COVER -> DAY ONE
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In spite of the perennial complaint that London theatre is not what it was (not that it ever was what it is now not), one of the most popular plays of the past few years has been Yasmina Reza's Art, which is a triangular debate about the nature of art in general and painting in particular.
Cultural historians are apt, retrospectively, to adduce all kinds of causality and concurrence but I shall simply say that the play came at an opportune moment, its widespread recognition coinciding with the opening of London's new and spectacular Tate Modern gallery housed in what was an electrical power station, even more magnificent in every respect than the converted railway terminal which now houses the Musee D'orsay in Paris.
In the great turbine hall, thousands of people swarmed beneath Louise Bourgeois' massive spider or stood patiently in line to climb her pyramids of distorting mirrors. The place was big enough to facilitate strollers and wheelchairs and vast but absorbent enough to soak up any amount of sound.
The ambience was as far away as it could be from the sepulchral municipal art galleries of my childhood with their pictorially and emotionally oily representations of the patriarchal and the pastoral, enlivened now and again by a nude with an unaccountable green wash and outsize buttocks.
Strangely, people assumed, because of the building, the frames, the signatures, the catalogues, the approbation and the price, that these objects were "Art" when they asked no questions and altered no fixed ideas of the nature of reality; they were like accidentally badly taken photographs, the qualification being necessary because there is something artistic about deliberately 'badly taken' photographs.
In Tate Modern, on the other hand, the question most often being asked was: ".. it's interesting but is it art?"
To which the answer is easy if not simple; if you ask the question of any object then it is art because it has made you ask. The question is, of course, asked out of a conventional desire to know that what you have imbibed is "Art", that you haven't been conned by some charlatan charging the public purse half a million dollars for a mere pile of bricks or a canvas with a single red stripe across its middle. It also assumes that there is some paradigm which is relatively easy to set out by which various objects can be ruled in or out when it comes to deciding whether an exhibit, say, a pile or bricks, is "Art" or not.
Ultimately, this taxonomy is fruitless.
Curators can assemble objects which they think are likely to elicit a response from viewers but they cannot guarantee that every viewer will respond, though they can guarantee that no two people will respond identically. Both halves of this statement are obvious: first, response depends to a great extent on context but, secondly, as no two people have the identical sum total of experience (setting aside an infinite number of personal events, at the simplest level no two people can stand in exactly the same place at exactly the same time) identical response would be a statistically microscopic possibility.
It is, then, the job of critics to explain context and assess whether the artist's apparent intention is fulfilled in execution.
Sadly, critics are not usually humble enough to see this as their calling. They tend, paradoxically in an age often termed "relativist", to evaluate works of art according to how nearly they correspond with other works of art rather than taking each piece on its intrinsic merit.
Thus, this building is ugly because it does not look like that building; this painting is pointless because it does not portray familiar objects in a familiar guise; this piece of iron cannot be "Art" because it is so like a piece of industrial waste that it can "say nothing".
In an age where knowledge generation is so phenomenal that we are increasingly forced to abandon the study of our past this abdication is particularly unfortunate. There is hardly any piece of art that has ever been made that is not in some way derivative, so to understand its derivation enhances its potential impact. To say that Rothko's pictures are rubbish because they do not look like Renaissance Pietas is to miss the point twofold:
- first, if they did look like 16th Century Italian masters they would simply be pictures about pictures, commentaries, pieces of art criticism but only tangentially statements about today;
- secondly, because they are in a direct line of descent from Renaissance religious art, Rothko's pictures have a much greater depth than a gifted draughtsman, ignorant of art history, could command.
There is a whole history of composition and line which anticipated the scientific exploration of optics and a richly complex manipulation of the psyche which anticipates the formulation of the idea of the subconscious. Now that we have science to accompany our art it would be foolish to confine artists to painting melodrama.
Whatever shortcomings our collective culture may manifest, our self-knowledge is so sophisticated that what we most need is for our sense of reality to be bent. We are so knowing in the ways of deception and self=deception that -- as deceivers -- we most badly need to be deceived. We are so sure of the price of everything and the value of nothing that we need to be tantalised by a piece of wood we wouldn't bother to carry home, only to learn that someone has paid a million dollars for it.
Having broken every conceivable rule of good journalism in terms of length of sentence and paragraph, not to mention my admiration of my digression, let me return to simpler points.
Middlebrow media dismiss much of what Tate Modern has to offer as rubbish, cynically produced by charlatans which has hoodwinked the keepers of the public purse. How can Tracey Emin's somewhat soiled and untidy bed be worth anything? It was worth millions of animated reflections more jolting than anything the average soccer match is likely to produce and it is mentally more refreshing than a thousand episodes of Dallas, so I would not begrudge Emin anything the authorities were minded to pay.
If we live in an age which is supposed to react only to sensationalism I see no reason why "Art" should be excluded from the generalisation. The rich and the cultivated may have reacted in previous eras to the suave, the urbane, the under-stated and the encoded but the majority of us have destroyed every kind of self-regarding encryption. Hacks also assume that as their judgment is infallible their strictures will be accepted by all but the deluded yet Tate Modern is packed almost every hour it is open. By definition, anything that prompts us to question the nature of reality, ourselves, our rulers and our journalists is a personal and collective boon. I suspect that the greater the outcry "in high places" the better the "Art" and the greater the need for us to leave ourselves open to respond to it on its own terms and in ours.
