Wednesday, May 28, 2008
I'd like to focus on a point of the debate related to the way the initial article was written in the Art Newspaper because I believe it is relevant to explore the way cultural differences affect the contemporary art world in general.
9.5.08 Jonathan San Francisco
How many of us felt the same in front of an art-related text, an introduction to a specific artist or an exhibition book/review? To be honest, if you do your first steps in the contemporary art world, it sounds like a foreign language!
To this first comment, a second writer adds:
What the writer is obscuring with his "art-speak" is that the videos featured animals being battered to death, in some cases by the artist, in the name of art. I saw the exhibit and was sickened and I've worked in hospitals all my life. What I saw when the exhibit was pulled was a demand, if you will, for ethical, humanistic and humane values rather than an "anything goes in the name of building my career." If the video had shown the torture of humans done as an art form there would have been no mistaking its brutality. I realize that most of us eat meat and that animals are usually not killed in a humane way but this exhibit wasn't about that. It was about promoting a career by using gruesome and controversial imagery.
Eventually, a third writer, visibly more concerned by what happens in the contemporary art sphere, writes:
9.5.08 Nancy San Francisco, CA
My 2¢ in response to the previous comments. Firstly, what is "art-speak"? When I hear someone use that term it always feels as though they are simply trying to dismiss the argument. This is a venue for art writing and sometimes complex and nuanced ideas require like language. Do we deride economists, carpenters or anyone that has a vernacular/vocabulary/language that we have trouble deciphering?
[...] I also wonder if Nacy's analysis that the artist is "promoting a career by using gruesome and controversial imagery" is based on an understanding of the work in context of his entire body of work/career, or simply on a knee jerk reaction and subjective view of contemporary art and artists.
9.5.08 josh Oakland
This actually makes a point here, the 'knee-jerk reference was obviously not compulsory but demonstrates a certain passion in the debate...! "This is a venue for art writing and sometimes complex and nuanced ideas require like language. Do we deride economists, carpenters or anyone that has a vernacular/vocabulary/language that we have trouble deciphering?" is a wise comment but...If you are a regular reader of these blog lines, or if you have a foot into contemporary art world as a hobby or as professional, you've probably acknowledge all the postmodernist theoretical background and would probably agree with this third writer. However a contradiction lays just there:
On the first hand, contemporary art is over mediatised and becomes increasingly popular. If not in a art-specific media, contemporary art is often introduced to the mass culture through the celebrities who bought or sold famous artworks, big amounts of cash exchanged and sometimes glittering cocktails and parties to celebrate prizes.
On the second hand, rich of a solid theoretical background and a more and more complex history of the Art and the interactions between sub-genres; contemporary art becomes less and less accessible to the newcomer but more and more interesting in my opinion although i agree that we can find the best, the worst and too often... the worst.
This is not just about the words to describe it! This is way more than just this! I am talking about visual vocabulary, the visual semantic rules and cultural history associated; the postmodernist grammar and conjugation system, which binds the artist, artworks and viewers altogether to create meaning with a unique sense of the tenses dialectic...
Therefore, how come a newcomer who never really learned this foreign language could possibly understand such complex artworks as Jim Beam JB Turner Train from Jeff Koons? Try to explain to a newcomer that this stainless steel train, filled with Bourbon is a masterpiece and talks about class, power and the contemporary art market?
Jim Beam JB Turner Train from Jeff KoonsThis definitely is a first step, although I hate when interactivity becomes compulsory in a growing number of museums...
The key lays therefore in the education process... When would we see a fully recognised picture analysis as an exam for the GCSE, baccalaureate or any equivalent?
Wednesday, November 14, 2007
The modernism...
Reviewing the advances of modern art history for example, it is easy to dress a parallel between the evolution of art and societal phenomena: The progress of science was accompanied by the development of electronic or multimedia art, bioart and optart.
The theorical concepts used by the major artists of the twentieth century can be found “in Marxist intellectual tradition, in Freudian Psychoanalysis, and in various forms of transaction between the two”. Therefore, marxism theorisation has been developed to analyse colonialism processes; Freudian advances in psychoanalysis have been reappropriated by feminists artists. Regarding the variety of societal influences and the speed of social changes influencing the art world, artists were seeking for a new definition of contemporary art that incorporated the diversity of new media, the progress in sciences and technologies. An intention of progression, experimentation... That is modernism!
On the basis of such theorical background, the culture from which the artworld emerged and the process of idea developement is defined as typical “Western in its orientation, capitalist in its determining economic tendency, bourgeois in its class-character, white in its racial complexion, and masculine in its dominant gender” (Harrison and Wood 1992:1015).
The next step for the art world was to criticise this hegemonic power of western culture in the modernist art world and to introduce the post-modernist concepts.
The contemporary art world shaped by post-modernist ideologies:
Harrison and Wood (1992) recognise that post-modernism has been introduced by three major theorists: Daniel Bell (1978) as a first author argues that the hope of modernism “lays in a return to consensus based on the shared need for moral and economic order”. Following this definition, Post-modernism would then come as a disruptive approach to modernism.
Habermas’ (1984) as the second major postmodernism theorists is reported to argue (Harrison and Wood, 1992) that “a strong ressource of aesthetic resistance remains necessary as a counter to the increasing power and autonomy of economic and administrative systems”, and therefore explains that the power to resist hegemony on the artworld lays in the hands of those who produce the artworks.
Finally, Harrison and Wood, report Lyotard’s (1984) view on postmodernism as an opposition to Bell’s view in which he “equates the postmodern, with a continuing scepticism regarding a possible consensus [...] with a form of nostalgia for the experience of an unattainable wholeness of presence” (1992:1016). In his view, postmodernism should therefore “wage a war on totality”(1992:1016).
Each of these three views remain influencial in the ‘high art’ sphere and the debate on post-modernism becomes deeper and more subtle. Due to the limitations imposed by the focus of this blog, I will not explore the post-modernism discourse in depth. However, what might be interesting at this point would be to note that each of these authors present a different view on postmodernism, which might have its origin in the three different origins of the writers (U.S.A. for Bell and respectively France and Germany for Lyotard and Habermas). Their views have been shaped by a set of specific social, historical and political conditions associated with each of these three different countries. Although they are different, they remain ‘western views’ and this fact has to be taken into account when debating on the evolution of art history.
The post-modernist critique on art history that claims for the originality of an idea, must therefore also analyse in which position the critique has been written.
Pictures:
Mike Kelley - Craft Morphology Flow Chart
Jeff Koons- Balloon Dog
Read more...
- Bell, D., ‘Modernism and Capitalism’, in Bell, 1978
- Habermas, J (1984) The Philosophical Discourse of Modernity, Cambridge: Polity
- Harrison C. And Wood P. (1992) Art in Theory 1900-1990. Oxford
- Lyotard, J-F (1984) The Postmodern Condition, Manchester: Manchester University Press
