George Orwell: "all art is propaganda"
There are several curators who have been making the running in laying out the territory of arts’ response to environmental issues, from Max Andrews and Mariana Cánepa Luna of the excellent Latitudes to Maja and Reuben Fowkes of translocal.org. There’s a good wide-ranging interview with Maja and Ruben Fowkes in Antennae Magazine in which they discuss altermodernism, the macho nature of Land Art, and how in sustainable art, form becomes a matter of ethics. All great stuff. One thing in the interview pulled me up short though:
As curators, can you provide some idea as to how art has been influential or can be more effective in making people more environmentally aware? Should it ?
We do not envisage art to have utility. As soon as art is seen in this way it is connected to the art market and we’re back into the capitalist, market-driven, growth model of production. If the utility of art is understood as a vehicle for advocating social changes or raising environmental consciousness we come to the problem of art as propaganda, which can also be counterproductive, as it undermines the subversive potential of artistic autonomy.
It’s true this view represents an orthodoxy within art – that artists should not be looked to for their “utility” - but Maja and Ruben Fowkes present this orthodoxy in a way that shows up how questionable this notion is.
Utility isn’t the quality capitalism prizes in art, it’s its lack of utility. Capitalism, the market, call it what you will, drives art forward by seeing art as the ultimate surplus value – as an entity with no purpose.
Jake Chapman is always good on the notion of surplus value in art. This is him discussing George Battaille’s The Accursed Share:
The best argument for a work of art pertaining to that surplus value is that it’s an act of absolute pure capital, pure taste without purpose. I think you could assert that about high modernist art but it’s impossible to say that now, because contemporary art is anthropological, and it’s social.
[Read the full interview by Simon Baker in Papers of Surrealism [PDF 728KB]]
To resist the idea of art having no utility is to resist the market’s attempt to commodify it. I’m with Bob and Roberta Smith on this one; in Hijack Reality Patrick Brill writes about how artists should be happy with the leaden box ticking culture of public commissioning, because at least it is a tangible acknowledgement of a value in art that is non-monetary.
Maja and Reuben Fowkes say:
If the utility of art is understood as a vehicle for advocating social changes or raising environmental consciousness we come to the problem of art as propaganda, which can also be counterproductive, as it undermines the subversive potential of artistic autonomy.
Firstly, there is nothing less endearing about the world of art than art proclaiming its own autonomous subersive potential. Secondly, the idea that propaganda and “subversive potential” are mutually exclusive doesn’t bear close examination.
As George Orwell said, “all art is propaganda”. The importance, he went on, is to distinguish between “good” and “bad” propaganda.
Interestingly, Emma Ridgway’s excellent interview with Gustsv Metzger found him referencing Eric Gill as a major influence. I’ll leave the last word on this to Eric Gill:
Art which is not propaganda is simply aesthetics and is consequently entirely the affair of cultured connoisseurs. It is a studio affair, nothing to do with the common life of men and women, a means of ‘escape.’ Art in the studio becomes simply ’self-expression,’ and that becomes simply self-worship. Charity, the love of God and your neighbour, which, here below, every work of man must exhibit, is lost. If you say art is nothing to do with propaganda, you are saying that it has nothing to do with religion – that it is simply a psychological dope, a sort of cultured drug traffic. I, at any rate, have no use for it. For me, all art is propaganda; and it is high time that modern art became propaganda for social justice instead of propaganda for the flatulent and decadent ideals of bourgeois Capitalism. (excerpt from a letter to The Catholic Herald, 28 October 1934)
Why I love Google alerts
I’ve just received a couple of emails from the art philosopher Dennis Denis Dutton. I’d love to pretend that they were a lofty exchange of high thought, but in fact they were simply kindly pointing out that I’d stupidly spelt his first name wrong in a review of his book I’d just posted on the RSA Arts & Ecology website, but thanking me anyway for it.
That I received the first email within two hours of the reivew being posted shows that Google alerts is a remarkable thing and that, after a year or so writing and researching a book, authors know that the moment they’re published most books disappear into a kind of strange unpeopled void and so any evidence that anyone at all has read them is gratefully received. It’s also gratifiying to know that a review doesn’t go unnoticed, for that matter.
Recessions make people wonder what the value of things is. Art for instance. As the fine art market takes a dive, Emma Ridgway opened the question below with her post on the art markets. Well, here’s another way of looking at it for you. What if art has a purpose? An evolutionary purpose. This is the idea developed by contrarian Denis Dutton. Dutton proposes the idea that an understanding of art is hard-wired in us. It is crucial for our survival, and is fundamental to our society.
Firstly art has a function in evolutionary adapation. Art gave homo sapiens an advantage over other species in not only empowering us to be able to imagine the possibility of food and shelter elsewhere – but also lending us the means to inspire others with that vision. Dutton believes the whole tradition of landscape painting drips with this kind of Pleistocene longing for the better place.
Secondly it is the human equivalent of the peacock’s feather. For Darwin, the ridiculously cumbersome plume was a conundrum which threatened to bring down then whole idea of evolutionary adaptation he’d proposed in The Origin of Species. Survival of the fittest? Why would a species make itself more cumbersome and flightless?
And then he realised those gaudy arse-feathers served a very different purpose. The peacock’s strut is actually a blaring signal that the male is healthy and genetically functional. The female sexually selects the male by its display.
Art too is a type of display. If you doubt this, ask any 18-year-old male why he has formed a rock band. Nine times out of ten the answer will be procreative rather than musical. (Dutton’s examples are a little more elegant than that one.)
Like most people smitten by evolutionary biology, Dutton takes this idea way too far, but it’s interesting to think about art in terms of its utility in communicating otherness – something which Dutton demonstrates excellently. If art — as we strongly believe at the RSA Arts & Ecology Centre — has a part in communicating the thought that we can live differently from how we live today, Dutton’s book supports the thesis that art has played a central role in doing this in the past.
Of course Dutton would probably balk at such a purpose himself. He’s a been a climate change sceptic in the past, and enthusiastically reviewed Bjorn Lomborg’s book The Skeptical Environmentalist in The Washington Post some years ago. But as I suggest in my review, despite the potentially revolutionary insights in his book, Dutton enjoys the role of curmudgeon too much. Like so many he finds in evolutionary biology an argument for looking backwards rather than forwards.
RSA Arts & Ecology: Review of Denis Dutton’s The Art Instinct.
7 ways of looking at Altermodernism
WILLIAM SHAW: Taking a jaunt around some of the discussions thrown up by Nicolas Bourriaud’s Altermodern manifesto and exhibition at Tate Britain I found myself constructing a kind of Beaufort Scale of critical responses:
1/. The Thrilled. Kazys Varnelis, Director of the Network Architecture Lab at Columbia University Graduate School of Architecture is positively inspired:
I’ve been immersed in writing lately, so this next exhibit slipped
under my radar, but Nicolas Bourriaud’s latest exhibit, the 2009 Tate
Triennial, is called Altermodern. Bourriaud’s manifesto can be seen here. Bourriaud’s one of the sharpest thinkers around today and this exhibit just cements my decision to explore network culture
in my next book. Bourriaud’s show marks a break with postmodernism
based on a new stage of globalization. As he writes in his Altermodern
manifesto: ”Multiculturalism and identity is being overtaken by
creolisation: Artists are now starting from a globalised state of
culture.”
I suppose this is the kick in the pants I need…
2/. The Engaged: The commentators on this post at Moot Blog jump at the mere mention of something post-post-modern, jumping into a debate about Po-mo and A-mo.
Me thinks The Tate are being somewhat provocative.
Although you’re right, there’s some wonderful critiquing and
questioning of Post-modernism at the moment. There’s a big buzz around
‘speculative realism’, check out Graham Harman
(http://doctorzamalek.wordpress.com/).
Equally, probably one
of the most interesting engagements with modernism is the notion of
‘hauntology’— this might be what the Tate is tinkering with. Have a
look at this:
(http://splinteringboneashes.blogspot.com/2008/10/when-nothing-ever-happens.html)
But please, no more modernism.
Nicolas Bourriaud is an interesting one. Well worth going to see.
3/. The Thoughtful: Michael L. Radcliffe of Artbizness suggests Bourriaud’s heart may be in the right place, he fails to live up to his own rhetoric:
Like
all good shows (and it IS a good show) its one that I will need to
return to many times, and I may like completely different works for
completely different reasons.
But I guess the biggest obstacle of the altermodern idea for me is
that if you’re saying that you’ve learned from the postmodernist
critique, then why would you exhibit the majority of artists from OECD
countries? It’s not exactly a record of the marginalised and at worst
smacks of imperialism. And I suspect the “creolisation” that Bourriaud
talks of as a part of altermodernism leaves no room for the poor or
marginalised.
4/. The Uncertain: Dan Cull doesn’t know what to make of it but suspects it’s a Good Thing.
I am not sure whether this is a new theoretical current or not, and as
a fan of post-modernist thinking in a way I am not sure I really care.
What I do know is that the Tate have put together a show that I really
want to go and see… and this to my mind is a good thing.
5/. The Long Suffering: Laura Cummins in The Observer practically sighs out loud:
Altermodernism itself is not a very thrilling definition, or
redefinition, of where art may be heading.
It is by no means
certain, in any case, that any theory of art that can be made to
stretch all the way from Tacita Dean to Franz Ackermann is of much
ultimate value. Altermodernism does not work as an idea so much as a
web of observations, a web with a weaver at its centre. The real
hyperlink here is not the art, but Bourriaud himself.
6/. The Arch. Stewart Home. This one doesn’t boil down to a neat quote. Agitator/self-publicist Stewart uses quite a lot of space to say he thinks Bourriaud is a fop, a phoney and a figure of fun. He considers the whole Altermodern thing is a hilarious bit of trumpery; but then long ago Stewart championed Neoism, so for both conceptual and practical reasons you are advised to take everything he says as unreliable.
As a taster for their 2009 triennial ‘curated’ by Nicolas Bourriaud
(AKA Boring Ass), Tate Britain hosted a series of talks concluding with
one this weekend by the International Necronautical Society (INS)…. [it goes on for a fair bit...]
7/. The Very Tediously English Indulging in Ritual Sneering at Frenchmen Who Use Long Words. Coxsoft Artnews:
If you’re a pseudo-intellectual art snob who wants to irritate your gormless friends, tell them that Postmodernism is dead and the new in-thing is Altermodern, a word coined by Nicolas Bourriaud to categorize what Coxsoft Art calls Tripe. It’s also the name given to the fourth Tate Triennial,
which Nick curated and which will be inflicted on a gullible public at
Tate Britain from 3 February to 26 April. The Tate claims
the show will offer “the best new contemporary art in Britain”. Look at
this example! Expect the usual Tripe.
Never, ever trust anyone who uses the word “pseudo-intellectual”.
(I’d been aiming for 13 ways… but fell short.)
Photo: Giantbum Nathaniel Mellors at Altermodern courtesy of Régine Debatty
On disasters…
Cornford & Cross’s current installation at Wolverhampton Art Gallery, The Lion and the Unicorn, created from 15 tons of locally-sourced coal as an exploration of topic of fuel, climate change and economic stability. Photo by Paul Ward. Until Jan 31 2009.
In this month’s Wired magazine, columnist Scott Brown takes a hilarious dig at Hollywood’s new obsession with environmental disaster movies.
Actually, no, it’s not that hilarious at all. It’s more just a dig, really, at the forthcoming slew of eco-conscious movies you’ll be seeing next year. There’s The Thaw (deadly parasite unleashed by melting icecaps), 2012 (eco-doom) and Strays (nuclear meltdown). Then there are the statuatory remakes. The Day The Earth Stood Still (this time around Klaatu has come to tell us off for wrecking the planet) and Creature From The Black Lagoon, in which the seas wreak vengence on us.
“The dopiness of so-called ecotainment – environmentally virtuous entertainment – rises in direct proportion to its message mongering,” says Scott. “Oh the hilarity!” he chuckles.
This default critical line on “ecotainment” (the neologism itself is a stinker, face it,) is interesting. The standard reaction is that the genre is a joke. Hilarity! My aching sides. Etc.
It’s entirely possible that these films will be stinkers. Hollywood blockbusters generally are. Probably unintentially funny at times too. But while right-wing Americans believe that Hollywood is trying to foist a liberal agenda on the world, these films are mammoth investments by hard-nosed producers, so it’s interesting that the disaster-movie juggernaut believes that it can profit successfully from exploiting what is presumably a growing public anxiety in this way.
But there is also an assumption on Scott Brown’s part that the very idea of making a film that contains an environmental message is funny.
Maybe it is.
Yesterday I posted an interview with David Lan on the main RSA Arts & Ecology site. David is a man with a reputation as one of the most remarkably creative and successful people in London theatre. As Artistic Director of the Young Vic his productions have been universally lauded.
Until last weekend. The reviews for Amazonia have been, and it’s no fun to admit this, pretty wretched. Lyn Gardner – a consistent champion of new work – was scathing. But her review echoed Scott Brown’s default position. “The preachiness makes you long to rush out and lop down a tree,” she says.
In the interview, Lan is still trying to comprehend what triggered such a hostile reaction. He’s one of the theatre’s most experienced figures – a virtuoso of different forms, and he didn’t see it coming, he says. Now he’s wondering, did they contextualise the play well enough? Did they create enough of those subtle cues that control the audience’s expectations? Or is it just very, very, very hard to make art that says meaningful things about the great invisible beast that is the environment? Now that a critical mass of work about ecology is starting to arrive, mabye it’s time to start soul-searching about whether it’s good enough yet.
You wonder too, whether the default critical sneer that greets any work that declares good intentions too loudly is also part of it. And whether that needs rethinking too. But that’s a delicate, possibly dangerous path to go down…
Weather Project
It has been raining for years now, not a day, not an hour without rain. This continual watering has had a strange effects on urban sculptures. The have started to grow like tropical plants and become even more monumental…
If there’s a major piece of work that should speak directly to the RSA Arts & Ecology agenda in the UK right now, it’s Dominique Gonzalez-Foerster’s TH.2058 at the Tate Modern. It greets you with the text above, and with the roar of falling rain. This is French artist Gonzalez-Foerster’s SF vision of London, 50 years from now. Rather like After Nature at New York’s New Museum last month, it’s dealing in eerie predictions of a world wrecked; lives dramatically transfigured by climate change. (Maybe not so far-fetched. If the part about growing sculptures is a touch beyond the predictive abilities of climate modellers, there is a scientific consensus that our shrinking temperate zone will become much wetter as the century progresses and deserts march up from the Mediterranean).
In the immense Turbine Hall, an XXL version of Louise Bourgoise’s massive spider Maman looms next to Alexander Calder’s even loomier 20m high flamingo. Below sit rows of bunks, post-Katrina-like, painted in oddly cheery IKEA blue and yellow, to house the refugees from the endless downpour. A Big Brother-sized screen plays snatches of films; Peter Watkins’ banned 1965 film War Game, Nicholas Roeg’s The Man Who Fell To Earth, Robert Smithson’s footage of his great piece of land art Spiral Jetty, a marine earthwork itself in danger of environmental ruin. On the bunks too, abandoned there by the imagined refugees, lie books, another collection of sci-fi apocalyptica and dark modern histories; The Lathe of Heaven by Ursula Le Guin, William Gibson’s Pattern Recognition, JG Ballard’s Drowned World, Jeff Noon’s Vurt, Mike Davis’ Dead Cities. Gonzalez-Foerster has gathered together a veritable compendium of dystopian imaginings.
It suggests a curious world in which art and humanity are inexplicably
drawn together by the crisis, the huddled masses sheltering in the
Tate, a world in which art looms even larger than normal. Lying on the hard bunks, reading, gawping, listening, you can imagine yourself a resident in this imagined future. Georgina Adam of the Art Newspaper is quoted in The Times saying “It’s an environment, not art.” Quite why an environment can’t be art is hard to figure but that’s what it is, an environment intended to wrap itself around you and draw you into imagining yourself part of it.
The real sadness is, it doesn’t really achieve that; shame because it’s a great idea. In the Tate, Gonzalez-Foerster is better at celebrating the imagined futures other people have dreamed than she is of creating one herself. The hall seems curiously empty, even with the giant sculptures; the beds and spider-like lights fail to create the sense of fear and awe that the works she references do.
Ordinary reality seeps in too easily. There is an audible join in the tape-loop of rain. The radio that’s supposed to be playing Arto Lindsay’s bossa nova has been broken by a member of the public. A museum guard is talking too loudly on a walkie talkie: “The small radio on the bunk. It’s been touched. What channel are we supposed to keep it on?”
Early reviews are tepid, or worse:
“French artist Dominique Gonzalez-Foerster just wasn’t up to the job,” writes Richard Dorment in the Telegraph. “Throwing
away the chance to make a dramatic visual statement, she leaves the
main hall untouched, hiding her installation behind a curtain made of
strips of coloured plastic hung just beyond the ticket and information
booths.”
Rachel Campbell-Johnston in the Times is furiously scathing: “I can’t think that Tate’s new Turbine Hall commission will inspire anything
much – except maybe a growing desire to make a trip to the loo. The sound of
running rainwater will no doubt have a deleterious effect on a few bladders.”
Only the smarter Adrian Searle in the Guardian gets a point, of a kind, from it: “We are meant to ruminate on catastrophe and laugh amongst the ruins of
art and civilisation. But you don’t need to wait till 2058 to do any of
that. The end is now.”
Illustration credit:
Dominique Gonzalez-Foerster TH.2058 2008
© Dominique Gonzalez-Foerster. Photo: Tate Photography
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