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... pathetically, only Hope remained inside. In the other
version the box held all of humanity's glories. When she opened
the box progress, knowledge, and exaltation vanished into
oblivion, forever lost to humanity.
Art, in all its forms, plays an exalted role as one of humanity's
glories. It also plays a profoundly personal role. Think, for
instance, of the impact your favorite artwork has had on your
life. Has it moved you to tears, to resolution, to moments of
joy? Have you felt that an artwork was as close to you as a
lover, a friend, or a child? Have you imagined what your life
would be like without art? Picture your most beloved painting or
recall your favorite song or regard your most treasured book and
ask yourself what if it had never existed. Would that leave a
gaping hole in your soul where once something precious had been?
When Pandora opened the box, marvelous things rose up and
vanished into space before her eyes. Without grasping the nature
of this phenomenon, she unleashed Postmodernism on humanity.
Artistic creation is fragile. For most artists creation calls on
the limits of their intellectual, sensory, and psychological
resources; each artwork is, in essence, the artist's summation of
what is important from all of existence. Additionally, it is
usual that an artist's career calls on the limits of their
financial resources. Given the nature of such a daunting task it
is no wonder that artists suffer profound doubts in one form or
another. Imagine young students impatient to express their
visions and passions on canvas and imagine their vulnerability in
hoping they will have what it takes to realize their dreams.
Without the certainty of accomplished works behind them, they
are, indeed, vulnerable to peer pressure, authoritative experts,
and the influence of the icons of their day. If their profoundly
personal visions and attempts are not acknowledged and supported,
then it merely takes an air of disapproval to blow away the
sparks that would blaze their future.
Several years ago I taught foundation classes at
Otis College of Art and Design, one of the most reputable art
colleges in the United States. While there, I offered seven
students a private apprenticeship program outside of their
schoolwork. These students had everything one could ask for: they
had fire, talent, intelligence, and drive; they had that
"light-bulb" look in their eyes. They studied with
other foundation teachers who taught them rock-solid basics, but
in the following year they entered into the fine art program,
which was dominated by postmodern teachers.
During a critique, one teacher and his students called my
18-year old apprentice a "fascist", an
"imperialist pig", and "naïve" because he
had exhibited a realistic oil self-portrait with studies that documented his
creative process, which was dramatically lit. He was not
criticized for lack of sincerity, passion, or talent. By
contrast, another student received the highest mark and praise
for a goldfish cast in resin which had its eyes plucked out and
sewn to its tail. A day after the critique my student came to me
crying and passionately asked "why?" What horrible
things did my student do to deserve such nasty condemnation from
the teacher and his cohorts? Could it possibly be that they were
chastising him because he displayed skill and passion in painting?
Another apprentice of mine took classes with an abstract
expressionist teacher (in the style of Pollock) who deflected answering to students' direct questions. In the third
week of class this apprentice came to me with tears bursting from
her eyes and blurted out, "what does this teacher want from
me?" I guessed that the teacher was looking for expression divorced
from thought so I
recommended that my apprentice use a stream of consciousness
technique for this class. I told her to unscrew her head and leave it on the shelf before
entering this class. She followed my advice to the letter.
She did not "think", did not ask questions, and did nothing
to aim for a realization. Later in that class, the teacher waltzed around the room
with my apprentice's "creation" and claimed that it was
a museum piece and that she was a genius. Overnight she became
the teacher's star pupil. My apprentice said in a mood of distaste
"that work took only 5% of my capacity". Was this
teacher so out of touch with these students that she confined
their potential by ignorance? Or did she do it on purpose?
During our apprenticeship program every one of the seven broke
down in frustration due to their postmodern education. "What
do they want?" Was the unanswerable query. After witnessing
two years of these episodes, it became apparent to me that it
wasn't knowledge, dedication, skill, or love of art that was
wanted by these teachers. It was both obvious and inconceivable
that the teachers acted to thwart these students' minds and
abilities. Did the teachers really want to turn students into
confused wrecks? What sort of people embrace such a
stance?
Rarely have I seen genius and rarely have I seen the completely
hopeless. One student was sent to my class with the aim that she
would finally pass, having failed the course given by other
teachers twice before. She had no interest, had no touch, and had
no understanding for drawing; she had no "light bulb"
in her eyes. Shockingly, just before our holidays she presented
me with an invitation to her exhibition at a modern art
gallery. I will never forget the look on her face after she
watched me read her invitation; she was gloating. I thought of
the struggles of my apprentices pouring their passion, their
egos, and their overtime into developing their potential for art;
I thought of the psychological abuse they were taking for it, and
I thought it unjust. Was it the way of the art world that
this pathetic student should displace them?
I don't mean to imply that all postmodernists are untalented, but
talent in the sense of mastery of drawing and painting is not a consideration for a
postmodern art education. Before their second year, my
apprentices were advised by the Dean of Otis College, by the Director of
Foundation, and by the Director of Fine Art that if they wanted
to continue drawing the figure they would have to go into
Graphic Design and forgo Fine Art. If the
postmodern community does not want skill, could it be that they want
students who embody a "getting away with it" mentality?
A few years ago I went to an artist's talk given by a postmodern
teacher/artist at a prestigious university gallery.
Prior to the talk I was embarrassed to find, after several
minutes of looking around the gallery, that, in fact, there was
an exhibition in the room, but I hadn't seen it. Her works were
camouflaged within the architectural setting. One of them was a
3" x 1" wide plaster band that wound around on the floor of the room.
It was there to be "sensed" and to subtlely affect
movement within the room, changing the traffic flow of the space
intended by the architect. In her talk she proudly stated
that she couldn't draw, couldn't paint, and didn't know anything
about architectural design. Yet all her works were dependent on
architectural settings designed by others. She condescendingly
referred to one of the buildings as a "fascist". When
asked if she had ever created directly from nature she said she
had never "thought of that." Without any skill in art
she had several museum exhibitions in which she presented her
deliberate acts of subtle subversion. Could it be possible that
subversion was the standard by which this postmodern exhibition
was chosen?
With every postmodern exhibition, with every class, with every
critic's praise, clues emerge as to the motives of the
postmodernists and the general direction of the postmodern
movement. I believe there is a key concept guiding postmodernists
but they, in their obscure way, don't want us or perhaps
themselves to understand what it is. Let us dig deeper and see if
we can find what that key is.
Museum directors are the guardians of art. They strive to protect
art by heightening cultural awareness: they give artists venues
in which to exhibit; they cultivate public interest in their
exhibitions; they arrange recognition of artists through critics
and media; they raise funds to pay for their initiatives; and
they produce educational programs for adults and children. They
have media, millions of dollars, and educational institutions at
their disposal to influence culture. Directors are the middlemen
between important new artists and the public; their influence is
profound in shaping "high" culture.
The mission statements of many contemporary art museums include
aims to express the "aesthetics of our time," to seek
out artists that are creating "new inroads," and to
exhibit the "best" artists alive today.
"Best" here does not have the meaning that it has in
sports, where the winner is the better athlete. Artistic value is
interpreted, meaning that it is up to the curators to
evaluate who are the best artists based on contemporary
aesthetics, which is postmodernism, and to support them
accordingly.
The Encyclopedia Encarta describes the aims of Dadaists' (the
first postmodern artists) works as "... designed to shock or
bewilder, in order to provoke a reconsideration of accepted
aesthetic values". But postmodern art goes deeper than
merely raising challenges to specific values; it is meant to
disrupt your psychological and epistemological processes or, in
other words, to shatter your sanity and throttle your mind.
To
accomplish this, postmodern artists mangle either or both the content and means:
1) They can choose a subject matter that will stretch your capacity
for the unimaginable, usually by projecting a thoroughly
disgusting state. Cultural Gothic by P. McCarthy is a good
example of this in sculpture. It is a mechanized sculpture group
in which a father encourages his adolescent son to fuck a goat.
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A
Postmodern version of a close family? |
Branded
by J. Saville is an example in painting. It is a self-portrait in
which the obese woman thrusts out a fistful of her flesh towards
us in an angry and defensive gesture. Incised scalpel-like wounds
that spell out words "delicate" and
"decorative" cover her rotten-colored flesh. Both these
works intentionally take us into psychotic states.
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Saville, Self-portrait |
Parenthetically, it could be implied that I take issue with the
artists' right to express themselves, which is not the case. My
point here is that these works are esteemed by the postmodern
establishment for their shocking content and not for
their quality as painting or sculpture.
Strictly speaking, Saville
and McCarthy aren't postmodern purists; they compromise their
postmodern, grotesque subject matters with figurative painting
and sculpture. For purists, matching the means to the ends is a
hallmark of the highest reaches of art, postmodern or not.
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"...art cannot be art and anti-art
at the same time." |
2) The other method of shock aesthetics is to redefine art as
anything but painting or sculpture. The classic example is The
Fountain by Duchamp, a urinal presented as an artwork. The
simple device of substituting anything but art, such as a toilet,
as an artwork creates an epistemological disturbance in our
minds. Think of substituting "table" for
"egg", "ice-cream" for "go",
"car" for "food", etc. It is something
like a computer virus that plays havoc with your system and
ultimately renders your computer's programs useless. In this way
postmodernists have substituted Rauschenberg's Erased De Kooning for
drawing, Christo's Umbrellas for sculpture, and Creed's Empty Room
for substance. Shock aesthetics are also commonly known in art history
as part of the anti-art movement. Oddly, modern art historians
gloss over the fact that, logically, art cannot be art and
anti-art at the same time.
In
Part I
of this series I stated that the theme of Christo's Umbrellas
magnified the contrast between the huge cost, effort, and scale
of the project and its end of non-existence. The thematic idea is
that this nihilistic work is not about "nothing" but it
is about the non-existence, the absence, of something that had
existed before. Stay with me on this idea; it is important
because nihilism is one of the key aesthetic concepts of
postmodernism. Now let us tweak the context and think of the
entire postmodern art movement as one gigantic Christo project,
in which "absence" is the theme. The postmodern
movement has taken on the universality of representational
art, with its history of 30,000 years, and succeeded in, in the
eyes of the contemporary art world establishment, of virtually wiping it off
the face of the planet. It has ripped the lid off Pandora's box
and replaced "progress, knowledge, and exaltation" with bile.
Notice what this does to the status of the art director as a
guardian of art, it creates a grotesque paradox; the directors of
contemporary art museums are the promoters and protectors of
anti-art. One important way in which they protect postmodernism
is by ignoring any alternative; they are silent when it comes to
value-orientated, representational art.
Far from being harmless, silence from the art establishment
delivers a deathblow to viable representational artists. I discussed this issue of
postmodern silence with Dr. Chris Sciabarra and he replied:
"[A] dominant ideology "brackets out" of the
equation real alternatives: it just doesn't allow fundamentally
revolutionary alternatives to even be considered. I think this is
not simply a conscious conspiracy, but a method of silence, of
omission. It becomes part of the overall worldview, this tacit
exclusion."
Silence is a very clever weapon for postmodernists to use; it
implies that representational art is dead and that even if
something is out there it doesn't merit notice. Tom Wolfe tells
the sickening story of young Fredrick Hart scanning art
magazines, hoping for a review of Ex Nihilo, the facade of
the Washington National Cathedral, an eleven-year sculpture
project. "Months went by...nothing."
The exceptional representational artist faces another kind of
wall of incomprehensibility as a consequence of this
"silence." In my long career as an artist I have met
many "regular" people, who don't know art in depth.
Though some of them have mentioned the "silliness" of contemporary
museum exhibitions. Yet, they have reverence for the title of
"museum" and they do not understand why
representational artists should have problems in getting critical
recognition. They feel this is something that they cannot judge
and it should be left to the experts to decide. The undertone of
their unstated words is, "if the experts do not acknowledge
you then there must be a good reason for it". It is also
unfortunate that if artists try to retaliate against the silence
of the postmodern establishment, then it sounds like "sour
grapes."
In an Agatha Christie story there is a small aside about the
theft of a brooch. In the novel everyone suspected the maid, as she
was the only one in the house at the time of the theft. No one
accused her of the theft because she was an elderly woman and had
always been very conscientious. The assumption of the locals and
her employers was that she desperately needed money. The maid was
terribly upset because she could see suspicion in their eyes and
she could do nothing about it. The maid died before the mystery
was solved. The brooch had been attached to a blouse that had
been sent to the cleaners; the laundress had stolen it. The
horror of this case was that the maid, in the absence of the
solution to the mystery, died without ever being granted
recognition for her goodness and honesty.
Just as the solution to this mystery is crucial to clear up where
the crime lay and redeem the innocent, understanding the
mysterious motives of the postmodern movement is crucial to
bringing about recognition of the goodness and honesty of benevolent, representational artists. Earlier I asked
questions and raised the issue about the key concept guiding the
postmodern movement. Now it should be clear. Postmodernism is
literally an anti-art movement. Its objective, ostensibly, is the
elevation of postmodern artists but its motive is the eradication
of art.
The postmodern aesthetic is a virus composed of the unstable
components of nihilism for its means and disgust for its ends. It
will take innovative contemporary representational art and
reason-based aesthetic criticism to remedy this plague. Stay
tuned for Pandora's Box Part 3, the last of the series, in which I
contrast two contemporary views of the sublime; the postmodern
and the integrated.
Michael Newberry
2002, revised in
New York, 2006
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