Backing into the Future

I am currently re-visiting past work because I can’t remember why I stopped doing it. Why not do landscapes? For years I accepted the imperative that a serious artist must avoid sinking into prettiness. But lately, I’m wondering if the future of art is one of creating lyricism and loveliness as these qualities become increasingly scarce in the world. This is an idea from Richard Powers‘ novel Orfeo where he suggests that ”… the key to re-enchantment still lay in walking backwards into the future”. By backing into the future, artists would return to the aesthetics of the past without forgetting the lessons of the last century.

For the last hundred years it has been a truism that the job of art is to progress by creating shocking images that shatter past expectations. But how relevant is it to épater la bourgeoisie anymore? The bourgeoisie have happily lapped up bold artistic experiments designed to shock them out of their complacency and have cannily turned them into marketable commodities. And the international bourgeoisie have transformed the art market into the world’s most effective and rewarding money laundering vehicle. In Orfeo, Powers uses a musician and composer as protagonist to explore this unhappy situation and that of the arts in general. He also pokes into some other thorny questions such as, do artists have a free pass to ignore their worldly responsibilities in pursuit of their art?

The novel is a wealth of information about music and describes a world of skill, sensation and experience that most of us don’t get to share.  In his youth, Powers’ protagonist had accepted the challenge of his professors and peers to create music that thumbed its nose at accepted mores. This was in the ’60s when the task of all modern artists was to be outrageous. This protagonist musician was at the heart of a no-holds-barred musical/theatrical happening over the course of a decade in which he created work that pushed boundaries and was on the leading perimeter of the cutting edge. The risks, successes and highs of these bold experiments are enviable and the reader feels comparatively earth-bound.

Not that artists didn’t enjoy a period of youthful artistic exuberance in 60’s & ’70’s Vancouver, BC where I came of age.  It was much like the time Powers describes in Illinois: artists had funding to carry out crazy experiments without the marketing imperative. For instance, in 1973 I had a Canada Council grant to photograph costumed fellow artists in various scenarios on the streets of Vancouver.

At the time, artists had ideas and ran with them – there wasn’t the amount of self criticism required then that there is now, though perhaps there should have been. From the perspective on 2024, these scenarios could be viewed with suspicion. Were they pitiless, stereotypical caricatures of sex workers and homeless old women? Or were they scenarios that described a city (Vancouver) at the beginning of its transformation from sleepy sea-side town to World Class City with World Class social upheaval? I have always disapproved of photographing real people going about their every-day lives and appropriating their images as art. So I used actors to express the changes I saw happening in my home town: expanding transactional sex; a growing and visible cohort of disadvantaged people; and an associated growing and visible cohort of the super-wealthy who were getting away with murder.

Later, with an Opportunities for Youth grant that Chris Dahl & I received, we worked with Bob Amussen to collect a sample of work  from all the artists we knew of in Vancouver and the surrounding areas, the good, the bad and the ugly, and collated them into a published book.

The dance company I worked with, a tortured and anarchic artists’ collective, produced cutting edge work that toured the province on a shoe-string.

There was even a hodge-podge artists’ band that gathered at the New Era Social Club with found instruments that created dissonant, unstructured sound.

But as I found out, non-paying gigs and widely-spaced grants are fine for the childless. But, as in Powers’ novel, the moral question arose – is it OK to sacrifice one’s children to one’s art? Successful male artists are usually careful to equip themselves with an admiring mate to support their work. And if the child-rearing thing doesn’t work out, they leave it to the spouse to manage on her own. As The Gorilla Girls pointed out, especially at the time, male artists were 98% more likely to become successful and able to find paying work. But I was not so blessed and had to find a day job.

Now, many years later, the imperative for art to be outrageous still stands, but as asked at the start of this blog, how relevant is it to épater les bourgeoisie anymore? Looking back, Powers’ protagonist in Orfeo says “ …rebelling is itself a passing fashion, as fragile as any. The manifestos of Peter’s 20s – the movements and lawless experiments, the crazy climbs up onto the barricades – feel like a tantrum now, like his daughter refusing to take her nap. Who can say what the Academy champions these days? … but he knows that cool will give way to warm, form to feeling, as surely as a leading tone tilts forever toward the tonic.”

This is the pattern one finds in Western art movements over the last couple of centuries. Whichever Academy of Art has the funding and commissioning leverage that makes or breaks artists, also decides that either form or feeling is the necessary ingredient for the times. The Classical period demanded form; the Baroque and Romantic periods fetishized feeling; the Neo-Classicists yearned for lost formality; the Impressionists ramped up feeling; the Modernists progressively reduced form to its essence, and the Post-Modernists pushed this until art itself was almost eliminated.

Are we at the point where “cool will give way to warm, form to feeling”? Is it an inevitable pendulum swing or does it swing back because those denied recognition, funding and acceptance by the current Academy push back through dedicated hard work?  We shall see. Or likely not “us” but commentators far in the future who will look back over the last 100 years and describe how Western civilization finally emerged from a dark age of anti-art to an age of …what?

Powers hints at the possible next phase as his protagonist hears one of his musical contemporaries, “a rigid serialist”, serve up “…a bouquet reeking of lyric consonants…a serious composer surrendering, turning his back on the last hundred years, and sinking into prettiness. And yet what courage in this backsliding. Els shakes his head at the loveliness of the florid finale. it makes him remember old pleasures condemned for reasons he can’t now retrieve.” (Orfeo, p.270)

Lyricism, loveliness, “Old pleasures condemned for reasons he can’t now retrieve”; could this be the new rebelliousness?  In this spirit I am currently re-visiting past work because I can’t remember why I stopped doing it. Why not do landscapes?

Why not go for beauty? It feels like a  repudiation of everything artists have been conditioned to believe. But let’s face it, art is not going to solve the climate crisis, mass species extinction or mass human migration. It is not going to shock the middle-classes and 100 years of attempting to do so has done nothing for society or the environment. So artists may as well return to their original job of facilitating reverence: for nature, for stillness, for God, however understood.  Artworks made with and for reverence may not appeal to the Academy, but will speak to “the usual hearty few …hungry for some transcendent thing that the human mind may never produce.” (Orfeo, p.276)

Powers suggests a way forward: “a middle path between romantic indulgence and sterile algorithms, between the grip of the past and the cult of progress”.(Orfeo p.274) No need to return to Rubenesque pink bottoms floating on Cumulus clouds or pastoral scenes of vanished country life.

Also no need to eschew landscapes, work exclusively with recycled waste or communicate that hopeless despair is the only sane attitude possible.

So my current approach is that ”… the key to re-enchantment still lay in walking backwards into the future”. I’m revisiting traditional drawing techniques of the past, from the 15th C. woodcuts and engravings of Albrecht Dürer to the 19th C wood engravings of Thomas Bewick and of Paul Nash in the 20th C. I studied and used these techniques as an illustrator and they became my trademark style. Now I am re-discovering the potential for these techniques when brought into the present via Photoshop. The melding of traditional techniques with current technical hardware opens up an unlimited potential for exploration and re-discovery of old pleasures condemned for reasons I can’t now retrieve.