Thanks to all Sculpture Level One students for your great attendance, attention and contribution to the 'Speculectures'. I have greatly enjoyed being allowed to speculate with my own writing and thinking in dialogue with you while avoiding the traditional model of repeating and consolidating established 'knowledge'. I hope you feel that this process has enabled you to gain confidence in your own relationship to History, Writing and Ideas related to practice.
Please use the blog to revisit and re-think anything we have covered in these sessions.
For the Blog record, today the handout was taken from the current TATE Etc. magazine spring 2010 pp. 30-37. It was an essay on failure (from a forthcoming book on the subject) by Lisa le Feuvre and titled:
If At first You Don't Succeed ... Celebrate.
The following are the NOTES FOR TODAYS Speculecture on
Ambitions and Values -an essay in draft form.
Today, we maintain the value of the artist against all odds. Banal and conservative forces, on all sides, from within and without, seem intent on diminishing the artist’s role and status to that of a light- entertainer, conforming to and controlled by the model of commodity, as yet another feature and function of the consumerist paradise.
We could argue that, according to such a scenario, the artist today is not truly encouraged to be ambitious. It’s true that success and visibility are greatly encouraged and even fetishised (as they have always been in show business) but we might argue that the artist’s possibilities are thereby tamed, prescribed and limited.
Undergraduates are invariably taught today –according, I suspect to a 90s Goldsmiths model (though alternative models are now emerging)- not to speculate or explore too widely or wildly, nor to question too deeply what art and the artist might possibly be. Rather, they are taught to follow, rather safely, in the footsteps of a small group of well-known artists who appeared in a spectacular blaze of success in London 20 years ago.
Those artists, sometimes referred to as ‘Young, British artists’, seem therefore to have installed a model and a benchmark for a generation, of a certain kind of ambition, which, throughout the 1990s became academic in that it became a model for the training and educating of artists, as well as a popular current image of the artist perpetrated by media and related institutions, such as Tate, Saatchi etc.
However, it doesn’t take long to think through to the fact that those artists attracted interest precisely because they went beyond, contradicted or contested what was academic in their own day. And one of the ways they did this was to be surprisingly ambitious –in terms of career visibility, sales and patronage- than their tutors would have expected for themselves.
This particular model, benchmark, and image of the artist -which today’s transformed context may have rendered tired and irrelevant – runs something like this: As an undergraduate, develop as much media and market savvy as possible. Cultivate the image of an effective professional with a digestible and recognisably cool and current practice. Compete sportingly (and if necessary un-sportingly) with your peers for supremacy (in imitation of King Hirst). Gain maximum career visibility as quickly as possible (before graduating if possible). Keep your fingers and everything else crossed in the hope that your career, thus-launched, will sustain you for more than a year or two.
It’s true that, when the YBAs –and particularly Hirst- appeared, they made other British artists at the time seem a little out-dated, under-ambitious, polite or timid or hippy-ish in their adhesion to an idea of art as an alternative world of values, bracketed off from the harsh realities of thrusting, Darwinian, post-Thatcherite economics. It’s also true that other big players in this phenomenon, such as Jay Joplin, Charles Saatchi and Carl Freedman- were attuned to the business and media world.
Nevertheless, what I want to argue here is that, just as art may, at one point in its long history have served the church, the State, art itself, revolution, the museum, the white cube etc. this model and benchmark of the 90s artist appeared as a response to and in service of the particular powers and values dominant at that time, and perhaps no longer
dominant today.
‘Ambition’ is closely linked with risk and speculation, and this means working as an artist without a prescribed view of what art and the artist is and how to achieve it. It’s true that it is wise and pragmatic to train and learn the ways of a business-like, heavily mediated art world, so as to avoid becoming a mere inconsequential dreamer, unequipped for the challenges and opportunities that present themselves to the artist of today. However, it might be the ruin of art’s real ambition, and a serious compromise to the whole adventure of becoming an artist, if it is reduced to a kind of ‘colour-by-numbers’ careerism wherein all risk and adventure are replaced with a sure-footed guide to a short-lived success.
Hirst is celebrated as a brave speculator for installing a sensational shark in Saatchi’s celebrated space, but in fact the project seems to have been thoroughly underpinned and guaranteed its success before any risks were taken.
It is therefore, perhaps in these terms that the best interpretation of the piece can be constructed i.e. the popular sign of a roving, speculative predator, proud of its power and freedom (the
avant-garde modern artist) is mastered by powers that it is forced to admit are far greater than itself, and henceforth contained as a mere sideshow or novelty for the entertainment of those powers.
Postmodernism, is therefore defined for us here, as a condition of dis-empowered, ironicised, containment. The artist represents us –the audience- not by confronting the ‘impossibility of death’ as Hirst often claims (this was actually the preoccupation of a distant generation of existentialists) but the impossibility of achieving anything more than, or alternative to this rather predictable novelty and entertainment value, now that the ambitions of art have been put firmly in their place by the unchallenged advance of consumerist capitalism and its very own set of values, a world in which art is only required to achieve certain things, certain degrees, and perform certain functions and services.
It would be worthwhile to research –and perhaps this has already been done- the many other artists, art worlds, ambitions and values thriving at the moment when the so-called YBAs emerged, and, supported almost immediately by all the most powerful forces, journals and institutions in the London art world, eclipsed, obscured and relegated just about everything else that was then also emerging, in a breathtaking act of monopolisation. It may be that, by comparison, every other artist at that time can now be seen to have been out-of-touch, over-Romantic or relatively hippy-ish in their approach to the possibilities of art, but it could also be argued that there were simply other, different kinds of ambition and values, albeit not so focused upon power, wealth and visibility. There must certainly have been many who had little interest in the relevance of applying values of ‘Youth’ and ‘Britishn-ess’ to the role of the artist.
If we turn now to the question of values I should first say that to dwell on this term might prove to be profound and disruptive. That’s because it is such a fundamental term in establishing any culture. We might even say that a particular culture is mapped and governed by the organisation of a certain set of values. Conflicts arise when different cultures with different values interact. It’s also a term with which artists constantly interact even if they are unaware of the fact.
To bring a shark into a white cube, to propose a urinal for an exhibition or take a bus ticket from the street and place it in a collage are all acts that bring value into question. If we use the tools of history, Geography, anthropology perhaps, we can see that, at different times in the world, and in different places, different cultures are organised around certain values. When the values are contested a tradition is challenged and disputes occur. The question for the historian might be ‘What is valuable for us today’? how did it become so? Could it have been otherwise? And in what direction are our present values evolving? For the Geographer or Anthropologist similar questions apply but transferred to the sphere of otherness –other cultures, other places.
The artist however, plays an important role in any culture, helping to forge and finesse the values that lie at its heart. Seen in these terms the act of submitting a urinal for an exhibition, or placing a bus-ticket within a collage are far more than merely petty or mischievous acts and begins to explain the enormous cultural impact these apparently inconsequential acts have subsequently achieved.
The idea of values is in fact a key to unlock the mysterious question of the artist’s role in any society. After all, what are artists for? are they nothing more than providers of light entertainment for a consumerist audience? Are they merely models of effective professionalism? Are they comparable with other middle-class professional such as ‘teacher, Lawyer, Doctor, Dentist, Banker etc? Or does an artist provide some other, perhaps more elusive and less easily quantifiable service to the community? These are questions that the past 20 years, during which a particular kind of art and artist has dominated a particular, rather local and temporary art world, have not erased. They are also questions which artists themselves, and no-one else, are ultimately called upon to answer.
As we have said, at a time in the world when the church was dominant in society the artist may well have served the church. When the bourgeois class of new aspiring merchants overthrew the aristocracy and became the new dynamic modern power, the artist likewise served that force. When further revolutions attempted to place the workers of the world in the driving seat of history artists lent a hand. And for a period in which art and artists tested the limits of art’s autonomy amid the ‘art-for-art’s sake of high modernism, art itself seems to have been their primary patron and muse.
At each point and place in this story, different values are at stake. For the artist, the values of a society, a time or a culture are not just manifest in its laws, taboos and ideas, but in images, forms and materials, all of which are within the artist’s grasp to transform (please look back at earlier ‘Speculectures’ on these themes to underpin this point).
Now, if we conclude by returning to the present, and to the tussle of a new generation with discarding the tired legacy of 90s art, we might have to consider just what the particular ambitions and values of that generation were and how they continue to be taught –now as an academic discipline – in today’s art schools. What were the values and ambitions that generation contested and what did they set in their place? Who and what were the forces and the context they served and articulated. And what might our own practices, values, aims and ambitions contribute today.
I leave these questions for you to answer in the time set aside for responses and discussion.
