How I think art and my own practice should be in a post postmodernism society.
How I think art and my own practice should be in a post postmodernism society.
In this essay I am going to try and mark out the ideas and theories that I think have led to artists and the art market being stagnated by a lack of skills and its lack of ability to be able to connect with a larger audience. Art seems to exclude itself from popular culture and general society in any real meaningful way. I will also try and illiterate curator’s practices, and their dwindling influence. And try to create a landscape for a movement that myself, and my peers could be a part of with pride. I would like to delve into the mindset of a postmodern thinker to try and detect the things in art that have lead to where we are today in a sort of ideological nowhere that has broken the connection between the artist and the audience.
Freud once said the goals of the artists are money, fame and beautiful lovers. A statement that ring’s truer now than ever before. Art seems to have lost its passion and drive. The use of a massive range of skills from artists made it appealing to the general audience. Sadly as the skill shown in art has dwindled so has the impact it makes. True masterpieces seem to be snubbed, by curators and the masses of wealthy people waiting in line to buy yet another puerile attempt at art.
The days of artists creating real labours of love using crafts they had spent years learning and perfecting are long gone. As Marc Chagall stated ‘Art must be an expression of love or it is nothing’. Art should be nothing but a labour of love, not some intellectual pat on the back. The passion and drive to create work to inspire the masses is out of the reach of artists, because the masses have more skills to be able to create work that they are not capable of. The amateur artist has become more of a voice for the generation. With small things such as internet memes, there is more intelligent satire on my Facebook newsfeed than in any art gallery.
The art of popular culture and the way they use social media as a platform to distribute and learn about art has vastly opened up the art market to those people that have been denied access due to social status or background. Or by the practices used, because if you are a painter or a sculpture or you work in wood or stone you will not win the Turner Prize or any other notable Prize in art. It has allowed art to be free, but the stagnated environment I find myself in, the world of fine art divides itself from all this, merely referencing it in some small way.
Art has been boiled down to how long it will take to make, and how much money it will make. The sad truth is that art has become a hobby for the wealthy and the emphasis is on quantity not quality. It seems as though the focus on money in contemporary art seems to have created a generation of lazy artists trying to get their points across in the wrong way. There has been no let up from derogatory attempts to shock the public. Pickling animals in my opinion is nothing to aspire too. Taking an already existing object and changing it slightly in my opinion does not constitute art. How are the audience possibly suppose to relate to a piece of art that the artist them self has no real connection too. After all as Edgar Degas once said ‘Art is not what you see, but what you make others see’. All people see in this case in an animal preserved in formaldehyde, hardly something that people are going to want to recreate from their own imagination.
Ready-made art started to rear its head as early as 1917 with Marcel Duchamp and his ‘Fountain’. By taking a urinal and writing his name on it he opened up a whole new world ready-made art. The ease of making pieces such as this takes any real passion and love out of it. Where’s the inspiration and effort. As I have said before why would anyone want to aspire to recreate such works? Artists enjoy the challenge of trying to figure out how to perfectly recreate their own imagination. It does not exactly challenge the minds eyes to take an already existing object and deface it.
Duchamp paved the way for many artists that have since burst on the art scene. The likes of Damien Hirst have made their fortunes bastardising everything that truly skilled artists stood for. Artists with a true ferocious passion for what they are trying to express seem to be few and far between. Hours, sometimes years of painstaking hard work would go into every piece they created to truly reflect exactly what they wanted to express and the feelings they wanted the audience to feel along with them. They craved a perfect representation of their own imagination. Sharing such deep thoughts and feelings with the audience makes art much more accessible to the general public.
In the past people seemed to understand the need for us to learn new skills to adapt with the circumstances around us. This generation has completely lost touch with what is truly needed to thrive and that’s a wide range of skills, not a bank account bursting at the seams. As technology has slowly replaced the tasks of day to day life people no longer feel the need to learn how to do something when there is a piece of technology that can do it for you. Since the dawn of time people have learnt and adapted skills to work for them in an ever changing landscape. Skills have always been a comforter for society, the knowledge that you have enough skills to thrive in the environment no matter what it throws at you.
Things that were once common place in industry and society are no longer used. Instead of being able to walk into a job and be trained to do it well with hands on learning, people now need to go to university and use courses to learn how to do these things. People no longer move from industry to industry acquiring a large range of skills as they go. Now they spend years learning how to do one specific thing. Without the ability to move around and learn new things people are no longer learning a wide range massively restricting what a single person can do. The reliance people have on others to succeed is astounding.
It’s not just the inability to acquire a wide range of skills after education that is damaging society’s chances of brilliance. Education itself no longer teaches everyday skills. In the past people went to school to learn skills now it seems that all people are being taught is how to pass a test. Not how to successfully gain a skill that can be taken out into the real world and used. Mastering the skill is something that is done after the tests are passed and you can do it with your own hands. There was once a time that people could walk straight out of school and into and independent life. Women were taught skills such as sewing and cookery to help them in their later roles as mothers and wives. Men on the other hand were taught skills such as mechanics and woodwork which allowed them to get a job to support their families and be the provider. Over time the need to learn skills has been pushed further and further down the list of what people want from life. Technology makes it easy for people to get away without really having to learn them because if you can’t do it its easy o find someone that can.
For the first time in history the rapid growth of new technology in society has been able to match the growth of the population, which has been the downfall of most societies that came before us. And in that time a lot of skills have been lost due to either no necessity or because of technological advancement. But it seems the more rapidly technology progress’ there seems to be these rare backslides in technology, such as the decommissioning of the Harrier Jet and the Concorde. Both when decommissioned had no superior model to replace them. This is what I think is happening in society, people seems to be harkening back to more traditional skills, skills such as sewing, woodwork and metalwork. People are trying to live more connected to their environment. Something that until recently has been lost in both society and art.
In western society skills have become less and less necessary because of capitalism, the west has lost its skills because it exports its skilled and semi skilled labour overseas, to places like China were the cost is low and the skills and labour are abundant. Leaving countries like England immersed in a sea of shops and call centres. With a society were skills are becoming less necessary and only skills based in technology and science are respected, possibly due to the post enlightenment thinking which sees all scientific and logical argument as superior. How are we expected to grow and expand on a skilful level?
Another failing of Western society, it has always debased what it considers lower art forms and it still continues to do so until this day. Snubbing and refusing to refer to illustrators, designers, graphic designers and potters as artists. The list goes on. Some of the greatest artistic talents are held by cartoonists and fashion designers, that some critics won’t even refer to as artists. It chooses to shrug off many of its themes and aesthetic values. Art critics seem to use words such as designer in an insulting way. Being described as an illustrator is seen as a bad thing. And they describe anything that is aesthetically beautiful as ‘chocolate box’ almost trying to push the apporent styles of work that have emerged in the past 25 years.
The punk era died and so should their style of thinking. The postmodern style of thinking is very pessimistic, pompous and childish. You could liken it to a stubborn teenager not wanting to clean his room or not wanting to create meaningful and skilled work through labours of their own. But what they did manage to achieve is to ever more force art into the higher echelons of society. Such as Damien Hirst rubbing elbows with David Camaron. And the level of wealth in art, one of Damien Hirst big hiccups was his piece ‘For the Love of God’. A diamond encrusted skull worth £50 million. A pear shaped pink diamoind set in the forehead of the skull was the bold focus of the piece. The only problem was that he wasn’t quite able to sell it in the normal way. He had to band together a group of bankers to come up with the money.
Art long since broke the boundaries of what can be considered postmodernism. And as contemporary art develops it’s sending an indistinguishable message. Although since, there have been many failed attempts at characterizing what it is exactly that art is morphing into. But currently nobody has led the charge in this post postmodernist era. Many have attempted to coin a phrase but there is no one cohesive message that seems to typicalise our generation. The art landscape at the moment seems as diverse as nature, in this constant game of diluting the original message. In the contrived way of putting the work of your role models in your own work so you can have a pat on the head from a curator. But if you did that in any other profession it would be considered plagiarism.
One of the main things I think continues the no skill in art was the intervention of the artist’s hand which further gave rise to artists who have very little skill. But they have a lot of money to pay other people to do it for them. And conventions in art such as the invention of the artist hand corrupt the core values of what and artist is. The definition of artist is ‘maker’. Which I personally don’t think enough emphasis has been made on this in art anymore. It seems to be the dirty words that you’re not allowed to use in your work are the very same practices that are rife in fine art.
. The art intervention movement championed by Dada has allowed the public to become the artist themselves. The idea of the intervention of the artists hand has been perverted by modern commercialisation. And possibly the influence of Andy Warhol whose whole ethos in his practice is too repeat something over and over again until it no longer has any meaning. But in the commercialisation of his art work and through advertising he managed to do what many other artists haven’t been able to achieve. And that’s to connect with and be accepted by the general public. But long gone are the days of pop art and, art yearning to connect with a larger audience. And to be accepted by the general population. All it seems to want to do is be controversial for controversial sake.
Conceptual art has done a lot to reconnect the artist with his audience and for the first time make the audience the artist which is a very interesting concept. Art is passion and you must share your passions. Conceptual art does this in more new and diverse ways. But conceptual art does have a lot to answer for in art. Or should I say the artists that abuse these concepts, ideas and theories in art to cut a corner to explain away things with words. An artwork shouldn’t need a page of writing to explain itself.
Art is self-explanatory though visual and pictorial conventions. And the social underpinning of all artwork is the world around us, although some artists like to leave this world all of us are grounded in it. It is a part of us and we are a part of it, however far we see ourselves removed from it. It seems like artists want to remove themselves from the realities around them. And have created the art world in a very insular type of way. It only judges inwardly and takes inspiration from itself. Breeding this more bizarre and pointless type of work that you see in very many modern art galleries. If art must fit the conditions of music it is failing, the only time I have ever been moved in a modern art gallery is to tears at the fact that what I wish to be has been corrupted beyond all belief. And bases itself in ideas and theories not known to normal people, artists try not to deal with normal life.
Something that an audience can connect with emotionally which music does and art should do. Instead the only emotion felt in an art gallery is disgust at a cow chopped in half and menstrual blood paintings. I think we could all try to do a bit better when it comes to inspiring emotions that change to world for the better instead of perpetuating a society of negativity. The only artwork made now is negative and all emotions like these breed is contempt. And the contempt seems to be directed back at the art world with budget cuts in art programs, in America there were major cuts in school art programs due to so called subversive work. That has shocked the public away from the art world. Art is not about riling people up it’s about connecting with them.
In places like China all tasks repetitively done over time and done with prophiancy is considered to have attained a skill or to have achieved the task to a level of an art form in whatever aspect it is. Children that show any talent of any kind from a young age is encouraged and supported to master it completely. As Leonardo da Vinci once said ‘Poor is the pupil that does not surpass his master’
I think technology has done something good for art, its allowed normal people to create artwork in ways never before expected. And it’s really allowed what critics called amateur artists to get their art out into a market not controlled by the curators. Who judge artwork using a bizarre system of reference, deference, difference? Simply put to reference something in the past. Deference is respectful submission or yielding to the art, ideas and figureheads. And difference is a small and insignificant way to differentiate yourself from your previous generations.
A curator’s job is an all encompassing role dealing in every aspect of the distribution, collection and archiving of work. Although the monopoly they have had in previous years has left the power back into the artist’s hands and not the art market. The internet has radically transformed the way we all live in, learn about and understand the world. To have the entire wealth of human knowledge at your fingertips has taken away the veil of the intellectual hierarchy. This allowed people of all backgrounds to compete on an intellectual level. And curators haven’t managed to keep up with this. Clutching onto their outdated ideas, and not trying to connect with a larger audience. All artists really want is to connect with a wider audience and inspire and to carry the torch.
Critics state that ‘No major figure of profound influence has emerged in painting or sculpture since the waning of Pop Art and the birth of minimalism in the 1970’s’. Art with any skill or any care or passion hasn’t been rewarded by critics in the art world. Things like form and function are like dirty words. Beauty and expression no longer exists in art. Instead you’re just left with a bleak mire of work that seems to only deal with the most horrific subjects it possibly can. It is almost as if the art world has a reversed view of what beauty is. This warped sense of reality in art, it merely brushes itself off as interesting and breaking boundaries, but it’s not.
The late 1980’s marked the arrival of the YBAs. A group of artists that one critic, Brian Sewell has dubbed ‘The post skill Movement’. The Young British Artists had an interesting start in 1988 with an exhibition by Damien Hirst called ‘Freeze’. In the exhibition Hirst used work from fellow artists from Goldsmiths college of Art. Many of which have gone on to make quite an impact in the YBAs. Goldsmiths College of Art was quite highly involved in the development of the YBAs by offering courses which broke the separation of media from painting, sculpture and printmaking among other practices.
What to say about those pesky YBAs, the puerile bunch of sycophantic children. They use shock tactics and poor attempts to show meaning in their work. But the truth is their work seems difficult to connect with. There is no genius within it to aspire too. Possibly the reason no one has ever done work like them before because its lacks depth, it only touches upon the issues that they deal with in a very blatant and obvious way. Without depth how is the mind expected to wonder into a whole new reality. The beauty of art is that it can be an escape, like a window into another world. Subtlety was always any artist’s best friend.
In recent years one of the YBAs most controversial artists has been Tracy Emin. Amongst some of her work is the piece ‘My Bed’. In the piece Emin opened up perhaps one of the most personal spaces a person has, their bed. But somehow even with such a personal place on offer for the world to see the piece still seems to lack any true skill. In the piece Emin shows us her own bed in all its embarrassing glory. The bed is littered with empty beer bottles and discarded knickers amongst other things.
Another major piece in the career of Tracey Emin is the piece ‘Everyone I have slept with 1963-1995’ also referred to as ‘The Tent’. The piece is advertised as a work of art of her sexual experiences. But as a massive contradiction to this the work, it is actually about anyone that she has had an emotional connection with. So along with the names of people that she has had sexual intercourse with is her grandmother’s name that she has fallen asleep with as opposed to sleeping with. So what she has tried to do is to shock everyone before they get to see the work, the work has already been judged before they see it.
Sadly, being left with these people as the forerunners of our own generation and contemporary art leaves us in a troubling place in art. In the landscape they have helped to carve out is one of wealth and social and political gain. It is not built on integrity and skill or a wealth of interesting ideas. It merely seems like a sarcastic teenager whinging at the old masters.
A painter hadn’t won the Turner Prize in 12 years until 1998, when Chris Ofili did and the only reason he won it was for the pure shock value that he had used elephant dung to make the paint that he used which is in fact just a traditional way of making paint. Not such a shocking innovative painting after all is it? I think it’s fair to say that without the elephant dung the painting would not have won the Turner Prize. The Turner Prize seems to gravitate towards things that shock the general population; it deters them away from art leaving it open to intellectual snobbery.
Galleries themselves are very sterile and unwelcoming places, stark and baron. And not just in its layout. Not many people go to galleries or go to see exhibitions. They purposely try to use art to push their own agendas. The galleries are still in control of what is considered fine art. But for an art form that is considered fine I have never seen so much blue-tack and pritt-stick used in my life.
I hope I’ve managed to show you the woeful state that art has been left in. And express some of the ways that we could change this for the better. No longer accepting the ruling judgement of the curators and the need to cling to the notions of authenticity, but no real frame of reference for this authenticity is really given. It’s like the cast of real hustle decided to be curators for a week. I have expressed my hopes that we can move forward in this new, yet un-named generation of art. I hope we can push forward into a new era of art that can connect once again with normal people and lift the bleak cloud of distasteful, graphic art.
Hopefully we can lift the cloud that makes art so inaccessible to the public and throw off the preconceived notions and snobbery that has plagued art for so long. Art is supposed to be this uninhibited creative melting pot. And the rules that seem to govern to this odd conformity to the will of the curator must end. It should be to the will of the public. The will of the many trumps the will of the few. We should be respectful of art in the public such a graffiti, who’s to say its okay in a museum but it is not okay on a wall under a bridge. Art needs take on the ideas of other cultures. And to be respectful to all those makers that are artists in their own right. That’s an art movement that I could truly be a part of.
So let’s set out the new landscape of artistic movement which I will dub the ‘age of skill’. In the age of skill we will harkens back to skills that we are losing or have already lost. We should embrace new skills that come with an ever developing world and we should adapt to a new artistic era with a sense of reverence to the past but then we should disregard it as we are already a product of it. Which doesn’t seem to have been realise by our forbearers, the need to validate your work by the past is an insane backward thinking.
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