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ZEITGEBER
ON
RESETTING THE ART-HISTORICAL CLOCK Z Zeitgeber \'tsit-ga-ber\ n [G, fr. zeit time (fr. OHG zit) + geber, lit., giver, donor, fr. geben to give, fr. OHG geban; akin to OE giefan to give -- more at TIDE, GIVE] (1968): an environmental agent or event (as the occurrence of light or dark) that provides the stimulus setting or resetting a biological clock of an organism. The twentieth century has been as a long flight on a fast plane travelling some low-level synchronous orbit, moving always east to west, against the rotation of the earth, and we are blinded by the sun forever in our face. Suffering chronic aesthetic jet-lag and burned corneas, we cannot see where to go, in any sense of the word. What is needed is an artistic Zeitgeber.
Preface This book is, on the face of it, a how-to book: how to be an artist. But to my mind the term "artist" signifies more than one who draws or paints or sculpts. And it signifies more than one who has good ideas or who is sensitive or expressive. For me an artist is both the master of a craft and the sharer of strong emotions. To be the master of a craft you must have a fair amount of natural talent and the patience and perseverance to develop that talent into a high level of skill. In order to share strong emotions you must a) have them, and b) know how to express them through your chosen craft. This knowledge of how to express yourself is not so much learned as it is discovered. Your ability to comprehend and express your emotions increases with every bit of useful information you manage to pick up, whether that information is intellectual, aesthetic, emotional, spiritual, what have you. Any progress or enlightenment you achieve in any area will enhance and illuminate your artistic abilities. Therefore a book on how to be an artist must engage the reader, the artist, as a whole person, not just as some disembodied groveler for technical secrets. For this reason, I try to share with you not only what it is to draw and paint and sculpt, but what it is to be an artist. No doubt many will find this old-fashioned, presumptuous, or otherwise offensive. I can only answer, quoting Thoreau, that "I trust none will stretch the seams in putting on the coat, for it may do some good to him it fits." As your sartorial advisor, my first warning is to avoid the greatcloak, the overcoat with hood, the fur-trimmed mukluk with sealskin earflaps: however great your talent, you cannot hide in your art. That is, no matter how much evidence you collect that the world is a nasty, clueless, inspirational void best left on the other side of a high hedge, you better be prepared to answer some questions—at least for yourself—or the wolves will get you the moment you step outside the studio. For talent and depth, even together, aren't enough. You also need courage. And while I can't give you the first two, I can help with the third, simply by telling you a few things. This is what a real education does, in my opinion: not tell you how to do something, but gird you to do what you already know.
For example, if you can't mix colors just by trying to mix colors, I can't teach you how. Color mixing, like everything else important in art, is not a science but a talent. Beyond the learning of a few commonsense facts, art technique is mostly intuited. Like a baby learning to talk, an artist simply does what he can, and takes it as far as possible. All I can do is encourage you to try, mainly by tempting you with what others have achieved when they tried, and then by encouraging you to trust the eye you already have. Of course, human potential is not all instinctive. The sort of courage I am talking about depends, in large part, on knowledge. Knowledge that transcends technique—wide-ranging knowledge. For instance, a sensitive, sincere master of a craft (should one somehow be spontaneously created by a flash of lightning or the collision of matter and anti-matter) will nonetheless feel completely overwhelmed and out of place in modern America if he or she does not have a fairly good understanding of art history and the present state of art, such as it is. Not that this understanding will mollify his or her feelings of alienation: these feelings may in fact increase. But such an understanding will allow an artist to deal positively with these feelings—to rechannel them back into an art that can effectively deal with both internal and external pressures. And so I include chapters not only on art supplies, techniques, and museum copywork, but also, and perhaps more to the point, on art education, art history, and the critics. In short, I mean to tell you everything I know about the subject of art that seems important (and that comes to mind). What appeals to you, you can keep. The rest I will still have for my own purposes. This is how I see my role as an author. Ten or fifteen years ago I was in desperate need of some good advice. I never got it. For the most part, my need remains. But to the extent that I have answered my own questions, I mean to answer some of yours. In a sense this book is a letter back in time. J. D. Salinger's character Seymour tells his younger brother Buddy to think of the book he most wants to read, and to write that book.1 As far as memory serves me, this is the book I wanted to read fifteen years ago. If you and I have convergent tastes in literature, then you are in luck: you won't have to write this book in fifteen years.
{Excerpts from the rest of the book} From "An Historical Overview": Great
art is so rarely produced because it is so rarely encouraged and
so rarely attempted. Our schools and other institutions do not so
much encourage high ideals as squash them. We cannot make great
artists but we can certainly destroy them. And our society is
doing so with terrible efficiency. Contemporary art has become
like Lewis Carroll's four branches of Arithmetic: "Ambition,
Distraction, Uglification, and Derision." In the avant
garde, any idea of excellence is dismissed as a bourgeois
conspiracy or as a reactionary alliance with all the anti-populist
politics of history. And even where pockets of residual
craftsmanship remain, mostly among the atavistic followers of a
Classicism of some sort or another, this respect for tradition
(which admittedly requires a great deal of effort to maintain) has
become an end in itself. The idea of excellence in such circles
no longer has any art-historical resonances or other personal,
psychological, emotional, or cultural echoes. It is an excellence
strictly of brushwork or color. Tout
le monde is
now a formalist, Santa Fe as well as New York City. Outside the avant garde all is an arid formalism of one sort or another. Contemporary formalist painting in the vein of Jackson Pollock, Mark Rothko, Jasper Johns, or Cy Twombly is Modern but no longer cutting edge. It is possible to lump this field in with contemporary Realism, for they are both abstract: even the landscape and portrait painters of the Southwest are more interested in brushstoke and color and edge than they are in any emotional or ideational content. For all these painters the medium is the message—trompe l'oeil and vast monochrome surfaces define the opposite limits of artistic ingenuity. The Realists and the Formalists are both caught on the surface, mistaking paint for a painting. No one on any of the contemporary art paths seems to remember that creation is synthesis, not analysis. Art is not whittling down, sectioning off—disallowing representation, or dismissing content. It is not the glorification of partialities, neither formless content or contentless form. Nor is it substitution—calling journalism painting, or acting sculpture, or politics art. If you have mastered many crafts, then mix your media, by all means. But if you can't paint, don't prop up your painting with a verbal cue, or even worse, a theory—bolstering, as it were, one disability with another. As Nietzsche said of Wagner, "where he lacks a capacity, he invents a principle." Or as Camus said, "He who has no character must have a theory." Despite the ever-increasing futility of all possible futures, we are told there is no going back. The bridge behind us has been washed out, it is said. While this is a relief to some, who understandably prefer to make no direct comparisons to the past (better to live on an island, up a tree, on a skinny limb, than to have to suffer Michelangelo's shadow), it leaves us in a tight spot. Fortunately, those with long enough legs or high enough boots don't require a road; they can strike out cross country. This divergence of craftsmanship and content, of feeling and execution, is only one of many. Another important schism has been caused by the market. Art is now a big business. A large percentage of the "artwork" produced in this country is market-driven and therefore hardly deserving of the title. There is nothing wrong with this decoration: our houses need color co-ordination and critical justification (or undercutting) as much as our cars need gas, some would say. But it seems to me that, after decades of all-inclusiveness in the name of equality, a few of our definitions need tightening up. The definition of Art is more critically in need of refinement than any other of the sloppy definitions our heritage (or lack of one, in this half-century) has passed down to us. If the anti-academic movement in art that has predominated since the time of the Impressionists has had anything positive to add to the definition of artist (and it has had very little), it is that the artist should not be the agent of the aristocracy or even of the bourgeoisie. He or she should be a worker of independence and self-expression—at best visionary; at least, sincere. This was originally the meaning of ars gratia artis: art for the sake of self-expression as opposed to art for the sake of decoration, or for the sake of financial gain, or (most importantly in the historical context) for the sake of illustrating a religious or political belief. This
last aspect is worth noting, for it is rarely mentioned that the
Modern movement began, at least in its roots in the nineteenth
century, as a reaction against external influences on the artist,
particularly political ones. This is poignant if not tragic,
seeing that the contemporary artist, even when he escapes being
crushed by economic considerations, ends up being completely
overwhelmed by political ones. The artists of the avant garde,
supposedly freed in this century by their protectors—the critic,
the academic, and the museum curator—from the mundane concerns
of "pleasing the customer," have found themselves
shackled by the political obligations owed to those self-same
protectors. These artists have bought their "freedom"
at a usurious rate by buying into a game whose rules are made by
other people. Yet no one cares to admit that it is no more
virtuous to pander to the critics, curators, and academics than it
is to pander to the market directly, by kneeling to the desires of
the galleries and buyers. In both instances the artist has sold
his creative autonomy to buy a starting position and a salary.
And in both instances control of the artist's agenda has passed
into the hands of non-artists. Of course eighteenth-century France was preoccupied with an egalitarianism we now take for granted, and the voice of the common man was only beginning to be heard. It is not surprising that Diderot would speak for the common interest as against the sensibilities of a court painter. But my point is that he was setting a dangerous precedent by choosing art criticism as a voice for his political complaints. Art, properly understood, cannot be so worldly. It cannot take requests, either from the aristocrats or the democrats. It will not give up its secrets to the Enlightenment, or to Science, or to the demands of any Program, any more than will God or Being or Instinct or the Unconscious. It is individual effort, the cry of the Id, shaped by the Ego perhaps, but best left alone by the Ego-ideal. It cannot be enlisted in a cause, no matter how worthy, without being corrupted beyond all recognition. Furthermore, with his critical method Diderot popularized the idea that educated non-artists were better able to judge art than artists. Otis Fellows, in his book on Diderot, says "Diderot believed that art should not be judged solely on its technical aspects. He felt that other considerations should be taken into account—the subject matter in general, the delineation of character, the psychological shadings. All of them, we are told, a man of letters can weigh as well as and perhaps better than the artist himself." Under the mistaken impression that artists judge art "solely on its technical aspects," Diderot believed that the "universal" education of a literary man could be an improvement on such judgment. But what artist, worthy of the name, has ever been simply a technician? In the very admission that what is being judged is art (rather than illustration or craft, say) is contained the idea that artist knows something beyond technique. In order to accept Diderot's assertion, you must believe that the artist is responsible only for putting the paint on the canvas: any meaning the painting has is accidental, fortuitous, or divinely caused. The artist therefore gets no credit for it. If he cannot verbally explain his non-verbal processes, he must not understand them, and therefore is only some kind of idiot-agent. The meaning, and so the worth, of the painting is left up to the judgment of those who had nothing to do with its creation. The critics, despite their creative ineptitude, claim to have an insight into this mystery that the artists themselves cannot match. In the end the whole claim is preposterous, and artists have been forced to fight, against ever-growing odds, what is clearly an attempt at creative coercion. Although
the aristocracy Diderot was attacking soon became obsolete, his
method of criticism has endured. Politics has changed but art
still suffers. And it suffers more under our strict
egalitarianism than it has since the darkest recesses of
medievalism. The artist is still expected to meet the demands of
the non-artist. But now the non-artist is not King or Pope, he is
the common man, the businessman, the media man, the scholar man.
We are all common men now. The artist is a decorator man. I do
not mean to be a snob: it is not that the Pope was a better
overseer to art than the Modern critic or client—in many ways he
was more demanding and intrusive, rarely in a constructive way.
But Michelangelo and Leonardo had the principle and the backbone
to stand up to Princes and Popes where the contemporary artist
cannot even stand up to a relatively powerless gallery owner or
magazine editor. We have reached the point where even the
philistines of the avant garde, in whom one would expect at least
the pretension of eminence, have instead betrayed themselves as
the final conquest of our nation of shopkeepers. Modern art has
become, as Robert Hughes calls it, a "wholly monetized art,"
monetized being an adjective whose meaning the lowliest French
peasant would have understood. Nor is Kojève alone in thinking so. Most social critics on the left have given art a low priority in their restructuring wishlist, and even those who want to keep a place for it have been forced to dramatically redefine it in hyper-egalitarian terms [see The Getty, in Chapter 2], so that it would be unrecognizable to Michelangelo or even van Gogh. Art has been bartered off as a cost of modern democracy or socialism by non-artists based on the flimsiest of post hoc arguments, with only the most cursory of cost-benefit analyses (to put it in their own terms), and with no vote. It would be droll if it weren't so tragic that Modern Art, cobbled together by the greatest minds of contemporary social theory as an answer to the "elitist" art of the past, appeals to the masses not at all. Those such as Clement Greenberg [see Chapter Four] attempt transcend this embarrassing snaggle with an elitism all their own, implying that the kitsch-loving masses don't know what's good for them; but surely someone in some conference room or university cubicle must be abashed to find that the new art is not only an aesthetic but a social failure. It is as if the social democrats have opted for Nietzsche's "last man" (his modern "herd animal," to replace his classical beast, the Christian), knowing full well the consequences, and without consulting the people themselves—who may or may not be content with merely smiling and blinking. Perhaps some have already begun to notice that we are building the future too small, hemming ourselves in unnecessarily, washing away three babies for every tubful of water. If you think I am making a case for the political Right, you are wrong. Unlike Hilton Kramer, I have never expected the Republican Party to be any help at all, and so I am not disappointed when it isn't. It is conservative only in an economic sense. The only thing the modern Right is interesting in conserving is laissez faire capitalism, all other concerns being secondary. It would be oxymoronic for the Right to even have a position on Art: it might sooner have a position on Astrology (and did, apparently, during the Reagan years). That it does have a position on the National Endowment for the Arts is neither here nor there in this context (I address the NEA in another chapter). It has an opinion on art funding, but that is a question of economics, you see. In the view of the Right, people have the unalienable right to make unequal amounts of money, money that should not be redistributed lest the profit motive fail and the economy collapse. But there can be no philosophical convergence of art and economics. Artists know, with Thoreau, that "Trade curses everything it handles. You could be dealing in messages from Heaven and the whole curse of trade would attach to the business." No
one, Right or Left, has apparently noticed that while Marx and
Locke have been duking it out over who gets what and how much
property; while Nature, laid out on a cold slab, decomposes as the
kids and grandkids bicker over the will, civilization has been
dissipating, its existence ever more tenuous and imaginary.
Bereft of leadership and inspiration (because no one much believes
in such things anymore) our children, and not just our children,
are adrift in a miasma of infinite freedom and zero
responsibility, a chaotic sea in which the only boat afloat is the
economy. Inwardly, we are even now living off aes
alienum,
another's brass, taking, even stealing, what little enrichment we
have from a source that is, like the earth itself, finite. Art
history is not resource that can survive unlimited assault, and
our pails are already coming up dry from the well. Let me take the first one first. As the French Revolution—the culmination of the work of Diderot and the other encyclopedists, of Rousseau, Voltaire and many others—was a turning point in history for liberté and egalité, all to the good. But its successes and its excesses did nothing for the democratization of art. This is because no one has ever been able to say how art can be positively democratized. Our democratic experiment here in the United States has been extraordinarily successful in many ways, but no one can argue that art has prospered here (except, for a while, financially). All the persuasive arguments up to now, foremost among them Nietzsche's, have said that art could not be democratized. But these arguments only addressed the incompatibility of art with the democratic state. And art is incompatible with the demands of any state, as Nietzsche himself said. Art is incompatible with the demands of any group or any authority outside the artist's creative mind. So it is not art and democracy that are incompatible, but art and the politics of the group, of whatever kind. To successfully democratize art is simply to maximize its opportunities, and then to leave it alone. It is to allow that the artist can come from anywhere, regardless of background, and to encourage without prejudice those with talent. But our democracy has not been satisfied with giving such a valuable political gift. Modern democratic practice has gone beyond the equalization of opportunity to the mandated equality of achievement. We have decided to understand Thomas Jefferson's "all men are created equal" to mean that every man or woman must remain equal at all times, and that all products of their efforts, whether of imagination or toil, must be given equal consideration. In the field of art, this has come to mean that every creation is equally artistic by definition: "artistic" has come to mean simply "creative." But "creativeness" is judged only by quantity; "art" used to be judged by quality. This aversion to the idea of quality is a symptom of every modern skill, artistic or not, and it threatens to undermine our ability to define ourselves at all. I am not sure, however, that there is any strict correlation between this modern phenomenon and democracy. Periclean Athens was a democracy, in a limited sense, but it did not treat quality as a pathology. And Christianity, a religion in which pride is the ultimate sin (as it is in our modern democratic state), never sanctioned a belief in the final equality of souls. For Jesus, the value of this life was, in large part, to allow for the separation of the wheat from the chaff, every tree that failed to bear fruit being thrown into the fire. This is hardly a complacent egalitarianism. But Christianity has rightly been seen as being democratic because its foundations rest on a conversion of the lower classes and a spiritual empowerment of the individual. The reason democracy and the highest expectations for and of the individual seem mutually exclusive is that Peter and Paul all but ditched the latter in order to found their religion. There is an early separation between Jesus and Christianity. Jesus never would have sanctioned the historical use of Christianity by the church to repress the lower classes by further limiting the importance of the individual. This history has been trenchantly anti-democratic, elitist in the worst sense, as in fascist. For fifteen hundred years the European peasantry was spoon-fed only the most self-negating, unempowering, mind-numbing parts of the Bible, all stress being put on abnegation rather than affirmation. Somehow Jesus' "glad tidings" of a spiritual journey of infinite wonder open to all, of a "heavenly kingdom within you," lost something in the translation from Hebrew to Greek to Latin to the modern European languages, and by the time the German or French or Italian laborer heard of it, this fabulous journey promised only to carry him from the depths of despair to the glories of resignation. If this fabulous journey sounds familiar, it should: we are still traveling it. The low ceiling of American spiritual expectation, inherited from this debased religion, was accurately measured by Thoreau a hundred and fifty years ago, and is now lower still. We have become as spiritual hunchbacks in order to live in the homes of our own making. Soon we may be crawling on all fours, or be permanently supine. One of the failings of modern thought is its inability to differentiate between two types of "elitism." It has been a semantic failure that we have continued to use the same word for such different meanings. Jesus' recognition of an elite—his insistence on a recognizable difference in the quality of personal spirit based on word and deed—affirmed individuality and responsibility and was democratic in the best sense, in that it denied the privilege of a ruling class based on wealth or birth or other worldly power. But elitism as political privilege and the right to use other human being as means aims for just the opposite state of human affairs. It is anti-democratic, with no belief in the right of the individual to self-rule. Its centralization tends to monopolize power, and this worldly power is based solely on previous access to power. It systematically denies the possibility of progress because it does not allow for the revival of leadership by the infusion of fresh talent. In this way it can be seen that democracy is, at least potentially, much closer to a meritocracy than all the old forms of rule. Equal opportunity maximizes the talent pool and great potential is not lost by being born to poverty or to racial or sexual "inferiority." Besides, art demonstrably is elitist in the first sense. And should be. As science is, and business, and sport, and education itself. No one seems surprised that the best scientists get paid the most for research, or that the best businesspeople get promoted, or that the best basketball players are the ones who get hired by the NBA. Why should art alone be expected to be not only equal access, but equal time? Why does the NEA itself still charge the arts in America, which have fallen so low that expectations themselves are now almost zero, with being elitist? Great art is exceptional; that is, it is the exception, as everything great is. Great art was, and always will be, created by an artistic elite, whether in an aristocracy or a democracy. To deny this is to misunderstand the word exceptional. And it is to misunderstand the value of exceptional things, to all people in a society. But in our modern democratic states such an understanding of our situation does not satisfy us. We demand the right to self-rule while at the same time throwing out all the rules for governing ourselves. We are anti-elitist in both senses. We are selfish with no proper hierarchy of selves. We have no spiritual goals, and our selves, newly freed by the political successes of our day, are adrift. We have kept only the coziest parts of the Bible to help us sleep at night and jettisoned any difficult "moralism" that might demand anything from us. We have done the same thing with democracy, playing down any notions of individual responsibility (which are surely as central as any democratic tenet) while playing up the "rights" of each and all to every fruit of civilization, earned or not, including any label one might desire, whether it be athlete, scholar, or artist. Our meritocracy is unrealized because we find true merit distasteful: it does not play to our vain glorification of small deeds. Add to this Science's complicity, with its purposeful, but unsubstantiated, de-spiritualizing of the world, and you have an excuse for such relativism. For if it all doesn't matter anyway, why not select only the chummiest, tastiest, mushiest ideas of history and ditch the rest? It must be pointed out, though, that Science's place of distinction in this muddle is based on absolutely nothing. Science has never proved a link between how? and why? Science spends all its time and money answering the question how? not why? It collects all its data on how? not why? One of its premises is that why? is not a valid, and certainly not a scientific, question. But then it presumes, once it has found out how? that it knows why?, too. Ask Science why? and it will say with great authority, with many a successful how? to back it up, "there is no reason." Not "we don't know the reason," but "there is no reason"; believing, no doubt, that why? would have shown up on its screens with how? had it been there. But this is specious. To understand the mechanics of the universe is not to understand its purpose or its teleology. Science may deny that the universe is in any sense purposeful, but this denial is just as unprovable, scientifically, as religion's assertion that the universe is purposeful. The atheist's belief is insupportable to exactly the extent that the theist's is. Existence may not prove Essence, but it certainly cannot disprove it. It is odd that Science would exhibit its inconsistency by having an opinion at all. It is expected that religion (and art and philosophy) might make assertions that are empirically untestable, for it believes in other tests; and only Science can be categorically wrong on this subject. I know I must seem far afield and almost laughably all-embracing in my concerns here. It is considered terribly unmodern to write so broadly, but I remind any skeptics of what van Gogh once said in a letter to his friend and fellow painter Bernard: You see, my dear comrade, that Giotto and Cimabue, as well as Holbein and van Dyck, lived in an obeliscal—excuse the word—solidly framed society, architecturally constructed, in which each individual was stone, and all the stones clung together, forming a monumental society. When the socialists construct their logical social edifice—which they are still pretty far from doing—I am sure mankind will see a reincarnation of this society. But, you know, we are in the midst of downright laissez-aller and anarchy. We artists, who love order and symmetry, isolate ourselves and are working to define only one thing. I almost have to rub my hands together and chuckle when I think of the number of art mavens who will blink and stutter to see one of the (supposed) fathers of Modernism saying such things; but that would delay my point, that being that artists need a groundwork as much as anyone, if not more, and that the reconsideration of some of the topics I am reconsidering might be a necessary step in the rejuvenation of the artistic psyche. Far be it from me to propose some sort of Freudian makeover, or regimen for artistic mental health. But I do think I can suggest that the sort of curriculum now predominating, which is to say, no curriculum (or to be even more existentially precise, the noncurriculum) can lead to only more chaos, more groping, more breast beating. And once we start to rebuild our education system—our system in general, which we are "still pretty far from doing"—I think we are going to have to admit that specialization, the narrowing of an individual's scope to increase his or her skill, has been a disaster, especially from a humanistic or spiritualistic standpoint. It's efficiency can be argued to some extent in business. But in art, where efficiency means nothing, it has only ended up giving us smaller artists. The artistic temperament, I would argue, is most often that of a generalist. An artist's most important skill, once technique is mastered, is making connections—doing the spiritual addition, as it were, and showing us the hidden sum. Not consciously, of course, and not nearly as prosaically as I just put it, but in effect this is what he does. Van Gogh may have felt isolated by the uncommon strength of his emotions, his intellect, and his compassion. And he may have concentrated on painting as his "one thing." But anyone who has read his letters knows that his concerns were as far ranging as it was possible to be. The artist cannot hope to reach emotional complexity or maturity without a rather wide-ranging curiosity, and so it is my guess that, like van Gogh, and like Leonardo, and like every great artist, the young artist hopefully reading this book really is interested in a thousand different topics, and only needs to see my example, as I gambol willy-nilly through every subject that enters my head, to believe that it may be possible to do this successfully—that is, without either coming to a dead stop, literally or figuratively, or ending up in the poor house or the loonybin. One
other closely-related subject that I want to touch on here while I
am being unattractively self-indulgent (and that I will come back
to later) is that an artist's predisposition for the grandiose,
the far-flung, the all-inclusive, and the world-saving is not
something to be taken lightly. I don't say this as an excuse for
my own intemperance (or I don't say it only
as an excuse). Despite the fact that there are almost no social
situations where the artistic temperament is seen as a plus-and I
can understand this, none better—I think we all have to find
some way, not only to tolerate, but to actually encourage the
"grand schemer," obnoxious or no. For we are
desperately in need of some grand schemes, our old ones having
apparently failed us. I will say it because no one else seems
willing to put himself in the situation of looking foolish enough
to say it, but we need some risk taking in the area of the grand
gesture, the big picture, the overall theory, and some risk-taking
on a completely different order than what we have so far seen this
century. The only way we can get beyond this intellectual
chatter, this modern complaint about the smallness of everything,
is to manage to put off scoffing for a moment at every
large-intentioned person who tries to do anything. So far the
only risk takers who have been given the benefit of the doubt have
been the ones who have risked telling us that we don't really have
what we think we have. Nietzsche and Freud, who told us this
about religion, the Existentialists who told us this about essence
and meaning, the positivists who told us this about certainty.
I'm not saying any of these people were wrong. I am saying it is
even more difficult, and risky, to rebuild, especially in a
climate like ours where every great enterprise is seen as
hopelessly pretentious and, most likely, monomaniacal. Not that
there are many great enterprises being floated, that I am aware
of, but it seems that those with any aspirations at all seem to be
dismissed out of hand. And by out of hand I mean in such a way
that it is made clear that these aspirations are culturally, or
sociopolitically, in bad taste, categorically. The field of
literature, for example, doesn't need too many careers like that
of Salinger before it gets the hint. Great writers, that is,
don't write seriously about religion anymore. The time of Thoreau
and Carlyle is past. This is the Age of Reason, my friend. Thus Democracy, Science, and Christianity need not be blamed for our current situation. Theoretically they all have as much to say against the present state of affairs as for it. It is the way we have chosen to translate our heritage that is the problem: what we have kept and what we have thrown out. As far as politics is the science of expediency, and as far as expediency defines our choices now instead of necessity or truth, politics is our problem. I hear now from all quarters that "everything is political," as if that were somehow the immutable state of human nature, or as if it were even a desirable state of affairs. It is neither. If it is true, and to a large extent it is true, it is true because we allow or prefer it to be. If we all, individually, stop discussing issues politically, they will stop being decided politically. The problem with our democracy is that we underestimate our own power. We are so caught up in asserting our rights that we forget to exercise our power. We are so busy making therapeutic and materialistic demands on our government that we forget there is work to be done in governing, and that we must do it ourselves. If each person decides to reorder his or her life according to principle, then our government will be principled. If not, not. That is what self-government, democracy, means. Self-government is not just laissez-faire capitalism and the right to vote. It is more than some narrow Protestant work ethic and dragging ourselves to the polls every two years. We exhibit a frightening laisser-aller in our own spiritual menage. We seem content to let life live us as long as we can pay the bills and keep the TV in proper repair. But in a self-perpetuating democracy we cannot await our principles from our government, we must supply them to our government. If we, as artists, do not like the expectations we have from our government, or from our society, as being political and therefore unprincipled, we must foist our principled expectations onto the government, for she is us, and must hear. Our greatest mistake is silence. The
truth is that our institutions in the arts (and elsewhere) are not
too democratic. They are not democratic enough. In theory,
democracy guarantees not equality, but equal opportunity. The
first principle of any government should be fairness. We need to
decide whether we want from our democracy fairness and equal
opportunity, or equality—which becomes in practice regulated
mediocrity. Our modern society is proving, and nowhere so
decisively as in the field of art, that we must choose one or the
other. For equality, strictly observed, unfairly discriminates
against excellence, and thereby destroys art—which must be
extraordinary by definition.
It is no wonder that the true artist rarely survives the various "opportunities" of art education. Our universities do not teach technique, our public schools pander to the lowest common denominator, workshops cater to the wealthy, and the few schools left (such as the Pennsylvania Academy) that have a traditional program set up for the student's progression suffer from all the ills that the École engendered—namely an overly regimented and uninspiring preset courseload that bewilders the struggler and inconveniences the adept. These fine art schools of the last sort are a dying breed, and one would hate to lose them, but it must be recognized that they cannot "create artists" now anymore than they could a hundred years ago. They can occasionally produce technical masters, but getting through such a program with your Muse intact is like following a map to heaven: with so many directions you forget where you are. It is just this sort of teaching that caused the artistic rebellion at the end of the 19th century, and if we want to avoid another century of chaos, it would be best to recognize that our artistic woes will not be rectified by any institutionalized answer. The only solutions to these problems are apprenticeship (a one-to-one relationship between artist and student) and patronage (a one-to-one relationship between artist and connoisseur). For it is these personal ties, more than anything else, that explain the aesthetic health of the Renaissance, and that explain the artistic poverty of our own time.
Item:
"For teachers, art becomes a wonderful way of teaching
vocabulary and language skills and for getting kids to think
critically, because they have to observe and justify their
opinions. They have to do an analysis of a painting and of what
they think the artist was trying to get at." [Leilani Lattin
Duke, director of the Getty Center] It is assumed, I suppose, that the talented have no need for encouragement. It is the sour-grapes position that those with gifts from Nature are least in need of cultural support. They are going to win the race anyway, the argument goes, so why waste our resources teaching them to run? But this is a very ungenerous line of reasoning, to say the least. The talented can no more define themselves in a vacuum, or against all the prejudices of society, than anyone can. An outcast is an outcast, whether he is a leper, a hunchback, or a prodigy.
It is easy to rail against the bad critic, but I would argue even against those critics who may have sensitive eyes or souls: not because they are always wrong, but because they are out of order.1 It's a free country, as Larry King is kind enough to remind us, and everyone is entitled to his or her opinion, no matter how uneducated it may be. But there is a categorical difference, it seems to me, in private complaint and public critique: in, for example, going home and complaining to your mate about the "godawful building they just put up downtown," and in going public with your opinions on architecture without having so much as built a sand castle. If you really have the knowledge, learned or intuited, to recognize not only that a building is "wrong," but exactly how it is wrong and what would make it right (which knowledge any good architecture critic is claiming, it seems to me), you are obliged first to use your talent to build a better building. Once you've done that, then you will have earned the right to criticize a lesser building. Even if you never convince anyone that your building is better, or that any other is lesser, at least you will have a leg to stand on. You will have earned your place in the argument. And, it must be added, your place in the argument will, and should, depend on your work as your primary credential. In the end, this is just another call for responsibility. Important writers make statements of consequence. Responsible writers make statements of consequence, the consequences of which they are responsible. If a writer makes a false statement, the falseness of that statement should affect the writer first and foremost, and other people only through their direct contact with the writer. This is what it means for a writer not to talk about things he doesn't know. If a writer has nothing at stake in the statements he makes, then his criticism is groundless, and therefore irresponsible. But an art critic who is not also, and primarily, an artist cannot possibly meet this criterion of responsibility. Other people, namely artists, will always suffer the consequences of the falseness of the art critic's statements before, and perhaps instead of, the art critic. The only consequence the art critic must take into account is his ability to sell copy. False or ridiculous or unpopular statements may affect him financially, but they cannot affect him artistically. He has nothing artistic at stake. A critic might interject here, "Oh, but isn't criticism itself an art form?" I don't think that it is, but even were it proved to be, this would only mean that the art critic must limit himself to statements about art criticism, not art, in order to remain responsible. This leads to a reductio ad absurdum, for of what interest is art criticism that cannot responsibly discuss art? The only exit from this dilemma is the obvious: art criticism is the responsibility of artists.
[Southwest
artists] fail to realize how hypocritical and mercenary it must
appear for a white man to get rich sentimentalizing a people that
his fathers and grandfathers have all but wiped out (and that his
fellow statesmen continue to harass, here and now). Do the
Kenneth Rileys and Howard Terpnings of the world donate some of
that mountain of cash to the Free Leonard Peltier fund, or to the
legal fights over logging and mining in Oregon and Arizona and
South Dakota? Are they members of Earth First!? Do they write
letters to their congressmen begging for fair treatment for their
subjects from the Bureau of Indian affairs? Did they fight to ban
nuclear testing? Are they vocal opponents of the Bureau of Land
Management and the Forest Service? I don't think so. It is
politically correct to weep crocodile tears over our "inglorious
past" and to sing panegyrics to the noble savage at the same
time that we refuse to learn anything from him. Realist paintings
like those that glut our Western galleries soothe our guilt at the
same time that they play to our vanity. It is all just a matter
of supply and demand, and the reality of the Indian's situation,
or ours, is beside the point.
Are we attracted to the fruit or to the form? If to the fruit, Bell would call us philistines. For as fruit, it is still terribly impure. I would call us humans. The fruit and the form are inseparable. If Cezanne's pears did not appeal to our hunger, their form would not appeal to our sense of beauty. To deny this connection is to deny the physical with a Victorian squeamishness that Bell, I am sure, believed he was above and beyond. For him, fruit, as fruit, is an impurity, just as sex, as sex, is an impurity. But trying to appreciate a Cezanne pear only as form is like trying to have sex in the dark, only for procreation. Cezanne's abstraction is successful because it manages to accentuate the fruit, the object, not obliterate it. It clarifies without destroying. Amplification through simplification. In this way Cezanne's accomplishment is not so novel: this was the theory of Velasquez, Hals, Sargent, and Rodin, among many, many others. Why is Cezanne the father of abstraction instead of, say, Velasquez? There were no critics in the court of Philip. I am not criticizing Cezanne; I am criticizing the critics who have wanted to elevate Cezanne, and the continuing abstraction of and subtraction from painting, at the expense of the Old Masters. I can find no good reason, either in the explanations of the critics or in the paintings of the Moderns, for preferring abstracted form (or color, or line) when I can have form and color and line and subject matter and idea and composition all in the same painting. I can't convince myself that artistic poverty is preferable to artistic wealth based simply on its "purity." I believe the explanation for the critics' preference for abstraction lies simply in their lack of ability to comprehend an artistic whole on the level of the Old Masters. They require the simplifications of abstraction, because they really cannot see the "significant form" in a painting until that is all there is left in it, and it has been circled and highlighted and put in letters ten feet tall. They are the type, no doubt, that is confused by subplots in novels and counterpoint in music. In their pathetic attacks on Classicism and their deification of the partialities and simplifications of Modernism, I can't help but see the reaction of those overwhelmed by an experience and a talent altogether too large for them. When Bell or Greenberg complains about Classical art's "lack of purity," I can't help but hear them saying in their hearts of hearts, "Stop oppressing us with your multiplicity of talents. We can only envy such prodigality. Give us someone we can relate to. Give us the limitations of a struggler like Cezanne. Or, even better, the incapacities of a complete phony like Barnett Newman. Who could be oppressed by that?" ~~~~~~~~~~~ Michelangelo
and Raphael were standing in the Sistine Chapel, discussing the
merits of the just completed ceiling, when a self-assured young
man strolled up, arms dismissively akimbo, gazing malignantly
skyward. Michelangelo looked sideways at Raphael, and then said to the young man, "Yes, well, perhaps you are right. Let us see what you have done." "Done? Gentlemen, you misunderstand me. I am a critic!" Michelangelo and Raphael laughed and laughed.
The best way to counter-critique Greenberg, I think, is to go straight to his articles, to begin the counterassault point for point, answering him on specifics, and building a general refutation on these answers. A propitious place to start is with his famous article, Avant Garde and Kitsch.1 . . .In Avant-Garde and Kitsch, Greenberg asserts that what has allowed the avant garde to go beyond the sameness of "Alexandrianism" (academicism, or kitsch) has been a "superior consciousness of history," that is, an advanced "historical criticism." This conveniently places Greenberg at the top of the pyramid. The artist becomes subordinate to, and is in the service of, the historical critic. He goes on to say, "...the most important function of the avant-garde was not to experiment, but to find a path along which it would be possible to keep culture moving in the midst of ideological confusion and violence." To do this, the artist "retires from public life altogether, seeking to maintain the high level of his art by both narrowing and raising it to the level of an absolute in which all relativities and contradictions would 'disappear.' Subject matter or content becomes something to avoid like the plague." There are two great jumps in logic here in as many sentences: how does creating "absolutes" help "keep culture moving" (much of Modern criticism has claimed just the opposite); and how does "avoiding subject matter and content" a) raise art to an "absolute" and b) "keep culture moving"? Greenberg does not expound or explain his thesis, he simply rushes ahead: "If. . .all art and literature are imitation, what we have here [with Modern art] is the imitating of imitating". Greenberg not only gives us another definition of Modern art, failing to tie it to previous definitions, he also continues to jump: how does the "imitating of imitating" a) express an "absolute", b) "avoid subject matter or content", and c) keep culture moving"? The whole article is like this. After the first couple of paragraphs, you're so lost in a maze of disconnected assertions and unsupported (and insupportable) claims, you either give it all up as pedantry or, apparently, swallow the whole thesis down with a big glass of Gatorade because it gives you what you were thirsty for. If
you are not yet convinced, let's go on for a minute. In the very
next paragraph he starts off, "That avant-garde culture is
the imitation of imitating calls for neither approval nor
disapproval." Oh, really. That's not very critical of him, is
it? It hardly seems like a superior form of historical criticism.
He continues, "In a sense this imitation of imitating is a
superior form of Alexandrianism." In what sense precisely? In
that it takes imitation and removes it one more step? This seems
not superior, though, but inferior. Why is "imitation"
inferior, but double-imitation superior? Because, he says, "There
is one important difference: the avant-garde moves, while
Alexandrianism stands still." This brings to mind three
questions: 1) this idea of "movement" clashes with the
previous idea of distilling into "absolutes". I would
think that absolutes are fairly stable. 2) given that Modernism
moves, and that "Alexandrianism" does not, why is
movement categorically better than stillness? Certainly the
opposite has been argued well many times throughout history (by
Lao-Tse, Buddha, Plato, Christ). Is any movement better than
stillness? Should we prefer even reversion or flailing to a
well-centered stasis? 3) in what sense does "imitating
imitating" move where imitation does not?
The
flat dismissal of Leonardo's multiple genius by Greenberg as a
"reluctance to commit himself" and as a sign of
"inconstant interests" is nothing less than astounding.
One wonders, almost fifty years later, how Greenberg managed to be
taken seriously. He is all "high-sounding empty things."
For we must remind ourselves exactly what is happening here.
Leonardo, perhaps the greatest, the most prolific and varied,
genius of all time, the embodiment of the Renaissance man (in
fact, the source for the very idea of a Renaissance man) is being
called lazy and nihilistic (having an "hostility to
accomplishment") by a man whose only accomplishment is
criticism--praising or damning another's accomplishment. The
thought of Greenberg sitting in his little Modern cubicle, legs
crossed (knee to knee, of course), affectedly smoking his damn
cigarettes, looking up every once in a while with a terribly
clever, terribly satisfied look in his big droopy eyes, musing on
Leonardo's or Michelangelo's shortcomings, is enough to give me a
heart murmur. It makes me wish we still had someone like Cellini
around: he would have known how to deal with such insolence.2
In
the same article, Greenberg, unsatisfied with this puerile assault
on Leonardo, also aims his pea shooter at Michelangelo:
"Michelangelo's Sistine frescoes constitute one of those
rapes of the medium that result in something splendid and
extraordinary but that leave us admiring the scale and force of
the artist's nerve more than his art." As Michelangelo's
defender, I will respond that Greenberg's critiques constitute one
of those rapes of the medium in which something splendid and
extraordinary is destroyed, leaving us admiring only the scale and
force of the critic's nerve. For he follows up with, "And
since these works [of Leonardo and Michelangelo] have such a
deleterious effect upon artists who come afterward, they amount
almost to acts of hostility toward art." Greenberg's theory
of criticism seems here to be "il faut s'abetir".1
What
we are to understand here is that the two greatest geniuses in
history have been bad for art, and that a Modern critic is its
savior. One gets the feeling, although it is never spelled out,
that the "deleterious effect" just mentioned is nothing
more or less than the "little brother" complex. The
Renaissance masters planted a flag so far up the mountain,
actually achieved so much, that their successors, especially at a
distance, despaired of climbing at all. I can't figure out any
other way to make sense of Greenberg's complaint. Michelangelo's
"hostility toward art" is simply his forgetting to leave
us something to do, or forgetting to leave us something we can do
easily. In this sense, achievement itself is inimical to the sort
of "progress" the Moderns demand.
Nietzsche called religion's goal "the minimum metabolism at which life will still exist without really entering consciousness." Greenberg's goal in art is analogous: the minimum metabolism at which art can exist (by definition) without really entering the consciousness of the artist or viewer. An art stripped of everything but its "essence": meaning art as a terminal patient, with only the faintest pulse. Such an art is "alive," assuredly, compared to a corpse, compared to no art. But is this all there is to a definition of a thing~its minimum definition? What of its maximum definition? Or even its viable definition? Modern art is art in the same way that the tiniest peak or trough on an electrocardiogram is life. But is this blip what we want as a viable definition of life, as a definition of what life can be or should be at its fullest? Would it even be correct to call this blip the "essence" of life? I don't think so. Greenberg is confused not only about the essence of art, he is confused about what the essence of any given thing might be. It is not the stripped down bare bones of a thing. It is not the least common denominator. It is not what is left after all "conventions" have been "expended." If anything it is the process of spending these conventions: not transcending them or excising them, but transforming the necessary conventions through the process of creativity into an original expression. Art is not the negation of all conventions. It is the proper use of the proper conventions, just like anything else is. Whittling away all but "flatness" from painting is like whittling literature down to the alphabet, and asserting that is literature's essence. It is like disallowing writers from forming words, or sentences, or ideas because these conventions betray a kitschy love for "content and subject matter".
You
may be thinking, after my comments on Greenberg, that it may be
difficult to crescendo into the end of this chapter. Thankfully, I
don't have to. Hughes is no theorist. Nor does he fancy himself a
messiah—it is not up to him to "keep culture moving."
He is at his best not when making extravagant claims for an
artist—which he rarely does (and which he would be no more
likely to do, I think, were there anyone worthy of extravagant
claims). He is at his best exploding the fraudulent claims
tendered by the artists themselves. And in the shallow waters of
Modern art, it is somehow reassuring to know that there is a
hungry shark gliding just below the reflective surface, keeping
the waders cautious of agitating the waves too much in the rush to
call attention to themselves, cautious of cutting themselves with
some foolish comments and bleeding into the current. And so I quote Hughes many times in this book as support for my thesis. In many ways his ascendence (and he has become quite influential) signals the death knell of Modernism. I give him a great deal of credit for the fact that Modern art has bottomed out so soon. I do not believe in historical necessity, and I do believe in the great power of the individual: if Hughes had been of the Greenbergian mold, he might have propelled Modernism to a new level of falseness and insolence on his personal powers of persuasion alone. Instead Hughes has been arguing so loudly (and so well) that the stagnation of art is upon us, that he has made many notice this fact at last (without, however, realizing how overdue such notice is.) He has seen the writing on the wall, has all but screamed that "art is dead"... but he can't seem to feel good about it. There is nothing, in his mind, to fill the gap. Fortunately there is a gap that needs filling for him, and that, if nothing else, sets him apart in this age of nonchalance. At times, though, his cynicism surrounds and dismisses not only the dying gasps of Modernism, but the viability of visual art itself. We find him, for example, damning art because "What really changes political opinion is events, argument, press photographs, and TV. " Here we find him not so much in over his head as just wrong, lost in the brambles because he doesn't have a clear idea about what art is for. Or, to be exact, he has it but has forgotten it in the modern hodgepodge of failed definitions. For in the same lecture, after stumbling around a while, arguing that art is not "morally ennobling" or even therapeutic because it does not have an effect on everyone who comes in contact with it (which is like saying that because some boats sink, water is not bouyant), he finally hits stride, finishing with this observance: Likewise, museum people serve not only the public but the artist...by a scrupulous adherence to high artistic and intellectual standards. This discipline is not quantifiable, but it is or should be disinterested, and there are two sure ways to wreck it. One is to let the art market dictate its values to the museum. The other is to convert it into an arena for battles that have to be fought~but fought in the sphere of politics. Only if it resists both can the museum continue with its task of helping us discover a great but always partially lost civilization: our own. And
so he answers his own question about changing political opinion:
it is not the place of art to be so worldly. Art is not an
argument, is not analytical, does not influence politics directly.
It addresses people's emotions, and so influences everything
indirectly. As Freud might have said, art speaks not to the Ego
but to the Id. It is synthetic, not analytic. Passion is primary;
and political opinion is only a toy boat that floats on the
surface of a deep sea. Hughes knows this, for in the previous
paragraph he gives a striking account of his reaction, as a
woodworker himself, to seeing the great Japanese temple of
Horyu-ji: "...resentment? Absolutely not. Reverence and
pleasure, more like." Did he take away points because the
temple had no message, made no statement, had no clear political,
intellectual or linguistic undertones? I doubt it. But such
reverence builds or destroys ones belief in ones own culture, a
belief that daily politics can only mirror. The literature of England [Tennyson, Keats, Shelley] conducted us into the world of the romantic imagination which served one of the essential needs of adolescence. It also catered generously for others: a heroic or noble past in which we could participate, and ethical structures to provide models for fantasies, if not for actual life. Hughes does not take exception to this view. The only thing to be added to such a concise statement is that surely the needs of the imagination do not die with adolescence. We will always need, both as individuals and as a society, a source for such spiritual replenishment. It seems to me that Hughes is genuinely frightened about the future of art, as well he should be. And so he feels compassion for the poor wretch, Modernism: he cannot kick a man when he is down. He is no doubt afraid that too much aggression toward the roots of Modernism could throw us into an artistic dark age. It is therefore one thing to butcher David Salle and Andy Warhol, and another thing entirely to demythologize the likes of Picasso or Cezanne or Kandinsky. But he forgets that Modernism has never been the ground beneath anyone's feet. The 20th century has been proud of its day-to-day existence. It has needed no tradition. How could it create one? He should know that all the momentary blips of Modernism are already as good as gone. No one misses them now. How could their further fading or complete disappearance be a tragedy? The real foundations of art are unassailable by Hughes or anyone else. Time and wars will continue to eat up some of them, but as the Dadaists recognized truly, there are a lot of great works left. It has taken all the energy of Modernism to suppress the instruction of the Greeks, of the Renaissance, of the Far East, of the 17th c. Dutch and Spanish painters, and of the 19th century Barbizons, Naturalists, and Romantics. But the possibilities remain. The examples of Phidias and Praxiteles, Michelangelo and Bernini, Rembrandt and Rubens, Velasquez and El Greco, Corot and Courbet, Carpeaux and Rodin still exist. I am not afraid of an artistic dark age. I have already lived through one.
Hughes
might argue that this committee was an improvement, because what
was needed was people who knew what to do with a collection of
this magnitude. This is probably true, but it attests to their
abilities as art administrators, as businesspeople, not as art
experts. It requires no artistic expertise to administrate a
collection that has already been collected. This is why the only
museums worth seeing in this country house collections whose
long-term worth has already been proven. For instance, if the
Metropolitan or the National Gallery had a shot at acquiring an
important Rembrandt or Velasquez or Sargent, administrators'
tastes in art would to have very little to do with the
acquisition. In Modern collections, where the current tastes of
the directors do decide the content, we can see clearly the
aesthetic expertise on hand. It is not encouraging.
This is fine as far as it goes (although I am not sure what the second half of that first sentence means--how can the drawing be both dispassionate and vehement?) He describes Pearlstein's work well and draws a nice analogy between it and abstract art. But he will not judge Pearlstein, whom he likes, as he judges artists he doesn't like. He doesn't lead the reader to a proper conclusion about what all this means about Pearlstein (although it seems pretty obvious) because he wants to keep Pearlstein around. Pearlstein's return to realism, to the nude, pleases Hughes, and so he refrains from making any negative comparisons of Pearlstein's nudes to historical nudes that perhaps please him more. But in giving Pearlstein preferential treatment, he is cementing Pearlstein's place at the top of the heap. In refusing to tell the whole truth, he gives a false impression of Pearlstein's abilities. And, most importantly, in glossing over the implications of Pearlstein's "philosophy," he is adding to the shelf-life of that philosophy. For five pages later, no longer discussing Pearlstein, Hughes admits, "A cloud of uneasy knowingness has settled on American painting and sculpture. Its mark is a helpless skepticism about the very idea of deep engagement between art and life: a fear that to seek authentic feeling is to display naivete, to abandon one's jealously hoarded "criticality" as an artist." But Hughes won't make the connection between this "cloud" and Pearlstein's cloud. It is the same. Pearlstein will not "deeply engage" himself in his art or his life, his nudes are purposefully cold and inhuman, he makes no effort to transcend his precious "criticality," but Hughes will let him get away with it. He lets him slide, just as he lets Kitaj or Hockney slide in claiming to draw well, just as he lets Lucian Freud slide with a much deeper emptiness.
Describing Newman's methods, Robert Hughes admits, "On the evidence of his early drawings, he had no discernible talent as a draftsman...[but] he was tenacious and argumentative, and his reductive cast of mind served him well in the studio." Praise on this level hasn't been seen since Lewis Carroll and the Snark: His
form is ungainly—his intellect small—
On David Salle:
The underlying problem that makes any action unthinkable is that instituting a system with high standards, standing for something on principle, demanding art from healthy individuals who can enrich our lives, is to create a vacuum, and everybody knows it. We are at a point in history where such demands cannot be met, and those at the NEA, and those critics like Robert Hughes, cannot bear the possibility of a null set, an empty classroom, an endowment with no one to endow, a new museum that must stand empty. And so we accept the least nauseating work we can find and convince ourselves that we kind of like it. It has become, in this way, much like voting for President. Our acceptance of Modern art, provisionally, mirrors the way we have accepted everything else in our lives, as if we could no longer do any better. But I say let the museums stand empty! Let the NEA draft the highest possible standards, and if no one qualifies for a year, for five years, so be it. We will know where we stand. That would be real courage. Not the existential courage to despair over a void where there is none, but the courage to see a void where it exists and to fill it. As things now stand, only the loudmouths who are submitting "controversial works" happen to have the type of personalities that would put the NEA over a barrel by crying "censorship" when they are rejected. The NEA has no backbone, has no stated purpose or set of standards (because any set of standards would be shouted down as elitist or discriminatory), and so has no choice but to capitulate to those who press it the hardest. It finds itself in the same position as the Congress who funds it: having no notion of right or wrong, of truth, or of a national policy based on something, anything, it is open to the highest bidder or to the lobby group that can scream the loudest or cry the most tears. If the idea of centralized support for the arts based on a policy of excellence scares you as being a step toward authoritarianism, then the NEA should be abolished tomorrow. The NEA cannot fund all artists, and therefore must discriminate based on something. This is simple logic. It is now discriminating based on some secret postmodern quasi-political agenda propagandized under the euphemism "excellence." But this is no better than Newspeak, a code word for some covert governmental operation. We should no more accept such closed-door flimflam from the NEA than we do from the NSC. The NEA will not stand up and say "Yes, we are Modernists here. These are our standards. We believe in them, we believe that in the long run they are good for our artists and for our countrymen, and we are prepared to fight for them." They cannot say this because this would be catch 22: if they were to stand up for something like this they would no longer be relativists—believers are absolutists—and absolutists cannot be Modernists. So they must slink around, denying everything, destroying values under the cover of night. And when pressed by the media they fall back on professed standards of, as Jane Alexander says, "artistic merit and excellence." [Interview magazine, July 1994] But the chosen work belies this assertion, and no one believes it but the mothers of the chosen. Ms. Alexander is just telling the people what they want to hear, and relying cynically on the people's credulity. Ms. Alexander is asked by a reporter how the NEA's judges decide on the merit of a work of questionable content, and she answers that they ignore content unless it is so egregiously undemocratic that it cannot be ignored. She gives as an example propaganda posters in Nazi Germany that were "artistically" praiseworthy, and seems disappointed that the politicized debate surrounding her NEA is so prejudiced as to disallow funding of Nazi propaganda. By "artistically" praiseworthy, I suppose she means something like technically competent—the Nazi posters exhibited good draftsmanship or fine use of color. So we are treated to the absurd spectacle of the spokeswoman for one of the bastions of Modernism not only promoting the aesthetics of Nazism, but also recommending judging art strictly on its technical virtuosity. Be careful NEA, or soon you may be encouraging a new Bernini!—and then the outcry!
On finding a model: Many artists have been driven back into the house and under the bed upon this discovery: that not only the galleries and buyers, the critics and academics, the museums and the NEA have forgotten what art is about; Mom and Dad and the girl next door have forgotten, too (or, actually, never knew). Mom and Dad, if they can find the time, may pose for you just to be nice (or because they still want to believe, beyond all hope, that despite the fact that you paint nudes you may be able to avoid becoming a sexual deviant or child molester; and because you are painting them you are not painting those deplorable nudes—which are hopefully just a phase). But the girl next door is not family, is not so biassed in your favor. It would probably take less pleading and convincing to actually get her into bed than to accept, or care, that you have real artistic talents and goals.
The
problem is (and you have probably already discovered this) that
you cannot invest a drawing or painting with emotion just by
wanting to. The more your intentions become conscious, the less
likely they are to be realized. A work of art will be emotional
not to the extent the artist desires it to be; it will be
emotional to the extent, or depth, that he or she actually feels
it. Passion cannot be faked or premeditated. This is why your
life outside of art is so important, and why I put so much
emphasis on addressing you as a whole person. Because only a whole
person can create art. There will be no love in your art if there
is no love in your life, there will be no depth in your art if
there is no depth to your emotions, and there will be no depth to
your emotions unless you allow them to react with the world,
positively or negatively (and preferably both). Our most deep-seated nihilism in this country, in this world, comes from, of all places, our religions. The most devout Christians in this country are the most offended by nudity. The fundamentalists, like many others, mistrust themselves in the presence of nudity. They are no longer able, and know they are no longer able, to make the right choice: to choose to see beauty instead of immodesty, to see love and trust and intimacy instead of lust and violence and selfishness. And so they renounce the choice. The gifts of God are too tempting, and one must shield oneself from their glories. But where there can be no sin there can be no virtue. Where there is no possibility of doing the wrong thing, there is no possibility of doing the right thing. And so most of us prefer to do nothing. We have bad sex, our love is tepid and unfulfilling, and we look guilty in the presence of the beauty of our own children. Our lives are a disgrace to any healthy religion or god. This all goes to say that the contemporary artist, as far as he or she is interested in a healthy life and a healthy art, is in the position of a blade runner. The artist (and especially the painter or sculptor of nudes) must run, and run well, a narrow path between artistic and sexual resignation (which resignation leads to creative celibacy) and outright hedonism and perversion, all encouragement being to fall off on either side. To discover the true nature of the instincts one must first make an experiment of oneself. An artist must allow himself the freedom to approach nudity and sexuality (if such is his or her interest) with an unjaundiced eye; to see it, as far as possible, like Adam saw Eve, or Eve saw Adam; to begin to imagine what it would be like to prefer Eden to the Fall. I t is to take a risk, to array the actual choices of life before you as they are naturally presented, and to choose based on your own store of wisdom and strength. It is to align yourself against the whole world, if the truth demands it: to discover your paradise and go there, alone if need be. If you have a healthy attitude about the nude, if you have a healthy attitude about anything, you will have immediately pared your audience down to almost nothing. This is hard to admit. But once you have made this sobering discovery, you are free to go from there. Dazzlingly free. Meaning that almost nobody will give a damn what you do one way or the other. This admission, as hopeless as it might seem at first, actually puts you in in the firmest of creative positions. After all, the best place to begin creating is in the void. Here, at least, you don't have to worry about bumping into or tripping over anyone's expectations. Perhaps if you had not been forced by circumstance into this empty room, you would have spent a lifetime searching for its solitude. |