Frank Stella... and the Simulacrum
Published in Flash Art, No. 126, January 1986
Here comes the time of the great Culture of tactile communication, under the
technico-luminous cinematic space of total spatio dynamic theatre.
- Baudrillard
There have consistently been two poles around which critical attitudes towards the work of Frank Stella have been located. On one hand, his work has been hailed as an apotheosis of rigorous modernist painting. It is seen as material in its effects, unbending in its logic, and hermetic in its outlook. On the other hand, it is viewed, derisively, as a dehumanized dead-end of painting. Here it is judged that the complexity of painting has been eliminated and the images have become merely "graphic." Humanistic subtlety is seen to be lacking in his work, where only a “bureaucratic" reshuffling and an "administrative," managerial approach to making art remains.
Ironically, it is only by combining these two view-points that a cogent appreciation of Stella's work can emerge. We will find that Stella's art is both materialist and bureaucratic, that it is both hermetic and graphic. But in order to encompass these various qualities, a different critical overview is needed. We will find that Stella is neither a modernist nor a bureaucrat, but that his work conforms closely to a model of post-modernism that is dominated by ideas of hyper-realization, simulation, closure, and fascination.
We must initially ask, how can Frank Stella’s work be post-modern when post-modernism is an idea that has emerged in criticism only in the 1980’s? The answer is that the critical formulation and dissemination of the idea of post-modernism has lagged far behind its appearance in art and in the culture. It is in fact in the early ‘60’s, the time of Frank Stella’s emergence as an artist, that the elements of the post-modern and its kindred phenomenon, the post-industrial, began to fall into place.
The early ‘60’s produced the emergence of the informational culture of the computer and of electronics. It produced international jet travel on a commercial scale and the accompanying changes in spatio-temporal and cultural relationships that the phenomenon precipitated. The
60’s produced the Interstate Highway System and the associated development of the de-centered Sun Belt cities that are based on the circulation of the automobile. It produced ICBM’s, the space program, and satellite reconnaissance, all of which inscribed reality within their circular orbits and parabolic trajectories.
If the ‘60’s were the cusp between the worlds of the industrial and the post-industrial, and between the real and the simulated, the art of the '60's was a response to this situation. On one side, in '60's art there is an intense nostalgia for both traditional and industrial culture. Rock musicians were fascinated by the acoustic Blues of the railroad culture of the 20's and by sitar music from India. Fashion embraced Guatemalan textiles and the clothing of the nineteenth-century American West. But at the same time, there is a fascination for the technological, the simulated, and the futuristic that is reflected in such phenomena as molded plastic furniture, the electric guitar, and the geodesic dome.
Stella, around 1960, can be seen as responding to this same situation. In Stella's work, a crucial transition took place in the jump between the Black paintings, which were still nostalgic for the industrial and the traditional, and the Aluminum paintings, which clearly embodied elements of the hyper-real, post-industrial world.
The Black paintings were still modernist in inspiration. The paint application, while mechanical, is uneven, and it shimmers with the sensitivity to light that is present in, for example, a Rothko. The patterned bands are likewise repetitive, but their symmetrical, hieratic quality and the frequent use of diagonal motifs links the images to the use of patterning in traditional non-Western art. The configurations are reminiscent of Islamic tile-work or perhaps Kurdistani carpets. Finally, the ubiquitous shimmering black color links the paintings to '50's nihilism and existentialism.
In the Aluminum paintings, an entirely different consciousness is posited. The paint is now applied evenly, the bands separated by taped lines. The effect is cool, even science-fictional. The paint is not just metallic – it is aluminum, which is a contemporary, technological metal linked with lightness, efficiency, and commercial applications. Most importantly, however, the configurations have almost completely lost their traditional, associative character. Instead, the introduction of the "jog" suddenly makes the bands appear to be moving: they are like lanes on a highway; they are bands for movement or circulation. In addition, the bands are unvarying and uninflected. They fill the space evenly and neutrally, becoming surrogates for activity in the painting and substitutes for painterly incident and imagery.
The cut-out areas of the Aluminum paintings also have an important function. No longer are these lanes of movement, these conduits of circulation, seen against a background as they are in, say, a Mondrian. In Stella, the background, and with it nature, is cut out. Abstract circulation and movement becomes the only reality.
In the various series of stripe paintings during the following five years, the concerns of the Aluminum paintings were furthered and expanded. The Copper painting are noteworthy in so far as their right-angle turns and intersections make more explicit Stella’s circulatory concerns. The Purple series introduced a new level of simulated intensity with Stella’s use of metallic purple pigment. Their configurations – triangles, parallelograms, and pentagons in which the bands form a continuous circuit also define a situation of closure and circularity where line flows into line without beginning or end.
In the running V series, the bands seem to travel at a new velocity more akin to electricity moving through a microprocessor than mere automobiles traveling on a highway. In the Moroccan series, Day-Glo paint is introduced. Color itself is not replaced by its hyper-realized simulated equivalent. In addition, in the Moroccan series, the theme of non-Western culture re-emerges in a post-modern way. There is no longer any possibility of actual influence by a non-Western sensibility in this art. Rather, in these paintings, as in the phenomenon of “Super Graphics,” Moroccan culture is deracinated and reduced to its most easily reproduced signs. A whole culture is reproduced by the simple devices of bright color and diagonal repeating patterns. The enclosure by the hyper-real of all other realities is complete.
Stella’s development during these years is of interest not just for the visual themes that appear in his pictures, but for the way he went about ordering the production of his paintings as well. During this period, Stella hyper-realized the means he employed. He used only man-made high-tech pigments and paints.
His deep stretchers, shaped formats, and extra human scale also seem to hyper-realize the painting as an object: they are pushed further from the wall than a “real” painting; they are bigger and more aggressive in shape.
At the same time, Stella’s use of series in moving from one group of paintings to the next is important. Artists have often worked in series, but in Stella’s
work there is no gradual evolution from painting to painting as one series emerges from the next. Rather series follows series in almost yearly intervals like car models from Detroit. Further, within the series, there is no modernist original upon which the other works are based. Instead the configurations for the whole series were decided on before hand. The identity of each painting was based on its being a part of the series.
The exhibition of these paintings as complete series hyper-realized the modernist idea of the art exhibit. In a Stella exhibition during these years, no evolution was visible. There were no large important paintings and smaller intimate ones. Rather there was just the display of the series, which combined with the other simulated and hyper-real means Stella had employed, gave these exhibitions a distinctly science-fictional quality.
In 1967, with the Protractor series, Stella's work moved even further into the world of simulation. Until 1967, Stella's paintings could still be read literally, as flat areas of paint on canvas, without illusion or ambiguity. But in the Protractor series, this literalist, still modernist space disappears and is replaced by the contradictory, theatrical, and seductive space of the Simulacrum.
In the Protractor paintings, the way space is made is three-fold. First, there is the physical space of the painting-as-object, which is dramatized by their
massive dimensions, unusual shapes, and deep relief. It is further emphasized by the inelegant physical way the canvas is stretched over the huge stretchers, the casual pencil lines, and the alternating areas of evenly applied paint and raw canvas. Secondly, there is the space of the design, which emphasized either the overlap of the interlacing bands or the interlocking relationships between fanning and framing bands. Thirdly, there is the space made by combining Day-Glo and bright acrylic colors which pulsate with an eerie push-pull effect that creates a coloristic space independent of the spatial
reading indicated by the bands.
These three independent spatial systems combine to achieve a space of theatricality and fascination. There is no attempt at a unity of spatial clues. Rather the spatial signs are additive – they combine to give as intense an effect as possible. Here we have left the unified modern space of reason and have entered a post-modern space whose purpose is to seduce.
In the Protractor series, Stella also furthered his relationship with the issues of multiplicity and the model. The Protractor paintings are not only based on a series of pre-existing patterns, but each variant is now treated in three different ways, as ”interlaces,” “rainbows," and "fans." The choice of the protractor as
the basis for this series is also significant. Stella's previous configurations had been based on simple geometric shapes -- squares, triangles, pentagons, and so on shapes which still had some link with the classic, idealist tradition of geometry. In the protractor, Stella chose a tool of the designer and engineer. The protractor is both itself a model, and it is a tool for making models. With the Protractor series, Stella takes the final step from the modern world of the ideal into the post-modern world, where the model precedes all.
In Stella's work, the Protractor series was at the same time an end and a beginning. It was the end of his making paintings simply with paint on canvas,
while it was the beginning of his use of additive coloristic and spatial effects to create visual overload that has characterized his work in metal relief up to the present time.
The various series of metal-relief paintings represent an intensification of the approach taken in the Protractor series. Seemingly massive cut-out shapes of high-tech honeycomb aluminum are lifted and tilted with mystifying ease. They are layered one over another with such complexity that any idea of their actual
spatial relationships is confused. Figure and ground are also obscured as holes created by negative spaces are filled by shapes peeking out from behind. Then, each plane is covered with a profusion of paint, color, and
brushwork that further complicates the space and creates a further sense of scintillating spectacle. In this work, we are in a world where space is dramatic but no longer makes sense, where everything is arranged to maximize effect, where, like at Disneyworld, Las Vegas, or the Shopping Mall, everything is arranged to entice, seduce, and amaze.
This is also a world in which any sign is admissible but all are severed from any vestigial real meaning. Here, the abstract expressionist brushstroke is reduced to an empty, neutral sign. The brilliant, complex color serves no other purpose than to establish the color-effect. Likewise, composition serves only to establish the ideas of movement and attraction. The works as a whole become a hyper-real, neutral simulation of painting.
The only references out of the work are into the world of the Simulacrum. Honeycomb aluminum and etched magnesium remind us of the post-industrial world of ultra-light metals and printed circuits. The illusionistic “cones and pillars” of the newest work are reminiscent of the spatial simulations of computer graphics. And, of course, everything refers to the universe of the model-multiply-produced parts with repeating imagery are bolted together into paintings that are themselves also multiples.
If we have established a case for Frank Stella’s work as post-modern, we must finally ask – how can this be so when Stella himself articulates such a different
set of concerns for his own work? It is possible because in the post-modern situation the artist does not necessarily have the same degree of self-consciousness that was characteristic of modernism. In fact, in the case of
Stella, we may see him acting out the role of modernist artist for a post-modern audience, and we can see his work as a hyper-realization of modernism. We may also see him so firmly encased within the Simulacrum that he has no awareness of its existence (unlike Warhol, who during the '60's constantly alluded to his consciousness of this issue – although this was perhaps why he was unable to sustain his critique). For example, Stella has recently discussed his desire to give his work the same intense reality that is present in the work of an artist like Caravaggio. But if we translate Stella's
desire for intense reality into desire for intense hyper-reality, we can get an idea of Stella's position vis-à-vis the Simulacrum.
Finally, Stella's modernist credentials are often supported by reference to his education: as a product of the prep school and the distinguished university, he is thought undoubtedly to be a worthy standard-bearer of the modernist tradition. Yet it is exactly this training that explains why we may locate Stella within the Simulacrum. For the Simulacrum was not invented by the masses, by the drinkers of Pepsi and the watchers of Super Bowls. It was invented by corporations, brokerage houses, advertising firms, and broadcasting companies, precisely those institutions that draw their leaders from those machines for turning modernist knowledge into post-modern information, the elite universities.
domingo, 14 de diciembre de 2008
Notes on Nostalgia
Notes on Nostalgia
Published in New Observations, New York, No. 28, 1985.
Simulation is master, and nostalgia, the phantasmal parodic rehabilitation of all lost referentials, alone remains.
--Baudrillard
1. Nostalgia is not a passing phenomenon precipitated by the 'conservatism' of the '80's. Rather it is a structural 'reality': it affects all current utterances - in the media, in politics, and in art.
2. Nostalgia has replaced nature as a referent in post-industrial culture. Nostalgia is the result of the massive realization of the concept of history that has occurred in all areas of thought; but, at the same time, it is also a result of the leveling of history that accompanies this surfeit of historical thought. The image of history is no longer the rough-hewn, well-defined road winding up the mountain's side. Its image has become instead the swamp, a morass criss-crossed by the myriad muddy paths that go nowhere, that disappear into the fogged-in horizon.
3. Every aspect of the social is subject to the rule of this history severed from determinism. In the daily TV news, the present is transformed into the historical: "events" are selected to make each day conform to the system of history. On the radio news, history is written on-the-hour. But national revolutions, car accidents, and the comments of film stars are all treated the same by this leveled historicity.
4. History becomes entertainment and entertainment become history. There are TV docu-dramas, and there are the Academy Awards. There is 60 Minutes, and there is the Baseball Hall of Fame. There is the traditional Christian calendar year 1984, and there is Super Bowl XVIII.
5. In politics, nostalgia promises the return of a reality that was itself an abstract ideal. Politicians rap themselves in the mantle of this nostalgia. Gary Hart runs as Kennedy, John Glenn runs as Ike, and Mondale runs as Hubert Humphrey. But Reagan wins because he runs as John Wayne. Reagan holds out to us a return to the time when men rode horses, chopped wood and owned ranches (though in this case the ranch is in the heart of Southern California). The question is this: Can the simulation of this reality give rise to a real disaster? Or does the system of deterrence characteristic of the simulacrum continue to enclose these approximations of the real? (The epoch of reality and the epoch of total war were, of course the same.)
6. In art, nostalgia is everywhere. There is nostalgia for the early twentieth century. There is nostalgia for Romanticism. There is nostalgia for the '50's, and nostalgia for Pop. Baudrillard tells us that everything is entitled to a second life as nostalgic referential. Artists today paint the '50's the way the Impressionists painted haystacks at sunset.
7. Since history has lost its directionality, this nostalgia is no longer the same thing as when the modernist artist referred to a previous style. Picasso quoted Cezanne because Cezanne represented a marker in an historical progression. Today there is left only a commentary on the vast crisscrossing of historical styles. (Or was history already leveled when Picasso quoted Cezanne?).
8. Nostalgia has also replaced transgression, or rather, nostalgia now simulates transgression. The Abstract Expressionists simulated transgression by their nostalgic adoption of the strategies of European modernism. The Neo Expressionists simulate transgression by their "parodic rehabilitation" of the early twentieth century; the post-modern architects accomplish the same thing by rehabilitating a pre-modernist vocabulary.
9. This is the end of art 'as we know it.' It is the end of the art of art history. It is the end of urban art with its dialectical struggles. Today this simulated art takes place in cities that are also doubles of themselves, cities that only exist as nostalgic references to the idea of city and to the ideas of communication and social intercourse. These simulated cities are placed around the globe more or less exactly where the old cities were, but they no longer fulfill the function of the old cities. They are no longer centers; they only serve to simulate the phenomenon of the center. And within these simulated centers, usually exactly at their very heart, is where this simulated art activity takes place, an activity itself nostalgic for the reality of activity in art.
Published in New Observations, New York, No. 28, 1985.
Simulation is master, and nostalgia, the phantasmal parodic rehabilitation of all lost referentials, alone remains.
--Baudrillard
1. Nostalgia is not a passing phenomenon precipitated by the 'conservatism' of the '80's. Rather it is a structural 'reality': it affects all current utterances - in the media, in politics, and in art.
2. Nostalgia has replaced nature as a referent in post-industrial culture. Nostalgia is the result of the massive realization of the concept of history that has occurred in all areas of thought; but, at the same time, it is also a result of the leveling of history that accompanies this surfeit of historical thought. The image of history is no longer the rough-hewn, well-defined road winding up the mountain's side. Its image has become instead the swamp, a morass criss-crossed by the myriad muddy paths that go nowhere, that disappear into the fogged-in horizon.
3. Every aspect of the social is subject to the rule of this history severed from determinism. In the daily TV news, the present is transformed into the historical: "events" are selected to make each day conform to the system of history. On the radio news, history is written on-the-hour. But national revolutions, car accidents, and the comments of film stars are all treated the same by this leveled historicity.
4. History becomes entertainment and entertainment become history. There are TV docu-dramas, and there are the Academy Awards. There is 60 Minutes, and there is the Baseball Hall of Fame. There is the traditional Christian calendar year 1984, and there is Super Bowl XVIII.
5. In politics, nostalgia promises the return of a reality that was itself an abstract ideal. Politicians rap themselves in the mantle of this nostalgia. Gary Hart runs as Kennedy, John Glenn runs as Ike, and Mondale runs as Hubert Humphrey. But Reagan wins because he runs as John Wayne. Reagan holds out to us a return to the time when men rode horses, chopped wood and owned ranches (though in this case the ranch is in the heart of Southern California). The question is this: Can the simulation of this reality give rise to a real disaster? Or does the system of deterrence characteristic of the simulacrum continue to enclose these approximations of the real? (The epoch of reality and the epoch of total war were, of course the same.)
6. In art, nostalgia is everywhere. There is nostalgia for the early twentieth century. There is nostalgia for Romanticism. There is nostalgia for the '50's, and nostalgia for Pop. Baudrillard tells us that everything is entitled to a second life as nostalgic referential. Artists today paint the '50's the way the Impressionists painted haystacks at sunset.
7. Since history has lost its directionality, this nostalgia is no longer the same thing as when the modernist artist referred to a previous style. Picasso quoted Cezanne because Cezanne represented a marker in an historical progression. Today there is left only a commentary on the vast crisscrossing of historical styles. (Or was history already leveled when Picasso quoted Cezanne?).
8. Nostalgia has also replaced transgression, or rather, nostalgia now simulates transgression. The Abstract Expressionists simulated transgression by their nostalgic adoption of the strategies of European modernism. The Neo Expressionists simulate transgression by their "parodic rehabilitation" of the early twentieth century; the post-modern architects accomplish the same thing by rehabilitating a pre-modernist vocabulary.
9. This is the end of art 'as we know it.' It is the end of the art of art history. It is the end of urban art with its dialectical struggles. Today this simulated art takes place in cities that are also doubles of themselves, cities that only exist as nostalgic references to the idea of city and to the ideas of communication and social intercourse. These simulated cities are placed around the globe more or less exactly where the old cities were, but they no longer fulfill the function of the old cities. They are no longer centers; they only serve to simulate the phenomenon of the center. And within these simulated centers, usually exactly at their very heart, is where this simulated art activity takes place, an activity itself nostalgic for the reality of activity in art.
Against Post-Modernism: Reconsidering Ortega
Against Post-Modernism: Reconsidering Ortega
Published in Arts Magazine, New York, Vol. 56, No. 3, November 1981.
In the last few years, there has been a growing interest on the part of many critics in the idea of post-modernism. These writers define post-modernism in various ways, but they share in common the belief that the age of modernist art is over and that anew set of theories is needed to describe art today.
No writer, however, seems to have entertained the possibility that what is today though of as modernism is not really outdated, but merely badly formulated in the first place. Critics today seem to universally equate modernism with the formalist ideas developed by Clement Greenberg in the 1950’s. But Greenberg’s definition of modernism has never been adequate to define the full range of twentieth-century modernist art. This formalist modernism was no better suited to define the past than it is the present. Another definition of modernism, outlined by the Spanish writer Jose Ortega y Gasset in his 1925 essay, “The Dehumanization of Art,” is both possible and more useful.
Any attempt to define the extent and character of modernist art is both a descriptive and a prescriptive exercise, since no definition of the characteristics of a society’s artistic production can be free of the author’s aspirations for that society. Greenberg’s modernism sought to provide an artistic equivalent for America’s post-war aspirations to leadership of the western and developing nations. Today, with those aspirations in shambles, it is not surprising that the ideas behind the equivalent aesthetic movement seem irrelevant and distant.
Greenberg also sought to provide a theory of modernism for a country that, unlike its European counterparts, was not yet post-industrial, but still completing its initial state of industrial growth. The art of post-war America, Abstract Expressionism, was transcendentalist, expressionistic, and confident, like European art of the nineteenth century, where Europe was still an industrializing culture. Greenberg’s modernism provided a positivist, determinist theory to support American art that was tied, ironically, to the values of both nineteenth-century capitalism with its emphasis on “taste” and “quality”) and nineteenth-century Marxism.
In order to form such a theory, Greenberg was forced to ignore a great deal of twentieth-century European art. Dada, Surrealism, Duchamp had no place in his system. He was forced to label even Analytic Cubism a “counter-revolution” against modernism and to push back the beginning of the modernist era to the middle of the nineteenth century to include the Impressionists (especially Monet), who were paradigmatic to his theory.
This strategy blurred important distinctions between this century and the last. In Greenberg’s formalist modernism, the nineteenth and twentieth centuries are treated as a unified historical epoch. The essential differences between the industrial nineteenth century and the post-industrial twentieth century are ignored. But, in fact, the nineteenth century was the era of industrialization in the Western world, of mechanism empiricism, and of popular art (both romanticism and realism). It was characteristically confident and passionate.
The twentieth century, on the other hand, is the age of relativity and doubt: Einsteinian physics replaces Newtonian mechanism as Freudian subjectivity succeeds Victorian absolutism. In philosophy, Marxist positivism is replaced by existential and phenomenological doubt. Automation, electronics, and the welfare state halt the ascendancy of the worker in heavy industry.
To create a theory of modernism that bestrides these very different periods, as Greenberg attempted to do, is bound to create difficulties. In Ortega, we find instead a theory of modernism that confines itself to the art of the twentieth century.
Like Greenberg, Ortega has a prescriptive role for modernist art. He sees modernism as the characteristic art of the twentieth century and of the liberal society, which he extols. For Ortega, the primary intellectual force in the twentieth century is relativism. This relativism is produced by individuals with a profound capacity for doubt, and necessitates the inversion of a tolerant political system that can encompass such doubt. For Ortega, that political system is liberalism, “the noblest cry that has ever resounded in this planet.” In 1930, at a time when fascism was on the rise throughout Europe and the Russian revolution had degenerated into the horrors of Stalinism, he wrote:
Liberalism is that system of political rights, according to which the public authority, in spite of being all powerful, limits itself and attempts, even at its own expense, to leave room in the state over which it rules for those to live who neither think or feel as it does…
At the root of Ortega’s liberalism is his belief that the positive technological and political advances in society are caused by the unusual individual who is separated from the “mass” of humanity by his “interior necessity…to appeal from himself to some standard beyond himself, superior to himself, whose service he freely accepts.” Such individuals, by force of their unusual effort, bring about the characteristic institutions that define our civilization, although their work more often than not remains unacknowledged. Advances like municipal water systems, the protection of law, or automobiles are seen by the “mass” as natural rights instead of the result of the struggles of committed individuals.
In contrast to the unusual individual, Ortega defines the “mass man.” The mass man is not synonymous with the common man. He is not a member of any particular socio-economic class, but rather is an individual who “regards himself as perfect.” The mass man “feels the lack of nothing outside himself.” He feels no compulsion to follow principles of legality when they are not in his self-interest. He regards the benefits of civilization as his natural right rather than as the result of a complex chain of social interactions. The mass man believes in “direct action.” When he rules (as in Nazi Germany or in Stalinist Russia), “the homogeneous mass weighs down on the public authority and crashes down, annihilates every opposing group,” because the mass “has a deadly hatred of all that is not itself.”
Ortega’s liberalism is at odds with the populist aspirations that have shadowed artistic thought in this country throughout the twentieth century. In part, the aspiration to populism is due to the belief in majority opinion which is so much at the basis of the American democratic approach. It is also the result of the humanistic aspirations of the American intellectuals of the post-war era. From the Marxist flirtations of Clement Greenberg and Meyer Schapiro to the socialist populism of Gregory Battock and Kim Levin, to such recent rightist enfants terribles as Jedd Garet, there has been a recurring discomfort with liberalism by writers on art and a consequent desire to make modernist art somehow conform to the populist world. Ortega, in contrast, maintains that modernist art is not only by nature unpopular but anti-popular, since the ideals it embodies are antithetical to the opinions of the mass man.
According to Ortega, modernism is essentially the art that is premised on doubt. In “The Dehumanization of Art,” he sets out the characteristics of such an art. The “new style” tends to:
1) dehumanize art
2) avoid living forms
3) see the work of art as nothing but a work of art
4) consider art as play and nothing else
5) be essentially ironic
6) beware of sham and hence to aspire to scrupulous realization
7) regard art as a thing of no transcending consequence
In each of these points, he seeks to differentiate the doubting art of the twentieth century from the passionate, positivist, and confident art that characterized the nineteenth. Fifty years later, the legacy of nineteenth-century art is perhaps no less with us, and it is worthwhile to retrace Ortega’s reasoning.
In his first point, Ortega claims that modernist art is “dehumanized.” Here he attempts to separate the effect of art, a “seeing pleasure,” from the autobiographical emotionalism that dominated nineteenth-century art. By dehumanization, Ortega means to “de-emotionalize.” Modernist, doubting art must be aloof from the “contagion” of “personal feelings,” Ortega traces this phenomenon in music:
From Beethoven to Wagner music was primarily concerned with expressing personal feelings. The composer erected great structures of sound to accommodate his autobiography…Wagner poured into Tristan and Isolde his adultery with Mathilde Wesdendonck, and if we want to enjoy this work, we must, for a few hours, turn vaguely adulterous ourselves.
But “lived” realities are too overpowering not to evoke sympathy, which prevents us from perceiving aesthetic relationships in their “objective purity,” and so should be avoided as the content of modernist art.
Music had to be relieved of private sentiments. This was the deed of Debussy. Owing to him, it became possible to listen to music serenely, without swoons and tears.
The contrast between these two attitudes is explicitly evident in the cinema today, where modernist and popular art exist side by side. In the popular cinema, we are wrenched by coercive illusionist techniques into experiencing fear and joy almost beyond our will. In the modernist cinema of Stan Brackage, Hollis Frampton, or Jean-Luc Goddard, on the other hand, we are treated to an “algebra of metaphors” that allows us to “be surprised, to wonder,” those facilities which “lead the intellectual through life in the perpetual ecstasy of the visionary.”
Ortega claims that “art ought to be full clarity, high noon of the intellect. Tears and laughter are aesthetically frauds. The gesture of beauty never passes beyond smiles, melancholy or delighted.” Only in such an atmosphere is doubt and reflection possible. And in Ortegan modernism, such reflection has a high purpose which relates it to the mainstream of twentieth-century phenomenological thought:
We use our ideas in a “human” way when we employ them for thinking things. Thinking of napoleon, for example, we are normally concerned with the great man of that name. A psychologist, on the other hand, adopts an unusual “inhuman” attitude when he forgets about Napoleon and, prying his own mind, tries to analyze his idea of Napoleon as such an idea. His perspective is the opposite of that prevailing in spontaneous life. The idea, instead of functioning as the means to think an object with, is itself made the object and the aim of thinking.
In this way, Ortega ties this modernism to the attitude of twentieth-century Husserlian phenomenology rather than to the positivism and determinism of nineteenth-century Marxism. Ortega emphasizes the limitations of human ideation: “We posses of reality, strictly speaking, nothing but the ideas we have succeeded in forming about it.” But for Ortega this process is unnoticed. “By means of ideas we see the world, but in a natural attitude of mind we do not see the ideas… the spontaneous movement mind goes from concepts to the world.” He points out that traditional art was content to accept ideas as synonymous with reality; reality was “idealized, although this was a candid falsification.” The modernist, aspiring to “Scrupulous realization,” inverts this process:
…if turning our back in alleged reality, we take the ideas for what they are – mere subjective patterns – and make them live as such, lean and angular, but pure and transparent; in short, if we deliberately propose to “realize” our ideas – then we have dehumanized and, as it were, derealized them.
The modernist artist reverses the “spontaneous” movement from world to mind. “We give three-dimensional being to mere patterns, we objectify the subjective, we ‘worldify’ the imminent.” Writing in the 1920’s, he finds this tendency “in varying degrees” in both expressionism and Cubism, reconciling approaches that formalists consider antithetical. “From painting things, the painter has turned to painting ideas. He concentrates on the subjective images in his own mind.”
From this derealized view of art follow the other characteristics of Ortega’s definition. The modernist avoids “the round and soft forms of living bodies” because of their strong associations with both “lived realities” and with traditional Western art and its aspirations to “the salvation of mankind” that had been so strong in the transcendentalist atmosphere of the nineteenth century.
Ortega claims that, steeped in Husserlian doubt, the modernist is “ironic,” that “whatever its content, the art itself is jesting. To look for fiction as fiction…is a proposition that cannot be executed except with one’s tongue in one’s cheek….Being an artist means ceasing to take seriously that very serious person we are when we are not an artist.” Modernist art functions as “a system of mirrors which indefinitely reflect one another [in which] no shape is ultimate, all are eventually ridiculed and revealed as pure images.”
Similarly, he views art as at thing of “no transcending consequence,” of no pretenses. “The kingdom of art commences where the air feels lighter and things, free from formal fetters, begin to cut whimsical capers.” Ortega connects the modernist impulse with playfulness and youthfulness. In fact, modernism has been characteristically the stance of young artists who, as they grow older, often lapse into a condition of solemnity reminiscent of the nineteenth-century artist-hero.
In order to establish the value of Ortega’s definition of modernism, we must demonstrate its applicability to the past art of the twentieth century as well as to artistic events occurring today. An Ortegan modernist pantheon is very different from that of formalists like Greenberg. In contrast to Greenbergian selection, the modernists chosen here demonstrate no unity of formal concerns. Instead, a like mechanism of meaning unifies their work.
As Ortegan modernism is a theory of the behavior of all the arts, it applies equally well to music and writing. Quintessential modernist musicians are figures like Eric Satie and John Cage; modernist writes are playwrights like Pirandello, Samuel Becket, and Bertold Brecht, or novelists like James Joyce, Alain Robbe-Grillet, or Thomas Pynchon.
Concentrating on the visual arts, one can point to Picasso (between 1907 and 1914), Duchamp, Jasper Johns (between 1955 and 1960), Ad Reinhardt, and Andy Warhol. All are unmistakably committed to creating art based on twentieth-century relativism rather than on the “psychic contagion” of romanticism or the mechanism of nineteenth century empiricism.
In the visual arts, of course, Picasso initiates modernism. Analytic Cubism is a complete negation of previous assumptions about visual art. In Cubism, we first see the artist concentrating completely on the patterns in his mind and “realizing” them on canvas. It is in Cubism that we first find the artist content to regard his work as a “thing of no transcending consequence,” an essentially ironic and playful undertaking. (note the frequent puns on the letters J-O-U in which the reality of the nineteenth century journal is transformed into pictorial play.)
In Duchamp, this modernist point of view is equally well defined. The ready-0made is an attempt at “scrupulous realization” in which the re-presentation of the object is exactly equated with the (presumed) presence of the object itself. Similarly, The Large Glass is, as Duchamp himself describes it, “the apparition of an appearance.” Duchamp was, as well, largely occupied with play (note his fascination with games, with roulette and chess). One of his later pieces is a plaster relief with the entirely Ortegan title of With My Tongue In My Cheek, Torture-Morte (1959).
In Jasper Johns, we also observe this concern with “scrupulous realization.” In his early work, he abandoned the attempt to represent three-dimensional objects on a two-dimensional plane, preferring either to scrupulously confine his representations on two-dimensional motifs (such as flags, targets, or numbers), or to render three-dimensional objects by making casts of them (in the case of body parts, flashlights, etc.). Overlapping objects are only rendered by overlapping canvases (as in Three Flags, 1958). Through all this, Johns maintains his ironic stance (he has even made an imprint with a clothes iron on some of his recent canvases). Play is specifically evoked in his work by the target (equipment in a game of marksmanship), his use of newspaper cartoons (in Alley Oop, 1958) and rubber balls in Painting with Two Balls, 1960. By making signs the subject of his art, Johns has “given three-dimensional reality to mere patterns” as Ortega suggests. Johns himself states that he painted “things the mind already knows. That gave me room to work on other levels.”
In Reinhardt, we see represented an Ortegan approach to abstraction. In his “Art-as-Art Dogma,” he states, “Art-as-art is a concentration on art’s essential nature.” Reinhardt claimed:
The next revolution in art will sound the farewell of the old favorite songs on “art and life” that the old favorite artist-ducks love to sing along with the old bower birds and the new, good, rich swallow audience.”
How closely Reinhardt’s statement reflects Ortega’s ideas:
Not only is grieving and rejoicing at such destinies as a work of art presents or narrates a very different thing from true artistic pleasure, but preoccupation with the human content of the work is in principle incompatible with aesthetic enjoyment proper.
To achieve this end, Reinhardt wishes to radically free his art from any subject other than mental pattern and intellectual process. In another diatribe he writes:
…no representations, no associations, no distortions, no paint-caricaturing, no cream pictures or drippings, no delirium trippings, no sadism or slashing, no therapy, no kicking-the-effigy…no impasto, no plasticity, no relationships, no experiments…
Instead, he advocates “painting as absolute symmetry, pure reason, rightness…Painting as central, frontal, regular, repetitive….Color as black, empty…. Verticality and horizontality, rectilinearity, parallelism, stasis.” Reinhardt exemplifies Ortega’s claim that modernist ‘art must not proceed by psychic contagion, for psychic contagion is an unconscious phenomenon, and art ought to be full clarity, high noon of the intellect.”
We also find that Reinhardt’s aesthetic was shaped by the decision to take an ironic stance in his work:
Everything that the [abstract] artists were called that was bad I’ve picked up and I’ve made them not bad words. Words like inhuman, sterile, cold – they became cool…. And the others – academic, dogmatic, absolute – I picked them up and said, “Well, why not academic?”
But it is perhaps Andy Warhol who takes the premises of Ortegan modernism to their furthest limit. Warhol applies the “inversion” of modernist dehumanization not only to his art but to his life. He is not content simply to accomplish the “realization” of his ideas in his day-to-day life as well. He abandons his “human” life not only in his art but also in his daily existence. As Warhol himself states:
I think that once you see emotions from a certain angle you can never think of them as real again. That’s what more or less has happened to me.
With the help of electronic recording devices, Warhol abandoned “lived realities” to concentrate on the plane of glass” of perception:
The acquisition of my tape recorder really finished whatever emotional life I might have had, but I was glad to see it go. Nothing was ever a problem again, because a problem just meant a good tape, and when a problem transforms itself into a good tape, it’s not a problem anymore.
This echoes Ortega’s description of the artist:
The painter, in fine, completely unconcerned, does nothing but keep his eyes open. What is happening here is none of his business; he is, as it were, a hundred miles removed from it. His attitude is a purely perceptive attitude; indeed, he fails to perceive the event in its entirety. The entire inner meaning escapes his attention which is directed exclusively toward the visual part….In the painter we find a maximum of distance and a minimum of feeling intervention.
Warhol was fascinated with figures in the media whose lives had been “dehumanized” – movie stars, celebrities, transvestites. To Warhol, the movies provided the most vivid example of this inversion:
The best atmosphere I can think of is film, because its three-dimensional physically and two-dimensional emotionally.
At the same time, Warhol shares with Ortega an appreciation of the playfulness of the whole modernist endeavor. Again Ortega states:
To the present-day artist the kingdom of art commences where the air feels lighter and things, free from formal fetters, begin to cut whimsical capers…The symbol of art is seen again in the Great God Pan which makes the young goats frisk at the edge of the grove.
Warhol echoes this view:
In some circles where very heavy people think they have very heavy brains, words like “charming” and “clever” and “pretty” are all putdowns, and all the lighter things in life, which are the most important, are put down.
Today, the post-modernist critics claim, younger artists are no longer working within the parameters of modernism. This is true—and has been for a long time—if we define modernism as Greenbergian formalist modernism.
However, if we adopt the assumptions of Ortegan modernism, we find that a good many younger artists, especially among those supported by post-modernist critics, are working within the assumptions of this fifty year-old theory. R.M. Fischer, Steven Keister, Cindy Sherman, and Richard Prince come to mind as artists who aspire to the kind of modernism that Ortega advocates.
On the other hand, a variety of art being produced today truly is something other than modernist. However, to call this art post-modernist is probably a mistake, since it exhibits all the signs of being, in fact, pre-modernist. The return to perspective techniques, the unique art object, human expression, “sensibility” – these are simply a retreat into nineteenth-century strategies by retrograde artists, as Benjamin H.D. Buchloh has pointed out in his recent essay on “new image” painting.
There has always been retrogressive art in our culture, but the unusual phenomenon today is that such work has gained the status of major art. This is the result of the changes in our society that have occurred with the last decade.
From the 1950’s to the 1970’s, it was the entrepreneurial class, buoyed by economic prosperity, that supported modernism, in the medium characteristically associated with that class – the visual arts. Today that class has largely retreated from its interest in the modernist point of view (just as it has retreated from is aspirations to liberalism). Instead, it seeks to reassure itself by withdrawing into historicism, romanticism, and a kind of parodic individualism.
Today, modernism has largely moved to a different arena, where it is supported by a different class. Modernism is as alive in music as it is under attack in the visual arts. Groups with such names as the talking heads, the Clash, the gang of four, and Public Image Limited, have all moved to an essentially modernist position. David Byrne, of the Talking heads, for example sings that “facts are useless in emergencies,” that
Facts are simple and facts are straight
Facts are lazy and facts are late
Facts all come with points of view
Facts don’t do what I want them to
Facts just twist the truth around
Facts are living turned inside out…
Here he reflects Ortega’s stance on the limits of ideation. The Clash sing about a cartoon confrontation between “G.I. Joe” and “Ivan,” a “Ruskie Bear,” ironically turning jingoistic labels in upon themselves. The Gang of Four sing:
The problem of leisure
What to do for pleasure
Ideal love a new purchase
A market of the senses
They are turning the attitude of advertising into an “algebra of metaphors” and neutralizing the “contagion” of popular culture. Similarly, the leader of the band the dead Kennedys uses the modernist nom de plume of Jello Biafra (running for mayor of San Francisco on the slogan, “There’s always room for Jello”).
In their instrumentation, these bands constantly parody phrasing of earlier, unconscious pop music. Their playfulness allows the B-52’s to transform the mindless drone of ‘60’s instrumental music into something else. Many of these musicians have also adopted a clearly modernist attitude toward their own public personas. John Lydon of Public Image Limited said in an interview in the Canadian magazine, MacLean’s: “I’m tired of the past and even the future’s beginning to seem repetitive. I don’t really know what to say. I talk crap all the time. I’m a liar, a hypocrite, and a bastard. I shouldn’t be tolerated….”
The modernism of these musicians is particularly significant because it is assaulting one of the most important strongholds of popular art in the nineteenth-century mold—electronically produced music. Because they apply modernist attitudes of irony and doubt to political and social issues, their work comes to serve the very purpose that was advocated by Ortega as the aim of modernism – the preservation of the possibility of liberal democracy. Their willingness to deal with the major events of our culture singles out these musicians as important successors to the daring modernists of the past.
In time of economic adversity and uncertainty, like the present, it is characteristic of the wealthy to retreat into a position of fear and reaction. On the other hand, during these adverse periods, there are also likely to be small groups among those without a large investment in the status quo who will be moved by adversity to a position of intense thought and doubt. These musicians are not supported by a wealthy entrepreneurial class (as have been modernist artists), but by this minority: those thinking, doubting individuals with the few dollars available necessary to purchase a record album
This market-structure has allowed modernism to flourish today in music. It could provide the necessary impetus for a modernist resurgence in the visual arts
Published in Arts Magazine, New York, Vol. 56, No. 3, November 1981.
In the last few years, there has been a growing interest on the part of many critics in the idea of post-modernism. These writers define post-modernism in various ways, but they share in common the belief that the age of modernist art is over and that anew set of theories is needed to describe art today.
No writer, however, seems to have entertained the possibility that what is today though of as modernism is not really outdated, but merely badly formulated in the first place. Critics today seem to universally equate modernism with the formalist ideas developed by Clement Greenberg in the 1950’s. But Greenberg’s definition of modernism has never been adequate to define the full range of twentieth-century modernist art. This formalist modernism was no better suited to define the past than it is the present. Another definition of modernism, outlined by the Spanish writer Jose Ortega y Gasset in his 1925 essay, “The Dehumanization of Art,” is both possible and more useful.
Any attempt to define the extent and character of modernist art is both a descriptive and a prescriptive exercise, since no definition of the characteristics of a society’s artistic production can be free of the author’s aspirations for that society. Greenberg’s modernism sought to provide an artistic equivalent for America’s post-war aspirations to leadership of the western and developing nations. Today, with those aspirations in shambles, it is not surprising that the ideas behind the equivalent aesthetic movement seem irrelevant and distant.
Greenberg also sought to provide a theory of modernism for a country that, unlike its European counterparts, was not yet post-industrial, but still completing its initial state of industrial growth. The art of post-war America, Abstract Expressionism, was transcendentalist, expressionistic, and confident, like European art of the nineteenth century, where Europe was still an industrializing culture. Greenberg’s modernism provided a positivist, determinist theory to support American art that was tied, ironically, to the values of both nineteenth-century capitalism with its emphasis on “taste” and “quality”) and nineteenth-century Marxism.
In order to form such a theory, Greenberg was forced to ignore a great deal of twentieth-century European art. Dada, Surrealism, Duchamp had no place in his system. He was forced to label even Analytic Cubism a “counter-revolution” against modernism and to push back the beginning of the modernist era to the middle of the nineteenth century to include the Impressionists (especially Monet), who were paradigmatic to his theory.
This strategy blurred important distinctions between this century and the last. In Greenberg’s formalist modernism, the nineteenth and twentieth centuries are treated as a unified historical epoch. The essential differences between the industrial nineteenth century and the post-industrial twentieth century are ignored. But, in fact, the nineteenth century was the era of industrialization in the Western world, of mechanism empiricism, and of popular art (both romanticism and realism). It was characteristically confident and passionate.
The twentieth century, on the other hand, is the age of relativity and doubt: Einsteinian physics replaces Newtonian mechanism as Freudian subjectivity succeeds Victorian absolutism. In philosophy, Marxist positivism is replaced by existential and phenomenological doubt. Automation, electronics, and the welfare state halt the ascendancy of the worker in heavy industry.
To create a theory of modernism that bestrides these very different periods, as Greenberg attempted to do, is bound to create difficulties. In Ortega, we find instead a theory of modernism that confines itself to the art of the twentieth century.
Like Greenberg, Ortega has a prescriptive role for modernist art. He sees modernism as the characteristic art of the twentieth century and of the liberal society, which he extols. For Ortega, the primary intellectual force in the twentieth century is relativism. This relativism is produced by individuals with a profound capacity for doubt, and necessitates the inversion of a tolerant political system that can encompass such doubt. For Ortega, that political system is liberalism, “the noblest cry that has ever resounded in this planet.” In 1930, at a time when fascism was on the rise throughout Europe and the Russian revolution had degenerated into the horrors of Stalinism, he wrote:
Liberalism is that system of political rights, according to which the public authority, in spite of being all powerful, limits itself and attempts, even at its own expense, to leave room in the state over which it rules for those to live who neither think or feel as it does…
At the root of Ortega’s liberalism is his belief that the positive technological and political advances in society are caused by the unusual individual who is separated from the “mass” of humanity by his “interior necessity…to appeal from himself to some standard beyond himself, superior to himself, whose service he freely accepts.” Such individuals, by force of their unusual effort, bring about the characteristic institutions that define our civilization, although their work more often than not remains unacknowledged. Advances like municipal water systems, the protection of law, or automobiles are seen by the “mass” as natural rights instead of the result of the struggles of committed individuals.
In contrast to the unusual individual, Ortega defines the “mass man.” The mass man is not synonymous with the common man. He is not a member of any particular socio-economic class, but rather is an individual who “regards himself as perfect.” The mass man “feels the lack of nothing outside himself.” He feels no compulsion to follow principles of legality when they are not in his self-interest. He regards the benefits of civilization as his natural right rather than as the result of a complex chain of social interactions. The mass man believes in “direct action.” When he rules (as in Nazi Germany or in Stalinist Russia), “the homogeneous mass weighs down on the public authority and crashes down, annihilates every opposing group,” because the mass “has a deadly hatred of all that is not itself.”
Ortega’s liberalism is at odds with the populist aspirations that have shadowed artistic thought in this country throughout the twentieth century. In part, the aspiration to populism is due to the belief in majority opinion which is so much at the basis of the American democratic approach. It is also the result of the humanistic aspirations of the American intellectuals of the post-war era. From the Marxist flirtations of Clement Greenberg and Meyer Schapiro to the socialist populism of Gregory Battock and Kim Levin, to such recent rightist enfants terribles as Jedd Garet, there has been a recurring discomfort with liberalism by writers on art and a consequent desire to make modernist art somehow conform to the populist world. Ortega, in contrast, maintains that modernist art is not only by nature unpopular but anti-popular, since the ideals it embodies are antithetical to the opinions of the mass man.
According to Ortega, modernism is essentially the art that is premised on doubt. In “The Dehumanization of Art,” he sets out the characteristics of such an art. The “new style” tends to:
1) dehumanize art
2) avoid living forms
3) see the work of art as nothing but a work of art
4) consider art as play and nothing else
5) be essentially ironic
6) beware of sham and hence to aspire to scrupulous realization
7) regard art as a thing of no transcending consequence
In each of these points, he seeks to differentiate the doubting art of the twentieth century from the passionate, positivist, and confident art that characterized the nineteenth. Fifty years later, the legacy of nineteenth-century art is perhaps no less with us, and it is worthwhile to retrace Ortega’s reasoning.
In his first point, Ortega claims that modernist art is “dehumanized.” Here he attempts to separate the effect of art, a “seeing pleasure,” from the autobiographical emotionalism that dominated nineteenth-century art. By dehumanization, Ortega means to “de-emotionalize.” Modernist, doubting art must be aloof from the “contagion” of “personal feelings,” Ortega traces this phenomenon in music:
From Beethoven to Wagner music was primarily concerned with expressing personal feelings. The composer erected great structures of sound to accommodate his autobiography…Wagner poured into Tristan and Isolde his adultery with Mathilde Wesdendonck, and if we want to enjoy this work, we must, for a few hours, turn vaguely adulterous ourselves.
But “lived” realities are too overpowering not to evoke sympathy, which prevents us from perceiving aesthetic relationships in their “objective purity,” and so should be avoided as the content of modernist art.
Music had to be relieved of private sentiments. This was the deed of Debussy. Owing to him, it became possible to listen to music serenely, without swoons and tears.
The contrast between these two attitudes is explicitly evident in the cinema today, where modernist and popular art exist side by side. In the popular cinema, we are wrenched by coercive illusionist techniques into experiencing fear and joy almost beyond our will. In the modernist cinema of Stan Brackage, Hollis Frampton, or Jean-Luc Goddard, on the other hand, we are treated to an “algebra of metaphors” that allows us to “be surprised, to wonder,” those facilities which “lead the intellectual through life in the perpetual ecstasy of the visionary.”
Ortega claims that “art ought to be full clarity, high noon of the intellect. Tears and laughter are aesthetically frauds. The gesture of beauty never passes beyond smiles, melancholy or delighted.” Only in such an atmosphere is doubt and reflection possible. And in Ortegan modernism, such reflection has a high purpose which relates it to the mainstream of twentieth-century phenomenological thought:
We use our ideas in a “human” way when we employ them for thinking things. Thinking of napoleon, for example, we are normally concerned with the great man of that name. A psychologist, on the other hand, adopts an unusual “inhuman” attitude when he forgets about Napoleon and, prying his own mind, tries to analyze his idea of Napoleon as such an idea. His perspective is the opposite of that prevailing in spontaneous life. The idea, instead of functioning as the means to think an object with, is itself made the object and the aim of thinking.
In this way, Ortega ties this modernism to the attitude of twentieth-century Husserlian phenomenology rather than to the positivism and determinism of nineteenth-century Marxism. Ortega emphasizes the limitations of human ideation: “We posses of reality, strictly speaking, nothing but the ideas we have succeeded in forming about it.” But for Ortega this process is unnoticed. “By means of ideas we see the world, but in a natural attitude of mind we do not see the ideas… the spontaneous movement mind goes from concepts to the world.” He points out that traditional art was content to accept ideas as synonymous with reality; reality was “idealized, although this was a candid falsification.” The modernist, aspiring to “Scrupulous realization,” inverts this process:
…if turning our back in alleged reality, we take the ideas for what they are – mere subjective patterns – and make them live as such, lean and angular, but pure and transparent; in short, if we deliberately propose to “realize” our ideas – then we have dehumanized and, as it were, derealized them.
The modernist artist reverses the “spontaneous” movement from world to mind. “We give three-dimensional being to mere patterns, we objectify the subjective, we ‘worldify’ the imminent.” Writing in the 1920’s, he finds this tendency “in varying degrees” in both expressionism and Cubism, reconciling approaches that formalists consider antithetical. “From painting things, the painter has turned to painting ideas. He concentrates on the subjective images in his own mind.”
From this derealized view of art follow the other characteristics of Ortega’s definition. The modernist avoids “the round and soft forms of living bodies” because of their strong associations with both “lived realities” and with traditional Western art and its aspirations to “the salvation of mankind” that had been so strong in the transcendentalist atmosphere of the nineteenth century.
Ortega claims that, steeped in Husserlian doubt, the modernist is “ironic,” that “whatever its content, the art itself is jesting. To look for fiction as fiction…is a proposition that cannot be executed except with one’s tongue in one’s cheek….Being an artist means ceasing to take seriously that very serious person we are when we are not an artist.” Modernist art functions as “a system of mirrors which indefinitely reflect one another [in which] no shape is ultimate, all are eventually ridiculed and revealed as pure images.”
Similarly, he views art as at thing of “no transcending consequence,” of no pretenses. “The kingdom of art commences where the air feels lighter and things, free from formal fetters, begin to cut whimsical capers.” Ortega connects the modernist impulse with playfulness and youthfulness. In fact, modernism has been characteristically the stance of young artists who, as they grow older, often lapse into a condition of solemnity reminiscent of the nineteenth-century artist-hero.
In order to establish the value of Ortega’s definition of modernism, we must demonstrate its applicability to the past art of the twentieth century as well as to artistic events occurring today. An Ortegan modernist pantheon is very different from that of formalists like Greenberg. In contrast to Greenbergian selection, the modernists chosen here demonstrate no unity of formal concerns. Instead, a like mechanism of meaning unifies their work.
As Ortegan modernism is a theory of the behavior of all the arts, it applies equally well to music and writing. Quintessential modernist musicians are figures like Eric Satie and John Cage; modernist writes are playwrights like Pirandello, Samuel Becket, and Bertold Brecht, or novelists like James Joyce, Alain Robbe-Grillet, or Thomas Pynchon.
Concentrating on the visual arts, one can point to Picasso (between 1907 and 1914), Duchamp, Jasper Johns (between 1955 and 1960), Ad Reinhardt, and Andy Warhol. All are unmistakably committed to creating art based on twentieth-century relativism rather than on the “psychic contagion” of romanticism or the mechanism of nineteenth century empiricism.
In the visual arts, of course, Picasso initiates modernism. Analytic Cubism is a complete negation of previous assumptions about visual art. In Cubism, we first see the artist concentrating completely on the patterns in his mind and “realizing” them on canvas. It is in Cubism that we first find the artist content to regard his work as a “thing of no transcending consequence,” an essentially ironic and playful undertaking. (note the frequent puns on the letters J-O-U in which the reality of the nineteenth century journal is transformed into pictorial play.)
In Duchamp, this modernist point of view is equally well defined. The ready-0made is an attempt at “scrupulous realization” in which the re-presentation of the object is exactly equated with the (presumed) presence of the object itself. Similarly, The Large Glass is, as Duchamp himself describes it, “the apparition of an appearance.” Duchamp was, as well, largely occupied with play (note his fascination with games, with roulette and chess). One of his later pieces is a plaster relief with the entirely Ortegan title of With My Tongue In My Cheek, Torture-Morte (1959).
In Jasper Johns, we also observe this concern with “scrupulous realization.” In his early work, he abandoned the attempt to represent three-dimensional objects on a two-dimensional plane, preferring either to scrupulously confine his representations on two-dimensional motifs (such as flags, targets, or numbers), or to render three-dimensional objects by making casts of them (in the case of body parts, flashlights, etc.). Overlapping objects are only rendered by overlapping canvases (as in Three Flags, 1958). Through all this, Johns maintains his ironic stance (he has even made an imprint with a clothes iron on some of his recent canvases). Play is specifically evoked in his work by the target (equipment in a game of marksmanship), his use of newspaper cartoons (in Alley Oop, 1958) and rubber balls in Painting with Two Balls, 1960. By making signs the subject of his art, Johns has “given three-dimensional reality to mere patterns” as Ortega suggests. Johns himself states that he painted “things the mind already knows. That gave me room to work on other levels.”
In Reinhardt, we see represented an Ortegan approach to abstraction. In his “Art-as-Art Dogma,” he states, “Art-as-art is a concentration on art’s essential nature.” Reinhardt claimed:
The next revolution in art will sound the farewell of the old favorite songs on “art and life” that the old favorite artist-ducks love to sing along with the old bower birds and the new, good, rich swallow audience.”
How closely Reinhardt’s statement reflects Ortega’s ideas:
Not only is grieving and rejoicing at such destinies as a work of art presents or narrates a very different thing from true artistic pleasure, but preoccupation with the human content of the work is in principle incompatible with aesthetic enjoyment proper.
To achieve this end, Reinhardt wishes to radically free his art from any subject other than mental pattern and intellectual process. In another diatribe he writes:
…no representations, no associations, no distortions, no paint-caricaturing, no cream pictures or drippings, no delirium trippings, no sadism or slashing, no therapy, no kicking-the-effigy…no impasto, no plasticity, no relationships, no experiments…
Instead, he advocates “painting as absolute symmetry, pure reason, rightness…Painting as central, frontal, regular, repetitive….Color as black, empty…. Verticality and horizontality, rectilinearity, parallelism, stasis.” Reinhardt exemplifies Ortega’s claim that modernist ‘art must not proceed by psychic contagion, for psychic contagion is an unconscious phenomenon, and art ought to be full clarity, high noon of the intellect.”
We also find that Reinhardt’s aesthetic was shaped by the decision to take an ironic stance in his work:
Everything that the [abstract] artists were called that was bad I’ve picked up and I’ve made them not bad words. Words like inhuman, sterile, cold – they became cool…. And the others – academic, dogmatic, absolute – I picked them up and said, “Well, why not academic?”
But it is perhaps Andy Warhol who takes the premises of Ortegan modernism to their furthest limit. Warhol applies the “inversion” of modernist dehumanization not only to his art but to his life. He is not content simply to accomplish the “realization” of his ideas in his day-to-day life as well. He abandons his “human” life not only in his art but also in his daily existence. As Warhol himself states:
I think that once you see emotions from a certain angle you can never think of them as real again. That’s what more or less has happened to me.
With the help of electronic recording devices, Warhol abandoned “lived realities” to concentrate on the plane of glass” of perception:
The acquisition of my tape recorder really finished whatever emotional life I might have had, but I was glad to see it go. Nothing was ever a problem again, because a problem just meant a good tape, and when a problem transforms itself into a good tape, it’s not a problem anymore.
This echoes Ortega’s description of the artist:
The painter, in fine, completely unconcerned, does nothing but keep his eyes open. What is happening here is none of his business; he is, as it were, a hundred miles removed from it. His attitude is a purely perceptive attitude; indeed, he fails to perceive the event in its entirety. The entire inner meaning escapes his attention which is directed exclusively toward the visual part….In the painter we find a maximum of distance and a minimum of feeling intervention.
Warhol was fascinated with figures in the media whose lives had been “dehumanized” – movie stars, celebrities, transvestites. To Warhol, the movies provided the most vivid example of this inversion:
The best atmosphere I can think of is film, because its three-dimensional physically and two-dimensional emotionally.
At the same time, Warhol shares with Ortega an appreciation of the playfulness of the whole modernist endeavor. Again Ortega states:
To the present-day artist the kingdom of art commences where the air feels lighter and things, free from formal fetters, begin to cut whimsical capers…The symbol of art is seen again in the Great God Pan which makes the young goats frisk at the edge of the grove.
Warhol echoes this view:
In some circles where very heavy people think they have very heavy brains, words like “charming” and “clever” and “pretty” are all putdowns, and all the lighter things in life, which are the most important, are put down.
Today, the post-modernist critics claim, younger artists are no longer working within the parameters of modernism. This is true—and has been for a long time—if we define modernism as Greenbergian formalist modernism.
However, if we adopt the assumptions of Ortegan modernism, we find that a good many younger artists, especially among those supported by post-modernist critics, are working within the assumptions of this fifty year-old theory. R.M. Fischer, Steven Keister, Cindy Sherman, and Richard Prince come to mind as artists who aspire to the kind of modernism that Ortega advocates.
On the other hand, a variety of art being produced today truly is something other than modernist. However, to call this art post-modernist is probably a mistake, since it exhibits all the signs of being, in fact, pre-modernist. The return to perspective techniques, the unique art object, human expression, “sensibility” – these are simply a retreat into nineteenth-century strategies by retrograde artists, as Benjamin H.D. Buchloh has pointed out in his recent essay on “new image” painting.
There has always been retrogressive art in our culture, but the unusual phenomenon today is that such work has gained the status of major art. This is the result of the changes in our society that have occurred with the last decade.
From the 1950’s to the 1970’s, it was the entrepreneurial class, buoyed by economic prosperity, that supported modernism, in the medium characteristically associated with that class – the visual arts. Today that class has largely retreated from its interest in the modernist point of view (just as it has retreated from is aspirations to liberalism). Instead, it seeks to reassure itself by withdrawing into historicism, romanticism, and a kind of parodic individualism.
Today, modernism has largely moved to a different arena, where it is supported by a different class. Modernism is as alive in music as it is under attack in the visual arts. Groups with such names as the talking heads, the Clash, the gang of four, and Public Image Limited, have all moved to an essentially modernist position. David Byrne, of the Talking heads, for example sings that “facts are useless in emergencies,” that
Facts are simple and facts are straight
Facts are lazy and facts are late
Facts all come with points of view
Facts don’t do what I want them to
Facts just twist the truth around
Facts are living turned inside out…
Here he reflects Ortega’s stance on the limits of ideation. The Clash sing about a cartoon confrontation between “G.I. Joe” and “Ivan,” a “Ruskie Bear,” ironically turning jingoistic labels in upon themselves. The Gang of Four sing:
The problem of leisure
What to do for pleasure
Ideal love a new purchase
A market of the senses
They are turning the attitude of advertising into an “algebra of metaphors” and neutralizing the “contagion” of popular culture. Similarly, the leader of the band the dead Kennedys uses the modernist nom de plume of Jello Biafra (running for mayor of San Francisco on the slogan, “There’s always room for Jello”).
In their instrumentation, these bands constantly parody phrasing of earlier, unconscious pop music. Their playfulness allows the B-52’s to transform the mindless drone of ‘60’s instrumental music into something else. Many of these musicians have also adopted a clearly modernist attitude toward their own public personas. John Lydon of Public Image Limited said in an interview in the Canadian magazine, MacLean’s: “I’m tired of the past and even the future’s beginning to seem repetitive. I don’t really know what to say. I talk crap all the time. I’m a liar, a hypocrite, and a bastard. I shouldn’t be tolerated….”
The modernism of these musicians is particularly significant because it is assaulting one of the most important strongholds of popular art in the nineteenth-century mold—electronically produced music. Because they apply modernist attitudes of irony and doubt to political and social issues, their work comes to serve the very purpose that was advocated by Ortega as the aim of modernism – the preservation of the possibility of liberal democracy. Their willingness to deal with the major events of our culture singles out these musicians as important successors to the daring modernists of the past.
In time of economic adversity and uncertainty, like the present, it is characteristic of the wealthy to retreat into a position of fear and reaction. On the other hand, during these adverse periods, there are also likely to be small groups among those without a large investment in the status quo who will be moved by adversity to a position of intense thought and doubt. These musicians are not supported by a wealthy entrepreneurial class (as have been modernist artists), but by this minority: those thinking, doubting individuals with the few dollars available necessary to purchase a record album
This market-structure has allowed modernism to flourish today in music. It could provide the necessary impetus for a modernist resurgence in the visual arts
The Deployment of the Geometric
The Deployment of the Geometric
Published in Effects, New York, No. 3, Winter 1986.
The deployment of the geometric dominates the landscape. Space is divided into discrete, isolated cells, explicitly determined as to extent and function. Cells are reached through complex networks of corridors and roadways that must be traveled at prescribed speeds and at prescribed times. The constant increase in the complexity and scale of these geometries continuously transforms the landscape.
Conduits supply various resources to the cells. Electricity, water, gas, communication lines, and, in some cases, even air, are piped in. The conduits are almost always buried underground, away from sight. The great networks of transportation give the illusion of tremendous movement and interaction. But the networks of conduits minimalize the need to leave the cells.
The regimentation of human movement, activity, and perception accompanies the geometric division of space. It is governed by the use of time-keeping devices, the application of standards of normalcy, and the police aparatus. In the factory, human movement is made to conform to rigorous spatial and temporal geometries. At the office, the endless recording of figures and statistics is presided over by clerical workers.
Along with the geometrization of the landscape, there occurs the geometrization of thought. Specific reality is displaced by the primacy of the model. And the model is in turn imposed on the landscape, further displacing reality in a process of ever more complete circularity.
Art, or what remains of art, has also been geometrized. But in art the geometric has been curiously associated with the transcendental. In Mondrian, Newman, even in No/and, the geometric is heralded as the timeless, the heroic, and the religious. Geometry, ironically, is deemed the privileged link to the nature it displaces. In this way, geometric art has been made to justify the deployment of the geometric. It has linked the modern deployment of geometry to the wisdom of the ancients, to the tradition of religious truth, and to the esoteric meditative practices of non-Western cultures. Geometric art has served to hide the fact that the modern deployment of geometry is stranger than the strange myths of traditional societies. Geometric art has sought to convince us, despite all the evidence to the contrary, that the progress of geometry is humanistic, that it is part of the "march of civilization", that it embodies continuity with the past. In this, geometric art has succeeded completely. In so doing, it has helped make possible the second phase of geometrization (that coincides with the post-war period) in which coercion is replaced by fascination.
We are convinced. We volunteer. Today Foucauldian confinement is replaced by Baudrillardian deterrence. The worker need no longer be coerced into the factory. We sign up for body building at the health club. The prisoner need no longer be confined in the jail. We invest in condominiums. The madman need no longer wander the corridors of the asylum. We cruise the Interstates.
We are today enraptured by the very geometries that once representedcoercive discipline. Today children sit for hours fascinated by the day-glo geometric displays of video games. Adolescents are enchanted by the arithmetic mysteries of their computers. As adults, we finally gain "access" to participation in our cybernetic hyperreal, with its charge cards, telephone answering machines, and professional hierarchies. Today we can live in "spectral suburbs" or simulated cities. We can play the corporate game, the entrepreneurial game, the investment game, or even the art game.
Now that we are enraptured by geometry, geometric art has disappeared. There is no need for any more Mardens or Rymans to convince us of the essential beauty of the geometric field embodied in the television set's glowing image. Today we have instead "figurative art" to convince us that the old humanist body hasn't disappeared (though it has). It is only now that geometric art has been discarded that it can begin to describe the deployment of the geometric.
First publication in Effects, New York, n° 3, winter 1986
Published in Effects, New York, No. 3, Winter 1986.
The deployment of the geometric dominates the landscape. Space is divided into discrete, isolated cells, explicitly determined as to extent and function. Cells are reached through complex networks of corridors and roadways that must be traveled at prescribed speeds and at prescribed times. The constant increase in the complexity and scale of these geometries continuously transforms the landscape.
Conduits supply various resources to the cells. Electricity, water, gas, communication lines, and, in some cases, even air, are piped in. The conduits are almost always buried underground, away from sight. The great networks of transportation give the illusion of tremendous movement and interaction. But the networks of conduits minimalize the need to leave the cells.
The regimentation of human movement, activity, and perception accompanies the geometric division of space. It is governed by the use of time-keeping devices, the application of standards of normalcy, and the police aparatus. In the factory, human movement is made to conform to rigorous spatial and temporal geometries. At the office, the endless recording of figures and statistics is presided over by clerical workers.
Along with the geometrization of the landscape, there occurs the geometrization of thought. Specific reality is displaced by the primacy of the model. And the model is in turn imposed on the landscape, further displacing reality in a process of ever more complete circularity.
Art, or what remains of art, has also been geometrized. But in art the geometric has been curiously associated with the transcendental. In Mondrian, Newman, even in No/and, the geometric is heralded as the timeless, the heroic, and the religious. Geometry, ironically, is deemed the privileged link to the nature it displaces. In this way, geometric art has been made to justify the deployment of the geometric. It has linked the modern deployment of geometry to the wisdom of the ancients, to the tradition of religious truth, and to the esoteric meditative practices of non-Western cultures. Geometric art has served to hide the fact that the modern deployment of geometry is stranger than the strange myths of traditional societies. Geometric art has sought to convince us, despite all the evidence to the contrary, that the progress of geometry is humanistic, that it is part of the "march of civilization", that it embodies continuity with the past. In this, geometric art has succeeded completely. In so doing, it has helped make possible the second phase of geometrization (that coincides with the post-war period) in which coercion is replaced by fascination.
We are convinced. We volunteer. Today Foucauldian confinement is replaced by Baudrillardian deterrence. The worker need no longer be coerced into the factory. We sign up for body building at the health club. The prisoner need no longer be confined in the jail. We invest in condominiums. The madman need no longer wander the corridors of the asylum. We cruise the Interstates.
We are today enraptured by the very geometries that once representedcoercive discipline. Today children sit for hours fascinated by the day-glo geometric displays of video games. Adolescents are enchanted by the arithmetic mysteries of their computers. As adults, we finally gain "access" to participation in our cybernetic hyperreal, with its charge cards, telephone answering machines, and professional hierarchies. Today we can live in "spectral suburbs" or simulated cities. We can play the corporate game, the entrepreneurial game, the investment game, or even the art game.
Now that we are enraptured by geometry, geometric art has disappeared. There is no need for any more Mardens or Rymans to convince us of the essential beauty of the geometric field embodied in the television set's glowing image. Today we have instead "figurative art" to convince us that the old humanist body hasn't disappeared (though it has). It is only now that geometric art has been discarded that it can begin to describe the deployment of the geometric.
First publication in Effects, New York, n° 3, winter 1986
Peter Halley talks to Dan Cameron - '80s Then - Interview
Peter Halley talks to Dan Cameron - '80s Then - Interview
DAN CAMERON: Before we talk about the '80s, we should talk about talking about the '80s.
PETER HALLEY: It's interesting, because the '8os were really three different periods: 1980 to 1983 was dominated by the recession and by the emergence of new European painting and neo-expressionism. Then you had the mid-'80s, in which the robust economic recovery spurred the emergence of neo-Conceptualism--which included artists who were showing for the first time, Koons, myself, et cetera, but also marked the first widespread acceptance of artists like Richard Prince and Sherrie Levine, who were first shown around 1980. Then you had the end of the '80s. After about '88, the economy was less good, the AIDS crisis emerged, and a more direct form of Conceptualism emerged, which defined itself in terms of a critical opposition.
DC: So, in fact, in that ten-year stretch, we're talking about three distinct trends.
PH: Yes, it's interesting to speculate on which version of the decade is going to win. Of course I'm rooting for the more optimistic, glamorous version, namely, the mid-'80s.
DC: One thing that strikes me about the transition from the early to the mid-'80s is this public shaping of the artist as a personality. People like Julian Schnabel, Keith Haring, and Jean-Michel Basquiat were visible in a way that rock musicians and film stars were visible, but by the mid-'80s you saw the artists taking a different kind of relationship to the work. Artists were very glamorous in the beginning of the '80s, whereas the art itself got very glamorous in the mid-'80s.
PH: I'd like to think that a less artsy, more conceptual art that uses Pop materials is more glamorous. I might try to make the case that it's also more elegant if you think of elegance as doing more with less. It used strategies of representation and syntax that were more sophisticated.
DC: I want to ask about your role in the '80s. I think the idea of a painter as a thinker, writer, and theorist came as a real shock to viewers, who were used to painters being only semi-articulate about their aims.
PH: Well, I've never quite been able to figure out how my role as a writer fit in. Even today it concerns me that more artists haven't done more writing. Maybe an artist writing just doesn't make sense anymore. However, when I was a student in the mid-'70s, I was thinking about people like Smithson, Judd, and Robert Morris--all of whom wrote. Not long after I came to New York in 1980, I was introduced to Jeffrey Deitch, then a young guy who worked as an art adviser at Citibank. He had just published an article in Arts Magazine, and I wrote him a note saying, "I really liked your piece, but I disagreed with what you said about such and such." He sent me back a postcard saying, "Peter, that's great. You should do some writing." That gave me the idea, and during the next couple years, since it didn't seem likely that I'd be able to show my work at that time, I began to write. The only person at any of the art magazines who actually read unsolicited manuscripts was Richard Martin at Arts. When he got my first pie ce, on Robert Smithson, Colab, and New Wave music, he immediately published it. After that, he published everything I sent him. If that hadn't happened, I would not have become a published writer, I'm almost certain.
DC: I remember distinctly the very powerful impact that it had in the art world once you began writing about abstraction and geometry, and once your texts could be understood as somehow forming a manifesto for the paintings. People were excited by the notion that someone would use their texts as a wedge to state their ideas and validate the artwork itself.
PH: Well, I wasn't exactly aware of it that way. "The Crisis in Geometry" was published in '84, at a time when I hadn't really shown any work. A lot of the texts contain attacks on traditional liberal humanism, with a special emphasis on anything to do with spirituality. I still feel a bit self-conscious about it, because it also meant an attack on what was a truism in the New York art world: that abstract painting was uplifting, or that art could be spiritual. It was a broad attack on dearly held values, but I thought it was needed.
All the French authors I was reading then were, for me, fuel with which to build that fire. My introduction to that French critical writing also burst a lot of my assumptions, as somebody who had been schooled in liberal humanism.
DC: I'm very interested in your memories of the East Village and how the very rapid acceleration, rise, and disappearance of that scene mirrored the '80s more generally. It seemed as if the East Village started with neo-expressionism, peaked with neo-Conceptualism, and then just hit a wall.
PH: I really feel that art then was emphatically political. In 1985, I believed that Francesco Clemente, Schnabel, and Basquiat were, you know, right-wing tools. I felt that their art was a product of Reaganism and that they were trying to reverse everything exciting that had happened during the previous fifty years. And I'm sure they felt something similar about me and about the people I was associated with.
DC: It's the last moment of true polarization in the American art world.
PH: In '81 you had neo-expressionist painting, and you had the Pictures generation, the Metro Pictures generation. During the early '80s, there wasn't much support for the Pictures artists, besides that of other artists. It wasn't Allan McCollum who was on the cover of the New York Times Magazine. The art world in the early '80s ignored them all, with the exception of Robert Longo. In 1985, when the East Village came along, all that changed. The first thing that the artist-run galleries in the East Village did was to schedule exhibitions of those artists. For Peter Nagy, Meyer Vaisman, and Oliver Wasow, it was impossible to see the work they liked at the established galleries, so they started their own [Nature Morte, International With Monument, C.A.S.H.]. They put up shows of Ross Bleckner, Allan McCollum, and James Welling. It's one of those classic stories: The enthusiasm of the younger generation for the Pictures artists fueled interest in them.
DC: The three examples that you cite, which were artist-run spaces--albeit commercial galleries--opted out of moving to SoHo after the East Village was over; they just closed their doors.
PH: When they closed, the East Village was over. But these were not professional art dealers. Their galleries may not have been nonprofits, but you have to remember that with the privatization of the '80s there was really no money for nonprofits. These guys were also all under twenty-five, and the paraphernalia of the nonprofits probably looked unattractive to them. I would liken it to starting a record label more than an art gallery. It really is one of the most remarkable cultural phenomena I've ever witnessed--all these young artists actually thought, "Well, we'll just hang out our shingle and show stuff we like, and maybe sell a few things and keep the space open." There was really no overhead and no machinery of a gallery.
DC: We think of it today as the happening scene. But ten times as many galleries in SoHo were showing what were more or less extensions of neo-expressionism. I'm still bracketing your work, because by the fall of '86 you were caught up in the movement of East Village artists into the most hallowed ranks of SoHo blue chip.
PH: The driving force behind International With Monument was Meyer Vaisman, and in '86 Meyer decided to retire as an art dealer. He had a strong desire that he and his artists would go on to show at one gallery, and that gallery was Sonnabend. I was following Meyer's lead.
DC: That was the moment when the notoriety accompanying International With Monument's roster of artists turned into something much bigger. There was almost a wholesale media feeding frenzy, and I was struck by the fact that the cultural debate got pretty ugly. The vituperation that your arrival was greeted with bore no resemblance to what had accompanied the arrival of graffiti, say, five years earlier.
PH: I know. It was really great. I mean, it was unpleasant, but I felt that we had some provocative things to say about the underlying structure of the world we all experience that most people really didn't want to face.
I may not have done a good job of representing the issues, but I wanted to talk about the ideas associated with simulation--the idea that nature and reality had to be reexamined and the new cultural capacity to create simulations of the old reality had to be taken into account. A lot of the work also contained an interesting point of view on consumerism. For me, the most important artist of my generation is Haim Steinbach, along with Cindy Sherman, of course. If you look around the art world today or in 1995 or 1990, there is probably more art influenced by Haim's basic strategies than anybody's except Cindy's. From where we sit, it's often difficult to remember how provocative it is for him to put objects on the shelf, even in 2002, and say, "This is art."
DC: How do you think our perceptions of the '80s have changed, and how would you characterize those perceptions today?
PH: About five years ago, I gave a talk to the College Art Association in which I asked why the early and mid-'80s were still so disparaged in the United States. One aspect of the '80s in New York that I don't think can be ignored is the fact that many of the prominent artists--Julian Schnabel, David Salle, Laurie Simmons, Sherrie Levine, and Ross Bleckner--were part of a sudden florescence of young Jewish-American artists. Like other, non-Jewish artists, they were reacting to being the first generation of Americans brought up in the suburbs, and, by becoming artists, they were trying to decipher their suburban experience. In my view, the artists of Jewish background specifically reacted to suburbia as a kind of diaspora from the city, which caused them to hearken back to a heroic vision of the urban Jewish intellectual--especially to the 1950s and people like Rothko and Newman--at the same time that they were reacting to suburbia. I experienced this as well, but I'm only half-Jewish.
DC: Shortly after the emergence of that generation, questions of racial and cultural identity moved to the forefront of artistic production and critical discourse. I think the role of Jewish identity in the formation of this generation of artists was there and may have been tacitly acknowledged as an aspect of what people were about, but nobody really formulated it as something shared by these artists.
PH: There's still a great deal of hostility toward the period. I don't know whether it means it's bad art, which is certainly possible. I'm open to that interpretation. But there is something that is still uncomfortable for a lot of curators, writers, and collectors. It'll be interesting to see how that looks in another ten years. In the meantime, one of the nice things is that there are a lot of younger people who have come of age finding something in this work--choosing to combine Minimalism and Pop as an interesting position, just as I did. So that's nice.
RELATED ARTICLE: '80s MARK DION
I came to New York in 1982 to study at the School of Visual Arts. At that time, all these amazing people were teaching at SVA: Craig Owens, Douglas Crimp, Benjamin Buchloh, and Hal Foster, as well as artists like Tom Lawson and Joseph Kosuth. They were incredibly generous; classes would evolve into dinner, which would then tum into an evening of drinking and dancing. In the mid'80s there was this great mushrooming of theory, and its spores infected everyone. A lot of people were terrorized by it, while other people just had a natural facility to jump in. You often found people who felt very free to quote Foucault and Baudrillard, though they'd never read Descartes, Kierkegaard, or Kant. There was a kind of dilettantism about it that was actually quite liberating, though some people used theory as a weapon. Certainly in school it was very competitive.
--AS TOLD TO GREGORY WILLIAMS
Dan Cameron is senior curator at the New Museum of Contemporary Art, New York, and is organizing the 8th International Istanbul Biennial.
COPYRIGHT 2003 Artforum International Magazine, Inc.
COPYRIGHT 2003 Gale Group
DAN CAMERON: Before we talk about the '80s, we should talk about talking about the '80s.
PETER HALLEY: It's interesting, because the '8os were really three different periods: 1980 to 1983 was dominated by the recession and by the emergence of new European painting and neo-expressionism. Then you had the mid-'80s, in which the robust economic recovery spurred the emergence of neo-Conceptualism--which included artists who were showing for the first time, Koons, myself, et cetera, but also marked the first widespread acceptance of artists like Richard Prince and Sherrie Levine, who were first shown around 1980. Then you had the end of the '80s. After about '88, the economy was less good, the AIDS crisis emerged, and a more direct form of Conceptualism emerged, which defined itself in terms of a critical opposition.
DC: So, in fact, in that ten-year stretch, we're talking about three distinct trends.
PH: Yes, it's interesting to speculate on which version of the decade is going to win. Of course I'm rooting for the more optimistic, glamorous version, namely, the mid-'80s.
DC: One thing that strikes me about the transition from the early to the mid-'80s is this public shaping of the artist as a personality. People like Julian Schnabel, Keith Haring, and Jean-Michel Basquiat were visible in a way that rock musicians and film stars were visible, but by the mid-'80s you saw the artists taking a different kind of relationship to the work. Artists were very glamorous in the beginning of the '80s, whereas the art itself got very glamorous in the mid-'80s.
PH: I'd like to think that a less artsy, more conceptual art that uses Pop materials is more glamorous. I might try to make the case that it's also more elegant if you think of elegance as doing more with less. It used strategies of representation and syntax that were more sophisticated.
DC: I want to ask about your role in the '80s. I think the idea of a painter as a thinker, writer, and theorist came as a real shock to viewers, who were used to painters being only semi-articulate about their aims.
PH: Well, I've never quite been able to figure out how my role as a writer fit in. Even today it concerns me that more artists haven't done more writing. Maybe an artist writing just doesn't make sense anymore. However, when I was a student in the mid-'70s, I was thinking about people like Smithson, Judd, and Robert Morris--all of whom wrote. Not long after I came to New York in 1980, I was introduced to Jeffrey Deitch, then a young guy who worked as an art adviser at Citibank. He had just published an article in Arts Magazine, and I wrote him a note saying, "I really liked your piece, but I disagreed with what you said about such and such." He sent me back a postcard saying, "Peter, that's great. You should do some writing." That gave me the idea, and during the next couple years, since it didn't seem likely that I'd be able to show my work at that time, I began to write. The only person at any of the art magazines who actually read unsolicited manuscripts was Richard Martin at Arts. When he got my first pie ce, on Robert Smithson, Colab, and New Wave music, he immediately published it. After that, he published everything I sent him. If that hadn't happened, I would not have become a published writer, I'm almost certain.
DC: I remember distinctly the very powerful impact that it had in the art world once you began writing about abstraction and geometry, and once your texts could be understood as somehow forming a manifesto for the paintings. People were excited by the notion that someone would use their texts as a wedge to state their ideas and validate the artwork itself.
PH: Well, I wasn't exactly aware of it that way. "The Crisis in Geometry" was published in '84, at a time when I hadn't really shown any work. A lot of the texts contain attacks on traditional liberal humanism, with a special emphasis on anything to do with spirituality. I still feel a bit self-conscious about it, because it also meant an attack on what was a truism in the New York art world: that abstract painting was uplifting, or that art could be spiritual. It was a broad attack on dearly held values, but I thought it was needed.
All the French authors I was reading then were, for me, fuel with which to build that fire. My introduction to that French critical writing also burst a lot of my assumptions, as somebody who had been schooled in liberal humanism.
DC: I'm very interested in your memories of the East Village and how the very rapid acceleration, rise, and disappearance of that scene mirrored the '80s more generally. It seemed as if the East Village started with neo-expressionism, peaked with neo-Conceptualism, and then just hit a wall.
PH: I really feel that art then was emphatically political. In 1985, I believed that Francesco Clemente, Schnabel, and Basquiat were, you know, right-wing tools. I felt that their art was a product of Reaganism and that they were trying to reverse everything exciting that had happened during the previous fifty years. And I'm sure they felt something similar about me and about the people I was associated with.
DC: It's the last moment of true polarization in the American art world.
PH: In '81 you had neo-expressionist painting, and you had the Pictures generation, the Metro Pictures generation. During the early '80s, there wasn't much support for the Pictures artists, besides that of other artists. It wasn't Allan McCollum who was on the cover of the New York Times Magazine. The art world in the early '80s ignored them all, with the exception of Robert Longo. In 1985, when the East Village came along, all that changed. The first thing that the artist-run galleries in the East Village did was to schedule exhibitions of those artists. For Peter Nagy, Meyer Vaisman, and Oliver Wasow, it was impossible to see the work they liked at the established galleries, so they started their own [Nature Morte, International With Monument, C.A.S.H.]. They put up shows of Ross Bleckner, Allan McCollum, and James Welling. It's one of those classic stories: The enthusiasm of the younger generation for the Pictures artists fueled interest in them.
DC: The three examples that you cite, which were artist-run spaces--albeit commercial galleries--opted out of moving to SoHo after the East Village was over; they just closed their doors.
PH: When they closed, the East Village was over. But these were not professional art dealers. Their galleries may not have been nonprofits, but you have to remember that with the privatization of the '80s there was really no money for nonprofits. These guys were also all under twenty-five, and the paraphernalia of the nonprofits probably looked unattractive to them. I would liken it to starting a record label more than an art gallery. It really is one of the most remarkable cultural phenomena I've ever witnessed--all these young artists actually thought, "Well, we'll just hang out our shingle and show stuff we like, and maybe sell a few things and keep the space open." There was really no overhead and no machinery of a gallery.
DC: We think of it today as the happening scene. But ten times as many galleries in SoHo were showing what were more or less extensions of neo-expressionism. I'm still bracketing your work, because by the fall of '86 you were caught up in the movement of East Village artists into the most hallowed ranks of SoHo blue chip.
PH: The driving force behind International With Monument was Meyer Vaisman, and in '86 Meyer decided to retire as an art dealer. He had a strong desire that he and his artists would go on to show at one gallery, and that gallery was Sonnabend. I was following Meyer's lead.
DC: That was the moment when the notoriety accompanying International With Monument's roster of artists turned into something much bigger. There was almost a wholesale media feeding frenzy, and I was struck by the fact that the cultural debate got pretty ugly. The vituperation that your arrival was greeted with bore no resemblance to what had accompanied the arrival of graffiti, say, five years earlier.
PH: I know. It was really great. I mean, it was unpleasant, but I felt that we had some provocative things to say about the underlying structure of the world we all experience that most people really didn't want to face.
I may not have done a good job of representing the issues, but I wanted to talk about the ideas associated with simulation--the idea that nature and reality had to be reexamined and the new cultural capacity to create simulations of the old reality had to be taken into account. A lot of the work also contained an interesting point of view on consumerism. For me, the most important artist of my generation is Haim Steinbach, along with Cindy Sherman, of course. If you look around the art world today or in 1995 or 1990, there is probably more art influenced by Haim's basic strategies than anybody's except Cindy's. From where we sit, it's often difficult to remember how provocative it is for him to put objects on the shelf, even in 2002, and say, "This is art."
DC: How do you think our perceptions of the '80s have changed, and how would you characterize those perceptions today?
PH: About five years ago, I gave a talk to the College Art Association in which I asked why the early and mid-'80s were still so disparaged in the United States. One aspect of the '80s in New York that I don't think can be ignored is the fact that many of the prominent artists--Julian Schnabel, David Salle, Laurie Simmons, Sherrie Levine, and Ross Bleckner--were part of a sudden florescence of young Jewish-American artists. Like other, non-Jewish artists, they were reacting to being the first generation of Americans brought up in the suburbs, and, by becoming artists, they were trying to decipher their suburban experience. In my view, the artists of Jewish background specifically reacted to suburbia as a kind of diaspora from the city, which caused them to hearken back to a heroic vision of the urban Jewish intellectual--especially to the 1950s and people like Rothko and Newman--at the same time that they were reacting to suburbia. I experienced this as well, but I'm only half-Jewish.
DC: Shortly after the emergence of that generation, questions of racial and cultural identity moved to the forefront of artistic production and critical discourse. I think the role of Jewish identity in the formation of this generation of artists was there and may have been tacitly acknowledged as an aspect of what people were about, but nobody really formulated it as something shared by these artists.
PH: There's still a great deal of hostility toward the period. I don't know whether it means it's bad art, which is certainly possible. I'm open to that interpretation. But there is something that is still uncomfortable for a lot of curators, writers, and collectors. It'll be interesting to see how that looks in another ten years. In the meantime, one of the nice things is that there are a lot of younger people who have come of age finding something in this work--choosing to combine Minimalism and Pop as an interesting position, just as I did. So that's nice.
RELATED ARTICLE: '80s MARK DION
I came to New York in 1982 to study at the School of Visual Arts. At that time, all these amazing people were teaching at SVA: Craig Owens, Douglas Crimp, Benjamin Buchloh, and Hal Foster, as well as artists like Tom Lawson and Joseph Kosuth. They were incredibly generous; classes would evolve into dinner, which would then tum into an evening of drinking and dancing. In the mid'80s there was this great mushrooming of theory, and its spores infected everyone. A lot of people were terrorized by it, while other people just had a natural facility to jump in. You often found people who felt very free to quote Foucault and Baudrillard, though they'd never read Descartes, Kierkegaard, or Kant. There was a kind of dilettantism about it that was actually quite liberating, though some people used theory as a weapon. Certainly in school it was very competitive.
--AS TOLD TO GREGORY WILLIAMS
Dan Cameron is senior curator at the New Museum of Contemporary Art, New York, and is organizing the 8th International Istanbul Biennial.
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A Rebours by Matali Crasset and Peter Halley
Cosmic Connections
Interview Matali Crasset / Peter Halley with Jeff Rian
JR How did this show come about?
PH Whatever goes into Matali’s work—the underlying things like the proportions, use of materials, humor—is very much the same as art. I got a better overview of her work from the interview we published in index [June–July 2005]. We were all very enthusiastic about her work.
MC I was working at Thomson, and the intention was to return to the essentials: better sound and better control.
JR Is this your first collaboration with a designer, Peter?
PH In 1995, at Jay Gorney Modern Art, I showed my paintings with Ettore Sottsass’s ceramics.
JR How is this show going to happen? Who does what when?
PH The wall drawings will go on first.
MC The idea was to create a connection between our works..Peter thought I should do wall drawings upstairs to be placed with his paintings, while he would do something on the wall downstairs, around a composition of mine.
PH I’d noticed trees in Matali’s works. But these are really a latticework of geometric lines and abstracted shapes that will give the walls light and scale.
MC The most important thing for me was to find a way to work together. Peter asked me to do come up with a wall drawing for the paintings, and to do something about nature. What I’m making in the wall drawings is more like the vibrations of trees; the objects downstairs diffuse these vibrations. I’m preparing tests using mason’s chalk lines. Peter thinks the background might be better in a pale gray. The chalk lines are pretty stabile and have a nice kind of fuzzy quality.
JR In the index interview, Matali, you said that purpose and context determined her design and materials; the function of an object being integrated into the form. How did they determine the purpose and context of this show?
MC At first, it wasn’t clear how or where to do the drawings.. I also wondered about the status of the two works. We know the paintings; what they’re basically about. I wanted to work on a more ephemeral system. So my work is for the exhibition, while his are more enduring.
JR In France, the word “status” has grave importance: What’s your status as a taxpayer? What’s the status of a work of art? What’s the status of your look?
MC [Matali laughs.] I want to take away the status of an object in order to propose something else. In Europe, you have to deal with current codes. You enter a room and the sofa gives you all the information about the owner: if it’s leather, if there’s more than one. All these codes are clear, but they create barriers. I try to get rid of them.
JR What are those objects downstairs. They look like sculptures to me.
MC They’re furniture: armchairs and a tree lamp.
JR Abstract art—paintings, sculpture—is for meditation: devices for contemplating the organization of mental process. Peter’s pattern of representation is based on what he refers to as “cells” and “prisons,” which are related to the architecture of control. But the colors make them sensual, and more thought provoking. Matali’s designs seem to put the mental aspect before their function—you have to look at them and think about them before using them. What’s the difference?
MC My work still has a function. Peter’s paintings go a step further, more like mental architecture. I want to bring more freedom into objects and spaces, and to create fluidity, because places can change from one minute to the next, whether for working, sleeping, or whatever.
PH Her work also makes me think of sixties avant-garde art. Weren’t you making portable, movable, even nomadic objects?
MC I explore for different typologies and different ways to combine them—kind of forms, not the symbolism of form—and ways to make objects, such as a chair, which usually has a prescribed height, etc. My objects are simple shapes, or modules, which I combine to make more flexible and to make you think differently about your daily life. This is similar in a way to the way Peter works: modular possibilities in infinite combinations.
PH Module is the right word.
MC But like I said, Peter’s work is more mental, while mine is more functional.
JR Matali, you’ve called Peter’s colors radioactive, as if they were light-emitting objects. Can you describe your colors—where they come from, what they might be about?
PH I’d like to know that too.
MC I think neither of us is afraid of color. For myself, I think of color as a common language. I try to break existing color codes, which can allow people to understand what I’m doing. Color allows me to give a different logic to a space; not just for the eyes, but for the emotions—an emotion generated by the combinations of colors and how they are imprinted on our memory. Some colors seem more spiritual, some more fun.
PH I often hear people say they’re afraid of color. Why do you think that is?
MC When you’re a kid you like color. Then, little by little professionals start taking over. Color is pre-selected in the different industries, for fabrics, paint, etc. People become afraid of color because they no longer experiment with it. They don’t even try, they follow what deco professionals decide for them.
PH Sottsass once said that when he’s designing a cabinet or a room he looks at a palate of available colors. He uses found colors like collage. Is that the same for you?
MC Yes. Designers use prefabricated materials whose colors are decided by so-called experts. I have to know all the palates and combine them.
PH Twenty years ago I was interested in relating color to a technological light and not a natural light. I thought Rothko’s were nice, but the light was about nature. I was interested in the kind of light at a shopping mall or, as it turned out, in a computer. I used florescent colors. But I also tend to think expressively with color. I guess it’s the way I’m wired. But what Matali says about color being a common language is interesting. I’ve shown in many different countries, and the paintings are read in a similar fashion.
JR Don’t Europeans see your paintings as American?
PH I think so. But what Matali said about how people are afraid of color could also be their fear of sensuality—which, in my experience, is especially the case in protestant or puritanical settings. Northerner Europeans always ask me if I make paintings in gray.
JR I get the feeling you and Matali reside in the same aesthetic planet.
PH She emphasizes playfulness, using simple gestalts, like the block shapes and colors.
MC But I would never have done the work I did with Peter in another context.
Interview with Jeff Rian.
Interview Matali Crasset / Peter Halley with Jeff Rian
JR How did this show come about?
PH Whatever goes into Matali’s work—the underlying things like the proportions, use of materials, humor—is very much the same as art. I got a better overview of her work from the interview we published in index [June–July 2005]. We were all very enthusiastic about her work.
MC I was working at Thomson, and the intention was to return to the essentials: better sound and better control.
JR Is this your first collaboration with a designer, Peter?
PH In 1995, at Jay Gorney Modern Art, I showed my paintings with Ettore Sottsass’s ceramics.
JR How is this show going to happen? Who does what when?
PH The wall drawings will go on first.
MC The idea was to create a connection between our works..Peter thought I should do wall drawings upstairs to be placed with his paintings, while he would do something on the wall downstairs, around a composition of mine.
PH I’d noticed trees in Matali’s works. But these are really a latticework of geometric lines and abstracted shapes that will give the walls light and scale.
MC The most important thing for me was to find a way to work together. Peter asked me to do come up with a wall drawing for the paintings, and to do something about nature. What I’m making in the wall drawings is more like the vibrations of trees; the objects downstairs diffuse these vibrations. I’m preparing tests using mason’s chalk lines. Peter thinks the background might be better in a pale gray. The chalk lines are pretty stabile and have a nice kind of fuzzy quality.
JR In the index interview, Matali, you said that purpose and context determined her design and materials; the function of an object being integrated into the form. How did they determine the purpose and context of this show?
MC At first, it wasn’t clear how or where to do the drawings.. I also wondered about the status of the two works. We know the paintings; what they’re basically about. I wanted to work on a more ephemeral system. So my work is for the exhibition, while his are more enduring.
JR In France, the word “status” has grave importance: What’s your status as a taxpayer? What’s the status of a work of art? What’s the status of your look?
MC [Matali laughs.] I want to take away the status of an object in order to propose something else. In Europe, you have to deal with current codes. You enter a room and the sofa gives you all the information about the owner: if it’s leather, if there’s more than one. All these codes are clear, but they create barriers. I try to get rid of them.
JR What are those objects downstairs. They look like sculptures to me.
MC They’re furniture: armchairs and a tree lamp.
JR Abstract art—paintings, sculpture—is for meditation: devices for contemplating the organization of mental process. Peter’s pattern of representation is based on what he refers to as “cells” and “prisons,” which are related to the architecture of control. But the colors make them sensual, and more thought provoking. Matali’s designs seem to put the mental aspect before their function—you have to look at them and think about them before using them. What’s the difference?
MC My work still has a function. Peter’s paintings go a step further, more like mental architecture. I want to bring more freedom into objects and spaces, and to create fluidity, because places can change from one minute to the next, whether for working, sleeping, or whatever.
PH Her work also makes me think of sixties avant-garde art. Weren’t you making portable, movable, even nomadic objects?
MC I explore for different typologies and different ways to combine them—kind of forms, not the symbolism of form—and ways to make objects, such as a chair, which usually has a prescribed height, etc. My objects are simple shapes, or modules, which I combine to make more flexible and to make you think differently about your daily life. This is similar in a way to the way Peter works: modular possibilities in infinite combinations.
PH Module is the right word.
MC But like I said, Peter’s work is more mental, while mine is more functional.
JR Matali, you’ve called Peter’s colors radioactive, as if they were light-emitting objects. Can you describe your colors—where they come from, what they might be about?
PH I’d like to know that too.
MC I think neither of us is afraid of color. For myself, I think of color as a common language. I try to break existing color codes, which can allow people to understand what I’m doing. Color allows me to give a different logic to a space; not just for the eyes, but for the emotions—an emotion generated by the combinations of colors and how they are imprinted on our memory. Some colors seem more spiritual, some more fun.
PH I often hear people say they’re afraid of color. Why do you think that is?
MC When you’re a kid you like color. Then, little by little professionals start taking over. Color is pre-selected in the different industries, for fabrics, paint, etc. People become afraid of color because they no longer experiment with it. They don’t even try, they follow what deco professionals decide for them.
PH Sottsass once said that when he’s designing a cabinet or a room he looks at a palate of available colors. He uses found colors like collage. Is that the same for you?
MC Yes. Designers use prefabricated materials whose colors are decided by so-called experts. I have to know all the palates and combine them.
PH Twenty years ago I was interested in relating color to a technological light and not a natural light. I thought Rothko’s were nice, but the light was about nature. I was interested in the kind of light at a shopping mall or, as it turned out, in a computer. I used florescent colors. But I also tend to think expressively with color. I guess it’s the way I’m wired. But what Matali says about color being a common language is interesting. I’ve shown in many different countries, and the paintings are read in a similar fashion.
JR Don’t Europeans see your paintings as American?
PH I think so. But what Matali said about how people are afraid of color could also be their fear of sensuality—which, in my experience, is especially the case in protestant or puritanical settings. Northerner Europeans always ask me if I make paintings in gray.
JR I get the feeling you and Matali reside in the same aesthetic planet.
PH She emphasizes playfulness, using simple gestalts, like the block shapes and colors.
MC But I would never have done the work I did with Peter in another context.
Interview with Jeff Rian.
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