art tomorrow

This web-site is provided by Edward Lucie-Smith from his own resources. It has no connection with Finest SA/Editions Pierre Terrail, the publishers of 'Art Tomorrow'.

Excerpts

CHAPTER LIST

Ch 1- Art for the 21^st Century

Ch 2-The Museum

Ch 3-Heritage of Pop

Ch 4-Representations of Reality

Ch 5 - Looking at the Past

Ch 6- Politics of Shock

Ch 7- Body and Identity

Chapter 8 - Art and Science

Chapter 9 - New Geography

CHAPTER I - ART FOR THE 21st CENTURY 

The purpose of this book is both modest and ambitious. Modest, in the sense that it aims to offer a guide, couched in the very simplest terms, to the latest developments in art. Facts, rather than grand theories, shape the territory it aims to occupy. Ambitious, because it does aim to relate these facts to broad tendencies in our society - tendencies which the world of art either embraces with indiscriminate and sometimes ignorant fervour or which, on other occasions, when they prove to be inconvenient, it tries to ignore altogether. In addition to this, it will attempt to explode a few entrenched myths, both about the use of the adjective ‘contemporary’, when this is applied to manifestations in the visual arts, and about the concept of an ‘avant-garde’. 

By looking at these things, one may hope to arrive at a few predictions as to the way in which art might develop in the future. Because this book is concerned with the future as much as it is with the past, it does not look much further back than 1990. One great weakness of many recent texts on contemporary art has been their paradoxical insistence on clinging to what is no longer new. Pop Art is now a historical phenomenon, though still a very influential one. Andy Warhol [1928-87], still celebrated by many as an artist of the present moment, died as long ago as 1987. Since his demise many things have happened in art. Nevertheless the Pop sensibility lives on because it is now so closely integrated with modern urban culture. Recent paintings by Jeff Koons [b.1955] are examples of this - they could just as easily have been made in the 1960s, the first heyday of the style. 

Nevertheless, many things have changed. Perhaps the first thing that needs to be examined  in order to understand these developments is the relationship between contemporary art and official institutions. Since the first public appearance of the Modern Movement - the irruption of the artists of the Fauve Group into the Salon des Indépendants of 1905 - the perception has been that contemporary art and the great mass of society surrounding it are always and irrevocably opposed; that progressive art protests against the sensibility of a complacent bourgeoisie, and that official institutions exclude or persecute experimental artists. 

One cannot plausibly make that claim today. Since the middle of the 20th century there has been a huge growth of events which celebrate contemporary art, and make it available to a mass public. These events include the venerable Venice Biennale, which, after undergoing numerous transformations in response to whatever was the Italian political situation of the day, has re-emerged as a major forum for the exchange of artistic ideas. Equally important have been the series of Documenta exhibitions held in Kassel - Documenta was originally founded to mark Germany’s renunciation of Fascist hostility to Modernism, but also to demonstrate the difference between the culture of the West and that of regions under Soviet domination. Kassel itself lies very close to the frontier that once divided the Federal Republic from the DDR. To these one must add the São Paulo Bienial, founded in 1957, which has made a wide range of contemporary art available to Latin American audiences; and more recent enterprises such as the biennials in Havana and Istanbul.  

Fabrizio Plessi's installation in Piazza San Marco, created for the Venice Biennale of 2001, was a good example of the way in which these exhibitions now offer leading artists opportunities to make spectacular gestures of a semi-official sort. Similarly, Tania Bruguera's installation for the Havana Biennial of 2000 demonstrated the way in which a political regime very different from the one prevailing in Italy can find profit in allying itself to contemporary art. The biennial exhibitions in Cuba have played a major role in establishing the island as a major cultural centre, despite the diplomatic isolation imposed on Castro's government. 

Even more striking has been the growth of museums, both in number and in size - one thinks here of architectural triumphs such as Frank Gehry’s Guggenheim Museum in Bilbao and the Tate Modern designed by Herzog and de Meuron in London. The popularity of these institutions, and their capacity to attract huge numbers of visitors, indicate that the contemporary visual arts occupy an increasingly central position in our society. This impression is reinforced by the widespread publicity given to major art prizes, such as the Turner Prize in England or the Hugo Boss Prize in the United States. 

In addition to examining the relationship between contemporary art and official institutions, one has to look at its relationship to geography, and also to politics, both regional and global. It is often said, for example, that contemporary art has ‘globalised’ itself - that it is now a universal currency. At the same time, somewhat in contradiction to this, certain regions or cities are named as being especially important for the development of art. Paris was the undisputed capital of the visual arts until World War II. After that the hegemony passed to New York. Some people still see New York as the place where all new enterprises in artistic creation have to be validated. Some people thing this centrality is now passing to London. Others still say that modern means of communication have rendered the idea of a single, dominant creative centre obsolete. 

If one tries to look at the idea of ‘globalisation’ within a historical and political, rather than a purely technological, context, one may arrive at depressing conclusions. During the first half of the 20th century, committed Modernists always claimed that their ideas were universally valid. It was nevertheless true to say that, in practical terms, these concepts did not have an unlimited currency. They prevailed in Western Europe, until the advent of the dictatorships in Germany and Russia, when their advance was checked. They were also successful in the United States and gained at least a toe-hold in Latin America, though there such ideas were often radically transformed for populist ends - as was the case with the Muralists [Rivera, Siqueiros and Orozco] in Mexico. Elsewhere, Modernism remained almost entirely unknown.

During the second half of the century, much greater progress was made - it became possible to speak, not only of the revival of Modernist concepts in Germany, then later in Russia and throughout Eastern Europe, but to point in addition, to the appearance of artists who work was allied to contemporary thinking almost throughout the globe: in Japan, China, Korea and throughout the Far East for example. Major Museums in Europe and in the United States often made a great parade of the support they offered to contemporary artists from non-European cultures. 

Here, once again, it is necessary to be prudent. If one examines, for example, the life histories of the most prominent of these non-European creators, one finds that the majority have spent the greater part of their careers outside the countries where they were born, and close to the centres of artistic of power. The best-known contemporary artist from Iran at the moment of writing is undoubtedly Shirin Neshat [b.1957] - but Neshat has spent almost the whole of her career in the United States. The Internet Web site for the 1999-2000 Carnegie International had this to say about her:

‘Although Shirin Neshat lives and works in the United States, her artwork explores issues of her native Islamic society, especially the position of women. She uses the specifics of her background culture to create works that communicate universal ideas about loss, meaning, and memory.’

This seems to me an interesting example of the way in which western institutions avoid or gloss over questions which it is really their responsibility to answer. How much weight should one give to nature and how much to nurture? For example. Neshat’s elegant videos - made in Morocco, not in her native country - and equally elegant photographs - in fact examine the Iranian situation from outside, and deliver answers which are acceptable to western feminism. They are heavily influenced by the expectations of a non-Iranian audience. 

From this point of vantage, one can look in several directions. One can, instance, begin to examine current relationships between contemporary art and politics. The dialogue between the artistic and the political did not start with the rise of Modernism - one only has to look at the careers of 19th century masters such as Jacques-Louis David, Eugène Delacroix and Gustave Courbet in order to realise this.  However, Modernism did intensify such exchanges - flirting first with right-wing radicalism [the Italian Futurists were in some respects forerunners of the Fascism of Benito Mussolini], then shifting to the left after the outbreak of World War I. The relationship was always an uneasy one - the Surrealist Group, a dominant creative force during the 1920s and 1930s, never succeeded in cementing an alliance with Soviet Communism; while the Soviets persecuted their own avant-garde artists with varying degrees of severity from the mid-1920s until the rise of Gorbachev’s perestroika in the 1980s. 

The triumph of American art during the years that immediately followed World War II saw the political element replaced by an exploration of personal subjectivity and even the rise of Pop did not return art in the United States to political themes. What changed the artistic landscape was the return to subject-matter which took place from the mid-1970s onwards, when Minimal Art, which can be described as the final phase of true Modernism, ran into the buffers and something very different began to take its place. It was the German artist Joseph Beuys [1921-86] who was chiefly instrumental in bringing about this change of climate. Beuys, who had begun his artistic career in the 1960s as a member of the Fluxus Group, which consisted largely of Americans living and working in Germany, was the first to realise that museums of contemporary art, and large-scale contemporary art events such as the Kassel Documenta, could provide extremely effective platforms for political and social views which might have gone unheard in other circumstances. Beuys described the political part of his activity as “social sculpture” and his charismatic personality made him a magnet for the young, especially in his native Germany. His views were a curious mixture - on the one hand radically egalitarian, on the other concerned with nature mysticism - basing himself  in this on Rudolph Steiner - and with his own role as a modern shaman, whose role it was to cleanse society through mysterious rituals and ordeals. 

Beuys’s practical example in the end had more effect that his specific doctrines. He was largely responsible for creating a situation where contemporary art became a preferred vehicle of expression for minority causes of all kinds. This return to content placed artists in a situation closely parallel to that of their pre-Modern forerunners, even if the actual means of expression were now very different from those employed by the moralising Salon artists whom the Modernist revolution had displaced. 

However, far more even than their predecessors in the 19th century Salons, contemporary artists who tackle social and political issues are preaching to the converted. Or rather, to be more precise, that part of their now greatly extended audience which does not in fact wholeheartedly agree with them seems to greet what they have to say with casual indifference, treating the message as no more than an interesting phenomenon - one which is not necessarily relevant to the lives the spectators themselves lead.  

Yet there is also another political dimension to contemporary art, which is its role as a vehicle for cultural competition. Nations feel diminished if their artists are not among the most prominent and most discussed of their time. in 2001, the French Foreign Ministry commissioned a report from Allan Queen, a professor of sociology, as to why French art was increasingly sidelined. His facts and his conclusions were depressing. He noted, for example, that in the list of the 100 most popular contemporary artists drawn up by the German magazine Capital, American artists made up 34 per cent of the total, German artists 30 per cent, British artists 7.5 per cent and French artists only 4 per cent. Quemin blamed, not neglect, but its opposite “the system of millions of pounds of annual subsidies and official promotion.”[i] Catherine Millet, director of the magazine Art Press, thought that Quemin’s report was fair and accurate. “We have few private collectors and everything rests with the state,” she said. “This makes French art look like official art.”[ii] The comment points to a dilemma. Art is a vehicle for cultural prestige, but contemporary art is uneasy about its change of status from a position outside the established order to one cosily within it. 

This, too, is a theme that a book of this kind can profitably examine, since it is closely linked to the meaning of the term ‘avant-garde’. One characteristic of new, experimental art, from the appearance of Fauvism onwards, has been its desire to shock - to de-stabilise the established order. This made the military metaphor implicit in the term avant-garde seem especially appropriate. What art historians have been slow to trace, however, is a gradual slide from one dimension to another. The Fauves were shocking, not for their actual content, but for the way in which they challenged established ways of seeing. With the Expressionists, then the Surrealists, psychological, as opposed to purely perceptual, challenges began to play a role in defining a commitment to avant-garde ways of thinking. 

Today, stylistic challenges have lost their impact - it is generally accepted that “anything can be art” and that contemporary art exists in what has been called a “post-media situation” - that is, in a situation where neither style no medium is the message, only content. Naturally this has led to an increasingly agitated search for ways of disturbing an audience which takes such attempts at disturbance in its stride. Avant-garde art, certainly from the rise of Surrealism onwards, has concerned itself with the exploration of sexuality, seeing the sexual drive as the most fundamental of human instincts. Recently there has been much emphasis on those aspects of sexuality which seem most likely to offend even the most jaded - pedophilia and scatology being those most obvious. 

On the other hand, observers such as myself have also begun to notice a certain rigidity in the definitions applied to artistic activity, in the sense that avant-gardism, far from being a challenge, has become a normative element in the world of contemporary art. Things are, or are not, avant-garde, because they fit into established categories, rather than because they challenge categorisation of any kind. Making a video or an environmental piece, for instance, are avant-garde activities per se,, while making a painting is a not. 

An examination of the concept of avant-gardism leads one fairly directly to an analysis of the relationships between contemporary art and material culture. For example, how do the new forms of art sustain themselves in Third World economies? The success of Cuba in making a place for itself in the world of avant-garde art, in particular through successive Havana Biennials, offer an interesting case history. The Biennials are firmly linked to politics. Through them, Cuba presents itself as the champion of the plural cultures of the Third World - cultures in which, more often than not, distinctively non-western elements mingle with non western ones. In showcasing these cultures, however, Havana has tended to attract a western audience, and artists who succeed in the context provided for them in Cuba tend to get taken up by galleries and dealers in New York, Paris, London, Milan, Frankfurt and Cologne. Native Cuban artists, such as Tania Bruguera [b.1968] and José Bedia [b.1959],  who achieve international recognition seldom remain in Cuba - they are forced to go abroad to make the most of the success which has been offered to them. 

The question of Third World or minority art forms and their place in avant-garde culture becomes especially acute when one examines the history of certain artistic groupings which attracted a great deal of attention during the closing decades of the twentieth century. Two cases in point are the new Aboriginal art of Australia and the African American art of the United States. Aboriginal art, in its present form, is not something that arose spontaneously. It was encouraged by whites, trying to find new sources of income for deprived outback communities. From a purely practical point of view, its success in large part depended on the transference of designs originally associated with ephemeral forms such as body painting and sand painting to acrylic on canvas - materials with no role traditional aboriginal culture. It also depended on a fortuitous resemblance between the combinations of coded signs used to represent aboriginal dreamings, such as the one by Malcolm Jagamarra illustrated here, and western abstraction - an interesting though tenuous link here being that Vassily Kandinsky, one of the fathers of abstraction in twentieth century art, seems to have taken ideas and signs from the primitive shamans whose work he studied during the time he spent working as an anthropologist in Vologoda, in the far north-west of Russia. These Aboriginal paintings have a purely western market, if one includes white Australia in that definition, and there are no museums or galleries in the outback where Aborigines can enjoy their own cultural products. 

The situation of African American art is more complex. African Americans are faced with difficult choices - whether they want to identify with their own ethnic grouping [to the point perhaps whether they refuse to address those who are outside it], whether they want to belong to the mainstream, or whether they seem some compromise between these two situations. The most successful African American sculptor of recent years, Martin Puryear [b. 1941] has firmly chosen the second of these options, though commentators nevertheless continue to search for ‘African’ elements in his work. The artists who have been most successful in negotiating a compromise have usually been women - examples are Betye Saar [b.1926] and her daughter Alison Saar [b.1956]. The reason is that their work is as much feminist as it is African American, and feminist concepts provide the work with a firm intellectual structure. 

One challenge to the status of African American art in the twenty-first century will be supplied by the huge increase in the Hispanic population of the United States and the growth of a vibrant hybrid Hispanic/North American culture in response to this. African Americans are only one of a number of cultural minorities within the US, and soon - if not in fact already - they will no longer be the largest. An example of this kind of art is the work of Pepón Osorio [b.1955], who is a member of New York's Puerto Rican community. 

Analysis of material culture leads directly to the question of technology. In the concluding decades of the twentieth century there was much talk about “technological art”. In general, technology was seen as something closely linked to an expansion of the means of representation available to artists - in other words, discussion of technology centred on artists’ video and, to a lesser extent, on digital still photography. Holography, which had once seemed a promising vehicle of expression for avant-garde artists, had slipped from view, largely because of its technical complexity and accompanying expense. 

The paradox with video and related means of expression was that the means available to artists were also, very largely, those developed for a large consumer market developed in response to the needs of amateur moviemakers and photographers. Few video artists had access to anything which could truthfully be described as cutting edge, and their efforts were regularly outstripped, both from a technical and also very often from an imaginative, point of view by the makers of television commercials, pop music videos and video games. 

Borrowing, as it does, many of its techniques from electronic entertainment, contemporary art is itself seen more and more as a branch of entertainment and less and less as a repository for spiritual and moral values. Yet 'entertainment', in this definition, also includes an element of spiritual uplift - a comparison can be made here with popular evangelism on television.. This movement towards entertainment is in fact part of a lengthy process which has been going on since the 18th century, when the first generation of professional art critics, such as Diderot, assimilated what they saw in paintings to their experience of the theatre. 

The rise of video and the increasing sophistication of digital imaging techniques has, however, had a profound impact in one area. Because images are becoming easier and easier to change and manipulate, our belief their inherent 'authenticity' is increasingly challenged, as is our sense of their essential uniqueness. The digital copy is indistinguishable from its original. Meanwhile, thanks to the efficiency of the new electronic means of communication it is no longer necessary to think of the work of art being firmly located in one place. In certain circumstances, it can be anywhere and everywhere. The religious aspect of contemporary art is therefore something built on extremely unstable foundations. 

Less noticed by commentators, but arguably more important than the rise of video and allied means of image-creation, is an increasing effort on the part of many younger artists to marry new art to new science. In particular, a number of artists have become fascinated by the advances being made by scientists exploring new discoveries in genetics. 

At the same time, some artists have also become fascinated by what one might describe as ‘pseudo-science’, and have started making works that allude to alchemy, or to the strange and often fraudulent objects found in sixteenth century ‘wunderkammers’ or in the booths nineteenth and early twentieth century fairground showmen. Examples are the hybrid creatures concocted by the German artist Thomas Grünfeld [b.1956]. The Post Modern elements of doubt and mistrust inherent in the electronic image also find a different, more self-conscious expression in art works of this type. 

The contemporary art scene has nevertheless also witnessed, in many parts of the world, a powerful return to conservative attitudes expressed both through the use of traditional techniques and a return to equally traditional images. In a sense the revival of traditional means of art-making seems less important than a new attitude towards imagery. The great icons of the pre-Modern past - Last Suppers, Crucifixions, Martyrdoms of all sorts, plus representations of Greek and Roman legends - have all begun to find a new vitality in the artistic cosmos of the twenty-first century. Very often these prototypes are used in new and aggressive ways - for example, as part of a polemic for feminist theory, or racial equali or the establishment of gay rights, as in the versions of the Last Supper created by three gifted photographers, Elisabeth Ohlson [b.1961] in Sweden, Adi Nes [b.1966] in Israel, and the African-American Renee Cox [b.1958] in the United States. Cox's 'Yo Mama's Last Supper' [2000] shows her own nude figure in place of that of the Saviour. Interviewed about the piece on the web site Salon.com, Cox said: "It becomes a protest, but that wasn't my intention. It was more about a critique. It also comes from research that I did -- about the Catholic Church and how affairs were handled around slavery and Catholicism ... Are there messages underneath? No, there are not. It's just that African-Americans are invisible, especially in Renaissance art. And Christianity is big in the African-American community, but there are no representations of us. I took it upon myself to include people of color in these classic scenarios. That is the most important thing."   

These images seized from traditional high culture now challenge the borrowings from popular forms, such as advertisements or the movies, which have been staples in contemporary art since the triumph of Pop in the early 1960s. The conjunction raises some interesting questions. For example, is a traditional religious image - a Madonna and Child - in fact less familiar, less central to most people’s experience, than, say, an image of Marilyn Monroe or Douglas Gordon's [b.1960] new version Alfred Hitchcock’s film ‘Psycho’? 

For a number of critics, recognition of this apparently conservative tendency would imply abandonment of the long-cherished concept of an avant-garde - as something which exists in perpetual opposition to whatever might seek to stifle creative experimentation. This seems to me to be putting the question in the wrong way. At the beginning of a new century one of these things we have to ask ourselves is whether the rebellious attitudes of the last century have not in fact become the orthodoxies which now impede progress. In recent years, one thing I have heard too often is the cry “But that’s not avant-garde!” What the existence of true avant-gardism implies is total fluidity of response and constantly changing methods of assessment and measurement. This book therefore sets out to look at the art we now have in new ways, in the hope of discerning what it might become in the future.