Beyond Media
Piri Halasz
The notion that painting may be going the way of the dodo finds some substantiation in the latest positions listings booklet of the College Art Association. It had fifty-five openings for "artists," but only twelve of them were for painters, drawing teachers, or artists who could teach both painting and drawing. Academics have their way of explaining this tendency (for job openings depend upon what courses students will sign up for). "The kids today are different," I have heard two academics say, with wise smiles. "They spend all their time looking at television," one added, while the other added, "They spend all their time at their computers." This is not the root of the problem.
I have always had an appetite for pop culture myself, which as an adult I indulge by looking at "Cheers," going to date movies, and reading People in waiting rooms. But I know this is mass-produced commercial culture, the shallowest sort of esthetic experience. I don’t confuse it with high art, whether by Michelangelo or any one of a number of younger artists I could name. This is because my elders knew the difference between high art and commercial culture, and taught it to me while I was still a kid myself. In those days, commercial culture included comic books, movie serials, and radio shows like "Captain Marvel," but I was taught that while these were fine for children and uneducated adults, they were not nearly rewarding enough for educated grownups.
Such teaching is precisely what "the kids today" don’t get. It’s their elders who are at fault, elders raised to believe that the pop art of Warhol, Lichtenstein et al. was high art. Since pop art’s source of inspiration was what is euphemistically known as pop culture, academics tend to revere the culture along with the art, and assume that it must have redeeming social value. This means they go right along with "the kids today" and, instead of attempting to raise their sights to genuinely fine contemporary art, they encourage them to treat the Web and reality shows as cultural touchstones.
Sure, I believe that painting and sculpture still offer artists the best opportunities to express themselves, but one show I saw recently was "New York Area MFA Exhibition" at Hunter College/Times Square. Viewing work there by MFA candidates from twenty nearby art schools, I thought, yeah but the mere fact that the work is painting doesn’t automatically make it good. Every school was represented at Hunter by painting as well as other media, but the painting was mostly pretty terrible. I had a similar experience at a painting exhibition entitled "Exploring Landscape: Eight Views from Britain" at Andrea Rosen. That show, too, had exactly one painting that I wanted to look at a second time.
So, the fact that a work of art is a painting doesn’t necessarily make it good – and by the same token, the fact that a work of art is in an alternative medium doesn’t necessarily make it bad. I felt this while I was looking at "Clay Works: American Ceramics From the Everson Museum of Art," in the Paine Weber Building, and I felt it even more strongly when I went to see "The Quilts of Gee’s Bend," at the Whitney Museum of American Art. This show had about sixty quilts made by forty-five African-American women over the past eighty years or so in Gee’s Bend, an isolated community of some seven hundred people in southwest Alabama. It was a beautiful show. Most of the quilts were lovingly hand- stitched, and made out of bits of fabric that often came from jeans, mattresses, shirts, curtains and other worn-out bits of clothing or household linens. This was folk art, not mass-produced commercial culture, and the designs of some quilts were extraordinarily fresh and inventive.
Last summer, I visited a dermatologist. He was youngish and an avid photography fan. When he asked me what photographers I liked, I said, Walker Evans, Berenice Abbott. He looked disappointed, and asked if there weren’t any younger photographers I liked. Cindy Sherman? Andreas Gursky? Well, no. I daresay he concluded that I was an oldster who automatically disapproved of anybody young, but that wasn’t it, and I tried to pin down why I have problems with these younger photographers. It’s not an issue of media, or I wouldn’t like Evans and Abbott. But they were modernists, while Sherman and Gursky are postmodernists. The two groups lie on either side of the paradigm shift which, as I see it, began back in 1951, when Robert Rauschenberg painted some all-white pictures with paint applied by a roller. This gesture said in effect that if abstract expressionism depicted nothing, and therefore was about nothing, then the perfect abstract expressionist picture had to be completely void, even of the personal touch. Seeing no meaning in abstraction became Rauschenberg’s rationale for lapsing back into figuration.
True, this was painting, not photography, and neither Evans nor Abbott were abstractionists, but photographers and painters strive for similar goals – toward beauty or toward what the Mock Turtle in Alice in Wonderland might have called "uglification." I feel that Rauschenberg – and the pop artists
who followed him – were angry with what they thought of as the failure of abstract art to convey anything, and in their anger sought to reverse all its priorities, including the desire to create moving, beautiful art. This inverse desire for "uglification" doesn’t always mean ugly art. It can, as with Sherman’s "Untitled Film Stills," which are poorly organized and badly lit, but with Gursky it becomes merely a condescending attitude expressed by pretentiously pretty vistas. In any event, it’s this difference in outlook, mind set, sensibility, mentality – call it what you will – that distinguishes modern from postmodern – not the medium but the spirit in
which the medium is used.
