Paul O’Kane October 2009
On 1st May 1846 Charles Baudelaire gave birth to Modern art.
He did so by appealing to artists of his time to reject what he called ‘the dogma of the studios’ and to embrace instead, what he called the ‘heroism of modern life’. This heroism was to be a sense that modern subjects, in the modern world, were no less important or ‘heroic’ than the heroes of the classical past, and that modern life, modern stories, modern experiences, were just as worthy of representation by artists as any story form the bible or from classical mythology, and any bar maid or road maker might be just as worthy of a portrait as a king or the wife of a banker.
The implications of Baudelaire’s writing sent artists in search of modern themes, newspaper stories, shop girls, the leisure activities of the new modern class of ‘bourgeoisie and the ranks of working people who served them and kept their dream alive.
But along with these modern themes these artists began rejecting established academic forms and techniques, materials and processes, and striving to be modern in this way too. Not only did they leave the habits of the studios -as Baudelaire suggested- to venture out, look at and even work in the open air, they also emulated photography’s new angular viewpoints and frozen gestures, or worked more quickly and roughly to capture the fast pace and change of the modern city.
Whenever, it seems, we are honest with ourselves and our times, and willing to throw off the ingrained attitudes and habits of our teachers and ancestors, to truly represent the world in which we live and which only we truly know, we thereby become immediately modern.
The transformation is itself heroic, because that which is immediately to-hand –the everyday tools, signs, codes, attitudes, fashions and materials that make the now so ‘now’ are often so new that they have not yet been assimilated into a current aesthetic. In this respect art lags a little behind life and it is the artist’s responsibility to help it catch up.
Often, we feel we can’t represent immediate experience because we fear it will seem too familiar, too ugly, not yet valued in the way we think of as art.
Perhaps art, and perhaps philosophy too, is really a way of making the world manageable. Representing the changing world is a way of understanding it, taming it, making it possible to live in by giving us a vocabulary and a map to guide us through?
This introduction seems to claim that the problem of the studio becoming an ‘ivory tower’ while the real world speeds on into the future, is a perennial question and an ever-repeated scenario.
Perhaps there are always pre-modern, modern, and post-modern moments in this respect, in both our practices and our lives, as we regularly check and adjust to ensure we are somehow keeping pace with the modern world.
The other important point raised by this introduction is that the current, the ‘now’ is always ‘hot’, ‘too hot to handle’ in fact. When I say ‘hot’ I mean aesthetically ‘hot’ in th sense that current events etc. may be too new to sit well within art. but I also mean politically ‘hot’ in that whatever is current is invariably politically volatile or disruptive.
This is because our immediate environment is like a breaking wave within which everything is in dispute, up-for-grabs, debatable. Tastes haven’t settled into orders, one news item or new trend may attract everyone’s attention for a day only to be soon forgotten, while another, barely noticed, might become established as historically significant.
For an artist to represent the immediate becomes risky, a kind of gamble on what may or may not turn out to be worthy of art’s attentions.
The city-dwelling artist of a so-called 1st world country, inhabits a built environment, detached from a natural tradition and surrounded by human production and inventions, repeated and reflected a thousand times a day. History and the future rub shoulders in a Georgian street converted into shops where the latest sneakers are on offer under bright lams on glass shelves. The Apple store inhabits a great 19th century Neo-Classical edifice,
Where there is history there is politics - stories of people’s lives, struggles and social change. Where there is the future there is politics - dreams of what can be, visions of what should be. And wherever there is commerce, habitation, architecture, there is politics if only because politics simply means people.
The studio, of course, may be a preferable place in which to dream of a better or different word. To invent a fantasy or recapture some lost world. In Baudelaire’s call for artists to address modern themes he specifically attacked this tendency, calling the nude (for example) the ‘darling of the artists’ and suggesting that its modern equivalent might be found in the bathroom, the morgue or on the operating table.
He criticised artists who painted important battle scenes –even though these were relatively recent events- because this suggested that the interests of the state were more worthy of the attentions of art than any event in today’s evening newspaper.
And Baudelaire also ridiculed artists who painted their figures draped in Greek and Roman dress to tell Greek and Roman stories when we have current ways of dressing and current issues and stories to represent us.
Here are a few more quotes from his 1846 essay that I believe are equally valid today:
“ The life of our city is rich in poetic and marvellous subjects”
“ We are enveloped and steeped as though in an atmosphere of the marvellous but we don’t notice it.”
“ … since all centuries and all peoples have had their own form of beauty, so inevitably we have ours.”
“Just as we have our own particular emotions, so we have our own beauty.”
Now, to make an art of Louis Vuitton sneakers –as does Murukami in the current Tate exhibition ‘Pop-Life’ may not seem immediately political, however, we can argue that, as he very word political refers to the Latin word for People, whenever we refer to people we necessarily bring politics into our art.
We don’t necessarily do this by overt or explicit means (rattling banners and marching) but nevertheless by invoking the socio-economic distinctions and tensions that influence our environment and or response to it.
You’ll find sneakers referred to in Bourriaud (he calls them ‘athletic shoes’) and he uses them as a sign of a new morality and immorality emerging in response to globalisation as sneakers become an international footwear –perhaps the first global footwear – and as Western consumers become aware of the exploitative forces by which their most expensive sneakers are so cheaply produced by low paid Asian workers in poor working conditions etc.
You’ll also find sneakers in the work of 1980s New York Simulationist Haim Steinbach where he uses them as a sign that his immediate environment has recently undergone a revolution according to which consumerism has gained the upper hand over artist’s attempts to represent their environment. In the world of ‘I Shop therefore I Am’ Steinbach stops making and starts shopping only turning his craft and compositional skills to the careful execution of his trademark shelves and display arrangements.
The artist Sylvie Fleury also used Prada shoes and high-end fashion brands very directly in her work.
In a famous essay by Frederic Jameson he discussed a painting by Van Gogh of a pair of farm labourer’s boots and compared them with an image of women’s high-heeled shoes printed in silkscreen and sprinkled with diamond dust by Andy Warhol.
In all these examples what is being represented is an everyday object that is immediate and current to the artist’s experience and environment, but in every case people and politics are hovering just beneath the surface of the aesthetic experience or visual impact, waiting for the audience to start thinking a little more deeply in order to move the work from mere surface spectacle to something that uses the opportunity and the context of art to raise political questions and discuss human issues by other means.
But a shoe is perhaps too obvious an example, a shoe, like a chair, always suggests the human it was designed to accommodate in the world. But if we consider instead what we might think of as more abstract, less ‘anthropomorphic’ materials, signs and practices, we nevertheless find it difficult to escape political reference.
A sculptor like Donald Judd or Gary Webb may seem to merely revel in celebrating the materials of their day; the Plexiglas, steel, machine cutting, enamel coating, spray-painting, etc. that inform current design and manufacture to build the modern, urban, consumerist environment through which we pass every day, but clearly, despite the relative abstraction of these artists’ works we have not escaped the political, even though an artist like Judd might have wanted to be remembered primarily as a a great post-war American formalist, or Gary Webb might like o be thought of as an ironic 90s jester type, using a bewildering mix of materials and forms to perhaps celebrate the impossibility of maintaining any political position in a rapidly globalising environment.
You will probably hear the phrase “I hate all this political art” as you walk around shows that seem to rely heavily upon their content at the expense of form and process, but it could be argued that this apparently apolitical position is merely a denial, a fantasy of inhabiting a bourgeois island of pure art detached from the human, and therefore political context in which it appears, as if there were an eye of the political storm where the world is still and where art resides untarnished by change and the disputes that invariably accompany all change.
Every human opinion, including the opinion ‘I hate all this political art” is something political, just as our consumer choices, our choices of footwear, or artist’s materials, our attitudes towards others can all be traced to the socio-economic relations in which we are all ultimately embroiled.
Nevertheless, there remains a sense in which thee brief thoughts only scratch the surface of the immense histories of artists and their engagement with, for or against a political art. We need to consider not only the great waves and wars of history that have engulfed the world since Baudelaire’s essay of 1846 and which clearly swept artists like the Dadaists, Surrealists, Constructivists etc. up in political events.
We need to also consider the 1970s as an era in which 19th & 20th Century politics’s focus on Marxism and Fascism shifted so that single-issue movements such as Feminism, Gay Rights, Postcolonial protest etc. came to dominate the political arena in which artists worked. (‘Art Since 1900’ is a great book to help you do this).
Then of course there is a new 21st Century shift towards the globalisation of politics and new religious influences to consider.
Meanwhile, on the other side of the coin, with regard to the regularly repeated appeal to an un-political or apolitical art we need to consider not only the formalists but also the fantasists and fictionalisers (again ‘Pop-Life’ is a useful show here) who seem to seek to escape the real world using art as their vehicle. Thus we could consider the Otaku phenomenon in Japan, or an artist like Mariko Mori or Matthew Barney who might be successfully sequestered from any overt political implication and maintained as examples of an art that does deserve to resist Baudelaire’s original call, close the studio door, block the windows and cultivate instead, nothing more or less than a world of our very own and keep alive the dream of an art that is only art and nothing more.
END
Sunday, 25 October 2009
Monday, 19 October 2009
SPECULECTURE 2. 26th Oct 2009 (1pm-3pm) "I hate all this political art" -Sculpture and ‘Possibilitics’
If I come to Sculpture as a means of expression, as a ‘career move’, as an inevitability given that it is unlikely that my life could succeed by any other means, or to improve my socio-economic conditions, opportunities etc. the first thing on my mind is not, perhaps ‘politics’.
In fact, politics, with its dualisms, well-known economy with the truth, corruption and rather dull and un-stylish associations may be anathema to the trajectory of any would-be artist.
But this Speculecture will nevertheless suggest that art conducts politics by other means and in fact has much to contribute to stimulating and rejuvenating long-held political positions and well-worn debates.
Here are some quotes you might want to read, think about, discuss and follow-up in preparation for or following the Speculecture.
(N.B we will also use this session for an Essay briefing.)
No culture can develop without a social basis, without a source of stable income. And in the case of the avant garde, this was provided by an elite among the ruling class of that society from which it assumed itself to have been cut off, but to which it has always remained attached by an umbilical cord of gold. The paradox is real.
Clement Greenberg from Avant Garde and Kitsch 1939 [Harrison & Wood Art In Theory p. 542]
The pageant of fashionable life and the thousands of floating existences –criminals and kept women- which drift about in the underworld of a great city, the Gazette des Tribuneaux and the Moniteur all prove to us that we have only to open our eyes to recognize our true heroism.
Charles Baudelaire, from On The Heroism of Modern Life 1846 [Harrison & wood Art in Theory p. 303]
“The altermodern is to culture what altermondialisation is to geopolitics, an archipelago of local insurrections against the official representations of the world.”
Nicolas Bourriaud from The Radicant p.185-6
Art presents a counter-power. Not that the task of artists consists in denouncing, mobilizing, or protesting: all art is engaged, whatever its nature and its goals. Today there is a quarrel over representation that sets art and the official image of reality against each other; it is propagated by advertising discourse, relayed by the media, organized by an ultralight ideology of consumption and social competition. In our daily lives, we come across fictions, representations, and forms that sustain this collective imagery whose contents are dictated by power. Art puts us in the presence of counterimages, forms that question social forms. In the face of the economic abstraction that makes daily life unreal, or an absolute weapon of techno-market power, artists reactivate forms by inhabiting them …”
Nicolas Bourriaud from Postproduction p.93-94
Mankind, which in Homer’s time was an object of contemplation for the Olympian gods, now is one for itself. Its self-alienation has reached such a degree that it can experience its own destruction as an aesthetic pleasure of the first order. This is the situation of politics which fascism is rendering aesthetic. Communism responds by politicising art.
Walter Benjamin, from The work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction 1936 [Harrison & Wood Art in Theory pp/ 520-527]
“Only when in technology body and image so interpenetrate that all revolutionary tension becomes bodily collective innervations, and all the bodily innervations of the collective become revolutionary discharge, has reality transcended itself to the extent demanded by the Communist Manifesto. For the moment, only the Surrealists have understood its present commands. They exchange, to a man, the play of human features for the face of an alarm clock that in each minute rings for sixty seconds.”
Walter Benjamin Surrealism. 1929
“I must insist that search here is … aimed at making each person find within themselves, through accessibility, through improvisation, their internal liberty. The path for a creative state …”
Helio Oiticica from Appearance of the supra-Sensorial 1967 [Art in Theory Harrison & Wood p. 913]
“Just as simulation painting often treated abstraction as a readymade, commodity sculpture often treated the readymade as abstraction, and just as simulation painting tended to reduce art to design and kitsch, commodity sculpture tended to substitute design and kitsch for art …”
Hal Foster The Art of Cynical Reason from The Return of the Real p. 107
Sunday, 11 October 2009
Speculecture 1. “All You Think About Is Your Bloody Self” -the question of the subject in practice.
Paul O’Kane October 2009
“If I can free a humble material from itself, perhaps I can free myself from myself”
Richard Tuttle.
When I think of the question of the subject in practice, I think of the I, I think of myself, the self that made art in an art college, as well as the self that made art after college in a studio, making shows and publishing art writing, singing, making music and teaching.
But I also think of the self that made art or thought like an artist before college and did so whenever and wherever I was that might have little apparently to do with art.
That is, I don’t think of the question of the subject in art as merely to do with ‘profession’, in fact, I suspect that serious consideration of the subject in art might well disrupt traditional notions of the professional artist.
Its uncomfortable and unfashionable to be intimate, unless of course you are on a Reality or confessional TV show, but thinking personally, this ‘I’ thinks that I think a lot about myself, inside myself, and this may be a way of protecting myself.
Perhaps a way of protecting the ‘self’ or the drive I need to produce my work. At the same time, when I ask myself the important and difficult question of why I make work at all and have always made it, I suspect that the work is also to produce and nurture, to promote and help survive that which I think of as my best self, the self I feel I really am and want to continue being, sometimes against all odds.
So you can already see that the question of the subject in practice is no simple matter, but we’ll try not to get too complicated, after all, simplicity is –as all artists know –a kind of grace.
I’ve seen, and we probably all know other people, including artists, who, don’t appear to protect the self or need to protect the self the way I do. They talk loud and act wild as if nothing can hurt them. And the people around them, if they are not themselves hurt by that behaviour, seem to like the fact that this confidence engenders trust and makes everyone feel relaxed.
Perhaps for people like that the self is not their engine, perhaps others are their engine and maybe that is a better motivation for an artist or for any human being. So, the question of the subject in practice could then simply be a question of different degrees of fear, privacy or degrees of dialogue with others.
Flicking through the little art history book in my head I offer the question up to, e.g. Russian constructivism. There, when I recall old black and white photographs of constructivist group shows what I always notice is that all the angular, welded steel sculptures look, to me, like they are made by the same person. What the artists and their leaders might call ‘bourgeois subjectivity’ has been pretty much purged from everyone’s work so that all that remains is the art and the state, art about art and art about the state, but no subject.
At some point in our career I suspect we have to come up against this question; how much should our work be about a self, how much about art, and how much about others, the world, or the state.
Whether it is good or bad, right or wrong, desirable or undesirable to purge the subject from art might be the central question of this session, and it’s not a bad one with which to begin a course. But we’ll come back to that question. For now let’s think of another couple of historical examples. Purely personal ones I suppose, taken from my own art history.
Fast forward to 2009, summer, the Tate modern bookshop and after seeing the Futurist exhibition I’m browsing in the bookshop. I flick though an enormous Saatchi publication titled ‘The Shape Of Things To Come’ with no words, only pictures. It’s a powerful presentation a big and heavy and expensive book full of high quality colour photographs, and the aim of the publisher or editor is, I suspect, to convince me that contemporary sculpture looks like this. But it immediately makes me think of alternatives to this point of view.
By the time I’ve flicked half way through the book the title makes me laugh because, in the very act of compiling these artists into the book –a bit like butterflies pinned in a collection- they seem to suffer the indignity of being consigned to history, or worse, to the bad taste of the recent past. They therefore become the very antithesis of ‘The shape Of Things to come’ and suddenly appear as ‘The Shape of How Things Are’ or ‘The Shape of How Things Were Quite Recently’ and therefore only useful to look at as a kind of negative resource, as examples of what we should no longer want to see, no longer want to make.
But to get back to the pint about the subject, something about the way the Sculpture is presented here, the uniform pages, photographs etc. seems to contribute to the fact that, in some way, just like the old Constructivist exhibition, we might also say that all this work looks the same. There’s a historical viewpoint at work here of course, so that things seen from a distance lose their details and nuances and we make generalisations about huge groups of people and long stretches of time.
Perhaps the Constructivists and their works were really far more individual and different than they appear in one well-known photograph. On the other hand, perhaps the Saatchi-favoured sculptors are more similar than we usually think if we look at them now but see them historically –as if from a distance- and if we look at them historically it might be to allow ourselves to move beyond them rather than be constrained by our admiration for their power.
Of course to claim that the Saatchi-favoured sculptors are similar would seem shocking
and unreasonable to many, after all the generation represented by a book like this -or perhaps a comparable contemporary sculpture selection such as ‘Unmonumental’- is usually celebrated for its wacky, wayward, zany, idiosyncratic, boundary-testng obsessive-ness, its neo-Dadaist, irreverent humour and amoralism, its simulacral slickness, post-holocaust sobriety and/or ironic neo-modernist cod-formalism.
Probably some of these attributes could be applied to most of the work in the book but each artist –most importantly- would have deployed them in their own combination along with hopefully something else that I cannot so easily identify.
But I’m afraid that the fact that I can so quickly discern these traits makes me worry that it might all amount to a kind of ‘Mannerism’ –i.e. a state of stagnant culture wherein what we know all too well to be successful or good art becomes stuck in a bad habit without really taking risks or really questioning; the self, the times or sculpture itself.
It is currently fashionable to assert that ‘postmodernism is dead’ even though it seemed dead to many by the end of the 1980s. Nevertheless the Sculpture I am looking at still seems to be quite stuck, without those last shreds of belief that sustained the conceptual art of the 1970s, and rather ridiculing its own pretension to be art like all the neo-Dadaism and Pop since the 1960s. To me, this is what then makes the Saatchi book postmodern and why Nicholas Bourriaud’s appeal for an ‘Altermodern’ art is as-yet more words than practice.
I close the book thinking perhaps this too is all the same, and perhaps that is a worthwhile aim, to lose the self and join others in a shared aesthetic, a shared modesty about the limitations of art, accepting it can only be and only do so much, and that the artist, after all, is not such a special individual or even such a special vocation.
And this brings me back to the subject, the subjects behind all these pages and pictures, how each one has strived to negotiate something personal and private, in dialogue with something popular and professional, dare I say it an ‘inner dialogue’ in dialogue with an outer dialogue.
But closing the book and consigning the artists within it to history –not the future as the title intended- leaves me with two positive notions:
ONE. ‘The Shape of Things to come’ revives and reminds me of the idea that Sculpture might always be in dialogue with something as universal as ‘Shape’. (incidentally that single word might have been a better title for the collection of curiously formed objects within).
TWO. The sense of closing the book of ‘contemporary sculpture’ as if it were all too familiar and all too soon over is also an empowering feeling and the subject in practice is, I am convinced, in search of some kind of power –power over materials, power over their lives, careers, self, others, power to make something of one’s self by taking control of the self and what confronts you –albeit through Sculpture.
And perhaps where there is a desire to gain power, there is always something that must be disempowered or overcome. Therefore, I can close the book of contemporary sculpture empowered by the sense that all this sculpture and those sculptures have been imprisoned by history, caged in the contemporary, and renew my determination that that this will not happen to me, or my work.
But the artist must succeed, enter the limelight and inhabit the contemporary, no? What is art that no-one sees, what is an artist without success? Art, the pinnacle of contemporary art is, after all, Damien Hirst flooded with paparazzi flashes as he flogs his diamond-encrusted skull or offloads his investments before the market dives.
Then again, as I’ve already said, I can’t let go of the fact that I will always be an artist, whether I’m close to or far from others, in or out of fame or fashion, in or out of the city, showing or not showing, at home or at work, professional or amateur. Therefore, art and the question of the subject in practice are about more than the current fetishisation of success - I am also sure.
And so I pull one last example from my own art history book, someone who might be the complete antithesis of that Contructivist exhibition with which I started, and someone whom I suspect the artists in the Saatchi-book might like to emulate in some ways but for certain important reasons are unable to.
Henry Darger is a surely mythologised figure but I’ll briefly rehearse the myth anyway to serve my purposes. Darger was a mildly mentally disabled loner who lived and worked in impoverished conditions in Chicago until his death in 1973. Only when he died was it discovered that he had produced an enormous body of written and visual works whose idiosyncratic craft and narratives were the envy of many contemporary artists striving to promote their own difference and originality as worthy of fame and success.
Perhaps it was Darger’s complete disregard for the limelight that enabled him to contribute a real difference, a truly personal perspective o human experience in the 20th century. Perhaps professional artists can compromise them selves too much by always keeping one eye on others, on the art worlds and art journals.
The story of Darger at least reminds us that a human being might be an artist and might make art for reasons that no-one else understands, and that, in turn, might remind us that art is still not something that we understand no matter how much we photograph it, write about it, promote and proliferate it, or even laugh and joke about its limitations.
In this all-too knowing world, where the contemporary is supposed to be everything, yet gets used-up and thrown away so rapidly, Darger reminds us that there remains an idea of art made for, by and valued according to no-one but the self, and that this is not strictly ‘contemporary’ but can nevertheless be very powerful.
…
That is enough I think to think about. The question of the subject in practice is vast, it has a huge literature and it will, I suspect, occupy us all in some way for the rest of our practicing lives. All I have done here is scratch the surface with some highly personal references. I’ve drawn attention to the possible value of amplifying the self, repressing the self so as to contribute to shared aims, or ‘hang on to the self’ as perhaps the most potent and idiosyncratic aspect of practice.
Some other words to help us in discussion:
Marcus Coates
Lindsay Seers
Ryan Trecartin
Kalup Linzy
Schizophrenia
Subconscious
Collaboration
Culture
Altruism
Feelings
Memoir
“I want to be a Machine”
‘Mind, Soul and Planets’
Sentiment
Transcendence
Phil Collins
Spies and Double Agents
Rocks or Rivers? –the constitution of ontology.
“If I can free a humble material from itself, perhaps I can free myself from myself”
Richard Tuttle.
When I think of the question of the subject in practice, I think of the I, I think of myself, the self that made art in an art college, as well as the self that made art after college in a studio, making shows and publishing art writing, singing, making music and teaching.
But I also think of the self that made art or thought like an artist before college and did so whenever and wherever I was that might have little apparently to do with art.
That is, I don’t think of the question of the subject in art as merely to do with ‘profession’, in fact, I suspect that serious consideration of the subject in art might well disrupt traditional notions of the professional artist.
Its uncomfortable and unfashionable to be intimate, unless of course you are on a Reality or confessional TV show, but thinking personally, this ‘I’ thinks that I think a lot about myself, inside myself, and this may be a way of protecting myself.
Perhaps a way of protecting the ‘self’ or the drive I need to produce my work. At the same time, when I ask myself the important and difficult question of why I make work at all and have always made it, I suspect that the work is also to produce and nurture, to promote and help survive that which I think of as my best self, the self I feel I really am and want to continue being, sometimes against all odds.
So you can already see that the question of the subject in practice is no simple matter, but we’ll try not to get too complicated, after all, simplicity is –as all artists know –a kind of grace.
I’ve seen, and we probably all know other people, including artists, who, don’t appear to protect the self or need to protect the self the way I do. They talk loud and act wild as if nothing can hurt them. And the people around them, if they are not themselves hurt by that behaviour, seem to like the fact that this confidence engenders trust and makes everyone feel relaxed.
Perhaps for people like that the self is not their engine, perhaps others are their engine and maybe that is a better motivation for an artist or for any human being. So, the question of the subject in practice could then simply be a question of different degrees of fear, privacy or degrees of dialogue with others.
Flicking through the little art history book in my head I offer the question up to, e.g. Russian constructivism. There, when I recall old black and white photographs of constructivist group shows what I always notice is that all the angular, welded steel sculptures look, to me, like they are made by the same person. What the artists and their leaders might call ‘bourgeois subjectivity’ has been pretty much purged from everyone’s work so that all that remains is the art and the state, art about art and art about the state, but no subject.
At some point in our career I suspect we have to come up against this question; how much should our work be about a self, how much about art, and how much about others, the world, or the state.
Whether it is good or bad, right or wrong, desirable or undesirable to purge the subject from art might be the central question of this session, and it’s not a bad one with which to begin a course. But we’ll come back to that question. For now let’s think of another couple of historical examples. Purely personal ones I suppose, taken from my own art history.
Fast forward to 2009, summer, the Tate modern bookshop and after seeing the Futurist exhibition I’m browsing in the bookshop. I flick though an enormous Saatchi publication titled ‘The Shape Of Things To Come’ with no words, only pictures. It’s a powerful presentation a big and heavy and expensive book full of high quality colour photographs, and the aim of the publisher or editor is, I suspect, to convince me that contemporary sculpture looks like this. But it immediately makes me think of alternatives to this point of view.
By the time I’ve flicked half way through the book the title makes me laugh because, in the very act of compiling these artists into the book –a bit like butterflies pinned in a collection- they seem to suffer the indignity of being consigned to history, or worse, to the bad taste of the recent past. They therefore become the very antithesis of ‘The shape Of Things to come’ and suddenly appear as ‘The Shape of How Things Are’ or ‘The Shape of How Things Were Quite Recently’ and therefore only useful to look at as a kind of negative resource, as examples of what we should no longer want to see, no longer want to make.
But to get back to the pint about the subject, something about the way the Sculpture is presented here, the uniform pages, photographs etc. seems to contribute to the fact that, in some way, just like the old Constructivist exhibition, we might also say that all this work looks the same. There’s a historical viewpoint at work here of course, so that things seen from a distance lose their details and nuances and we make generalisations about huge groups of people and long stretches of time.
Perhaps the Constructivists and their works were really far more individual and different than they appear in one well-known photograph. On the other hand, perhaps the Saatchi-favoured sculptors are more similar than we usually think if we look at them now but see them historically –as if from a distance- and if we look at them historically it might be to allow ourselves to move beyond them rather than be constrained by our admiration for their power.
Of course to claim that the Saatchi-favoured sculptors are similar would seem shocking
and unreasonable to many, after all the generation represented by a book like this -or perhaps a comparable contemporary sculpture selection such as ‘Unmonumental’- is usually celebrated for its wacky, wayward, zany, idiosyncratic, boundary-testng obsessive-ness, its neo-Dadaist, irreverent humour and amoralism, its simulacral slickness, post-holocaust sobriety and/or ironic neo-modernist cod-formalism.
Probably some of these attributes could be applied to most of the work in the book but each artist –most importantly- would have deployed them in their own combination along with hopefully something else that I cannot so easily identify.
But I’m afraid that the fact that I can so quickly discern these traits makes me worry that it might all amount to a kind of ‘Mannerism’ –i.e. a state of stagnant culture wherein what we know all too well to be successful or good art becomes stuck in a bad habit without really taking risks or really questioning; the self, the times or sculpture itself.
It is currently fashionable to assert that ‘postmodernism is dead’ even though it seemed dead to many by the end of the 1980s. Nevertheless the Sculpture I am looking at still seems to be quite stuck, without those last shreds of belief that sustained the conceptual art of the 1970s, and rather ridiculing its own pretension to be art like all the neo-Dadaism and Pop since the 1960s. To me, this is what then makes the Saatchi book postmodern and why Nicholas Bourriaud’s appeal for an ‘Altermodern’ art is as-yet more words than practice.
I close the book thinking perhaps this too is all the same, and perhaps that is a worthwhile aim, to lose the self and join others in a shared aesthetic, a shared modesty about the limitations of art, accepting it can only be and only do so much, and that the artist, after all, is not such a special individual or even such a special vocation.
And this brings me back to the subject, the subjects behind all these pages and pictures, how each one has strived to negotiate something personal and private, in dialogue with something popular and professional, dare I say it an ‘inner dialogue’ in dialogue with an outer dialogue.
But closing the book and consigning the artists within it to history –not the future as the title intended- leaves me with two positive notions:
ONE. ‘The Shape of Things to come’ revives and reminds me of the idea that Sculpture might always be in dialogue with something as universal as ‘Shape’. (incidentally that single word might have been a better title for the collection of curiously formed objects within).
TWO. The sense of closing the book of ‘contemporary sculpture’ as if it were all too familiar and all too soon over is also an empowering feeling and the subject in practice is, I am convinced, in search of some kind of power –power over materials, power over their lives, careers, self, others, power to make something of one’s self by taking control of the self and what confronts you –albeit through Sculpture.
And perhaps where there is a desire to gain power, there is always something that must be disempowered or overcome. Therefore, I can close the book of contemporary sculpture empowered by the sense that all this sculpture and those sculptures have been imprisoned by history, caged in the contemporary, and renew my determination that that this will not happen to me, or my work.
But the artist must succeed, enter the limelight and inhabit the contemporary, no? What is art that no-one sees, what is an artist without success? Art, the pinnacle of contemporary art is, after all, Damien Hirst flooded with paparazzi flashes as he flogs his diamond-encrusted skull or offloads his investments before the market dives.
Then again, as I’ve already said, I can’t let go of the fact that I will always be an artist, whether I’m close to or far from others, in or out of fame or fashion, in or out of the city, showing or not showing, at home or at work, professional or amateur. Therefore, art and the question of the subject in practice are about more than the current fetishisation of success - I am also sure.
And so I pull one last example from my own art history book, someone who might be the complete antithesis of that Contructivist exhibition with which I started, and someone whom I suspect the artists in the Saatchi-book might like to emulate in some ways but for certain important reasons are unable to.
Henry Darger is a surely mythologised figure but I’ll briefly rehearse the myth anyway to serve my purposes. Darger was a mildly mentally disabled loner who lived and worked in impoverished conditions in Chicago until his death in 1973. Only when he died was it discovered that he had produced an enormous body of written and visual works whose idiosyncratic craft and narratives were the envy of many contemporary artists striving to promote their own difference and originality as worthy of fame and success.
Perhaps it was Darger’s complete disregard for the limelight that enabled him to contribute a real difference, a truly personal perspective o human experience in the 20th century. Perhaps professional artists can compromise them selves too much by always keeping one eye on others, on the art worlds and art journals.
The story of Darger at least reminds us that a human being might be an artist and might make art for reasons that no-one else understands, and that, in turn, might remind us that art is still not something that we understand no matter how much we photograph it, write about it, promote and proliferate it, or even laugh and joke about its limitations.
In this all-too knowing world, where the contemporary is supposed to be everything, yet gets used-up and thrown away so rapidly, Darger reminds us that there remains an idea of art made for, by and valued according to no-one but the self, and that this is not strictly ‘contemporary’ but can nevertheless be very powerful.
…
That is enough I think to think about. The question of the subject in practice is vast, it has a huge literature and it will, I suspect, occupy us all in some way for the rest of our practicing lives. All I have done here is scratch the surface with some highly personal references. I’ve drawn attention to the possible value of amplifying the self, repressing the self so as to contribute to shared aims, or ‘hang on to the self’ as perhaps the most potent and idiosyncratic aspect of practice.
Some other words to help us in discussion:
Marcus Coates
Lindsay Seers
Ryan Trecartin
Kalup Linzy
Schizophrenia
Subconscious
Collaboration
Culture
Altruism
Feelings
Memoir
“I want to be a Machine”
‘Mind, Soul and Planets’
Sentiment
Transcendence
Phil Collins
Spies and Double Agents
Rocks or Rivers? –the constitution of ontology.
Thursday, 8 October 2009
SOME QUOTES RELATED TO THE FORTHCOMING 'Subject' SPECULECTURE
It has frequently been remarked by psychoanalysts that the period in which hysterics and patients with phobias and fixations formed the bulk of their clientele, starting in the classical period with Freud, has recently given way to a time when the main complaints centre around “ego loss”, or a sense of emptiness, flatness, futility, lack of purpose, or loss of self-esteem. (Taylor, Charles. 1989 Sources of the Self p.19)
Oblomov hmself is not sure he is a person. He thinks he may be a type, and that is what he is usually taken to be. Early in the novel he looks at his fabulously slovenly servant and thinks 'well, brother, you're more of an Oblamov than I am' - as if he has read the book and recognised himself. (Michael Wood's review of ‘Oblomov’ by Goncharov LRB August 2009 p. 8.)
Why write a play about St. Thomas More? [...] For this reason: A man takes an oath only when he wants to commit himself quite exceptionally to the statement, when he wants to make an identity between the truth of it and his own virtue; he offers himself as a guarantee. And it works. There is a special kind of shrug for a perjurer; we feel that the man has no self to commit, no guarantee to offer. Of course it’s much less effective now that for most of us the actual words of the oath are not much more than impressive mumbo-jumbo than it was when they made obvious sense; we would prefer most men to guarantee their statements with, say, cash rather than with themselves. We feel—we know—the self to be an equivocal commodity. There are fewer and fewer things which, as they say, we “cannot bring ourselves” to do. We can find almost no limits for ourselves other than the physical. (Robert Bolt)
What is a self? Is it the rings of experience that grow within the tree? Is it the soul begotten and not made in the womb, or the being nurtured in the world outside? Is t the narrator in one’s head, the teeming consciousness that keeps one sleepless at night or distracted during the day, brave in danger or paralysed in a crisis? Is it the source of that anger that flames spontaneously at slights to one’s honour, or the source of this honour in the first place? Is it in one’s capacity to love, forgive or endure, or in one’s desire to lead a moral life? Is it the will that governs everything one ever says or does, or something far bigger than that? (Laura Cumming A Face To The World –On Self Portraits p. 262)
Oblomov hmself is not sure he is a person. He thinks he may be a type, and that is what he is usually taken to be. Early in the novel he looks at his fabulously slovenly servant and thinks 'well, brother, you're more of an Oblamov than I am' - as if he has read the book and recognised himself. (Michael Wood's review of ‘Oblomov’ by Goncharov LRB August 2009 p. 8.)
Why write a play about St. Thomas More? [...] For this reason: A man takes an oath only when he wants to commit himself quite exceptionally to the statement, when he wants to make an identity between the truth of it and his own virtue; he offers himself as a guarantee. And it works. There is a special kind of shrug for a perjurer; we feel that the man has no self to commit, no guarantee to offer. Of course it’s much less effective now that for most of us the actual words of the oath are not much more than impressive mumbo-jumbo than it was when they made obvious sense; we would prefer most men to guarantee their statements with, say, cash rather than with themselves. We feel—we know—the self to be an equivocal commodity. There are fewer and fewer things which, as they say, we “cannot bring ourselves” to do. We can find almost no limits for ourselves other than the physical. (Robert Bolt)
What is a self? Is it the rings of experience that grow within the tree? Is it the soul begotten and not made in the womb, or the being nurtured in the world outside? Is t the narrator in one’s head, the teeming consciousness that keeps one sleepless at night or distracted during the day, brave in danger or paralysed in a crisis? Is it the source of that anger that flames spontaneously at slights to one’s honour, or the source of this honour in the first place? Is it in one’s capacity to love, forgive or endure, or in one’s desire to lead a moral life? Is it the will that governs everything one ever says or does, or something far bigger than that? (Laura Cumming A Face To The World –On Self Portraits p. 262)
Wednesday, 7 October 2009
'Indicative Readings'
THINKING AFTER KNOWLEDGE ‘Indicative Readings’ for Speculectures
It would be good to start by hearing what students have been experiencing and thinking about looking at culturally and discussing where I am ‘coming from’ in terms of current interests and recent cultural experiences.
But I don’t want to set collective readings which everyone is forced to read (and often do not read) each session. This can be a very useful and effective traditional technique and it can be experienced elsewhere during the course. For my own seminar however, I believe it will be far more effective to record the Speculecture sessions and post them as MP3s on Backboard to complement the Blog. The aim is that students can pick whatever reference or idea really interests them from each session, then follow it up and re-introduce it to later discussions.
The point is both to avoid interrupting the spontaneity of the sessions (by note-taking, white-board use etc.) and also to avoid imposing any preconceived notion of a canon or hierarchy of sources and referents. The aim of this is to maintain a sense of tabula rasa or carte blanche about what a contextual studies, or a contextual studies tutor should be, should provide or should prioritis,e in tune with a sense of rapid and radical shifts in the social and technological arena and in the fields of art and education.
Nevertheless, the Speculecture and conversation that follows will produce an array of unexpected directions and connections that can be pursued by individual students using the Blog and MP3s as ‘notes’. Each session, and the seminar series as a whole, will therefore produce a ‘canon’ of its own.
It would be good to start by hearing what students have been experiencing and thinking about looking at culturally and discussing where I am ‘coming from’ in terms of current interests and recent cultural experiences.
But I don’t want to set collective readings which everyone is forced to read (and often do not read) each session. This can be a very useful and effective traditional technique and it can be experienced elsewhere during the course. For my own seminar however, I believe it will be far more effective to record the Speculecture sessions and post them as MP3s on Backboard to complement the Blog. The aim is that students can pick whatever reference or idea really interests them from each session, then follow it up and re-introduce it to later discussions.
The point is both to avoid interrupting the spontaneity of the sessions (by note-taking, white-board use etc.) and also to avoid imposing any preconceived notion of a canon or hierarchy of sources and referents. The aim of this is to maintain a sense of tabula rasa or carte blanche about what a contextual studies, or a contextual studies tutor should be, should provide or should prioritis,e in tune with a sense of rapid and radical shifts in the social and technological arena and in the fields of art and education.
Nevertheless, the Speculecture and conversation that follows will produce an array of unexpected directions and connections that can be pursued by individual students using the Blog and MP3s as ‘notes’. Each session, and the seminar series as a whole, will therefore produce a ‘canon’ of its own.
SPECULECTURE TITLES
All sessions held in SLT (Small LEcture Theatre - Wilsons)
12/10 1-3 "All you think about is your bloody self" -the question of the subject in practice
LEVEL 1
26/10 1pm-3pm "I hate all this political art" -Sculpture and ‘Possibilitics’
+ Essay Briefing
LEVEL 1
09/11 1pm-3pm The Priority of Form.
+ Essay Tutorials
LEVEL 1
30/11 1pm-3pm Approaches to process and the valuation of materials
LEVEL 1
18/01 1pm-3pm Ambitions and Values
LEVEL 1
01/02 1pm-3pm 'Need To Know Basis' - Knowledge. Empiricism & Speculation
LEVEL 2
15/02 1pm-3pm The Thing.
+ Essay Briefing
LEVEL2
01/03 1pm-3pm Art and Immorality.
+ Essay Tutorials
LEVEL 2
26/04 1pm-3pm The Changing Image of the Artist.
LEVEL 2
10/05 1pm-3pm 'Believe In Your Hands' - The act of making
LEVEL 2
Additional issues for which there isn’t time in these sessions:
Reference, Quote and Ramification
Juxtaposition and Singularity
The Uses of History.
12/10 1-3 "All you think about is your bloody self" -the question of the subject in practice
LEVEL 1
26/10 1pm-3pm "I hate all this political art" -Sculpture and ‘Possibilitics’
+ Essay Briefing
LEVEL 1
09/11 1pm-3pm The Priority of Form.
+ Essay Tutorials
LEVEL 1
30/11 1pm-3pm Approaches to process and the valuation of materials
LEVEL 1
18/01 1pm-3pm Ambitions and Values
LEVEL 1
01/02 1pm-3pm 'Need To Know Basis' - Knowledge. Empiricism & Speculation
LEVEL 2
15/02 1pm-3pm The Thing.
+ Essay Briefing
LEVEL2
01/03 1pm-3pm Art and Immorality.
+ Essay Tutorials
LEVEL 2
26/04 1pm-3pm The Changing Image of the Artist.
LEVEL 2
10/05 1pm-3pm 'Believe In Your Hands' - The act of making
LEVEL 2
Additional issues for which there isn’t time in these sessions:
Reference, Quote and Ramification
Juxtaposition and Singularity
The Uses of History.
INTRODUCING SPECULECTURES
Paul O’Kane Associate Lecturer Contextual Studies 09/10
For this year’ Level One and Level two Contextual studies programme I will give a series of what I call ‘Speculectures’. These are brief presentations speculating on what might be a fundamental principle of artist’s or sculptor’s practice and considerations. A rapid rate of technological and social change mean that we need to become ever more spontaneous in our thinking, learning and teaching and this means utilising all the facilities at our disposal to renew existing models of what it means to be an artist, student, lecturer etc. As such these sessions are also experiments in teaching and learning.
The aim is to create a studio-like, creative, and constructive atmosphere and a working group that organically accumulates its own body of knowledge rather than dutifully absorbing an established creed. In this respect, the aim of the series as a whole also remains speculative -at best a group adventure in ideas and images.
Each ‘Speculecture’ will be followed by group discussion via which we will generate further content and questions to follow-up in the library, the studio, or the wider city, reading, Googling, visiting, making, discussing and feeding back in to the following CS session. I will accompany each ‘Speculecture’ series with an online Blog and complement it with any necessary texts, suggested readings, shows, movies, museum, music etc. using photocopied handouts, Blackboard and the Blogs where students will be able to respond to my own reflections with their own comments.
Again, spontaneity and invention is desirable in this respect and therefore the traditional idea of a ‘reading list’ is replaced by diverse materials and reference evolving directly out of our discussions so that individual students or small groups feel more motivated to seek-out and understand information specific to their interests and share the outcome with the wider group.
For this year’ Level One and Level two Contextual studies programme I will give a series of what I call ‘Speculectures’. These are brief presentations speculating on what might be a fundamental principle of artist’s or sculptor’s practice and considerations. A rapid rate of technological and social change mean that we need to become ever more spontaneous in our thinking, learning and teaching and this means utilising all the facilities at our disposal to renew existing models of what it means to be an artist, student, lecturer etc. As such these sessions are also experiments in teaching and learning.
The aim is to create a studio-like, creative, and constructive atmosphere and a working group that organically accumulates its own body of knowledge rather than dutifully absorbing an established creed. In this respect, the aim of the series as a whole also remains speculative -at best a group adventure in ideas and images.
Each ‘Speculecture’ will be followed by group discussion via which we will generate further content and questions to follow-up in the library, the studio, or the wider city, reading, Googling, visiting, making, discussing and feeding back in to the following CS session. I will accompany each ‘Speculecture’ series with an online Blog and complement it with any necessary texts, suggested readings, shows, movies, museum, music etc. using photocopied handouts, Blackboard and the Blogs where students will be able to respond to my own reflections with their own comments.
Again, spontaneity and invention is desirable in this respect and therefore the traditional idea of a ‘reading list’ is replaced by diverse materials and reference evolving directly out of our discussions so that individual students or small groups feel more motivated to seek-out and understand information specific to their interests and share the outcome with the wider group.
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