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 stabilised and
institutionalised, the rude vitality which originally fired it appears spent.
Its forms cease to pulse and act merely as promulgation for their sponsering
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 naturaly lent theirselves 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 favour of
straight epistomology. Today´s art is left trailing in its wake, often
functioning as no more than philosophic auxilliary 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 neutralised by its sanction.
According to Dan Kuspit these pieces are “born with good manners…very
civilised pudding indeed”, a sycophantic flattery that acts only to legitimise
the ruling and institutionalised 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 works to you
anymore than you have to see them. When Bildo’s work takes the form of painting,
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, partake 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 fetishising art’s own concepts and
status. The “non art -art object” genre depends on art being significantly
different from that which it isn’t, in the same way that unarted kitsch
is simply kitsch but art- kitsch provokes a phillosophic fizz of art’s (or
art theory’s) implicated meanings. And despite the death of art, of value,
of meaning, no gallery walls have fallen. Rather the gallery and audience appear
in good nick, basking in their elevated status as significant adjuncts. Niether
are the museaum and art history outmoded, instead they function as cultural legislators,
there to acknowledge and legitimise the new art, which without it occuring against
such a backdrop would cease to be. In their making artists are focusing their
energies on creating institutionalised artworks- made with their viewing and
exhibition, their art historical and art theoretical meanings (that is, their
status as genuine art object) at the forefront. They are aimed at the gallery,
the museaum , at the corona of posterity- the seal of another stabilising authority,
a further endorsement from the executive. The end of art must be seen as being
a very long lasting end indeed, and one compatible with desires for art historical
immortality. That postmodern theory is capable of synthesising and subsuming
these odd factors into its critical body doesn’t detract a jot from their
peculiarity. In fact such a theory can’t really do otherwise.
“I used to
say my brain was my favourite organ, but then I realised who was telling me that”
Woody Allen. Epistimology is reason’s tool, and reason can’t help but
be biased to its own structures. Prejudiced to the explicative, reason executes
everything over in its image. It calls and responds to itself, as such we see
art theory responds to art theory more than it does to actual art. Danto terms
modernism, The Age of Manifestos- which while being apt is radically partial.
Such critical theoretics entail an evaporation of the art work.
Reason is prejudicial and imperial, the other spheres of value only allowed their
articulation within it. As malleable and amorphous as post modernism depicts
itself, once stabilised and soveriegn, it systemizes- and all systems by their
nature are Articles of Faith, particular and finite. Once the system is realised
it immediately becomes defunct as a guide to making art and can only call for
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 soveriegn theory of the day cannot of course challenge or 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. The visual experience
of abstract paintings degenerated from a dynamic interaction to a kind of receipe
reading.
Oehlen is a contemporary painter who for a while made some succesful abstract-
or as he termed them, “post – representational”- pictures. Contrary
to the perenial metaphysic carriage of abstract painting, 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 act almost as an opposite
to Bildo’s- 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 predeccessors”
(Kuspit again). If it is not to capitulate to reason, art has to be in some sense
unaccountable. True art succeeds in being for a while untrammelled and undefinable;
a crisis for reason, not its sub-set. The work becomes necassary – it says something
only it can say. It’s a rare bird that does this, but it is the only true
work of art. However with miles of gallery walls to cover and acres of floor
space to fill, the “concious Industry “ will take in its place the
ringing of its own plaudits. This worn out nature of our contemporary forms would
have been better and sooner realised 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 patronises, it barely requiring art at all.
Danto again: “ The object disappears as criticism extends to infinity”.
However, at the
high point of decadence, the reigning culture’s fiducial cliches can serve
to appropriately highlight the very symptoms of its malaise, can reveal where
it is failing: The contemporaneous 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 sanitised 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 reemphasised in the use of the superficia of object and simulacra,
these operating as work’s Alpha and Omega. Outside of the visual arts, where
it appears as standard, this method isnt 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 and conditions which amounted to anything more than circumstantial posturing.
Instead , confirmed in its propinquity to theory, the conceptual work bristles
with a punctillious surety and confidence, a fixed correctness that adverts itself
neatly into the lap of Critical Theory. Considering the highly equivocal nature
of meaning and 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; Oelhn’s
medium- the failed and agrestic medium: paint on canvas. If impossible circumstances
and conditions don’t preclude the possiblity of an attempt at engaging with
them, they none the less require an impossible medium (but an impossible medium
engaging the impossible, not llustrating it as happens when Bildo and other art-theoretical
artists paint). 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. Yet beauty and aesthetics have of course been
understood in differenet ways before and, likewise, art has ended before (and
this end of art appears to share the same ideas about its uniqueness and sovereignty
as every other end). Oehlen would formulate something different. He doesn’t
see this current theoretical take of ours as final or sufficient, for him it
fails to pin beauty.Not dissimilar to the classical proposition of pulchritude
vaga (Vagabond beauty), he says “here you can see that beauty is not static
but constanly 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 perenial nature when it is working
free from theoretic dictates. Painting can’t help but signify that which
according to Barthes, “ cannot be imitated”, the body. 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 assurred procrastination in its inability
to act in the face of schismatic impossibilities, painters of worth entertain
the ridiculous through engagement and subsequent failure. Contemporaneously,
the painter’s 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
Oehlen’s engaging with the impossible that something is made, through this
failing and attempt that something arises. What is it?
Writing about the
post representational works of Oehlen, Walter Dickoff stated, “Evidence
that the picture itself is. It no longer presents but is simply present”.These
pictures are the realisation of a (im)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, colour,
etc), as a formulation of its own impossibility. For that scarce commodity, a
genuinely good painting, it seems the ridiculous engagement with the act is requisite,
yet requisitely tortorous. 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, those he has observed in untrained creators
( adolescents, the insane, drunks, amatuer painters). The dichotomy of possibility
and impossibility must be entertained without recourse to the stabilising factors
of talent or identity. Visually 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 the social outcast- is snubbed.
For Baechler the margins are simply the margins. They serve here to prick that
romantic grandiosity, while still allowing him access to an unprescribed response
(the insane, the drunk), or a niave understanding of what the prescription actually
is (adolescents and amatuers). The interest in common-place cases allow an involvement
with contemporary circumstances (the non erudite/ pop form they take) without
forfeitting 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 comprimising
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 necassary 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 judgement and ability without compromising the painting
with an overburdened and intentional content. At the same time, as it has to
be independent of both the artist deliberations, it must also go beyond the signals
of circumstance. Baechler has to maintain his fidelity to the medium’s form
in order to take it to a conclusion unforeseen. As with Oehlen, we are distinctly
and materially aware that it is a painting we are looking at; Baechler’s
aesthetic virtuosity alerts the audience to the evidences of its making and as
such, the implications of being.
He shares with
the young Twombly the ability to put the wrong line in the right place, a correct
awkwardness. It makes for the marvellously voluptuous effect of a sensual jilt
and displacement, felt almost bodily, this sense of disjuncture is of a significance
completely ungraspable within the exclusive terms of reason. The painting’s
emphatic qualities superecede any forays that our reason would like to make,
regardless of their circumstantial quoting 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 epistimology
are subverted in the rendering: the images don’t “mean” or “sign”
in the usual way appropriatted images do. The ambigious daubs and fillibrated
scrapes don’t constitue the form of the object they depict, but feel unallied
to it, neutering any epistimological wandering. Not original, but not a copy,
niether 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, “not static” or fully
present. Yet going back to Dickoff, nothing appears to us but the work itself.
Recalcitant, 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, impossible, unreasonble 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”. Inappropriatte, yet sufficient to an inappropriatte
brief. The successful engagement with obligations and hence to form and failure
vindicates the genuine work. It is a common 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 irressolvable 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
in them to be aproppriatted by any form of reasoned understanding. In Phaedrus,
Plato accounts for the ungraspable quality of beauty in 2 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 being due
to any understandable sign but grasped intuitively. This view has been criticised
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 waryily 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 simultaniety
of climbing a ladder of making and a kicking away of its meaning… What remains?
We don´t exactly know.
