Art Forecast: entrenched system, some chance of change.
Imagine somebody painting, working on a canvas with brush in hand. She begins with an idea of the picture she is going to do, but as she works the process takes on its own rhythm and before long it’s leading her. Having relaxed control, insights flourish which she didn’t know or mean to make. The structure of the painting is truer than if she’d second-guessed it, and the parts fall into a place that looks pre-destined, although she hardly seemed to think at all about it.
On the evidence of the many artists who have described something similar to this, there is such a thing as spontaneous creativity. Even I have had my small episodes, and when I first experienced this free play I was so thrilled, I wondered why I hadn’t always been open to it. I felt happier at the end of the painting session than when I’d commenced, which is often not the case, and all of the energy that I’d spent had counted positively toward the completion of a new picture. If losing myself in painting could result in a work so direct and joyous, why in the past had I put plans and conceptualisations in the way?
The answer is that free play doesn’t come easily, or when you expect it to. Many artists, especially in their early years, would lose the thread and make nothing but a mess without some kind of plan. Thinking ahead about what the finished work will look like is an understandable response to the fear of embarrassment with a difficult medium. I don’t mean by this that works involving a degree of planning or conscious thought are inferior to more spontaneous executions. Just that conceptualisation should be understood as a defence against a flood of possibilities that, unabated, would overwhelm the artist.
Indeed, without conceptualisation most modern artists could not have functioned. Think of Matisse. By conceiving of his work as a simplification, he permitted himself to treat the human figure, that most revered subject, as a loosely drawn bundle of prisms and cylinders. This was something that no artist within a nineteenth century tradition of painting would have contemplated, but for Matisse it was one of the keys to painting traditional imagery with the large colour areas that were so important to his vision.
There was a precedent for his concept of form, too, in the ancient traditions of African and Oceanic art, although the tribal artist’s outlook was not at all the same as Matisse’s individualistic vision. Conceptualisation, which in art’s earliest incarnations had expressed a shared concept of Creation and life on Earth, had become by the twentieth century an act performed by the artist on his or her own behalf, and the early modern artists understood that to conceptualise was a huge and difficult undertaking, as much a burden as a freedom. When Picasso first showed his friends ‘Les Demoiselles d’Avignon’, even Braque recoiled from its violent simplifications, likening looking at the painting to swallowing petrol.
Yet as fundamental as the provocations of modern painting and sculpture were, they might have appeared tame compared to what occurred just before World War One, when Marcel Duchamp, a young participant in Cubism who would soon renounce painting, put his signature on a funnel and declared it art. The seeds of pure conceptual art - art as a game of ideas, devoid of the intelligent working of materials - had been sown.
A funnel is a hard, formed thing. It’s not prone to squelching like clay between your fingers and it can’t argue back when labelled an artwork. It hardly seems a fair target for conceptualisation, and if I maintain my thesis that conceptualisation is a kind of artistic defence mechanism, the question begs: against which fears were Duchamp’s so-called ‘readymades’, the purest conceptualisations in the history of art, conceived?
The fear of being forgotten can be the only answer. Duchamp must not have been able to resign himself to being a link in a long lineage. He wanted to be bigger than art, and being good at an activity inaugurated by others – like sculpting or painting – was not enough. So, he isolated that aspect of art that is concerned with controlling experience - conceptualisation – and privileged it in a way that would never be repeated with the same force. Little wonder that later photos show him sitting around, smoking cigars and playing chess. The job was done.
By now we are all familiar with what Duchamp’s legacy has enabled: at its worst, works like Pierre Huyghes’s pot-plant rainforest in the Sydney Opera House (seen during last year’s Biennale of Sydney). Stupid to the point of insult, Huyghes’s spectacle managed to diminish all the wonderful things it encompassed: the idea of a rainforest, an actual concert hall, even the humble happy plant became something less in his installation than it ordinarily is, all in the name of a concept which remained obscure because there was no real point other than to provide a spectacle.
The modus operandi of an artist like Huyghes resembles the thinking of the advertising executive: gauging a mood, offering what he thinks his patron (the art milieu) wants, but ultimately standing for nothing at all. Conviction and goodwill are not prerequisites for being taken seriously as a contemporary artist but self-awareness and gamesmanship seem to be essential. Even painters and sculptors who want to get ahead have learnt to drop the mystery and talk about their work as if it was intended to generate the right kind of concept.
I know that I’m not alone in wanting no part of this game. I couldn’t be less interested in ‘reading’ art works or, in the case of Duchamp, pondering the competing claims of art and philosophy to encapsulate human experience. I have five senses, a body and a mind, but they’re one in consciousness. I need to look at forms that give scope to that awareness, not gestures that reduce me to an interpreter of strategy. There must be a different set of possibilities for art, a future that does not merely continue the values that presently hold sway.
One reaction to the situation, an emotional but understandable reaction, is to run a mile in the other direction. If it is rampant conceptualisation that I object to, perhaps I should imagine an art in which conceptualisation has no place. Would the world come crashing down around such a form, or would artists simply work differently?
I often see people making art without conceptualising, primarily in classes where I teach drawing. In drawing from life, direct experience supplants conceptual planning, and composing without preconception can be the means to a very free and open-ended kind of creativity. Drawing from life offers such immediate satisfactions, and opens onto such a potent dialogue with past art, that only somebody trying to wield power and limit experience could dismiss it as retrograde, or impose conditions upon it. As the pencil bites into the paper habits are broken, the self opens and the world enters in. If the consciousness of the twenty-first century artist is truly different to artists of the sixteenth or first centuries, a small drawing will be enough to reveal it, and it needn’t involve any conceptualisations or artistic tricks. There are equivalents for this kind of free play in many media, most notably painting, sculpture and photography, all of which can be practiced before a subject.
For some artists this way of thinking will provide a real and attractive alternative to conceptualisation, but I would not suggest that working from life is the sole solution to the larger cultural problems that beset contemporary art. I have no objection to conceptualisation per se; it is an ancient premise of art and an eternal human capacity. Perhaps the problem begins when there is no substantial material realisation to temper each individual artist’s ideas, and no sense of tradition against which to measure them. The talk of innovation that is heard within our art institutions, from the Venice Biennale to the Doug Moran Portrait Prize, suggests outward expansion towards a new frontier of art. But the path to real originality is more circuitous and mysterious than that, and involves an assimilation of tradition that may initially appear backward looking.
Perhaps then, the biggest obstacle in the way of a future that is really different to the present, is not conceptualisation alone but its coupling with the notion of avant-gardism, which encourages artists to outdo each other with brash acts and smart-arsed ideas that amount to a kind of violence. If I am correct in this, then we should be able to see some practical ways forward.
To start with, the best service that contemporary art curators could perform for our culture is to confess that at this point in history, ‘new ideas’ are not leading us to the kinds of insights or self-knowledge we should expect of art. Having acknowledged that art is not on a forward march to any destination in particular, there would be nothing to stop our museums and art councils from casting a wider net over the diverse works of the present moment, to find other criteria for quality in the many kinds of art being made today.
For there are a large number of artists working today who have been invisible to our large cultural institutions because they have opted not to join the parade of concepts. These artists are not stylistically similar enough to constitute a group or movement, but they have in common a commitment to art’s aesthetic dimension: the transformation of materials through the crafting of an image. Some of them could be described as belated modernists, making work that is continuous with twentieth century styles, but without the insistence on their work’s historical inevitability than artists displayed during modernism. They are teasing out the potential that modernism made, according to their interests. Then there are others whom I would call traditionalists in the loose sense that they work in genres that pre-date modernism, but take certain modern developments into account in the way they practice them. The forms their works take could not have arisen at any earlier date.
I don’t wish to show these artists in too triumphant a light because what they offer is not a new age of genius, but simply the continuance of a form of art that is appropriate to our needs and circumstances. What was achieved by the great artists of the past simultaneously nourishes and dwarfs them, but the best of them have met the demands of tradition and achieved original insights that are true to their epoch and locales. But at the moment their chances of being included in a museum exhibition of contemporary art or awarded a retrospective exhibition in a state gallery are next to nil.
We are fed all kinds of consoling lines about contemporary art: that its ugliness prevents complacency in us, that it’s a vehicle for new ideas about the world; even that it has claimed the terrain of spirituality in our secular society. But nothing can mask the fact that the conditions for art are very bad in our time. During the twentieth century every previous certainty about art was challenged. Our awareness that the world contains vast differences of ideology and opportunity prevents us from returning to the illusion of a single stream of progress (which is what modernism came to represent in the latter half of the twentieth century), and the ultimate ridiculousness of our situation is that the catch-all concept applied to the confusion of the present moment – ‘post-modernism ’, which you’d expect to imply an alternative to modernism - repeats two of the most alienating aspects of modern art: an extreme emphasis on conceptualisation and an insistence on avant-gardism. The way out of this impasse is not easy to see, for the current status-quo obscures the best alternative: a shift away from Duchamp’s legacy, from art as an anti-traditional gesture, towards an experience of art’s aesthetic dimension that takes the whole human being – body, mind and spirit - into account.