Physic of the irrelative: In Siem Reap (written 25th January 2012)
The window of our hotel room gives onto the main road on which, against the rising sun, the delicate profiles of bicycles, motorcycles and cabriolets, with two, three or four figures borne on each (families heading out to set up stall) course lightly and endlessly from left and right, as though on rails. At intervals a solitary coconut palm intersects this horizontal, spindling into its own patch of sky, surmounted by a wheel, a staring eye of wide-flung fronds. The fine protozoan stream below is coarsened by the infraction of tour buses; this has not happened before, I am told by my French companion J-N (long ago expelled by the Kymer Rouge, he now returns frequently to the country). Among the smaller vehicles is the ubiquitous three-wheeled fly fashioned from motor-scooters; too inexpensive for Chinese and Korean arrivistes. They tend to be used instead by Caucasian travellers who aren’t cyclists, and by people like us.
We head for the ancient Royal city of Angkor Thom, a few miles north, conveyed in two of these carriages (‘tuk-tuks,’ for ‘two-stroke’) by J-N’s old friends Messrs. Nye and Orm; cheerful, courteous, obliging and hired by the day at fifteen dollars; equivalent, here, to a weeks’ minimum wage. The livelihood of many depends wholly on their earnings during the winter tourist season. All along the way, barefooted or naked children play with sticks in the iron-red earth; some are seen in clearings, flying rudimentary kites. If we stop, they will approach, asking for ‘dollars.’ They are sent out to beg by their parents; they ought to be in school. Their English is startlingly good, and mocks Korea’s obsession with lucrative and utterly useless private language schools (many of these children also speak Korean). On being refused they become accusatory and petulant, but it is better to give pens and notebooks rather than money. We are blocked hundreds of yards short of the extraordinary three-headed tower of the South Gate by an adamant concatenation of motor-coaches on the narrow road, and must walk. J-N, who never minds walking, is dismayed by the queue of lumbering vehicles, having seen nothing like it in the forty years he has known this place. Also alighting, Nikon-wielding Chinese tourists elbow us aside to take snaps (of each other) against the fifty-four stone figures of Asuras and Devas that are pulling, respectively, the head and tail of the water-snake Shesha to churn the ocean and form the universe, and line either side of the causeway above the moat. From the surface of this, vivid lotus flowers stare up (the inundation of the rainy season is only recently passed). Our wives, gazing down together, are forced apart at the knees by a man, crouching with a camera, who screams back at them for their remonstrances. Passing through the bottleneck of the South Gate, I glance up at the corbelled vault (the Khmers did not build arches) and wonder for how long the sandstone structure will withstand the chemical and mechanical onslaught from this gross increase in the volume of traffic. Its mesmerizing mass recedes into etherealized elegance as we progress along the dead straight forest road. After a mile we trundle past elephants carrying sightseers on a languid circuit of the Bayon temple, on the upper terrace of which people stumble about between the two hundred great stone faces of Lokesvara.
Nearby is Baphuon; the eleventh-century three-tiered ‘mountain temple.’ Dedicated to Shiva, this and the other early Hindu monuments were converted to Buddhist shrines in the early twelfth century, and newer temples dedicated to Buddha and bodhisattvas. Hinduism was briefly reinstated in the middle of the thirteenth century, and the Buddha’s faces removed, before Buddhism was restored as the primary state religion by the end of that century. Decapitated Buddhas are still visible; other lesser deities have lost their heads to traders, who sometimes fail to strike them off cleanly and leave them disfigured. Other bas-relief figures, like those wrestling with the naga at the South Gate, or those about the perimeter of Angkor Wat, are marred by the scars of bullets.
I make my first drawing from one corner of the pyramidal Baphuon, standing on the coping of a tall perimeter wall where a ‘C.A.’ carved his initials in 1960. I later discover that this was the year in which restoration of the ruined temple began. In the course of the following decade a plan was drawn up, and each stone numbered. The last time J-N was here, nothing was standing at all. Reconstruction had not begun before the drawings were lost in the Khmer Rouge years and was completed only six months ago. Nor is my position as inconspicuous as I had hoped; a number of curious tourists seek to join me on the wall, as if I’m a public entertainer and that is their role. I have not yet learned, as Bo-Kyoung wishes I would, to send them packing. But I do tell them that I’m a beginner, which they invariably accept without question. On the west side of the structure, built into the wall of the first tier, is a sixteenth-century statue of a reclining Buddha, seventy metres long, for which one of the original towers was demolished; less stable than the structure it replaced, it has recently been strengthened and restored with the rest of the building.
From the day of our arrival, which is the second day of the Lunar New Year, until the weekend that follows, the horde of Chinese travellers is overwhelming. The necessity of avoiding the New Year holiday – clearly, for this emerging set, an occasion for touring – had not occurred to us; no-one has seen such a crowd before. They set up a nerve-racking, unremitting din, yelling at each other from the top and bottom of the temples; smoke in the temples; even defecate there (this being a ‘world heritage’ site); all before our gaze. They scramble all over the crumbling masses of laterite; Ankgor Wat, Ta Keo, Pre Rup. I am reminded of a population of penguins on a dwindling iceberg. But this is nearly as far from the Arctic as one can travel; it’s winter, and thirty-two degrees Celsius (in Seoul it’s minus sixteen). We beseech the Cambodian guides and stewards to exercise some control. Rules are posted at the temple entrances. Those that it does not occur to Orientals to violate, like not exposing one’s shoulders or breasts, are flouted by nonchalant Western pilgrims whose flesh heaves out of singlets and camisoles. Then a gang of shirtless Russian youths settles on the ruins to sunbathe. The Cambodians glower, but dare not censure their guests. The desecration is unchallenged. Their government will accept the ruination of its world heritage tomorrow for all our filthy lucre today.
The Japanese, by contrast, wait in single file for orders to advance; each wearing a green hard hat (many of the areas to which visitors have unrestricted access are clearly dangerous) and, as in Seoul, a mask (avian influenza; typhoid; yellow fever). But they are invariably polite. J-N’s Korean wife, though as fervent a nationalist as mine, enjoins us to visit Tokyo and Kyoto. Cambodia’s population is fifteen million: one-tenth, and one-fifth, that of Japan and Korea respectively. Infant mortality: ninety-five per one thousand births. Average life expectancy: fifty-eight years. Number of psychiatrists: twenty (Lonely Planet).
In the temple of Bayou, Ta Som or Angkor Wat, a momentarily unobstructed view of the stonework reveals not a single square inch left unworked by the twelfth-century carvers. Acres of wall teem with figures – each one of the Khmer people represented, perhaps, a hundred or a thousand times – as if they had formed with the stone and were already dancing across the blocks as they were quarried. Their arch-eyebrowed and beaming smiles are those of the Cambodian faces we have already seen, multiplied over and over. ‘Happiness! Joy!’ observes J-N raptly. In a remote corner (Banteay Prei, north and a little off the beaten track) is a tiny carving of someone on horseback and despite this being very eroded it is wonderfully clear how precisely the carver had studied the subject; the spine bending with the flung-back pose of a rider at full gallop. The carvings, particularly the bas-reliefs of the battles of Lankra and Kurukshetra on the west side of Angkor Wat, are an even more extraordinary sight at sunset (I do not fulfil my hope of seeing the east-facing ones, or the towers, at sunrise, to enjoy them in relative peace) which in Cambodia is over even more quickly than in Korea.
After two days I have attempted a few drawings, and can see things improving if I persist, but it is not until the first week of the New Year is over that I can work without being filmed and photographed and gawped at whenever I get out my drawing materials and fielding interventions by Chinese sightseers, one of whom complains that I have left out the ‘details,’ as though it were any business of his. As in Korea, it is the men who take it upon themselves; women don’t trouble me while I’m drawing. Back in incurious England, hardly anyone did. But I’m not displeased when a young European stops to say: ‘You’re actually drawing? That’s quite cool.’
On the approach to many an historic monument, small groups of musicians are stationed on a mat by the roadside; usually a quintet. A sign explains that they have lost limbs to mines, and asks for donations. To my ears, the sound of their instruments is not very dissimilar to traditional Korean folk music. Tourists point cameras, take them in and walk on with barely a pause. J-N is disgusted, supposing the passers-by to be French (on the ‘human safari’). But this is all the mine victims have come to expect. They observe our indignation on their behalf, and smile. I’m having a hard time with tourists of any stripe. Some of the younger ones, perhaps French or British, choose to saunter unshod, in Raybans, dreadlocks and that kind of bouncy, pharisaical gait, past people who can’t afford shoes.
In the evening, as we walk through the town, the darkness is not as impenetrable as I had expected in a tropical zone. J-N lightheartedly accuses the Brits of stealing yet another word: crépuscule. I mention the imperceptibly fading light of English afternoons. He remembers not being able to tell, on journeys to the north of that country, ‘whether it’s day or night.’ But the tenebrous margins of the main road through Siem Reap are as populous as at any time; small domains are marked out by hammocks, motorcycles and stumps of worn furniture between which a few figures sell fruit, play music, eat, smoke or lounge on old office chairs, looking out at the passing traffic. There are no streetlights, but somehow all is visible, in the kind of half-light I associate with dreams. Each evening we buy mangosteens, which have a hard, dusky skin over a carmine-coloured mantle, forming a little chamber with ribbed walls around a cluster of translucent grapelike fruits. Coconut ice cream becomes an indispensable conclusion to every meal.
Our acquaintance with the chivalrous and unassuming J-N seems now sufficient, and the setting appropriate, for me to ask him more about his experiences in Cambodia. He enters upon an increasingly impassioned oratory. In April 1975 he ignored orders to leave his post at the Cultural Centre in Phnom Penh, until forced to join the rest of the remaining foreigners at the nearby French Embassy – the only diplomatic mission still open – where Cambodians seeking refuge in the compound were voluntarily surrendered to the Khmer Rouge. Like François Bizot (author of The Gate, and also present) he bitterly opposed the decision and never believed it was necessary. He, Bizot and hundreds of others were then driven to the border with Thailand, taking three days, in stifling closed trucks. He makes nothing of that; he was allowed to live. He lost many Cambodian friends. He was appalled by the selfishness of his countrymen – scrambling over the doomed to save their own skins, grabbing anything they could carry and abandoning the women with whom they had had children – to certain death – in order to return home to their wives. In France, the barbarity of the Khymer regime was only gradually recognized; he demurred when congratulated on his deliverance, mindful of the suffering of the people he had left behind and their good-naturedness even under bombardment by the Americans and the communists. Against this, the rancorous self-absorption of the French was maddening. He still has no time for them: ‘It is election year, and all they talk about is their petty concerns and comforts – just what goes on within this little square…’ (drawing on the table with contemptuous fingers) ‘…why don’t they think about doing something to help Africa?’ (before Cambodia he was posted for two harrowing years in Nigeria). He shrugs angrily, sweeping his country off the table with the back of his hand – ‘I despise them!’ In his view, also, André Malreaux (of La Condition Humaine) was a detestable villain, and his widow’s attempts to exonerate him in her biography were ‘lies from beginning to end.’ It was a long time after the fall of the regime before he could think of returning to Cambodia.
For Park Chung-Hee In the Republic of Korea, the policies of the Khmer Rouge gave licence to the lethal assault he was about to make on uprisings in Busan and Masan, when he and his bodyguard were assassinated by Kim Jae-Gyu, four years after the events in Phnom Penh recounted by my friend. Kim acted, as he later testified, to prevent the planned massacre and other outrages in the offing from an increasingly unhinged dictator. But he, having been duly hanged, was not on hand to do the same service the following year, which saw the atrocities at Gwangju committed by Park’s successor, Chun Doo-Hwan.
On his last day in town J-N shows us Banteay Srei, a small but beautiful temple, twenty miles north of Angkor Wat, with extremely fine carvings (Malreaux had tried to make off with one, perhaps several, of these, in the 1920s). On the return to Siem Reap we stop to buy palm sugar from a family camped by the roadside. The following morning J-N departs alone for Phnom Pen (his first visit for thirty-seven years; later he tells us that he has found it impossible to retrace his steps), his wife for Seoul, and my wife and I continue touring with the kind assistance of Mr. Orm. For a quiet hour, we have the wonderful Victory Gate to ourselves. That is, other than a band of scowling baboons, wanting biscuits, which they turn rapidly over and over in their tiny fingers before sampling. But they too have their leaders; distributing to all and sundry may offend the hierarchy. Mr. Orm points out for us the carving of the three-headed elephant Airavatar plucking lotus flowers, ridden by the Hindu deity Indra. My wife, with her camera, is able to climb the bank on either side of the gate to reach a position close to two of the great stone faces, now confronted by the looming trunk of the sort of tree – whether Tetrameles Nudiflora or Ceiba Pentandra, isn’t clear – that has famously colonized the temple of Ta Phrom. Some stone figures that have not been entirely engulfed beneath its enormous roots peer out through the crevices like inhabitants of Gormenghast. We are advised not to wander down an inviting forest path – because of mines, snakes, spiders? Moving on, we find that things have quietened down in the temples, and during the last two days I produce some better work.
On our final evening in Cambodia the moon’s thin crescent appears on its back ‘like the half-closed eye of a Buddha,’ as in Bizot’s description (I’ve just finished his book). A visit to a North Korean restaurant is disappointing; the place is packed with three busloads of carousing South Koreans, very reasonably disregarding their government’s resuscitated national security laws that would have them arrested for it, but we would prefer somewhere quieter. Mr. Orm, standing by, takes us instead to a Cambodian restaurant. We are served a delicious dinner. Once again it is a group of Chinese tourists, at a nearby table, who spoil the atmosphere. When they’ve eaten their fill they take the manager to task, for the sake of it, over a matter of half a dollar. It is specifically this they expect as their change (never dreaming of tipping) rather than the equivalent in Cambodian currency, which is all the staff can offer – though of perfectly equal value. Voices are raised, but we do not understand until later what has happened, although one of the women pitches into the manager with shrill belligerence, joined by a male companion who repeatedly pronounces (a phrase that has me grinding my teeth): ‘That’s your problem. It’s not my problem.’ They are as relentless as wolves. The Cambodian yields, bitterly: “I pay it myself. I pay your half-dollar myself.’ He reels from the table, away towards the kitchen. The diners stand and swagger out, in a practised way, with contemptible grins. That any grown human person might make sport of another so grotesquely disadvantaged, and with such relish, is repellent, but I begin to appreciate how very little I really have seen of the world and its people.
Reparative mode (1)
To both this and the post Derry Court, where the same events are recounted, I attach an extract from Carl Jung’s autobiography Memories, Dreams, Reflections:
‘Only through objective cognition is the real coniunctio possible… I surrendered myself to the current of my thoughts. Thus one problem after the other revealed itself to me and took shape… One must accept the thoughts that go on within oneself as part of one’s reality. The presence of thoughts is more important than our subjective judgement of them. But neither must these judgments be suppressed, for they are also existent thoughts that are part of our wholeness.’
Reparative mode (2)
While writing this post I also paused over Declan Kiberd’s introduction to Ulysses (the 1992 Penguin reissue) in which he refers to Lionel Trilling’s ‘brilliant distinction between sincerity and authenticity. Sincerity, a congruence between avowal and feeling, can be achieved when there is no problem of form; it is based on the Romantic ideal of truth to the self and it presupposes a definite identity which it becomes the task of a lifetime to be true to. Authenticity is a more excruciatingly modern demand, which begins with the admission that there is a problem of form, and that this makes the congruence between avowal and feeling difficult; it recognizes that the issue is not truth to the self but the finding of the many selves that one might wish to be true to.’
Sometime Professor (1)
Yanegi by 이인범
Any inquiry into intercultural perspectives of Korean art is illuminated by the Japanese scholar Yanagi Muneyoshi (1889-1961) who provides a helpful basis on which to examine the obscuration within those perspectives of an incommensurable paradigm.
Yanegi’s Joseon and Her Art (1922) was widely influential in its denomination of Korean aesthetic consciousness as the ‘beauty of sadness’, and the identification of stylistic elements. Within this consciousness, ‘natural’ beauty is ‘non-technical’ or ‘non-dualistic.’ The influence of this analysis on the study of Korea arts, and on Japanese cultural colonialism, is known as the ‘Yanagi Syndrome.’
But Yanagi’s excurses were submerged in the contemporaneous inrush upon East Asia of Western systems of thought, specifically the fine arts, ‘defined,’ in Heidegger’s words, ‘according to… what people call western European sciences.’ It is not generally recognized that his contribution requires to be examined from the angle of philosophical truth, rather than for its cultural validity.
Comment on his work is therefore invariably conceived within the subject-object dichotomy of the modern European world-view, whatever the concerns of the author, ‘Korean Art’ having become a text in a catalogue of new possibilities for art and the aesthetic within the intercultural narrative, rather than the heritage of a unique and solitary creative milieu.
Yanagi sought out, not a definition of Korean Art, but its aspects of ‘Mingei’ and ‘non-dualistic beauty,’ extraneous to the framework of European modernity and its dynamics of I-other, east-west, Korea-Japan or fine art-craft, within which such aspects lose their autonomous character. This system of truth was his staring point, but it is not where his quest was developed. Nevertheless, it provides the only terms on which his work is appraised.*
Thus the possibility is diminished of transcending perspectives that structure our outlook, such as the very concept of ‘western art,’ and discussion about Korean Art, or the work of Yanagi Muneyosi, becomes little more than an instrument of ideology.
*I refer for example to the work of Choi Hareem, Mun Myoug Dai, Idekawa Naoki, and the oriental Orientalism of Kikuchi Yuko and others.
Sometime Professor (2)
Lecture presented at Ehwa Women’s University, October 2016
‘Spontaneity is not enough; or, to be exact, spontaneity is not possible until there is an unconscious co-ordination of form, space and vision.’
Herbert Read (1893-1968) died when I was a child. His ideas about art and education predominated in the UK at that time. He believed that art could be an international medium of cultural exchange and understanding, and that the explanations he found in philosophy (Bergson, Nietzsche, Hegel, Marx) were weaker versions of truths that were perceptible in art itself. The sentence above was written in 1943, at a time when the general idea of the artist’s lonely unforgiving struggle, and gradual mastery over materials, still prevailed. The writing style guides the reader through the writer’s thinking clearly and efficiently.
After the Second World War, modernism and modern criticism emigrated from Europe to America. I have never been to America but have a lot to say about it. The new American criticism was intellectually adventurous. Alfred Barr’s study of Matisse, published in 1951, was famous for concentrating on documentation and avoiding speculation; it was a work of art history, not art criticism. Art history in America had been conditioned by its geographical and cultural distance from Europe, which made for an objective discussion of European art. In the new art-historical approach there was a revolution against the European belletrist mode of appreciative writing on art by writers like Berenson, Fry, Pevsner, Clark and Gombrich whose approach was challenged by new ideas from psychoanalysis and applied linguistics. It began in the Chicago school of literary criticism, and later extended to the whole of the literary and aesthetic field as well as history, anthropology and geography. In art criticism the register of conversation used by those European and English writers was overtaken by the register of scientific exposition. In this way modernist criticism became a mode of knowledge, rather than a mode of exchange, or persuasion.
Modernism in Europe had been a periodic re-setting of the conditions and principles pertaining to art and creative activity, to re-establish continuity with great traditions. But in America progressive art was seen more as an historical inevitability that involved the apotheosis of its successive heroes. ‘The tradition of the new’ was a term invented by the critic Harold Rosenberg, along with ‘action painting.’ He held that America was the centre of international culture in the postwar period and, thanks to him, the names of Jackson Pollock and Willem de Kooning are enshrined and acclaimed in perpetuity as two supermen of modern art, although there were probably several artists of comparable standing who might have been instead. His fellow impresario of American modernism, Clement Greenberg, believed more particularly in the primacy of form, which derived from the specificity of the medium. But minimalism, sixty years ago, was the last formal re-incarnation of modernism in painting.
This teleological perspective of a self-perpetuating succession of movements in art held sway until the conceptualist movement of the 1960s. Conceptualism grew out of European New Realism, which among other things was a trenchant protest against the western art market and its cult of personality, But its original parent was Marcel Duchamp, who moved to the US after his success at the Armory Show in 1913. It was Duchamp who first declared that ‘art is a game,’ since ‘ego is in everything.’ For the conceptualists, the artist’s activity was of necessity always political. From now on it would be nothing if not a ‘challenge’ to public culture. Art Forum, first published in 1962, took as its mission the promulgation of high culture in the US, and it presented the main body of art criticism that arose around the conceptual movement. To begin with, most of its contributors were aligned with the Greenberg methodology, predicated upon close formal analysis, lucidity of expression and the construction of developmental narratives. But they included Annette Michelson, who lived in Paris for much of the 1950s and 60s and became fully conversant with Continental philosophy, on the basis of which she set out to renew art criticism all over again.
Meanwhile in 1966 a colloquium took place at John Hopkins University in Baltimore, entitled The Language of Criticism and the Sciences of Man, to which Roland Barthes, Jacques Lacan, Jacques Derrida and other French intellectuals were invited to speak. The lecture delivered by Derrida is supposed notoriously to have marked the break between structuralism and post-structuralism. This event initiated the general uptake of contemporary French thinking in the American academy.
There also emerged, at about this time, the phenomenon of art-writing, or writing as a component of the art-work, as a rejection of the self-important Artforum ‘establishment’ whose writers by now were seen as writing for each other. These writing artists and dissenters were the first university-trained artists in America and included Robert Smithson, Joseph Kosuth and Sol LeWitt, who began to theorize their own work in order ‘to counterbalance a general critical incompetence.’ It should be remembered that the outlook of the beat generation was still current: aesthetic, political and literary. But as with every other serious-minded initiative, this became, as another critic pointed out, another critique of the institution that ended up legitimating the institution. Nowadays ‘art-writing’ is fully institutionalized through academic cceptance, despite being described in the London Review of Books some years ago as ‘fragmentary, inconculsive and digressive; Tristram Shandy without the jokes, or the point.’
The periodical Art-Language was produced at the end of the 1960s in the UK by the Art & Language ‘conceptual artists collaboration,’ whose contributors shared the opinion that ‘the practice of conceptual art is primarily theory and its form predominately textual.’ in 1974 the journal Semiotext(e) was founded by a semiotics reading group at Columbia University, first with readings of Nietzsche and Saussure, then Foucault, John Cage and Gilles Deleuze, with the intention of introducing French theorists to American readers. But in 1976 Annette Michelson and her colleague Rosalind Krauss left Artforum to found the journal October.
Krauss, former Greenbergian neophyte at Artforum in the late 1960s, had come to the proposition that the real interest of critical writing lies in its methods rather than its judgements: not in what is meant, but in how meaning is generated; hence her attention to linguistic theory. Lacan’s engagement with linguistics had led from his insight that the unconcious functions like a language; Krauss was searching for a methodology with which to establish more rigorous interpretive criteria. She set herself against Greenberg’s view of modernism, predicated on pronouncements of aesthetic value – what she called an ‘art history of the proper name’ – and at October she and Michelson introduced many French poststructuralist texts, translated by Krauss herself. But like Rosenberg and Greenberg she maintained the emphasis of New York as the global centre of advanced art. Her principal interest was in sculpture, for which she saw photography as the ‘operative model.’ The translations (from Barthes, in this example) would arrive on the page as follows:
‘What this (photographic) message specifies is, in effect, that the relation of signified and signifier is quasi-tautological. Undoubtedly the photograph implies a certain displacement of the scene, but this passage is not a transformation (as an encoding must be). Here there is a loss of equivalency (proper to true sign systems) and the imposition of a quasi-identity. Put another way, the sign of this message is no longer drawn from an institutional reserve; it is not coded… It is thus at the level of the denotated message or message without code that one can plainly understand the real unreality of the photograph.’
The Saussurean jargon, incomprehensible yet still perfectly parsable, was enthusiastically taken up by dissertation writers at American universities. The wholesale transmission of a few theorists from France into the humanities departments of North America came about under the particular conditions of academic work in American society. Universities are more confined to the enclave of the campus, owing to their relatively weak valorization in mainstream media, while the liberal arts are dominated by English departments and social sciences, and ruled by positivist and economic paradigms, especially since the 1980s. These observations may help to explain how the infusion of continental theory threw up the framework for a new orthodoxy and a new curriculum.
It was recently suggested, in a fashionable online journal, that the ‘translated French’ sound of October‘s literature was assumed, and affected, by other arts publications, beginning with Artforum; then became increasingly mannered, detached from the arguments it had originally served, and re-formulated as an independent argot among artists themselves, and other writers of promotional literature, statements, press releases, exhibition guides, grant proposals and wall texts. This does seem to have happened. But it remains to be understood how and when meaning was allowed to drop out of the language altogether, to the extent that further translation from English becomes impossible.
In 1973 TJ Clark published Image of the People, a study of Courbet which became the founding text for what has been the dominant art-historical approach of the last three decades: the social history of art. Its purpose was ‘to discover the links which bind together art and politics,’ from a resolutely Marxist perspective; radical at the time. Like Krauss, Clark dismissed the old narrative of an heroic avant-garde, and formalist celebrations of ‘an art of pure sensation.’ The hundreds of thousands of artists who absorbed his ideas began to insert themselves into the discourse ‘ironically’ and graduates from Anglo-American art schools have done the same ever since, as a matter of course.
The ideologies that governed the American academy were being received, and starting to take effect, in British art schools just at the time that I myself graduated in the early 1980s. The ‘academization’ of art in the UK proceeded very quickly after the Thatcher government closed London’s old independent art schools, and after the 1988 Education Act, which allowed more administrative control.
Much American art had been nurtured in the purlieus of art schools like CalArts, which is how original initiatives like pop art and conceptualism became neutralized, routine and inane. In the 1970s CalArts implemented a ‘post-studio’ programme whose purpose was to supply students with the information they needed to make their careers. ‘Being informed’ did not mean being educated; it meant studying Artforum and October and being steeped in contemporary theory, because the stated goal of the institution was to produce career-minded artists and media strategists. In America from the mid-1960s museums and universities collaborated in the propagation and theorizing of new art. The Museum of Modern Art and the Whitney Museum of Contemporary Art in New York disseminated their values through the American education system. The ‘progressive’ ethos became industrialized and dogmatic. In their concerns for an aesthetic that conformed to the establishment, schools fostered competition instead of a truly creative discourse, because the art-educational spectrum was polarized between modernism and postmodernism and sustained a conflict between them. In effect, postmodernist discourse itself is the suspension of opposites without resolution.
During this period there have been two other relevant developments: a phenomenal growth in private collectors and museums, and the unprecedented degree of the incursion of the market, which recovered its dominance over the art world in the Reagan era. This monetarist art culture dated from the early 1960s when the ‘blockbuster’ was invented, and André Malraux sent the Mona Lisa across the Atlantic to gratify John Kennedy’s megalomania. In the 1980s the price of historic art became absurdly inflated; once the stock of old masters was exhausted, contemporary art then became more expensive than it had ever been. Of course, this induced the need for an uninterrupted supply of new art whose high monetary value could be justified, so curators and critics were constantly seeking out and seizing upon ‘the next big thing,’ which turned up everywhere and anywhere. In the academies, immature artists were pressured to bring into being something spectacular and innovative, and to theorize their work as they went along. At the same time the autonomy of the intellectual field was diminished, because it no longer controlled its own agencies of legitimation.
Among French theorists, Baudrillard especially has been lionized in the American art world since his essay The Precession of Simulation was published in Semiotext(e) in 1983. His argument is that, since culture is now consigned to the endless production of imagery with no reference to the real world, ‘simulation envelopes the whole edifice of representation as itself a simulacrum.’ He created a set of vogue words to evoke the entropic state of Western culture; such as ‘simulacrum,’ ‘hyperrealization’ and ‘closure.’ His lecture at the Whitney Museum in 1987 was ardently and copiously attended by collectors, dealers and artists, whom he told that the art object could pre-empt its condition as merchandise by ‘becoming more mercantile than merchandise itself.’ Since Baudrillard reduces all cultural meaning to ‘simulacra,’ his pronouncements tend to the market assumption that art has no purpose but self-promotion. He further claimed that ‘art presupposes that all problems have been resolved.’ This statement now brings to mind a description of romanticism – made several years later by the British painter Miles Richmond – as ‘the ranks of artists who make life more comfortable for the already comfortable.’ But Richmond would have had no time for Baudrillard, for whom, evidently, all art is of this kind; something you do in your spare time.
The American painter Peter Halley, a devotee to Baudrillard, declared in his eulogy to the deceased philosopher that ‘in (his) system, language is freed from the constraints of the real world.’ Halley has provided much of the writing on his own art, including this example from 1993:
‘if placing a frame around culture, if “framing” the media, properly describes the mechanism of appropriation. then the mere consciousness of the frame bracketing or framing the frame or the framer, and the hybridization of this regression and instrumentalization, both captures the legacy of appropriation and projects its demise in the hyperframe.’
In the lexicon of contemporary art English from which such Baudrillian incantation is assembled we also find words like aporia, biopolitical, dialectic, tension and transversal. An artist’s work interrogates, questions, encodes, transforms, subverts, imbricates, displaces or serves to do so. Suffixes such as -ion, –ity, –ality, –ization are added to make nouns; visual becomes visuality, global becomes globality, potential becomes potentiality, experience becomes experiencability. The prefixes para-, proto-, post– and hyper– expand the language exponentially. There is a heavy proliferation of dependent clauses and adverbial phrases, such as radically question or playfully and subversively invert. What the words mean no longer matters, since there is no longer anything, in Samuel Beckett’s phrase, that ‘must be tried to be said.’
The main transformations in art practice of the past thirty years have taken place in sculpture, to which Rosalind Krauss attended closely. Sculpture discarded its factual self-sufficiency and became a kind of painting, or photograph, with a frame that extends to include the viewer. The character of three-dimensional art, as it may now be more appropriate to call it, has become asocial, fragmenting and confrontational. The inherited images of order, integration and ideal autonomy are no longer credible. ‘Experiential’ is what art must be, in the sense of providing experiences – by contrast with experience, as it was once understood. The commitment to materials is also long gone; the audience – or ‘witnessing publics’ as someone at New York University decided it should thereafter be known – is where the substance of the thing lies. This is the domain of ‘relational aesthetics,’ the term introduced by Nicholas Bourriard in 1998; the paradigm of ‘gallery-as-laboratory’ and ‘artist-as-designer.’ Bourriard, a progeny of Duchamp, reiterates the belief that artistic activity is a ‘game,’ not ‘an immutable essence.’ The artwork is no longer ‘a space to be walked through’ but ‘a time to be lived through.’ This movement or development has grown with, and out of, the possibilities afforded by new media which, it is elsewhere claimed, ‘consecrates the social freedom of the artist.’ Relational art offers not the encounter between viewer and object but ‘inter-subjective encounters… meaning is elaborated collectively, rather than in the space of individual consumption.’ What is required of a good artist in the age of relational aesthetics is ‘sociality, not mastery.’
The need for relational art seems to me to accord with certain societal changes in the west. there is distrust, not to say hostility, towards representations of cultural authority, and this was first and most clearly discernible in language. A generation has grown up insulated by visual media from any first-hand contact with the natural environment. Meanwhile the tradition of drawing was destroyed in the American academy in a single generation, because its skills were no longer taught. This became evident in the 1980s figurative revival, carried out by the worst generation of draughtsman in the the history of art. in the UK, I was one of the last students to study drawing as an independent discipline. This activity is now no longer understood because it is concerned with absolute values, and with the expansion of consciousness in the tangible world. The loss of this tradition is unique to our century.
If you decide to reform a culture, language is the easiest point of attack. Art criticism has given way to theory, or the theology of repudiation. Art is now a collaboration in which we pursue ideas about ourselves. But an idea that cannot be expressed in words, however elusive the words, cannot be worth expressing, In the present mass-culture, everyone is both a producer and consumer of art. What is produced is ‘avant-garde;’ what is consumed is ‘kitsch.’ Critical thinking is getting harder, especially in America where, I am told, depreciation or simple disapproval is increasingly proscribed. In the ‘friended’ world of social media, at least among the young, adversarial stimuli is ignored or prohibited. A thought is not considered a thought until it is shared. No-one makes solitary excursions into the mountainside in order to draw something, because in order for such an act to have any meaning, one would have to exercise the language of critical inquiry.
I wish to finish, as I began, in the early 1960s, with a comment from Sir Lawrence Gowing in this (holds up) exhibition catalogue from the Tate Gallery in London. The exhibition was one of the biggest surveys of European and American art in the 20th century. Gowing’s peroration to his catalogue essay begins thus:
‘Why call it expression? Why call it meaning? (Better call it thirst or hunger). The only purpose of words, or criticism and of catalogue introductions, is to clear the words away. Art has always been basically a matter of need.’
Bibliography:
Bourriard, Nicholas, Relational Aesthetics (les Presses du Reel, 1998)
Gowing, Lawrence, catalogue essay for 54-64: Painting & Sculpture of a Decade, organized by the Calouste Culbenkian Foundation at the Tate Gallery, London (London: Shenval Press Limited, 1964)
Hughes, Robert, Nothing If Not Critical (The Harvill Press, 1995)
Hughes, Robert, American Visions (The Harvill Press, 1997)
Levine, David & Rule, Alix, ‘International Art English’ in Triple Canopy 16 (July 2012)
Morgan, Robert C., The End of the Art World (Allworth Press, 1998)
Potts, Alex, The Sculptural Imagination (Yale University Press, 2000)
Read, Herbert, Education through Art (London: Faber & Faber, 1943)
Richmond, Miles, statement in Miles Richmond y Ronda (Convento de Santo Domingo, 2006)
Shone and Stonard (eds.), The Books That Shaped Art History (London: Thames & Hudson, 2013)
