CHANGING THE MAINSTREAM
Kirk Hughey
“The
purpose of art is to lay bare the questions which have been hidden by the answers”
James Baldwin
One of the prevailing clichés of contemporary art is that art serves as
a “mirror of its time”. How much truth underlies this assumption?
Two shallow and seemingly contradictory conventions have subtended our view of
art. One would hold art, like spirit, entirely separate from life. The other
would conflate art and life(“erase the boundary”), making the terms
indistinguishable. The first proposition can easily lead to the conclusion that
art is irrelevant to life-but doesn’t the second do so as well, since no
distinctive contribution to life is considered beyond gratuitous description
or decoration? What if we see art and life as distinct yet inseparable and interactive?
Art has two tools that are its power; intuition and felt experience. The first
is the source of deep innovation in all disciplines. In art the intuitive defines
the context itself, free of any need for functional justification. It can err
in descriptive means yet reach the same end as slow logic and observation. Felt
experience cuts to the core of all human action beyond bare survival and the
human response-system itself hasn’t changed in a hundred thousand years.We
may be responding to inaccurate or incomplete information -and it is possible
for us to be persuaded of this and change our response accordingly. But the fact
remains that no-one can convince us that we do not feel what we feel-it is the
one certainty we have that is beyond dispute. It is this realm of certainty,
and the ways information evokes it, that art explores. In its own way art is
the science of desire.
From this position we can suggest that art is both the motive and the result
of life-proposing in the first case, and transcending in the latter. Art as the
study of motive can be predictive of history; as result of life it transcends,
exceeds, history.
We can see mainstream art as the mirror of its time, but also containing the
seed of self-caricature that will create the necessity of its replacement. We
can also see that individual artists can exceed, remain independent of, history
and may as well be predictive of future development. As with mutation in evolution,
significant innovation in art and science always comes from the edges and corners,
not from the mainstream or the academies.
Following this, we can draw some parallels between art and the exigencies of
politics. I’ll suggest two axiomatic positions: that all systems begin to
decay at the point of thir greatest success with some assumptions that underlay
the success also leading to its decay and, as systems approach their extreme
they become caricatures of themselves; provoking the emergence of their opposite.
In political terms a system becomes mainstream when it dominates as a reflexive
world-view, directing all major social decisions. In art, the same dominance
occurs when a trend becomes an “academy” that informs all major decisions
regarding quality and support.
In U.S. social history19th century assumptions we consider “conservative”
peaked mid-century and declined through contradictions brought by its own industrialization
into the early 20th century reaching caricature with Hoover. As an aside, but
worth remarking, that period in the 19th century also brought the impress of
a pseudo-scientific worldview that was to shape and distort much of the next
century. As a perceptive critic of the time, Albert Aurier, remarked on the influence
of the sciences; “They must, therefore, be accused of having made this society
lose faith, become earthbound, incapable of thousands of those intellectual or
emotional
utterances which can be characterized by the term devotion.”
Reaction and movement toward the “liberal-left” position began with
FDR. The apogee of American influence and wealth was reached post-war(WWII) –
this was also the apogee of white male European dominance. A steady-state continued
until the 1960’s but marked by the beginning of contradictions inherent
in the white male European assumptions of dominance. In the 60’s the major
accomplishments following liberal, Enlightenment, European ideals were made by
women and blacks- the white male liberal “establishment” became rendered
more or less impotent while the conservative continued in its own caricature
from the 20’s. In contrast to the compelling dignity and empassioned concern
of the black civil rights movement we had the self-promoting gyrations of white
males using the, even then, outworn tactics of neo-dada confrontation, absurdity
and transgression. The civil rights cause made some gains and never lost its
credibility. The anti-war cause was effectively delayed – finally finding justification
in spite of the tactics of its promoters. In the public mind the left began its
transition from the party of the people to the party of nihilistic clowns. Can
it really surprise us then that the first African-Americans to attain Cabinet
rank are Republicans? Or that the left would decay into the tiny, impotent swelter
of narcissistic ambition that is the contemporary art establishment?
Art can be “successful “(in social/financial terms) as a mainstream
only as it is broadly accepted by a ruling social elite of some kind. To do this
it must operate on assumptions, and with forms, that are easily taught, recognized,
and quantified. It must become a verifiable investment. In short, it must become
academic.
The apogee of Western and American art, as evocative motivation, was reached
at the same point as the apogee of U.S. influence-the 1940’s to 1960’s-in
abstract-expressionism. It accomplished one of the higher objectives of art-to
produce individual works that exceed history. Unfortunately, through the efforts
of its apologists, it also became the most financially successful American art
in history to that point. So efforts were made to turn it into an academy. Within
the innovation of Abstract-Expressionism there was both the presentation of individual
authenticity and the possibility of decay into caricature as mindless form, pose
and mass inertia(the indifference of the “all-over” field).
What resulted was mostly self-indulgent mess or deadly formalism. Caricature.
The stage was set for reaction against individualism, against abstraction(“formalism”)
and against expression of feeling. The flipside of simulated emotion is apathetic
indifference. Oddly the Marxism continued as in the liberal political sphere-
now “neo”, now mostly pose with the appearance of the “limousine
liberal”. This was echoed in the fashionable philosophy of the time, which
was mostly French, a harking back to American provincial snobbery.
Enter a new “tradition” to feed the new trend: that of the “ready-made”,
the poor step-child of Marcel Duchamp. Art for a ready-made market. The sublety
of the original was entirely lost, of course. Duchamp’s art was the specific
act of selection itself(an insight into the real base of all art and its origin
in selection -though not ending there), not the objects themselves. Certainly
this couldn’t be bought and sold-but the point was lost anyway and everyone
now assumed the objects-and therefore any object or objects- was the art in the
most old-fashioned of terms. Expensive things.
It was possible to turn this into an academy founded on principles no different
in substance than those of the 19th century French Salon. Easy to do, easy to
recognize, easy to buy and sell. Based still on a faux-left philosophy, to give
the rich an excuse for self-indulgence in the name of intellectual and cultural
patronage, it became an entire industry based on a misunderstanding. In an industry
that adopted irony as its official position, and Duchamp as its progenitor, the
salient irony was the rise of a careerism quite at variance with Duchamp’s
own motive; ignoring his advice, and example that “the great artist of tomorrow
will go underground”, artists contrived their work as no more than instrumental
in a scramble toward notoriety that would embarrass the most avaricious huckster
or porn-queen. A hollow “transgressiveness” became the instantly recognizable
sign of investment potential. Visitation burgeoned at contemporary exhibitions
but the visitors now came for the same reason they used to attend sideshows-to
see the fat lady and the two-headed cow.
The facile and predictable ultimately bores, so serious seekers starve or look
back. The greater public saves its money for the greater spectacle of theme parks
and thriller movies that this art copies but cannot equal. Art about art propelled
by nothing more profound than shallow transgression finally ends by trangressing
its own importance. There is nothing left but to “transgress” but a
relic of Goya – a gesture so pathetic as to be laughable. But the joke finally
is on the gesture-not on Goya. Should it surprise anyone that the British, having
opted to be the subservient devotees of American marketing in art, should follow
us doggedy into that more significant transgression that is war?
Why are we shocked to discover that the wider world follows the example of art
in its focus on the literalist symbol used for transgressive effect? Hirst and
Stockhausen were condemned for suggesting that 9/11 was the consummate “work
of art”. But weren’t they right, in their terms? It was the conclusive
derivative and enaction of a certain view of art-their view-and that of the academy
they serve. Beginning with Burden firing his silly pistol at an airliner-hasn’t
the only difference between art and life become the feeble wimpiness of the first
and the effective demonstration of the latter?
The most apparent attribute of all academic art is the use of literalist description
as conceptual symbol. The content then becomes an intellectual abstraction easily
recognized by those initiated into the iconography. The execution of the form
itself is devoid of any personal “touch” or expression because its
only purpose is to describe the symbol. Anything that would individualize it
or produce any expressive affect would veer into the wasteland of that which
is impossible to formulize. An impersonal facture certainly can present a personal
statement but that statement would still be anathema. Whatever depends on the
person, their experience and feeling, becomes unteachable, unrecognizable to
superficial curatorial summary, impossible to quantify for investment purposes.
Unteachable, unorganizable, unsaleable and intangible-what could be worse for
a burgeoning industry of the imponderable? The threat then arises of an actual
elitism(that term of terror)-not the artificial one of family, class, position,
power and wealth (that mythology presumes anyone with ambition can attain?)-but
one that crosses all those lines to find the inner aristocracy of sensibility
wherever it occurs regardless of social distinction. Revolution, in short. The
“elitism for everybody” of Lyotard. Well, we can’t have that can
we?
Those holding power by virtue of systemic greed might crumble and carry with
them their enabling loyal opposition of academics.
Those who idolize their sacred cows of”modernist/postmodernist”art
are no different in intent or effect than those who sanctify some notion of “traditional”
art. Likewise there is little difference between those who reduce to facture
and those who reduce to concept. Both are only describing externals of art and
seeing it as either hollow symbology or inert material object. They “read”
it as if it were a textbook and cannot feel it as a revelation of mortal response.
Bone-collectors on the highway of life, they absent themselves from the only
value art has ever had and turn it into the poor, irrelevant, stepsister of science.
They would purify it of affect- but affect is the baby in the bath of art.
Sources:
Duchamp, A Biography, Calvin Tomkins, 1996
Essay on a New Method of Criticism, Albert Aurier, 1890-93
