Reformation Row - The Conceptualist Priesthood and Aesthetic Distraction
Historically, we usually associate the reformation with the religious split within Western Christianity initiated by Luther, Calvin and other early Protestants. In general Northern Europe, with the exception of Ireland and pockets of Britain, turned Protestant. Bloodshed reigned as exemplified in France and the St. Bartholowmew's Day Massacre. Western civilization was never the same.
But casualties were not just human during this schism; many works of art were also burned or destroyed by iconoclasts (in Germany the term used was Bildersturm or image storm). As was sometimes the case with church wall painting, art was literally white washed over and hidden from the iconoclastic fury of crowds - intentionally protected, yet also eerily forshadowing the stark white interiors of the contemporary public art museum which embodied the anti-art, minimalism and conceptualism to come some four hundred years later, and fathered by anti-aesthetic reformers like Marcel Duchamp and Sol leWitt.
During the Reformation, works of art which did survive could be said to have been aided and abeted by individuals willing to go to great lengths and risks, in order to preserve their visual heritage under siege by the reformists. In England much of the destruction took place in an organized fashion ordered by the King and Parliment. It could be said that what occured back then was not only a split, but a visual purge with significant consequences for the future of the wests' artistic identity and the relevance of aesthetics today.
In the movie A Month in the Country (see link below), an interesting dialogue ensues between a Vicar and an atheistic and traumatized first world war veteran, commissioned to restore a pre-reformation wall mural. It does not take long to deduce that the Vicar is opposed to the restoration; but since it has to be restored, his hope would be that it is appropriate and tones in with the rest ...
Vicar - "It will distract from worship."
Veteran - "After a time they won't notice it."
Vicar - "It will distract"
So, what is it the Vicar is so concerned about here which will lead his congregation to distraction?
Is it religious criticality? Judgement? Loss of ecclesiastical control? Transubstantiation? Humanism? Individualism? It is hardly that easy to determine.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VXzl9_UY0_Q&feature=related
We know artists have been used as vehicles for religious propaganda for centuries and religious suppression continues to have a long and sordid history, but perhaps it's more than that. The loss of the Vicar's power and control over the congregation's "imagination" may be at stake here, and it is this I maintain, that is disturbing to the Vicar. The image was undergoing a huge transformation in the time the film A Month in the Country portrayed. Control of the image was changing. Representational painting was on a journey to obliteration which could not be stopped. So the seduction and illusion of the aesthetics of a third dimention, so durable and stubborn, becomes the Vicars' concern just as it was for Duchamp and his distain for retinal art. Perhaps the Vicar anticipates the end of art, and does not wish to see any remnent survive. Especially imaginative art. One can only speculate.
Conceptualism Today
Priests can take many forms; at once religious and then at other times secular. In 1918, Duchamp's penchant for anti-art became so zelous he eventually abandoned making art in favour of chess. A supremely anti-artistic act. Still, the western artistic establishments carried out his vision with curatorial determination to this day - now in the form of postart. Postart can generally be considered a period we are now experiencing where the boundaries between art and life are blurred. Art no longer exists to mediate aesthetic experience.
With reform came new rules. And with conceptualism , painting suddenly became "strategic". Painting was now subject to the calculations of serial production and formal unity. This sometimes reflected the appropriation of objects know as "ready mades" (ie. urinals, rope or plywood).
A corollary to the conceptualist strategy is the love/hate relationship with painting and the imposed logic of reduction. Art was now considered dispensible as proven by the Bildersturm. So inspirational art took a back seat to the conceptualist research tool - a democratic fundamental used to investigate the netherlands of visual relevance. Compare it to the interference you may hear when searching for your favorite radio station.
Yet problems continued to arise. It was kind of like fraternising with the enemy. For some conceptualists there was still a need for reconcilliation with the crafted image - that enfant terrible to reformers called painting. But for the pure conceptualist reformer, a firm dichotomy existed between aesthetics and conceptualization. However, as conceptualism evolved it became a tool rather than the end it was originally intended to be. The race to create the last painting had become farcical and purists were retreating from the precipice. Painting could be used by conceptualists; the question was how.
As time went by the church transformed into a museum. For the priests of conceptualism, the museum context established a whole new type of professional. Since art was serious stuff and an artist now needed a strategy to create art, how art was produced became the topic of curatorialism. Curators raised questions regarding the relevance of the image when in fact it was believed it could be outsourced. Reforms execution was complete. Art was now a project and no longer a product of the imagination.
The Art Conceptualist became the new "renaissance man" by subsuming the role of curator as well. Control over art was reformed by making art, curating art, and writting catalogue essays for their own art. Conceptualists enjoyed using institutions to remind us through their own painting, that painting was out of vogue. The late Gerald Ferguson, a Nova Scotia College of Art and Design art educator and conceptualist, literally used the canvas as a shroud to cover common objects like rope (see link below), then like a child rubbing a penny underneath some paper, obtained a blackish relief (called frotage) on the canvas with paint intended to factualize the employed object. Black, normally associated with cavities or receding qualities, actually captured the surface of the rope while the negative space between the rope became the white of the canvas; the type of reversal one might encounter with an old photographic negative. The overall result is reminiscent of a casual abstract expressionist gesture - an ironic reference to painting. The only realistic trait to the work is the title which identifies the object and the length of rope defined.
http://blogs.thedailybeast.com/daily-pic/2012/1/10/gerald-ferguson-at-canada-gallery
Using Ferguson's work further as an example, the next step in a conceptualists baggage would be to eliminate the painting altogether. With an extreme reductive strategy, text would then be applied to the museum wall. The term 50ft, Rope not only becomes the fulfilment of Bildersturm, but conjurs up those free associations one may make with a utilitarian object such as rope - the last vestiges of the viewers role.
The marketing of conceptualism through the museum became a conduit for hyping up the banality of everyday objects as aesthetic objects. We then overlooked the banility of everyday objects and believed them to be charasmatic as we identified with this new aesthetic experience. But to overlook their banility is to banalize, or lower our aesthetic experience - thus diminishing our imaginative relationship with art.
Contemporary art has developed many characteristics concurrent with contemporary society. It is chaotic and aligns itself with the void left by the end of modernism. It is also narcisistic in its mirroring of the artists' barren postart soul and deeply felt anxiety; dreaming turbulently as each postart hoax unfolds through the standard channels of the art establishment and it's sister marketing machine, the media. However, there are still artists who do not admonish the public but aim to engage with them. This quality is purposeful and part of a great history bequeathed to the artists of today by the masters of yesteryear. There have been times when we needed to white wash over visible reality in order to preserve it and protect it. But as we place value on the self affirmation of visible reality, this is not one of those times.
What is an Artist?
In an excellent article in Canadian Art, Sarah Thornton, writer for the Economist on contemporary art, asks the question "what is an artist?" One curator implies the question is dim and so we are lead on a symantic and circuitious route without end.
http://www.canadianart.ca/online/features/2012/02/02/sarah_thornton_report_from_london/
In the article, the curator's lack of response neglects that the artist is the unifying factor. It is reminiscent of techniques used by the conceptualists when maintaining the supremacy of the idea over the art. Or in this case the created over the creator. It continues to resonate like the postart priests echo heard by a lost patron in an empty gallery wondering where the art is and seeking the exit door to the street.
Steven Rhude, Wolfville, Nova Scotia
"Using Ferguson's work further as an example, the next step in a conceptualists baggage would be to eliminate the painting altogether. With an extreme reductive strategy, text would then be applied to the museum wall. The term 50ft, Rope not only becomes the fulfilment of Bildersturm, but conjurs up those free associations one may make with a utilitarian object such as rope - the last vestiges of the viewers role. "
ReplyDeleteIts ironic that Gerry started to paint landscapes in the last years of his life-again using black, which he thought "worked" best. He was a hard man to get to know, Always a curmudgeon--- but he thought about the history of art and he could be generous and yes, even kind. I think making him an exemplar of Conceptualism is problematic because he was so much more and he painted until the end of his life.
As someone who is not an artist, but who has long had sympathies with things like Dada, I feel like ading something in their defence, and suggesting that the argument against them could be spun a little more dialectically. My impression was that things like Dada grew out of a concern that forms of art were functioning, not just as distractions, but as affirmations of a social order that, in the darkness of events like WWI, was seen as abhorrent. Surely they were onto something - the way art can function as a resounding "Yes" to the way things are. The attack on the old aesthetic was, insofar as it was reasonable, an attempt to find a way of saying "No".
ReplyDeleteThe dialectic kicks in when, decades later, we see the way the anti-art movement becomes part of a new affirmation. No is the new Yes. Out with the bathwater went the baby. And, with hindsight, we see (or at least I suspect we ought to see), an older notion of the aesthetic as something crucial to our humanism - crucial to the survival of our humanism in an inhuman world.
But still, like the old Dadaists, I am troubled by the way that the beautiful images of the human continue to function as props for the inhuman - a lying mythology encouraging a false reconciliation.
Not sure, I confess.