Complexity of Art

I went to a talk given a few days ago by Richard Jochum, an artist / philosopher / educator from Austria who’s been a visiting scholar here for the past two or three years now. His lecture, on ‘Understanding Contemporary Art,’ was really quite fascinating: accessible to persons like myself – who have little background in art theory, aesthetics, or the philosophy of art – and yet subtle enough to make clear complex issues and distinctions. I asked Richard for permission to write a brief post on his talk, even though it’s on something that’s outside my range of familiarity. I certainly won’t attempt to even summarize his lecture, which was jam-packed with bits and pieces of history, philosophy, commentary, and presentation – he covered 61 Powerpoint slides in as many minutes! And given that I’m reacting to a lecture rather than a text, it’s necessarily inadequate as an accurate representation of his ideas. What follows, therefore, is more a series of thoughts that were inspired by his talk rather than a representation of his material.

Most of the first half of the talk was devoted to a discussion of some of the major historical shifts in the social status of artists: from that of ‘technician’ and ‘maker’ during times of antiquity, to the discovery during the Renaissance of the artist and his specific ‘genius,’ and then onward to early modern formulations of the artist as perhaps not a genius (which makes the accessibility of the artist a problem) but nevertheless as someone who is different by virtue of being creatively ‘inspired.’ Along with these shifts in the status of the artist were changes in the social function of art itself: art was first subordinated to religion and politics before becoming, in the modern era, an autonomous medium of societal self-reflection. That is, modern art became a social institution in its own right, and the work of art became a means of social commentary and expressing aspirations for social improvement. The autonomization of art made this possible: it is only in the modern era that art proclaimed that it does not exist for others, but for its own self: art for art’s sake. Of course, there is a tension here between art’s self-referentiality (art comes to understand and realize itself as art, not as ‘useful’ for religious, moral, or even commercial purposes, even if it continues to serve these) and its hetero-referentiality (art looks outward onto society, observing its injustices, its problems, its aspirations and achievements, and so on). This tension is fascinating, but in his review Jochum simply observed that the notion of the autonomy of art is an especially European concept and is considered suspect by many for that reason: ‘art for art’s sake is just another piece of deoderised dog shit,’ as Chinhua Achebe once wrote.

This brings us to the present, which Jochum covered in the second and more ambitiously speculative part of the lecture. today, we sense that modern art has turned on itself, become ironic, critical and filled with a taste for ‘post-modernity.’ But while this predilection for irony and critique may satisfy some, Jochum instead argued for a more affirmative outlook, one tied to contemporary theoretical and intellectual developments within the field of art that are changing the way how we see art – indeed, how we see, in general. These developments suggest, for him, the need for a concept of visual literacy to complement emerging notions of visual culture. (Here especially I am taking a number of interpretive liberties with Jochum’s lecture, because it is in relation to these themes that I was most stimulated, and therefore am having a harder time separating what he said from what I thought.)

One observation that Jochum made and which became apparent even in the Q&A which followed is that we have more and more difficulty ‘understanding’ art: go to any exhibit of contemporary art, and it isn’t difficult to read or hear comments in which people say, ‘I just don’t get it. This isn’t beautiful.’ People will read about art and go to a show, and they’ll wonder: what’s all the fuss about? ‘Is this art?’ they’ll ask? In reaction to these kinds of comments, it’s easy to simply say, art is what you like, or what you think it is, and if you adopt this point of view, there can be no debate: de gustibus non est disputandum. But if this becomes generally accepted, then there’s nothing more to say, and communication about art – or rather, art as a form of communication – can hardly develop on this basis.

For me, one of the upshots of Jochum’s talk was to suggest that we need to reflect on how art is produced: or rather, that we think of art as a comprehensive, multi-layered production rather than as singular objects to be considered as solid wholes. Of course, the notion that art is a ‘production’ will hardly be news to anyone who works on Broadway shows or in the movies, but these aren’t often thought of anymore as ‘art.’ But it’s a notion increasingly apparent in the work of certain artists, with Koons being one example that popped into my mind:

Jeff Koons’s ‘Puppy’
Photo: Public Art Fund

Jochum, however, used the example of Christo. As he pointed out, perhaps the most significant aspects about Christo’s ‘Gates’ project as a work of art was not the 14 days or so in 2005 in which the saffron flags flew in Central Park, but the years and years of laborious and meticulous planning, networking, and persuasion and politicking that went into its happening, not to mention the voluminous commentary, criticism, observation, and public reaction that was generated by it. This plenitude of activity is perhaps unsurprising given the project’s qualities as ‘monumental’ art, but the fact is that art today – no less than any other sphere of life – is dependent on different kinds of technical specialization, variegated but interconnected roles, networks and relationships, wild imaginings and concrete specifications, that require activity spanning different social fields, involving categories of people and forms of knowledge and technique that exceed the mere spectacle and observation of the work itself.

Thus, the lesson I drew is that the artist is enmeshed in a network of others, or more precisely, that art is situated in a network of transformations and mediations and only comes to us as a provisional outcome of these. (Bruno Latour has an essay which touches on some of these themes). Christo and his collaborators conceive, sketch, plan, sell, negotiate, organize, and execute his monumental works – but the work comes to an end, and they move on to the next project. But does this mean that the work of art disappears? No: for the network transfigures the work of art again, into digital photographs, books, archival materials, live recordings, and so on. We now have a tremendous capacity for recording, storing, and organizing artistic work and experience for recovery and representation and reinterpretation in widely dispersed and socially and temporally different contexts.

Another exampled raised by Jochum, in addition to the ‘Gates,’ was the famous ‘Monument Against Fascism’ by Jochim Gerz and Esther Shalev-Gerz. Constructed in the city of Hamburg-Harburg in 1986, the monument was a thin pillar of lead – apparently erected in an awkward corner of a public square in one of the city’s neighborhoods – on which people were invited to write their reactions and comments and draw whatever they wanted. As the bottom segments of the initially towering column was filled up with scribblings and graffiti, it was slowly lowered in stages, several feet at a time, into the ground so that all that remains today is the top of the moment (with a portion preserved beneath ground) and a plaque (monument: erected, 1986; disappeared, 1993). The temporariness of the monument was intended to solve the question: whose monument it it? By making it disappear, the sculptors answered: it’s a monument for those people who visited it, saw it, touched it, and wrote on it, meaning that the task of being ‘against fascism’ can never be stably, much less permanently, represented, but must be undertaken anew by each generation, in its own way. (Thomas Jefferson, I suppose, had something of the same idea about democracy, when he proposed that the American people rewrite the constitution every twenty years.)

As Niklas Luhmann has pointed out (I have not yet read Art as a Social System, but he makes this observation in a number of different places), the printing revolution led to an exponential increase in not only the storage of knowledge but also in the possibilities for variation and comparison and critique: with printing, it became much easier not only to recall something across spatially and temporally distant contexts, but also to argue about it, criticize it, compare it current knowledge and, as often happened, label it ‘ideology.’ Art was certainly not immune to this, and art’s ideological potential was and continues to be recognized and exploited through various means. But there was something about the unity of the work of the art which made its dissolution into ideology and critique tenaciously problematic; it became possible to recognize something as ideological, and yet still sigh and marvel at its beauty.

What this suggests is that in the modern era the work of art itself was preserved and kept ‘intact’ even while appreciated as a focus of changing communicative patterns. The work of art is what it is, but we can still offer and account for changing valuations and assigning shifting meanings to the work of art, and explain it as the result of shifting tastes, fashions, and styles. These currents of communication took on the role of explaining shifts in how we see the work of art and how we account for its meaning. Thus a work of art can be provocative today, banal tomorrow; controversial here, widely beloved there; politically acceptable to some, disgusting to others, and so on.

What Jochum’s talk and the examples above suggest, however, is that these kinds of temporal and cultural factors are now being introduced into the work and presentation of art itself; that is, artists are now interjecting into works of art directly the contingent relationship between situation and meaning, and between production and appreciation. How is art produced, how is it presented, who sees it and under what circumstances? To offer a somewhat facile formulation, these are questions that are not answered before art can become art, or are tangential to the work of art itself, but is now being answered through art. Jochum suggested to us that we think of Brancusi’s ‘Bird in Space,’ which exemplifies for many modernist sculptural beauty, without its pedestal…the sculpture remains intact, but would it be the same? Or think of the Storm King Art Center, in upstate New York: a 500-acre garden park of monumental sculptures, that can be viewed in a single day only with difficulty. Visiting Storm King, a place of significant beauty, invites us to think of how scupture is produced (how was this piece constructed, transported, executed?) and how much and the kind of interpretive work must be undertaken even to see it (compare Serra at Storm King and in his recent exhibition at MOMA). From small to large, we are becoming interested and preoccupied with the kind of labor that goes into not only the production of the work of art itself, but also the work that goes into making it possible as a focus of observation and a source of communication. (“Isn’t it beatiful?” is in every case a genuinely constructed sentiment.)

Storm King Art Center

Museums today recognize this, and struggle with its implications: the idea of a museum of ‘modern’ art has become problematic today not only because we don’t know what ‘modern’ means (or we dispute its usefulness and validity). It’s also because of the difficulty of maintaining the illusion, an illusion museums once fostered and perhaps continue to foster, that art is simply about the object and the appreciation of its beauty. But we now know so much about art; we know that each object presented to us is the result of a series of selections and decisions – aesthetic (is this beautiful? under what standards?), technical (is the painting hung well? is the lighting correct?), political (is this ‘correct’?), financial (who’s supporting this kind of art?), cultural (who likes this? what does it mean?) – which are bundled together and presented as ’stable’ even if this stability is temporary and therefore to an extent chimerical. Thus museums today are forced to confront questions of identity and direction for which firm, lastingly stable answers, are likely to be enormously elusive; the modern art museum is now intimately tied not only to problematic cultural definitions of the ‘modern,’ but also to the risks inherent in its choices and selections. This makes the museum an increasingly ‘reflexive’ site: it becomes itsartistic decisions, but did it decide correctly? As Jochum pointed out, we often follow Duchamp – and more latterly, Rauschenberg – and mock modern art as being whatever the artist says art is. But this decision is only been plausible because these decisions are at the same time met by and matched up with the decisions of the art museum. A urinal is just a urinal, yet it becomes art only through the ‘cooperation’ of artist and museum. Perhaps this bargain is coming undone.

Because there is so much art, and so much criticism of art, and so many different actors who are linked together in the production of art, we have difficulty seeing and making sense of what is presented as art. There is more art, and more noise. But this is perhaps not a failure or art per se than the inadequacy of the categories and frameworks which allow us to regulate this surplus of meaning and reduce it to appreciable forms: or, as Jochum would put it, is a reflection of our lack of visual literacy. This term is often understood in a conservative manner, with reference to the past, as a species of cultural illiteracy. We can’t recognize a Rembrandt, or appreciate a Shakespeare play, and this is taken correctly as a sign of growing cultural incompetence. But – even though Jochum didn’t put it in these terms – literacy is just as much about the embroidering of past, present, and future. Why then, privilege only the past? Why not think of visual literacy as a theory of how the present can be used to draw in the past and the future together into new sources of meaning, excitement, emotion, and intelligence?

Image by: Jan Schmoranzer. From opencallcomplexity.blogspot.com

Jochum’s recent work has involved him with the activities of a cell biology lab, where he has been helping to develop visualizations of cell cultures and cell structure. This of course is possible only because of increasingly sophisticated imaging technologies, which illustrates what Latour pointed out (in the essay I referenced above) years ago: that the work of doing art and the work of doing science share important parallels. In both fields, many laborious steps have to be taken – technologies and techniques created and meticulously employed, experiments carried out, visualizations repeatedly created and carefully inspected – all before we can say that ‘this is a work of art’ or ‘this is a scientific finding.’ Today, the artist’s studio and the scientist’s lab mirror each other: much of the work is done with a computer interface, by observing and reobserving what is on screen, using mouse and button to carry out minute changes and refinements in order to produce desired effects. Both artists and scientists carry out this work in the here and now, with an understanding of what has been done in the past and in acknowledgment of the possibilities of further work and new discoveries, tomorrow.

I find this conceptualization of art as network that emerges and evolves over time quite beautiful, but extraordinarily humbling. We each become a tiny molecule in a vast series of connections linking up different kinds of productive activity; we’re individually hardly special, but rather gain our significance only in the context of an ever-evolving structure that produces ‘new’ works of art only to reabsorb them into its memory banks of what was once done in the name of art. Furthermore, because art is not particularly exceptional or special in this regard, it can share in the activities of other endeavors – such as science – in its attempt to visualize and represent the world. This leads up to new possibilities for meaning and connection, for seeing the world ‘artistically.’ But – as I asked Jochum – does this not also suggest ever more abundant sources of noise? By this I meant: new risks and hazards of unintelligibility; new sources of incomprehension, and therefore new reasons to dismiss art as unintelligible, trivial, irrelevant, or even outrageous? He offered only the following, which I found completely satisfactory, Adorno’s aphorism from Minima Moralia: We are faced with “the almost insoluble task is to let neither the power of others, nor our own powerlessness, stupify us.”