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.
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