Beautiful Losers is a documentary film about the art movement of the same name [ripped off the Leonard Cohen novel] formed around a handful of talented underdogs who found each other at Aaron Rose’s New York gallery, Alleged, in the 90s. While some are undoubtedly more interesting than others (namely Mike Mills, Harmony Korine, Shepard Fairey, Chris Johanson, and the late Margaret Kilgallen), their collective cult influence has been undeniably prolific. Spanning art, design, music and independent film, these are the artists that came from the DIY subcultures of skateboarding, graffiti, etc., and accidentally brought you Street Culture in it’s mainstream form – as sold by Pepsi (Mills), Nike (Geoff McFetridge), and the like.
They certainly weren’t the original or the only exponents, and not all have sold out to corporate advertising. But The Masters in contemporary art have always been masters in their own marketing – top players such as Koons or Hirst being obvious examples. A modus operandi that capitalises on the naivety of the buyer might be obscene to some, but to others it’s admirably audacious, even entertaining. So in the case of Aaron Rose, who “didn’t even know that an art gallery sold art”, and his (beautiful) losers, who maintain that they’re interesting precisely because they’re “un-careerist” and rooted outside of the art world, do the same rules apply?
It would be easy to accuse this film – which inexplicably waxes nostalgic about a scene that’s not even 20 years old – of self-perpetuating its own myth. Speaking to Rose, I realised that dismissing it as propagandist or self-satisfied was missing the point. “It was never really an anti-art movement, because actually there was just no knowledge of the art world” he explains. “It existed outside of that and eventually became a part of it, but it wasn’t even like punk, deciding to be against something, because there was never a manifesto… it was purely about people having fun and making things.”
The point is that Beautiful Losers was never clever enough to be manipulative; in one scene Mills even describes his fellow artists as “awesomely dumb”. As a whole the film is badly structured, lacking in substance and ridden with clichés, such as “real beauty lies in the part of the work that’s off”, “if you want to write yourself into history, you have to Do It Yourself”, blah. A typical product of modernist ego, Beautiful Losers asks only to be understood, and, like its artwork, is about self-expression rather than any meaningful social commentary. The problem is that it expresses itself badly, and in so doing becomes ultimately boring.
But the laziness and immaturity inherent here, as almost unconscious landmarks of that generation’s ennui, are also marks of integrity. The oblivion to / lack of concern for such shortcomings reveals an artistic language that’s simply not judged in terms of success or any other middle-class quantifier. The fact that Beautiful Losers can’t be intellectualised in the way that the commercial art world requires it to doesn’t render it meaningless if it was never intended for that audience in the first place, and if it can influence those for whom it was intended.
Much of the work is in fact both beautiful and interesting, despite any impression you might get from the artists interviewed. Some say you should never meet your heroes, and personally I’d have preferred never to have seen the faces behind the work – but others need role models. Admirably, Rose did not shy away from the suggestion that his documentary distorts our perception of art that was more than capable of speaking for itself. “I do feel like it’s done that and of course that saddens me, but unfortunately it’s just a risk you have to take – to hope that the good that comes out will outweigh the fact that we’ve maybe lost something in people’s ability to look at things for what they are”.
This lot may not have been the first to have liberated art from its establishment, but if they can inspire counterculture groups of the future, like those of the past, then they deserve to be given a voice. And if you really can’t bear the sound of it, Money Mark’s score is at least excellent.
Beautiful Losers (dir. Aaron Rose) is out now
Written by Octavia Wonderland for Notes From the Underground
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