Art, Postmodernism and The Universe.
Hunter College MFA Thesis and the extended version of my artist's statement.
If it cannot guarantee me a successful career or even a job (which it most certainly cannot be said to) my Master of Fine Arts degree does certify one thing: after several years of living, breathing, eating and sleeping in, on or around it, I am afforded the privilege of saying I know something about visual art. I rely on this privilege in defense of some unconventional beliefs that I will set forth in this essay. I have come to these beliefs as a direct result of my experiences in my undergraduate studies and subsequently in Hunter College’s MFA program. They stem from an attempt to synthesize what I have learned of Art History and Art Theory with the subjective knowledge arrived at through observation of the work being made by my contemporaries, my own struggles in the studio, and by analyzing the reactions, comments and criticisms of my professors and peers in critiquing my work.
In attempting to reconcile the information coming from these disparate sources there are often rifts; gaps where what is learned from the book differs vastly from what is experienced in the field. These schisms, between what is presented as objective knowledge and my actual subjective experience, the frequent incongruence of theory and practice, have left me to fill in the blanks with my own speculations.
I have concluded that these gaps exist because art does not quite fit into the academic model. I have thought extensively about why this is, both from the point of view of the art maker or author based on my own experiences as such, as well as from a more disinterested philosophical perspective, and have come to the conclusion that the reason is simple: imagination and creativity cannot be taught. Concrete skills, techniques, and even basic critical thinking can all be practiced and learned and thus taught, but not so with creativity or imagination. They are un-teachable, yet exist if in varying degrees within everyone, artist or otherwise—they are innate. I will discuss them further later on in talking about my work, as they are central to its conceptual framework.
I would like to return for a moment to the gaps I mentioned before. I believe every artist who has studied art in an academic sense has experienced these gaps, where reality and the theoretical diverge, and the artist is left to fill the gap. At these points of diversion a space is created for the artist to put forth new ideas in an attempt to bridge the gap, like a spider mending a tear in its web. In other, more ambitious instances, the web is redesigned, enlarged and perhaps attached to an entirely new source of support; and all the while, the black widows, the patient spiders of art history lay in wait—watching, grouping and analyzing the actions of the artist spiders as they build their webs. Until at last, the hungry spiders of art history see a larger pattern emerge and swoop down, consuming all of the artist spiders and overtaking all of their carefully woven webs to spin together into the giant meta-narrative web of Art History.
I will present a few reflections and ideas about what is going on in the ever-expanding universe of art in order to hollow out a proper vantage point from which the reader/viewer can see and contemplate my work. These observations and ideas are central to an understanding of the ideas at play in the work. They are the threads of the web I am weaving—formulated to mend the torn spots where I have found a synthesis of what is taught and what I experience as an artist to be impossible. In most cases, these ideas are not present in the work in a literal or forthright way; nonetheless, they are seminal to the production and understanding of my current work, so I think it is important that I elaborate.
The first, widest in scope and the idea that requires the most thorough explanation relates to the commonly accepted model of what happened to Western Art in an historical sense after Modernism. But before I launch an attack on the entire premise of Postmodernism, I would like to distinguish among first, Postmodernism the sociopolitical ethos, as postulated in the writings of social philosophers such as Lyotard or Pynchon; and second, Postmodernism as art historical phenomenon, or more accurately a structural paradigm imposed upon art. And third, more recently and most troublingly, Postmodernism as a conscious approach to art making. To put it bluntly, the distinction is quite simply that Postmodernism as a structural analysis of society in the Post-Cold War era is ingenious; as a model for what happened to art during this period it is threadbare at best, lacking consistency, clarity illuminative power. Consequently, accepting and working within it has become part of a formal visual arts education. In my view, this latest installment of Postmodernism poses a serious threat to contemporary art and the development of future artists, as it instructs new artists to enter into a cyclical and tired dialogue about art itself.
In the very first lines of his book Post-Modernism: The New Classicism in Art and Architecture, Charles Jencks, concedes the problematic nature of any general statements about postmodernism. “Most people,” he states,
“Have heard of Post-Modernism and don’t have a very clear idea of what it means. They can be forgiven this confusion because Post-Modernists don’t always know and, even when they think they do, often find themselves disagreeing.”
As I see it, this confusion has spawned and encouraged a generation of artists to make art about art history—all based on a historically inaccurate analysis of the preceding period in art history.
The trouble for Jencks is that Postmodernism, the commonly accepted identity of and/or current movement within contemporary art is a misunderstanding, an historicist farce, a premature end imposed on Modernism. I see Postmodernism not as an art historical period or movement, but rather as an existential crisis suffered by art itself as an inevitable result of certain tendencies within Modernism. In his Postscript to The Name of the Rose, Umberto Eco speaks of a similar idea, of “moments of crisis,” and draws a connection to Nietzsche’s Thoughts Out of Season,
“in which he wrote about the harm done by historical studies. The past conditions us, harries us, blackmails us. The historic avant-garde…tries to settle scores with the past…The avant-garde destroys, defaces the past.”
Modernism’s valorization of modernity, the new and the avant-garde and scorn of anything old or traditional, along with the idea of art as Art—an autonomous creature, an almost uncontrollable and self-governing force—eventually led to a situation in which modernism itself became antiquated by its own standards and caved in on itself.
When Duchamp’s Fountain, his now-famous urinal, was exhibited as a work of art in 1917, Art took an enormous leap—but not a forward leap, a backward leap to the nascent state of Modernism, when art first gained self-consciousness and began to ponder its own existence. In his seminal essay, The Postmodern Condition: A Report on Knowledge, Lyotard declares, “A work can become modern only if it is first postmodern. Postmodernism thus understood is not modernism at its end, but in the nascent state, and this state is constant.” The piece and the act of submitting it to a juried exhibition shifted the discussion of what constitutes art from its place within philosophy and relocated it to art itself. Duchamp’s Fountain seemed to suggest that he thought anything can be art if we call it Art, give it a capital letter, place it within the context of Art. As a chess player, I have always been fascinated by Duchamp, in particular his involvement with Dada. I think it quite possible that Duchamp, seeing many moves ahead into the game of Art, consciously created work that was designed to eventually achieve a stalemate of sorts. After all, Dada was the anti-art movement.
Regardless of Duchamp’s intentions, his Fountain shattered art’s self image. Furthermore, it broke down a wall that Modernism had erected between itself and the other disciplines. I do not mean to suggest of course that the shift occurred as a direct result of a single work by a single artist. It was more like a rolling snowball, starting out small but growing exponentially in size and momentum as it tumbled through time. Duchamp, Manzoni, Warhol, Levine—each added a new layer, more mass with which to squash art. Suddenly, philosophy of art was made into a subject for artists to broach. The end and the means became one and the cyclone began. A self-aggrandizing situation arose in which art was turned from a point of departure for discussing bigger ideas (beauty, truth, life, death) into a forum for a discussion on what art could and couldn’t, should and shouldn’t be. All of sudden “visual” art became a forum for artists to tear down or at least attempt to, one by one, the most fundamental of art’s value systems—beauty, authenticity, etc.--billing them as oppressive guardians of the status quo, and replacing them with criticality and irony. This created a whirlwind that shook the foundations of Art so deeply that the aftershocks are still filling galleries with cynical art jam-packed with ingenious critiques, criticisms, criticality etc. to be sure, but without a hint of heart or aesthetic endeavor. Artists like Dana Schutz, Rachel Harrison, and Justin Lieberman are in my opinion all examples of this phenomenon—supplanting beauty not even with truth, but with lack of skill, empty art historical references and critique all in the name of some kind of demented sense of morality. Jencks freely admits,
“I’m an architectural writer who has mistakenly wandered into the special preserve of what may be one of the fastest growing commercial markets, apart from micro-chips and Rubik cubes, that is the art-world-market.”
And so did postmodernism, at its own peril though, as this alignment with commercialism and success made believing in its anarchic and anti-establishment agenda difficult if not impossible. Perhaps Postmodernism is merely what happened when art, art history and art criticism became part of the modern liberal arts and then graduate education, institutionalized so that together they could create a niche for each other in modern day capitalist society; when art history became a subject, an object and then eventually a starting point in art. “The emphasis was thus on ultra-avantgardism, and some…critics, philosophers and not a few artists accepted it as historical truth,” Jencks writes. It is what happened when art history caught up to itself, ran out of history to record and analyze, and launched an attempt at an historical analyses of the present, which is impossible to do accurately as history requires hindsight. And artists—having become learned students of and believers in the ‘truths’ of postmodernism—began to make art which took the logic of the past (art history’s progressive nature), combined it with an attack on modernism and applied it to the present, as if that might allow them to manifest the future of art in the present, start the next movement, rediscover the glory of the avant-garde. Eco illuminates this flaw in the logic of postmodernism,
“But the moment comes when the avant-garde (the modern) can go no further, because it has produced a metalanguage that speaks of its impossible texts (conceptual art). The postmodern reply to the modern consists of recognizing that the past, since it cannot really be destroyed, because its destruction leads to silence, must be revisited.”
Modernism already carried within it a strong reactionary quality, and postmodernism turned this tendency back on itself. Like a student introduced to Descartes and Sartre for the first time, art became completely immersed in a dialogue with itself about itself.
Postmodernism in practice seems to me nothing but an historicist approach to art making, which is completely backwards, since art history should logically follow art and not the other way around. This is not to say that there is no value to any work categorized as postmodernist, or that the ideas that have come out of postmodernism are not interesting, but rather that postmodernism, as a category art history seems forced and perhaps short sighted and therefore any art-making predicated on its truths is necessarily flawed.
I wish to make it perfectly clear, that my problems lie not with the ideals of Postmodernism such as irony, reflexivity, criticality, etc., but instead with the overuse of said ideals toward an end of consciously creating “Postmodernist” art. These concepts, which I consider to be among the most central to a contemporary notion of Postmodernist art making have become self-defeating in their overuse. Jencks puts it well when he writes:
“Now in the 1980s, when Post-Modernism has become respectable and academic and its products are starting to turn up on every coffee table, we can anticipate its kitsch and pomposity—those twin specters which did so much to bring down Modernism in the 1960s. ”
It is not that works of art should have no content, but critical, ironic or otherwise, this content must be balanced with a set of aesthetic concerns that operate both independently of and in conjunction with said content. That is one thing the artists of the Renaissance, such as Michelangelo, did impeccably well. Their art was at once so aesthetically pleasing, so awe-inspiring, and yet so rich with content that it was not only the Church’s tool of choice for conveying the stories and teachings of Christianity to the illiterate masses, but continues to captivate both scholars and laymen today.
Yet among the majority of those within the inner circles of academia and to some extent outside them in the larger art-world, beauty—particularly if all traditional and/or unchecked—has become something of a ‘dirty’ word, an outmoded, idealistic and misguided value, and a taboo among so many contemporary artists. Instead we have art as joke, art as social critique, as art historical art about art and many others. These iterations of what constitutes art are problematic, and though occasionally entertaining, I find most of them hideously boring and snooty and almost never visually interesting.
Overly ironic work defeats itself for me because it seems more interested in being clever than being truthful, genuine or accessible—and so I do not wish to access it. Similarly, overly reflexive work defeats itself for me because it appears more invested in self-referentiality than in engaging with the viewer, and so I, the viewer, become disenfranchised, disengaged. Work that is overly critical (or maybe overly interested in its own criticality) is for me the most self-defeating and the least successful of all art that takes as its aim the creation of a Postmodernist Work of Art. Firstly, it lives a hypocritical existence, as it always depends upon as its center and point of departure that which it is criticizing. Overly critical work is diametrically opposed to the fundamental aim of Art, which is creation. It is far easier to criticize than to create, and more importantly criticism cannot exist without creation and is always structurally dependant on it. Furthermore, it rests on the assumptions on the part of the artist that the viewer knows enough about what the artist is critiquing to understand why it is being criticized, and if so that the viewer will then find the artist’s critique interesting enough that they will entertain it as art, without any kind of visual reward being offered. Especially when the art in question is ‘postmodern,’ entangled in a self-congratulatory dialogue centered on art history, a “quote” of a ‘quote’ of a critique on art—I think this is a lofty supposition. Which brings us to the most fundamental problem with postmodernism—It is supposed to be a rejection of the elitism inherent in Modern art, but it only increases it. Postmodernists fault their modernist predecessors for making art too hermetic, sealing it off from reality and to those outside the field of art. Yet postmodernism cannot be said to have made visual art more accessible or less convoluted. If Modernism is a room filled with people from the art-world looking at large abstract paintings trying to have an ‘aesthetic experience,’ it pails in comparison to the pomposity and elitism of the Postmodernism room next door where a similarly homogenous crowd sneers at a series of photographs of people making obscene gestures behind unsuspecting viewers as they look at the paintings in the room of Modernism.
Whether it really exists, what Postmodernism is and how it came to be is probably an amalgamation of all of the aforementioned ideas and influences along with many others I have undoubtedly overlooked. But as I am an artist and not a student of history or art history, I do not claim to have all the facts. Though I have tried to support them with the words of those much better informed than myself, the assertions I have made herewith are merely the conclusions I have drawn in attempting to parse out all that I have taken in from the field of experience on one hand and from the field of knowledge on the other. I will turn now to more direct discussion of my own work and endeavor to explain how it relates to the above.
I have always been fascinated by sublimity surrounding what we have come to call the ‘Universe.’ In a sense it is only an imaginary space except for, possibly, a few individuals who have actually traveled there, provided our endeavors in and observations of outer space over the last fifty years have been more truthful and astute than those conducted in the field of art and art history. You and I (forgive me if you are in fact an astronaut and have been to outer space) have never been to outer space or seen the celestial bodies up close. They are of a scale completely incomprehensible to us. What images we have, the ones that are not artists’ renderings are taken from so far away, across space and time, that we can never truly understand what outer space is or what it looks and feels like. Not only is our entrance into and visual experience of outer space in any real sense an impossibility, what is more, the closest we can come to comprehending its metaphysical or theoretical implications is an awareness that we cannot fully comprehend them. As current theory would have it, the cosmos is the only place where the idea of infinity is manifested in actual, physical form. We do not know the Universe’s size, only that it stretches far beyond our imagination, and that theoretically it is expanding at the speed of light. We also know that in theory, it has no end and no beginning, and yet strangely, distance there is measured in light and time, which are predicated on ends and beginnings. Essentially, when it comes to the Universe—its appearance, its limits, its history—we know only that we know we cannot truly know. And yet there is a sense that we have made so much progress since the period roughly five hundred years ago when we believed whole-heartedly that the world was flat and if one traveled too far he would fall off. The world became round and everything rotated around it, and then it was the Earth and its neighbors that rotated around the Sun. Later still, our world was composed of an unimaginable number of combinations of tiny elements, which upon further examination numbered just over a hundred. For human understanding of the Universe is a work in progress, a constantly shifting paradigm that grows (or at least changes) with our understanding of our physical reality. Obsession with the cosmos is a cross-cultural phenomenon, stemming from an innate curiosity within man. Albert Einstein, who most recently shattered and redesigned our image of physical and metaphysical reality, extending it to include an infinite and incomprehensible Universe, had an explanation for this constant questioning:
“The most beautiful thing, we can experience is the mysterious,” he argued. “It is the source of all true art and all science. He to whom this emotion is a stranger, who can no longer pause to wonder and stand rapt in awe, is as good as dead: his eyes are closed.”
As an artist, I recognize immediately the truth of Einstein’s statement—the link between scientist and the artist being their constant quest to evoke the Sublime, and the link between beauty and mystery being their ability to bewilder and enlighten.
The ‘death’ of Modernism (Postmodernism), which was meant to include the ‘deaths’ of Truth, Sincerity, Beauty and the Sublime to name a few, was only an illusion. And it is our ever-expanding curiosity about our ever-expanding Universe that makes it an ideal subject for art, as well as a perfect stage for a resurrection of so many of the invaluable romantic tendencies of Modernism. As an artist who wishes to diverge from the current, governing epistemologies of criticality, historicity etc, I have decided instead to humbly attempt, if only in my own work, to revive some of the aforementioned fallen stars in the Universe of Art.
For the fallacies of Postmodernism have opened up a kind of black hole in the Art Universe. A point can occur in a star’s life when its mass becomes too large for its internal pressure resulting a supernova—the explosion, collapse or ‘death’ of a star. A black hole is a region in spacetime that occurs as a result of supernova. Black holes are focused fields of gravity so powerful that once matter is pulled in it can never escape. They are structured like a vortex with the hole at the center. Once created the black hole will begin to pull all forms of matter around it into its orbit, where they will spiral in until they disappear.
Modernism was like a shining star that began to burn too brightly to contain itself and exploded, leaving in its wake a black hole, which is currently pulling Art toward an irreversible disappearance. The only thing to do as I see it is to re-impregnate Art with enough creativity, beauty, sublimity, romanticism, and sincerity that it becomes too massive for the black hole to come to bear on. As much as possible, I try to make my current work a departure from the rules and regulations of Postmodernist ideology. The work instead is invested in the earnest attempt to achieve beauty and an investigation into the unknown and unknowable—and the Universe is a perfect setting. It is necessarily a romantic subject matter because it roots from the idea that one could ever depict that which is a) never-ending, b) unavailable to the eye and c) almost entirely a mystery.
I arrived at idea of the Universe as a subject matter for my work, or perhaps my work arrived at that subject matter because it embodies—visually and theoretically—so many ideas that I am interested in. Ideas of order and chaos, life and death
It is far easier to criticize than to create, and good Art is never easy
It has been a compelling endeavor, attempting to depict the infinite, to imagine the unimaginable, and I suspect it should keep me busy for a long time. In terms of the form the work takes, I am currently exploring an idea I would call “maximalism”—or in simpler terms, I wish to do everything to everything with everything. No matter the medium or materials used or how futile the act, an art about the Universe must be universal in its approach—and currently in keeping with this I am making paintings, sculptures, photographs, installations, animations and sculptural drawings. At a glance, there is not a hint of theoretical or critical content, but metaphorically lurking beneath its aesthetically driven surfaces the work is an allegory for the current dilemma facing art/artists as well as my solution to it; and this is as it should be—the visual coming first as it is visual art. And regardless of deference toward form, in the meta-narrative created through the volume, variety and installation (the “maximalist” tendency of the work) an undeniable sense of the massive, the unanswerable and the unknown is created. Einstein said, “I am enough of an artist to draw freely upon my imagination. Imagination is more important than knowledge. Knowledge is limited. Imagination encircles the World.” And so I have decided to take that which literally encircles the Earth as the subject of my work: outer space, the solar system, the galaxy, the Universe.
BIBLIOGRAPHY
1. Jencks, Charles. Post-Modernism: The New Classicism in Art and Architecture, Rizzoli International Publications Inc., New York, 1987.
2. Lyotard, Jean-Francois. The Postmodern Condition: A Report on Knowledge, Manchester Univ. Press, 1984.
3. Eco, Umberto. Postscript to the Name of the Rose, Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, New York and London, 1983.
4. Calaprice, Alice. The Expanded Quotable Einstein, Princeton Univ. Press, Princeton and Oxford, 2000.
5. Sylvester, George. "What Life Means to Einstein: An Interview by George Sylvester Viereck," The Saturday Evening Post, Vol. 202 (26 October 1929).
In attempting to reconcile the information coming from these disparate sources there are often rifts; gaps where what is learned from the book differs vastly from what is experienced in the field. These schisms, between what is presented as objective knowledge and my actual subjective experience, the frequent incongruence of theory and practice, have left me to fill in the blanks with my own speculations.
I have concluded that these gaps exist because art does not quite fit into the academic model. I have thought extensively about why this is, both from the point of view of the art maker or author based on my own experiences as such, as well as from a more disinterested philosophical perspective, and have come to the conclusion that the reason is simple: imagination and creativity cannot be taught. Concrete skills, techniques, and even basic critical thinking can all be practiced and learned and thus taught, but not so with creativity or imagination. They are un-teachable, yet exist if in varying degrees within everyone, artist or otherwise—they are innate. I will discuss them further later on in talking about my work, as they are central to its conceptual framework.
I would like to return for a moment to the gaps I mentioned before. I believe every artist who has studied art in an academic sense has experienced these gaps, where reality and the theoretical diverge, and the artist is left to fill the gap. At these points of diversion a space is created for the artist to put forth new ideas in an attempt to bridge the gap, like a spider mending a tear in its web. In other, more ambitious instances, the web is redesigned, enlarged and perhaps attached to an entirely new source of support; and all the while, the black widows, the patient spiders of art history lay in wait—watching, grouping and analyzing the actions of the artist spiders as they build their webs. Until at last, the hungry spiders of art history see a larger pattern emerge and swoop down, consuming all of the artist spiders and overtaking all of their carefully woven webs to spin together into the giant meta-narrative web of Art History.
I will present a few reflections and ideas about what is going on in the ever-expanding universe of art in order to hollow out a proper vantage point from which the reader/viewer can see and contemplate my work. These observations and ideas are central to an understanding of the ideas at play in the work. They are the threads of the web I am weaving—formulated to mend the torn spots where I have found a synthesis of what is taught and what I experience as an artist to be impossible. In most cases, these ideas are not present in the work in a literal or forthright way; nonetheless, they are seminal to the production and understanding of my current work, so I think it is important that I elaborate.
The first, widest in scope and the idea that requires the most thorough explanation relates to the commonly accepted model of what happened to Western Art in an historical sense after Modernism. But before I launch an attack on the entire premise of Postmodernism, I would like to distinguish among first, Postmodernism the sociopolitical ethos, as postulated in the writings of social philosophers such as Lyotard or Pynchon; and second, Postmodernism as art historical phenomenon, or more accurately a structural paradigm imposed upon art. And third, more recently and most troublingly, Postmodernism as a conscious approach to art making. To put it bluntly, the distinction is quite simply that Postmodernism as a structural analysis of society in the Post-Cold War era is ingenious; as a model for what happened to art during this period it is threadbare at best, lacking consistency, clarity illuminative power. Consequently, accepting and working within it has become part of a formal visual arts education. In my view, this latest installment of Postmodernism poses a serious threat to contemporary art and the development of future artists, as it instructs new artists to enter into a cyclical and tired dialogue about art itself.
In the very first lines of his book Post-Modernism: The New Classicism in Art and Architecture, Charles Jencks, concedes the problematic nature of any general statements about postmodernism. “Most people,” he states,
“Have heard of Post-Modernism and don’t have a very clear idea of what it means. They can be forgiven this confusion because Post-Modernists don’t always know and, even when they think they do, often find themselves disagreeing.”
As I see it, this confusion has spawned and encouraged a generation of artists to make art about art history—all based on a historically inaccurate analysis of the preceding period in art history.
The trouble for Jencks is that Postmodernism, the commonly accepted identity of and/or current movement within contemporary art is a misunderstanding, an historicist farce, a premature end imposed on Modernism. I see Postmodernism not as an art historical period or movement, but rather as an existential crisis suffered by art itself as an inevitable result of certain tendencies within Modernism. In his Postscript to The Name of the Rose, Umberto Eco speaks of a similar idea, of “moments of crisis,” and draws a connection to Nietzsche’s Thoughts Out of Season,
“in which he wrote about the harm done by historical studies. The past conditions us, harries us, blackmails us. The historic avant-garde…tries to settle scores with the past…The avant-garde destroys, defaces the past.”
Modernism’s valorization of modernity, the new and the avant-garde and scorn of anything old or traditional, along with the idea of art as Art—an autonomous creature, an almost uncontrollable and self-governing force—eventually led to a situation in which modernism itself became antiquated by its own standards and caved in on itself.
When Duchamp’s Fountain, his now-famous urinal, was exhibited as a work of art in 1917, Art took an enormous leap—but not a forward leap, a backward leap to the nascent state of Modernism, when art first gained self-consciousness and began to ponder its own existence. In his seminal essay, The Postmodern Condition: A Report on Knowledge, Lyotard declares, “A work can become modern only if it is first postmodern. Postmodernism thus understood is not modernism at its end, but in the nascent state, and this state is constant.” The piece and the act of submitting it to a juried exhibition shifted the discussion of what constitutes art from its place within philosophy and relocated it to art itself. Duchamp’s Fountain seemed to suggest that he thought anything can be art if we call it Art, give it a capital letter, place it within the context of Art. As a chess player, I have always been fascinated by Duchamp, in particular his involvement with Dada. I think it quite possible that Duchamp, seeing many moves ahead into the game of Art, consciously created work that was designed to eventually achieve a stalemate of sorts. After all, Dada was the anti-art movement.
Regardless of Duchamp’s intentions, his Fountain shattered art’s self image. Furthermore, it broke down a wall that Modernism had erected between itself and the other disciplines. I do not mean to suggest of course that the shift occurred as a direct result of a single work by a single artist. It was more like a rolling snowball, starting out small but growing exponentially in size and momentum as it tumbled through time. Duchamp, Manzoni, Warhol, Levine—each added a new layer, more mass with which to squash art. Suddenly, philosophy of art was made into a subject for artists to broach. The end and the means became one and the cyclone began. A self-aggrandizing situation arose in which art was turned from a point of departure for discussing bigger ideas (beauty, truth, life, death) into a forum for a discussion on what art could and couldn’t, should and shouldn’t be. All of sudden “visual” art became a forum for artists to tear down or at least attempt to, one by one, the most fundamental of art’s value systems—beauty, authenticity, etc.--billing them as oppressive guardians of the status quo, and replacing them with criticality and irony. This created a whirlwind that shook the foundations of Art so deeply that the aftershocks are still filling galleries with cynical art jam-packed with ingenious critiques, criticisms, criticality etc. to be sure, but without a hint of heart or aesthetic endeavor. Artists like Dana Schutz, Rachel Harrison, and Justin Lieberman are in my opinion all examples of this phenomenon—supplanting beauty not even with truth, but with lack of skill, empty art historical references and critique all in the name of some kind of demented sense of morality. Jencks freely admits,
“I’m an architectural writer who has mistakenly wandered into the special preserve of what may be one of the fastest growing commercial markets, apart from micro-chips and Rubik cubes, that is the art-world-market.”
And so did postmodernism, at its own peril though, as this alignment with commercialism and success made believing in its anarchic and anti-establishment agenda difficult if not impossible. Perhaps Postmodernism is merely what happened when art, art history and art criticism became part of the modern liberal arts and then graduate education, institutionalized so that together they could create a niche for each other in modern day capitalist society; when art history became a subject, an object and then eventually a starting point in art. “The emphasis was thus on ultra-avantgardism, and some…critics, philosophers and not a few artists accepted it as historical truth,” Jencks writes. It is what happened when art history caught up to itself, ran out of history to record and analyze, and launched an attempt at an historical analyses of the present, which is impossible to do accurately as history requires hindsight. And artists—having become learned students of and believers in the ‘truths’ of postmodernism—began to make art which took the logic of the past (art history’s progressive nature), combined it with an attack on modernism and applied it to the present, as if that might allow them to manifest the future of art in the present, start the next movement, rediscover the glory of the avant-garde. Eco illuminates this flaw in the logic of postmodernism,
“But the moment comes when the avant-garde (the modern) can go no further, because it has produced a metalanguage that speaks of its impossible texts (conceptual art). The postmodern reply to the modern consists of recognizing that the past, since it cannot really be destroyed, because its destruction leads to silence, must be revisited.”
Modernism already carried within it a strong reactionary quality, and postmodernism turned this tendency back on itself. Like a student introduced to Descartes and Sartre for the first time, art became completely immersed in a dialogue with itself about itself.
Postmodernism in practice seems to me nothing but an historicist approach to art making, which is completely backwards, since art history should logically follow art and not the other way around. This is not to say that there is no value to any work categorized as postmodernist, or that the ideas that have come out of postmodernism are not interesting, but rather that postmodernism, as a category art history seems forced and perhaps short sighted and therefore any art-making predicated on its truths is necessarily flawed.
I wish to make it perfectly clear, that my problems lie not with the ideals of Postmodernism such as irony, reflexivity, criticality, etc., but instead with the overuse of said ideals toward an end of consciously creating “Postmodernist” art. These concepts, which I consider to be among the most central to a contemporary notion of Postmodernist art making have become self-defeating in their overuse. Jencks puts it well when he writes:
“Now in the 1980s, when Post-Modernism has become respectable and academic and its products are starting to turn up on every coffee table, we can anticipate its kitsch and pomposity—those twin specters which did so much to bring down Modernism in the 1960s. ”
It is not that works of art should have no content, but critical, ironic or otherwise, this content must be balanced with a set of aesthetic concerns that operate both independently of and in conjunction with said content. That is one thing the artists of the Renaissance, such as Michelangelo, did impeccably well. Their art was at once so aesthetically pleasing, so awe-inspiring, and yet so rich with content that it was not only the Church’s tool of choice for conveying the stories and teachings of Christianity to the illiterate masses, but continues to captivate both scholars and laymen today.
Yet among the majority of those within the inner circles of academia and to some extent outside them in the larger art-world, beauty—particularly if all traditional and/or unchecked—has become something of a ‘dirty’ word, an outmoded, idealistic and misguided value, and a taboo among so many contemporary artists. Instead we have art as joke, art as social critique, as art historical art about art and many others. These iterations of what constitutes art are problematic, and though occasionally entertaining, I find most of them hideously boring and snooty and almost never visually interesting.
Overly ironic work defeats itself for me because it seems more interested in being clever than being truthful, genuine or accessible—and so I do not wish to access it. Similarly, overly reflexive work defeats itself for me because it appears more invested in self-referentiality than in engaging with the viewer, and so I, the viewer, become disenfranchised, disengaged. Work that is overly critical (or maybe overly interested in its own criticality) is for me the most self-defeating and the least successful of all art that takes as its aim the creation of a Postmodernist Work of Art. Firstly, it lives a hypocritical existence, as it always depends upon as its center and point of departure that which it is criticizing. Overly critical work is diametrically opposed to the fundamental aim of Art, which is creation. It is far easier to criticize than to create, and more importantly criticism cannot exist without creation and is always structurally dependant on it. Furthermore, it rests on the assumptions on the part of the artist that the viewer knows enough about what the artist is critiquing to understand why it is being criticized, and if so that the viewer will then find the artist’s critique interesting enough that they will entertain it as art, without any kind of visual reward being offered. Especially when the art in question is ‘postmodern,’ entangled in a self-congratulatory dialogue centered on art history, a “quote” of a ‘quote’ of a critique on art—I think this is a lofty supposition. Which brings us to the most fundamental problem with postmodernism—It is supposed to be a rejection of the elitism inherent in Modern art, but it only increases it. Postmodernists fault their modernist predecessors for making art too hermetic, sealing it off from reality and to those outside the field of art. Yet postmodernism cannot be said to have made visual art more accessible or less convoluted. If Modernism is a room filled with people from the art-world looking at large abstract paintings trying to have an ‘aesthetic experience,’ it pails in comparison to the pomposity and elitism of the Postmodernism room next door where a similarly homogenous crowd sneers at a series of photographs of people making obscene gestures behind unsuspecting viewers as they look at the paintings in the room of Modernism.
Whether it really exists, what Postmodernism is and how it came to be is probably an amalgamation of all of the aforementioned ideas and influences along with many others I have undoubtedly overlooked. But as I am an artist and not a student of history or art history, I do not claim to have all the facts. Though I have tried to support them with the words of those much better informed than myself, the assertions I have made herewith are merely the conclusions I have drawn in attempting to parse out all that I have taken in from the field of experience on one hand and from the field of knowledge on the other. I will turn now to more direct discussion of my own work and endeavor to explain how it relates to the above.
I have always been fascinated by sublimity surrounding what we have come to call the ‘Universe.’ In a sense it is only an imaginary space except for, possibly, a few individuals who have actually traveled there, provided our endeavors in and observations of outer space over the last fifty years have been more truthful and astute than those conducted in the field of art and art history. You and I (forgive me if you are in fact an astronaut and have been to outer space) have never been to outer space or seen the celestial bodies up close. They are of a scale completely incomprehensible to us. What images we have, the ones that are not artists’ renderings are taken from so far away, across space and time, that we can never truly understand what outer space is or what it looks and feels like. Not only is our entrance into and visual experience of outer space in any real sense an impossibility, what is more, the closest we can come to comprehending its metaphysical or theoretical implications is an awareness that we cannot fully comprehend them. As current theory would have it, the cosmos is the only place where the idea of infinity is manifested in actual, physical form. We do not know the Universe’s size, only that it stretches far beyond our imagination, and that theoretically it is expanding at the speed of light. We also know that in theory, it has no end and no beginning, and yet strangely, distance there is measured in light and time, which are predicated on ends and beginnings. Essentially, when it comes to the Universe—its appearance, its limits, its history—we know only that we know we cannot truly know. And yet there is a sense that we have made so much progress since the period roughly five hundred years ago when we believed whole-heartedly that the world was flat and if one traveled too far he would fall off. The world became round and everything rotated around it, and then it was the Earth and its neighbors that rotated around the Sun. Later still, our world was composed of an unimaginable number of combinations of tiny elements, which upon further examination numbered just over a hundred. For human understanding of the Universe is a work in progress, a constantly shifting paradigm that grows (or at least changes) with our understanding of our physical reality. Obsession with the cosmos is a cross-cultural phenomenon, stemming from an innate curiosity within man. Albert Einstein, who most recently shattered and redesigned our image of physical and metaphysical reality, extending it to include an infinite and incomprehensible Universe, had an explanation for this constant questioning:
“The most beautiful thing, we can experience is the mysterious,” he argued. “It is the source of all true art and all science. He to whom this emotion is a stranger, who can no longer pause to wonder and stand rapt in awe, is as good as dead: his eyes are closed.”
As an artist, I recognize immediately the truth of Einstein’s statement—the link between scientist and the artist being their constant quest to evoke the Sublime, and the link between beauty and mystery being their ability to bewilder and enlighten.
The ‘death’ of Modernism (Postmodernism), which was meant to include the ‘deaths’ of Truth, Sincerity, Beauty and the Sublime to name a few, was only an illusion. And it is our ever-expanding curiosity about our ever-expanding Universe that makes it an ideal subject for art, as well as a perfect stage for a resurrection of so many of the invaluable romantic tendencies of Modernism. As an artist who wishes to diverge from the current, governing epistemologies of criticality, historicity etc, I have decided instead to humbly attempt, if only in my own work, to revive some of the aforementioned fallen stars in the Universe of Art.
For the fallacies of Postmodernism have opened up a kind of black hole in the Art Universe. A point can occur in a star’s life when its mass becomes too large for its internal pressure resulting a supernova—the explosion, collapse or ‘death’ of a star. A black hole is a region in spacetime that occurs as a result of supernova. Black holes are focused fields of gravity so powerful that once matter is pulled in it can never escape. They are structured like a vortex with the hole at the center. Once created the black hole will begin to pull all forms of matter around it into its orbit, where they will spiral in until they disappear.
Modernism was like a shining star that began to burn too brightly to contain itself and exploded, leaving in its wake a black hole, which is currently pulling Art toward an irreversible disappearance. The only thing to do as I see it is to re-impregnate Art with enough creativity, beauty, sublimity, romanticism, and sincerity that it becomes too massive for the black hole to come to bear on. As much as possible, I try to make my current work a departure from the rules and regulations of Postmodernist ideology. The work instead is invested in the earnest attempt to achieve beauty and an investigation into the unknown and unknowable—and the Universe is a perfect setting. It is necessarily a romantic subject matter because it roots from the idea that one could ever depict that which is a) never-ending, b) unavailable to the eye and c) almost entirely a mystery.
I arrived at idea of the Universe as a subject matter for my work, or perhaps my work arrived at that subject matter because it embodies—visually and theoretically—so many ideas that I am interested in. Ideas of order and chaos, life and death
It is far easier to criticize than to create, and good Art is never easy
It has been a compelling endeavor, attempting to depict the infinite, to imagine the unimaginable, and I suspect it should keep me busy for a long time. In terms of the form the work takes, I am currently exploring an idea I would call “maximalism”—or in simpler terms, I wish to do everything to everything with everything. No matter the medium or materials used or how futile the act, an art about the Universe must be universal in its approach—and currently in keeping with this I am making paintings, sculptures, photographs, installations, animations and sculptural drawings. At a glance, there is not a hint of theoretical or critical content, but metaphorically lurking beneath its aesthetically driven surfaces the work is an allegory for the current dilemma facing art/artists as well as my solution to it; and this is as it should be—the visual coming first as it is visual art. And regardless of deference toward form, in the meta-narrative created through the volume, variety and installation (the “maximalist” tendency of the work) an undeniable sense of the massive, the unanswerable and the unknown is created. Einstein said, “I am enough of an artist to draw freely upon my imagination. Imagination is more important than knowledge. Knowledge is limited. Imagination encircles the World.” And so I have decided to take that which literally encircles the Earth as the subject of my work: outer space, the solar system, the galaxy, the Universe.
BIBLIOGRAPHY
1. Jencks, Charles. Post-Modernism: The New Classicism in Art and Architecture, Rizzoli International Publications Inc., New York, 1987.
2. Lyotard, Jean-Francois. The Postmodern Condition: A Report on Knowledge, Manchester Univ. Press, 1984.
3. Eco, Umberto. Postscript to the Name of the Rose, Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, New York and London, 1983.
4. Calaprice, Alice. The Expanded Quotable Einstein, Princeton Univ. Press, Princeton and Oxford, 2000.
5. Sylvester, George. "What Life Means to Einstein: An Interview by George Sylvester Viereck," The Saturday Evening Post, Vol. 202 (26 October 1929).
