...better to ask forgiveness than permission...
The problem with a new thing is that we don't quite understand what to look for or what we're looking at and so we miss it. It is a problem of vision. Modernism, the great unknown of the late 19th and early 20th century, beginning with the Impressionists and ending with the Abstract Expressionist, created a culture where radical visions were formed out of the challenges of accepted ones. Each ground breaking theoretical idea was part of the dismantling of the old western visual tradition and each answered the challenge to "make it new." Which meant, above all, to explore one's moment in this short life, to honor one's difference and to say what is true within oneself. Through all of these fast and violent changes in vision over the last 100 years or so, the concept of an artist had remained steady. Along with their connection to the history of art, artists were always responsibile to the concept that vision moved forward, ideas were built out of historic accomplishments and advancement came from the development of art's perceived weaknesses. To be an artist meant to find truth through one's vision, to think with sight, to understand and ruminate about the truth as it lay before one's eyes.
For artists, vision is both a verb and a noun - to see, to interpret, to understand, and more importantly, it is a description of the revelation itself. After the final success and ultimate failure of American-type abstraction, Postmoderism filled the descriptive void, changing the game, creating an auteur class - the concept of a visionary, an artist was destroyed - first through Postmodern theory, then through its practice. Fine Art Culture became endemic, tied to economics, education and entertainment. It is a billion dollar industry, driven by corporate economic systems, fueled by academic institutions and maintained by art professionals - all in the business of manufacturing and selling luxury leisure products graciously upgraded for today's contemporary tastes. And with the rise of this economic system we've seen the extinction of what used to be called the avant garde - but that is changing.
It is easy to assume a style. Especially with a lens and a computer. After that all you need is a technician to produce it - to give the product that handmade, one-of-a-kind sheen, 5 to a series - a reproduced original. Art is, today, all about the manufacturing of luxury goods. In fact most all of the arts are now subject to reproduction, because most all of art production is designed through programming. Series of cibachromes, series of sculptures, series of DVDs - the idea of the one-off does no one any good in a market driven world. Andy said it best - everyone gets the same Coke. The unique product is too unstable, is too uneven, too unknown, and therefore too risky as a business proposition - it may fail to sell to enough collectors to be economically viable for those who sell and those who invest. Andy became a machine, and once his machine patent was out in the public domain lots of little machines got built fast. The industry of machines are clicking, whirring and humming along as you are reading this, creating art products left and right, employing hordes of assistants, technicians, bankers, lawyers, shipping agents, clerks, salesmen, gallerists, bloggers, websites, professors, students, art supply stores, and well, the list is endless....Autuers direct the product, provide the name recognition and live as celebrities in our small world. They pick and choose, direct and manage, but rarely actually create. How do we know this is true? Because there has been no real stylistic change or theoretical challenge to visual art in the last 40 years, just a plethora of personality driven product. 40 Years at least - 2 generations. (It may be more - you can trace this back to the Surrealists - but that is pushing a point.)
So what are we talking about?
I have seen the promise of a few 21st Century artists' work. It shows up occassionally for a bright moment and then falls away just as quickly. A recent example was Chris Ofili's show at Zwirner (which we have written about.) He pushed himself in an old way, and came up with a new idea for his work. He wasn't making product, but trying to push his vision, his style to a different level. There was risk on the wall and you could feel it if you looked for it. The show blipped on our screens because of who he is and his history with the press - but once that personality excitement came and went the work of the show disappeared. For the most part the show was written about like all the other product, but some of us saw the difference of Matisse in the work, and we took note. Here was someone struggling to understand what was on offer, what remained in the challenge left us by the master - and he put it out there for all to see. Chris fought well. His vision sharpened - he found expansiveness, but he didn't win - he's not strong enough just now. Still an artist strives to find style. There are others as well, but they come in small bits and pieces to the public. These shows usually get overlooked, because most who go to galleries don't know the history of what they're looking at - they know the narrative of the press release, sure, but they don't know what's at stake. For them art started with Warhol and flowered with Koons and Hirst. What they know about history is served up in auction catalogue descriptions, executive summaries prepared in gallery borchures, or what is blurbed about in a feel good essay written by an academic critic for an autuer's show catalogue. What's at stake for artists is HUGE, and yet Postmodernism continues to foster and manufacture this endless solipsism.
"...overripe bits of rough trade, with yearning mouths and hair like black ice cream." Robert Hughes' description of Caravaggio
Artists inherit their time. It is what's given to them to make sense of. They live as all humans have lived - against and within the time they inherit. Matisse and Picasso existed through 2 world wars and a world wide economic collapse. They spent their times developing a visual memory of that epic. Occassionally they looked to the past for help, for inspiration, for sustenance, but they never expected that past to express their unique moment. Humans live as they always have - if you'll forgive - with Eros and Thanatos - the urge to Life and the urge to Death. It's simple enough. You live, and it's up to you to pack as much life as you can in that time - you're going to die - and even though you may be young and healthy - death can come at any moment. For artists this underscores their urge to create, to put their memories, their life, into their work. Matisse found the need for joy and fullness, color and form - women, women, women! Picasso wanted power and strength and physicality and flesh - women, women, women! Both had an urge for life and an urge to build their memories, to fill their lives with the images of their time and existence, and to recreate that memory, those images, those fleeting moments in the minds of others.
Matisse sat in his home surrounded by as much comfort as he could afford - large cages of birds singing, flowers, patterned fabrics, overstuffed chairs and naked women, Ingres' promise of Odalisques made real in his life. And what emerged was a body of work celebrating that promise. Picasso chased greatness and power - pushed his way into the vangarde - packed his mind with images of speed, form and light and remade the Western Visual Tradition in his own flesh. His work defined how we see form and physicality in the 20th Century. Their achievement was at an apex of culture - a time that had been made ready for change by fantastic artists pushing forward to new visions.
But what of those artists that inherit a "virgin" time - a time that has no supporting precedent for what their vision can bring? What happens to those who are the first innovators, those that must clear the fields, clear the land - those who see something different in the system they inherit - the first artists rather than the grand ones? Giotto, Bellini, Donatello, Tintoretto, Caravaggio, Delacroix, Manet, Cezanne, Gorky - Are they any less for being the first to take in hand a new expression, for opening the door for others to walk through, for risking acceptance and giving permission to those who follow - Phillips before Alexanders? Would we have recognized their innovation if we had been part of their time or would it have slipped by unnoticed? Would we have just seen crazy fuckers working hard on wacky projects? What is happening at this cultural moment is something similar to what art has seen in the past. Artists are starting to make good on the promise of avant garde art. Occasionally we see them wresting the future from the decadent mannerist art world we've inherited.
What we are talking about is the LIFE of art. Art that comes from one's existence, and is witnessed not through lenses, not through reproductions, not made by teams of professionals, but up close, in the flesh, real and breathing in front of YOUR eyes. What is it like to be alive at this point in time - how do we SEE, how do we remember, how do we express? Hell, we understand that we are digitized, blackberryed, uploaded and programmed, but when you take your lover in your arms - what is it to be alive at that moment? How do we see joy, life, pain, death - what is the VISION of our lives? What are we seeing and feeling, and how do we express it? Whether we're about pleasure or power - what is our life like in the 21st century? We want direct interpretation, we want to see through those eyes, not mediated through contextual interpretation or presented as a bought-and-paid-for product. We want the things artists experience, but even more, we want the things that artists have poured into their memories, that define experience. And because these types of artists don't ask permission, they're willing to express it in the first person and stand out of the comfortable systems on their own.
We are living through an incredible moment for human history, and America is supposedly leading the world into the future. We are experiencing climate change, war, the collapse of our democracy, the political rise of corporations, the spread of super diseases, the rise of fundamentalism, the patenting of DNA, the digitization of human existence and fuck all. Huge amazing changes are happening in quick succession and somehow the art world is fixated on the next auction, whose prices are up, or which gallery so and so is showing at. Auteurs continue to ply their POMO strategies and none of it, none of it, speaks to this time, to what it means to be human right now. Rough Trade it is then - out of the systems of comfort and through our own experiences. Here's where the new visual memories are being made. "I´ve seen things you people wouldn't believe...." Just as the great artists did "strange" things without permission in order to make new art, just as they forged a visual record of their memories and lives, a few 21st Century artist are starting to understand what's at stake, and for those that do, maybe forgiveness awaits.
Exciting Times Lie Ahead!
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