The art world of the last 45 years has recast our modernist past. In the late 19th century the modern movement went through Redon, Rodin, Cezanne, Seurat, Gaugain, Renoir, Monet, Van Gogh. The next group to appear were the Fauves [Matisse, Derain, Marquet, Van Dongen, Dufy, Vlaminck and Braque] Braque, together with Picasso founded Cubism which included Leger, Gris, Lipschitz, Laurens, Duchamp-Villon, Archipenko and others. After Cubism Dada appeared, which included Arp, Picabia and Duchamp. Now, the high point of Duchamp's work was the large glass: The Bride Stripped Bare by her own Bachelors, Even. After that, without doubt the high point of his career, he spent a few years playing with readymades and then quit art completely. spending most of the rest of his life enjoying living, playing chess and having a fine circle of friends in New York, his adopted home. It was only after AE that first the Neo Dada and Pop artists began to reevaluate his contribution and make him the center of the 20th century artistic scheme. His readymades were quite suddenly raised to the level of major examples and major models for such artists as Jasper Johns, Andy Warhol, Lichtenstein and others. The changed view of the early part of the century was that it was all about getting away from the traditional concept of art which held its place on the wall and in the space and produced new poetry and new logic of facture through poetic ideas. No, it was challenging all the possibilities of art and making something which was a joke simultaneously on the aspirations of the artist and the piety of the audience.
Johns' early paintings were painted with an AE hand, but rather than going through that sort of improvisation on the way to a self chosen image which would carry formal and philosophical weight, the work of the brush was to describe a previously chosen image which might have looked like something profound, but was in fact nonsense -- and that is not a criticism. Nonsense like an alphabet, a pattern of numbers taken from a math book, a map or a flag. None of these were images chosen because they revealed the heartfelt yearnings of the artist towards making a poetic statement, but images which made fun of that. These were, after all, the children of Duchamp.
Today the art world, from the major museums through the major art schools to the dealers and the artists inside this world all judge other work from this viewpoint. Only it has now gone on for 45 years, and the younger artists have to be aware of their precedents as well as being inside this ideation [I should rather call it propaganda]. Everyone is happy. The paintings within this golden land keep getting astronomically more expensive every year and the one standard by which to judge any art is its monetary value, and the standard to judge an artist is his[her] income.
It is too simpleminded to say that the art world, after the success of AE decided to have a permanent avant garde in place from then on, and to support it and carry it immediately into the establishment. That is one of the reasons for the blend of P. S. 1 and the MOMA. Yes, it is true that we now have a permanent avant garde, but more important it is an avant garde based on a modernist past which has been invented by the current crop of major artists [using their own standard of their wealth]. But the art which was supported was only new and avant garde by measuring how much ir carried out Duchamp's example. It must of course also carry this idea to newer and more questionable objects and images. Thus the avant garde is made to include only questionable images and peculiarities. There is no thread except that to tie it to the past. But now it is only the new past this art world has created with Duchamp as the central role model.
If you have read the book, first published in 1956, "Canvases and Careers" by Cynthia and Harrison White, you may have a good idea why the first Avant Garde came to be. The overproduction of too many extremely skilled and ambitious academic painters in France and in other European countries by the academies made it necessary to find new ways of making a living for qualified professionals. There were several possibilities. Some academicians gave up their painting and became producers of lithographed popular prints. And a few began to work further and further away from the accepted norms of pictorial behavior. Some brave entrepreneurs first essayed the role of the dealer, and supported several of these until it came time for their first group and one man shows[both of these institutions were invented then and there]. And their very peculiarity and difference from every thing everyone else was exhibiting, ultimately made them all successes. I was careful there, I said was showing, because Gustave Moreau -the teacher of many of the Fauves, was painting work in secret which could have been showed with their work, but he kept it hidden.
So an avant garde, and all the other 19th and 20th century avant gardes were formed of artists working in a style which was absolutely despised by the main figures buying art, curating art, and writing about art. They were not painting to requirements of the Haute Bourgeouisie, the major critics and the museums, and they attracted no early and easy enthusiastic responses. None of this is true of the pseudo avant gardes since AE. Contrary to the current opinion, I would mark AE and post war Art informel in France as the last of the avant gardes. And although they were real, perhaps even they had a little too much of a model for artistic behavior from early 20th century abstract painters like Mondrian,Van Doesburg, Vontongerloo, Gabo, Pevsner Arp, Brancusi, Malevich and El Lisitski, and therefore, did not have quite as much freedom as they thought they had. But I still think of several of those artists as true and full figures.
So, what is the situation now? If an artist works from the motif and looks for poetry in his intimate response to the motif, or, for that matter also his large forming responses to the motif, he is taking himself too seriously. He should not be looking for some way to express his response to a motif in formal terms with potential poetic meaning. He should be simultaneously responding to a motif and its inherent stupidity and the inherent worthlessness of traditional forming. Then he would be part of this brave new world. Not that I think that world is either brave or new. I think it is craven and trapped in a time warp.
With this new establishment in full fettle the time was ripe for academic critics to enter and justify it philosophically. At a time not too distant from that of the 30's Duchamp, Wittgenstein upended modern philosophy. From his viewpoint most of the crucial subjects of such as philosopher as Kant could not even be discussed philosophically. They were outside the potential subjects of discourse. Lated in his last published work,"Philosophical Investigations." and in the notebooks of his later lectures he reevaluated a good bit of territory in a highly non doctrinaire way. Using his new insights he opened up, all over again many of the issues which early on his work had closed down. Some of his best students went on to consider topics out of classical philosophy and subjects which that had a better fit outside of his philosophy, like concepts out of Freud, for example.
When any of the serious modernist figurative artists works from a motif there are an infinite range of possibilities involved in the forms observed their colors and the character of the edges of shapes. The level of abstraction ar every point is up for grabs. If a reference to the motif is required that reference has a wide range of degrees of detail and complexity to be decided, not only for every point in the canvas but also for every form represented. The two are different and affect each other. Thus the complexity in Wittgenstein is best seen in referential painting.
No philosopher nor even a serious philosophy student, when I read in Philosophical Investigations I found wonderful exhilarating support for modern metaphoric thought processes, pointedly for my own when I worked from a motif. On one page he discusses looking at a window which has two panes in the upper part and two in the lower part. He then discusses how to look at it. One way would be to see it as a cross, another way sees it as four equal planes, another would be two planes, each divided in half horizontally. Or we could see it as two planes divided in half vertically. He goes through all of the possibilities noting how we feel when we restrict the possibility to only one of those groups. He pointedly mentions the cross, of course he has made a point about the restrictive thinking made necessary by Christianity, but I can take it as an endorsement of the artist's open ended look at the motif with metaphoric possibilities as one of the things on his mind.
From the viewpoint of a professional philosopher this kind of discussion could seem to point towards Duchamp readymades as a wonderful artistic extension of Wittgenstein's philosophy, which, emphatically, it is not. Duchamp took things out of context and put only one new potential image onto them, destroying their original context. This opens up nothing, rather he closes down whole avenues of thought for the sake of a joke which should stall all future art. Which it did do, at least for Duchamp. There is no serious parallel between Duchamp and post Duchamp and modern philosophy. Philosophers are something like poets, people who work for the wonder in their work with little expectation of reward. While Duchamp was a joker, finished with his career as a producer of art, the current establishment is exactly the reverse everything it does is predicated on money and career. Not only for the artist but for the whole of the art world and its various denizens.
All over the country there are small pockets of serious people. They probably had contact with some of the better teachers at work from the 1950s until now in Boston, New York, Kansas City, Chicago, New Bedford, Los Angeles, San Francisco and the Bay area, Bloomington, Washington D.C. and Philadelphia. In all of those places and in many others unregenerate modernists were hard at work both teaching and painting over those years. Some of their students, despite the lack of acceptance in this art world have been working seriously ever since. They have been accomplishing works responsive to the issues and more than that. They have been exhibiting, primarily locally, since they are not very commercial in this context, but sometimes nationally, as well. So those are what I think are the issues. To build on the baby of modernism, and not throw it away [like the bath water] in a yearning for the easy negation of post Duchampian nonsense.
[this is good] Love the "What are the issues" essay. It's the best summary of the past 100 years in the art world that I've ever read. Unfortunately, I'm sure only a handful in the art world would agree. Especially the part on Duchamp.
David D
Posted by: dalessandro | 11/15/2006 at 07:48 AM
[this is good] I would love a post Duchamp artworld. Actually I think it already exists - in Hollywood. It seems that the stuff I love - great painting - does not even exist for most of America. The art that I can discuss with anybody is movies. But, at the same time, if a museum does a Monet show, the people come out in droves and love it. Normal people even travel to see it. Only artworld insiders go to see Duchamp. There are more people interested in NASCAR than Duchamp. Take heart!(?) Duchamp was nobody.
Posted by: Matthew Lopas | 12/31/2006 at 10:00 PM