My top ten movies of the year, in no particular order:
(with caveat I haven't seen Up in the Air yet)
1. Two Lovers
2. Anvil! The Story of Anvil
3. Gomorrah
4. The White Ribbon
5. The Hurt Locker
6. Tokyo Sonata
7. Revanche
8. Tyson
9. State of Play
10. Star Trek or District 9
Saturday, January 2, 2010
Tuesday, January 2, 2007
Postmodernism and Politics
Dada was an extreme protest against the physical side of painting . . . It was a sort of nihilism to which I am still very sympathetic.
—Marcel Duchamp, 1946
Paul Cézanne, like many plucky, aspiring French painters in the 19th century, repeatedly attempted to exhibit his work in the Salon, the official annual art exhibiton of Paris. His submissions were rejected every year from 1864 to 1869. In 1882, largely due to the influence of friend and fellow painter Antoine Guillemet, his chunky Portrait of the Artist's Father was accepted and has the distinction of being Cézanne’s first and last successful submission to the Salon. So much for pluck.
The ironic joke is, of course, that Cézanne is now considered one of the greatest proto-modern artists, having a huge influence on many post-impressionist painters such as Gauguin, van Gogh, and especially a young Picasso. Cézanne was a key figure in the aesthetic break from moribund traditions exemplified by the salon, and a pioneer of the modern movement.
Modernist art broke free from the confines of a classical realist tradition that had degenerated into a barren and stilted academicism at the same time the salon was vigorously rejecting impressionist work. The pictorial ideals of the high Renaissance and the schools of David and Ingres were held as pinnacles of artistic achievement and impressive techniques were developed to “fool the eye” into believing that painted bodies and objects seem so realistic that they almost appear to be popping out of the painted surface. Subject matter was expected to be literary or morally edifying, frequently exploring classical and biblical themes.
The influence of modern, scientific color theory and the art of the Far East had a profound and liberating effect on the avant-garde of the day. Artists such as Manet, Monet, Pissaro, and Renoir began depicting a different world from the one that existed in the lofty battle scenes and serene classical nudes of the Paris salon. Concerns and milieus of the middle class began to be illustrated in a style that appeared to be crude, garish, primitive, or simply inept to the average nineteenth-century Frenchman with an interest in painting and sculpture. The lofty academic depictions of a Bouguereau or a Winterhalter did not correspond to the day-to-day world of the Impressionists; reality on canvas did not feel like reality lived in the streets, cafés and parks of Paris. A new way of looking and feeling had to be invented. Monet’s pink and green sunsets may seem the epitome of chocolate-box decoration today, but it cannot be overstated how radical they were for their time, and what a shock they caused among the delicate, insular and conservative sensibilities of the nineteenth-century art world.
At the root of this revolution was a response, articulated by Roger Fry, that at its fundamental level, a painting is an agglomeration of spots of paint that does more than just depict a person, street or landscape, but exists to express how humans feel. The recent invention of the camera satisfied the need to record and illustrate the world the “proper” way most people think it looks, which is the static, one-point perspective model developed during the Renaissance, referred to as realism. In painting terms, the long-standing notion of the picture plane as an illusionistic “window” was replaced with the notion of the painting as an expressive object in itself—a flat rectangular construction of paint blobs, lines, and shapes that is deeply interesting for its own sake or aesthetic import.
It took Manet and the Impressionists about seventy-five years to dismantle this Renaissance model that renders a view of the visual world that is rigidly “photographic”. Later, Cézanne and the Post-Impressionists (and still later the Cubists and the Fauves) would further develop the radical idea that a painting could combine and encapsulate multiple viewpoints, scales and even multiple points in time. This churned-up view of reality coincided with a different world-view, a world-view brought about quantum mechanics and by the invention of the airplane and the cine-camera. People began to look at the world in a new way, whether it looked blurred from the window of a moving train, or flat from an airplane. What is not entirely clear is if these artistic developments were a causal effect of scientific developments, or a natural progression from the radical depictions of the Impressionists and their successors.
Modernism ends a long trajectory that began with the breathtaking yet constrained illusionism of the Renaissance and ends in anti-realism or abstraction. There are many writers, Hans Belting included, who have written that the end of modernism, culminating in pure abstraction, coincided with an end of art history. Or, to put it another way, art history was incapable of continuing in the sense of having a progressive developmental history. Others like to see the trajectory of art history culminating in Greenberg’s idea of “purity”—in modernism, art was cleansed or purged of its irrelevant aspects (outmoded realism, story-telling, moralizing) to dwell on the philosophy of its own being. Purity meant self-definition, of limiting and defining each of the arts, to what was particular to itself. Medium scrambling, or the mixing of artistic disciplines, was as abhorred as subject matter.
The postmodern task of discrediting modernism began with Marcel Duchamp. His art and writings exemplify the antagonism or theoretical battle going on in the
twentieth-century art world between activist (profound/concept-based) and aesthetic (sacred/process-based) art, and between ideas, intellect, the mind and physicality, sensuality, and the body.
Ironically, Duchamp started out as a Fauvist, albeit a bad one. He claims to have been heavily drawn to Henri Matisse’s painting, and considered Matisse’s discovery around 1906 to be a “major event” for him [1]. Perhaps out of a sense of frustration, he abandoned fauve painting soon after and began his life-long endeavor of attacking the intensity of physical painting.
Duchamp fame rests largely on the notoriety of his ready-mades, which are unremarkable, everyday objects such as a shovels or brooms, transformed by their inclusion in an art context, i.e. by placing them in a gallery (artspeak: recontextualizing). In 1917 he shocked sensibilities by exhibiting a urinal. Modernist art critic Clement Greenberg believes this event was also an attempt to bring “raw” aesthetic experience—the kind of aesthetic experience that comes from contemplating say, a sunset or a brick wall—into the context of the museum. Greenberg considers this kind of unformalized aesthetic experience inferior, by and large, to the kinds of aesthetic experiences resulting from formalized art:
Duchamp's sub-tradition is alive and well today, and one frequently hears of an earnest artist's attempt to "push the boundaries" of art by exhibiting bricks, old tires, balls of string, whatever. What gets lost, however, is a sense that at its very best, visual art succeeds due to a kind of pressure exerted on an artistic medium, within the medium's boundaries. It is this pressure that gives aesthetic pleasure or satisfaction, and without it we get the kind of "raw" aesthetic experience
Greenberg complained about aesthetic experience that had not been shaped and guided by an artistic hand. In terms of quality, the vast majority of contemporary art can't be judged to be bad because it isn't attempting to be good. It is just there, like a brick wall is just there. It is art gallery décor, lacking the courage to be real art.
In spite of claims from its members that we are ensconced in a healthy pluralism, a similar environment exists today that existed in 1870’s Paris. This is Duchamp's legacy. The official art of the contemporary art world has its own essential prerequisites. Among the “cutting-edge” galleries and museums, art is expected to be subversive, critical, didactic. Artists explore themes to do with identity, gender, power, politics, sexuality, etc. Here are three brief artist statement summaries I found online, more or less at random: Artist Rita Wong states that her work “investigates the intersections and relationships between decolonization, social justice, gender, racialization, labour, migration, and contemporary poetics.” [3] Eleanor Bond's paintings and drawings "combine speculative projections of the built environment with meditations on a number of social, ecological, political and economic themes." [4] Ken Lum's art is "centrally concerned with issues of identity as it traverses the discourses of urban image production. Comprised of multiple forms, Lum's art is a practice of desubstantiation from notions of identity as they submit to the acculturation process." [5] Statements like this are all over the place, and you begin to wonder how any of these artists could even pick up a brush or pencil, given the weight of intellectual baggage and lofty issues with which they saddle themselves. The question as to how non-discursive visual art could possibly tackle these complex issues with any success is, of course, eshewed, as is any self-examination of the enterprise's artistic value. What's most interesting, though, is the deliberate evasion of clarity contained in artist statements apparently intended to achieve the opposite purpose, and the tacit assumption that all art needs to be didactic or morally uplifting. Is a painting or sculpture obligated to tackle the world's problems or undertake the work of an academic disertation? What happened to, you know, expressing emotion, bringing joy into the world, that sort of thing?
The belief that politically engaged work is better than apolitical work runs rampant through the contemporary art world and the university. It's a conclusion that a century of modern art was supposed to avert; that's because one of Modernism's great achievements was to prove that modern art doesn't need to be explicitly political because modern art is implicitly political. Putting an abstract painting on your wall or a daisy-patterned rug in your living room speaks volumes about the embrace of the non-utilitarian in the face of any kind of authoritarianism.
However, trying to argue these points to a member of the concept-based contemporary art world is like teaching a frog to tap-dance. Driven by fashion as well as ideology, they are a hard bunch to sway and are notoriously resistant to common sense argument. Today's plucky, contemporary artist with a passion for form and colour, will likely feel lonely among the throngs of installations, photo-texts and other beloved forms of today's avant-garde. They will continue to make art from their heart and guts, and remain uninterested in the "practice of desubstantiation from notions of identity as they submit to the acculturation process". These "pro-formers", painting against the grain of fashion, will apply for exhibitions and grants, and many of them will receive rejection letters from selection-committees, perhaps making them feel like a glum Cézanne as another one of his masterworks was denied entry into the Paris salon.
(c) 2007 Adrian Livesley. Reproduction or transmission prohibited without author's written consent.Footnotes:[1] Donald Kuspit, The End of Art. New York: Cambridge University Press, 1999. p. 45.
[2] Greenberg, Homemade Esthetics. New York: Oxford University Press, 1999. p. 56.[3] Emily Carr Institute website. http://www.eciad.ca/~rwong/ [4] Concordia Fine Arts website http://studio-arts.concordia.ca/[5] Ken Lum's website http://kenlum.net
—Marcel Duchamp, 1946
Paul Cézanne, like many plucky, aspiring French painters in the 19th century, repeatedly attempted to exhibit his work in the Salon, the official annual art exhibiton of Paris. His submissions were rejected every year from 1864 to 1869. In 1882, largely due to the influence of friend and fellow painter Antoine Guillemet, his chunky Portrait of the Artist's Father was accepted and has the distinction of being Cézanne’s first and last successful submission to the Salon. So much for pluck.
The ironic joke is, of course, that Cézanne is now considered one of the greatest proto-modern artists, having a huge influence on many post-impressionist painters such as Gauguin, van Gogh, and especially a young Picasso. Cézanne was a key figure in the aesthetic break from moribund traditions exemplified by the salon, and a pioneer of the modern movement.
Modernist art broke free from the confines of a classical realist tradition that had degenerated into a barren and stilted academicism at the same time the salon was vigorously rejecting impressionist work. The pictorial ideals of the high Renaissance and the schools of David and Ingres were held as pinnacles of artistic achievement and impressive techniques were developed to “fool the eye” into believing that painted bodies and objects seem so realistic that they almost appear to be popping out of the painted surface. Subject matter was expected to be literary or morally edifying, frequently exploring classical and biblical themes.
The influence of modern, scientific color theory and the art of the Far East had a profound and liberating effect on the avant-garde of the day. Artists such as Manet, Monet, Pissaro, and Renoir began depicting a different world from the one that existed in the lofty battle scenes and serene classical nudes of the Paris salon. Concerns and milieus of the middle class began to be illustrated in a style that appeared to be crude, garish, primitive, or simply inept to the average nineteenth-century Frenchman with an interest in painting and sculpture. The lofty academic depictions of a Bouguereau or a Winterhalter did not correspond to the day-to-day world of the Impressionists; reality on canvas did not feel like reality lived in the streets, cafés and parks of Paris. A new way of looking and feeling had to be invented. Monet’s pink and green sunsets may seem the epitome of chocolate-box decoration today, but it cannot be overstated how radical they were for their time, and what a shock they caused among the delicate, insular and conservative sensibilities of the nineteenth-century art world.
At the root of this revolution was a response, articulated by Roger Fry, that at its fundamental level, a painting is an agglomeration of spots of paint that does more than just depict a person, street or landscape, but exists to express how humans feel. The recent invention of the camera satisfied the need to record and illustrate the world the “proper” way most people think it looks, which is the static, one-point perspective model developed during the Renaissance, referred to as realism. In painting terms, the long-standing notion of the picture plane as an illusionistic “window” was replaced with the notion of the painting as an expressive object in itself—a flat rectangular construction of paint blobs, lines, and shapes that is deeply interesting for its own sake or aesthetic import.
It took Manet and the Impressionists about seventy-five years to dismantle this Renaissance model that renders a view of the visual world that is rigidly “photographic”. Later, Cézanne and the Post-Impressionists (and still later the Cubists and the Fauves) would further develop the radical idea that a painting could combine and encapsulate multiple viewpoints, scales and even multiple points in time. This churned-up view of reality coincided with a different world-view, a world-view brought about quantum mechanics and by the invention of the airplane and the cine-camera. People began to look at the world in a new way, whether it looked blurred from the window of a moving train, or flat from an airplane. What is not entirely clear is if these artistic developments were a causal effect of scientific developments, or a natural progression from the radical depictions of the Impressionists and their successors.
Modernism ends a long trajectory that began with the breathtaking yet constrained illusionism of the Renaissance and ends in anti-realism or abstraction. There are many writers, Hans Belting included, who have written that the end of modernism, culminating in pure abstraction, coincided with an end of art history. Or, to put it another way, art history was incapable of continuing in the sense of having a progressive developmental history. Others like to see the trajectory of art history culminating in Greenberg’s idea of “purity”—in modernism, art was cleansed or purged of its irrelevant aspects (outmoded realism, story-telling, moralizing) to dwell on the philosophy of its own being. Purity meant self-definition, of limiting and defining each of the arts, to what was particular to itself. Medium scrambling, or the mixing of artistic disciplines, was as abhorred as subject matter.
The postmodern task of discrediting modernism began with Marcel Duchamp. His art and writings exemplify the antagonism or theoretical battle going on in the
twentieth-century art world between activist (profound/concept-based) and aesthetic (sacred/process-based) art, and between ideas, intellect, the mind and physicality, sensuality, and the body.
Ironically, Duchamp started out as a Fauvist, albeit a bad one. He claims to have been heavily drawn to Henri Matisse’s painting, and considered Matisse’s discovery around 1906 to be a “major event” for him [1]. Perhaps out of a sense of frustration, he abandoned fauve painting soon after and began his life-long endeavor of attacking the intensity of physical painting.
Duchamp fame rests largely on the notoriety of his ready-mades, which are unremarkable, everyday objects such as a shovels or brooms, transformed by their inclusion in an art context, i.e. by placing them in a gallery (artspeak: recontextualizing). In 1917 he shocked sensibilities by exhibiting a urinal. Modernist art critic Clement Greenberg believes this event was also an attempt to bring “raw” aesthetic experience—the kind of aesthetic experience that comes from contemplating say, a sunset or a brick wall—into the context of the museum. Greenberg considers this kind of unformalized aesthetic experience inferior, by and large, to the kinds of aesthetic experiences resulting from formalized art:
Duchamp did by intention set himself against formal and formalized art. He did, in effect, try to make free-floating, “raw” aesthetic experience . . . institutionally viable (showable in art galleries and museums, discussable in print and by art-interested people). His “raw” art turned out, however, to be less than raw insofar as it had its own orientation to conventions; only these weren’t aesthetic ones, but the largely un-aesthetic conventions of social propriety, decorum. The point became to violate these. So a urinal was shown in an art gallery . . . the point was made. But there was a still further point: to defy and deny aesthetic judgment, taste, the satisfactions of art as art. This remained the main point for Duchamp . . . and it remains the main point for the sub-tradition that he founded. [2]
Duchamp's sub-tradition is alive and well today, and one frequently hears of an earnest artist's attempt to "push the boundaries" of art by exhibiting bricks, old tires, balls of string, whatever. What gets lost, however, is a sense that at its very best, visual art succeeds due to a kind of pressure exerted on an artistic medium, within the medium's boundaries. It is this pressure that gives aesthetic pleasure or satisfaction, and without it we get the kind of "raw" aesthetic experience
Greenberg complained about aesthetic experience that had not been shaped and guided by an artistic hand. In terms of quality, the vast majority of contemporary art can't be judged to be bad because it isn't attempting to be good. It is just there, like a brick wall is just there. It is art gallery décor, lacking the courage to be real art.
In spite of claims from its members that we are ensconced in a healthy pluralism, a similar environment exists today that existed in 1870’s Paris. This is Duchamp's legacy. The official art of the contemporary art world has its own essential prerequisites. Among the “cutting-edge” galleries and museums, art is expected to be subversive, critical, didactic. Artists explore themes to do with identity, gender, power, politics, sexuality, etc. Here are three brief artist statement summaries I found online, more or less at random: Artist Rita Wong states that her work “investigates the intersections and relationships between decolonization, social justice, gender, racialization, labour, migration, and contemporary poetics.” [3] Eleanor Bond's paintings and drawings "combine speculative projections of the built environment with meditations on a number of social, ecological, political and economic themes." [4] Ken Lum's art is "centrally concerned with issues of identity as it traverses the discourses of urban image production. Comprised of multiple forms, Lum's art is a practice of desubstantiation from notions of identity as they submit to the acculturation process." [5] Statements like this are all over the place, and you begin to wonder how any of these artists could even pick up a brush or pencil, given the weight of intellectual baggage and lofty issues with which they saddle themselves. The question as to how non-discursive visual art could possibly tackle these complex issues with any success is, of course, eshewed, as is any self-examination of the enterprise's artistic value. What's most interesting, though, is the deliberate evasion of clarity contained in artist statements apparently intended to achieve the opposite purpose, and the tacit assumption that all art needs to be didactic or morally uplifting. Is a painting or sculpture obligated to tackle the world's problems or undertake the work of an academic disertation? What happened to, you know, expressing emotion, bringing joy into the world, that sort of thing?
The belief that politically engaged work is better than apolitical work runs rampant through the contemporary art world and the university. It's a conclusion that a century of modern art was supposed to avert; that's because one of Modernism's great achievements was to prove that modern art doesn't need to be explicitly political because modern art is implicitly political. Putting an abstract painting on your wall or a daisy-patterned rug in your living room speaks volumes about the embrace of the non-utilitarian in the face of any kind of authoritarianism.
However, trying to argue these points to a member of the concept-based contemporary art world is like teaching a frog to tap-dance. Driven by fashion as well as ideology, they are a hard bunch to sway and are notoriously resistant to common sense argument. Today's plucky, contemporary artist with a passion for form and colour, will likely feel lonely among the throngs of installations, photo-texts and other beloved forms of today's avant-garde. They will continue to make art from their heart and guts, and remain uninterested in the "practice of desubstantiation from notions of identity as they submit to the acculturation process". These "pro-formers", painting against the grain of fashion, will apply for exhibitions and grants, and many of them will receive rejection letters from selection-committees, perhaps making them feel like a glum Cézanne as another one of his masterworks was denied entry into the Paris salon.
(c) 2007 Adrian Livesley. Reproduction or transmission prohibited without author's written consent.Footnotes:[1] Donald Kuspit, The End of Art. New York: Cambridge University Press, 1999. p. 45.
[2] Greenberg, Homemade Esthetics. New York: Oxford University Press, 1999. p. 56.[3] Emily Carr Institute website. http://www.eciad.ca/~rwong/ [4] Concordia Fine Arts website http://studio-arts.concordia.ca/[5] Ken Lum's website http://kenlum.net
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