Heartney, E. (2013) Art and Today. London: Phaidon

I started reading this on March 6th and read 4 pages a day up till 27th June when I was about to start Art and Architecture… making extensive notes and discussing each chapter in depth.

It has revolutionised my understanding of Art, and hugely improved my writing, but I think the time has come to move on.

My big take away is that… art asks questions.

It destroys the accepted viewpoint, makes you see anew, and thrusts a counterpoint to the accepted interpretation and status value. Whether this is ‘Art and Identity’ (I sort of think most art is a variation on this) or ‘Art and Popular Culture’, art is doing the same thing… it matters not what it is attached to,  or what it is looking at… it asks questions.

So, there comes a point (which took me six months) at which you suddenly realise art is repeating itself with different subjects. The Art bit of ‘Art and ?????’ is remarkably homogenous. And as my tutor said, I need to start to be more selective in my reading and apply it more rigorously to my practice. Hence, if I want to make some art about ‘Representation’ I should definitely re-read the chapter in this book on ‘Art and Representation’ but that I don’t need to plough through the rest of the book when there are so many calls on my time.

It was hugely important for my development as an artist to have read this and developed a deep feeling for what art is, but for now there are better uses of my time.

I’ve also learned that art is not necessarily painting, and that painting is not necessarily art.

By this definition, paintings which don’t ask questions or give us radically different ways of seeing the world (however beautiful) are not art.

Art can be in the form of a thought out manifesto or an individual artistic vision: the artistic voices of Bacon, Picasso, Hopper, Monet and Hockney all gave us new ways of seeing the world, and asked questions.

There is a common value judgement which says that painting as art are more valuable [higher status] per se than painting as craft/decoration. However, while accepting that within any group there is a hierarchy of skill, I would say that commercial painting is equal in status – and in its value to society – as obscure gallery paintings selling for £10,000’s… which are inaccessible to 90% of the population and explained and validated by a theocratic cadre of critics, and given cash value by millionaires and the public purse. Commercial and high art perform totally different jobs, but I don’t think either job is more important than the other.

So, the value of this book is that I now know where I want to place my art. I don’t want to paint commercial art (looks nice/gives pleasure/skilful/no meaning/complete in itself) or museum art (difficult to access/ugly/validated by gatekeepers/low craft skill/meaningful/not complete without explanation):

I want to paint paintings with meaning that are accessible to everybody and complete in themselves.

Chapter 1: ART AND POPULAR CULTURE

Focuses on Warhol and his legacy which seems to fall into a several strands.

1. Warhol used low brow common culture references as his subject matter such as baked bean cans and promotional photographs of stars.

This doesn’t seem very different (apart from in degree) from artists over the years redefining what is worthy of painting, whether it was the introduction of ‘ordinary people’ in Dutch genre painting or Millet painting peasants as heroes.

Where it is different is in taking mass ‘communication’ as a subject matter rather people.

2. An extension of this is that artists now look at how reality and meaning are constructed out of language and deconstruct the visual language of mass communication.

An example being Richard Prince’s re-interpretation of ‘Marlborough Man’.

3. A further extension is that instead of low brow cultural subject artists such as Sylvie Fleury turn to high brow luxury products and (almost) fetishise them, so that high art becomes almost indistinguishable from kitsch.

4. Warhol made himself the star and kept reinventing himself to become a cult of fame like David Bowie.

There is a strand of artist such as Damien Hurst who rise to fame on a high concept gimmick like his cow and calf cut in half and preserved in a glass case and then maintain their profile with stunts such as a diamond studied skull to become a ‘factory’ brand in their own right. So that the distinction between a luxury product and a Damien Hurst ‘spot’ painting becomes blurred, is it art or a luxury factory item?

5. Warhol produced art in factory like quantities and became his own brand.

See above… this is perpetuated to this day with superstar ‘artists’ such as Jeff Koons.

This begs the question as to at what society means by art… that it doesn’t have a single definition and different ‘communities’ have a vested interest in claiming the status that goes with the label. In the end we all have to decide what we accept as art.

Personally, for example, I would say that Jeff Koons and Damien Hurst make luxury products not art. The process of design and manufacture is commercial. However this is mudied because all artists from Picasso to the semi professional painter in our village who does ‘cat’ paintings has a brand, an identity and a ‘value’, so it’s not just about branding.

For me, when the brand is bigger than the person and all the products are the same it ceases to be art, that can be for a superstar or a local painter… but when the art is more important than the artist or brand, when it truly speaks and connects to people and the art gives value to the name, not the name giving value to the art, then it is art.

So, a person who paints pub signs (for me) is not an artist, nor is the locally famous artist who churns out popular paintings to a formula (such as the cat and dog painter) and nor are the brand led factory superstars like Damien Hurst… but the person who is always searching for meaning, whose products change as they change, and whose art gives value to their name (rather than the other way round) is an artist.

The amount of meaning put into the work – that doesn’t have to be a high concept verbal meaning, it can be visual, emotional or subconscious – governs how artistic it is… and the amount of skill governs how successfully that meaning is communicated.

Chapter 2: Art and the Quotidian object

Quotidian means everyday.

This chapter makes three points.

1. You can make art out of anything… this just seems an extension of paint. Paint isn’t intrinsically very valuable and is a fraction of the cost of a £2000, £20,000 or £2 million painting. So, it doesn’t seem any stretch of the imagination to say you can make art out of plastic cups or straw. It’s not the material that gives art its value it’s what the artist does with it.

And we didn’t need Duchamp or Warhol to teach us that.

My concern is that we are making temporary art, which may be part of the intention, but with unproven art materials the danger is that they degrade very quickly.

2. Art can be about anything… it could be about a tin of beans or a household brush.

Again, in as far as it was a shock when Millet painted a giant peasant striding the fields – a subject not worthy of being a painting in the days when `history painting still ruled supreme in academic art, so it’s no stretch to extend the subject matter to anything not high status.

This could be hand making a consumer item to make us rethink our relationship to consumerism to making a giant kitsch toy out of an expensive material, in effect changing it into a luxury manufactured one-off item.

We didn’t need Warhol to feature bean cans or contemporary advertising for this to be a logical extension of finding new things to focus our art on.

3) Where Warhol and Duchamp did start something new, though I’d dispute whether it is art or something else is in concept art.

This is art created by the intention of the creator and the viewer where not by the object, the object is unimportant or can sometimes be dispensed with altogether.

If Warhol’s Brillo box was put next to the cardboard version it was indistinguishable, but it became art because he intended it to comment on consumerism rather that transport Brillo pads (he framed it both literally and metaphorically). And the viewer came to it as a work of art positioned by their foreknowledge of Warhol’s intent. Had it been in a stack of cardboard boxes on the factory floor and nobody had been told it was hand-made it would not have been art, just a funny box the workman broke up.

Like Duchamp’s ‘Fountain’ the object has no intrinsic artistic value but because it is framed by the artist it becomes art.

This is very limiting as it means the only intention that can be applied is a ‘work of art’ is that assigned to it by the artist, it is very difficult to see any other interpretation of Warhol’s Brillo box than that he gave it. In contrast great art – be it a Shakespeare play or a Caravaggio is reinterpreted by each new generation.

The art is not in the object but in the intention, it is word based not visually based. Take away the intention and it ceases to be art. I would say this makes it more akin to everyman philosophy than art.

It also de-skills and degrades the viewer as he is no longer an equal to the creator and object but subservient to the God like artist (and their intention) and the priestly critics who interpret the works for the viewer, who is no longer able to interpret and judge the work for themselves. This makes concept art subject to a high degree of ‘official’ control,  hugely elitist and anti-democratic.

Chapter 3: Art and Abstraction

I found this chapter fascinating and it has changed the whole way I look at paintings as I now see abstracted elements in lots of paintings both before and after the ‘invention’ of abstraction as a movement.

It’s very difficult to remember all the details and I’d need to make notes and study abstraction specifically for an essay, but a first read is very useful for a background understanding.

Basically this chapter was a history of abstraction from its roots to the present day.

In the late 19th century abstraction started as a way of freeing form, shape, colour and line from specific objects, so making it like theoretical maths, a pure language that only referenced itself. It was as if the symbols of a language had been cut away from what they would usually refer to; as if the word tree no longer referred to a tree but had meaning only in terms of itself on the flat surface. However, neither was it a ‘formal’ language, that is a language to talk about shape or form, it was beyond conscious meaning. Which is ironic, as it was closely linked to truth… the idea that mimesis in painting is only an imitation of an imitation and that the only real truth are inside the mind in the form of ideas.

There were two basic forms of abstraction (and this holds true today, even though they are often mixed up: geometric abstraction using straight lines and geometric forms and organic abstraction using curved and irregular shapes that could be found in nature.).

Initially abstraction was connected to truth and utopian political movements, but when these movements died after the second world war abstraction lost its political and ideological dimensions and became linked with purity

This appealed direct to the subconscious but was also tied up with formalism. That is it was unsullied by ideas, you looked at it and ‘meditated’ with your subconscious, but its concerns were also about how pure shapes and colours related to each other on a flat surface.

Both these first two stages of abstraction, it seems to me, relied on an internal coherence within the canvas. It didn’t matter (as a viewer) if you didn’t understand the language, you were aware that it was there. A bit like looking at a foreign language, it is obviously not childish squiggles like when a four-year old presents an adult with ‘writing’ or invented marks thrown together on a canvas and passed off as language… even though it is meaningless in terms of conscious thoughts you can see it has grammar, syntax, rules and, within its own terms, meaning.

But sometime in the 60’s and 70’s, with the rise of postmodernism abstraction as a separate movement died.

Now it is used as a technique (like vigorous brushwork, thin paint or a the choice of media) to enhance representational paintings. So there will be elements of abstraction (both geometric and organic, separately or together) in representational paintings – and some paintings that are called abstract by their creators Charles ray Family Romance in 1993 look entirely representation, more surreal than abstract. In this paragraph I’m representational in its widest sense to mean anything ‘objective’ referred to in the ‘real’ world outside of the flat canvas whether that meaning is pictorial, spiritual, emotional or ideological and dictated by artistic intent and critical direction or negotiated by the viewer as an equal with the canvas.

Chapter 4: Art and Representation

This is the most mind-blowing essay I’ve read on art – it’s like… wow… really!!!!

In great detail starting with Plato and Aristotle the chapter charts painting from its uncomplicated artisan beginnings as mimesis (truth) or fake, if you’re Plato, up to the modern position of painting as an exposure of subjective reality as conditioned by arbitrary conventions.

Interestingly science and technology still assume there’s an objective reality ‘out there’ free of human subjectivity. But, in the words of the book, for painting: “… reality has become as mutable as our minds.”

In its simplest form there is no way the world really is, it’s all viewpoint, and our sense of reality (what is natural and unchallengeable) is shaped through visual/artistic representations. This can be innocently on a personal level through unchallenged arbitrary conventions (Jesus is white/Judas is Jewish… though come to think of it that might have been driven by the Catholic church?!… fat is good/bad… what is worthy of being painted/what is not…) or representations manipulated for ideological ends such as the happy worker in Stalin’s Russia.

So, nowadays the last thing painting aims to do is mimesis (as there is no such thing)… painters can blindly try to match what we ‘see’ such as painting a lovely landscape – but that is governed by what is accepted as ‘a good landscape’… there are all sorts of rules. When these are broken, as with the Impressionists there is a huge public kick back. But individual ways of seeing are also conditioned by lots of concepts and thoughts that make us who and what we are at this moment in time and in this society.

Other artists deliberately try to make the invisible conventions visible and challenge our ways of seeing… using Soviet social realism as a painting style but subverting the meaning so the manipulation becomes obvious, or drawing our attention to the surface as a manufactured surface.

This explains museum art perfectly, it is state funded and controls the ideas that are acceptable. Painting is dangerous. Gallery art is anarchic but primarily concerned with aesthetics and money, so not a threat. It’s when you get genuine popular revolutionary art (like rap music is for young people?) that speaks to everybody that governments are threatened.

So, as a painter, you have to maker choices about what you represent… do you reinforce conventions? Do you paint your own inner world? Or do you use art to better the world by exposing conventions and shaking things up?

I don’t think it matters which you choose, it’s a personal matter, the craft skill is the same… but I think artists need to be aware of what they’re doing and though challenging the norms is not something I’d personally want to do (as it’s ideas led and I like story, aesthetics and emotions) it shakes up our thinking and is essential for a healthy democratic society.

Chapter 5: ART AND NARRATIVE

Fascinating chapter which goes a bit off piste at the end as it becomes not about story, but about art as revelatory and revealing the hidden in plain sight; such as Gillian Wearing’s photographs of ‘normal’ people holding a sign saying what their real concern is… a man in a suit with a sign saying, ‘I am desperate’, which reveals the social mask.

However, it does return to story on the last few pages by highlighting artworks where the ‘narrative’ is so fractured that the reader has to create their own narrative.

Narrative (or meaning) can be rooted in three areas: 1) An external objective reality – a painting of a tree, a king or a battle: 2) Dictated and fixed by authorial intent. The creator writes down what the painting means: 3) Meaning is created by the viewer out of a dialogue with the painting using a multiplicity of clues, that can be read in a myriad of ways. An example of viewer created meaning is Mathew Ritchie’s immersive imaginary mythology (fractured and piecemeal) where the viewer pieces together their own narrative out of his Blake like mythology.

For some reason this made me think of the bible and a comment my partner made, that most works of art are a mixture of all three meanings. The Bible has some root in objective reality; there was a Roman civilisation and there may have been a man called Jesus crucified – there certainly was a new ideology the Roman’s tried to crush: the writers of the bible had a definite moral message, they wanted their stories to convert us to and become the template for building Christianity: yet as a collection of cultural symbols open to re-interpretation modern clerics can get the Bible to ‘mean’ anything they want to suit their current needs.

This is true of most works of art… other than abstract art there is usually some reference to an outside world – a real object or event: the artist usually has a meaning they want to convey which can be anything from a full-blown ideology to our visual way of seeing as with impressionism: and most of us make art relevant to our own lives and times by ‘reading’ our own relevance into it, be that reinforcing or challenging our current ideas… making the unseen visible or just entertaining us by mirroring back something amusing.

All great art has a fluid meaning, from Shakespeare to Leonardo Davinci to Picasso.

It is perhaps this richness of interpretation that defines art. A copy of a tree that is nothing more than an unskilled attempt to capture ‘tree’ – that brings neither the painterly skill to let the artist express their inner selves (like Van Gough’s Sunflowers) or the complexity of expression to be relevant through time (like Picasso) is not art.

Which leads me to say that painting is not about craft skill but about ‘seeing’ (about what’s inside the artist’s head), though the skill – like a composer – is necessary in order to get what’s inside the artist head onto the canvas.

Narrative helps us make sense of the world, be that in the form of a myth to explain the sun rising and falling (it’s on a God’s chariot); or a modern-day soap like Coronation Street that looks at modern social mores; or our own life narratives – where we position our lives as leading up seamlessly to this point, and cast ourselves as heroes: stories make sense of chaos.

So story has a very powerful personal and societal function… but stories (whether they be personal life histories, family histories or in a book) are all fiction, and could be written in any number of ways from any number of viewpoints, hence the common phrase that somebody has ‘re-written history’… (they’ve re-written their life story to make sense of new circumstances). And the welcome re-writing of history as societies democratise and the ‘voices’ of the weak begin to be heard, such as the voices of cultural minorities and women.

The chapter starts with a history of narrative painting on cave walls, nobody knows the  authorial intent but the paintings record the world around them, and important and dangerous events like hunting. Next are pleasant murals on the walls of Pompeii. In the middle ages story telling was stolen by the church for propaganda (like a modern mogul controlling ALL newspaper/TV and film and pushing it towards their own agenda). That control dissolved with the Renaissance and the rise of secular patrons aggrandising and fixing their stories in society, so that the secular establishment took over from the church, its control of choice was academic art and History painting. By the 19th century ordinary man was fighting back and contemporary subjects became worthy such as genre scenes and giant like peasants striding across ploughed fields. This continued in the 20th century and up until today with the peripheral characters (of academic art) and background details being foregrounded. As the ideological art of the church or state, as in Catholic art or that of Stalinist Russia, waned the way a story was told became increasingly important… ideology had always come in a pleasant aesthetic package but the ‘entertainment’ element of the new democrastised narrative painting grew.

Nowadays grand subjects co-exist with intimacy painting, moral paintings and paintings that are purely pleasurable diversions.

After 1850, and up until today, much of art revealed the artifice of storytelling. Paintings like Le Dejeuner Sur L’Herbe (the naked women were not nymphs but strong people looking at the viewer, equals to the fully clothed men… exposed the hypocrysy of middle class propriety and prostitution, and the shattering of perspective showed the process and hidden rules of visual storytelling… and exposed the ludicrousness of ‘acceptable’  pornograhical classical nudity. What was ‘natural’ and therefore unchallengeable was shown to be ‘unnatural’ and open to change. The establishment reacted very badly… as they did to impressionism, which favoured the perceptual experience over ‘realistic’ narrative.

It’s all about who controls how we see the world. And how we see the world has huge implications for society and politics… power never likes to give up privilege and the best way to perpetuate power is to make it seem natural.

This goes on even today with modern museum art (state sanctioned and paid for art) in control of an artistic elite dictating acceptable meanings via an army (or priesthood) of critics  – fixing the meaning with the creator rather than democratically allowing the viewer to enter into a ‘debate with the artwork’ as an equal.

There was a brief period in the early to mid 20th century where much of painting was stripped of narrative (abstract art) and Formalism triumphed, which saw art as an optical experience dominated by shape, colour and surface and narrative art as a discredited imitation of literature.

Personally, I think narrative started with art, and written language developed from art.

In the 1970’s narrative came rushing back in the form of performance art, feminist art and pop art. But the narrative was different in that it was now self-conscious and signalled its own bias. Suddenly, meaning and voices were being opened up for everybody, not just the people with status and power.

This trend has accelerated and today most ‘art’ (that is primarily to do with narrative) has knowing allusions to its own artificiality.

Here the chapter lurches away from narrative as it not only goes totally video and photographic but also becomes all about exposing the author as unreliable narrator; so the art becomes about the nature of narrative rather than about the narrative (or story) being told. All the tropes and conventions of commercial video and the narratives are attacked… what is a totally unnatural process of imagined black marks on paper – the script – through actors surrounded by a crew of 30 with a camera shoved in their face – to the editing process is passed off in the cinema as totally natural, in art is show to be what it is… a work of fiction. Modern video art exposes all the moving parts of film, video and photography, which is useful but I don’t know that it is art in its own right… it’s criticism rather than art… it comments rather than creates.

A final note is that modern artistic narrative is a pastiche (there are no new movements being created) and harks back to a dimly remembered time when the world was predictable and safe, and times were golden; and the original movements are forgotten.

A very interesting and thought-provoking chapter.

Chapter 6: ART AND TIME

Another cracker of a chapter.

My takeaway from this, and again it’s a complex chapter with many twists and turns, is that time is a ‘thing’ just like a chair. But unlike a chair we can’t see or touch it directly, we can only observe or experience its effects on us or the world around us.

This chapter makes time ‘visible’.

Of course our sense of time is inextricably bound up with our identity as beings existing in time and space – you can’t disconnect the two.

So, we have:

1. Real time: Time as it unfolds in the here and now.
2. Reel time: Time as stretched, compressed or mixed up as in films.
3. Parallel time: Time experienced in a far flung place, as in a web cam feed, as well as in the here and now.
4. Immersive time and space: Time and space experienced inside another ‘reality’, as in an immersive video game. An out of body experience where our reality of time and space is changed.
5. Disturbed time: Our sense of time distorted by drugs where time is not fixed relative to our body and mind.
6. Multiple time frames experienced simultaneously as in a bank of surveillance cameras.

Our original sense of time was determined by the the diurnal day and the seasons… with the invention of clocks, time was chopped up and experienced in pieces. Most of our days are fragmented and ruled by the clock but sometimes on holiday, or when we’re very ill, time can return to its historic state.

This can be approached on canvas as in some of Hockney’s photographic montages where he catalogues his house with polaroid snaps; as well as the different viewpoint, he is capturing multiple times frames. A sort of cubism of time.

But mostly, time is examined through the prism of video.

You can have a video of a painting where the painting is put back into the flow of time, or a photograph of something dead like a madame Tussaud manakin done in such a way as it looks like a photograph of a living person. Videos of real time encompass a studio at night over many hours where the tiniest interruption become major events, like a spider crossing the frame or a mouse scuttling across the background.

The most telling for me was an art work by Gary Hill called Tall Ships that simulated a ‘living’ artwork. You walk along a misty bridge and see people in the distance. If you look at them they approach till they are life size, make eye contact for about 10 seconds… then break eye contact and walk away. Normally with art the viewer is in control so when they break our eye contact it is as if the artwork is alive. However this made me think more about AI than the nature of time.

In conclusion there’s a philosophical debate as to whether time exists but there is some objective proof of time in decay of the physical world; however we can only experience time subjectively.

This chapter made me aware of time as something separate from me, and that our sense of self is tied to our experience of time. Our experience of time is subjective and can be altered both externally by visual inputs and internally by emotions and drugs.

Chapter 7: ART & NATURE AND TECHNOLOGY

I think I’m seeing a pattern and my understanding is getting much clearer, so hopefully my summaries will shrink.

Basically, the way Art is used in academic/museum culture is not to do with the object but to do with the message… you could call it Message Art. Unlike traditional art, and the way the general public still use the word, where Art means the object… a painting or sculpture… which may or may not carry a message – is not academic or journalistic – and involves a high degree of skill and aesthetics. Message Art is all about the message and the object may, or may not be, important… in most cases it is merely illustrative or enhancing of an idea, and as such is diminished in importance to being a minor part of a whole. The object therefore requires no skill or aesthetic as the ‘Art’ is about the message not the object.

Which isn’t to say traditional art doesn’t have meaning, or even a message, but primarily it is about the object… hence the skill and aesthetics are in the object, not in the message… and the meaning in traditional art comes out of a dialogue between the viewer and the object. Great (traditional) Art is timeless and reinvents itself for each new generation and viewer. Message Art is fixed in the present and the meaning is dictated by the producer and critics… you may agree or disagree with the message… but not with what the message is.

So, this chapter deals with Message Art and how it examines the dynamics between rapidly accelerating technology and the real (or ‘natural’) world.

It goes into the details of the arguments as they wax and wane over time from Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein to the present day. But basically the messages split between the terrified and the positive… science as a force for good and science as a destructive cancer which will destroy the natural world… by natural world it means on the one hand ‘Nature’ as a whole and on the other ‘The human body’, as natural and subject to the laws of nature.

So you get AIDS and Global Warming as existential threats… and cybertronics and cyborgs as the end of ‘natural’ humans… and on the plus side a utopian future where science cures all human and planetary ills.

Message Art concerning nature is called Eco Art and concerning people is called Bio Art.

Chapter 8: ART & DEFORMATION

A very interesting and wide ranging chapter… which has opened my eyes to how much ‘message’ there is in paintings we take as totally ‘natural’. Of course, nothing is ‘natural’ that is a convention because formal artistic categories, and social and political conventions are as man made as much as anything concrete like a chair.

What reinforces convention is seen as safe and normal while what crosses the boundary (this chapter is all about boundary crossing) is seen as deformed and disturbing. But of course either side of our ‘normal’ safe middle ground is the messy process of death and decay one side, and birth and growth the other.

Totalitarian states such as Stalinist Russia with their buxom women breeders and happy hearty working men or Nazi Germany with their Arian super race idolised physical perfection. This is for the benefit of the state/ideology/ruling elite and not for the worker who for the most part is caught up in an endless struggle to attain an unattainable perfection, and feels forever inferior.  This reminded me of advertising and Facebook, and the modern addiction to image and perfection… which belies the deeper question as to whose benefit such perfection serves? I’d say it serves the companies selling the clothes, diets and dreams… and the impossibly inaccessible but constantly available pop and movie stars who serve as perfection’s figureheads.

This totalitarian perfection doesn’t reflect ‘real’ people’s lives or bodies and doesn’t help people be happier or improve their situations.

And here we come to Deformation.

A noble tradition involving the:

1. Grotesque – boundary crossing.
2. Carnivalesque – overturning the natural order. As in medieval carnival days when the natural order was overturned for a day and ordinary folk could mock their leaders and commit all sorts of ‘indecent’ acts in public.
3. Abjection – shit, body hair, copulation – normally hidden – destroying the sense of self and boundaries.
4. Informe – formlessness.

The social and political norms normally benefit the elite, traditionally a middle class, middle aged white patriarchy… idealised bodies such as Michelangelo’s ‘David’ or Titian’s ‘Venus of Urbino’ are today seen as old fashioned and ideologically suspect. As are all the naked nymphs and goddesses that fill our art galleries. Now as much a record of social change these paintings are seen for what they were, as an excuse for men to look at naked women (and preserve their power over women as objects), than the pinnacle of high art.

How did this shift in perception happen?

The 1960’s abstraction temporarily killed figurative art… a wiping of the slate. When it was rebooted in the 1980’s it came with a feminist critique of the ‘male gaze’ where objectified female beauty was seen as dubious. Performance Art further shifted the body from subject matter to an instrument or art material.

So it’s ironic that just as art was lurching towards democracy and giving everybody a voice, advertising and pop culture was tightening its grip on physical perfection.

In this light the disruption of perfection is an important public service (most upsetting when applied to the human body but also creating a reaction when applied to social and political norms, and even formal art categories). By subverting idealised (accepted) representations, art brings us closer to the truth of being human and disrupts sexist patriarchy, repressive governments, political correctness, puritanism and ‘official’ culture.

The flip side is that by conforming to artistic and cultural conventions (which by default most artists do both because they need to sell their work and because you need to be psychologically driven to challenge the norm) they reinforce the cultural status quo.

Viewers instinctively project themselves onto physical and social representations and see the world in the painting as ‘natural’ and unchallengeable.

Therefore, any painting – even if we can’t see it because it appears totally natural… a pretty landscape or happy beautiful people chatting in a bar, has a message. And this chapter has raised my awareness of the commercial and ‘political’ role of art. Whatever you paint is a choice with consequences… even if you don’t realise it.

Chapter 9: ART AND THE BODY

This chapter is all to do with the sense of self and how that is reflected in art and the body both with the body as subject or as art medium.

Sense of self, it seems to me, is intrinsically tied up with self esteem and mental well being. In totalitarian states (and until recently advertising and pop culture) there is only one voice defining/reflecting the ‘perfect’ body and sexual behaviour; whereas in a democracy – and certainly in states that allow artistic freedom – there are many voices which reflect the multitude of bodies and behaviours in society.

As a medium the body leapt onto the artistic stage in the 1950’s to 1970’s with performance art… we all have a body, and to some extent this is always a mobile canvas in a public show… but performance art made the body into an art medium like a painting, sculpture or video.

On one level performance art is a bit like a play (acting) without the script (narrative and entertainment) where the body is the meaning. As such performance art addresses sexuality, personal trauma and gender and racial stereotypes. This puts it in conflict with the accepted social mores and gender definitions of society, and the strictures of social and political ‘law’.

Performance art also introduced the audience as an artistic medium through audience participation. The audience become (physically, psychologically, spiritually and emotionally) part of the artwork when they join in the action. This makes the ‘artwork’ an ephemeral and unique experience as no two audiences participate in exactly the same way. Though as any actor knows a theatre audience takes on a unique group personality and interacts with the show, so no two traditional performances are ever the same… and in traditional art the viewer enters a dialogue with the art not entirely dissimilar (in that meaning is created in that dialogue) from audience participation.

Generally, performance art was either light or dark.

Light performance art: Celebrates the body with happenings such as naked bodies covered in paint rolling around on canvases.

Dark performance art: Artists who nailed themselves to a cross or made the audience listen while they masturbated looking at the viewer.

Dark performance art tended to be ascetic and iconoclastic and attacked restrictive definitions of the body and sexuality (much of the performance art of the 1970’s was linked to the feminist movement and addressed female sexuality. So from being passive subjects for the male gaze in high art, newsagents shelves and tabloid newspapers women suddenly became active objects in their own art.

By being active and powerful and exhibiting their own naked bodies in a way they wanted women challenged their role as male pin ups… this could be in a light sexy way or darkly as they endured pain and suffering.

However, I think there’s a very thin line between politics and art… or maybe art is always politics? Boundaries are always slippery and difficult but some performance art (like all art) seems wrongly defined and should be classified as politics and not art.

To take an extreme example I would say (and remembering our bodies are one canvas that is always accessible) self immolation – for example a Buddhist monk burning themselves to death in front of a Chinese embassy – is a politics not art.  Yet it has all the hallmarks of  dark performance art. And it would certainly gain a worldwide ‘audience’.

So by using the body as an artistic medium, or as a subject, artists challenge political powers and social mores, gain control over their own subjectivity and dramatise their personal alienation from society. In common parlance they give themselves a voice. The sexist assumptions embedded in traditional art of the woman as passive object of the male gaze (which also suggests passivity in the home and subservience to man) and the religious dominance of heterosexual coupling as ‘normal’ and gay coupling as abnormal are challenged. By bringing diverse voices into the open society is forced to challenge assumptions and make social and political choices.

This brings us to Kenneth Clark and his naked definition:

Naked:  No clothes and embarrassed

Nude: No clothes and not embarrassed – prosperous and confident.

In traditional art women were nude (yet passive to the male gaze)… but ‘clothed’ in allegory, symbolic meaning and ‘good taste’, this allowed them to be considered wholly aesthetic. Pornography, on the other hand… looking at nude women as objects of sexual intent… was considered prurient. But by the 1960’s this separation was becoming muddied as it was argued that an abundance of passive nubile women was no longer excusable as, ‘…this is okay because she’s a goddess’ tag.

Artists responded by stopping painting nudes altogether in favour of text or painting the nude with a different gaze… the female or homosexual gaze for example. Joan Semmel painted nudes from the female viewpoint looking at her own and the male body next to her; Sylvia Sleigh replaced objectified women with objectified men; and Hannah Wilke posed nude daring men to see her as a passive sexual object.

In this way artists challenged society’s attitudes to sexuality, gender relationships and ideals of physical beauty.

The nude came back in 1970’s reworked from the traditional formulas with artists like  Lucien Freud who painted people whose bodies verged on the grotesque, their flesh gross physical matter rather than silkily seductive.

And then we have hard pornography.

And artists like Robert Mapplethorpe dived deep into the pornographic pool and shook up societal values… his beautifully photographed hard core homosexuality triggered a massive debate… should it be seen as art or pornography?… And to what degree was the ‘public’ (the state) outrage driven by hypocritical (given what we now know about the take up of internet pornography of every description) values of acceptability? And was the reaction also driven by the heterosexual good, homosexual bad, ideology of patriarchal religion?

Personally, I think male pornography, however beautifully shot, has the same issues as nude women in traditional art. Whatever the artistic packaging you can’t entirely take away the sexual gaze, be that male, female or something else. And a sexual gaze objectifies the subject. So the question is whether you want pornography on public display… and if you do is there any point at which you draw a line?

As John Berger said in his seminal (at least in bringing it to a wider audience) 1970’s TV series “Ways of Seeing”, the quintessential motif of Renaissance art, the female nudes, served up as allegories of virtue, justice and truth are anything but that. They are jam packed with subliminal messages about the role and status of women. John Berger said that in these paintings men act and women appear, men look at women and women watch themselves being looked at.

Since then there has been a huge amount of literature on how Western Art replicates the unequal relationships embedded in Western culture. Laura Mulvey’s 1975 critique on Hollywood’s male gaze can easily be translated to painting. We start in a position where the portrayal of women in film (and art) reinforces male dominance and relegates women to fantasy objects.

The debate goes on as a whole generation brought up in the 1960’s and 1970’s who were steeped in this debate have been replaced by the current generation steeped in the values of the internet, and the iron grip it has held on body image and female sexuality/male gratification.

I can see some progress in mass culture and politics; take for instance the present James Bond films compared to the 1960’s ‘dad’ films and the portrayal of men in domestic roles in some advertising. But given the unregulated pressure on young people (by the internet and social media from ? people who are benefitting themselves not the young people) and the reported problems of young women molested at school and pushed into having sex and looking ‘attractive’, I think art and society have a lot of work to do.

Finally, by choosing different sexual practices and conditions (such as boredom/’decadence’ in long term middle class relationships) as the subject for art… and exhibiting that work in museums and galleries… more voices are heard and we are a healthier and happier society.

Chapter 10: ART AND IDENTITY

My tutor says I need to relate all my research and thinking to my practice, otherwise it exists (interesting as it is) in a vacuum. Not part of a painting degree.

So, I’ll try and relate my reaction to this chapter to my art practice.

Firstly identity is, it seems to me, central to our mental well being – it is to a very large extent who we are and governs our thoughts and actions. Personality and identity are inextricably linked. However, it is not a classification and doesn’t exist in fact, it is a way of organising all the elements of our life and personality into a convenient package (a social construct) which then protects (we feel safe within it) and controls (it dictates our possibilities, beliefs, expectations and behaviour) in equal measure.

Equally it seems there are three sorts of identity:

1. Identity as a label given to us by ‘Others’; usually used for control by the ruling group.  Often to humiliate, undermine, diminish, confine and containing lots of stereotypes (black American, Woman, Immigrant, lazy Arab, Trailer Trash etc.)

These groups are so wide and the people inside them so variable as to be meaningless except as a tool of social control. They give us the official history of a country or group and hide reality. A reality that often includes terrible acts, such as in the slave trade.

These identities have an almost godlike power and for many years went completely unchallenged. It is only in the relatively recent past that Art began exposing these identities and giving ‘minority groups’ a voice. A particularly powerful example is The Dinner Party, 1974-79 by Judy Chicago. Not only did this increase the number of feminist artists but revolutionised the way art was judged and valued so that it now include marginalised groups such as gays and hispanics.

It is ironic that following this movement and the recognition (in academia at least) that much of our history was fake news [and that we needed to redress our political and social structures to reflect reality] that we now have politics and internet which is using fake news and identity stereotypes to seize political power and shore up the influence old power blocks… older rich middle class white conservative/Christians and their economically and educationally less fortunate (but also white) working class followers.

I use that grouping as a broad brush social/political observation not as a multi layered ‘identity’.

As an artist this matters  because it allows me to see, and therefore reject, the boundaries put on me by society… mainly ageism… you’re old, irrelevant, don’t have a voice, stick to painting landscapes, you can never be a real artist, you can never earn any money at it.

It allows me to say, I have a value and my voice (whatever it is is) is as equally valid as a young person, I can have an artistic career – okay, it will be a bit shorter – but it’s worth pursuing.

2. The identity we choose for ourselves.

This is often as equally false as identities given to us from outside and just as much of a social tool. However, this is for our benefit rather than the ‘Others’ and empowers rather than restricts us. It makes a huge difference whether we identify as an art student (I am learning and my work does not have any social or financial value) or an artist (my work has social and economic value). There’s a line in the new Elton John biopic film where an established musician tells the young Elton he must kill off who he was born (his old identity) and be reborn as what he wants to be… a rock star. So Elton changes his behaviour and becomes what he wants to be, at least career wise.

Changing behaviour doesn’t in itself change realities (indentifying as a rock star doesn’t make you one, you also have to have talent, hard work and luck) but it enables us to move outside ourselves and explore new possibilities… or at least to take action to change… which could be anything from somebody who has been constantly told they are useless enrolling on an art course to a gifted musician deciding they are good enough to start a band and giving it a go.

Children do it all the time… they play at being other people (take on different identities). Adults dress up as people they’re not, be that as Elvis impersonators or Civil War re-enactors. Though in these cases there is a knowledge that they are not actually the identity they borrow and it’s sanctioned – as different from being seen as a personality disorder – by being placed within (for children) ‘play’ or (for adults) a ‘society’ or stage act.

As an artist being aware that my self identity might be wrong means I can reject false and unhelpful ones and try out new ones… like, I am an artist as well as a first year student. I can try and see myself in ‘reality’ and make identity choices that help me, and thereby have a much more nuanced approach to art.

In fact, if I ‘merely’ paint the world as ‘I see it’ that is a form of identity painting.

What I can no longer do is paint innocently.

3. Finally there would be a ‘scientifically’ researched ethnographic identity which reflected accurately which groups we belonged to… but just like a novel it would be made up of multiple words (groups) in a unique order and be a one-off fiction. And the whole power of identity is about being part of a group… of not being unique… of having an ‘identity’.

Which brings us nicely back to the beginning… the paradox of identity as being both simultaneously core to our being and fictional.

I’m sure my tutor will be pleased to hear, I can try on different identities and loosen up and play. Just as a child might try on different costumes, and see which fits.

I don’t have to paint realistic trees and flowers and tight representational paintings of seashells. I can be me, I just need to be brave and have a go.

Chapter 10: ART AND SPIRITUALITY

I think this chapter confuses ‘Art and Religion’ with ‘Art and Spirituality’.

Religion being a reified ideology made up of physical buildings and social structures, usually a patriarchal hierarchy for the benefit of a ruling caste. Many religions are morally corrupt… see all the recent exposures of Catholic pedofillia, religious wars past and present, and inhuman acts done in the name of religion from judgemental (and often hypocritical) glances to stoning to death of homosexuals.

Spirituality is (usually) an individual transcendent experience.

Of course religion may contain altered emotional and psychological states as part of its ‘product’ but it also has rigid rules and a total submission to an elite (unchallengeable) hierarchy sanctioned by ‘god’. Many religions also strive for global ideological monopoly (hence religious wars to eliminate anybody who disagrees with you or holds an alternative opinion) and often have incredible wealth, status and political power.

So the prime purpose of official religious art is marketing, control and propaganda with any spirituality being either an add on by the individual artist or a tool to seduce the viewer.

Unofficial religious art, by boxing its spirituality inside a religion, also acts as propaganda for that religion; even if that isn’t the artist’s primary intention. The artist is part of a religion and expresses her devotion or spirituality through the tropes and symbols of her religion.

The chapter says that in the Western world before the Reformation Catholic ideology was dominant and that all art was part of the church. Artists were told what subjects and messages to paint. And that this was mirrored in other cultures.

So, all pre Reformation Western art was religious.

The next big chunk of time (roughly 300 years) from the 16th Century Reformation up to the modern art of the late 19th Century was a transitional period driven by the rise of the mercantile classes.

Religion became nationalised (as in the Church of England) and subsumed into the state to do its bidding. While culture gradually became secularised: with the arts, intellectual activity, ideas, customs and social behaviour becoming decoupled from religion. However, art production (even as it freed itself from religion) naturally used the culture around it as its raw materials, so extracts from religion and Biblical icons were still common.

The modern era can be said to begin with the Pan-European overthrow of the old religious habits and traditions by the late 19th Century avant guard artists when the link between Western art and religion was finally broken.

It is at this point that Art and Spirituality can be said to be born. Artists kept the transcendence and ditched the religion.

Of course, there was still a strand of artists who were members of mainstream religions (or who experimented with Eastern religions, or who made up their own mishmash of  religious ideologies into a personal religion) who linked their ‘spirituality’ to specific religious iconography and symbols… but the mainstream link was broken and spirituality (however defined) became just another subject for artists to question and examine. As such it is no different to ‘Art and Identity’, ‘Art and the Body or any other human experience examined by art.

This uncoupling led to Abstraction as the artist could now choose whatever subject matter they wanted, or no subject matter at all. And great religious artists of the past could be revered for their formal properties rather than their religious content. As with all effective propaganda beauty is a great way of seducing your viewer before slipping in your ideological virus, and many of the great masters’ paintings were incomparably beautiful. These paintings are now rightly revered in our museums and galleries for their stunning beauty (it could almost be said to be a spiritual beauty), while the religious meaning is long dead.

It also meant that artists could engage with African art and its visual distortions regardless of their religious function. This gave artists a new visual language which was picked up by a whole generation of artists, but it is perhaps best known in some of Picasso’s work such as Les Demoiselles d’Avignon.

Picasso and Braque also explored new ways of seeing the physical world with Cubism.

Once artists were freed from the shackles of religion any way of seeing/exploring the world became valid; be that visually as in Impressionism, Cubism; emotionally as in Expressionism; ideas based as in much contemporary art linked to social concerns like identity; or just to the world filtered through the artist’s individual personality and vision.

Post World War Two there was a blossoming of ‘pure’ (not linked to religion or religious iconography) spirituality in Abstract Expressionism. ‘Transcendence’ without ‘text’ or ideology.

Artists were still commissioned for religious work, but the artist’s religious beliefs were now irrelevant to the commission – this may have been the case in the past, but pre-reformation the artist would never have dared flaunt there disbelief openly.

Artists also started to use religious symbols to attack religion… such as Piss Christ by Andres Serrano. But, though interesting, this has more to do with religion and politics than spirituality, so I’ll steer it back to spirituality.

I think Art and Today should have had an Art and Religion chapter as well as an Art and Spirituality chapter as spirituality is just a lick of paint on religion (religion being about power, money, control, privilege and status) whereas spirituality is a fundamental part of being human.

Art has also taken up the up the big questions of: Why are we here? What is the meaning of life? What is good or evil? etc under the banner of ‘spiritual art’. Personally, I think these questions, being language based, belong under philosophy rather than spirituality. And not under religion as religions are closed belief systems with limited scope for internal change, whereas philosophy is all to do with debate and argument; and being open to new information and ideas, and to shifting positions.

The chapter lurches back into religion as it examines the artistic aspects of the Soviet Stalinist era and Judaism. Fascinating, but nothing to do with spirituality. The dishonesty of both art systems (and whether the soviet mythology is preferable to the Christian mythology because it is political and for ‘the good of the all people’ rather than the Christian mythology of ‘personal enlightenment’) should be in a chapter on Art and Ideology, not in one on spirituality.

There’s also a discussion linked to the rise of artistic interest in the iconography and tropes of Eastern art and the contrast of the Western belief that the body has to be conquered against the Eastern belief in the body as an illusion. Very interesting, but again religious rather than spiritual.

There is a disturbing section on artist Ron Athey, who performs masochistic acts in public as a way of punishing his body to gain spiritual transcendence. This feels like it should be in a psychological handbook rather than an art book. He openly says his performances are linked to a damaged childhood… and this is clearly psychological not spiritual.

The chapter ends by trying to define spirituality, or at least look at some of the ways artists have attempted to do this.

Many artistic movements such as minimalism, post minimalism and conceptualism see spirituality as an altered mental state and question whether you can separate the physical and spiritual. They point to the psychological and pharmaceutical pathways to spiritual experiences from religious ritual (Western and Eastern) to dropping acid.

The final section examines the artistic search for a universal spirituality. Wolfgang Laib’s, ‘Mountains not to Climb on’ features five mini mountains made out of hazelnut pollen. This makes us reframe and review our view of the world and induces a sense of awe and wonder at the natural world… not dissimilar from the awe induced by some Victorian landscape painters and the early American school?

In this vein there is also The Weather Project by Olafur Elliason – I’m mentioning this because I saw it in the Tate Modern. When I visited it I thought it was a pale imitation of being out in nature: of walking on a high mountain ridge in a gale or being focussed in on a single flower covered with dewdrops. But I can now also see it as an attempt to communicate (give the experience of) spirituality disconnected from religion.

However, two questions immediately spring to mind

1. As experiential art (with a taste of a real experience) that is geared to getting mass footfall is this fundamentally any different from artistic Disney?

In Disney the environment would be themed to a film… if you went in Tarzan’s jungle you’d get a safe ‘packaged’ jungle; a gutted, version of the real thing. Is The Weather Project anything other than a packaged version of sunlight and mist?

2) In essence (apart from scale, theatricality and audience participation) is this any different from standing in front of any stunningly beautiful painting that takes your breath away?

Is it not just scaled up aesthetics?