As readers of my previous post posts will know, I cannot claim to speak on behalf on poshumanism, nor tell what it might dictate for art. That said, I do have great sympathy for the claim, expressed by Taney in her various writings and in her questions for this symposium, that contemporary art must recover the sensual, the expressive, the embodied. While I take it that that is a common goal among the panelists here, I have some perhaps divergent ideas about how best to enable that that reflect my philsophical differences, expressed previously, as well as other personal experience and attitudes.
I am a newspaper art critic, of nearly fifteen years experience, working mostly in the "college town" of Ithaca, NY (hello to Werner Sun, my neighbor, if you're out there!). While academic thought runs deep in my family background and in my ongoing reading, my primary loyalties are to artists working outside of, or in some cases marginal to, academia. Art is not an academic discipline! Without engaging in broad brush condemnations of academic contributions to current thinking on the arts, I propose that most academic commentators on contemporary art are handicapped in understanding and accepting the broad range of what is, in fact, going on. The temptation to interpret and judge the importance of artists and artistic tendencies on the basis of specialized commitments and esoteric (to be unkind) theories is too strong.
Let me recommend that the best way to recover the sensuous immediacy of art is not to dictate, not in the name of supposedly radical and liberatory intellectual theory, what artists ought to be doing. I think rather, we writers and commentators ought to let practicing artists take the lead. And I while do I identify with modernism in the visual arts, I think the old military metaphor of the avant garde is dead, buried. Radical formal or stylistic innovation, while a generative goal back in the day, is no longer the wide open horizon that it used to be. I think most contemporary radicalism in the visual arts is false and that the posture of perennial oppositionality impedes what is genuinely valuable about art-making. So I think we ought to be open, at least in principle, to the whole gamut, rather than trying to stipulate or predict.
22 comments:
Not sure if this would be appropriate as a proper post but since most of us are probably huddled around our computers all day, may I recommend this online lecture, tonight, by professor Stephen Asma, of Columbia College, Chicago? Asma is, I believe, a student of Mark Johnson’s and his writings on imagination and the emotional mind have been an influence on me. https://mind-foundation.org/event/the-evolution-of-imagination-the-role-of-mythopoetic-cognition-in-phylogeny-and-ontogeny
Arthur, You had me at hello.
This is so succinct, straightforward and clear. (Being able to write that way is a skill that gets well honed from writing for a newspaper for many years.)
And this is closely aligned with how I see things after 50 years of being an artist. Operating outside of popular careeristic considerations or trends, my fundamental intention from the beginning has been to connect with and explore domains that may not have names and may not be understood. But they are aligned with your description of "the sensual, the expressive, the embodied."
This passage is essential:
"I think most contemporary radicalism in the visual arts is false and that the posture of perennial oppositionality impedes what is genuinely valuable about art-making. So I think we ought to be open, at least in principle, to the whole gamut, rather than trying to stipulate or predict."
Like you, part of what drew me to Taney's inspiring writings inter alia was her determined advocacy for stepping outside the fruitless pursuit of "contemporary radicalism" and "perennial oppositionality." As your post has suggested, a significant gap exists between a languaged assessment/interpretation and "what is, in fact, going on." I'm here to bear witness that, in fact, something IS going on.
PS. Arthur, the lecture by Stephen Asma looks very compelling. Two problems: It is at 7:30PM CET (1:30 EST) and it seems that tickets cannot be purchased in the US. If you have a back door option, please share it. I would like to be able to hear him.
I was able to purchase a ticket from the US.
Arthur, are you a member?
No, I just went onto the website.
All set!
Thank you, Arthur, for these words. One of the very problems about the academic world is the nature of gate keeping. Until recently, the exclusionary nature of "who" was admitted to teach in the higher realms relegated women to non-tenured positions, or no position at all. When I was completing my undergrad work, there was a dearth of women to work with. That continued into my MFA work, where one of the old white men suggested that I get in touch with him when I did something interesting.
I'm are not here to air old grievances, but that basic mechanism of gate-keeping has also shut out the narratives (cultural, aesthetic) of many others. Artists who teach below the higher realms suffer greater indignities. Who cares about educating kids? Yet, unless we work to open imaginations at all levels, the kind of empowering of a post-humanist intellectual under-girding is going to take longer, longer, longer.
What is tremendously hopeful about the broad conversation of this conference is the welcoming into the visible realm so many new ideas. Parsing them in connectivity, relationship, and expanded qualities is not just thrilling, but again, needed. Taney, your work in this regard is a breath of fresh air. And it fits. The wider globe is filled with similar awakenings. Our place is doomed unless and until we see our place with a new clarity.
Modernism opened us all to the visual language with form at its heart. Innovation for innovation sake has proved to be vacuous time and time again. It takes work to grow our own "mycelial networks" that root our work within the wider conversations where it can take its place. We require the whole gamut for that.
Arthur, Deborah, and Karen - many thanks to Arthur for initiating this thread and to the two of you for following up so vigorously. Everything you're saying is so important to the larger vision of this project. While I encourage all of you to continue exploring (and I too plan on chiming in later today), this post speaks so directly to our final session that I might want to repost it on our last day. It will be an excellent way to wrap things up.
PS - Would any of you be willing to watch the lecture Arthur mentioned tonight on Zoom and record it? I want to see it, but I'm not going to be able to attend live.
I will record it Taney. (It starts at 1:30pm EST BTW)
Spot on, Arthur Whitman!
I would suggest that the aspect of "innovation for innovation's sake" that is associated with modernism wasn't necessarily the goal or motivation of many modernist artists. Many wanted to create an idiom that would usher in a new age or serve as a collective organizing principle...whether they were a Constructivist in the midst of an actual revolution or a mystical Symbolist who espoused a "priesthood" artists. In many respects, we can speak of modernism as a visionary movement, which did end up being represented as the formal innovations of select "visionaries." To be sure, Kandinsky backdated his paintings so that he could be considered the first abstract painter, but he had a mission that was much larger than "be the first kid on your block to own the latest gadget." I have been struck by how this sort of mythologizing has persisted. Consider the recent exhibition of the paintings of Hilda af Klint in which the main thrust seems to be how she preceded Kandinsky and other contenders for the title of First Abstract Painter with little attention paid to her mystical search for a vocabulary to make the invisible visible.
Thank you Arthur for alerting us to the lecture by Stephen Asma today. It was such a remarkable and rich journey with him.
Yes Stephanie, I think that that is very much true. And in some, perhaps attenuated way, it's still true for many contemporary artists working in a (broadly) modernist idiom--for whom I consider myself something of an advocate. The innovation for innovation's sake narrative is or was a useful myth, carried over to some extent in postmodernism, and I think it was largely generated by critics and theorists rather than working artists. It served the goal of defending and institutionalizing modern art at a time when many (probably most Americans until the sixties) were skeptical if not hostile. But that battle was more or less won a while ago.
Taney, thank you for expressing your sympathy for what I'm saying here. I'd be honored to have it reposted (perhaps with some kind of elaboration or reframing?) and I look forward to furthering this line of thought.
Let me address questions 4.1 and 4.2 more explicitly, and apart from my previously expressed reservations concerning "official" academic posthumanism (I have others). Perhaps this is an exaggerated concern. But I am very wary of having another top down doctrine that tells artists what they should be doing or what counts as "relevant." I think it's time to embrace a genuine pluralism where all forms and materials and styles, new and old, are on the table.
I enjoy the work of Thomas Saraceno and other proponents of the new biomorphic art. I also happen to think that there are some very good plein air impressionist landscape painters out there. The audiences will be different but they are both part of my vision of what contemporary art is and can be.
Deborah, I'm glad you enjoyed the lecture. I'd love to see your recording if it's available--particularly as I missed the first minutes!
Arthur, I didn't end up recording it myself because the MIND Foundation will be sending it out to everyone who paid to watch. When it arrives I will gladly share it with you.
A version of the lecture is available here: https://youtu.be/PZhh2Eyrgt8
Thanks for this, Arthur. Christine’s talk made me wonder if the discussion of art can be non-humanist, more than if the making of art can be.
I think what the panel was suggesting when they pondered “where was the art” in Christine’s bolt, is that human consciousness acting upon matter is the key ingredient to matter becoming art. It seemed that only when Christine explained her concepts backing it up was the bolt accepted into the category of art. Without her explanation, the bolt might have remained exiled from the status given by that word, because it was shaped by utilitarian need, it was a duplicate.
To my mind, this is what has been so human-centric about contemporary art. But is the human centered-ness in Christine’s activity or those who observe, discuss, and qualify it?
Christine sometimes spoke of the material she works with as if it had its own life and consciousness, and the image I got was of Christine and the materials becoming a third consciousness together. It made me want to know more about how the final form of her work is come to- does she begin the process with knowing what the final form will be, or do the materials contribute input to the shapes they become? Is Christine transformed by the materials as much as the materials are transformed by Christine? Rather than speaking of Christine as the sole initiator of the project, is it possible to see the materials as having initiated Christine into helping them become a new form? I think of Michael Polan writing of how plants cultivate us to cultivate them. I think many artists have the experience of feeling manipulated by materials they are drawn to work with, but this is probably not discussed academically because it gets too.... mystical. But if thinkers are exploring non-humanist perspectives, it might be an exciting experiment to wonder if materials perhaps have a desire or destiny themselves.
I love seeing how the panel is so beautifully weaving all these conversations together into new thoughts. What an exciting symposium this is!
Thanks so much for your comment, Linda. What you say about Christine's work resonates so strongly with the kind of inter-agential subject-object relationship we discussed in some earlier posts. (If you haven't read Jane Bennett's new book, Influx and Efflux, I highly recommend it -- it's an exploration of this very subject.) I think we need to abandon those old fears about accusations of mysticism, or animism, in speaking about these things. It seems clear that even if we're not willing to grant that inanimate matter has consciousness, it does exercise *some* kind of agency, and that different materials engage with us in different ways. It's helpful here to remind people that we ARE matter, that we're made of the same stuff as Christine's metals, Noguchi's stones, and a carpenter's wood! I'd be willing to venture that all artists who work closely with materials are animists to some extent. They may not be willing to say so in the heady atmosphere of today's art world, but when they're alone in their studios I doubt they're the only living beings in the room.
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