David Robbins (born 1957 in
Whitefish Bay, Wisconsin
Whitefish Bay is a village in Milwaukee County, Wisconsin, United States. The population was 14,954 at the 2020 census.
History
In the early 19th century when the first white settlers arrived, the Whitefish Bay area was controlled by Native A ...
) is an artist and writer who was one of the first to investigate the
art world
The art world comprises everyone involved in producing, commissioning, presenting, preserving, promoting, chronicling, criticizing, buying and selling fine art. It is recognized that there are many art worlds, defined either by location or alte ...
's entrance into the
culture industry
The term culture industry (german: Kulturindustrie) was coined by the critical theorists Theodor Adorno (1903–1969) and Max Horkheimer (1895–1973), and was presented as critical vocabulary in the chapter "The Culture Industry: Enlightenment ...
.
For three decades, in artworks and writing David Robbins has promoted a frank, unapologetic recognition of the contemporary overlap between the art and entertainment contexts. His work ''
Talent'', eighteen "entertainer's
headshots" of contemporary artists including
Cindy Sherman
Cynthia Morris Sherman (born January 19, 1954) is an American artist whose work consists primarily of photographic self-portraits, depicting herself in many different contexts and as various imagined characters.
Her breakthrough work is often co ...
,
Jeff Koons
Jeffrey Lynn Koons (; born January 21, 1955) is an American artist recognized for his work dealing with popular culture and his sculptures depicting everyday objects, including balloon animals produced in stainless steel with mirror-Surface fi ...
,
Jenny Holzer
Jenny Holzer (born July 29, 1950) is an American neo-conceptual artist, based in Hoosick, New York. The main focus of her work is the delivery of words and ideas in public spaces and includes large-scale installations, advertising billboards, ...
,
Allan McCollum
Allan McCollum (born 1944) is a contemporary American artist who lives and works in New York City. In 1975, his work was included in the Whitney Biennial, and he moved to New York City the same year. In the late 1970s he became especially well kn ...
and others, is widely credited with announcing the age of the celebrity artist, and ''The Ice Cream Social'' (1993–2008), a multi-platform project comprising a TV pilot for the
Sundance Channel Sundance Channel can refer to:
* Sundance TV, formerly known as Sundance Channel (United States).
* Sundance Channel (Canada)
* Sundance Channel (Netherlands)
* Sundance Channel (Europe) Sundance Channel can refer to:
* Sundance TV, formerly kno ...
, a novella,
installations, ceramics, and performance, has been cited by curator
Hans Ulrich Obrist
Hans Ulrich Obrist (born 1968) is a Swiss art curator, critic, and historian of art. He is artistic director at the Serpentine Galleries, London. Obrist is the author of ''The Interview Project'', an extensive ongoing project of interviews. He is ...
as pioneering the "expanded exhibition." In its totality ''The Ice Cream Social'' represents an emphatically American version of some of the exhibition strategies employed by artists associated with
relational aesthetics. His work is in many museum collections including the
Metropolitan Museum of Art
The Metropolitan Museum of Art of New York City, colloquially "the Met", is the largest art museum in the Americas. Its permanent collection contains over two million works, divided among 17 curatorial departments. The main building at 1000 ...
and the
Whitney Museum
The Whitney Museum of American Art, known informally as "The Whitney", is an art museum in the Meatpacking District and West Village neighborhoods of Manhattan in New York City. It was founded in 1930 by Gertrude Vanderbilt Whitney (1875–194 ...
, New York,
MAMCO
The MAMCO () is the contemporary art museum of Geneva
Geneva ( ; french: Genève ) frp, Genèva ; german: link=no, Genf ; it, Ginevra ; rm, Genevra is the second-most populous city in Switzerland (after Zürich) and the most populous city of ...
, Geneva, and
Moderna Museet
Moderna Museet ("the Museum of Modern Art"), Stockholm, Sweden, is a state museum for modern and contemporary art located on the island of Skeppsholmen in central Stockholm, opened in 1958. In 2009, the museum opened a new branch in Malmö i ...
, Stockholm.
Progressively evolving away from the prevailing model of the professional contemporary artist, in his books ''High Entertainment'' (2009) and ''Concrete Comedy: An Alternative History of Twentieth-Century Comedy'' (2011) he identified and advanced other categories of imaginative endeavor. In 2000 he withdrew from active participation in the art world in order to discover how his imagination performed when not formatted to produce art, and began using the term "independent imagination" in place of "artist." Subsequently relocating to
Milwaukee
Milwaukee ( ), officially the City of Milwaukee, is both the most populous and most densely populated city in the U.S. state of Wisconsin and the county seat of Milwaukee County. With a population of 577,222 at the 2020 census, Milwaukee ...
he aligned his work with contexts and formats historically forsaken by the avant garde, positing the suburb as a frontier for art production and creating TV commercials for galleries. In 2016 he produced "Theme Song For An Exhibition," a pop song created with musicians
Evan Gruzis, Nicole Rogers, and Richard Galling, which was launched simultaneously on the websites of eleven museums, including the
Serpentine, London, and the
Hammer, Los Angeles.
Career
After attending
Brown University, Robbins was employed in the early 1980s by
Andy Warhol
Andy Warhol (; born Andrew Warhola Jr.; August 6, 1928 – February 22, 1987) was an American visual artist, film director, and producer who was a leading figure in the Art movement, visual art movement known as pop art. His works explore th ...
,
George Plimpton
George Ames Plimpton (March 18, 1927 – September 25, 2003) was an American writer. He is widely known for his sports writing and for helping to found ''The Paris Review'', as well as his patrician demeanor and accent. He was also known for " ...
, and
Diana Vreeland
Diana Vreeland (September 29, 1903 – August 22, 1989) was a French-American fashion columnist and editor. She worked for the fashion magazine ''Harper's Bazaar'' and as editor-in-chief at ''Vogue'', later becoming a special consultant to the ...
, during which years he educated himself about art by interviewing emerging artists such as
Richard Prince
Richard Prince (born 1949) is an American painter and photographer. In the mid-1970s, Prince made drawings and painterly collages that he has since disowned. His image, ''Untitled (Cowboy)'', a rephotographing of a photograph by Sam Abell and ...
,
Jenny Holzer
Jenny Holzer (born July 29, 1950) is an American neo-conceptual artist, based in Hoosick, New York. The main focus of her work is the delivery of words and ideas in public spaces and includes large-scale installations, advertising billboards, ...
,
Keith Haring
Keith Allen Haring (May 4, 1958 – February 16, 1990) was an American artist whose pop art emerged from the New York City graffiti subculture of the 1980s. His animated imagery has "become a widely recognized visual language". Much of his wor ...
, and
Allan McCollum
Allan McCollum (born 1944) is a contemporary American artist who lives and works in New York City. In 1975, his work was included in the Whitney Biennial, and he moved to New York City the same year. In the late 1970s he became especially well kn ...
. Robbins began exhibiting his art in the mid-1980s in New York, where he was closely associated with the
neo-conceptual Gallery Nature Morte
Peter Nagy (born 1959) is an American artist and gallerist. Nagy is the owner of Gallery Nature Morte, founded in New York City and now located in India.
Early life
Nagy was born in 1959 in Bridgeport, Connecticut. He studied at the Parsons Sch ...
.
In contrast to the
Pictures
An image is a visual representation of something. It can be two-dimensional, three-dimensional, or somehow otherwise feed into the visual system to convey information. An image can be an artifact, such as a photograph or other two-dimensiona ...
generation (his immediate predecessors who maintained a critical distance from the mass advertising and entertainment imagery that fascinated them), Robbins pioneered an approach to art that unapologetically embraced entertainment culture. His first solo
exhibition, ''The David Robbins Show'' (1986) featured "guest" collaborators such as Richard Prince, Clegg & Guttman, and Jennifer Bolande. He gained wider recognition for photographic works such as ''Talent'' and ''The Art Dealers' Optical Tests'' (1987), which treated the art context as material for comedy. He actively promoted what he termed the "comic object"—an object made with sophisticated comic rather than
aesthetic intent. In later works such as ''The German Reunification Public Sculpture Competition'' (1991) and ''The Ice Cream Social'' (1993–2008), Robbins looked at political content through a comic lens. In other works of the same period, such as the ''Situation Comedies'' (1994–2003), he emptied his comedy of all narrative and topicality, creating objects that explored comedy as a subject in itself.
Robbins is also known for the theory and practice of what he refers to as "alternatives to art." Concrete Comedy is his term for a kind of non-fiction comedy of objects and gestures that surfaced in the early decades of the 20th century, first evidenced in the work of German comedian
Karl Valentin
Karl Valentin (born Valentin Ludwig Fey, 4 June 1882 in Munich – 9 February 1948 in Planegg) was a Bavarian comedian. He had significant influence on German Weimar culture. Valentin starred in many silent films in the 1920s, and was sometimes ...
and French artist
Marcel Duchamp
Henri-Robert-Marcel Duchamp (, , ; 28 July 1887 – 2 October 1968) was a French painter, sculptor, chess player, and writer whose work is associated with Cubism, Dada, and conceptual art. Duchamp is commonly regarded, along with Pablo Picasso ...
, and was subsequently recurringly manifested culture-wide, in fashion, architecture, music, film, television, art, advertising, and design. In November 2006 Robbins' "Concrete Comedy" essay appeared in ''
Artforum
''Artforum'' is an international monthly magazine specializing in contemporary art. The magazine is distinguished from other magazines by its unique 10½ x 10½ inch square format, with each cover often devoted to the work of an artist. Notabl ...
'' magazine. From 1996–2006 he taught a course in the subject at
The School of The Art Institute of Chicago
The School of the Art Institute of Chicago (SAIC) is a Private university, private art school associated with the Art Institute of Chicago (AIC) in Chicago, Illinois. Tracing its history to an art students' cooperative founded in 1866, which grew ...
, during which period he wrote ''Concrete Comedy: An Alternative History to Twentieth-Century Comedy'', the first comprehensive consideration of
materialist comedy. The book was published in 2011 by Pork Salad Press. His other "alternative to art," known as High Entertainment, argues for a category of imaginative production that balances art's emphasis on form-discovery with entertainment's emphasis on accessibility. Born of the new production and distribution opportunities of the digital era, High Entertainment encourages the "independent imagination" to apply art's experimentalism to mainstream forms such as commercial film and television.
[Interview with David Robbins," '']Bad at Sports
Bad or BAD may refer to:
Common meanings
*Evil, the opposite of moral good
*Error, Erroneous, inaccurate or incorrect
*Unhealthy, or counter to well-being
*Antagonist, the threat or obstacle of moral good
Acronyms
* BAD-2, a Soviet armored tr ...
'', 2007
Writing
Robbins was an early contributor to ''
REALLIFE Magazine
''REALLIFE Magazine'' was a publication featuring written and visual material by and about young artists that was co-founded and published by artist Thomas Lawson and writer Susan Morgan between 1979 and 1994.Printed Matter''REAL LIFE Magazine'' R ...
'', ''
Purple
Purple is any of a variety of colors with hue between red and blue. In the RGB color model used in computer and television screens, purples are produced by mixing red and blue light. In the RYB color model historically used by painters, ...
'' magazine, and ''Art issues''. His books include ''Concrete Comedy''; ''The Velvet Grind: Essays, Interviews, Satires 1983–2005'', which collect several of his early interviews; a novella, ''The Ice Cream Social''; ''High Entertainment''; ''The Dr. Frankenstein Option''; ''Foundation Papers from the Archives of the Institute for Advanced Comedic Behavior''; and ''The Camera Believes Everything''. In 2020 ''Accrochage'', three scripts combined to make a single narrative arc and formatted as a book, was published in Berlin.
Video work
Video work includes ''Lift'' (2006), which screened at the New York Video Festival; ''The Ice Cream Social'' (2004), winner of the
Sundance TV Lab competition; and ''
Something Theater
''Something Theater'' is an American television show created by Bobby Ciraldo, David Robbins, and Andrew Swant. The half-hour program has aired in Southeastern Wisconsin on The CW affiliate WVTV since February 2009. It is broadcast from Milwauke ...
'' (2009–present), a broadcast television show created with
Bobby Ciraldo
Bobby Ciraldo (born 12 October 1974 in Skokie, Illinois) is a filmmaker and web-based artist whose works include ''Hamlet A.D.D.'', ''William Shatner's Gonzo Ballet'',[Andrew Swant
Andrew Swant (born 1976 in Madison, Wisconsin) is an American filmmaker best known for ''William Shatner's Gonzo Ballet'', ''The Jeffrey Dahmer Files'', and '' What What in the Butt''.
In 2012, Swant co-wrote and starred in ''The Jeffrey Dahmer ...]
. Since 2010 he has made television commercials for art exhibitions and galleries, occasionally purchasing time on broadcast TV to air them. His video ''Concrete Comedy: An Introduction'' premiered in 2014 as part of
MOCAtv's Art + Comedy channel. That same year he created ''TV Family'', a television show in Italian, for Museo MADRE in
Naples, Italy
Naples (; it, Napoli ; nap, Napule ), from grc, Νεάπολις, Neápolis, lit=new city. is the regional capital of Campania and the third-largest city of Italy, after Rome and Milan, with a population of 909,048 within the city's adminis ...
.
References
External links
Official WebsiteAccrochage: An Interview with David Robbins by Matt Cook*
ttp://www.high-entertainment.com/ High Entertainment online book*
Artforum interview with Robbins regarding his Concrete Comedy conceptInterview with Robbins regarding High Entertainment*
ttp://www.jrp-ringier.com/pages/index.php?id_r=4&id_t=&id_p=5&id_b=314 The Velvet Grind bookArtforum article about David Robbins' Ice Cream SocialForming Fun''Discussion between David Robbins and Hans Ulrich Obrist published in'' X-TRA : Contemporary Art Quarterly
{{DEFAULTSORT:Robbins, David
Living people
American contemporary artists
Filmmakers from Milwaukee
1957 births
People from Whitefish Bay, Wisconsin
American male writers