May 27, 2004
BONFIRE OF THE VANITIES
So Jeanette Winterson says that only 'philistines' are celebrating the Saatchi fire. 'The great strength of Brit Art in recent years is that is has forced the debate on what art is and who it is for,' she claims.
Ah, debate. Who was it who said, 'Debate is idiot distraction'?
The sentiments Robin quotes from Deleuze couldn't be more apposite.
"[P]hilosophy has absolutely nothing to do with debate, it’s difficult enough just understanding the problem someone’s framing and how they’re framing it, all you should ever do is explore it, play around with the terms, add something, relate it to something else, never debate it.
Because once one ventures outside what’s familiar and reassuring, once one has to invent new concepts for unknown lands…then thinking becomes, as Foucault puts it, ‘a perilous act,’ a violence whose first victim is oneself."
Or, as Robin himself put it, in connection with I'm a Celebrity Get Me Out of Here: "I have some creeping sense that by being drawn into serious debate about these things one is merely contributing to their reflexive self-image as important cultural beacons. Isn't it a waste of mental energy, for people who have some, to devote it to analysing this stuff?"
The Britart debate, such as it is, was begun and ended with the r.mutt urinal nearly a century ago. Duchamp established once and for all that the object is irrelevant; anything can be a work of art. End of. Or it should have been: instead, we've been subject to ninety years of tedious recapitulation in which the radicality of Duchamp's insight has been garbled. If Duchamp's original gesture was liberatory - 'anything can be art, lose your hang-ups about categorization' - its take-up by his adherents has been relentlessly conservative and restrictive. Now, art can only be 'about art', a boring meta-discourse. The more interesting conclusion to draw from Duchamp's jest was Brian Eno's: that art is less about the object, and everything to do with affect. It is not the art object, but the art experience to which we should pay attention.
But this ability to produce affect shouldn't be confused with the capacity to 'inspire' mindless chit-chat.
A cheap reversal perhaps, but it's Winterson, not the straw men she attacks, who is peddling the worse kind of philistinism. Winterson happily advocates the empty platitude - propagated by Kapital at its most vulgraizing - that art is a kind of PR event. What is important, it seems, is 'that people are talking.' On this definition, art is in nowise different from reality TV.
There's nothing 'perilous' about Emin or Hirst; no hint of 'unknown lands'. The appropriate analogy would be Tarantino; someone who didn't create the taste by which he was judged, but who simply hung onto the coat-tails of previous trailblazers. With the Britartists, as with Tarantino, controversy really means 'controversy': a tried and tested revisting of already exhausted strategies that are just as kneejerk as the response they elicit. Such posturing causes minimum discomfort to the artist, who, in the very moment that they are being vilified (and, naturally, gaining valuable publicity) are already being hailed by self-serving commentators as 'important'.
The point is, worthwhile art may turn out to be controversial, but art that is designed solely with the purpose of producing controversy can never be worthwhile. Winterson's own analogy makes this point consummately. "The informal Constable appreciation society," she writes, "forget that their hero had tomatoes thrown at his pictures, and that they were considered crude daubs by those who complained that Constable did not understand chiaroscuro, and simply laid one primary colour next to another without grading." Unlike the Britart controversocrats, Constable didn't produce his art in order to elicit (yawn!) shock, even if shock, outrage and misunderstandings were by-products of his painting. Constable had what the alleged conceptualists of Britart lack: a unique vision of the world, a set of perceptions that re-engineer the way in which we see. This meant that he could lead taste, pre-empt it; something that the Britartists could never hope to do. It's precisely the 'tomato-throwing' dismissal that has never happened to the cossetted Britartists, who, may well be derided by elements of the public, but who were immediately coddled by a sycophantic art establishment.
All that said, I can't quite go along with Nick Southall or Sean, in part because the fire didn't only consume PoMo tat like Emin and Hirst. There was also serious work by the likes of Paula Rego in there, and the Chapmans categorization as 'Britartists' never seemed to fit. Too much vision, too much affect.
Posted by mark at May 27, 2004 06:47 PM | TrackBacklawks a mercy, i ain't going to go along with your across-the-board dismissals of Emin and Hirst (even he occasionally delighted), but that's only in the interests of balance.
you are quite right about Winterson, reading her own webpage is a bizarre exercise in decoding jumbled preening.
i think you might be being too harsh about YBA setting out to elicit shock always, that seems too much like caricature (granted the latterday career of Hirst especially though, as a counter-argument, will not help me too much here).
obv. otherwise, spot on! i wish i could phrase inchoate views like you, ya bastard...
Rego and the Chapman's, also Ofili and Heron, yeah i'd go with that (certainly 'Hell' is far better than anything Emin has ever produced).
P.S.
who'd a thunk k-p would align with Robert Hughes and against the hip young things partying in Basel!
I wait to see anything by Emin or Hirst that isn't lame shock-mongering and fifteenth-rate vapid (non)conceptualism.
who'd a thunk k-p would align with Robert Hughes and against the hip young things partying in Basel!
Well, there's nothing more conservative than hedonism. :-)
haha!
you just really vividly reminded me of that Flaubert maxim about keeping your life ordinary so your work can become extra-ordinary (or such).;-)
what Emin or Hirst have you seen? i mean, i've never seen her 'Bed' in the flesh and StylusScott makes a good (and poignant-ish) pt. over at auspicious fish's comments that seeing it in the flesh he was rather affected &c.
otherwise it's always just like never hearing any music, just reading the album reviews.
god!
talk about a fate worse than death...
Haven't seen much tbh --- but does it really matter? That's why contemporary conceptualism is - as a rule - so poor (and why many of the works of art that went up in the fire shouldn't be mourned); the thing is, they are all about the 'idea', its physical instantiation is irrelevant. And the ideas, the ideas are so vapid. Emin is completely conservative; the comparison with reality TV is not idle. As a commenter remarked over at AusFish, Emin (someone prop open my eyelids puhleez) is the artwork herself. And she ain't no Andy Warhol. (Actually cf Marcello's excellent observations on Warhol and Big Brother on CofM way back when). Emin's is a kind of celebrity expressionism; adolescent petulance and portentous self-importance puffed up into an aesthetic.
Posted by: mark k-p at May 27, 2004 11:43 PMah but there's also a quote at AusPis from someone about how affecting 'bed' is in the flesh, which kinda (partially?) might invalidate some of your grumpy old man objections to Emin, at least...;-)
P.S.
wd luv the CoM URL for the piece you cite, PLS.
did idly google the Marcello thing before posting, but couldn't find the ref .... However, since you asked, and after having painstakingly sifted through the CoM archives: it's http://cookham.blogspot.com/2003_06_01_cookham_archive.html
Posted by: mark k-p at May 28, 2004 12:12 AMit seems to me that the Chapman brothers are the
worst offenders in terms of the tiresome adolescent desire to provoke, and I include Hell in this.
Their work depends on the connivance and co-operation of the media just as much as Emin, although in Jake's case its dressed up in a superannuated Deluzian jargon of intensities and schizoid flows. He also still dresses like a student.
Its true that many of the YBA's have taken the advances made by Duchamp, Warhol and seventies conceptualism and commodified them. Sam Taylor Wood, for example, is unspeakable. Hirst's 1,000 years on the other hand, even though you have to go into Saatchi Land to see it, is the real deal. Also Michael Landy, Douglas Gordon and others
Posted by: Conor at May 28, 2004 08:44 AM"But this ability to produce affect shouldn't be confused with the capacity to 'inspire' mindless chit-chat."
That's the pot calling the kettle black innit Mark?
I thought you did it rather well!
;-)
Posted by: paul "Essex boy" meme at May 28, 2004 11:25 AMSomewhere in France, I once went to the Museum of Post-Duchamp Nick-Nacks. (It may have been called something different. I don't remember.)
One room had a table full of small sculptures made from rubbish. It was all jolly enough, I suppose. Anyway, when we were there a party of primary school children came through. I assume that this was a hey-kids-art-isn't-just-stuffy-art-galleries sort of thing. Some of the kids looking at the things touched and poked them, and were told off by the teacher for doing so. The message seemed pretty clear to me: even if it's made out of junk, it's still art and so it's still more important than you.
[When the kids were gone, me and the wife politely followed this curator guy around while he touched and poked the things on the table.]
The irony is that one my favourite things about 20th century art is the way its innovations (collage, mobiles) ended up as rainy playtime activities.
you're using an inherently subjective term - 'affect' - as an objective measure of whether the art you dislike is 'good'. "It is not the art object, but the art experience to which we should pay attention". Presumably the rarefied experience which acts as arbiter is yours and yours only, because plenty of people have and will continue to be inspired by the work of Emin, Hirst etc...
Your distaste for populism/elitism arguments seems to spring from the fact that your viewpoint is clearly situated within the latter field.
Re robin's kids playing comment - in the Bilbao Guggenheim when I went in February there were two little rooms full of little blocks which had been arranged into fictional cities. One was created by the artist, but the other was created by children playing with the blocks. It was pretty cool, I got the same kind of child-envy you get when you see a ball pit.
Posted by: Tom at May 28, 2004 04:09 PMBall pit envy -- love it.
One of the great advantages of having a three-year old is that you can go round the play-den's equipment. I know all the Sheffield ones intimately. My favourite one features a truly terrifying vertical drop that sends you screaming into a vast ocean of coloured balls, in which one can bob contentedly. While rescuing the occasional "drowned" toddler.
DEEPLY satusfying.
Posted by: paul "Essex boy" meme at May 28, 2004 05:08 PMYour distaste for populism/elitism arguments seems to spring from the fact that your viewpoint is clearly situated within the latter field.
You'd have to substantiate that; there's no-one more elitist than Emin and her cronies. They are telling people not indoctrinated into PoMo sophistry and semiobabble that they 'don't understand' the greatness of the Concept.
And I think no-one's been inspired by Emin any more than anyone in the crowd admired the Emperor's new clothes. Same syndrome.
What you chaps are on about re: kids reminds me of when I took my nephews around Tate Modern. On seeing some of Warhol's stuff: 'This is rubbish. Literally rubbish.' (He's ten btw).
Posted by: mark k-p at May 28, 2004 07:53 PMklassic!
Posted by: scott at May 28, 2004 08:56 PM'robin not from haverhill' where the hell are you from then?
Posted by: robin not from zanzibar at May 28, 2004 10:20 PMjust one or two points.
tracey emin is not generally considered by those with knowledge of art history beyond vaguely 'getting duchamp'to be a 'concept artist'
it is a grave mistake to equate all art in any way working within post-modern art's systems of signifiers; readymades, etc as conceptualist. In many ways conceptual art has more to do with modernism than pomo. The YBA's work takes on different concerns conceptual, painterly, exressive and beyond with variations of both quality and type of work covering a whole spectrum. To discuss Hirst and Emin in the same breath while citing The Chapman's as exception of choice aligns you with every cliche peddling ignorant out there. Your blind attempt to address Winterson's ill-advised comments don't save you at all.
Unfortunately neither Winterson nor yourself seem to understand anything even resembling modern art's current condition. Very little of the YBA's work is primarily concerned with the nature of art although it does assume certain dialogues dealing with it as known. Most of it has other, far more interesting issues to address, emin's looks at identity, performativity, gender, class, eroticism, sensuality and gesture. Quinn looks at mortality and physicality. Even Hirst is far more concerned with religion than art although he is no way convincing at any point. Mr K-punk seems to have made an easy jump prompted by Jeanette Winterson's own ignorance in deciding that use of the ready-made form (or, it seems, association in kpunk's mind by virtue of being a YBA with the concept of the readymade. they don't all use them all the time, sometimes not ever) dictates content.
There is a similar problem with the idea that another primary goal of these artists (its never clear exactly who you mean by the YBA's) is to shock which kpunk seems very convinced of. Its all further betraying of the fact that you're relying on media generated cliches about these artists and not actual knowledge of their work. Obviously all artwork makes use of spectacle, display and effect,but to claim that is it's sole aim is frankly after all these years is just more tired redectionism.
stick to what you know about.
Posted by: hestia at May 29, 2004 02:36 AMtracey emin is not generally considered by those with knowledge of art history beyond vaguely 'getting duchamp'to be a 'concept artist'
Yes, well I think we ignorant people refer to as a 'concept' artist because when we look at her work we cannot see anything except 'ideas'; to wit, tired notions of
identity, performativity, gender, class, eroticism, sensuality and gesture
which have to be unpicked by the obliging critic to fill the vacuum in the response to the 'work'.
I didn't talk about 'shock' so much as 'controversy'. As an ignorant person, I walk around these shows and have no response whatsoever to the objects themselves. To me, strip away the question of whether the bed or the tent are art and what are you left with; an unmade bed and a tent with some embroidery on it. Somehow, the context is supposed to make these objects interesting. It's in this sense that they are 'about art'.
Otherwise, why isn't my unmade bed in the morning a (yawn) comment on (yawn) 'performativity, identity and gender'?
I looked at Hirst's pharmacy and his tanks and all that comes to mind is some well-rehearsed critspeak: 'meditations on transience', 'a questioning of the relationship between prescription and recreational drugs', 'investigations into medicalisation'; you can just spool this stuff on in lieu of a response.
I don't think
that use of the ready-made form .... dictates content.
I think there is no content at all in many cases.
Brian Eno said something else interesting about culture now - that increasingly it is about creating contexts. His example was Miles Davis who - on his best work - stood back, created the environment in which others could play. My feeling with Emin is that she doesn't create context, she's entirely dependent on 'contextualization' provided by an uncritical art establishment.
Posted by: mark k-p at May 29, 2004 07:32 AMI'm terribly sorry perhapsI shouldn't have used the word ignorant, it does offend people. However, while it does seem you don't know very much about modern art, i'm not interested in whether you know what the critics say about Emin, I'm interested in how much you have seen, looked at spent time with all this work you are so dismissive of. This is where it gets interesting:
'As an ignorant person, I walk around these shows and have no response whatsoever to the objects themselves. To me, strip away the question of whether the bed or the tent are art and what are you left with; an unmade bed and a tent with some embroidery on it.'
purely because it sounds like maybe you actually saw that one and actually had a reaction to it which i'm prepared to accept although I do feel rather sorry for you that you aren't imaginative enough to have got anything more from it than what the trash papers fed you. perhaps you did you're just not interested, its not an exciting view so you have to dress it up with tabloid platitudes. 'a tent with embroidery on it' is a ridiculous way of looking at it and you should be embarassed.
in favour of multiple views what if i asked you how you felt about seeing someone's unmade bed? or yes, your own...weren't you interested in what was embroidered on the tent? If you have no interest in those answers then i would suggest that your dislike of the work is based in personal prejudice and closemindedness. Emins work is NOT conceptual purely because you CAN'T reduce her work to conceptual content, gender, performativity etc, although those are all present, and can be referred to NOT as concepts
but realised and integrated and accessible to the open mind, educated or otherwise via experience of her work, context or no context. You do, as someone pointed out, have to see it.
Tracey Emin is the artist most cited by applicants to art school as an inspiration, these people aren't experts, they're just not so prejudiced that they can't get anything from the work. So they get a lot. It makes sense to them, they care about it.
Your tone suggests i suppost some elitist idea of having insider art knowledge or some such notion. Not in the slightest, I would support enormously a discourse on art opened up actually to the public and not to those who purport to speak for them, but i won't discuss anything with anyone whose emiprical knowledge of the work extends to press clippings and rarely gets through a gallery door. bollocks to the public's opinion on what they read about art in the telegraph, I want to know what happens when they see it. i wish they weren't spoon fed the idea that this art is not for them. Its not elitist to demand familiarity with what you have an opinion on, the work, not its context, not critical work about it, not headlines. I wouldn't ask for an opinion on todays big blockbuster release from someone who hadn't seen it.
hirst, i personally have little interest in arguing with you over, in his case, most of what you think is probably true, he is that trite and that conceptual and that bad at it. some of his works are better than others, but it is really all very simple. A perfect example is his recent work with David Bailey on Stations Of The Cross. he makes a lot of money but less than posh spice. He got his ideas from a bona fide genius of conceptual art Jeff Koons and from charles saatchi, clever businessmen, thats all.
purely because it sounds like maybe you actually saw that one and actually had a reaction to it which i'm prepared to accept although I do feel rather sorry for you that you aren't imaginative enough to have got anything more from it than what the trash papers fed you
I don't know where you've got this idea that I've been programmed by 'trash' papers to have this response. I haven't read anything in a tabloid about Emin. Yes, I could use my 'imagination' to trumpet up some spurious response to the piece, but why should I? I want to be swept away by someone's vision, not asked to provide it for them.
'a tent with embroidery on it' is a ridiculous way of looking at it and you should be embarassed.
errrr, right. 'Unsophisticated' maybe - but 'ridiculous', hardly. To me, this is like saying saying the emperor has no clothes is 'embarrassing.'
The Chapmans I think are more interesting because of their choice of intertexts; I guess it's because I'm interested in Goya, Bosch and Bellmer that I'm prepared to give them the time of day. Plus, there was something disturbing abt those retouched Goya etchings that went beyond the 'debate' that the defacement or not issue raised. Transforming art objects back into found objects, that was interesting.
As for Hirst, the tanks have some fleeting material effect; the pharmacy that it was in the Tate a while back struck me as vacuous.
Not sure what you're saying about Koons. I actually like Koons, although I admit I've only seen reproductions. His meta-kitsch has a genuine creepiness that I find unsettling and disturbing.
O and I disagree with Conor above abt Sam Taylor-Wood; I like those 360 degree photos. Haven't seen the Beckham thing, though I have to admit it doesn't interest me.
O and re: Tracey Emin is the artist most cited by applicants to art school as an inspiration, these people aren't experts, they're just not so prejudiced that they can't get anything from the work.
it's hardly surprising, given how much her work resonates with adolescent self-importance; how much media coverage she gets and how rich she is. :-)
Posted by: mark k-p at May 29, 2004 12:42 PM>Tracey Emin is the artist most cited by >applicants to art school as an inspiration
I don't care about Tracey Emin enough one way or another to offer an opinion on her work. However I have to say that if I was applying to art school, I would certainly be namedropping her on my application form ;) I 'd also like to point out that just because an artist is inspiring, it does not necessarily follow that their work is aesthetically valuable.
Posted by: johneffay at May 29, 2004 03:16 PMwell we aren't going to agree on tracey emin i suppose. bit of a cheap shot at adolescents don't you think though...considering the whole elitism rant that led me to mention them.
basically i suppose my point is an attempt to inexpertly echo deleuze and suggest that there is more to be gained for all involved from a discussion of these things that doesn't take such oppositional starting points as the ones so often taken on the YBA's. maybe you got your views somewhere other than the daily mail but you sure as hell sound similar.
i just wanted to put forward a bit more detail than hirst and emin:bad vs. chapmans:
in general those bemoaning the state of the YBA's will be glad to know that an awful lot of less newsworthy work goes on in the artworld that is totally different to what you see in the saatchi gallery. Go check out some dgree shows in the next few weeks, you'll be pleasantly surprised how much subtlety is creeping back in.
i didn't mean to suggest that aspiring art students liking tracey emin meant she was necessarily good merely that it is possible for it to be appreciated by those not critically very informed, contrary to what kpunk seemed to be saying:
'...have to be unpicked by the obliging critic to fill the vacuum in the response to the 'work'.'
bit of a cheap shot at adolescents don't you think though...
LOL. Yeh, well, forgive me for that - I spend all day at work with adolescents, that kind of makes me uh ambivalent towards them. :-)
maybe you got your views somewhere other than the daily mail but you sure as hell sound similar.
I've no idea what the Daily Mail says; or, rather, I suppose I've got an idea what they say, but, needless to say, I haven't read it. If there is a similiarity, isn't this because, for better or worse, we probably share a 'commonsense' view of Emin? I mean, what I find most odd about what you and Robin are suggesting is the implication that the only reason that ppl don't like this kind of art is that they've been duped by a hostile media. If people only had an open mind, they would respond to it.... Well, the notion of an 'open mind' is a little dubious any way (as Nietzsche says, to be alive is to be prejudiced), but isn't it at least as accurate to say that people need to be schooled in a certain way of responding in order to get something out of Emin?
I'm honestly aghast that ppl really get anything from her.
i just wanted to put forward a bit more detail than hirst and emin:bad vs. chapmans:
Yeh, fair enough....
in general those bemoaning the state of the YBA's will be glad to know that an awful lot of less newsworthy work goes on in the artworld that is totally different to what you see in the saatchi gallery
That's great news, seriously, and I wouldn't have assumed any different, really. It wasn't the whole of modern art I was condemning, even if it sounded like that...
Posted by: mark k-p at May 29, 2004 06:36 PMmerely that it is possible for it to be appreciated by those not critically very informed, contrary to what kpunk seemed to be saying:
'...have to be unpicked by the obliging critic to fill the vacuum in the response to the 'work'.'
Just to clarify; I wasn't suggesting that ppl substitute a critic's response for their own - it's worse than that. What I meant was that people have introjected a whole way of responding that simulates the required critical attitude - the spooling of a certain brand of hackademic drivel - and this substitutes for actual engagement; indeed, the point of art on this model seems to be to elicit this kind of dreary discourse.
Posted by: mark k-p at May 29, 2004 07:11 PMYes. Duchamp, if he were still milling around today, would not be identified
with a "ludic" post-modernist art (aka Emin, Hirst et al), the
"conservative-pluralist" posture of "anything goes" in art, characterized by
pastiche, quotation, play, and [driven by] PR, but with a more
"critical-oppositional" avant garde strain of postmodern art, as with his
visceral stance against complient modernism and the bourgeoise,
artvalue-conferring gallery system of nearly a
century ago. Yes, Duchamp would be welcoming Saatchi's unwitting "enhanced
market-exchange
value of warehoused art" insurance-scam bonfire as itself, in contemporary
Street-Porter parlance, a Work of Great Performance Ought ... as with KLF's
ritual-redemptive burning of £1 million in hard cash some years ago ...
But its not just in traditional, unexamined notions of "Autistic Circles"
that the
progressive avant garde is everywhere miniscule and marginal in rampant
postmodernist
commodity cultural production. What about that [near-fascist] ubiquitous
OTHER hysterical British Cultural Obsession, namely -----Gawdening? Both the
Actual irreal
and the TV real? Still ingrained in a nostalgic pre-modern, arcadian
Victorian mindset [strictly
allied to the latest garden-implement/accessory inventions of the
consumer-capitalist dispensation], doesn't it desperately need a Duchamp to
blast it into oppositional modernity?
I mean, are we even yet permitted to imagine a Duchamp-inspired "gauden
exhibit" in, say, the Chelsea Flower Show, contemporary British/Irish
gawdening's gallery system?
But look here: "Exhibit 21 ----The English Avant Garden: Passing first
through the unspoiled, organicist aphid-infested rose bushes, and the
slug-eaten dahlias, then strolling by
the Roundup-withered grass-patch laden with randomly-dispersed, dehydrated
dog faeces, we're
suddenly pleasently confronted by the maggot-eaten Pigeon corpses floating
indifferently in the rustic Water Feature, before lazily ambling on to the
scented Patio Area
with leaky Septic Tank as focal point, just adjacent to the experimental
Children's Playpen -
lovingly realised as a burnt-out Hiace van containing a bubble-wrapped
wasps' nest
balancing on a mountain of crumpled bear cans; and moving on, then, to the
awe-provoking
foot of the specimen gauden, featuring a precisely symmetrical and
symbolically-monumental arrangement of four great mounds of moist,
dandalion-rich earth - each with biscuit-tin covered headstone, with the
spray-paint inscription "This Is Not A Garden" - where we buried the
bodies, prior to their death, of Alan Dragmarsh, Charlie Dimwit, Dearmad
Gavin, and that dapper fuc*wit with the cravat, the cufflinks, and the Lord
Byron designer-haircut. And we've already been commissioned by Tony Blair to
re-create a precise replica at his new retirement home in downtown,
gun-metal Baghdad ..."
"This Is Not A Garden"
Nah, on second thoughts it might just set another bad precedent for the
"affectively performing" ludic pomo arts and autists: to witness, 100 years
from now, the British countryside choc-a-bloc with £1-million pomo landscape
commissions by armies of Tracey Emin and Damian Hirst Landscape-Gawdening
Autist lookalikes ... Avant Garde-ning, RIP. Next stop: Home DIY.
Get me out of here, Mr Saatchi, I'm not, I'm really not a celebrity!
LOL, Padraig!!!
Posted by: mark k-p at June 1, 2004 12:17 PM