Ceci n'est pas un pipe, mais il contient le poop
Written: Aug 21 '03
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Product Rating:
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Pros: Provocative questions about the nature of art; the dialogic (conversational, interviewing) style.
Cons: The author’s wacked out New Ageyness and obtuse insistence that art be ecologically oriented.
The Bottom Line: Conversations about art and other things, ranging from the sensible to the provocative to the ridiculous.
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| Lobstergirl's Full Review: |
When it comes to art, newness isn’t enough to excuse one from fustiness. In order to be truly meaningful and relevant, art must also be participatory and interdisciplinary, even antidisciplinary.
At least that’s the view of Suzi Gablik, whose book Conversations Before the End of Time: Dialogues on Art, Life and Spiritual Renewal is a series of exchanges, mostly about art, with artists, art critics, philosophers, academics, educators, a curator, a dealer, a novelist, a psychotherapist, an ecopsychologist, a Jungian analyst, and an environmental historian. (Call me reactionary, but I’m just not that interested in what environmentalists have to say about art, any more than I give a crap what sports announcers think about paleontology.)
The art world suffers from multiple afflictions, Gablik would argue. First, art, like psychotherapy, is an individualistic endeavor. Rather than being participatory pursuits, they are an escape from the world, a retreat behind closed doors and into the self. Second, museums function to quarantine art from the rest of the world, creating an artificial divide between the elite and the common and ensuring that museums will be oases of beauty and the outside world, a desert of ugliness. This “institutionalization” or “enfranchising” of art reinforces and perpetuates the severely exclusionary system of masterpieces, experts, and connoisseurship. Third, the extreme commodification of art, nourished by dealers, galleries and collectors, creates an unhealthy fetishization.
The kind of art that Gablik espouses is, in the words of one interviewee curator, “less about seeing than about doing.” Art and life should meld. Two “artworks” that are cited approvingly by Gablik – endlessly -- are 1) a woman’s monthly ritual cleansing (removal of garbage) from the Rio Grande River, arising from “her need to try to heal the river and be with its pain”, and 2) an artist taking a group of inner city kids on an ecology field trip to Belize, after which they volunteer for various environmentally-oriented projects in the city. What makes these projects art, rather than, say, garbage removal and social work? Gablik says what makes them art is the artist’s choice to define him or herself, and his/her work, as such. To some extent the question shares definitional ground with “what makes Duchamp’s urinal art?” The fact that it hung on a museum wall, or that Duchamp called himself an artist? But when you remove the museum, or go to the extreme of removing the artist, how are artistic meaning and validity established? Who decides what gets called art?
This is essentially the central issue in the discussions about ‘the canon’ that were so widespread in the early 90’s. (The book’s conversations took place a decade ago, and while some of the jargon sounds dated and some of the political passion seems quaint, as far as I know the culture wars are still going on, if perhaps on more muted and less public battlegrounds). Certain works of art, and certain artists, are anointed by the high powers of the art world – important dealers, curators of established institutions, art critics. In opposition to this highly exclusionary milieu arose the idea of antidisciplinary art: art that not only isn’t part of the established art world, but often doesn’t coincide with our ideas about what art is. At the very least, we expect art to involve an artist, whatever medium he/she is using, and a viewer. Antidisciplinary “art” dispenses with these things. As one former artist couple who got rid of all their art and belongings and moved to the woods expresses it, “We started living life as an art. It’s as if washing dishes, if done with presence, is as much of an art form as painting a picture or making a sculpture.” Another contributor, who teaches a class called “The Aesthetics of Everyday Life”, denotes as art such things as informal neighborhood gardens and the Good Friday Stations of the Cross parades on the Lower East Side.
Hilton Kramer, one of the founders of The New Criterion and for many years the art critic for The New York Times, appears in the minority here (along with dealer Leo Castelli) as a high modernist old fogey, sensibly praising Diebenkorn and belittling Schnabel. At the opposite end of the spectrum are a number of contributors who enthusiastically support the aims of the hugely controversial 1993 Whitney Biennial, an exhibit typified by the museum’s artist-designed metal admission buttons which, when arranged, formed the sentence “I can’t imagine ever wanting to be white.”
Some of the interviewees have large stature in the world of art or academics (Kramer, Arthur Danto). Some are obscure but have interesting things to say (Richard Shusterman, Mary Jane Jacob); some are obscure, have little or nothing of value to say, but are tangentially amusing; others have no stature, have nothing illuminating to contribute, and should not have been included. Some whose ideas about art are perhaps deservedly marginal have interesting ideas about other disciplines, such as James Hillman’s views on the shortcomings of therapy and Carol Becker’s on the miseducation of art students. Barbara Kirshenblatt-Gimblett’s assertion that “quality is the new racism” and that museums establish an “aesthetic apartheid” qualifies her as completely, eye-rollingly insane, and thus mandatory reading.
Much of Gablik’s commentary is at least coherent, if philosophically unpalatable, but occasionally one has to deal with such unpleasant sentences as “I try to delve into the matrix of her confusion and to feel out the rough texture of her soul’s turbulence.” Then, there is her relentless, and ridiculous, vision of apocalyptic doom; she believes that the earth and civilization are on the verge of collapse (hence the book’s title), and that only ecologically-rooted, participatory, communitarian forms of art can hope to turn things around. Unintentional humor ensues when her question of many of her interviewees whether they think the world is coming to an end, and how art can address this problem, elicits the replies, “uh, not really” and “it can’t.”
The virtue of this book is that, awash in kooky ideas and tedious politicizations, it nevertheless manages to raise important issues about the roles of art, the artist, and the viewer in society, and what sorts of schemas we ought to use to evaluate art: purely aesthetic, meritocratic, political, communitarian, participatory, or some combination of these. Do such distinctions as amateur vs. professional, and literal vs. metaphorical, matter? Ultimately the most persuasive answers come not from the author or her ideologically likeminded artist-theorist-academic cohorts, but from the book’s heretics.
Recommended:
Yes
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Lobstergirl
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Satan, oscillate my metallic sonatas.
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