UNREASONABLE ENGAGEMENTS.
Perry McPartland
At its high water mark of acceptance and supererogation, some marks of malaise seems to occur within the reigning cultural form. In its unchallenged authority, now stabilized and institutionalized, the rude vitality which originally fired it appears spent. Its forms cease to pulse and act merely as promulgation for their sponsoring culture. Our contemporary panorama seems to be exhibiting the peculiar proofs of this. For all the apparent radicalism of the culture’s surface pronouncements, things seem suspiciously staid and conservative. The ground breaking conceptual works which initiated the shift into epistemology naturally lent themselves to Critical Theory. And once Critical Theory took investigations into meaning as the end result of art, it began more or less dispensing with art in favor of straight epistemology. Today’s art is left trailing in its wake, often functioning as no more than philosophic auxiliary for deconstructive discussions on the dissolution of art and non- art. And a very smooth and chummy collaboration it is proving, something like a girls Guide club for Edward W Said’s "3,000" specialists. This unblushing nepotism makes for artwork which–operating at the behest of theory- is almost inevitably neutralized by its sanction. According to Dan Kuspit these pieces are "born with good manners…very civilized pudding indeed", a sycophantic flattery that acts only to legitimize the ruling and institutionalized taste. The art audience is staved from all encounter with crisis or even from any surprise that extends beyond the novel; repetition and confirmation are proffered instead (Bildo’s "Not Picasso", "Not Warhol", etc.- I don’t have to describe these pictures to you anymore than you have to see them. The painting functions in the same way as object art, forfeiting itself immediately. And doubtless right now someone somewhere is preparing an exhibition , "Not Bildo"…). The selfsame audience , in their purchase and subsequent viewing of these pieces, partaking in a kind of existential prank. Yet its all wildly safe and rehearsed through. And while this deconstruction has served to puncture some myths, it has done so at the expense of fetish commission in its own likeness. Any form, once it is taken as the cultural given and norm should of course become immediately suspect. Deconstruction, grown fat and soft on the spoils on its own nature, needs questioning again. Art which genuflects to the sovereign theory of the day cannot of course subvert it, but only elaborate on it, or as in Bildo operate as hermeneutic addendum. Such work will be stillborn. Something like what happened in modernism, once its transcendental solution -"flatness"- was aired. Oehlen is a contemporary painter who for a while made some successful abstract- or as he termed them, "post–representational"- pictures. In these the paint is robbed of all its transemantic properties, it is stubbornly unmystic, an indocile significant mess. In their insistence as paintings they are almost as an opposite to Bildo’s painting- looking at them is like having a finger poked through your thoughts.
Reasoning cannot anticipate such works, as genuine success will always have its animus outside the reigning critical categories. "The new vision will always be disjunctive, anti- conceptual, anti- poetic in terms of its predecessors" (Kuspit). If it is not to capitulate to reason, art has to be in some sense unaccountable. True art succeeds in being for a while untrammeled and indefinable, a crisis for reason, not its sub-set. It becomes necessary–it says something only it can say. It’s a rare bird that does this, but it is the only true work of art. But with miles of gallery walls to cover and acres of floor space to fill, the "conscious Industry" will take in its place the ringing of its own plaudits.
The worn out nature of our contemporary forms would have been better and sooner realized were it not for the acromelagy of critical theory, which–possessed of its own autonomous and fissiparous momentum- doesn’t require excellence in the art it patronizes, barely requiring art at all. Danto again: "The object disappears as criticism extends to infinity". However, at the point of decadence, the reigning culture’s fiducial clichés can serve to appropriately highlight the very symptoms it is suffering from, can reveal that which it is failing to address: The art theoretical-art piece suffers from certainty, hygiene and a lack of engagement.
A narrative end offers the opportunity of avoiding the mess of engagement, and allows the position to be sanitized with an aloof cynicism. However ironic distance of this type is a luxury item. it means you can afford to not engage directly in conditions of crisis. In its stead, in almost a psychological reverse, quotidia of circumstance appear in plethora. The hyper -real world is reemphasized in the use of the superficia of object and simulacra, the work’s Alpha and Omega. Outside of the visual arts, where it appears as a standard, this method isn’t even common. In other mediums similar themes are faced- the failures and impossibilities of meaning, of language of metaphysic, of art- without it precluding an engagement with the conditions that these circumstances betray. Yet in the visual arts where this failure and impossibility are pared and pared, few artists have ever actually attempted an engagement with meaning which amounted to anything more than posturing. Instead , confirmed in its propinquity to theory, the conceptual work bristles with a punctilious surety and confidence, a fixed correctness that adverts itself neatly into the lap of Critical Theory. Considering the highly equivocal nature of meaning and Oehlen the failures it would bespeak, postmodernism’s house style appears insufficiently ambiguous. To paraphrase , it’s too clean. Another medium is required, something creakier and already compromised and unfit for theory’s amanuensis, something marginal, unsure and ridiculous: Oehlen’s medium- the failed and agrestic medium, paint on canvas. If impossible circumstances and conditions don’t preclude the possibility of an attempt at engaging with them, they none the less require an impossible medium (but an impossible medium engaging the impossible, not illustrating it as happens when Bildo paints).
Every system, the one in place now is no different, says that to take beauty in any other way than the contemporary consensus is either wrong- or as we have now- impossible. Beauty and aesthetics have been understood in different ways before (and, of course, art has ended before, and this end of art appears to share the same ideas about its uniqueness and sovereignty as every other age). Oehlen would formulate something different. Not dissimilar to the classical proposition of pulchritude vaga (Vagabond beauty), he says "here you can see that beauty is not static but constantly seeks to redefine itself by longing for the end of art". Oehlen strives not to empty art, but as one of his titles read, "Expand Knowledge Through Failure", its opposite- to give painting an impossible content. Surely failure and the impossibility of meaning are best shown through an engagement, their presence ratified in terms of attempt.
Speaking to David Sylvester, De Kooning said,
"I really think it’s sort of silly to do it. But the moment you take this attitude it’s just as silly not to."
While De Kooning was talking specifically about his Woman Paintings, this could almost make for a description of painting’s perennial nature when it is working free from theoretic dictates. Painting can’t help but signify the body, that which according to Barthes, "cannot be imitated". The body, then matter then the act, and to act–either for or against is ridiculous. And in that painting has no apotheosis, it inevitably ends in failure. Even De Kooning’s bravura doesn’t completely overshadow the Women’s "sheer hilarity". Whereas conceptual work somehow displays an assured procrastination in its inability to act in the face of schismatic impossibilities, painters of worth entertain the ridiculous through engagement and subsequent failure. Contemporaneously, painters’ role is akin to the "disappointing clown", found more commonly and overtly in other media- in Beckett, in Oe Kenzaburo, in Boltanski. And perhaps this has something to do with Boltanski’s repeated referencing of himself as a painter- his methods aren’t of the type of conceptual distance, but like Oehlen’s, of improvised engagement and failure. And it is through his engaging with the impossible that something is made, through this failing and attempt that something arises. What is it? Writing about the same works by Oehlen, Walter Dickoff stated,
"Evidence that the picture itself is. It no longer presents but is simply present".
These pictures are the realization of a possibility withstood. They are of a type of beauty that can only be redefined through a balancing act that must take the language of form- painting, through the success of its own terms (form, color, etc), as a formulation of its own impossibility.
For that scarce commodity, a genuinely good painting , it seems engagement with the act is requisite, yet requisitely torturous. The American painter, Baechler takes his forms–abstract and figurative- from the quotidia around him. Similarly he will often use methods that are alien to his own skill, as he has observed in untrained creators ( adolescents, the insane, drunks, amateur painters). The dichotomy of possibility and impossibility must be entertained without recourse to the stabilizing factors of talent or identity. The work bears a superficial resemblance to Art Brut, however- just as in Oehlen and abstraction- the romantic nature of the form- in "Art Brut", the romanticism of social outcast- is snubbed. For Baechler the margins are simply the margins. They serve here to prick that grandiosity, while still allowing him access to an unprescribed response (the insane, the drunk), or a naive understanding of what the prescription actually is (adolescents and amateurs). The interest in common-place cases allow an involvement with contemporary circumstances (the non erudite/ pop form they take) without forfeiting the conditions that they imply (a deliberate act of being). Such second hand images in their limitations, whether in the striving for an elusive form or a throw away of inadequately expressed expression, inevitably reveal the incident of human touch, act and being. Employing these borrowed images is a way of eliding his own intentionaility towards specific form, of not compromising himself with deliberate meaning. For Baechler’s meaning isn’t a decipherable symbol, it is mute. When the pieces are successful, this working with someone else’s images or methods also provides a way for the artist to ambush his own virtuosity in the medium without falling victim to it. And this is how it has to be; engagement means an obligation to form, it means an obligation to the medium’s necessary devices–otherwise it is merely snide, the cynicism of the clean non- object that abdicates itself. Once he has selected his image(s) Baechler is free to use his judgment and ability without compromising the painting with overburdened content, at the same time he must maintain his fidelity to the medium’s form in order to take it to a conclusion unforeseen. The virtuosity alerts the audience to the evidences of its making and the implications of being. He shares with the young Twombly the ability to put the wrong line in the right place, a correct awkwardness. The marvelously voluptuous effect of a sensual jilt and displacement, a disjuncture of a significance completely ungraspable within reason’s exclusive terms. the images themselves are sufficiently dirty to prevent them "sticking" to their adverted reference. Their nature is pudent, they are labile and poised. Their relationship to pop and epistemology are subverted in the rendering: the images don’t "mean" or "sign" in the usual way appropriated images do. The ambiguous daubs and fillibrated scrapes don’t constitute the form of the object they depict, but feel unallied to it, neutering any epistemological wandering. Not original, but not a copy, neither ideal nor a representation of something else. Contemplated against time, there is more in these non- conceptual negatives than simply that which appears, their beauty is never completely determined, never static or fully present. Yet going back to Dickoff, nothing appears to us but the work itself. Recalcitrant, they won’t be shunted into a unilateral meaning, the painting holds itself an object, immutable.
Painting then as a formulation of its own limited nature, ridiculous and non–conceptual.
"…I don’t think artists have particularly bright ideas. Matisse’s "woman in a Red Blouse"!–What an idea that is! Or the cubists- when you think about it now, it is so silly to look at an object from many angles.." (De Kooning.)
Yet the abjuring of ideas or the taking on of ridiculous or impossible ideas is "enough", inappropriate yet sufficient to an inappropriate brief. The successful engagement with obligations and hence to form and failure vindicates the genuine work. It is a human fallacy to interpret that which isn’t present as a representation of something else. In Oehlen and Baechler the metaphysic and representation are both dead- ended and instead we are bought back to the object. There is no attempt to resolve irresolvable contradictions, but only to find ways of engaging with them. The paintings don’t tell anything, they only betray their own limitations and inadequacies to exposure, yet simultaneously they somehow manage to prove their aesthetic vitality. Not functioning as bearers of meaning, they shirk their externally secure identity .There’s nothing to be appropriated by any form of reasoned understanding. In Phaedrus, Plato accounts for the ungraspable quality of beauty in two different ways. The first is based on its unique meaning- its likeness and signification of the beyond. Schopenhaur expanded on this, the aesthetic object’s content not due to any understandable sign but grasped intuitively. This view has been criticized as romantic, specifically by Nietzsche who based his aesthetics on Plato’s second proposition, that of a unique physiological effect- as in a shudder of fever, being of a direct psychic experience not grounded in meaning. Menke has noted that "Almost every effort to stress the incomprehensibility of the object in opposition to hermeneutics follows one or the other". While the paintings discussed herein work in a way that appears to owe something to both traditions, it seems they offer the possibility of an extension to this discussion, too. Painting taken as a transemantitic blank, a negative integer.
And after this negative what remains? A warily stated residue of failure, the trace of being, matter and through touch and the brokering of form, something unanticipated in it, the trace of a person acting in impossible circumstances, a simultaneity of climbing a ladder of making and a kicking away of its meaning… What remains? We don’t exactly know.
