The modern art world lives awash in a global tsunami of opportunity, a proliferation of contemporary work from all four corners of the globe...in fact there are no more four corners of the globe...the door is wide open, mutating, materializing - the hierarchy of the patrimony of the Renaissance is not the gold standard - M. Kimmleman's musing over the so-called 'value' of 'Il Ducio's', Madonna/Child...this 'value' has changed...hard pressed to find typical, traditional significance...art that emerges now is not hidebound by the indigenous, the specific, the traditional...the hallowed concept of 'authenticity' has evolved beyond it's archaic source and now the arbitration of value, taste and standards hovers over and speculates on a heady mixed brew, toward a consensus of possibilities...Not anarchy, exactly but possiblities.
You definitely can't go home again...but there is a way forward...moving through pockets of residual resistance, careful not to pick up any annoying ticks...from the 'registrars' of the archives of modernism, the PC academic turf guards to those in lockstep with the ultra hip and merely clever...break on through, wake up and smell the turpenoid because just as in life, now a 'Re-Mix Beyond Boundaries' is the order of the day.
So what's in this heady brew...with biennials abounding globally, Art Basel, ArtBasel/Miami...both London and NYC's gallery/auction/museum scene mixing it up, the Saatchi Gallery's upped the ante putting their money on the painting horse, China, the Germans, Russia, Islamic Art, the uber Sotheby's, Tobias Spinmeyer's wink and nod, Africa, South America, all charged and ready to go...a veritable merry go round...a cultural 'chug a lug'...While pondering the depths...the kitchen sink with a wink, posture or pander toward some skills, some art history, some moral center or NOT at all...maybe a totally craven cave in to the market or a schizophrenic dirty dance between these several forces of art spin following on the heels of trend...a cat's cradle of art...fixed, flipped and turned inside out...Pandora's box is gushing...
Ambivalence just doesn't do it and indifference is a defence...gung ho, clever antics alone don't do it either, neither does flavor of the month or disposable...Pose is ok for fashion but Art reaches for archetype, races toward the primal and passionate, can't abide things halfway...even when austere it needs to be truly so...but passion doesn't mean spill your guts, do it with some concentration, agility, relationship to a reality, a viewpoint or vision. With all the glut, the imposters, the chargers on the battlefield can ride way out of hand...for instance, let's put four over achievers on the mat together...Matthew Barney, Tim Hawkinson, Paul McCarthy and Keith Tyson...yikey, crikey...give me a twelve shot tequila hangover anyday...you know what I'm talking about here...some restraint, not a straightjacket just some restraint...pull back and resist the flame, the gobbelygook, the obvious and pare off the flab and focus. I'm thinking about the Damian Hirst show at Gagosian last year, the multitude of paintings...way out of line here...maybe it's a guy thing, maybe it's just attention grabbing, squeaky wheel get's oiled thing...Anyway...
Cranky types get flustered, dig in...hold their breath...try to parse it out. 'We wander around in that 'sluggish mishmash'...says Peter Schjeldahl a so-called 'mishmash' which has prevailed and characterized contemporary art for over a decade now where everything is possible and nothing is qualifiable. Take a deep breath...but the playing field just keeps getting larger and wider and weirder...Are we just making it up as we go along...well, yeah as we clamber over old platitudes, parade and plunder...everything's ripe for the picken now...Yet in spite of the fluctuating parameters there really is a playing field and a scale for determining the pulse, the aptitude, the qualifiers in a piece of work...For starters here, are we finally tired of perusing the dusty corners, the nihilistic slackers, the sordid deadenders...Give me some shit...but not the squalid kind like Gunter Brus, more like the earthy kind like the Chris Ofili kind...you know where I'm going here, the Vitality...
Well, it really does matter what you hang your hat on and even if your hat is not a pipe, 'c'eci n'est pas un pipe'...all art conundrums aside there is either a heartbeat or a lack of one and that is the heart of the matter...talking about our old friend 'vitality', the fact that there either is a heart beating or not...witness Anish Kapoor's 2005 folly (as in architectural structure) for World of Interiors magazine's 'projects' in the snow. It doesn't just evoke, it IS, it relays a Tantric fervor...this piece is a teardrop, the back of a whale, a vermilion tikka - packed snow covered in a thick, red powder skin, a dense opaque membrane...it melts, a pool of dye, a transient puja, celebrated then gone...his work carries all the power and might of Mohenjo Daro...it is infinite, a womb with the bouyancy of water, a mysterious blend of clean, coherent modernism combined with the deep, ancient proportions of Hindu iconography...Now, look at the Bean in Chicago...heavy - the surface curves like the slow movement of an anaconda - full and voluptuous but rigorous and devoted to the energy of solid weighted matter. Here is no rising Mozartian filigree, no emotion, sweet temperament or Baroque frenzy - instead, the skin is not about to burst but glides, dense, a powerful dose of the universe compacted then reflected with the contained energy of a meteor. Mined from a deep vein of potent, universal prajna/energy...they are both seeds incarnate and energy unsprouted, totally not inert but hovering constructs of deep, contained vitality.
Some works are inviolate...the Laocoon, Vermeer's 'Woman with a Jug'...like UNESCO heritage sites...they exist not in an airtight vacuum but in a timeless, ageless blue chip, gold standard...
Let's talk about Painting, my medium of choice...a striving, wild eyed, phoenix...currently busy being infused with the tantalizing elements of all imagery global. These are some of the basics...it's tactile, it's immediate and painting moves and gets life from the innate physicality of the individual painter's body. The heart pounds, the mind focuses and the 'hand' moves...it's primal, it's startling and however refined, intellectual or matriculated it can be or NOT, it still wants and gloriously sometimes has my fixation of choice, Vitality. a plastic materiality is skillfully constructed, a complex blend of vision/concept/forms which comes alive to the viewer's retinal consciousness. Plying relevance with these magic intangibles it creates and leads the viewer through a spontaneous symphony or cacophony of visual movement. But we're talking about good painting here not bad painting...here we go...Let's talk about skill, just one component of good painting...and to name a few esteemed endeavors like playing the violin, world class tennis or architecture, it takes training, practice, craft and engineering so to speak...Good painting combines with deep, innate proportion, an intact 'hand' and a craftsmanship that can set the piece of work up on it's legs but not seal every last bit of life out of it or look like its been wrapped up or squeezed from the MFA grinder...to promote a core vision (again that relationship to something) with able plastic standards. So what's a core vision in this day of fluctuating parameters...well, an agile deference to decency and well-being, acknowledging complexity, weaving a path through the straits of history, memory and conscience...not just a lean, clean 'don't get flummoxed machine' but taking hold of hope and celebration...
So let's talk about those who talk about art, who create the space for art...but first for some critical distance and relief from the well intentioned conventional, sometimes in-bred, righteous trilling, the academic turfbound rant and help with wrestling down the 'post, post modern, multi-culti mania, go-round' let me offer up a re-mix with an astute, focused, ever original, lively voice and put things in wide screen perspective. Not a fem smack down aka old school Germaine Greer or a suck up to Madonna like Camille Paglia or even the affable, amenable, rational Jerry Saltz but a nuanced, appreciative, schooled, cogent and down in the trenches art afficionado parlay...Treading on holy ground here...Why aren't there any German, women painters??? What's with that??? And cudos to the UK in developing and freeing up major paint plyers like Jenny Saville, Cecily Brown...and all those painting people waiting in the wings. Are we going to make a push for Abstract Expressionism again...have we acknowledged there might be a second coming here...What about the figure??? Are we finally over all preconceptions, post and misconceptions...Let's face it artists are born but careers are made and critical focus is key to putting jewels in their settings, moving the ever gregarious queue of artists up and along and when need be, 'inciting to riot' the next generation of players across the stage...
Good criticism involves getting things out in the open, undermining the status quo while placing the very able artists in view and keeping the visionaries roiling until they burn off, emerge more brightly, nag at your conscience or blossom under your very nose. Good criticism respects the insightful, fair player stance, protects against the 'schooled', humbugs and fuels the voracious mind committed to art.
Prodigious talent comes around a few times in a generation...but not to cut back on access for the many that are called that never get chosen, art needs all the warm bodies/minds it can have...but let's talk about more than numbers, let's talk about 'disposable' here...there really is a lot of shit to wade through now...PC culture that we are which takes a co-opted affirmative action stance as it's core value tries to bely the nasty fact that disposable trend, fashion, cronyism and hutzpah are the drag here, the sludge that we're wading through...'The Whitney Biennial' need I say more...a hodgepodge or vital mix...a stretch, a reach, a pandering, a preying on...And, where's the painting??
The good thing is what this does expose is the final rent, a radical opening in the dull, stultifying patriarchal, western civ fabric holding down and providing cover for the old school, and instead...a proliferation of mixing it up and creating vitality...out of the woodwork leaps the merry makers, the bunglers, the pundits, the bounders, the tribe of others...oh happy days until you realize someone's got to stem the tide of the 'disposable' merry go round, the ADD thing...As I said, take a deep breath, gather yourself and look, look smart not hard and look for relationships, vitality, able plastic standards, proportion authentic to the 'hand' and that spark of pulse quickening genius...
As Pier Paolo Pasolini once said...'Archaic civilization--superficially called folklore must not be forgotten, despised and betrayed, but it must be integrated within the new civilization.' 'The irrational must not be dismissed which would be impossible but simply checked and dominated by reason, by productive and fertile passion. Curses transform themselves into blessings'.
I wish...
Stephanie Bell Behnke/2006
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