Response: Art is always in flux

Visual art is always undergoing a significant change. Just as the world political situation has been and always will be at a ‘critical stage’.

Jason Walsh longs for the grand designs of yesteryear as if they had completely disappeared which is certainly not the case. (1) Thankfully the grand designs have become more nuanced and are no longer encapsulated within a set of rigid frameworks as those that characterised much of the art of the early to mid-twentieth century.

The constant return of aesthetics/return of painting (the one generally infers the other) is a kind of horrendous feedback loop that the media has successfully generated for years now. Art professionals know that painting has been, still is and will remain a current and valid form of artistic expression. Artists, regardless of their chosen medium or focus of activity know this. Yet every so often the culture sections or Sunday supplements of the daily/weekly press churn out an article presenting a variation on the theme of the return of beauty. The formula is simple; drag out the ‘horrific’ memory of Carl Andre’s line of bricks, or present something a bit more ‘up-to-date’ such as Tracey Emin’s bed piece, and then let the readers know they can breathe a sigh of relief because painting happens to have ‘returned’. Once and for all: neither painting or aesthetics ever actually disappeared!

Much of Walsh’s article seems to based on a kind of simplistic argument that art and it’s development is a kind of never-ending struggle of dynamic opposites, that there is ‘good’ and ‘bad’ art. I find it unfortunate that he chooses to use wording such as ‘cold, calculating’ and ‘boring’ especially when he speaks in such sweeping generalisations.

Walsh bemoans that art has been ‘robbed of its autonomy and subject matter while simultaneously being dragooned into service as a crude propaganda tools for officialdom’.

Unimpressed: Finbar Rosato writes in defence of contemporary art

It sounds as if this is some awful recent development. Art is and always has been defined by its position in complex power relationships. Art and its patronage has been an unavoidable reality for centuries and nothing has changed considerably in modern times. From the comically un-hip ‘Cool Britannia’ Labour party campaign in Britain in the 1990s to the terrifying culture-wars played out every so often in the name of ‘public decency’ and ‘common sense’ to the incredibly complicated power games simmering under the surface at the annual art fairs in Miami and Basel to the commissioning of public works of art. Art and money are always in unholy alliance with each other. I am not so cynical that I would say that we should just accept the status quo, but we should consider what we could learn from the situation rather than repetitively and loudly stating how bad we think it is.

Works of art can exist simultaneously both as autonomous forms with their own agenda and as aspects of larger power games and contexts. It has always been this way and any fleeting moments when art has briefly shone out as an entirely autonomous form are exceptions to the rule and there is nothing that really says that it actually was better back then. Indeed, the various situations and contexts in which works of art are located are often integral aspects of the art experience. Art can be viewed in galleries and in museums. It can be viewed in artist’s studios and in peoples’ homes. It can be viewed in the street and in the media. Common to all locations is that there are none that are neutral, and even if we try to imagine some kind of ‘pure’ autonomy for the work of art, the context can never be entirely erased or disregarded, and neither should it be.

While we look at works of art on display in museums, we are always forced to ask how they got there. Who were the donors? What preceded the donations? What mechanisms were/are at work in order that we might be looking at these works of art at all? Exhibiting works of art is not a pure process, and there will always be issues of representation and power dynamics, and even if we could certainly wish that the situation were different, the awareness of the facts adds enormously to the art experience.

What has been characterised as post-modernism in art is much, much more than the conceptual art of the 1960s and 1970s. Indeed there are many works of art that have been labelled as post-modern, especially works made in the supposedly morally dead 1980s that have overtly utopian political ambitions. That artistic styles and choice of media change and shift should not be something to focus on when looking for driving forces and high ideals. Just because it doesn’t look like a work by Ad Reinhardt doesn’t mean that it is the moral equivalent of a Jeff Koons (if there is a moral dimension to Koons’ work). The reverse can also be true. Take the works of Sol Lewitt as an example. Lewitt was one of the original conceptual artists, and his focus throughout his career remained on processes, instructions, texts and theories. The visual results of his cogitations however are sumptuous fields of colour and inspirational forms, his main and final concern. Sol Lewitt’s work should stand as an example that the various processes of conceptual art were a means rather than an end. It is of course easy to follow the notion peddled by the tabloid and broadsheet press that modern art is by definition always provocative for the sake of being provocative. I find it interesting that Walsh simply dismisses so much art production as unworthy of any attention, and speaks disparagingly of Brian Sewell in the same breath.

Grand ideas are interesting and valuable. Modernism is of enormous value both as a still-functioning set of principles and as a historical lesson, and not just with regard to art but also to architecture, politics and social theory. However, just as many of the paths of modernism were laudable and still remain extremely current, many other aspects must be recognised as being excessive and unnecessary at the time and quite abhorrent and out of date in the present day.

The idea of a return to some singular ‘grand narrative’, some kind of ‘objective truth’ towards which all art should aspire, should without hesitation be consigned to the scrapheap. Pluralistic and global are not dirty words and no-one should be fighting to hold onto the position as arbiter of absolute cultural value.

The presentation of the ‘concept’ of alter-modernism as some kind of potential light in the darkness is quite an unfortunate over-estimation of the situation. Not to speak ill of Nicolas Bourriaud, but it is often the case that the ideas he presents are taken by others to be prophecies or all-encompassing manifestoes. Not long ago he introduced the idea of relational aesthetics, a theorisation of a major trend in the production of art in the 1990s and 2000s. That an essay that he has written and an exhibition he has curated as recently as this year should be a defining moment in the history and development of art is a tad unrealistic.

Walsh writes of the’ re-emergence of the significance of the individual work of art’. To anyone with an active interest in art, this really isn’t anything that has ever gone away in the first place. Lamenting the demise of what has gone before can only get in the way of actually looking at and gaining an understanding of what you are confronted with today. One can of course choose to ignore the total global production of contemporary art in order to keep up the futile search for the ‘re-emergence’ of ‘real’ art.
There are many, many artists working today in various field and media with very progressive agendas and goals. Louise Lawler, Fred Wilson, Jeremy Deller, Rikrit Taravanija, Tino Sehgal, Santiago Sierra, and Barbara Kruger are just a few of the high profile artists to work with ideas that relate to the progressive agenda of the ‘grand narrative’, but without ever feeling that what they really need to do is adapt themselves to some wordy manifesto.

(1) Re-imaging modernism, Jason Walsh, forth, October 16, 2009