“Yeah, but is it art?” That’s a question that I often hear. “What is art, anyway?” That’s another one.
Willem de Kooning, Woman V 1952-53
Art is notoriously difficult to define. If you ask a person how they define art they are likely to give you a set of answers relating to two factors: aesthetic beauty (“I like how it looks. It is beautiful.”), and emotional impact (“It makes me feel a certain way. It stirs emotion.”).
That’s a fine working definition for art that was being produced 200 years ago, but take a trip to any modern art museum and you will quickly see that there are many works in residence that lack the factors that many people consider to be so essential. There is art that is ugly, and it is supposed to be. There is art that is emotionally detached, and it is supposed to be.
Larry Bell, Untitled 1986
What do we do with these sorts of work? To say that they are art because they exist in a museum is simplistic and begs a much more important question: why are they there? I suppose that is really the question I aim to answer.
Controversial art, the kind of art that begs us to ask the question “Is this art at all?”, is controversial because it draws into crisis the accepted definition of art. One familiar example is Duchamp’s Fountain (1917), which consisted of a urinal turned on its end baring the signature “R. Mutt.” Before the signature, before that specific urinal was selected by the artist, it was just an ordinary urinal, but the signature and the authorial gesture of turning it on its end brought it into the realm of art. Or so Duchamp would have told us, although the tongue planted firmly in his cheek would have made it hard to get out.
Duchamp, Foutain 1917
What he was trying to do was not so much make art, but comment upon the status of art in bourgeois culture, and more specifically on the near-mythical status of the artists as a unique creative genius. He was aiming to shock, to upset, to outrage. He was attacking the concept of the cohesive artwork, where there is unity between the part (the medium) and the whole (the larger concept), and where the entire thing is orchestrated by the creative genius, typified by any number of paintings by Titian or Rubens or Poussin. It is only in relation to the classic definition of art that Duchamp’s work makes sense, and it is only through that relationship that it is provocative. His Fountain is an object in opposition to Rubens and Poussin, an attempt to break down the elevated status of both art and the artist. Was it art? No. And that was the point. It was an act of defiance, the signature and the submission of the piece to an art show deliberately ironic
But something funny happened to Duchamp’s Fountain, and to the entire avant-garde practice that he belonged to. It was swallowed up by the very institution it sought to undermine. After 1954, in the post-war period, artists were looking to make a social impact, to draw art off of its pedestal and into the praxis of life. They looked to artistic predecessors like Duchamp and took up his motifs, in a sense institutionalizing him. Taking an object from every day life and holding it up as a work of art went from being a radical movement against art to being yet another technique an artists could adopt in order to create a work of art. Duchamp became what he once mocked.
It is important, however, to realize that the artists of the post-war period mined the motifs of Duchamp for a reason: his art made an impact because it existed in a dialog with the practice of art in large. To put that succinctly, it was self-reflexive. It commented upon the nature of art, it existed specifically in reference to works of art that came before it, and it was self-aware of its position within that developmental timeline. That sense of self-reflexivity, of understanding itself in relation to the history of art and the practice of art, is what finally allowed Duchamp’s Fountain to be considered art. And today commissioned replicas of the piece can be seen in museums worldwide
This characteristic of self-reflexivity has become an incredibly important marker for any “true” art that has been made after the 1890s. It doesn’t much matter if it is ugly or emotively neutral, but it does matter that it is able to exist in dialog with other works of art. Art today must be able to refer to its own history, to comment upon the nature of that history, and on its own existence within that history. This opens up the doors wide for the ugly, the banal, and even the silly to all exist comfortably under the moniker of “art.”
The famous critic and theorist Marshall McLuhan wrote, “Art is anything you can get away with.” In a sense, he’s very right. Art is what you can get away with in the sense that, all aesthetics aside, if an artist (or a critic) can make a comprehensive argument for why their work should be considered art, if they can place it within the timeline of the practice of art, or demonstrate the way that it comments on the practice of art even at a conceptual level, then it might be considered art.
Ultimately, time is the final judge. Plenty of self-reflexive work has fallen by the wayside, forgotten or nearly forgotten and certainly never canonized into the annals of art history (does anyone remember Kinetic art?). Such artists fail where Duchamp succeeded: their works are not appropriated by the next generation. They are not found to be useful or profound, and younger artists cannot comment on their work or use their stylistic developments to create further comments on art. So art must not only be self-reflexive, but it must be usefully so. It must not only speak, it must say something.
Next time you are at a modern art museum don’t be put off by something that is ugly or boring or confusing. Try to find the connections it makes between itself and the art that came before it, and try to see how it influenced younger artists to take this self-critique of art one step further.
November 8, 2008 at 12:42 pm |
‘Kill your idols’ was one motto Duchamp lived by, maybe we should do the same with him?
November 8, 2008 at 5:45 pm |
Wouldn’t that run the risk of turning Duchamp once again into an idol, by adopting his motto? :)
December 16, 2008 at 7:16 am |
Very helpful post! I’d love to hear your thoughts on Serrano, especially his Piss Christ, in light of what you’re saying about aesthetically repulsive, or vacant works seek to qualify themselves as art by entering into a sort of dialogue with other pieces of art. Serrano’s work definitely qualifies as repulsive and such and, since I’m not very educated on art, I had understood his ultimate purpose to be that of creating a sort of visceral response in the viewer (which would be his real work), rather than merely creating some artifact that comments on art itself. Do you read Serrrano in the same way as Duchamp, or do you think he’s aiming at something different?
December 16, 2008 at 7:31 pm |
First of all, something you should know about me as an art historian is that I love art that breaks taboos and shock sensibilities. I’m actually working on a blog post about that right now, so you’ll have to come back later and read more.
I think that the answer lies in your question. What is art supposed to be? Well, if you follow the school of Winckelmann or ask an average person on the street, they will tell you that art is supposed to be beautiful and evoke pleasant or high moral feelings. By creating work that is both offensive and repulsive, Serrano is attacking the notion that art should be beautiful or pure or holy. He’s also attacking the social taboo which says that religion should be respected. He dialogs with the history of art through negation, basically, through creating a negative visceral response, but that isn’t his only goal. (And maybe not even his stated goal, but it is achieved nonetheless.)
For art to be appropriately self-reflexive, it doesn’t have to ONLY comment on art. Serrano’s photo doesn’t have to be merely a comment about the status of art, it can also be political or cultural or whatever else. What is important to me as a historian, is that I can accurately place his work within a larger art historical dialog. And I can do that very easily.
(As an interesting side note, one of the reasons Piss Christ was so talked about is because it was Serrano had received funding from the National Endowment for the Arts, so it was basically a big pile of tax payer funded offensiveness.)
December 17, 2008 at 5:32 pm |
[...] of art in a very illuminating way. A post especially worth checking out is one entitled ‘Is it art, or not?’, where he explores the question of what art, most fundamentally, [...]
January 17, 2009 at 2:41 am |
But something funny happened to Duchamp’s Fountain, and to the entire avant-garde practice that he belonged to. It was swallowed up by the very institution it sought to undermine.
And this is precisely the reason that I don’t like Duchamp, or the effect he had on art. Though Duchamp himself had his own reasons, as you explained, I see it as the opening to art of the pretentious ‘thinking’ prat, who exploits art to put foreward some kind of political, social or personal message without any aesthetic value in the work itself.
“Art is anything you can get away with.”
The question of ‘what is art’ has often plagued me. I am a lover of art and a collector of art books (which I try to review on my blog).
I am aware that art is a mostly undefinable and ever changing medium; its kind of like opinion itself – it’s different for everyone.
However, I have come to a conclusion that art and self expression are two seperate things, though the two are likely to intertwine. So, if I see an ‘artwork’ that has no aesthetic value (whether that value is pretty, ugle, disturbing, funny etc) and no actual skill involved, I deem this ‘work’ to be self expression not art (Piss Christ is a good example).
Art used to be treat like a trade; the ‘masterpiece’ was originally the work an apprentice would produce upon finishing their trade. Personally, I would prefer if art was a little less interprative and returned to some of its more institutionalised ideals (some, not all). You’ll find that most people can actually have some sense of dialogue with artworks that aren’t interested solely in self expression.
January 17, 2009 at 5:04 am |
I see it as the opening to art of the pretentious ‘thinking’ prat, who exploits art to put foreward some kind of political, social or personal message without any aesthetic value in the work itself.
Ah! I love the thinking prats! They are the ones who drive art forward, asking the provocative questions and bending the rules, changing the definitions and forcing us to think about the nature of art. Not to mention art is much more than just aesthetics. It’s about culture, reaction, history, and to a degree it is also about politics and sociology. “Art for art’s sake” is generally dull and unprovocative. Art that inspires protest or uproar is art that actually says something larger about the culture in which it is produced. For example, Duchamp said something very noteworthy about the nature of the museum and the deification of the artist. To me, that is far more interesting than something aesthetically pretty.
I would agree with you that art and self-expression CAN (that’s the key word) be separate terms. For example, the drivel hung up in my local coffee shops: that’s self-expression. But I think it’s not very useful to use such subjective terms as “lack of skill” or “unaesthetic,” because what seems lacking in skill to you might be different to another viewer. To have a useful working definition of “art,” it needs to be as universal as possible. Either that or, as you suggest, you can just throw up your hands and say, “Art is different to everyone and useless to define.”
I also disagree about Serrano, and I think that his work is far more than just self-expression, because it makes a very far-reaching culture statement. You could consider that personal, but I believe it thus speaks to a very large audience, and speaks of the cultural climate under which the work was created (that’s what’s particularly useful to an art historian) Besides that, I find it both skillful and aesthetically valuable.
January 18, 2009 at 9:22 am |
Ah! I love the thinking prats! They are the ones who drive art forward, asking the provocative questions and bending the rules, changing the definitions and forcing us to think about the nature of art.
What I mean about hating the ‘thinking prats’ is the ones who try vainly to follow in Duchamps footsteps by focusing on infamy and the intellectual point, rather than the art itself. Occassionally, a genius will come out and move things foreward, but most of the time I feel its just another idiot trying to prove something.
Sorry for sounding overly pessimistic, I just tend to come across that way lol!
Its not as if I only like older art. i love a lot of modern artists, such as a lot of the work featured here:
http://www.guupress.com/
http://www.gallerynucleus.com/
My favorite modern artists would have to be Hyung-Tae Kim, Bengal, Benjamin and Rain. I also like a lot of anime, manga and comic illustrators.
I would agree with you that art and self-expression CAN (that’s the key word) be separate terms. For example, the drivel hung up in my local coffee shops: that’s self-expression.
I agree with the coffee shop example also.