Of course my tests aren’t watertight, but if you put them all together in a Venn diagram, the bit in the middle is pretty well guaranteed to be contemporary art.
Picasso said, ‘All children are artists. The problem is keeping them artists.’ But of course there are loads of rubbish child artists. Their parents might have their work on the fridge, but really we all know that not all children are that good at art. But there is a truth in that comment, in that art is about relaxation and spontaneity and freedom.
One of the great enemies of the contemporary artist is self-consciousness. Ever since the definition of art started being challenged in the mid-nineteenth century, in order to work in the contemporary art world, an artist needs to be achingly aware of the audience and the history and the value and all the other things swishing about. So in many ways it would be lovely to be a child again, but you can’t be an innocent in the art world. You have to address the self-consciousness and the rules of the art world and the history and the context in which you’re working. An outsider artist, someone who doesn’t think about these things, can be a fantastic maker of things, but they never have to deal with what it means to be an artist in the art world. Working out what it means to be an artist has been almost the central concern of an artist since the nineteenth century.
I am haunted by this image: after a lecture once I had a student come up to me, who said, almost whimpering, ‘How do you decide what to do your art about?’ And I was struggling to say something and then I looked at her hand and saw she had an iPhone, and I said, ‘Well, I didn’t have one of those.’ Because she has every image, access to all information, in her hand. When I started, I had none of that. It’s a challenge for young people today, how to navigate the abundance of information and images.
But it’s important to make art because perhaps the people that get the most out of art are the ones that make it. So I don’t think it’s important to be a good artist, no, unless you really want to be one and then it can be very painful if you aren’t.
Perhaps there is a danger that art will just dissipate via the web and all of the amazing delivery systems we have now; that it will be so woven into ordinary life that art becomes some form of fallout, as though it has exploded and the dust has settled into every single piece of culture. Perhaps the web can bring into reality the idea that Joseph Beuys, the artist, had. He said everybody can be an artist, and maybe that’s possible with the web. This is partly why I like the art-context definition of art. I want a fairly clear place that I can go to, where I can worship at the great temple of art.
Perhaps art is ultimately all about the personal experience, the reaction you have to it, the reaction I have to it; they won’t be the same, but we are having a reaction. And the fact of it being physically there in front of me, something that, the minute you move away from it, is something else – I can appreciate the intellectual bag that holds all that stuff, but I’m still looking for the thing in the bag.
Although, of course, this idea that anything can now be art is the very essence of now, the mid-2010s. The way we think and feel and live now means in the future people will look back on all the variety of art and say, ‘Oh, that’s such a 2014 vintage!’
Because just as reputation changes over time, so too does the definition of what art is. And the boundaries of contemporary art are not formed by what art can be, but where, who or why.
I hope that my little stings of the whip will help you remember where the edges are when you’re next in an art gallery.
(Of course the final irony – and I love this story – is that if you go to an art gallery and you see Duchamp’s urinal sitting there – the artwork that started it all – it will have been handmade because the original was destroyed and, by the time people became interested in it, you couldn’t get that model of urinal any more. And so those urinals were handmade by a potter.)
Nice Rebellion, Welcome in!
Is art still capable of shocking us or have we seen it all before?
I WANT TO START BY TALKING ABOUT A FILM I saw recently, called Cave of Forgotten Dreams, by Werner Herzog. It’s a marvellous film if anybody wants to see it, all about the 30,000-year-old art in the Chauvet Cave in the south of France that was discovered fairly recently. I see it as a time capsule of Ice Age art. It hadn’t been opened for more than 20,000 years!
In the film, one of the archaeologists is looking at one of the walls and it has these two overlapping drawings – in charcoal – of horses. And she says, ‘You know, these look like they could have been done by a person on the same day. They’re in the same style. But when we carbon-dated these drawings, they were 5,000 years apart.’ And yet they looked almost identical.
This is astounding; not just that these ancient pictures survive alongside each other, but that art, an activity so closely associated in our time with innovation, could have remained stylistically similar for five millennia. Now, artworks seem to go out of date faster than a celebrity tattoo.
The world of art seems to be strongly associated with novelty. The mainstream media, with its addiction to news values, seems particularly drawn to the idea of there being an avant-garde. Work is always ‘cutting edge’, artists are ‘radical’, shows are ‘mould-breaking’, ideas are ‘ground-breaking’, ‘game-changing’, ‘revolutionary’, a ‘new paradigm’ is forever being set.
And of course all artists nurture a tender dream that they too are original. The worst thing you can ever say – if you ever go to an art exhibition and meet the artist at the opening or at a private view or something like that – the worst thing you can ever say to them is, ‘Oh, your work, yeah, it reminds me of …’ Do not do this. This is a bad, bad thing to do.
But I, and some other commentators in the art world, think that we have reached the final state of art. Not an endgame, I don’t mean it’s all over. I mean we’re in an ongoing state of omnidirectional experimentation. Anything can be art now. We’re really agreed on that today. By about the mid-1960s, early 1970s, most things had at least been tried or suggested, and now we’re in a state where anything goes. So formally, art is in its end state. I can just see it, going off into the horizon, and people will say, ‘I’m doing this. Isn’t it new?’ and I’ll go, ‘Well, it comes under the bracket of anything. So, no, it’s not that new.’
That doesn’t mean there won’t be new, exciting art that’s made. But it does mean that the idea of an artwork falling outside the boundaries of what art can be isn’t going to happen any more. We know that freshness and novelty are part of the recipe for beauty. We like to see fresh, new things. But art is quite jaded today. It says, ‘Yeah, had that idea already, but that’s a great version of it.’
If you asked an artist about the idea of the cutting edge nowadays, they might giggle a bit. They might see new ideas as merely tweaking ongoing trends. The idea of aesthetic or cultural upheaval in art seems quaint today. Most ideas, they’re all chugging along. You can do anything now in the art world, and if you do it in the right way and you’re good at it, you will find a place for yourself.
Art is still an arena of inventiveness. But revolution and rebellion and this idea of upheaval are no longer what I would think of as a defining idea in art. A hundred years ago, art was almost synonymous with this idea of revolution. You’d go to the exhibition of modern art and people would be shocked and offended and the paintings would be called beasts. In 1905 an exhibition by a group of painters including Henri Matisse (now a coach-party favourite) and André Derain was unfavourably compared to a Renaissance-style sculpture in the same room with the phrase ‘Donatello au milieu des fauves’ (‘Donatello among the beasts’) by the critic Louis Vauxcelles. The group was thereafter forever known as the ‘Fauves’. Grrrr.
But now we’re a century on from that idea. Robert Hughes, the much-respected art critic who died fairly recently and whose death is lamented, said way back in 1980, at the end of his landmark television series The Shock of the New, ‘The avant-garde is now a period style.�
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So I want to look at what’s happened to that idea and where it still sits in our culture. That idea of the leading edge, the avant-garde, what’s happened to it? Because it still hovers in our minds. And although art isn’t necessarily the crucible of all that is cutting edge in our culture any more, it still is inventive, and maybe it does still need to progress. Or is this progress happening but it’s dotted around the world and so we don’t notice it as strongly? What art world are we heading into? Perhaps we’ll have to adjust our idea of what a cutting-edge artist looks like.
When I started at art college, revolution and change and rebellion seemed fundamental to my conception of art. I joked at the time that the main thing I learned at college was to hate art. One of Picasso’s favourite expressions was ‘We must kill modern art.’ That was how central rebellion was to the idea of being an artist. Parricide was encouraged. We had to establish ourselves in opposition to what had gone before. A young Robert Rauschenberg encapsulated this impulse when he took a drawing by reigning modern master Willem de Kooning and spent a month in 1953 carefully erasing it and then showed it as a piece of his own work. One of the delightful traits of the art world is that it enjoys being challenged. After a century, or even 150 years now of this idea of revolution and challenge, we still encourage it. A young outsider – talented, a little bit angry – comes along and goes, ‘You, Establishment!’ and shakes his fist at the Establishment and says, ‘I am going to show you what fantastic innovation I have here!’ And the art world looks down and goes, ‘Oh, yeah, nice rebellion! Welcome in!’
There’s even an acronym which suggests the kind of art that that young man or woman might be making, and it’s MAYA: Most Advanced, Yet Acceptable. A term coined by ‘the father of industrial design’ Raymond Loewy when talking about the social constraints on what designs the consumer will accept.
But despite the laissez-faire attitude of the art world that anything goes, I think there are limits. The long tradition of increasing outrage (embraced in some 1960s art such as that of the Viennese actionists, which involved a lot of blood and nudity, or American performance artist Chris Burden, who got someone to shoot him in the arm) was tested in 2003 when Chinese artist Zhu Yu was photographed eating parts of a stillborn baby. I don’t think he quite got it; he thought shock was the real point of art. And people looked at the photographs and thought, ‘Ooh, I think he’s gone a bit far.’
But maybe he was calling the avant-garde’s bluff and saying, ‘I’ll show you what shocking is!’
Or maybe the photographs he took just weren’t very good.
In the case of my work the challenge might have been one of polite academic taste or fashion. Pottery was a naff, unfashionable medium practised by earnest folkies or dangly-earringed hippy ladies. In 1986 (around the time I started exhibiting) there was a TV advert for Babycham that summed up the process I was going through. (For those of you who don’t know, Babycham was an early alcopop.) In the ad a gauche, posh young woman goes into a hip and happening bar and she orders a Babycham, a drink that then suffered from terminal uncoolness. On hearing her order the previously noisy crowd falls into stunned silence. The barman drops his cocktail shaker. Then the basso profundo of a real hip dude rings out: ‘Hey! I’d love a Babycham!’ and the whole bar erupts into desperate orders for the newly hip beverage.
So working in pottery was a mild rebellion. But really I see myself as the young woman, my first dealer and collectors as the dude, and the rest of the party as the wider art world. But in my case it took a further fifteen years for them to want a Babycham.
What I am trying to say is that even the wilfully conservative position I took – making formally conventional vases – was eventually welcomed in.
So now here I stand, a fully paid-up member of the Establishment. But when I entered the art world, the word that was constantly on people’s lips was ‘post-modernism’. At that point in the early 1980s, modernism, with its confidence in ever-mutating progress, was over. We were in a period where anything went. And I for one felt cheated. I wanted to plant my revolutionary flag and sign up to a definite art movement, one that could go, ‘Wooh, yeah, you’re the old people who made rusty metal sculptures. We’re the new people who are making this work.’ I wanted to feel like those artists did who staged the first New York Armory Show in 1913, America’s first big encounter with the shock of modern art. To signal that they wanted to make a break from the past the emblem of the show was an uprooted pine tree, an image borrowed from the Massachusetts flag carried into battle during the Revolutionary War.
I wanted to feel like many mid-century British artists had when they encountered contemporary American art, like Alen Jones in the early 1960s when he first saw a work by Roy Lichtenstein, a graphic painting of a leg opening a pedal bin. He said it was a real culture shock. He said it was amazingly liberating that this could be contemporary art. And I wanted that experience; I wanted that shock. I’ve never really had it.
After being brought up on the classic history of art as a succession of isms, centred in different cities, it all seemed to fragment. In the 1960s artists had confronted all sorts of boundaries to what art could be and each had given way without much of a fight. So by the time I came along anything in any style could be art. Art was no longer linked to making nice objects or even objects at all, it was a sub-branch of philosophy. Leaving college I felt like one of those Japanese soldiers who had been holed up in the jungle only to emerge and be told that the war ended years ago.
But in many ways, I was labouring under a misapprehension because art history never was this smooth succession of isms. If you think about Picasso, he started his career in the 1890s, painted one of the early icons of modernism, Les Demoiselles d’Avignon in 1907, and was still working right up to his death in 1973. He practically outlived modernism and he had a go at most of the movements that were around along the way. And that’s just one artist.
So artists can – awkwardly – keep working past the sell-by date of their style. The Tate Britain recently rehung its collection of British art and now it shows us art in pure chronological order. It shows us that the art movements of modernism overlapped for decades. In one room a 1909 painting by the High Victorian artist Alma-Tadema (all marbly nudes in fantasy history) hangs near a raw 1906 life study by Walter Sickert, an artist who pioneered painting from newspaper photos long before the pop artists. In the 1990 room we have an angsty impasto cityscape by Leon Kossoff, a colourful geometric painting by the long-established Bridget Riley, a wall of conceptually rotting flowers by Anya Gallaccio and the seemingly casual photography of Wolfgang Tillmans.
The idea that art moved cleanly on and there was only ever one way to be a contemporary artist seems to be the specialism of a few, mainly male, Certainty Freaks. Certainty is a dodgy business.
Of course these revolutions that went on in the twentieth century were to some extent a storm in a fur-lined teacup. They preoccupied the small village of the international art scene. For me, as an angry young man, there was something nice about working in a little-visited cultural backwater. A little kayak would occasionally come up with a critic in it, but just by being involved in the art world you felt edgy because the art world itself was this amazingly rarefied, difficult, dangerous place to be. And the rebelliousness wasn’t just from the work or from the ideas that were floating about. It was also from the lifestyle of the artist.
Allan Kaprow, who established the idea of the performance-art ‘happening’ in the 1950s, and probably qualified as a genuine bona fide cutting-edge figure in his time, wrote an essay in 1964 called ‘The Artist as a Man of the World’. He posited (and this was probably quite an annoying idea to many people living in cold-water lofts in Soho at the time) that what artists wanted was a comfy middle-class life the same as most people. He thought the profession of artist was not that different from any other specialized job. And in many ways perhaps he was teasing, but it’s an interesting thought.
Of course w
hat’s also happened since the 1960s is that a large chunk of society has embraced a lot of the artist’s lifestyle. Virginia Nicholson (someone with great bohemian credentials because she’s the niece of Virginia Woolf, a full-on bohemian) said, ‘We’re all bohemians now.’ And if you think about it, all the things that were once seen as subversive and dangerous like tattoos and piercings and drugs and interracial sex and fetishism, all these things that artists made use of to show their freedom and otherness – they crop up on X Factor now on a Saturday night, for family viewing.
The last truly dangerous thing – the one thing you won’t see – is underarm hair.
In some ways it’s not that difficult to be subversive within art. The art world can be quite orthodox in some ways. One of the most rebellious acts done by an artist recently was by Tracey Emin. She supported the Tories.
Creative rebels often like to think they offer an alternative to ‘The Man’, the capitalist system, like one of the Occupy protestors. But of course what they don’t realize is that by being all inventive and creative they’re actually playing into capitalism’s hands because the lifeblood of capitalism is new ideas. Contemporary art is like an R&D department for capitalism. Karl Marx referred to this need for progress or novelty as ‘the restless nature of capitalism’.
The art world is also a perfect model for neoliberalism, when you think about the way it operates. Pioneers will come along to buy art hoping their investment will pay off because their taste will become a wider trend in society. That’s just like any other investor – they’re buying futures in the avant-garde. They’re gambling on the posterity of the object. And there’s no fixed measure of quality, so it’s amazingly fluid. In many ways, just by investing in it, they’re making it more likely to happen.
Playing to the Gallery Page 5