[70a] Steve Edwards, ‘Art & Language’s Doubt’ in Art & Language in Practice, Vol. 2, Fundació Antoni Tàpies, Barcelona, 1999, pp. 249-255 (p. 254).

Art & Language’s Doubt

Conceptual Art wasn’t a style. It was more like modernism’s nervous breakdown

Mel Ramsden

It has become a commonplace in our age of therapy (perhaps this should be the title of Eric Hobsbawm’s next book) that the means to healthy recovery from a breakdown is not to repress the traumatic event, but rather to find a new synthesis for it within the context of a life. In this light, I am interested, in this short essay, in exploring the point when an important section of the neo-avant-garde (Art & Language) realised that its projected antagonist or fantasised other – which could be labelled, somewhat simplistically, as high modernism – was not quite as stupid as had generally been assumed. This realisation involved making modernism ‘a thing of the past’, as a condition of its continuation – and here I draw on Tim Clark’s essay ‘In Defence of Abstract Expressionism’, in which he presents a reading of Hegel’s discussion of the end of art. In Clark’s account, Hegel did not mean that art would cease to be made, but that at certain decisive historical moments the art of the recent past would be seen as having run its course, and would thus become available as a usable tradition for the present. As Clark puts it, this procedure involves ‘fixing the moment of art’s last flowering at some point in the comparatively recent past, and discovering that enough remains from this finale for a work of ironic or melancholy or decadent continuation to seem possible after all. The “can’t go on, will go on” syndrome.’ (1) I doubt that Clark had Art & Language in mind when he wrote this passage, but it strikes me – particularly the phrase about ironic or melancholy continuation (maybe even decadent is right) – as as good a description of the practice as there is. The art of high modernism is for Art & Language sufficiently of the past to be significant. For certain forms of postmodernism, in contrast, this culture remains a living, phantasmagoric enemy. And as so often happens, in the heat of battle the real grievances of an enemy are travestied and repressed. Clark insists that Abstract Expressionism cannot be made ‘a thing of the past’ by imitating its central characteristics (he has in mind its ‘vulgarity’), but for Art & Language the labour of continuation involves making Abstract Expressionism, indeed modernist aesthetics, a point of departure precisely through its ruination.

I want to argue, as part of my consideration of this process of continuation, that since Art & Language’s return to painting in the mid 1970s the work produced has been shaped by a ‘constellation’ of principled refusals.

Refusal 1

Art & Language have maintained a high level of scepticism about the politics of virtue that has dominated art theory, and much art practice, since the waning of Conceptualism. Theirs is a practice built upon refusing the consolations that much of the academic left have found refuge in during a period of political reaction, whether Althusserian ‘theoretical practice’ or subsequent discourse theories. Since the mid 1970s, many artists and intellectuals have seen their specialist ‘intervention’ in representation or culture as the decisive factor in the project for social change. In the end, such approaches to ‘art and politics’ boil down to the idea that if you write enough books, or paint enough pictures, capitalism (or patriarchy, or colonialism, or... ) will collapse under their weight. Galleries, publishing houses and bureaucratically assessed projects seem to have benefited more from this output than have the oppressed and the exploited.

Unconnected to any substantial social base outside the academy these practices of political substitutionalism remain wilfully blind to the fact that the production apparatus is untransformed. This is a virulent species of bad faith that allows for the establishment of careers in this apparatus by those who nevertheless claim the space of radical virtue. Art & Language, in contrast remain in, and of, the left while refusing to claim that their work can be a substitute for mass political action.

Refusal 2

While much recent critical theory condemns the tradition of modernism as a practice in complicity with social power, Art & Language reject any easy dismissal of modernist aesthetics and practice. The work of Art & Language draws on the modernist legacy of self-reflexivity as a critical tool (and a compelling aesthetic tradition) which, whatever the problems or risks involved, cannot be dismissed without sacrificing a powerful resource. To take an obvious case, Picasso’s Demoiselles d’Avignon may be politically suspect for its primitivist fantasies and its machismo, but it is also a compelling painting. To concentrate on the former attributes to the exclusion of the work’s novel pictorial effects – its new spatial possibilities and patterns of spectator identification – is a form of ultra-leftism, or it would be if the argument was sufficiently of the left for this barb to strike home. To extend this argument to two artists who figure so prominently for Art & Language – Courbet and Pollock, signifying the different limit positions of a critical realism in the art of the modern – authenticity of the gesture, vanguardism, individualism, technical radicalism, and so on, may be unavailable to us but they remain powerful as desires. To write off the expressive resources of modernism on political grounds is to risk disarming critical thought and – what may amount to the same thing – making bad art.

Refusal 3

While refusing the current consensus about modernism, Art & Language recognize that too much critical water has flowed under the bridge for a return to a modernist practice to be feasible. Interested claims to disinterestedness, universalizing claims for particular tastes, bogus individualism, expressionist fantasies, masculine exhibitionism, the hyperventilation of the market and of curatorship... have all made it impossible to occupy modernist ground. This is demonstrated by the abandonment of the ‘snow pictures’ (2) These works, in which the image was gradually obliterated by the application of progressively more and more dabs of white paint (‘snow’), were abandoned because Art & Language found they had no grounds on which to stabilize the surface – that is to stop the process of snowing – other than grounds of taste. For Art & Language such grounds cannot constitute an adequate criterion for a painting.

This criticism of modernism is, by now, probably common sense but it bears stating in the light of Art & Language’s continuing commitment to aspects of the modernist programme. After the nervous breakdown new ways of going-on have to be found.

This list could be extended to include Refusal 4: the refusal to accept the current anti-realist consensus. This is a consensus in which any claim to map or describe a reality independent of discourse is seen to be, in the phrase of one critic, ‘pre-post-erous’. No doubt we could add a Refusal 5... The point, I think, is that the work of Art & Language is driven by the exploration of this constellation of problems. Art & Language have developed a systematic programme of research on the basis of these refusals: in each incarnation the work examines where art might lead once it is shorn of its routine props and gestures. Art & Language make paintings out of the dialectical tensions inherent in art practice during the last twenty years: the stress here is on tension, rather than resolution, since the Aufhebung is never quite attained.

It is important to say that this refusal of the available positions means that Art & Language make second-order paintings. The work produced involves a reflection on the resources available and unavailable to art today, rather than a series of novel aesthetic claims. It is in their second-order status that the social index of these works can be found, since from where we stand none of the available artistic positions can be inhabited with comfort. Social Realism and high modernism are battered beyond revitalisation, while postmodernism is more like the autobiographical drama of a generation than a viable practice. In the absence of a radical social force capable of breathing life into any of these legacies, the practice of Art & Language, as Paul Wood has perceptively argued, consists in confronting modernism with its ‘Others’. (3) At various points these Others have taken different forms - language, Social(ist) Realism, Fascism, most recently gender, or perhaps it’s the discourse of gender – but modernism has remained a constant counterpoint. It is important, I think, to see this as a confrontation in which different artistic and ideological characters are brought face to face. These characters evidently do not get along well together.

I want, briefly to take two examples. The works collectively called Portraits of V. I. Lenin in the Style of Jackson Pollock stage a meeting between high modernism and its repressed other, Social(ist) Realism. But while the outcome of the confrontation of East and West that takes place in a Rocky movie or a Captain America comic book is a foregone conclusion, nothing is quite secure here. Is this, for instance, realism read via modernism or vice versa? Is it an attempt to give realism a modern form, or to make of modern form a realism? What is being ironised or mocked here: the claim to heavy subject or the dream of an escape from such claims? The Stalinist ideology or the US triumphalism? The questions only multiply. In the series of paintings called Index: Now They Are, made in 1992-3, monochromes, those ultimate signifiers of the modernist endgame, screen or mask versions of Courbet’s L’origine du monde. From the perspective of much contemporary thought about art, both components of this work represent forms of masculine heavy breathing. But what happens when these loaded signs from the history of modern art are brought together? Is it possible to suggest that these works reveal beneath the monochrome the repressed truth of modernism – gender difference/the female body/masculine desire? Again we are left wondering, is the monochrome obliterating gender or is gender breaking through? Are these very different systems of representation or do they represent some continuum?

There is no dialectical synthesis of modernism and realism or of gender politics and modernism on offer here; no third term beyond bone-headed authenticity claims and second-order knowingness. The point, I suspect, is that these questions are unanswerable because there are no longer secure grounds from which to line up answers. These works offer us a series of unresolved contradictions. It seems to me that it is a strength of these paintings that the contradictions remain alive and the questions unanswered. In this moment of political defeat, undecidability appears preferable to false sublation and leftish business-as-usual. In our time there are no clean hands. Instead we see something like the mutual ruin of both the contending forces. The condition to which this formulation alludes has been known as ‘barbarism’ in the socialist tradition. It is probably the shape of our culture. The stress is on culture here, for while the great myths of bourgeois ideology are strewn all around in tatters – not even the bourgeoisie believing them any longer – the bourgeoisie itself, however wretched and unheroic, stands triumphant internationally. In such an intellectual climate no artistic legacy can quite be inhabited with conviction. The point is that works as cussed as these cannot be made without recognising the strengths of both traditions, without seeing the force of bourgeois culture and the claims of its opposition. For artists like Komar and Melamid, in contrast, the victory of postmodern irony over (Stalinist) earnestness is just too easily won. Such a position involves forgetting how tawdry and brutal capitalism was and is.

Wood has described Art & Language as occupying the ‘ruined palace of art’. (4)  In this image art is a refuge from which to survey the nightmare of history, and a place to shelter, but it is a ruined palace. The wind of Conceptualism blew the roof off, and the chill blasts of history find their way through the cracked walls. Art can never again be the calm refuge that it once appeared, or at least it can only be so for those prepared to indulge in utter bad faith. Wood offers us a coherent and convincing account here, but his metaphor is too aristocratic neatly to fit with Art & Language’s practice. As an alternative I offer an image adapted from Lukács’ swipe at Adorno for having taken up abode in the Grand Hotel Abyss. (5) Lukács meant by this that Adorno had become a professional doom-monger who needed the abyss of commodity hell to justify his own mandarin passivity. If, for a moment at least, we can suspend Lukács’ value judgement, the Grand Hotel Abyss might be an apposite figure for the practice of Art & Language. To occupy the Grand Hotel Abyss is to be inside bourgeois society contemplating the ruins of bourgeois culture. It is to recognize that every document of civilization is also a document of barbarism. It is to allow your eye to roam over the destruction; to look into the precipice and recognize that the ground you stand on is not secure; to understand that this culture will not hold while simultaneously realising that it is all you have to work with.

Discussions of Lukács’ remark, however, tend to ignore the fact that that this is a Grand Hotel, with all the attendant connotations of faded bourgeois comfort. The question remains, is it possible to reside there without becoming seduced by its pleasures? For Art & Language the dilemma is how to prevent the critique of radical careers from turning into a career. Without a social base outside the museum or the little magazine, the only real way to do so is to fail and be left muttering, in the pub or the kitchen, about opportunists. Art & Language, however, accept the awkward necessity of doubled speech – they are unembarrassed hypocrites – hence the centrality of the tropes of irony and allegory in their paintings. The range of works from the mid 1980s called Index: Incident in a Museum can be seen as the products of two megalomaniacs continually imagining their inclusion in the central spaces of the museum system. Alternatively, they can be understood as ironising the implication of Art & Language in this system. Irony, the last refuge of the charlatan, is used here to keep a distance from the system of market and careers while participating in it. Faced with the dilemma of needing the market and despising it, irony seems, for the moment at least, the only escape (and then only a metaphorical one).

The recent works called Sighs Trapped by Liars strike me as particularly interesting in this respect. In the culture of modernism, furniture suggests nothing so much as a comfortable accommodation with the powers that be: think of the way that Matisse’s dictum on painting, businessman and armchairs has come to stand for a decadent hedonism in much modern art history, (6) or consider the way in which Don Judd’s chairs, beds, and bookcases seem to insist, against their own better judgement, that Minimalism has become one more executive lifestyle. To project your own history into such forms is to contemplate some disturbing questions. In the face of these works the spectator is propelled to ask, is this all there is? For all the effort and sheer critical labour, is the legacy of Art & Language just another contribution to bourgeois domestic decor? As George Grosz once suggested, the answer to such questions will ultimately depend on who wins, but for the moment at least, it is probably, Yes. The whole project of Art & Language has been to defer that condition in a hopeless, but necessary, attempt to stay one step ahead of the inevitable. To do so means finding ways to keep the fragments of a culture active and alive and to search for ways, however ironic, melancholic or decadent, to continue the project of modernist self-criticism.

Any practice predicated on irony must run the risk of mandarin detachment. One of the real strengths of the trope of irony as it is used by Art & Language, however, is that it enacts a critical distance from the norms of a culture. Art & Language have refused the comforts and illusions which intellectual substitutionalism offers in an era of defeat. Their second-order practice has allowed them to keep open a series of questions about what art is and what it is for, and it has enabled a series of cultural shards to be kept in view. It remains to be seen where the Art & Language project will go now that the culture of the West has become largely a second-order culture. There are, of course, many different forms of irony – there is the whimsical irony of a Simon Patterson and the withering irony of Art & Language – but irony is now the mode of a culture. At this juncture in history irony may have to be added to the list of ruined forms. In the context, finding ways of making paintings that do not lapse into ‘mere irony’ becomes increasingly important. More than ever, the problem facing a critical second-order practice, like that exemplified by Art & Language, is one of meaning the work.



Notes



(1) T. J. Clark, ‘In Defense of Abstract Expressionism’, October, No 69, Summer 1994, p 23.

–––––

(2) For an account of these worfs see Charles Harrison, ‘On the Surface of Painting’, Essays on Art & Language, Oxford (Blackxell), 1991, pp 175-205.

–––––

(3) Paul Wood, ‘ Art & Language: wrestling with the angel’, Art & Language, Paris (Galerie nationale du Jeu de Paume), 1993, pp 23-31.

–––––

(4) Paul Wood, ibid., p 16.

–––––

(5) Lukács’ remark is from The Theory of the Novel, Cambridge, Mass (MIT), 1971 p 22/ He had originally discussed the ‘Grand Hotel Abyss’, in connection with Schopenhauer, in The Destruction of Reason, London (Merlin), 1980.

–––––

(6) Matisse’s comment, which turns out not to be so affirmative as some would imply, is in ‘Notes of a Painter’ (1906), reprinted in Charles Harrison & Paul Wood eds., Art in Theory 1900-1990: An Anthology of Changing Ideas, Oxford (Blackwell), 1992, p 76.