Art inside out

Working with contemporary art is a complex business. Working as a curator, it seems to me that there is a commonly held expectation that those who work within what is dishearteningly referred to as the art world have an encyclopaedic knowledge not only of contemporary art, but also of recent to ancient art history, architecture, philosophy, governmental cultural policy, the history and theory of psychotherapy, and genus studies among other fields. It follows that if art today can potentially cover all these fields and more, then presenting and mediating contemporary art to both initiated and uninitiated audiences can be tricky to say the least.

I went to art college, where like many other a student I was convinced of my own genius. At college I played with different media, made some work I was happy with and obsessively read and re-read a number of books about developments in modern and contemporary art. It was there that I laid the foundations for my future career, by becoming more interested in other artists’ work than in my own practice and eroding all vestiges of belief in my own artistic vision.

After ten years, two post-grad courses, and having worked freelance and for galleries and institutions, I am still learning, relearning and re-evaluating the knowledge that somehow entitles me to carry out my chosen profession in being professionally opinionated. There are of course many professions where this is the norm, journalism perhaps being one of them.

In an article in frieze magazine in 2008, the curator Tirdad Zolghadr makes reference to the expectations that curators and other art professionals have the ability to miraculously hold forth on a range of subjects as varied as “...London architects, Arab migrants, Leninism, the eastward expansion of Europe and the early history of western philosophy.” (1) Zolghadr’s article goes on to make a number of striking arguments about the jack-of-all-trades position that has become the norm in working with art. His tentative, critical and humorously self-deprecating position is that the interdisciplinary nature of visual art often deprives curators, critics and other professionals of the possibility of making truly critical delineated arguments about art and it’s qualities and value. Zolghadr does not argue for a return to an absolute delineation of artistic canon, value and quality, but he is presenting the importance of awareness of the fragility of various intellectual and artistic positions. Art practice and representation can be floating, non-linear, illogical, contradictory “crazy fun” but this mercurial situation should not end up being a pre-defined and calculated position in itself.

But there we are, floating along in the maelstrom of interdisciplinary practice and strategy, constantly fighting to keep abreast of all the various positions and forms that art can take. It seems like an indomitable and ungraspable force, a compelling but indefinable zeitgeist. The art world (shudder) basically functions according to the institutional rules; anything goes as long as there is some kind of institutional acceptance for it. There are fluid and flexible codes of acceptance and understanding and all players in any given situation have to have some kind of silent strategic understanding of the specific codes of the situation they find themselves in. It can be easy to present and propose ideas as long as you have mastered the language (or specific dialect) of the context. So aside from being intellectually omnivorous, artists and arts professionals alike have to be accomplished and self-confident socialites. This is but a brief sketch of the complex power relationships that define the art world.

And what of art that is made and presented outside this framework? There are innumerable galleries showing work in a variety of “traditional” media that are never really marked on the map in terms of the zeitgeist of contemporary art. There are a multitude of artists working away in total ignorance of the various codes of fashion and intellectual rigour that define the glamour and/or credibility of contemporary art. Their oil paintings and watercolours, driftwood sculptures and batik prints are not really considered worthy of discussion. These artists’ works and careers exist and develop in a parallel unfashionable art world which at best is viewed with mild boredom and amusement, and at worst scorned and deprecated by arts professionals. This position is a combination of dedication to the values of the progressive avant-garde and simple lazy snobbery.

But beyond the realm of the Sunday painter, the happy and enthusiastic amateur, there is yet another world, the world of the outsider artist. Here we can locate most contemporary folk art, the art of the insane, the art of religious visionaries, and the art of the eccentric loners. There are many individuals whose work and activities have become the focus of interest in a wider cultural field and specifically in the world of contemporary art.

The mythical Henry Darger, whose epic and violent tales of the Vyvian girls were written and illustrated in an immense body of work that was only “discovered” after the artists death. A great deal has been written about Darger without me adding anything further in this text, suffice to say that Darger has been enormously influential on the work of many contemporary artists.(2)

Daniel Johnston, the manic-depressive, savant folk singer and artist has been a kind of underground icon for more than twenty years in the world of American rock music. Johnston was trained as an artist before embarking on a music career punctuated by serious mental health problems. He has created an enormous body of naïve, pop-culture related drawings and paintings on the subjects of good and evil, Jesus, love and music. (3)