Dawoud Bey: History Lesson in Philadelphia

The Society of Photographic Education Meets in Philadelphia

The Society for Photographic Education held its national conference this past week in Philadelphia. I had been active as an SPE member in the 1980s and early 1990s, but hadn't attended or participated in one of the conferences for probably fifteen years or more. This years conference theme and title "Facing Diversity," along with an invitation from the conference organizers to be a featured speaker, found me in Philadelphia among some 1200 photographers and photographic educators who came from all over the country to participate in panels, show their work to portfolio reviewers and to interview for various college and university teaching positions. A wealth of other programming--both on and off site--along with the presence of a number of a number of curators, writers, and critical theorists leading and participating in provocative discussions, made for a lively and engaging four days.

At the conclusion of the conference a convocation program was held that saw a number of awards given to both students and various professionals in the field, acknowledging their works and contributions within the field. The Honored Educator was my dear friend Dr. Deborah Willis, who received an outpouring of heartfelt tributes from former students, those she has mentored over the years and her son Hank Willis Thomas that left not a dry eye in the room. My remarks that evening were dedicated to her. I wanted to provide some historical context for the gathering, since the population of attendees at these events is becoming simultaneously both older and younger. The older folks may or may not know the history leading up that moment and the younger ones just coming into the field almost certainly don't. I was pleased to be introduced by Myra Greene, my colleague in the photography department at Columbia College Chicago. The text of my remarks follow below:

"When I was asked to speak at this event I thought long and hard about what I wanted to say here and indeed if I wanted to say anything at all. Actually I thought about what needed to be said on this occasion in this place as this community gathers here in Philadelphia where over four days a wealth of ideas, thoughts and work would be presented. As a black person I have to say that I was quite honestly somewhat put off by yet another event purporting to be about “Diversity” since on the surface it appeared to be yet another ready opportunity to preach to the choir or to come to Philly and “stick it to the man” while “the man” is actually elsewhere, going about his usual dastardly business, completely ambivalent to the absence of those routinely excluded from the institutional conversation. I also am aware that the conversation about “diversity” as a specific term has gone on now for well over two decades even as during that time some things have changed while sadly more than a few things remain the same. I thought then that it would be helpful to re-examine some recent history, since I believe that it is important to be familiar with that history in order to avoid some recurring pitfalls. I am also aware that some might not know this history at all and subsequently take a lot of hard work and struggle for granted. Whatever advances have been made require an historical framework.

My interest in making photographs was crystallized in 1969 when I went to see the exhibition “Harlem On My Mind” at the Metropolitan Museum of Art when I was sixteen years old. I had never been to a museum before on my own and I have to say that actually didn’t go to the museum that day to see the exhibition. Some of you may know the contentious history of that exhibition. You might know that Benny Andrews and a multiracial group of other artists organized themselves into a group that became the Black Emergency Cultural Coalition to protest the exclusion of the voice of the black community in this this exhibition that purported to speak on their behalf. You may know that Meir Kahane formed the Jewish Defense League at that moment to protest what he felt were the anti-Semitic statements made by a young black woman student, who took the Jewish shop keepers in Harlem to task for what she considered to be their exploitative relationship with the black community. Unknown to the writer her essay had been altered and footnotes removed, making some of the quotes appear to be her own rather than words of others that she was quoting in her essay. You may or may not know that Roy DeCarava, refusing to give up control of his work in order to be in the exhibition was on the picket line, with a sign that said, “The White Folks Show the Real Nitty Gritty.” So when I set off that day from Queens, NY to go to the met I was actually going to see what all of the controversy was about, since I had read about in the local papers. As fate would have it by the time I found my way there the picket lines had vanished. Or maybe they had never come that day. At any rate I then had little choice but to go in to see the show.

Usually when I talk about the “Harlem On My Mind” exhibition I talk about seeing the photographs by James Van DerZee for the first time and how that experience informed my decision—along with my own family’s history there—to begin my first project “Harlem, USA.” But what I am in interested in looking at and revisiting this evening is the sense I got very early on of the museum as a highly contested site as the Met sought to move what it considered to be “the black experience” into the halls of a mainstream museum.

The “Harlem On My Mind” protests were not the only flashpoints taking place between artists, the larger social community and mainstream institutions. That same year Andrews and others petitioned the Whitney Museum of American Art, demanding that they be more responsive to the works of black artists. In the ensuing back and forth the BECC announced what it called “a massive boycott” of the Whitney over its decision to indeed mount an exhibition of works by black artists but with no input from them or black curatorial input. Similar protests took place at the Museum of Modern Art that same year, led by the Art Workers Coalition, a group of artists, filmmakers, writers, critics and museum staff, pressuring MoMA into implementing various reforms. These included a more open and less exclusive exhibition policy concerning the artists they exhibited and promoted: the absence of women artists and artists of color was a principal issue of contention. The coalition successfully pressured the MoMA and other museums into implementing a free admission day that still exists in certain museums to this day. All of these actions were undertaken by artists to press the issue of how to dynamically engage the museum as a pubic institution and make it more truly responsive to that public and the larger art community.

Not only were artists and their supporters protesting the lack of equitable representation on the part of mainstream public institutions, but more importantly they were forming their own organizations in order to provide the support that others were not. It is worth revisiting this history as a way of also looking forward. So let me talk a little bit about some of that history:

In 1967 the Studio Museum in Harlem was founded. The institution took its name and identity from a proposal that was written by the painter William T. Williams, whose idea it was to have a community museum for African Americans that also included studio space where members of the community could interact with black artists, and the artists would have the opportunity to more directly engage the community. Williams and fellow artist/sculptor Mel Edwards rolled up their sleeves, and with push brooms and much sweat cleared the light industrial loft space--then located over a Kentucky Fried Chicken-- in preparation for repurposing it into studios and exhibition space. The Junior Council of the Metropolitan Museum lent its backing to the fledging effort shortly thereafter. By 1969 [the very year of the Harlem On My Mind controversy] the museum mounted an exhibition, "X to the Fourth Power" that featured to work of Williams, Mel Edwards, Sam Gilliam, and Steven Kelsey (a white artist). The museum has been continually exhibiting works by black artists ever since that time. It’s first artist-in-residence was the painter LeRoy Clarke, who was joined shortly thereafter by Valerie Maynard and Lloyd Stevens. The museum has been providing work space, stipends and exhibitions to artist continuously ever since and many of those artists have gone on to become some of the most celebrated artists working in this country. The numerous publications that Studio Museum in Harlem has produced and the curators and art administrators it has trained are all testimony to its endearing importance. But it is important to remember that it began with one artist’s proposal and then another one joining him to help make that vision a physical reality, one that continues to provide much needed and extraordinary support some forty years later.

Also in 1969 the photographer, curator, writer and educator Nathan Lyons along with his wife, the artist Joan Lyons, founded the Visual Studies Workshop in Rochester, NY. For forty years now VSW has been provided a resource to the community of photographers and those committed to the artist book. Their publication AfterImage has been published consistently and has been an absolutely valuable source of information as well as providing an outlet for those writing on photography and media. Again, it was two artists who undertook the hard work needed to create, build and sustain this institution.

Another history lesson: In 1974 five New York Puerto Rican photographers—Charles Biasiny-Rivera, Roger Caban, George Malave, Phil Dante and Nestor Cortijo--came together to found an organization that became En Foco. While initially formed to create exhibition opportunities locally for their work and others, the organization for over thirty-five years now has exhibited, published and otherwise promoted the works of hundreds of photographers of color and provided workshops, portfolio viewings and other programming that have probably—both directly and by extension—benefited thousands of photographers as well as providing a resource for other institutions seeking the work of those photographers and artists. I know that many of you in this room today—including myself--have been the beneficiaries of the work that those five visionary photographers did as the organization has moved forward and grown over the years. It is important to remember that En Foco was not formed by someone deciding to open their doors and “diversify” or otherwise reconsider their pattern of exclusion. It was founded by photographers, by five Newyoricans who had a vision and attached a plan to it and did the hard work needed to make it a reality. So let’s acknowledge Miriam Romais and the current staff of EnFoco for the work they continue to do.

Let me continue with this history lesson: Around that same time in 1973 two former Syracuse University students Phil Block and Tom Bryan set up and began running the Community Darkrooms, a public access photography facility they had created by petitioning the University for much needed work space for area photographers. Community Darkrooms soon expanded and became Light Work/Community Darkrooms. Phil and Tom then brought in Jeffrey Hoone, who became and remained the director of Light Work from 1982 until recently, bringing in Hannah Frieser to continue the work of this extraordinary organization. Light Work’s residency program has provided an opportunity for hundreds of photographers over the years to have the necessary support to pursue their work in an absolutely supportive environment, and to disseminate that work through the publication Contact Sheet, which they grew from an 11X17 folded black ink broadside into a major publication which regularly puts that work in front of an audience of thousands. It would seem to me that we as photographers should be paying them for this, but no, they pay us while also providing this ongoing support through their residency and publication program. The existence of Light Work and its extraordinary growth makes it clear the power we each have to be the ones to make the difference that we need. I’d like to ask Jeff Hoone to stand so we can acknowledge his hard work on our behalf along with Hannah Frieser and current Light Work staff.

I could repeat these story in so many other ways by talking about so many other institutions. I could talk about Exit Art, which was founded by the artist Papo Colo and Jeanette Ingberrman, or Autograph, which was founded by several black photographers in London in 1988 who had previously started a group called D-Max, or we can talk about GASP Arts, founded five years ago by artist Magdalena Campos Pons and her husband, the musician Neil Leonard. I had a wonderful pleasure last night of participating in an event at the Philadelphia Photo Art Center, a new organization here in Philadelphia that is being run by two young photographers, Stephanie Solfa and Christopher Gianunzio, who are doing some really meaningful work right here in this community, creating opportunities and infrastructure for photographers here in Philly. All of these people, and others too numerous to mention, and some I don’t even know remind us what it is we as a community need to continue to do if we are to ensure our survival. There is no one else, quite frankly, but us. As the saying goes, “We are indeed the ones we have been waiting for.” I think we always have been and we always will be.

I believe that it is this self initiative, along with continuous public and vocal agitation insisting that public institutions be truly reflective of the public that sustains them by their tax dollars as well as demanding that public institutions reflect the very nature of the society in which they are situated, that will bring about the change that we both want and need. It was those public demonstrations, protests, writings and other forms of agitation that created whatever inroads were made over the past several decades. And progress has been made, but only because it was demanded. If you want an example of what happens when we fail to publicly agitate for change, what happens when we let our guard down, what happens when we stop letting people know that we have the capacity to get seriously pissed off if we are disrespected, one has only to look as far as the current Whitney Biennial. In an exhibition that ironically uses an image of Barack Obama on the catalogue cover, we find among other things absolutely no Latino artists and a total of three black artists among fifty-five artists in the exhibition. Artists from other non-white cultures are also underrepresented or not represented at all. What is your response to that? What would the response have been in 1969? I can’t imagine that this kind of situation would have been tolerated at that moment. Perhaps because there have been some changes over these past decades that we have become complacent or less vigilant. After all a few people of color have received MacArthur Fellowships, Rome Prizes, Guggenheim Fellowships and other forms of significant recognition. Some of us may have books, commercial gallery exhibitions, residencies where others pay us to simply do the work we want to do. I’m one of them And others here tonight are also among those fortunate enough to have have made important inroads, all due to those who came and agitated before us. So it’s easy to think the work is done, the struggle over. And yes, it’s frustrating to realize that even as progress is being made pressure must still be continuously applied.

And then along comes the Whitney Biennial 2010 to remind us just how little some things have changed as far as some people are concerned and why we must continue to agitate for an inclusive presence. With all of the profound problems we are facing as a country right now and for all of the frustration that grows out of a seeming inability to directly affect real and sustained social and political change, some have said that the progressive movement in this country is experiencing a kind of collective depression and that this explains the eerie silence surrounding so much of political discourse from the left at this moment. I wonder if those of us who have struggled so long in our various arenas may not also be suffering from a kind of battle fatigue? One thing I do know is that those who would like to maintain the status quo of exclusion never seem to get tired of doing so. And we must never tire of letting them know that we belong at the table as much as anyone else, even as go about the business of building our own tables.

So what to do? I don’t think it’s for me to come here tonight and answer that question. Rather I can only hope that through the example of history we get a sense of what needs to be done. Finally, I’d like to share a few thoughts on “Diversity,” since that is the theme of this conference. Diversity to me implies that there is still some normative paradigm at the center that we are seeking to destabilize rather than doing away with it in favor of something quite different. It suggests that institutions have an inherently white and male identity that needs to be added to. To operate out of this paradigm is, of course, a kind of tokenism by yet another name and seeks to trade on the momentary (but always empty and short lived) self-congratulatory excitement of seeing a new color in still unexpected places. It would seem to me that by now we should be approaching a point where anyone should be expected to be anywhere. I think it's time to turn away from "diversity" as an operative objective and turn instead towards the more meaningful and substantial goal of making institutional spaces ever more inclusive and embrace the goal of inclusivity, in which everyone's identity is central to the whole. One way to accomplish this is to consider how in fact the institution's identity can be meaningfully transformed and expanded conceptually by this enhanced inclusiveness in a way to deeply transforms the very nature of that institution. Inclusivity implies a desire to actually change through institutional expansion, while diversity implies to me that those being brought in have to simply fit into the normative and dominant existing paradigms and simply add "color" to it.

In the end of the day we still need to agitate for a transformed worldview within institutional culture that embraces the truly global and multiracial character of our human community.

Anything less than that should met with continuing, vocal and vociferous protest."

See more Bey posts at his blog, What's Going On?

Clifford Meth's Welcome to Hollywood and His Sharky Response

As Rich Johnston writes, "Earlier this week, writer Clifford Meth revisited his rather-abandoned-of-late column at Comic Bulletin, Meth Addict.In which he told how a project he was associated with, Dave Cockrum's The Futurians almost made it to the screen a couple of times.And how he was also hired to write a screenplay treatment for his IDW series Snaked, before being moved aside for another writer - and then discovering he was suddenly not getting paid his kill fee...

"We have a contract," I said. "Of course he's going to pay me." "No he isn't. He's pretty sure you won't sue him. The fee is too small and you'd have to fly to Los Angeles to file for damages. Apparently this is how he does things." "Tell me this is a bad joke." "Sorry Cliff," said my agent. "Welcome to Hollywood."

So Cliff describes how he offered to "talk" with the producer's parents. Whose address Meth happened to have. Which suddenly has the desired effect.The column has been pulled, after someone got a bit scared it seems. But I understand the specific column in question has been bought out by a bigger site who will be running it tomorrow.

Not Bleeding Cool, we weren't even in the bidding. But if you'd like to read the whole column now, go to Daniel Best's Blog, where it is re-posted here.

Noah Berlatsky: "Artists Write: The Last Shall Be First"

Proximity continues its Arts Theory Column, edited by Mark Staff Brandl, with an essay by Noah Berlatsky: "The Last Shall Be First."

Most traditional economic theory is built around the concept of scarcity -- the idea that there's not enough stuff to go around. In The Accursed Share (1946), famed theorist Georges Bataille inverts this; life, he says, is characterized, not by too little, but by too much. Life is excess -- it pushes onto every bleak rock, every cranny; it spends itself in profligate sexual activity and in the ultimate profligacy of death. And it throws out unneeded economic activity; too much fat, too many children, too much grain in the stores, too many bodies in the street, too much creative energy shaking its collective tuchas on the YouTube videos.

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For Bataille, it is the business of life and of society to consume this "accursed share". The paradigmatic way to do this is through sacrifice; the burning of goods -- or, better, of lives -- with no recompense. Through sacrifice, Bataille argues, the blasphemous impulse to turn other creatures, other lives, into productive things, is reversed, acknowledged as false and evil. To respect the universe, abundance must be spent, not horded. The Aztecs, in burning men, honored life.

The bloody Aztec rituals were paradigmatic; the North American Indian custom of potlatch, on the other hand, was, for Bataille, a sinister travesty. In the potlatch, an Indian would give a valuable gift to a rival to demonstrate his own wealth and power. In response, a rival would have to give an even greater gift. This could go on and on, back and forth, and whoever ended by giving the greatest gift would show himself superior. Thus, squander was not in fact squander -- the winner did not lose his gift, but instead traded it for prestige, or rank. Bataille thus notes contemptuously that potlatch "attempts to grasp that which it wished to be ungraspable, to use that whose utility it denied." By turning sacrifice into rank, Bataille believed, potlatch turns, not a part, but the whole of the universe to a servile thing.

...in the modern day, the avatar of Bataille's twisted potlatch is none other than the artist, in all his or her needy, self-deluding, miserly profligacy



Potlatch as such is now practiced in only a handful of places, and (to be remorselessly PC) one has to wonder whether Bataille's anthropological account really did the custom justice. Still, if Native Americans don't exactly recognize Bataille's potlatch, others, I think would. Who, after all, profligately spends time, energy, and resources in a remorseless quest for status and rank? Who grasps the sacred and turns it to the profane ends of thingness? Who wastes, not in the name of a sublime nothing, but in the pursuit of a soiled, excess something?

The answer is clear enough: in the modern day, the avatar of Bataille's twisted potlatch is none other than the artist, in all his or her needy, self-deluding, miserly profligacy. The artist hunkers down with her or his materials, practicing, practicing, practicing, wasting life in the pursuit of an entirely useless form--and for what? Why to be noticed, admired, proclaimed a genius--in short, for rank. True, some artists, the least debased, seek, not some subcultural caché, but simply money. They are guilty only of the typical human failing; the desire to turn bits of life into things; to treat the sacred as a business proposition. Beyoncé and Rod Stewart are no more despicable than, say, Bill Gates, or your average carpenter. But by far the vast majority of artists forswear (relatively) healthy capitalism for the putrid wallowing in essences; they desire to turn life itself "authenticity" into a bludgeon with which to beat their rivals. The Aztecs tore out hearts to offer to the Sun God; artists pour out heart and soul and offer it to Pitchfork reviewers.

That is not to say that all artists are inevitably defiled. On the contrary, if any contemporary figure attains to Bataille's ideal of pure sacrifice it is one particular kind of artist--that is, the failed artist. Note that by "failed" here, I do not mean the artist who has missed commercial success, but has underground cred or aesthetic bonafides, or who is discovered and lionized after his death. On the contrary. When I say "failed" I mean "failed." I mean an artist who profligately, copiously, obsessively works on creating objects that are, literally--by everyone and forever--unwanted. Creators of tuneless songs that never achieve dissonance; of ugly canvases too self-conscious to be outsider art; of doggerel verse too banal for even the high school literary magazine--in them, the excess of the universe is annihilated. Genius, love, life--are exchanged for neither lucre, nor cred, nor beauty, but are instead simply thrown away. Failed art is permanently wasted, and it is therefore sacred. Squatting amidst the gross outpouring of sublimity, the ugly, the thumb-fingered, the clichéd piece of crap, is alone sacred.

Proximity magazine here.

Lamis El Farra, Painting Show in the Collapsible Kunsthalle

The Collapsible Kunsthalle: documentation of the latest exhibition, "Faces," paintings by Lamis El Farra. Trogen, Switzerland, Galerei am Landesgemeindeplatz.

Link here.

Short Video Interview with Brandl at CAA on Columbia College Blog

Barabra Trinh says, "While I’m sitting waiting for a session to begin, my curiosity was sparked when a man in front of me was enthusiastically speaking about comics and his art on the T-shirt he was currently wearing. Instead of handing someone an ordinary business card, he hands them a button with his contact info on the back. That is because Mark Staff Brandl (http://www.markstaffbrandl.com/) is no ordinary artist. He is interested in comic/ sequential art, painting, and art history. His installations are described as ‘walk in comic books’, a mixture of installation and comic books that are 12 ft tall. In the video, Mark tells us about himself and his experience at CAA."

Barbara Trinh, BA Candidate from the Film & Video Dept

Student Comics KSL 2010

Comics by the Students in the 2-day Class in the Kunstschule Liechtenstein

(Art Academy of Liechtenstein)

in March 2010 with Mark Staff Brandl.

(click on comics to view enlarged)

Brandl: Post-Hysterical: Timeline, Comics and a Plurogenic View of Art History

A 55 minute speech, with images, by artist and art historian Mark Staff Brandl. Originally presented at the CAA (College Art Association, art historians organization) annual conference, as well as at the Kunstschule Lichtenstein, in 2010. It concerns description and criticism of the standard conceptions and models of fine art history and the history of comics, while offering a new one model for conceiving of and teaching these histories.

Stephen Hicks: Why Art Became Ugly

Why Art Became Ugly
by Stephen Hicks

For a long time critics of modern and postmodern art have relied on the "Isn't that disgusting" strategy. By that I mean the strategy of pointing out that given works of art are ugly, trivial, or in bad taste, that "a five-year-old could have made them," and so on. And they have mostly left it at that. The points have often been true, but they have also been tiresome and unconvincing—and the art world has been entirely unmoved. Of course, the major works of the twentieth-century art world are ugly. Of course, many are offensive. Of course, a five-year old could in many cases have made an indistinguishable product. Those points are not arguable—and they are entirely beside the main question. The important question is: Why has the art world of the twentieth-century adopted the ugly and the offensive? Why has it poured its creative energies and cleverness into the trivial and the self-proclaimedly meaningless?

It is easy to point out the psychologically disturbed or cynical players who learn to manipulate the system to get their fifteen minutes or a nice big check from a foundation, or the hangers-on who play the game in order to get invited to the right parties. But every human field of endeavor has its hangers-on, its disturbed and cynical members, and they are never the ones who drive the scene. The question is: Why did cynicism and ugliness come to be the game you had to play to make it in the world of art?

My first theme will be that the modern and postmodern art world was and is nested within a broader cultural framework generated in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Despite occasional invocations of "Art for art's sake" and attempts to withdraw from life, art has always been significant, probing the same issues about the human condition that all forms of cultural life probe. Artists are thinking and feeling human beings, and they think and feel intensely about the same important things that all intelligent and passionate humans do. Even when some artists claim that their work has no significance or reference or meaning, those claims are always significant, referential, and meaningful claims. What counts as a significant cultural claim, however, depends on what is going on in the broader intellectual and cultural framework. The world of art is not hermetically sealed—its themes can have an internal developmental logic, but those themes are almost never generated from within the world of art.

My second theme will be that postmodern art does not represent much of a break with modernism. Despite the variations that postmodernism represents, the postmodern art world has never challenged fundamentally the framework that modernism adopted at the end of the nineteenth century. There is more fundamental continuity between them than discontinuity. Postmodernism has simply become an increasingly narrow set of variations upon a narrow modernist set of themes. To see this, let us rehearse the main lines of development.

Modernism's Themes

By now the main themes of modern art are clear to us. Standard histories of art tell us that modern art died around 1970, its themes and strategies exhausted, and that we now have more than a quarter-century of postmodernism behind us.

The big break with the past occurred toward the end of the nineteenth century. Until the end of the nineteenth century, art was a vehicle of sensuousness, meaning, and passion. Its goals were beauty and originality. The artist was a skilled master of his craft. Such masters were able to create original representations with human significance and universal appeal. Combining skill and vision, artists were exalted beings capable of creating objects that in turn had an awesome power to exalt the senses, the intellects, and the passions of those who experience them.

The break with that tradition came when the first modernists of the late 1800s set themselves systematically to the project of isolating all the elements of art and eliminating them or flying in the face of them.

The causes of the break were many. The increasing naturalism of the nineteenth century led, for those who had not shaken off their religious heritage, to feeling desperately alone and without guidance in a vast, empty universe. The rise of philosophical theories of skepticism and irrationalism led many to distrust their cognitive faculties of perception and reason. The development of scientific theories of evolution and entropy brought with them pessimistic accounts of human nature and the destiny of the world. The spread of liberalism and free markets caused their opponents on the political Left, many of whom were members of the artistic avant garde, to see political developments as a series of deep disappointments. And the technological revolutions spurred by the combination of science and capitalism led many to project a future in which mankind would be dehumanized or destroyed by the very machines that were supposed to improve its lot.

By the beginning of the twentieth century, the nineteenth-century intellectual world's sense of disquiet had become a full-blown anxiety. The artists responded, exploring in their works the implications of a world in which reason, dignity, optimism, and beauty seemed to have disappeared.

The new theme was: Art must be a quest for truth, however brutal, and not a quest for beauty. So the question became: What is the truth of art?

The first major claim of modernism is a content claim: a demand for a recognition of the truth that the world is not beautiful. The world is fractured, decaying, horrifying, depressing, empty, and ultimately unintelligible.

That claim by itself is not uniquely modernist, though the number of artists who signed onto that claim is uniquely modernist. Some past artists had believed the world to be ugly and horrible—but they had used the traditional realistic forms of perspective and color to say this. The innovation of the early modernists was to assert that form must match content. Art should not use the traditional realistic forms of perspective and color because those forms presuppose an orderly, integrated, and knowable reality.

Edvard Munch got there first (The Scream, 1893): If the truth is that reality is a horrifying, disintegrating swirl, then both form and content should express the feeling. Pablo Picasso got there second (Les Demoiselles d'Avignon, 1907): If the truth is that reality is fractured and empty, then both form and content must express that. Salvador Dali's surrealist paintings go a step further: If the truth is that reality is unintelligible, then art can teach this lesson by using realistic forms against the idea that we can distinguish objective reality from irrational, subjective dreams.

The second and parallel development within modernism is Reductionism. If we are uncomfortable with the idea that art or any discipline can tell us the truth about external, objective reality, then we will retreat from any sort of content and focus solely on art's uniqueness. And if we are concerned with what is unique in art, then each artistic medium is different. For example, what distinguishes painting from literature? Literature tells stories—so painting should not pretend to be literature; instead it should focus on its own uniqueness. The truth about painting is that it is a two-dimensional surface with paint on it. So instead of telling stories, the reductionist movement in painting asserts, to find the truth of painting painters must deliberately eliminate whatever can be eliminated from painting and see what survives. Then we will know the essence of painting.

Since we are eliminating, in the following iconic pieces from the twentieth century world of art, it is often not what is on the canvas that counts - it is what is not there. What is significant is what has been eliminated and is now absent. Art comes to be about absence.

Many elimination strategies were pursued by the early reductionists. If, traditionally, painting was cognitively significant in that it told us something about external reality, then the first thing we should try to eliminate is content based on an alleged awareness of reality. Dali's Metamorphosis here does double-duty. Dali challenges the idea that what we call reality is anything more than a bizarre subjective psychological state. Picasso's Desmoiselles also does double-duty: If the eyes are the window to the soul, then these souls are frighteningly vacant. Or if we turn the focus the other way and say that our eyes are our access to the world, then Picasso's women are seeing nothing.

So we eliminate from art a cognitive connection to an external reality. What else can be eliminated? If traditionally, skill in painting is a matter of representing a three-dimensional world on a two-dimensional surface, then to be true to painting we must eliminate the pretense of a third dimension. Sculpture is three-dimensional, but painting is not sculpture. The truth of painting is that it is not three-dimensional. For example, Barnett Newman's Dionysius (1949)— consisting of a green background with two thin, horizontal lines, one yellow and one red—is representative of this line of development. It is paint on canvas and only paint on canvas.

But traditional paints have a texture, leading to a three-dimensional effect if one looks closely. So, as Morris Louis demonstrates in Alpha-Phi (1961), we can get closer to painting's two-dimensional essence by thinning down the paints so that there is no texture. We are now as two-dimensional as possible, and that is the end of this reductionist strategy—the third dimension is gone.

On the other hand, if painting is two-dimensional, then perhaps we can still be true to painting if we paint things that themselves are two-dimensional. For example, Jasper Johns's White Flag (1955-58) is a painted-over American flag, and Roy Lichtenstein's Drowning Girl (1963), Whaam! (1963; Figure 4), and others are over-sized comic-book panels blown up onto large canvases. But flags and comic books are themselves two-dimensional objects, so a two-dimensional painting of them retains their essential truth while letting us remain true to the theme of painting's two-dimensionality. This device is particularly clever because, while remaining two-dimensional, we can at the same time smuggle in some illicit content—content that earlier had been eliminated.

But of course that really is cheating, as Lichtenstein went on to point out humorously with his Brushstroke (1965). If painting is the act of making brushstrokes on canvas, then to be true to the act of painting the product should look like what it is: a brushstroke on canvas. And with that little joke, this line of development is over.

So far in our quest for the truth of painting, we have tried only playing with the gap between three-dimensional and two-dimensional. What about composition and color differentiation? Can we eliminate those?

If, traditionally, skill in painting requires a mastery of composition, then, as Jackson Pollock's pieces famously illustrate, we can eliminate careful composition for randomness. Or if, traditionally, skill in painting is a mastery of color range and color differentiation, then we can eliminate color differentiation. Early in the twentieth century, Kasimir Malevich's White on White (1918) was a whitish square painted on a white background. Ad Reinhardt's Abstract Painting (1960-66) brought this line of development to a close by showing a very, very black cross painted on a very, very, very black background.

Or if traditionally the art object is a special and unique artifact, then we can eliminate the art object's special status by making art works that are reproductions of excruciatingly ordinary objects. Andy Warhol's paintings of soup cans and reproductions of tomato juice cartons have just that result. Or in a variation on that theme and sneaking in some cultural criticism, we can show that what art and capitalism do is take objects that are in fact special and unique—such as Marilyn Monroe—and reduce them to two-dimensional mass-produced commodities (Marilyn (Three Times), 1962).

Or if art traditionally is sensuous and perceptually embodied, then we can eliminate the sensuous and perceptual altogether, as in conceptual art. Consider Joseph Kosuth's It was It, Number 4. Kosuth first created a background of type-set text that reads:

Observation of the conditions under which misreadings occur gives rise to a doubt which I should not like to leave unmentioned, because it can, I think, become the starting-point for a fruitful investigation. Everyone knows how frequently the reader finds that in reading aloud his attention wanders from the text and turns to his own thoughts. As a result of this digression on the part of his attention he is often unable, if interrupted and questioned, to give any account of what he has read. He has read, as it were, automatically, but not correctly.

He then overlaid the black text with the following words in blue neon:

Description of the same content twice.
It was it.

Here the perceptual appeal is minimal, and art becomes a purely conceptual enterprise— and we have eliminated painting altogether.

If we put all of the above reductionist strategies together, the course of modern painting has been to eliminate the third dimension, composition, color, perceptual content, and the sense of the art object as something special.

This inevitably leads us back to Marcel Duchamp, the grand-daddy of modernism who saw the end of the road decades earlier. With his Fountain (1917; Figure 6), Duchamp made the quintessential statement about the history and future of art. Duchamp of course knew the history of art and, given recent trends, where art was going. He knew what had been achieved—how over the centuries art had been a powerful vehicle that called upon the highest development of the human creative vision and demanded exacting technical skill; and he knew that art had an awesome power to exalt the senses, the minds, and the passions of those who experience it. With his urinal, Duchamp offered presciently a summary statement. The artist is not a great creator—Duchamp went shopping at a plumbing store. The artwork is not a special object—it was mass-produced in a factory. The experience of art is not exciting and ennobling—it is puzzling and leaves one with a sense of distaste. But over and above that, Duchamp did not select just any ready-made object to display. He could have selected a sink or a door-knob. In selecting the urinal, his message was clear: Art is something you piss on.

But there is a still deeper point that Duchamp's urinal teaches us about the trajectory of modernism. In modernism, art becomes a philosophical enterprise rather than an artistic one. The driving purpose of modernism is not to do art but to find out what art is. We have eliminated X —is it still art? Now we have eliminated Y —is it still art? The point of the objects was not aesthetic experience; rather the works are symbols representing a stage in the evolution of a philosophical experiment. In most cases, the discussions about the works are much more interesting than the works themselves. That means that we keep the works in museums and archives and we look at them not for their own sake, but for the same reason scientists keep lab notes—as a record of their thinking at various stages. Or, to use a different analogy, the purpose of art objects is like that road signs along the highway—not as objects of contemplation in their own right but as markers to tell us how far we have traveled down a given road.

This was Duchamp's point when he noted, contemptuously, that most critics had missed the point: "I threw the bottle rack and the urinal into their faces as a challenge, and now they admire them for their aesthetic beauty." The urinal is not art—it is a device used as part of an intellectual exercise in figuring out why it is not art.

Modernism had no answer to Duchamp's challenge, and by the 1960s it found it had reached a dead end. To the extent modern art had content, its pessimism led it to the conclusion that nothing was worth saying. To the extent that it played the reductive elimination game, it found that nothing uniquely artistic survived elimination. Art became nothing. In the 1960s, Robert Rauschenberg was often quoted as saying, "Artists are no better than filing clerks." And Andy Warhol found his usual smirking way to announce the end when asked what he thought art was anymore: "Art? —Oh, that's a man's name."

Postmodernism's Four Themes

Where could art go after death of modernism? Postmodernism did not go, and has not gone, far. It needed some content and some new forms, but it did not want to go back to classicism, romanticism, or traditional realism.

As it had at the end of the nineteenth century, the art world reached out and drew upon the broader intellectual and cultural context of the late 1960s and 1970s. It absorbed the trendiness of Existentialism's absurd universe, the failure of Positivism's reductionism, and the collapse of socialism's New Left. It connected to intellectual heavyweights such as Thomas Kuhn, Michel Foucault, and Jacques Derrida, and it took its cue from their abstract themes of antirealism, deconstruction, and their heightened adversarial stance to Western culture. From those themes, postmodernism introduced four variations on modernism.

First, postmodernism re-introduced content—but only self-referential and ironic content. As with philosophical postmodernism, artistic postmodernism rejected any form of realism and became anti-realist. Art cannot be about reality or nature—because, according to postmodernism, "reality" and "nature" are merely social constructs. All we have are the social world and its social constructs, one of those constructs being the world of art. So, we may have content in our art as long as we talk self-referentially about the social world of art.

Secondly, postmodernism set itself to a more ruthless deconstruction of traditional categories that the modernists had not fully eliminated. Modernism had been reductionist, but some artistic targets remained.

For example, stylistic integrity had always been an element of great art, and artistic purity was one motivating force within modernism. So, one postmodern strategy has been to mix styles eclectically in order to undercut the idea of stylistic integrity. An early postmodern example in architecture, for example, is Philip Johnson's AT&T (now Sony) building in Manhattan—a modern skyscraper that could also be a giant eighteenth-century Chippendale cabinet. The architectural firm of Foster & Partners designed the Hong Kong and Shanghai Banking Corporation headquarters (1979-86)—a building that could also be the bridge of a ship, complete with mock anti-aircraft guns, should the bank ever need them. Friedensreich Hundertwasser's House (1986) in Vienna is more extreme—a deliberate slapping together of glass skyscraper, stucco, and occasional bricks, along with oddly placed balconies and arbitrarily sized windows, and completed with a Russian onion dome or two.

If we put the above two strategies together, then postmodern art will come to be both self-referential and destructive. It will be an internal commentary on the social history of art, but a subversive one. Here there is a continuity from modernism. Picasso took one of Matisse's portraits of his daughter—and used it as a dartboard, encouraging his friends to do the same. Duchamp's L.H.O.O.Q. (1919) is a rendition of the Mona Lisa with a cartoonish beard and moustache added. Rauschenberg erased a de Kooning work with a heavy wax pencil. In the 1960s, a gang led by George Maciunas performed Philip Corner's Piano Activities (1962)—which called for a number of men with implements of destruction such as band saws and chisels to destroy a grand piano. Niki de Saint Phalle's Venus de Milo (1962, Figure 8) is a life-size plaster-on-chickenwire version of the classic beauty filled with bags of red and black paint; Saint Phalle then took a rifle and fired upon the Venus, puncturing the statue and the bags of paint to a splattered effect.

Saint Phalle's Venus links us to the third postmodern strategy. Postmodernism allows one to make content statements as long as they are about social reality and not about an alleged natural or objective reality and—here is the variation—as long as they are narrower race/class/sex statements rather than pretentious, universalist claims about something called The Human Condition. Postmodernism rejects a universal human nature and substitutes the claim that we are all constructed into competing groups by our racial, economic, ethnic, and sexual circumstances. Applied to art, this postmodern claim implies that there are no artists, only hyphenated artists: black-artists, woman-artists, homosexual-artists, poor-Hispanic-artists, and so on.

Conceptual artist Frederic's PMS piece from the 1990s is helpful here in providing a schema. The piece is textual, a black canvas with the following words in red:

WHAT CREATES P.M.S. IN WOMEN?

Power
Money
Sex

Let us start with Power and consider race. Jane Alexander's Butcher Boys (1985-86) is an appropriately powerful piece about white power. Alexander places three South African white figures on a bench. Their skin is ghostly or corpse-like white, and she gives them monster heads and heart-surgery scars suggesting their heartlessness. But all three of them are sitting casually on the bench—they could be waiting for a bus or watching the passers-by at a mall. Her theme is the banality of evil: Whites don't even recognize themselves for the monsters they are.

Now for Money. There is the long-standing rule in modern art that one should never say anything kind about capitalism. From Andy Warhol's criticisms of mass-produced capitalist culture we can move easily to Jenny Holzer's Private Property Created Crime (1982). In the center of world capitalism—New York's Times Square—Holzer combined conceptualism with social commentary in an ironically clever manner by using capitalism's own media to subvert it. German artist Hans Haacke's Freedom is now simply going to be sponsored—out of petty cash (1991) is another monumental example. While the rest of the world was celebrating the end of brutality behind the Iron Curtain, Haacke erected a huge Mercedes-Benz logo atop a former East German guard tower. Men with guns previously occupied that tower—but Haacke suggests that all we are doing is replacing the rule of the Soviets with the equally heartless rule of the corporations.

Now for Sex. Saint Phalle's Venus can do double-duty here. We can interpret the rifle that shoots into the Venus as a phallic tool of dominance, in which case Saint-Phalle's piece can be seen as a feminist protest of male destruction of femininity. Mainstream feminist art includes Barbara Kruger's posters and room-size exhibits in bold black and red with angry faces yelling politically correct slogans about female victimization—art as a poster at a political rally. Jenny Saville's Branded (1992, Figure 10) is a grotesque self-portrait: Against any conception of female beauty, Saville asserts that she will be distended and hideous—and shove it in your face.

The fourth and final postmodern variation on modernism is a more ruthless nihilism. The above, while focused on the negative, are still dealing with important themes of power, wealth, and justice toward women. How can we eliminate more thoroughly any positivity in art? As relentlessly negative as modern art has been, what has not been done?

Entrails and blood: An art exhibition in 2000 asked patrons to place a goldfish in a blender and then turn the blender on—art as life reduced to indiscriminate liquid entrails. Marc Quinn's Self (1991) is the artist's own blood collected over the course of several months and molded into a frozen cast of his head. That is reductionism with a vengeance.

Unusual sex: Alternate sexualities and fetishes have been pretty much worked over during the twentieth century. But until recently art has not explored sex involving children. Eric Fischl's Sleepwalker (1979) shows a pubescent boy masturbating while standing naked in a kiddie pool in the backyard. Fischl's Bad Boy (1981) shows a boy stealing from his mother's purse and looking at his naked mother who is sleeping with her legs sprawled. If we have read our Freud, however, perhaps this is not very shocking. So we move on to Paul McCarthy's Cultural Gothic (1992-93) and the theme of bestiality. In this life-size, moving exhibit, a young boy stands behind a goat that he is violating. Here we have more than child sexuality and sex with animals, however: McCarthy adds some cultural commentary by having the boy's father present and resting his hands paternally on the boy's shoulders while the boy thrusts away.

A preoccupation with urine and feces: Again, postmodernism continues a longstanding modernist tradition. After Duchamp's urinal, Kunst ist Scheisse ("Art is shit") became, fittingly, the motto of the Dada movement. In the 1960s Piero Manzoni canned, labeled, exhibited and sold ninety tins of his own excrement (in 2002, a British museum purchased can number 68 for about $40,000). Andres Serrano generated controversy in the 1980s with his Piss Christ, a crucifix submerged in a jar of the artist's urine. In the 1990s Chris Ofili's The Holy Virgin Mary (1996) portrayed the Madonna as surrounded by disembodied genitalia and chunks of dried feces. In 2000 Yuan Cai and Jian Jun Xi paid homage to their master, Marcel Duchamp. Fountain is now at the Tate Museum in London, and during regular museum hours Yuan and Jian unzipped and proceeded to urinate on Duchamp's urinal. (The museum's directors were not pleased, but Duchamp would be proud of his spiritual children.) And there is G. G. Allin, the self-proclaimed performance artist who achieved his fifteen minutes by defecating on stage and flinging his feces into the audience.

So again we have reached a dead end: From Duchamp's Piss on art at the beginning of the century to Allin's Shit on you at the end—that is not a significant development over the course of a century.

The Future of Art

The heyday of postmodernism in art was the 1980s and 90s. Modernism had become stale by the 1970s, and I suggest that postmodernism has reached a similar dead-end, a What next? stage. Postmodern art was a game that played out within a narrow range of assumptions, and we are weary of the same old, same old, with only minor variations. The gross-outs have become mechanical and repetitive, and they no longer gross us out.

So, what next?

It is helpful to remember that modernism in art came out of a very specific intellectual culture of the late nineteenth century, and that it has remained loyally stuck in those themes. But those are not the only themes open to artists, and much has happened since the end of the nineteenth century.

We would not know from the world of modern art that average life expectancy has doubled since Edvard Munch screamed. We would not know that diseases that routinely killed hundreds of thousands of newborns each year have been eliminated. Nor would we know anything about the rising standards of living, the spread of democratic liberalism, and emerging markets.

We are brutally aware of the horrible disasters of National Socialism and international Communism, and art has a role in keeping us aware of them. But we would never know from the world of art the equally important fact that those battles were won and brutality was defeated.

And entering even more exotic territory, if we knew only the contemporary art world we would never get a glimmer of the excitement in evolutionary psychology, Big Bang cosmology, genetic engineering, the beauty of fractal mathematics—and the awesome fact that humans are the kind of being that can do all those exciting things.

Artists and the art world should be at the edge. The art world is now marginalized, in-bred, and conservative. It is being left behind, and for any self-respecting artist there should be nothing more demeaning than being left behind.

There are few more important cultural purposes than genuinely advancing art. We all intensely and personally know what art means to us. We surround ourselves with it. Art books and videos. Films at the theatre and on DVD. Stereos at home, music on our Walkmans, and CD players in our cars. Novels at the beach and as bedtime reading. Trips to galleries and museums. Art on the walls of our living space. We are each creating the artistic world we want to be in. From the art in our individual lives to the art that is cultural and national symbols, from the $10 poster to the $10 million painting acquired by a museum—we all have a major investment in art.

The world is ready for the bold new artistic move. That can come only from those not content with spotting the latest trivial variation on current themes. It can come only from those whose idea of boldness is not—waiting to see what can be done with waste products that has never been done before.

The point is not that there are no negatives out there in the world for art to confront, or that art cannot be a means of criticism. There are negatives and art should never shrink from them. My argument is with the uniform negativity and destructiveness of the art world. When has art in the twentieth century said anything encouraging about human relations, about mankind's potential for dignity, and courage, about the sheer positive passion of being in the world?

Artistic revolutions are made by a few key individuals. At the heart of every revolution is an artist who achieves originality. A novel theme, a fresh subject, or the inventive use of composition, figure, or color marks the beginning of a new era. Artists truly are gods: they create a world in their work, and they contribute to the creation of our cultural world.

Yet for revolutionary artists to reach the rest of the world, others play a crucial role. Collectors, gallery owners, curators, and critics make decisions about which artists are genuinely creating—and, accordingly, about which artists are most deserving of their money, gallery space, and recommendations. Those individuals also make the revolutions. In the broader art world, a revolution depends on those who are capable of recognizing the original artist's achievement and who have the entrepreneurial courage to promote that work.

The point is not to return to the 1800s or to turn art into the making of pretty postcards. The point is about being a human being who looks at the world afresh. In each generation there are only a few who do that at the highest level. That is always the challenge of art and its highest calling.

The world of postmodern art is a run-down hall of mirrors reflecting tiredly some innovations introduced a century ago. It is time to move on.

Stephen Hicks is a professor of philosophy at Rockford College in Illinois. He is the author of Explaining Postmodernism: Skepticism and Socialism from Rousseau to Foucault (Scholargy Publishing, 2004). He can be contacted through his Web site. This article is based on lectures given at the Foundation for the Advancement of Art's "Innovation, Substance, Vision" conference in New York (October 2003) and the Rockford College Philosophy Club's "The Future of Art" panel (April 2004).

Artists Write: IDEAS DON'T MATTER: "How Literary Ideas Subvert and Vitiate Art" by John Link

Artists Write: Thinking While Making Things is the column of art theoretical writings by practicing artists, edited by Mark Staff Brandl, in Proximity magazine. This issue, Number 5, features "Ideas Don't Matter: How Literary Ideas Subvert and Vitiate Art" by John Link.

IDEAS DON'T MATTER: How Literary Ideas Subvert and Vitiate Art by John Link

The dirty little mandate of our "anything goes" art scene is that "everything" must revolve around ideas, must ultimately emulate some sort of literature. The connection between visual art and the literal can be obvious or it can be contrived or it can be plain silly, just as long as it is "there."

The literal need not be creative. Witness the great success of the Wim Delvoye's artwork Cloaca, tied not to poetry or other lofty forms of verbiage, but to the lowly documentary, though it purported to document the rather intellectual question of "bioethics."

Cloaca was exhibited in 2002 at the New Museum in NYC. The museum described it as a performative event "for bringing art and science closer together, by inviting us to examine the ways in which we think of our bodies as machines, at the same moment in our cultural evolution where the separation between real and virtual has grown tenuous ... a metaphor for a society that privileges the cerebral over the corporeal, exulting in the latter only when it can be packaged into a kind of perfection."

What form did this perfectly packaged idea take? "Cloaca was an elaborate installation of laboratory glassware, electric pumps, gauges, and plastic tubing, which must be kept running at all hours of the day and night in order to function properly ... requiring regular infusions of chemicals and enzymes to keep the digestive system functioning, as well as a constant internal temperature regulated by computer."

Not too clear about what all this bioethical stuff means? Now that everyone is obsessed with outcomes, wonder what this thing does? It shits, that's what. About 5 inches at a time. Like a potty trained baby, it delivered the expected product every day at the designated hour, from a spigot that vaguely resembled those found at Dairy Queen, to the applause of the gathered crowd if the delivery took place during days the exhibition was open. Each ceremony was terminated when a museum employee removed the artistic outcome from the exhibition area. The resultant turds sold for $1,000 each.

With all due respect to the prestige bestowed by having a show at the New Museum, an alien from Mars might say Cloaca looked like an elaborate high school science project mistaken as "new" artistic revelation. Is the New Museum too young to remember that Experiments in Art and Technology claimed this territory for "advanced" art in the middle of the last century? More to the point, what if Cloaca had been displayed as an untitled and unexplained abstract contraption? The enlightened class may be enchanted with ideas, but they still can't think for themselves; they require help from a narrative.

Serious art is seriously malicious: emerging art makes fools out of the greatest possible number of art experts. Its natural prey is found in those who form large and complacent groups secure in the belief they know what's what. Today that group is certain that ideas are the core of art.

In the late 19th century the French Academy turned out to be the vulgarians when they were finally destroyed by the best art of their time. Their domination of the art system of that day did not protect them from art's malice. Today's vulgarians hold high positions in our museums, galleries and publications, not at all unlike the members of the discredited Academy. Curiously, these powerful "taste makers" celebrate the same avant-gardism the Academy hated, as if that will protect them from the Academy's fate. But like their Academy predecessors, they have developed a high degree of comfort with mutually-held ideas and avoid the difficulties of looking for real innovation.

Genuine innovation evolves slowly and painfully, without leaving footprints that conform to commonly accepted rules, and therefore remains invisible to those who embrace such conventional wisdom. Today, that's because such academicians have tied themselves to the rule of ideas and take comfort in the certainty that satisfying this dictate can provide. However, beauty sheds rules, sheds criteria, sheds standards, sheds anything a priori to itself, including ideas and truth. It exists to be seen, felt, and absorbed, not ruminated upon. It is tied to materials, not ideas, and looks retro to those who assume (wrongly) that ideas were the essential ingredient of avant-gardist art when it was still a living force in the evolution of ambitious art.


John Link was born in 1942 and lives in Michigan. His work includes painting, drawing, printmaking, photography, sculpture, and digital media; it is included in the collections of the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, Smithsonian Institute, Oregon State University, Golden State University, Clorox Company, Arthur Anderson & Co, California College of Arts and Crafts, Osaka University of the Arts, and Mitsubishi International Corporation. Articles about him have appeared in the Miami Herald, San Francisco Examiner, New Art Examiner, Los Angeles Times, Digital Video, Chicago Tribune, and The Chronicle of Higher Education. He has written for Arts, New Art Examiner, Digital Video, New Work, American Craft, and Dialogue. He taught art and art history for 39 years, starting at Southern Illinois University and continued at Virginia Tech and Western Michigan University. He was department head at the two last institutions.

Heimspiel 09, Cartoon und Kritik

An Bild anklicken, um grosser zu sehen.

Oben in Deutsch, below in English

Click on image to see larger.

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Heimspiel 09

Heimspiel: endlich mit haupsächlich echte regionale Künstler! Danke Corinne Schatz und Katharina Ammann! --- Grosser Buh-Ruf für Koni Bitterli, der mein Bild halb versteckt und absichtlich belieidigend gehägt hat. Kleinkarierrt. Offentsichlich ist er mmer noch zornig mit mir wenig meine veröffentlichte Kritik von jetzigem Kuratoren-Arroganz?





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Orientierungslose Ratlosigkeit

Manchmal liefert einem der Alltag die schönsten Bilder: Bei der Heimfahrt von der Kunst09 in Zürich fährt vor mir ein dunkelblauer BMW, der zuerst die Ausfahrt aus dem Parkhaus und dann den Weg aus den architektonischen Grossstadtträumen von Örlikon nicht findet, grundsätzlich in die falsche Richtung blinkt und schön langsam den ganzen Verkehr aufhält.

Genauso scheint es sich auch mit der Kunst09 zu verhalten, die sich für die wichtigste Kunstschau in der Schweiz neben der Art Basel hält und sich "in den letzten 15 Jahren zur hochkarätigen Veranstaltung entwickelt" haben soll - so der Pressebericht.

Was finden wir vor Ort?
Eine Veranstaltung, die zwar nach Aussen elegant daherkommt, aber ohne Ziel und orientierungslos im Seichten dümpelt und den Besucher nur aufhält. Ein Supermarkt für Sofakunst.

Es gibt durchaus viel versprechende Namen - nur leider halten die Arbeiten nur in den wenigsten Fällen, was sie versprechen und Entdeckungen sind bis auf eine oder zwei Ausnahmen nicht zu machen. Was auf Kunstmessen grundsätzlich gilt: dass es, auch wenn es um Kunst geht, nie wirklich Kunst sondern Waren zu sehen gibt, wird auf der Kunst09 nur umso deutlicher und es ist schade, auch gute Künstlerinnen und Künstler so schlecht repräsentiert zu sehen.

Nun stellt sich der geschätzte Leser vielleicht die Frage, warum ich mich dennoch darum bemühe einen Text zu dieser Veranstaltung zu verfassen, wenn doch besser darüber geschwiegen werden sollte. Berechtigt, kann ich da zurückgeben. Den Anlass dazu gibt die ZKB in ihrer Pressemitteilung zur Verleihung des alljährlichen Kunstpreises. Es geht dabei nicht um die Auswahl der präsentierten Künstler oder Galerien für diesen Preis - nein, es geht um ein Zitat, das ich Ihnen nicht vorenthalten möchte:

"Was früher die Rolle der Kirche war, ist heute die der Bank: Das Fördern der Künste und das Wecken und Verbreiten des Kunstverständnisses und -interesses in der Bevölkerung. Zum dritten Mal in Folge nimmt die Zürcher Kantonalbank diese Verpflichtung auch an der Kunst Zürich wahr und verleiht mit einer Preissume von CHF 10.000 den ZKB Kunstpreis an eine von 12 ausgewählten Soloshows."

Ist das Selbstüberschätzung oder einfach nur Unzeitgemäss? Ist es ernst gemeint oder steckt da ein satirischer Werber dahinter? Können die wirklich Rechnen oder sind das Hinweise auf die Gründe, die in die internationale Finanzkrise geführt haben?

Mich hinterlässt das ratlos und lässt mich am Verstand der Menschheit zweifeln.

Shooting Foxes....scoping the IAW...

I have long been a fan of the Sharkforum and resident artist/critic Mark Staff Brandl's take on the present state of art criticism.

This is by way of a practice run to 'scope' the afore mentioned 'art criticism now?' agenda :-)
I love that word 'scope' you'd think we were shooting bears..maybe we are...certainly foxes...

His latest project involves asking artists to write about their practice and its theoretical basis as a challenge to the current curatorial/academic mish mash that sometimes pertains in the IAW (international art world). He (I think correctly) cites the current fashion orientated dealer driven art world as suffering from a 'glossies' approach that has jettisoned the baby with the bathwater and quite correctly identifies a gap 'in the market' (how loaded that phrase has become in the past 30 years) where artist's voices have become swamped in other louder discourses. Usually these discourses are tied hand and foot to financial and kudos driven 'standing' in that same 'IAW' and have long since lost any real veracity or in some cases coherance as theoretical writings let alone curatorial statements or overviews.

We here in Nottingham have some recent first-hand instances of this I.A.W. Gobbledygook thanks to our sudden emergence into the IAW thanks to Nottingham Contemporary. As our provincial minds sink in the flood of propaganda we are about to be verbally lashed by maybe it a good point for some circumspect analysis of this phenomena.

My own artistic history is pretty much framed in two decades. Firstly 1980-1990 then 2000-2010.

Phase 1: I graduated from Hornsey college of Art London (Middlesex University as is now) in 1981 and my art history tutor there was John A. Walker who has written extensively about the specifically political dimension to celebrity art as well as popular cultural connections ( Art in the Age of Mass Media 2001). At this time there was little separation between 'art' and 'theory'. Indeed it was common practice to read and absorb not only general theory but specific artist's statements. Magazines like Artscribe and Art Monthly put artist statements centre stage and along with a varied 'contextaul' studies area which ranged from contemporary poetry to applied design we were encouraged not only to think for ourselves but also to be as wide in our reading as possible. In those days notions of 'networking' and 'careerist' 'making it' were viewed from a heavily left-wing viewpoint ( Hornsey had been a scene of 'Riots' alongside actions in France in 1968 ) so much so that I do not think the words were ever used.





We were serious (maybe too serious) students with serious ambitions to create serious artworks. There was little hope of making money except in maybe the long term and we set ourselves for many years of cold, lonely debate and artmaking activity in usually sub standard freezing cold 'studios'. We did have a sense of community and a shared sense of what the 'art world' was and what was 'significant'. What was written about in Artscribe framed the debate and our sense of the 'art world'. There were few curatorial driven exhibitions to see and a hang of Bacon or Auerbach at Marlborough would be the highpoint of a summer. Serious artists shown seriously with little theoretical framing except in large Thames and Hudson or Phaidon tomes or reviews in the 'serious' press. Waldemar Janusczack, James Faure Walker, Sarah Kent, Brian Sewell, Mathew Collings...the names of those critics I remember 20 years later such was there standing....Artcribe had a 'local' i.e. usually London focus.

The art world then may have been smaller (pre boom and bust and the internet) but one felt one could get a handle of the major developments and the significant figures as they emerged. I remember seeing early shows by Doig and Julian Opie. Indeed I even ended up as a figure in a Gilbert and George photo piece. This was pre Goldsmiths, Hirst and the collapse (in my opinion) of those values and the boom in a larger, more fashionable, successful and in my opinion shallower art world. That art world was fed, watered and bloomed under the hands of an advertising executive and there was indeed a cut off point. The change in attitudes can be dated to the Royal Academy Sensation show...soon Stuart Morgan tried to sail artscribe into 'International Art World' waters and promptly sank....he just didn't understand the Prada Bag set...

There and ever after even the hard leftists in the artworld found themselves chasing a beguiling gravy train and many acres of comment fell over backwards justifying their selling out to a capitalist driven art world on a scale hitherto unimagined. Craig-Martin at Goldsmiths and priniciples of newly business orientated Academies across the country raced to catch up and cash in. This also coincided with a boom in markets across Europe and the USA and suddenly Brit was HIP. Nobody could bare to criticise a position we so fully deserved...now we were art top dogs we could look down on others and crow....and of course objective criticism.hard criticism..was thrown out the window.

I remember attending a show in the mid 1980's where the curatorial statement ran to over a thousand words and was written in such impermeable 'academese' that nobody could actually read it. I dismissed it but foolishly did not realise the power of the word was on the march.....

Soon fellow artists were 'locating their practice' and referencing Derrida and Foucault. Indeed one friend went from rather dull printmaker to being an expert on postmodernism in a matter of weeks. The honesty and integrity of magazines like Artscribe and Art Monthly were suddenly outshone by their glossy step-children ...Frieze, Flash etc etc and countless others that spawned and drowned in their own scenes. This also coincided with the first attempts to push M.A.'s and Phd's for artists.....up until that point M.A.'s were few and far between and centred on the 'top' institutions The Slade, Chelsea and Royal College. More importantly these were heavily studio-based courses...long on practice short on theory....evn in the late 1980's one could still just paint at the Royal College like David Hockney......just....

I still have some of the copies of artscribe I would spend hours poring over..then for a few brief years before his untimely death Peter Fuller's 'Modern Painters' seemed to show a way forward with erudite well written articles by the likes of Jed Perl rubbing shoulders with informed 'outsiders' like david Bowie and poet Jamie McKendrick. I ws verbally lashed by a graphic designer who then head of Goldsmiths M.A. for even suggesting Fuller was worth reading as too rightist..the same Goldsmiths that spun a silk purse out of a sow's ear a year later with Damien Hirst......ah the irony of it all. Nothing corrupts good intentions and political principles like a hefty wad of cash especially in the Halls of Academe....

What Fuller recognised (he was a good critic grounded in an appreciation of the English Tradition especially the writings of Ruskin, Moore, Sutherland and Hockney..read 'Beyond the Crisis in Art' currently out of print) was the essential connection between an artists's writing and their art. Especially if one moved closer to the arts and crafts area of Gill, David Jones and all the way back via William Morriss to William Blake.

That tradition has never been broken it merely been supplanted by the hysterical winnying of a thousand 'on the make' mediocrities in both studio and academia. Tie-ins and stitch-ups replaced a grounded and reasoned debate. A in-depth knowledge was not needed to spurt out a trendy 1000 word review of Hirst that never delved into his fragile and lately revealed lack of knowledge of anything remotely to do with art. Like the Peter Sellers film 'Being There' all that mattered was to be in attendance at the 'Cinderella's Ball' to catch some benefits from the King's largesse. Many very good painters and theorists (equally) retreated to the shadows ...some never to return.....John Hubbard, David Blackburn, Simon Lewty, Gillian Ayres even artists with reputations as formidable as Athony Caro's, John Hoyland's or Tom Phillips' were not safe. they were all pushed form the banquet table by the greedy and Sunday Supplement friendly advertising savvy new brood....they have never left nor raised their snouts since.....Chapmans, Hirst, Emin..you know the rest....

Now there seems to be a new mood afoot where not only Aesthetics but the artists themselves may once more be allowed their rightful place at the high table of art and there a very good chance their writing a lot better than the charlatans who supplanted them.

Read David Smith, Robert Motherwell, CY Twombly, Philip Guston, Picasso, Matisse.......it a long and noble tradition of both thinking and doing..

Hirst on Art.........don't make me laugh

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Academic artists? Oxymoron?

There was a time when the phrase 'academic artist' was synomonous with a certain conservatism and use of traditional strophes that reflected the academic virtues of fine handling of paint, drawing of a certain standard and a certain 'resemblance' to the world of the viewer who would recognise the metaphors and the world that produced the works. A 'hang' may be as crowded as the Rowlandson of Somerset House but like the Royal Academy Summer Show one knew what one was getting.

Now the phrase has more chance of pertaining to an altogether more insubstantial, less skilful and frankly bizarre world.....for now we have a new breed of 'institutional academic artists'. These strange hybrid creatures (neither fish nor fowl) have realised that their 'practice' ( a cosy word for what they 'do' that has jettisoned the need to actually 'do' anything) is a fair hothouse flower that could not survive in the cruel harsh winds of UK PLC in a recession. having realised that their slender talents are unbankable in any BRITART fab cash in bank way they are flocking to peddle their wares at the feet of Symposiums and Academic meetings. spitting out acronyms like the funnel of one of Turner's Steamships and generally trying to survive by writing as much about themselves and doing as little actual 'work' as in artwork' as possible.

The Botanic Gardens at Kew do not have as rare and flimsy a bunch of Credit Crunch Orchids to maintain as the New Universities (desperate for AHRC money to keep the wolf from the door having spent all the cash the poor students have provided). One cannot turn around these days for collaborative projects, new commissions, artists in residence ( a wide term as will be seen) and lectures by people less able to academicise than actually 'do' anything. In the past there were often spurious connections to float the poor artist into the academic flow...

Some artists benefitted from a fragile correspondence between their practice and the particular specialism of a department...Lace or plastic, car engines, botany..tie-in art flourished and some artists swiftly moved from garrett to academic offices and never left such was the increase in prosperity not to mention the warmth involved.

Now we are at a fascinating juncture in this process as the wind of time and change starts to blow back on these poor fragile blooms. As the realisation that UK PLC is not only bereft of jobs but the talents to actually do something instead of just talk about doing it University departments are clutching at new straws...economic development and regeneration are the key.

From talking about their practice these hybrid 'Academists' are now spouting a whole new range of acronym driven homilies....again to keep their place in the warm flowerbed....it is too cold out in Real Land..too many redundancies too few opportunities.

So as the recession bites maybe one would expect the chill wind to produce some hardier perennials..maybe a return to some of those traditional practices and skills as mentioned in the old concept of 'The Academy'. No not a jot of it...

No it appears we will wait in vain for hardy snowdrops to bloom in their stead.

I have recently trawled through some academic notions of practice and whilst many reduce the brain to a sponge and yet others begger belief both in description and action none so far has matched my latest prize.....

An artist who shall remain nameless is speaking at a destination which alack shall also remain anonymous
on his revalatory practice of.......


'Pouring special brew on a station platform and shouting'

I wish dear reader that I could be making this up...but alas it is true. Said artist manages to not only stupify with the nonsensical act but then to explicate it in almost Johnson like hyperbole....Dear friends what looks like the drunken action of a immature less than gifted imposter is in fact art..and not only art but art of a high order..art that bears a direct descendance form the Greek Gods and Hermes himself and yes from a tradition of lay preaching....

This is where we are good kind people mouthing platitudes and accomodating gibberish in the name of art....

I may not know much about art but I do know many kinds of shit when it travails the ear and this is 100% genuine bullshit and some of our academic institutions live and breath this kind of nonsense.....so far...

Methinks a little pruning in the gardens of the comfortably well off not amiss...and soon.

Maybe then some of those real blooms and real skills can blossom without choking in the avant-garde weedbeds of edification, explication and plain verbose drivel......and we can leave that to rot like any good remnant of verdure on the roots of the finer arts.

And a handy gardening tip if it smells like shit it probably is...treat with caution and dig it under whenever possible.

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