“I Hate All This Political Art” SPECULECTURE 2

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