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if you're a recent MFA or Ph.D. graduate
YOU'RE NOT AN ARTIST OR CURATOR
by
MIKLOS LEGRADY
_______________________________________________________
STIFLING
CREATIVITY IN THE VISUAL ARTS
Dr.
Jaclyn Meloche's book is titled What is our Role?: Artists
in Academia and the Post-Knowledge Economy, and was just
published through YYZArtistBooks (Toronto). This book follows
the theme of her symposium some years ago at the Lillian Smith
Library, also sponsored by YYZ Artist's Outlet.
Meloche,
reflecting on what she learned on her own journey through academia,
said that artists today needs a Ph.D. to attain the high level
of accomplishment that only advanced studies deliver. The symposium
illustrated this with the work of four post-graduate students,
all showing strong, interesting, even fascinating work when
they started their doctorate. But the work got weaker as they
progressed through the program; by graduation day their art
looked like every postmodern clone, the ones that make us roll
our eyes in despair. These students had been homogenized, the
originality squeezed out of them, they learned to get with the
program. This suggests that if it’s 2018 or later and
you’re a recent graduate, you’re neither artist
nor curator but an esoteric priest in an academic cult as far
removed from art as homeopathy is from true medicine. Remember
that in 2008 bankers crashed the global economy, so an entire
profession of artists can certainly go off the rails.
Came
discussion period. This was structured to leave no room for
opinions outside the theme, as though we were to be disciples
of this specific academic creed. I raised the obvious question
about aesthetics, as the work shown had denied a role to that
algorithm we call a sense of beauty. Meloche came down like
a ton of bricks, with severe disapproval at hearing the word
beauty used in an art conversation. Was I ignoring the latest
canonical assertions, did I know nothing of postmodernism? I
replied a bit intimidated as I’m not used to people being
openly rude or hostile. Later I surmised she was fiercely defending
curatorial territory. Still, I nervously brought up the Dennis
Dutton video on youtube called “The
Art Instinct, a Darwinian Theory of Beauty.”
Aesthetic
taste, argues Denis Dutton, is an evolutionary trait, and is
shaped by natural selection. It's not, as most contemporary
art criticism and academic theory would have it, ‘socially
constructed.’ The human appreciation for art is innate,
and certain artistic values carry across cultures. It seems
an aesthetic perception allowed situations that ensured the
survival of the perceiver’s genes. If people from Africa
to Alaska prefer images that would have appealed to our hominid
ancestors, what does that mean for the entire discipline of
art history? Dutton argues, with forceful logic and hard evidence,
that art criticism needs to be premised on an understanding
of evolution, not on abstract theory. Dutton’s point makes
sense; blue skies linked to warm sunny days for millions of
years associate positive feelings with blue; a non-verbal visual
language had developed from life experience. I also pointed
out the numerous scientists who established beauty as an algorithm
vital for mental health, part of a language of aesthetics that
functions in a liminal mode. Some in the audience murmured agreement
but curator Meloche was not pleased.
Months
pass. The YYZBOOKS ‘about’ page states they are
an alternative Canadian press dedicated to critical writing
on art and culture. Their mandate is to encourage ideas and
critical thinking and to foster appreciation of contemporary
Canadian art and culture by producing challenging yet accessible
publications that reach diverse audiences. Their objective is
to provide a discursive forum for artists and writers and to
facilitate new avenues of discourse within Canadian publishing.
YYZBOOKS is the publishing arm of YYZ Artists Outlet, a non-profit
artist-run centre in Toronto, Canada.
After
Meloche’s symposium at the Lillian Smith library, I got
in touch with YYZ Artists’ Outlet director Ana Barajas,
to meet, discuss and ask about working with YYZ to publish a
book. She asked me to wait due to work pressures, and over a
few more emails during the course of a year I got a similar
brush-off. No direct rejection that contravene YYZ’s mandate,
but clear signals similar to what the flat earth society would
send to astronomer Carl Sagan.
Eight
months after my first approach YYZ announced the publication
of Jaclyn Meloche’s book, while my recent emails were
still being ignored. I sent Ana and Jaclyn a first draft of
this article suggesting a discussion. I was hoping they’d
invite me to YYZ to talk ideas over Glenlivet and Dufflet’s
pastries but no such luck. When there was no reply I had the
impression they pulled up the drawbridge and barred the gate
instead; perhaps they were not fully committed to encouraging
scholarly critical writing, or providing discursive forums that
don't support their own interests. There's precedents like H.G.
Wells’ A Short History of the World on the papacy
of Innocent III (1160-1216). “And it was just because
many of them probably doubted secretly of the entire soundness
of their vast and elaborate doctrinal fabric that they would
brook no discussion of it. They were intolerant of questions
or dissent, not because they were sure of their faith, but because
they were not.” Possibly YYZArtistBooks only encourages
critical thinking by their close friends, otherwise showing
a haughty disdain even at science, if it contradicts their Logos.
Danielle S. McLaughlin of the Canadian Civil Liberties Association
says that when we can no longer explore and discuss ideas that
are troubling and even transgressive, we are limited to approved
doses of information in community-sanctioned packets.
Worrisome
at best, this Canadian failure of logic and scholarship, this
refusal to engage in discussion for fear that it might shake
the tree and teach us a lesson. It’s as if unconscious
of a purpose other than the trashing of art, academia will roll
on that path to see where it leads. It doesn’t take a
visionary to guess where destruction leads, and they likely
will reap the whirlwind someday . . . but not today; right now
they’re apex predators. Perhaps it’s about gatekeepers
directing the flow of money and resources to friends rather
than strangers. This mercenary undercoating to Canadian art
could explain what looks like insider-trading, the curse of
genuine scholarship. Insider-trading degrades art with Stalinist
precision.
Basically
I disagree with Meloche’s faith in academia as a site
to shape artists. One jumps through hoops and gets with the
program, learns to be an artist like all the other artists in
one’s cohort, but alas, the homogeneity. Unavoidably,
since academia is the information network par excellence,
when a bad idea enters the system it spread like a virus, and
when bad ideas take root they are tenaciously hard to uproot.
New information is available that contradicts the foundations
of postmodernism yet no one is willing to face the reality check
and rock that boat. There is no place for dissent when a curator
has spoken. Consequently the art system is too rigid to correct
itself, it's drowning trying to save the status quo, while immutable
laws say the good must make way for the better.
Cultural workers, students, teachers, curators, have generally
accepted the notion that pretence is art. The term pretence
itself is loaded but generally it means we’re being deceived.
In 1617, Sir Dudley Carleton, for instance, protested to Rubens
that paintings offered to him as by the hand of the artist himself
were in fact largely the work of his studio. Rubens was quick
to replace them with works he could vouch for as being entirely
his own -- it would not do to acquire a reputation for passing
off inferior work as original. In 1652, Peter van Halen, painter
and Master of the Guild of Saint Luke in Antwerp purchased Brueghel’s
painting “Cattle Market” for 204 guilders. On closer
examination, Van Halen decided it was not an original but a
copy. After three years of lawsuits, van Halen managed to establish
that the painting was indeed a studio copy made by Brueghel’s
assistants and was awarded damages.
Of
course any philosophy of art today looks at the full picture;
the theatre and its double, the balance of opposites, the Yin
in the Yang of the Tao. A true definition of art includes real
and false art, good and bad art, meaningful and meaningless
art, and so through the entire pantheon of dualities. Within
this higher philosophy, pretence and bad art and other negatives
on the list are also art, as they exists within the definition.
Which, from a conceptual point of view, means that bad art is
just as valid as the good. In fact since bad art is easier to
produce than good, we have a surfeit of it.
Most
artists do not have sufficient time for studio practice, so
if they must make art they have to go for the shocking, fast
and nasty, which is bad art rebranded as conceptual. We know
Duchamp stopped making art after he made art intellectual.
Thankfully
academia denies there is such a thing as bad art, there’s
no inferior work, holding that it’s simply a failure
to understand on the viewer’s part. Others object that
if such is the case one’s integrity and the dignity
of personal experience are degraded.
In
Ontario another artist observed that “When the art changed
around the parallel, later artist-run, gallery scene, it was
late 90s, the Harris years, and suddenly everybody just needed
to work a lot more in order to get by. Fewer hours spent on
the work & the stuff in the galleries started looking shoddy,
which was embarrassing, but then the traditional materials were
abandoned in favour of technology (video, photography, projection,
text as image etc.). Why? Because you can get experts to do
the hard parts, & tech doesn't get tired and totally screw
that part up.”
Strangely enough, the intelligentsia among us, the professors,
the artists, curators and writers suffer a surfeit of integrity
and yet nobody objects when Sol Lewitt writes that a conceptual
artist is a mystic who overleaps logic. Lewitt has accredited
status, from which we learn that status trumps integrity. Professional
integrity now means to follow the party line else you’re
barred from the banquet of teaching jobs, exhibitions, grants,
and that pat on the back.
Carl
Jung points out that those who suffer a surfeit are overcompensating;
they are troubled by conflicts they close their eye to. Science
says it’s easy to know what art is since Homo Sapiens
have been making it since the dawn of time. Art is specific
and functions as the semiotic language of sensory cognition
(I’ll just let that sit there like a stick of dynamite
with a sizzling fuse). Academic art on the other hand is more
intellectual, standardized, as it must pass peer review. Homogeneity
increases with each generation; errors get embedded so as not
to ruffle colleagues, mistakes accrue incrementally inside the
cultural canon. Because academic art is so self-referential,
contemporary art turns into an illustration or documentation
of systemic academic beliefs. Worse, today’s art deconstructs
the very rules of art, making ‘no rules, no art’
a perfectly legitimate art strategy. Few noticed that with ‘no
art’ we have no art.
Instead of transcendent images like “Grand Central Station,
1929” by Hal Morley, today’s photography shows a
badly lit table with 20 socks worn by by Hispanic refugees.
Journalism used to be the role of journalists, not artists.
Postmodernism is academia’s vision of the future of art;
it means empty paintings in art galleries, it means beds, and
desks, and chairs in art galleries, metal fences and sticks
and stones and cement and such, all piled, twisted, dispersed
or scattered in art galleries. Jerry Saltz calls it Anarchy
Lite, the product of derivative thinking intimidated by art
history, while Barbara Rose decries superficial artists whose
very thinking stops with the thought of putting a found object
in an a gallery space.
If the very concept of art can be negated, inverted, or contradicted
as an art strategy, there’s a name for that: it’s
nihilism. The postmodern denies beauty, dispenses with form
or skill; it’s the no of art, the counter aesthetic. Who
can ever forget the only musician who ruined John Cage’s
4’33”, when due to his nervousness his finger accidently
touched a piano key? When it’s all negative a therapist
would say that person’s unhealthy; the academic art mind
is sick. Since archaeology insists the art instinct is biology
and since psychology says art is crucial for mental health,
we need wake up to the fact that art is no longer anything you
can get away with. When denial is a popular trope we’d
say the culture is setting up a nasty neurosis. Another possibility
gaining traction is that art is the canary in the mine. With
all it’s negativity, it’s rejection of quality,
aesthetics, and sensibility, it’s embrace of the lackluster
and mind numbing, today’s art may be picturing the downward
spiral and breakdown of contemporary civilization. Will you
sit back and let that happen?
Rob Storr of MOMA tells us that in the 1960s, the art world
moved from the Cedar Tavern to the seminar room. Dance went
unscathed; you could not hire Karen Kain to dance a ballet in
your name then credit yourself the world’s greatest dancer,
just as in literature you cannot escape charges of plagiarism.
But in art you can pay others to think for you and produce those
ideas; it is legitimate to hire someone else to do your homework.
This is when art is degraded, a reduction Susan Sontag described
in her seminal Against Interpretation as the revenge
of the intellectual on the artist.
We are raising a crop of curators and students who have no idea
what art is. We’re offered blank canvasses in colors straight
from the can, pictures cut from art books, empty rooms filled
with detritus; are these brilliant heights or what? The cerebral
emptiness is underwhelming in this vacuous future for Canadian
art. It’s a never ending praise of idiocracy, but sooner
or later the emperor’s new clothes must go to the cleaners.
Science
documents art having a biological role, and there are consequences
when it no longer fills that function. Most of what we call
art today are actually cult objects based on historical illiteracy;
for example Duchamp said found objects were never art. It’s
a special kind of cultural illiteracy though, an ignorance chewing
holes in the cultural fabric. And that is why in 2018 if you’re
a recent graduate you’re neither artist nor a curator,
but a high priest in an academic cult as far removed from art
as homeopathy is from real medicine. It's time for one more
thesis nailed to the church door.
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