CERTAIN controversies have a way of being cyclic; they come round and round, the same each time only different. Always the lead question recurs: What is art? Can it be defined, and if so by whom? Are all norms and standards gone by the board nowadays, all accepted criteria ditched? Can a work of art genuinely mean something to somebody, and nothing at all to the next person? (The obvious answer to that one, at least, is: "Yes, certainly".)
With regularity, serious people ask: Has visual art gone off the rails? Is it admitting to its inner ranks all sorts of pseudo categories which are patently phoney or absurd and will have vanished inside a few years? Is it a case of anything goes, so long as the artist calls it by a fancy name and there is the inevitable catalogue introduction, full of Derrida and wind? And why do the critics, or at least some of them, go along with it?
Much of this hinges around the alleged decline, or even death, of painting and sculpture in the more traditional sense. People who would have denounced Picasso as a faker as recently as 30 years ago, now cling to him as a measuring rod. At least he painted.
Remember the once widely reported case of the painting monkeys (or were they chimpanzees?) who were given paint and canvases, and produced pictures which to the man in the street resembled the work of Pollock and de Kooning? It seemed at the time to give infinite satisfaction to some people who felt the Action Painting "fraud" had been shown up. Yet nowadays Abstract Expressionism is often evoked as the last "heroic" age of painting. Today, the artists who grab the headlines and win prizes at biennales are likely to be conceptualists or installationists, or the more pretentious kind of art photographer.
The play Art, which I have not seen but of which I have read the script, hinges on the strain put on a relationship because one of the characters, a dermatologist called Serge, has bought a certain modern painting for 200,000 francs (£23,000). It is described as "a white canvas with fine white diagonal scars". His friend Marc tells him it is "shit". Naturally, there is a considerable breach between them, which widens and spreads to other characters in the play (but I am not here to discuss the plot).
Obviously the canvas in question is a Minimalist one. We had something similar to this dispute in Dublin after one of the Rosc exhibitions, when a painting by Agnes Martin was bought by the Municipal (now Hugh Lane) Gallery. In this case the stripes were horizontal rather than diagonal, and they were faint lines rather than incised "scars", but the reaction was very similar. Curiously, at the time hostile parties - including, I think, at least one TV personality - derided the picture as a bare canvas", although it had been both painted and primed. This suggests either that they had not seen it close up, or were in some need of an oculist - perhaps both.
I personally think that the Martin painting is a masterpiece, but there are whole acres of Minimalist paintings and sculptures which bore me by their formalist sterility and the pretentious, dated cult of emptiness. Of course Minimalism, having created almost an empty space, saw that vacuum soon filled by the fiery breath of the New Expressionism, which has virtually vanished in turn, consumed in its own flames and smoke. The so called "return to painting" in the mid1980s proved to be a false dawn, or a false alarm. A renewed orgy of conceptualism and installation art followed, and roughly speaking has continued to the present (Photorealism, much acclaimed about 15 years ago, has receded into the shadows and even Richard Estes and Ralph Goings are rarely mentioned).
UP to perhaps a decade ago, ephemeral or "rigged" movements in art were generally blamed on the machinations of international or New York dealers, backed by the usual retinue of predatory critics and art writers, lecturers and minor academics. The fashionable art magazines, always anxious for novelty, snob appeal and a little genteel controversy, could usually be relied upon to string along with this. After all, the more such ephemeral fashions occur and recur, the more there is to write about and theorise. Artwriters anxious for an avant garde reputation could leap on the bandwagon, while others might pose as honest, no nonsense, anticant critics by denouncing the latest vogue imported from New York, or Documenta, or the Sao Paulo Biennale.
At the back of all this lay some solid material rewards for the dealers and artists in the form of sales and reputations. However, the growing tendency to downgrade painting and sculpture in favour of installation or conceptual pieces, or the kind of fashionably black framed, fuzzy, deliberately grotty photographs which nobody wants to buy, has created a relatively new situation. To begin with, this type of art is not well suited for showing in the average private gallery because of the space it demands; and in any case, the private collector does not particularly want it or have room for it.
The ante has therefore passed to the public gallery curators and to a certain kind of international entrepreneur who "selects" an exhibition according to a predetermined formula, and hangs or presents it like a fashionable theatre producer doing "my" version of Beckett. And, of course, the catalogue essay and the accompanying lecture are all important, since there is a new school of verbalisation about art ("artspeak") which is essentially a fringe academic activity and is catching on fast in the universities. But the talking and very high powered, eloquent and quasi philosophic it often is - is not confined to writers and lecturers. Verbalising is a universal phenomenon in the contemporary art world.
Artists themselves have evolved a new, aggressive dialectic with which to discuss or explain their work, and in some cases it might even be said that the work itself is little more than a vehicle for the talk or lecture based on it. The latter activity, in fact, is becoming their real career and many reputable colleges, universities and learned institutes - in the US, at least have opened their doors to them. So the appeal of much contemporary art becomes more verbal/intellectual than truly visual.
One result is that the artist craftsman seems to be vanishing in favour of the artist talker or artist intellectual. In contemporary art schools, traditional (and often essential) skills are sometimes neglected in favour of "projects" and concepts, or even written essays just as, in the 1960s, the one sided vogue for abstract art led to the neglect of drawing and modelling. In both cases, a heavy price can sometimes be paid. This was admitted recently by a leading figurative painter in America, who on leaving art college virtually had to start afresh and learn elementary skills which his training had denied him.
But then, the fashionable intellectual climate is often hostile not only to craft as such, but even to the idea that art is meant to last physically - if not "for all time", than at least for longer than the average lifetime. Built in obsolescence has been elevated to the level of an aesthetic. There are eminent artists today who even destroy their artefacts after exhibiting them, a process which they defend with conviction, and the physical contents of many or most installation pieces are as disposable as theatre props. Craftsman ship as such does not really arise, since the work itself is a performance or "concept" in which the physical media are not the most essential part; it is the "idea" that counts, or the immediate effect, as in a theatre.
Since the 1960s, a certain amorality and live for the moment ethos has entered the art world (and other areas too) which shows little sign of waning. All the "happenings" and spontaneous events which were part of the hectic, feverish atmosphere of New York at that time reflected this mood and it spread to other countries.
Of course, the inherent danger is that by turning an ungifted or silly artist loose on some public project, you will be left with a pretentious mess or an eyesore. "Bringing Art To The People" should be done properly and tactfully, or not at all. Inept (and inescapable) public sculptures littering the countryside, half baked projects in suburban parks and even in city centres, naive or cliched slogans affixed in public places we have seen it all, and more of it seems to be on the way. This generally is the fault of well meaning people at the top who believe we need art to enter all moments and aspects of our lives - which is rather like saying that we need music even while we sleep.
Meanwhile, will painting, as we know it, survive? Perhaps not quite as we know it, but it seems to me to be in no danger at all of dying out, and most good painters are doing all right and have their own followings and collectors. In fact, instead of a vanishing or at least endangered species, we have arguably too many painters (and sculptors) active, not too few. We probably have just too many artists of every kind, which is one of the reasons why art gimmicks are so prevalent - energetic, and sometimes untalented, careerists just out of art college will resort to Ball sorts of stratagems to make their mark in an overcrowded profession, against tough competition.
They may capture most of the headlines and media interest, but it would be a mistake to take the rumpled surface of the stream for the real current. The genuinely gifted, committed people presumably will continue to work on in whatever medium suits them and today there is a wide choice. In the hybrid style mansion of Post Modernism there are many rooms, in spite of the propagandist talk about a "mainstream", which usually turns out to mean whatever style is on top at the moment. After all, only a handful of talents count in any age, and there is no special reason to think that our era is subnormal in that respect. The trouble, as always, is that these talents are only recognised fully when the smoke - or smokescreen - has cleared away.
A white canvas with white lines why not? If it happens to be by Agnes Martin, readers are hereby invited to send me one in the next post, suitably packaged and insured. I know exactly on what wall in my house I could hang it.
