He will have no inheritors, because he shot blanks. The heirlooms, the thousand and more artefacts of his peculiar cathexis, may survive him in the nihilism of the market—but who could ever claim to possess them? They were pabulum, sterile, expiring from the moment of their induction, and perhaps there was not a little pique to his project, a malice to its profusion. The conspicuous consumption, the pretension to ownership of, yes, the nouveau riche, but also of the middle and working classes—that was this materialist’s grand gag.
Was it an inside joke? Anyway it was made, over and again, at the quite literal expense of someone, somewhere. If he slung objects and affects together with madcap and even slapdash care, sold them for profit, leveraged from them still greater appointments and social cachet, the expected relish of the conniver or cynic is nowhere to be found within his artistic inclination, and absent from his output. He was Evel Knievel for his demimonde, not a con- but a commodity-artist, and almost a mirage; his feats were ersatz but without the misanthropic sarcasm of a scam. In fact it was the savant’s anhedonia which was his disposition and desperate last resort. Balderdash, cliché, irony…bluster, parody, kitsch—the cheerless instruments with which he plied his trade were not weapons, though they were arrayed against a class of consumer-interpreters.
In much the way of a sign. And it would not be false to call him a semiotician, or a linguist—though neither would have been his preferred term, by which he knew himself. Saussurean at its best, Warholian at its worst, or vice versa, his artistry was a Pop astonishment, a compound, and not just of signifier and signified. But of course he could mobilize those, too. His facility was finally one of appropriation: Anything, he knew, could be made into an agent of his will, a deputy of his aesthetic, and from this capacity he founded his practice. He would not develop the images, the language of his métier but underdevelop them, pare down and take them literally. So reduced were his materials that they could recall Platonic forms: pure essences, idealizations, noumena, things unto themselves. The signature scare quotes were the famous “technique” for this “effect.” His routine became a resource, then, a means not to suggest the excessive and a priori availability (or so-called “legibility”) of his wonted motifs but to interpret them, as overdetermined even before his arrival.
And after, too, which is our moment now. How tragical that we should never see the complete fruition of the will of Virgil Abloh. He had had his designs, in both senses of the word, schemas for the full elaborated introduction of his way of seeing and its imposition over ours, to achieve a communal sight. At a minimum that instinct made of him a visionary—an aesthete—whose late efforts were escalating, toward some hidden unity or aspiration; the pace quickened and perhaps the vision become more whole, even as the culture became fractured, fractious. He, Virgil, tested in himself what or indeed whether synthesis could be accommodated by the fusion of contrary and competing tendencies, and his abstracted handicraft gave the answer. Something of the zeitgeist departs with him now, and we lose with it some notion of the work of art in the age of mechanical reproduction. Here was our Hephaestus, and there was his medium.
This is so good: a nuanced yet evocative description of Virgil Abloh. You captured what I found so difficult to like about his work--it was earnest in the worst ways (at least the scammer has charm!) and yet strangely thoughtlessly glib in mechanisms (quotation marks, his formulaic--and again, charmless--3% rule, etc..) In any case, I can't wait to read more of your writing xo