Modernisms  & Postmodernisms

The art historian/critic James Elkins made an interesting statement in his 2005 book on modernisms  & postmodernisms, Master Narratives and their Discontents. The focus of the book is the role of painting in modernist & postmodernist theories and the core question of whether painting is irrelevant to contemporary visual arts.

If our understanding of contemporary visual arts is based on the assumption that there is a clear trajectory of progress in art-making where the avant guard reject the outdated, unconscious approach of the past and present and lead us forward into the future through new ways of presenting images, then the Postmodernist rejection of painting is justified.  Postmodernism and painting are mutually exclusive because painting is a creature of modernist theory, and modernist theories rest on belief in the ability of art, specifically painting, to transcend the human condition.

Postmodern theories suggest that modernism’s belief that art can transcend entanglement with the political, moral and social failings of the time in which it is created are at the core of paintings irrelevance. From this perspective, the whole history of modernist painting is its coming painfully to an understanding of its place in the disenchantment of the world. Criticism of modernism is essential based on the uselessness of the received rules of painting and the hopelessness of proceeding as if painting could be the place where the world is “re-enchanted” (pp. 52-55).

In response to modernism and painting’s association with hopeless efforts to re-enchant the world, contemporary art schools and postmodern critics reject painting in favour of other visual art media, such as video and other new media. And those who do continue to paint are careful to avoid using received rules. Elkins touches on the problems with this approach:

“It is certainly much easier to make an acceptable piece of video art than it is to make an acceptable painting, and…the reason for the relative ease of video art is that painting has a longer history: more strictures, more limitations, fewer possibilities, a much denser lexicon of critical terms. Therefore…the ease of video is a reason to keep considering painting, especially when it’s a place where things seem to keep going wrong, or where the artists are deliberately misbehaving themselves, piling kitch on camp on kitch without end”. (p. 164) He uses the example of Jeff Koons, whose “…place in the history of twentieth century art is assured in part because of his apparently deeply sincere endorsement of kitch ideas and kitch media“(p. 70) .

The Torment of the Artist

The disenchantment of the world is captured in a few evocative sentences by my author, Richard Powers. In his 2009 novel, Generosity, he describes the torment of the artist reluctant to contribute to the meaningless torrent of artistic works flooding the world at any given moment. In the face of ecological, social and economic megadisasters an artist can only tell,”...the odds against ever feeling at home in the world again. About huge movements of capital that render self-realization quaint at best. About the catastrophe of collective wisdom getting what we want, at last.”(Powers, Richard, Generosity 2009, Farrar, Straus and Giroux, p. 152) This is the quandry that postmodernism has met with scepticism, suspicion and anti-authoritarianism.

Powers outlines the decline of modernism through the disenchantment of a budding art historian who “…nurtured the belief that the deepest satisfaction lay in those cultural works that survive the test of Long Time. But a collision with postcolonialism….shook her faith in masterpieces.A course in Marxist interpretation of the Italian Renaissance left her furious. For a little while longer she soldiered on, fighting the good fight for artistic transcendence until she realized that all the commanding officers had already negotiated safe passage away from the rout.” (p. 61)

Elkins describes postmodernism not as the name of a period with a definable approach such as  postimpressionism but as “…a condition of resistance that can arise wherever modernist ideas are in place. Postmodernism works like a dormant illness in the body of modernism: when modernism falters and fails, postmodernism flourishes.” (p. 89)

Elkins’ & Power’s complementary works agree that the assumption that art can transcend the human condition is a core value of modernism that the postmodern critique rejects. So how can artists, especially painters, step out of the here and now and create works that are timeless, universal and make transcendence possible?

The Return of Myth

In his blog, [Re]construction: Metamodern ‘Transcendence’ and the Return of Myth, Brendan Dempsey, a graduate student at Yale University, courageously entered the fray. He suggested that “metamodern mythopoeia reasserts a form of ‘transcendence’ without forfeiting postmodern immanence as it reconstructs artificial paradigmatic models for the twenty-first century“. He includes the work of several young artist who he feels are involved in is artistic mythmaking that oscillates between the poles of discredited modernist myths and postmodern superficiality.

Dempsey used this work by Adam Miler as an example of a painting that, “reconstructs artificial paradigmatic models for the twenty-first century” and “oscillates between the poles of discredited modernist myths and postmodern superficiality“. In The Roses Never Bloomed So Red, Miller delivered an impassioned critique of late-capitalist decay by depicting a fauness vanquished by the violent spirit of development.

This is an early work by Miller and the egregiously curvaceous fauness dooms this painting to the level of soft-core porn, despite its censoriousness. Some of his later work, while still featuring voluptuous nudes being violated in erotic ways, is undeniable in its technical mastery and force. But Miller’s latest work, such as his Comedia Humana” project, is more strongly connected to myths so that, for the most part, the female nudes escape the problem of the male gaze. But overall, Miller has been lured into the same traps that have ensnared artists of earlier epochs.

Perhaps myths are not something that can be conjured up by modern men, steeped in a myth-denying culture. Myths are stories that live in our DNA and make sense to us because they are part of the fabric of ourselves as human beings. As Joseph Campbell would say in his book The Power Of Myth, “…true myths are our ties to the past that help us to understand the world and ourselves.The myths that have come down to us through thousands of years of oral and written history are precious strands of our true selves and attempting to discredit them is like trying to discredit the seasons“. Myth is clearly not a vehicle that will automatically “reassert a form of transcendence” but must be used with conscious awareness and humility to work.

Post-Clement Greenburg

It could perhaps be said that much of post-modernist theory has been developed in reaction against Clement Greenburg‘s definition of what makes or breaks good painting. Greenburg simply defined good painting as something that someone with good taste, such as himself, could see was a good painting.  His point of view is somewhat offensive to our post-modern sensibilities, but he was not aware of post-modernism’s greatest contribution to criticism in all genres – the disparaging of bias.

Scientific research on perception showed that the mere act of observation affects the thing observed. This has led to a general understanding that it is impossible to be objective – that the observer sees based on a set of values and assumptions that influence what is seen. This understanding has led to a cultural revolution in all areas including the arts. This cultural revolution meant that dead white men were no longer automatically considered the “greats” of literature, drama, music and the visual arts. It was no longer intellectually acceptable to assume that women and minorities were grossly under-represented among the “greats” because they were less capable of creating masterpieces. But once using the “greats” as a yardstick for excellence was gone, the very concept of excellence came under attack, all criteria for assessing the arts was dismissed and everybody is now an artist.

But the postmodernist critique, while entirely justified and rational, has been taken to extremes, until, as Elkins says, we have been subjected to exhibitions “piling kitch on camp on kitch without end”. So it is worthwhile to revisit Greenberg’s worldview to retrace our steps.

Greenberg never examined his assumption that, because he was a person with good taste, what he saw as a good painting was a good painting and he needed to provide no further evidence of this. But the reason his attitude is still appealing is because he is right in assuming that the point of art is to abandon oneself to the pleasure of viewing. It is not an intellectual activity that requires several wall-feet of text to understand. Art should be a visual, visceral, sensuous experience that bypasses the busy brain and transcends mundane day-to-day life.

Jackson Pollack was Greenberg’s most famous protégé and is a good example of a painter whose work as a visual experience is not narrative, not conceptual and certainly not banal. It is a pleasure to lose oneself in this artist’s ability to weave a surface of textures and patterns with all the complexity of nature but the intentionality of a human sensibility.

Other painters that Greenberg loved, such as Larry Poons, also confirmed his good taste.

Not all of the painters Greenberg admired are immediately recognizable as a visual, visceral, sensuous experience. Perhaps, as he said, you had to stand in front of them. But the point he was making is that a great painting can transcend entanglement with the political, moral and social failings of the time in which it is created.  Paintings is not and never can be irrelevant because we only have to look at a great painting like those above to know that they can create a place where the world is “re-enchanted” and can achieve transcendence.

The post Transcendence first appeared on Marion-Lea Jamieson, Artist.

So I look for ideas from writers that have tried to capture a sense of what is happening in and to the Western visual arts. This is a daunting challenge as it is impossible for anyone living in a period of time to stand outside of it and look objectively and from a future perspective to say that this or that phenomenon, philosophy or paradigm represents the times. Harold Rosenberg was just such as writer who tried to see where art was going in his time and what might be expected in the future.

Though written 50+ years ago, Rosenberg’s early 1970’s book on art criticism Harold Rosenberg was prescient. At first I was put off by his use of terms like “the artist is a man who…”, but I came to overlook his gender insensitivity. Rosenberg’s primary concern is that art, and he is primarily concerned with painting, is in danger of going over the edge that separates it from crafts, commercial design and the mass media. This concern no doubt grew out of the success of artists like Andy Warhol, a former commercial artist, who wholeheartedly embraced popular culture and commercial processes.

What’s interesting about Rosenberg’s views, is that, though he is deeply immersed in the art world, he is not aware of the term, or the fact, of post-modernism. He is writing at a time of huge changes in attitudes toward art and he is documenting this change as it is taking place.  Thus he is able to report on the transition between the philosophical endorsement of modernism that was widely accepted by the art establishment, and the shattering of this consensus through emerging artwork critiquing that philosophy.
In many ways, his writing was prescient as it can be said that art has since gone over the edge he described. But this jump was a conscious choice by the artists involved and made out of a sense of necessity. That felt necessity was to rebel against the commodification of art and the modernist illusion that the art object could meaningfully convey a response to a world that was capable of creating two devastating world wars and weapons of mass destruction. The jump was also motivated by photography that could record life much better that painting and had replaced it in many ways.,

Instead of making irrelevant art for money, artists such as Marcel Duchamp were making art as criticism through parody, irony or subversion. Artists like Troy Emery continue that tradition today. though one has to question whether using parody, irony and subversion has become an avenue to sure commercial success. Whereas Duchamp only made one Fountain, like Jeff Koons, Emery makes dozens of pieces, with slight variations. He has fully embraced the post-modern acceptance of commercialization as a defensible and even central aspect of an art practice.

Perhaps one of the reasons that painting has been considered an outdated art form is that it is difficult to crank out paintings at an industrial/commercial scale. While it is accepted that sculptors will farm out the actual casting or fabrication of their artworks to artisans, there is no similar tolerance for painters. Sophisticated collectors of paintings expect it to have been the work of the artist that signs it, not a painting factory. Of course there were the screen prints of artists like Warhol, and currently there are Gicleé prints of paintings, and paintings that have clearly been mass-produced. But these never have, and likely never will, achieve the recognition and respect given to mass-produced sculptures.

Rosenberg’s primary concern was that painting would become commercial design and mass media, but this has not happened. Instead, it became somewhat irrelevant to the art establishment and by extension, the art market and many artists. Rosenberg’s insensitivity to gender issues reflects his lack of attention to other important issue that created the post-modern revolution. Though he touches on the fact that taste in art, especially modernist painting, was set by an elite made up of white, middle & upper class males. They in turn found they most admired the work of white, middle-class male artists, so that women & visible minorities were excluded from exhibitions & sales.

There were many other artists who did not accept that there were insurmountable problems with making artworks such as painting. For instance, Rosenberg suggests that “…if Miro had a “problem” it was how to reach a state of creation unhindered by problems”. And as Rosenberg says, many artists saw the only other alternative to be making art for oneself.”For Barnett Newman, painting was “…a way of practising the sublime, not communicating it

Others such as Piet Mondrian, believed that it was possible to “…conceive of a grand vision such as the salvation of the human race.. that could be expressed in paint.” He believed his work was a “plastic vision” that would help to set up ” …a new type of society composed of balance relationships”.

Mondrian was aware that his work could not speak for itself without a “new phase in human development” so he wrote statements and manifestos explaining his ideas. The irony, for Rosenberg, was that in contemporary art, the meaning of artworks is not in themselves, but in the personality of the artist, “…his ideas, his role, his pathos.” He saw with clarity that what would become post-modernism would replace ideas in art altogether.

Modernist painters wrestled with the issue of content and the reaction against using recognizable images. Rosenberg refers to “pre-formlist abstraction” as that which has an unmistakable subject but “…projects a content that is implicit in but not restricted to the marks on the canvas”.

In this approach, a painting “…comes into being through unanticipated responses to what is taking place on the canvas”, as Rosenberg describes the work of Joan Mitchell. Whatever has gone on before provides the clue & the motivation for the next move.

The “meaning and emotional intensity of Mitchell’s pictures] are produced structurally, as it were, by a whole series of oppositions: dense versus transparent strokes; gridded structure versus more chaotic, ad hoc construction; weight on the bottom of the canvas versus weight at the top; light versus dark; choppy versus continuous strokes; harmonious and clashing juxtapositions of hue – all are potent signs of meaning and feeling.”(1)

Rosenberg describes these as pre-formalist modernist painters as differentiated from the formalists who conceived abstract art in terms of “…a grammar of dimensions, edges, and color relations”. Formalism also focused on eliminating metaphorical references, perhaps in reaction to what had become a cloying use of metaphors by some artists in earlier periods.

But the ultimate destination of this formalist direction were paintings that eliminated not only metaphor, but dimensions, edges, and colour relations as well, to become a flat plane of one colour. My question is, where’s the fun in that compared to Mitchells’ aim and method: to express delight at having been taken by surprise?

This is not an essay in that it does not attempt to wrap up an argument with a neat conclusion that summarizes previous rambles but is an ongoing exploration that can be continued in another post.

1) Nochlin, Linda (2002). “Joan Mitchell: A Rage to Paint”. In Livingston, Jane. The Paintings of Joan Mitchell. New York: Whitney Museum of American Art. p. 55. ISBN 0520235703.

The post This is not an Essay first appeared on Marion-Lea Jamieson, Artist.

As a place to start this exploration, we can use the 2017 Vancouver Art Gallery exhibition called Entangled: Two Views on Contemporary Canadian Painting. A review by Robin Laurence titled, “Entangled shows contemporary Canadian painting is alive and well” said the painters exhibited, “found ingenious and sometimes revisionist ways of revitalizing the object and justifying their medium”.  But the paintings, such as the those shown below, uniformly rejected the notion that beauty has any role to play in painting. As this show was designed to represent the cutting edge of contemporary painting in Vancouver, why was it so clearly adverse to aesthetics? Is this anti-art or simply a redefinition of art, especially painting, as a discipline that must eschew aesthetics in order to be contemporary?

While Laurence’s review agreed that painting is considered a dead art form, he describes the painters of Entangled as not entirely convinced of its demise. “Human beings, after all, had been applying pigment to receptive surfaces for tens of thousands of years.”

Why do painters continue to paint if the medium has  been declared “dead, defunct, or worse, irrelevant”?  One good reason was given by Gamlin, the maker of oil paints  who describe painting as the most complicated, all-encompassing, and rewarding experience, “because painting requires us to see, think, feel, and perform complicated physical tasks all at the same time, striving for something meaningful, striving to make order out of the very raw material that is oil colors” and because painting makes the painter “feel so good to be so alive.”

Clearly other art forms offer the same experience, which is why artists persist despite a general lack of pecuniary benefits and worldly disinterest.  In his book, The Blue Guitar, John Banville‘s goal is not narrative but “linguistic beauty …pursued as an end in itself “. In one passage, he describes what happens to the painter protagonist as he “…sank steadily deeper into the depths of the painted surface, the world’s prattle would retreat like an ebbing tide, leaving me at the centre of a great hollow stillness…In it I would seem suspended at once entranced and quick with awareness, alive to the faintest nuance, the subtlest play of pigment, line and form”. Banville hints that in much of writing or painting this state of hyper-awareness eludes us. “How treacherous language is, more slippery even than paint.”

So why was there so little attention to visual beauty …pursued as an end in itself, in the Entangled show?  No artist wants their work to be irrelevant, so the works shown were largely concerned with challenging modernist ideas of aesthetics rather than breaking new painterly ground, with the possible exception of a few works such as this one:

The primary goal of most of the exhibition’s painters appeared to be to challenge the idea of paintings as objects of beauty, value or egotism. While clever and in some cases original, many, if not most, paid no attention to visual beauty …pursued as an end in itself.

Some, like the piece to the right are a replay of ideas that have been done many times over the last half-century. Such works reflect the dominant art paradigm in which emotions or any feelings other than amused irony are part of an outdated modernist sensibility and strictly renounced.

So why has visual beauty, pursued as an end in itself,  become an unacceptable pursuit for a self-respecting contemporary artist? And is the Anti-Art movement a logical culmination of the antipathy to aesthetics?  The following investigates a number of very good reasons why aesthetics and art itself have become suspect.

1) Looks Good Over the Couch
The most obvious reason for disavowing aesthetics in painting is its use as decoration.  Paintings are generally chosen not for their technical skill or visual discoveries but because they complement the decor. Painters at the beginning of their careers often strive for stereotypically beautiful paintings of landscapes, bunches of flowers, nubile nudes etc.

Those who persevere realize that beauty is a snare and a delusion – the more a painter strives for beauty in a familiar form that has been portrayed by other artists and recognized as such, the farther s/he gets from it. Those who make a profession of creating “beautiful” paintings that look good over the couch never set out on the life-long journey to scale painting’s  insurmountable cliffs, at the top of which is another insurmountable cliff and so on.

2) Artwork as Investment
The second most obvious reason is that paintings exemplify the commodification of art. As in this article in the Huffington Post the wealthy looking for safe investments are advised to buy real estate and artworks, especially paintings.

“The art market rebounded quickly after the last recession, faster than traditional investments. High net worth individuals (HNWI) with a portfolio diversified into art assets were not as greatly affected. Additionally, rather than investing in stocks or bonds, art provides investors with an alternative, tangible opportunity.”

They are not, of course, buying paintings they like, but works attached to a highly valued brand (aka artist). Artists have always had to deal with the philistinism of the market, but there has likely never been a period in history when the art market, with its focus solely on profit, has  so dominated artistic production and public understanding of the value of art.

3) Art & Big Egos
In the contemporary visual art world  there is the belief is that artists who create large, grand or durable artworks are egotists. To avoid this damning charge, a generation of artists has been careful to ensure that their works are small, self-effacing, unserious and/or constructed of waste products.

Large paintings are viewed as a throwback to the modernist era when gigantic artistic egos created giant canvases.

In an attempt to democratize art, especially painting, the post-modernists discarded distinctions between “high” and “low” art. Into this aesthetic vacuum stepped the phenomenon of the artist as personality and the unprecedented importance placed by the market on the personality of the artist rather than the artworks themselves.

Artists such as Jeff Koons or Takashi Murakami, are not so much artists as brands marketed on the strength of name recognition.

4) Relativism
An offshoot of identity politics has been a revival of the relativist philosophy that Socrates opposed.  Socrates believed that virtue was something that should be aspired to and is immutable, permanent and unchanging – a moral absolute.

His antagonists, the Sophists, did “not offer true knowledge, but only an opinion of things” and held a relativistic view on cognition and knowledge.  In a relativist universe where there is no right and wrong or standards of excellence, every person can only act in their own interests and neo-liberalism is the modern version of this thinking.

The implication of relativism for the arts has been that, since Clement Greenberg, no one feels they can say whether an artwork is good or bad, or even if an object can rightly be called art. Who can judge excellence in a world without right or wrong,  good or bad?  So for contemporary artists it is safer not produce something that clearly strives for excellence but to produce works that abjure technical skill and aesthetics .

5) Truth is Beauty & Beauty Truth
Our culture and its tools have changed more in the past 30 years than in the previous 1900, so that it is no longer a changing culture but a culture of change. It is a culture where change has attained a god-like status of inevitability and determinism.

In this philosophical climate, there is no potential for art to reveal truths as there can be no absolute truths , so what is the point of art? If painting is not metaphysical or about making money or beautiful objects to please the bourgeoisie, it can only be an in-your-face repudiation of all pretentious, presumptuous, egotistical aims and a reminder of all that is wrong with society. Thus contemporary artists produce works that eschew aesthetics.

6) Art & Gentrification
A new argument against aesthetics, art & culture has surfaced that goes a long way toward explaining the hostility to art and the rise of an anti-art sensibility. This argument appeared in an article by Dorothy Woodend in the online journal The Tyee.

The article states, “Beauty doesn’t need any help. How about we fight for ugly?”  This statement is odd because, after 30 years of exploitative, poorly planned, free-for-all growth, beauty in Vancouver has been effectively expunged. However, Woodend was referring to a PR campaign by one of the more neighbourhood-unfriendly developers in the city. They are running a marketing bonanza under the guise of an art exhibition featuring giant pink billboards, transit ads, posters and pink cars emblazoned with the words “Fight for Beauty”  that are currently everywhere.

This PR campaign highlights a debate about art & culture that is gaining momentum in all cities where housing is an international commodity, locals are displaced and artists who remain are forced to scramble for studio space and affordable housing. The displacement is a result of gentrification where local governments allow the demolition of affordable dwellings and their replacement with unaffordable condos. In the cities where this is taking place, activists rightly term it class war as the less wealthy are replaced by higher-income earners.

One of the tools local governments and developers use to create acceptance of this process has been termed art washing. The Vancouver Mural Festival amply demonstrated this approach. In the same way that condominium marketing campaigns re-purpose words like “community” and “regeneration” to sell boxes of air, art is used to divert attention away from the gentrification and displacement taking place. As Woodend says, “..it is difficult not to lose respect for the very idea of art itself”.

All those pretty murals, full of blandishments  like “The Present is a Gift” were a quick way for the city to run with a branding scheme for neighbourhoods in a way that ultimately served the interests of developers, realtors, and property owners – stakeholders the then ruling municipal party, Vision Vancouver is beholden to more than working class residents who live in these areas.

Ironically, given Vancouver Mural Festival’s message of improving neighbourhoods and communities, their flagship mural, titled “The Present is a Gift,” adorns The Belvedere and its painting was the catalyst that began the renoviction process of the dozens of artists who lived in the building some for over the last 30 years.

Conclusion

The reasons above provide convincing arguments for contemporary painters to eschew painterly aesthetics. Painting has been commercialized and successful painters are entrepreneurs. The connection between art & gentrification overshadows all other concerns about the arts as it is a scourge in every major city in the world. This issue warrants further exploration and research.

However, the nagging question remains – why anti-art? The commercialized consumer culture touches every aspect of contemporary society from food to games, so why have visual artists felt their disciplines must not search for visual beauty, “pursued as an end in itself “?  Clearly this question deserves  further study so I have continued the discussion in my next blog.

The post Anti-Art first appeared on Marion-Lea Jamieson, Artist.