

[ILLUSTRATION OMITTED]

Though not evident at the Secession, Krebber's work typically reveals his formidable knowledge of painterly practice, summarizing in a few lean strokes much of the medium's recent German past, doubling and multiplying his voice with those of his predecessors, and toying with the idea of painting's endgame. Indeed, the codes and signs, the references and allusions, and, in particular, the "secondary" material (the posters, invitation cards, and books, which play a significant role in Krebber's exhibitions) are utterly steeped in a nigh-folkloric Cologne tradition. Yet, viewed from the outside, this quite-specific tradition can border on an elaborately constructed private language or world fortified by an erudite barricade of knowledge, ultimately suggesting an obsessive-compulsive self-referentiality. For those in the know, this interpretive game acts as a reassuring affirmation of one's world, and as the identification of what is "Krebberesque," an adjective that seems to have materialized as part of the Cologne dialect with the artist's first show at Christian Nagel in 1990.

[ILLUSTRATION OMITTED]

Although his formalist acolytes may be wrong, at least partially, in citing Krebber as their antecedent, the current critical appraisal of both the "new" formalism and Krebber's work is ultimately even more troubling. In an art world bereft of easily identifiable or radically innovative strands of practice, there is a tendency to exaggerate the significance of superficial similarities. While the artists so often brought together under the rubric of formal or modernist affiliations may be engaged in worthwhile individual pursuits, they often have little in common, and, like Krebber, are more accurately (and perhaps more interestingly) placed in the context of their historical moment and immediate environment--be it Warsaw, Manhattan, or Glasgow. But either way, I would not go looking for salvation in any of these places. After all, Krebber himself has remarked, "I do not believe I can invent something new in art or painting because whatever I would want to invent already exists." Krebber's own practice could perhaps stand as both an example and warning to others. While a consummate knowledge of his immediate cultural context protects him from any accusations of naivete or misguided notions of originality, the weight of his inheritance leaves room for just the slightest of activities.

Jessica Morgan is curator of contemporary art at Tate Modern. (See Contributors.)

Jessica Morgan