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is based on the assumption that there is a clear trajectory of progress in art-making where the avant guard reject the outdated, unconscious approach of the past and present and lead us forward into the future through new ways of presenting images, then the Postmodernist rejection of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.

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Philosophers have attempted to address issues to do with aesthetics, such as who should make aesthetic judgments and whether it is even possible to make them. This blog explores how philosophical theories have shaped current attitudes toward art & aesthetics. It suggests that the consolation of philosophy has not extended to the arts.

Previous blogs have wrestled with the conflict between contemporary art and aesthetics and attempted to identify and understand the problems and philosophical efforts to resolve the quandary of aesthetics. This blog makes further efforts at understanding. Wikipedia defines aesthetics as: “… a branch of philosophy that deals with the nature of art, beauty and taste and with the creation or appreciation of beauty… the study of subjective and sensory-emotional values”.

Analytical Philosophy

All western philosophy appears to be refinements of the thinking of its founding fathers, Plato and Aristotle. In brief, Plato‘s philosophy is a transcendental metaphysics based on his theory of forms and he is described as an absolutist.

Aristotle by contrast, believed that the proper goal of metaphysics is to present a non-transcendental essentialism. Two major schools of philosophy have developed from Aristotle’s approach Analytical and Continental.

Logical Positivism

Analytic philosophy is identified with the logical-positivist principle that there are not any specifically philosophical facts and that statements about value, including all ethical and aesthetic judgments, cannot be objectively verified or falsified. Instead, the logical positivists adopted the theory that value judgments expressed the attitude of the speaker. The first half of the 20th century was marked by skepticism toward, and neglect of, subjects, such as aesthetics. During this time, utilitarianism was the only non-skeptical type of ethics to remain popular. The influence of logical positivism began to decrease mid-century but it’s influence in the arts, especially the visual arts, continues to hold sway.

Logical positivism attempted to analyze & critique culturally damaging & limiting bourgeois assumptions. Based on the idea that what is cannot be extrapolated to determine what ought to be, this approach has given rise to a revolution in thinking. Politically and socially, this revolution has, in some instances, led to more diversity & inclusivity.  But these ideas have been applied more widely than they merit as well as misinterpreted and wrongly applied. While the main thrust of logical positivism was the uses & misuses of language, especially the written word, these ideas have been indiscriminately applied to the visual arts. Especially at the university level, administrators & teachers eager to embrace current thinking have embraced the idea that aesthetic judgments cannot be objectively verified or falsified. As a corollary to that it has been assumed that aesthetic judgments should therefore not be made and as a further corollary, that aesthetics itself is an unsound basis on which to view art. The influence of logical positivism has been to downgrade the role of aesthetics in the visual arts . This is based on the assumption that, as there is no objective way to determine if a work of art is beautiful or not, attempts to create beautiful works are naive and irrelevant. This transition can be seen by comparing Claude Monet‘s *Water Lilies painted in1906, to Mark Rothko’s “No. 14” painted in 1960 and Joseph Beuys‘ “Ben Vautier wrapped in String”, May 23, 1964 and “The Table”, created in 1971.

A previous blog has explored a change in the direction of art criticism as a result of this interpretation, or misinterpretation, of logical positivism. This change has made it risky for critics to make any value judgments about works of art and they are more comfortable expressing their views in the form of a personal response to the work, rather than trying to make objective observations. Critics are wary of forming or adhering to criteria on which to form judgments, or of analyzing artworks according to any criteria other than subjective experience.

A visual arts establishment fearful of taking on questions of aesthetics has left the determination of value to the marketplace. So the final outcome of one hundred years of philosophical works designed to circumvent the bourgeoisie’s stranglehold on western culture has been to consolidate and strengthen its grip on the visual arts.

Continental Philosophy

The term “continental philosophy” is used to refer to a range of thinkers and traditions outside the analytic movement. It differs from analytic philosophy in that it rejects the natural sciences as the only or most accurate way of understanding natural phenomena. Continental philosophy considers experience as variable: determined by factors such as context, space and time, language, culture, or history.

A major strain of continental thought is structuralism/post-structuralism. Structuralism proposes that one may understand human culture by means of a structure—modelled on language that differs from concrete reality and from abstract ideas. Post structuralism emphasizes plurality of meaning and instability of concepts that structuralism uses to define society; language, literature etc. So though these philosophers were mainly focused on the application of their ideas to analysis of written material, their work has been extrapolated to apply, however erroneously or tenuously, to the visual arts. The post-structuralist thinkers with the most important influences on the visual arts include Roland Barthes, Jacques Derrida, and Michel Foucault.

Barthes felt that avant-garde art should maintain a distance between its audience and itself. By presenting an obvious artificiality rather than making claims to great subjective truths, the avant-garde ensures that their audiences maintain an objective perspective. He believed that art should be critical and should interrogate the world, rather than seek to explain it. Strict adherence to this approach can be observed in any description of the goals and objectives of contemporary artists by galleries, museums of the artists themselves. These descriptions are always careful to state that the artist is “investigating” this or that in an objective way, rather than making any definitive statement as to what the art is about. This open-ended approach is a cornerstone of post-modernism.

Derrida’s work retains major academic influence and has been influential on thinking about aesthetics, art and art criticism. Derrida argued that that the whole philosophical tradition of Western culture rests on arbitrary dichotomous categories (such as sacred/profane, signifier/signified, mind/body), “by which an order is imposed on reality and by which a subtle repression is exercised, that excludes, subordinates, and hides the various potential meanings.” Derrida refers to his procedure for uncovering and unsettling these dichotomies as deconstruction of Western culture. Again, this post-structuralist approach has been widely applied to contemporary art and has become the accepted measure by which it is viewed. Any clear statement of goals or reference to absolute principles is suspect, such that contemporary art practices and criticism are based on a relentless relativism. The more vague and open-ended an art-work, the better, to avoid accusations of the artist’s attempt to impose a subtle repression of the viewer’s freedom of interpretation.

Foucault’s theories primarily address the relationship between power and knowledge, and how they are used as a form of social control through societal institutions. Often cited as a post-structuralist and postmodernist, his thought has influenced academics working in critical theory.

The rarefied philosophical musings of these thinkers have had a profound impact on contemporary art. Critics have attempted to interpret, translate and apply the moral relativism of Continental Philosophy to the visual arts to profound, but detrimental, effect.

In her book, The Long Life, Helen Small says she does not wish to “revisit the deconstructive/Heideggerian debate over the “destruction” of metaphysics – or what sometimes looks like a competition for the credit of having murdered it (Derrida v. Nietzche)”. If we define metaphysics as “thoughts which seek to penetrate beyond the boundaries of experience” by denying any metaphysical basis for either existence or thought, this view assaults traditional criteria for aesthetic judgements. Artistic forms can no longer be linked to any substantive affirmative metaphysical meaning.

Professor Helen Small, Merton Professor of English Language and Literature

No Consolation of Philosophy

This brief discussion of analytical and continental philosophy suggests that both branches of the discipline have contributed to deriding the role of aesthetics in the visual arts.  Both branches agree on a central theme – aesthetic judgments express the attitude of the speaker rather than any objective fact and artworks can only be analyzing according to subjective experience. However, the continental philosophers have been most effective in convincing the Western contemporary art establishment of this view.

The previous blog On Criticism, described how the thinking of post-structuralists colonized universities and shaped contemporary art institutions and through them, contemporary art. These assumptions have been transported to institutions of higher learning where students learn the words and phrases that are designed to convey their superior understanding of art and denote a belt of intellectual rather than technical tools. Some critics argue that universities have been transformed in the late twentieth century into institutions where the broadly humanist educational curricula of the past have been replaced by a free-market model of learning and where the assumptions of moral relativism are scarcely challenged.

As David Balzer explains in his book, Curationism, it is no longer adequate to go to art school, one must have a Masters of Fine Arts to be taken seriously. He describes how critical theory imported from Europe, mainly from France, became trendy in the 1980’s and colonized universities in the 1990’s. One of the main objectives of this critical theory, particularly post-structuralism, is to explode assumptions about language, tradition and privilege. Graduates of programs based on these new theories were embraced by contemporary museum and gallery curators as a way to ostensibly break free from their image of themselves as having a stodgy, dead-white-male-focus. Artists thus came under pressure to professionalize by taking graduate degrees from the institutions that offered these new theories, especially for those working outside painting, drawing and traditional sculpture.

While the post-structuralist theories discussed above challenged the white male privileges of the modernist era, they have led to unanticipated effects on the visual arts that, some would say, have damaged Western culture more than the previous philosophical errors. These effects include more social control by societal institutions, less creative freedom for artists and far less creation or appreciation of beauty and subjective sensory-emotional values, or aesthetics.

The impact of the post-structuralists has gone far beyond the arts and could be said to have negatively affected the earth itself. As Zadie Smith says in the collection of essays, Feel Free (2018):

“What will we tell our granddaughters about our collective failure to address global warming? So I might say to her, ‘look: the thing you have to appreciate is that we’d just been through a century of relativism and deconstruction, in which we were informed that most of our fondest-held principles were either uncertain or simple wishful thinking, and in many areas of our lives we had already been asked to accept that nothing is essential and everything changes–and this had taken the fight out of us somewhat.“

Where the cultural establishment does not tolerate expressing opinions based on firm principles, and where it is assumed that every work of art is subject to any number of various interpretation, none of which are more true or relevant than any other, there is an authority vacuum created. As David Balzer explains in Curationism, this vacuum has been filled by the sector with the most to gain from creating its own measure of value for artworks – the market. Value is imparted by popularity, sales and giving people what they want. Curators have become visual merchandisers so that contemporary art has become a seemingly timeless zone of consumerism and spectacle. Two examples of highly successful artist/merchandisers are Damien Hirst and Jeff Koons.

We have been schooled by university cultural-studies departments and their end-of-snobbery messages to believe that anything is fair game for “critical discourse” from porn to action films and mainstream hit-driven music. Balzar goes on to suggest that the equal aesthetic rights given to all expressions of human activity prevents the addressing of internal structural oppression. “It invokes an abstract idea of equality that is institutionally normalized without being able to see the means by which that normalization occurs”.

Thus this blog concludes that aesthetics in the visual arts have come full circle after a century of philosophical attempts to construct or deconstruct the ways in which aesthetic judgments are made. Instead of social control effected through value judgments by societal institutions run by stodgy white males, social control is effected through dollar value judgments imposed by the marketplace. As Balzar points out, however, the arts may be in a worse position now than before because this social control is subtle and internalized, so it is difficult for dissenters to frame their opposition in the face of an entrenched and highly popular system of belief.

How have relativism and deconstruction, in which our fondest-held principles are wishful thinking, nothing is essential and everything changes, become so entrenched? In any overview of philosophy, relativism and deconstruction are included as only one of many lines of thought and not considered the most important in terms of contributing to an understanding of the most vexing quandaries of our existence.  So how has suspicion of any clear statement of goals, reference to any absolute principles and denial of any metaphysical basis for existence or thought become the dominant paradigm? If we follow the money, we find connections between moral and aesthetic relativism and the triumph of free-market capitalism.

An interesting topic for other blogs, but meanwhile relativism has taken the fight out of us at a time when we need to battle against art as commodity and the earth as an environmental catastrophe. For these crises, there has been no consolation from the most influential philosophies.

The post The Consolation of Philosophy 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.

The question is whether painting is relevant and can have an impact on the wider society, or whether it is an art form that is only about the painters’ connection to the painting and the viewer’s personal connection to the painting. Is it a passive art form or can it make the leap from canvas to galvanizing political action?

Paintings in History

In many periods of history, painting has played a powerful role as political propaganda. Earlier civilizations such as the Egyptians, Assyrians, Greeks and Romans used murals, bas-reliefs and sculptures to celebrate political triumphs and the power of the elites. This tradition continued through the 20th century with the commissioning of paintings and sculptures commemorating battles won and their victorious winners. As the last centuries’ winners have been outed as ruthless and immoral by any standards, there has been demands for removal of these sculptures and paintings from the public realm. So in that sense, paintings depicting the triumphs of ruthless men have had a strong political impact even in the present day.

There have been powerful paintings that generated controversy and influenced public attitudes and even political outcomes that were not sanctioned by ruling elites. For example, the painting below, Raft of the Medusa, had scandalous political implications in France; the incompetent captain, who had gained the position because of connections to the Bourbon Restoration government, fought to save himself and senior officers while leaving the lower ranks to die, so Géricault’s picture of the raft and its inhabitants was greeted with hostility by the government. As Jake Hirsch-Allen says in his analysis, “the power of The Raft as a political tool of propaganda was immediately apparent and has been its most enduring historical facet. As the story of the Medusa became a cause célebré, embroiled in the complexities of
Bourbon-restoration politics and tensions between the Liberal and Royalist factions…and, as
events progressed, with the highly emotive subject of the slave trade, the Raft of the Medusa
itself became a symbol these debates.”

Though Géricault’s painting was still part of in the heroic “history painting” style, this muscular work was transformative in re-defining the scope of painting’s subjects and impacts.

The Impressionists

While Impressonists such as Claude Monet and Edouard Manet are not usually associated with shaping political attitudes, their work had influence. As art historian Nancy Locke said in transcripts of her talk to students at Penn State University, “By painting the homeless, for example, Manet depicted the social implications of poverty. Similarly, by painting scenes which blurred class lines (like many subjects of the Impressionist canvas), artists influenced shifts in society.”

In his paper on Intersections of Art and Politics, John Kim Munholland, argues that Monet also communicated a strong political message, “The Rue Montorgueil, Celebration of June 30,1878 and its twin The Rue Saint-Denis, Celebration of June 30, 1878, in which the words “Vive la République” appear on a flag…blurred class differences with their patriotic, republican messages. Set in the streets of a popular quarter of Paris, they reminded viewers that the Commune uprising also had been an expression of outraged and frustrated nationalism among the people of Paris, who had held out against the Prussians during the siege, but had been forced to capitulate by the Versailles government.”

Early-Modernism

The “history painters” and Impressionists sought to influence the direction of their societies through content, or depiction of their subjects. The modernists scorned content and expressed themselves only through form. For instance, Piet Mondrian, working during the appalling upheavals in Europe during the 1930’s & 40’s, believed that his work was a “plastic vision” that would help to set up ” …a new type of society composed of balanced relationships”.

According to the online Encyclopedia Britannica, Mondrian’s artistic direction was “Rooted in a strict puritan tradition of Dutch Calvinism and inspired by his theosophical beliefs, he continually strove for purity during his long career, a purity best explained by the double meaning of the Dutch word schoon, which means both “clean” and “beautiful.” Mondrian chose the strict and rigid language of straight line and pure colour to produce first of all an extreme purity, and on another level, a Utopia of superb clarity and force. When, in 1920, Mondrian dedicated Le Néo-plasticisme to “future men,” his dedication implied that art can be a guide to humanity, that it can move beyond depicting the casual, arbitrary facts of everyday appearance and substitute in its place a new, harmonious view of life. This kind of magical thinking is like a poignant glimmer of a previous era’s optimism about art and the human imagination. Mondrian’s philosophy could be thought of as self-indulgent navel-gazing, except for the fact that it produced these astounding works of art and revolutionized thinking about painting.

Modernism

From a twenty-first century perspective, the conviction that rigidly controlled lines and blocks of colour could contribute to world peace seemed laughable. Modernists, like the Minimalists who came after Mondrian, did not share his belief in the power of art to transform society. Like Frank Stella they had a reductionist approach to art, wanting only to demonstrate that every painting is “a flat surface with paint on it—nothing more”, and rejected the idea art as a means of expressing emotion. He summarized his apolitical and anti-social approach by saying, “My painting is based on the fact that only what can be seen there is there. It really is an object… All I want anyone to get out of my paintings, and all I ever get out of them, is the fact that you can see the whole idea without any confusion…. What you see is what you see.“

So with Modernism, painting became what in another blog is described as “self-reflexive”, or concerned only about itself. This could be considered to be a political statement as it is in keeping with the growing individualism of the second half of the twentieth century. Ties to community were weakening and western governments pressured their citizens to become individualistic consumers to bolster the economy.

The drive for purity by Modernists like Frank Stella, Ellsworth Kelly, and Kenneth Noland influenced, and was strongly influenced by, the thinking of the American art critic, Clement Greenberg. His theories could be said to have built on the ideas about purity that inspired Mondrian, but lacked the painter’s Calvinist & Theosophical zeal.

Greenberg believed in progressively purifying painting of all representation and illusion and promoted the hard-edged and colour-field abstractions of his favourite artists. Mondrian believed that his painting would contribute to a more harmonious and peaceful world. The only rationale provided by the Modernists for cleansing away any spatial depth or sculptural qualities in painting, was that it is ridiculous to try to create spatial illusions on a flat surface. Modernists did not feel that art should play a role in the larger world, but believed in “art for art’s sake”. The rise of a consumer culture and the commodification of art during this period was not a concern.

Post-Modernism

The Postmodernists were more aware of consumerism and the emerging role of the art market but the movement tried to neutralize it by absorbing it. Postmodernists reversed the Modernist contempt for popular culture, the mass media and mass consumerism and looked for inspiration in the everyday. In his blog The Postmodern Revolution, David Adams comments that this approach “…seemed much more vital than modernist art. (See for example fig. 7, which also suggests the revival of painting that took place).”

Adams goes on to say, “…postmodernism refers to the end of an epistemologically centered philosophy based on the efforts of a knowing subject to know truth by achieving a true mental representation of objective reality (the Cartesian subject-object dualism). It argues (among many other things) that there is no temporally invariant truth since human understanding is always historically-based (or “contingent”).

Post-modern relativism, which has been discussed in other blogs, was a direct outgrowth of the individualist and anti-social introspection of the Modernist era. In this approach, not only does painting have no relation to anything outside itself, it assumes that there is nothing outside itself that is true – only what a particular individual might happen to believe. This brings us to the present day where relativism is widely held and could be called the dominant paradigm. Part of this paradigm is that there can be no possibility of an authoritative assessment of artistic worth or quality as everything is only relative. Anyone’s taste in art is equal to anyone else’s as there are no absolute or even conventionally accepted criteria. Into this moral and authoritative vacuum, the market has taken on the role that used to be held by what used to be called experts on art.

The Market Monster
In a culture of getting and spending where there are no other standards for gauging excellence in art, the marketplace is the logical arbiter. A painting is worthwhile if it can obtain a high price. A previous post, On Theories of Art, suggested that objective assessments of art are difficult to attain because art is about feelings rather than reason, but feels the need to be justified by some form of reason other than marketability. As in all aspects of life in a capitalist society, the market has skewed relations between artists and their work and between artists and viewers.

Though written in 1975, Harold Rosenberg’s Art on the Edge, contains many ideas that remain highly relevant. Rosenberg calls the influence of the marketplace on the direction of contemporary art “…a process of transformation whose end is not in sight” (p.8) and over 40 years later, this transformation continues to mutate. For an artist, alternatives to the market are either art-as-criticism, (parody, irony, subversion) or making art for oneself. The irony is that ironic, subversive, parodies of art have been absorbed by the establishment so that they happily sponsor shows that are opposed to them. “To create the illusion of an adversary force, everything that has been overthrown must be overthrown again and again”. (p.90)

This relates to a discussion in the previous post describing the current epoch as not a changing culture but a culture of change. The ideology of constant change has, like the end of history, eliminated real change. It will not be possible to rescue art from the market’s perverse influences through renunciation of artistic sins that went before. And it is naive to believe that one art form or another can have an effect on a pervasive economic system that manipulates every aspect of life.

The Contemporary Era

As I am an artist not a scholar, this is a necessarily brief and sketchy overview of the social and political influence of the visual arts, especially painting, over the last 100 years. I have divided art history into three major art movements: Pre-Modernism, Modernism and Post Modernism. These divisions are only visible from historical perspective and the current era is made up of many disparate schools such as Post-Post-Modernism, Anti-Art, Conceptual Art, Site Specific Art, Installation Art, etc. Their commonality is the assumption that easel painting is dead, or at least irrelevant. But as I have argued here, jettisoning easel painting and conventional concepts of aesthetics, has done nothing to bring greater harmony or halt the commodification of art. Western societies teeter on the brink of instability and the art market continues to go from strength to strength. As I update this blog in April of 2024, I include the latest figures for the art market in 2023 from Artsy:

“The art market experienced a down year in 2023. Total sales in the art market fell by 4% year over year to $65 billion. The figure represents the lowest since the COVID-blighted year of 2020, but is still higher than pre-pandemic levels when sales were $64.4 billion”.

However, their good news for art market was:

“Most dealers and auction houses expect stable or improving sales in 2024, and those predicting lower sales were in the minority both for their own businesses and with their peers.“

This is not the Utopian, harmonious culture that Mondrian hoped to bring about through an extreme purity, superb clarity and force in painting. The modernists and post-modernist that followed, and the elimination of aesthetics and painterly painting they endorsed, have been happily absorbed by the market. So where does this leave contemporary art and artists? This is a topic for future blogs about even more on painting.

The post Even more on Painting first appeared on Marion-Lea Jamieson, Artist.

The 2D/3D series built on earlier work in the Ephemera series. It explores the dualities of male & female, vertical and horizontal, soft and hard, open and closed, active & passive.

They built on the Ephemera series by again working with the transition between an idea realized in one dimension that could then be translated into a third.

These works were intentionally lush to suggest the intensity of the process and to communicate that experience.  This assumes that imagination and creativity are human attributes that offer the greatest potential for harmony.  It also assumes that art can and should act as a counter-weight to the overwhelmingly empty or negative images with which we are continually barraged, rather than underline them.

I wrestle with being  a modernist painter in a post-modern era. I recognize and accept the post-modern critique that has forced artists to examine their assumption of socially enforced dysfunctional paradigms. But now, artists should move beyond a critical stance to a more pro-active role. While cynicism and irony have been important tools for creating distance from unrealistic optimism, perhaps it’s time to rejuvenate art’s role as a vehicle for exploring the spiritual side of human experience. In an increasingly crowded globe with divisive differences, art is universally accessible and can help to focus on what is worthwhile.

Every/No Thing, ML Jamieson, 2005, oil on canvas, 36” x 48”

These paintings were developed during the summer I lived in a small cabin in an organic orchard in Winfield, on the outskirts of Kelowna while working on a sculpture commission for that city.  After a long day onsite in the hot city I would return to the cabin in the evenings and draw.  It was almost a retreat experience as I barely had electricity and no phone, fax, computer or all the distracting paraphernalia of modern life.              

I bought a sheaf of drawing papers, a bundle of oil pastels and lost myself in the joy of form, colour, line and texture.  In my nightly drawing sessions I was searching for an uninhibited flow of ideas from my unconscious to the paper via my oil sticks.

Working in euphoric bursts of energy, I had great satisfaction in having nothing to do with the rational mind.  I produced about 20 drawings in that time.

The Winfield cabin drawings were experiments in colour, line & form and back in my Vancouver studio, were translated  into oil paint on canvas. These drawing and paintings were then used as research for developing 3D ideas for concrete sculptures. Working through  drawings and paintings was a good way to come up with ideas  to develop in 3D .

The idea in Memory was subsequently translated into concrete in the two pieces below:

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There were many other concrete pieces that grew out of the original 2D/3D series begun in that cabin in Winfield that can be the subject of another blog.

The post On Painting: 2D/3D first appeared on Marion-Lea Jamieson, Artist.