I need to read this thread more carefully, but the topic immediately reminded me of this NYTimes book review, by Barry Gewen, entitled "State of the Art," (11 Dec 2005)* in which Gewen provides an extended review of recent books by several key art critics, some of whom are skeptical of the claim that art must be "dangerous."
The reviewer himself uses the review to suggest, in fact, that the argument "art must be dangerous," and its pal "it's all individual expression," are ultimately shallow and simplistic. Not only have they resulted in much bad art that has little else than shock value going for it, but they have undermined the ability of art to speak to a broader audience, thereby limiting at least its direct influence on the culture.
Here's the heart of his argument, as I see it, and I've italicized what I take to the sentences that seem most essential to his thesis:
Anthony Julius is both a culture critic and a lawyer, and in his recent book "Transgressions: The Offences of Art," he examines the blurry boundary between art and law. Art, he says, has long been the beneficiary of a set of pieties that grant artists an "exalted status," allowing them to behave in museums, auditoriums and galleries in ways that would be unacceptable in other contexts. A Viennese artist, Günther Brus, performed a now-famous - or at least notorious - work in which he urinated and defecated on a stage, then masturbated while singing the Austrian national anthem. (Other aspects of this piece cannot be described in a family newspaper.**) When he was arrested for degrading state symbols, he argued that he was challenging taboos, and that his actions should be protected as a work of art.
Brus was right: the spectators present had freely chosen to be there. But what if he had physically attacked the audience as a way of breaking taboos? André Breton once said that the "simplest Surrealist act" would consist of "dashing down into the street, pistol in hand, and firing blindly . . . into the crowd." In fact, art may exist in what Julius calls "a privileged zone," but it is a zone within the confines of society. To believe that everything is permitted in the world of art is to suffer from a failure of the imagination about what human beings are capable of. For social beings, even artists, the idea that anything goes is a fiction.
It's understandable why the fiction arose, and why so many art critics bought into it. It would have been difficult to predict that dripping paint on a canvas would conclude with someone squirting paint from his anus or worse. Similarly, it has taken time to recognize that granting artists a privileged zone eventually undermined their seriousness. The Greenbergers thought they were protecting art by removing it from the materialistic workaday world, but by restricting it to what goes on in museums and galleries, or transforming it into a conversation solely among artists, they were actually converting it into an irrelevancy. Art made no claims on the "nonartistic," except as a source of amusement. And the artists, for their part, were given permission to behave like unsocialized children.
Harold Rosenberg had said that art was "a space open for the individual to realize himself in knowing himself." Today, after decades of narcissistic and exhibitionistic spectacles, when it's possible to grasp the limits of Rosenberg's libertarian ethos, we can see that he should have said art was not only a space for the individual to realize himself in knowing himself, but also a space to enable others to know themselves, as well as a space to evoke the bonds that exist between artist and spectator in their common self-awareness, which is to say in their common humanity. It's a definition that understands art is necessarily a social interaction, communication between people, dialogue, not merely the unfettered expression of the boundless ego as has been the case with so much work over the past few decades.
He then goes on to argue for the value of a specific piece of performance art by Marina Abramovic--one in fact which might seem, given this position, to be simply "shocking," but which instead, he argues, offer[s] her viewers a gift of spirituality without the doctrines, rituals or consolations of religion, and, thus, he says, fits his understanding of entering into a significant "dialogic" relation with the viewer.
*Now, NYTimes book reviews, even archived ones, are free, but you do have to register. If you want the entire thingy sans registering with the jack-booted corporate spies at the Times--sarcasm alert!--please feel free to pm me and I'll zip it to you in a PM.
**this is just to say that the term "family newspaper" puts the aloo saag I ate for dinner on an elevator to my esophagus. |
