Alessandro Rolandi
Part I of an article on contemporary art.
As an artist, I have been more and more conscious recently of how art and culture are suffering from a sinister sickness. I look at the art world today and cannot help to ask myself if being an artist still has something to do with what brought me to love this choice. I look at artists’ works presented in official international events and cannot help but feel uneasy and I am left with the impression we are not doing the same job. Speaking to people inside and outside the art world, I realized I am by far not the only one questioning what art has become, its criteria and values. Artists, collectors and just the general public are complaining about the mediocrity of the work, and a “calculated conceptualism” which has spread to the whole art establishment. Worse, it seems to many that the artist – whose position was to impose a vision and enlighten it – is no longer fulfilling his role in society. I came to art with no sentimentalism but with serious admiration and respect and I still consider that making art is not only to produce objects and spread them around, but it is mainly to propose a language, a system of values, a vision of the world and of society. I still believe artists should be accountable for their work and their meaning, and should be capable of paying the price of their choices. In this sense I feel disturbed by what art has become and by the generalized “indulgence” I perceived.
Why is art sick? Why and how did we get to this point? And what are the consequences on art and artists today?
For me the roots of this indulgence that art is now often accused of, are a consequence of various movements or critics – Duchamp, Kosuth or Warhol -- throughout the 20th C and how they have been misinterpreted and abused, allowing the artist to justify everything.
Today we are still under the strong influence of postmodernism which has continued to redefine the artist and its role, emptying it from all classical concepts and in my view from all sense.
Also to blame is the marketting of the artworks and of the artist himself, which come as a consequence of the indulgence in the art world, but not only. Society needs speed, quick flashy messages and sensation. Art has merged with advertisement and this has transformed the artist and more dangerously his work into a mass-product like any other.
Risks, real provocation as well as manual ability and mysticism are nearly absent from an art scene today dominated by “clever thinkers”, which has instituted an “elitism” of twisted thought, raising mediocrity to a norm and completely losing touch with the majority of the public. This system fits particularly well in the 21st C, where distances and time are reduced and compressed and instantaneous communication through the Internet and other tools leave human beings more and more alone facing the power of uncontrolled desire and narcissism.
Come artista sono cosciente come da un po’ di tempo a questa parte, arte e cultura siano in balia di una certa sinistra infermità.Uno sguardo al mondo dell’arte di oggi mi rimanda spesso a chiedermi se essere artista ha ancora qualcosa a che fare con ciò che mi ha portato a questa scelta.
Dando un’occhiata ai lavori esposti nell’ambito degli eventi ufficiali internazionali, non posso fare a meno di sentire una strana sensazione di inadeguatezza e rimango con l’impressione vaga di non star facendo quello stesso mestiere. (…)
Mi sono avvicinato all’arte senza sentimentalismi, ma con autentico rispetto ed ammirazione nei confronti della difficoltà della missione di creare opere d’arte, e nonostante ogni possibile evoluzione o cambiamento del sistema, sono ancora dell’idea che fare arte sia prima di tutto, proporre un sistema di valori, una visione del mondo e della società ancora a venire. Ho sempre pensato che gli artisti dovessero essere responsabili del loro lavoro e pronti a pagare il prezzo delle loro scelte. In questo senso mi sento “disturbato” da ciò che l’arte è diventata e dal senso generalizzato di “indulgenza” che la pervade…………………………………………………………
Il senso autentico del rischio, della provocazione vera e non calcolata, così come l’abilità e l’esperienza della manualità o la tensione mistica sono quasi totalmente assenti da una scena artistica dominata da “scaltri pensatori”che hanno instaurato un elitismo di pensiero distorto che ha eletto la mediocrità a norma del sistema, e tagliato ogni comunicazione con la maggioranza del pubblico per evitare di essere messo in discussione.
1/
As I mentionned above, Marcel Duchamp is one of the artist’s/critic’s who left an indelible footprint on contemporary art and what it has become. He not only redefined the artist as someone who must not touch or handle an artwork but also transformed an everyday object into art. He invented “l’object trouvé”, or ready-made with his scandalous “Urinoir” presented in New York in 1920. For him the simple fact for an artist to bring a ready-made object into a gallery was an artistic gesture. What was new and provocative then has been copied endlessly since. And the gesture of simply displaying an object, no matter what the intellectual motivation, just looks empty and lazy. There are plenty of examples from Jeff Koon’s hoover in the 90s or more recently Tracy Emins’s bed or Damien Hirst’s pharmaceutical cabinets.
Though Duchamp paved the way for what was to become conceptual art, Joseph Kosuth was the founder of the movement, and the one who defined it. According to him, art does not exist at all in the sphere of “experience” but only in the one of the “intellect”, which can be extended to other mental and philosophical systems. Therefore the object, the artwork merely stands as a proof of an “illustration” of the “concept”. In this way art became exclusively an idea, opening the door to an extremely dangerous territory where the experience of craftsmanship had no place and where everything was possible. Now I am not criticising conceptual art as such – there have been many great conceptual artists and fertile movements ( Arte Povera, Land Art, Joseph Beuys, Bruce Nauman, Christo etc.) – but what it has become: the concept has become a mere pretext that justifies every action by a person who defines him/herself as an “artist”.
In the 60ies, Andy Warhol introduced advertising and its mechanisms in art. He was a visionary in his wish to democratize art and the artist – still today a very controversial issue -, but the result was an act of “destruction” celebrating “the banal” and the obvious, elevating the “surface” of everything as the new and only icon. He succeeded in turning upside-down the traditional “elitism” that surrounded art, but in the end he simply substituted one elitism, based on idealism and aristocratic points of view with another one, pragmatic, progressive, mass-oriented and emptied of any value beside money. He did not bring art to the masses; instead he gave mass-production the state of art.
And Warhol’s prediction that everyone will be famous for 15 minutes resulted in a parade in the 80ies and 90ies of new stars that inevitably became victims of a voracious culture machine. This was intensified with the fixation of youth as a value in the 60ies-70ies when the baby-boomer generation came of age.
We can add here how this phenomenon was accentuated by the dramatic effect of the “Aids” that heavily struck the artistic community.
As a result, new and young became synonymous with creativity and a form of addiction to try and fill up the increasing emptiness and desperation of our society.
Today, many artists define themselves as post-modern artists. The movement, defined in the 80ies by Jean François Liotard (La condition post-modern, Les immatériaux, expo Beaubourg Paris), was a reaction to the failure of Modernism, which ended violently with Auschwitz. After the Second World War, artists were left with pieces of a broken glass and no more enthusiasm or faith towards a possible future, but only endless possibilities to follow. This apparently stimulating situation has proven to be extremely sterile and has created a system with no values apart from the ones decided by the artist himself to justify his work, which leaves an awkward aftertaste to outsiders that everything in art is now possible.
With postmodernism, creative disciplines have provisionally exhausted all their problematic by choosing to quote them, creating endless new movements instead of seeking a new vision. The intellectual reasons behind this choice have often been poor, and lead to the Mannerist temptation of naming the most recent movements, with the highly significant prefixes neo or post (neoexpressionist, neominamalists....).
Instead of being creating new values, art has got stuck in an everlasting “variation on the theme” which in the end has reduced more and more the range of action. (The mere idea of pushing further already extremist kinds of research such as minimalism into post minimalism and neominimalism seem more like mental masturbation than a serious intellectual attempt).
The post-modern artist was lured into thinking he was working in a new philosophical territory of which he was, at the same time, exploring the possibilities and setting the laws. We can make a parallel with totalitarian ideologies and systems of thoughts that pretend to start from scratch, to get rid of all that has been seen, made or discussed before, in order not to question or compare the new model proposed. This system has locked the artist in an ivory tower where no criticism has any justification.
Post-modern art focused on the detail while art has lost a larger and more generous vision to become mainly an intellectual exercise, the growing complexity of which has cut any bridge with society. The system feeds on itself and is gradually bringing art to a dead-end.
Also the assumption that talent, genius and inspiration no longer exist, one of the keys of Postmodernism, has propelled technology – a tool – into art. A lot of contemporary artists believe that using new software, or a new technology is the end of the creative process rather than the beginning. Technology is a form of tool making, an extension of the body; both are neither art nor invention. They are not about the undefined, the inexplicable, the mystery, but they are extremely charming because they offer easy solutions and shortcuts for the contemporary artist in his battle to get a place in the sun. Now to me, easy solutions can possibly help to find the path of illumination, but are definitely not of the same kind. Shortcuts can help find intuitions, but are far away from sharing their same nature. I firmly believe that in several years artists will find the right way to use these sophisticated tools properly to do art. It will be from these tools that some new art will come. So far, seldom have photographers and video artists come up with a vision.
The consequence of the movements and theories I have briefly explained is that art has gradually been emptied from its traditional criteria, and has proved unable to set new ones. This has left a huge void filled by all kinds of artists of different standards. From the outside, it is very difficult today to understand what is a good artist, but it is easy to understand what makes a good artist. Gradually the path has been set for a complete marketting of the system, where artists have no choice but become extremely good advertisers, independently from the quality of their art. In some cases, the limits have been pushed so far that an artist has become one with its product. Of course the market has extended its reach to all spheres of our lives and to other forms of art, but whereas in cinema for instance an underground industry still thrives, no such phenomenon exists in art anymore. And this is what I find disturbing.
Poco a poco l’arte svuotata dei propri criteri tradizionali e incapace di dettarne di nuovi, ha lasciato un enorme vuoto in cui si affannano innumerevoli artisti di tutti i tipi e di tutti i livelli. Dall’esterno è estremamente difficile capire oggi cosa sia un buon artista, ma è facile capire cos’è che fa un buon artista. Una cosa è sicura, il postmodernismo imponendo l’assioma che tutti possono diventare buoni artisti, ha segnato il passo verso una marketizzazione completa del sistema, in cui gli aristi non hanno altra scelta se non quella di diventare eccellenti pubblicitari, indipendentemente dalla qualità della loro arte. In alcuni casi i limiti sono stati spinti così lontano che l’arista è divenuto una cosa sola con il suo prodotto.
II/ Marketing has always existed and as such it is not negative, but what is alarming today is its domination of the entire chain of the art system. The market and the art establishment set its own rules, allowing no place for confrontation. And this for obvious reasons is dangerous for art and creativity and, in a larger sense, for culture itself, which are now emptied from their original function in society.
The market has flattened all values, discussions and debate about art and culture. Art is what the market (curators, critics) decides. The official avant-garde has become official art and “avant-garde” -- something opposed to and that questions the establishment -- does not exist anymore, because there is “only” the establishment, which has one single rule: either you are in the market and are a successful artist (both artistically and commercially according to criteria set by the market) - in this case you can be what you want, because labels and packages are easy to find; either you are outside of it and are not a voice out of the chorus, an alternative, but simply an “outcast”. This unique system has negatively affected the quality the artworks as well as their control as there is no counter-balance. The establishment is never confronted and the system will live long undisturbed, free to mix truths and lies and make them unrecognizable. Everything nowadays can be art and artists and their artworks have become interchangeable, exactly like sport-shoes or any other good.
Counter-culture is dead because modern life cannot afford the luxury of doing something without the calculated commercial risk and the perspective of a marketing success.
The market has substituted confrontation with competition, depersonalizing the relationship between artists who are no longer in the condition to debate their work, simply because they need to stay in the market, to pay rent and survive. The work they do is no longer important either, only to give it a place in the market. As a consequence art lacks spontaneity simply because it is made mainly for a specific commercial target before any creative necessity.
The result of this is very worrying for art and what it has become. Artists have to follow strict rules if they want to be recognized and just survive. As a result all risk has disappeared from their work, which has become a mere product. How art is sold has become more important that what you sell. This is just one of the many examples: Cattelan’s installation “la Nona ora” (the pope hit by a meteorite) was strategically shown in Poland, where the crowd, furious, broke into the museum, and then put on auction at Christie’s New York for a million dollars. Also significant of this attitude is Charles Saatchi, who decided one day that some English “bad painters” had to become famous.
Today who are the artists taking risks? Not the majority of young artists, who now carefully premeditate and measure their every move and naturally stand back with fear, but not surprisingly, the mature ones, those whose artistic arenas are broader than what the mainstream ordinarily demands. Artists that may have been off the radar for decades are still the most daring and challenging.
Chi sono oggi gli artisti che prendono ancora dei rischi? Non la maggioranza dei giovani artisti, che giudiziosamente premedita e misura ogni mossa e tende a rimanere sul chi vive intimorita, ma , in fondo senza alcuna sorpresa, quegli artisti le cui arene creative sono sempre state più ampie di ciò di cui il mainstream si fa ordinario portatore. Artisti che sono stati lontani dai riflettori per decenni, sono ancora quelli più capaci di osare e di lanciare sfide autentiche.
Bruce Nauman -- with his challenging sound-installation at the Serpentine Space of Tate Modern for Unilever serie 2005 --, Louise Bourgeois or Marina Abramovich -- who recently after an interview in which she blamed a young artist’s lack of ideas and originality in a re-interpretation of one of her old performances decided to perform “7 easy-pieces” at the New York Guggenheim in which she quoted 7 of the most well-known performance pieces of her generation (Nauman, Beuys, Acconci, Burden) and brilliantly succeeded into giving new energy and new breath to performance-art, are all examples of how the young generation has been incapable of proposing something really new. The impact and force of these “old artists’” new or reinterpreted works might be a signal and an alarm about the condition of contemporary art and who knows they might eventually help break the veil of political correctness on art today and inject new positive conflicts or at least feed the sleeping courage of many young contemporary artists...
As a conclusion to this brief and of course not complete overview of contemporary art I would like to add that renowned artists (Damien Hirst, Maurizio Cattellan or Jeff Koons) are merely a mirror of our current society, and not what it is sometime expected from art, a quest of the unknown, a peek into the future and times to come. Who are these artists? What is the meaning of contemporary art today? To me the traditional definition of art has been questioned, redefined and destroyed but no viable solution has yet emerged.
Are contemporary artists Iconoclasts ? Is contemporary art just another form of Iconoclasty, only pushed to another extreme not by politics but by pragmatism and marketing? There is a big difference between a personal symbol and a social symbol. There is a big difference between artefact and art. An artefact is useful, does not relate to anything more vitally than to its use, it is isolated in its momentary meaning and it is easily reproduced. It is not an original. Much contemporary art should be seen as artefact. A toy is fine, but is only a toy, not reality. Art is reality. The artefact is a manufactured object; a work of art is a language. The artefact has only an educational or sentimental value whereas the work of art is an absolute value.
Come conclusione a questo troppo breve e non esaustivo passaggio a volo sull’arte contemporanea, vorrei aggiungere che anche i piu’ gettonati tra gli artisti riconosciuti oggi (Hirst, Cattelan, Koons) sono appena uno specchio della società attuale a non , come ci si aspetterebbe a volte dall’arte, una proiezione in cio’ che è sconosciuto, una “visione” del futuro e dei tempi a venire. Chi sono questi artisti? Qual è il senso dell’arte contemporanea oggi? Sempre a mio modesto parere la definizione tradizionalmente nota di arte è stata messa in discussione, ridefinita e distrutta, ma nessuna possibile soluzione è ancora apparsa. Gli artisti contemporanei sono degli Iconoclasti? L’arte contemporanea è solo una forma di Iconoclastia, solamente spinta ad un altro estremo non dalla politica, ma dal pragmatismo e dal marketing?….C’è un’enorme differenza tra un simbolo personale e un simbolo sociale. C’è una grande differenza tra arte artefatto. Un artefatto è utile, non ha nessuna referenza più vitale dell’uso per cui è stato concepito, è isolato nel senso momentaneo ed è facilmente riproducibile. Non è un originale. La maggior parte dell’arte contemporanea dovrebbe essere considerata come artefatto. Un giocattolo va bene, ma è solo un giocattolo, non è la realtà. L’arte realtà. L’artefatto è un oggetto realizzato a mano; un’opera d’arte è un linguaggio. L’artefatto ha semplicemente un valore sentimentale o tutt’al più educativo, mentre un’opera d’arte è un valore assoluto.