A response to Richard Taylor...

Kindly or otherwise, the Glasgow based artist Richard Taylor has cited my last post ('Rewind', 15th October 2010) in his article published yesterday on the following art blog: http://cca-glasgow.com/blog/?p=1104.

What follows is my email response to Richard's article, which hopefully raises some further questions around the issue of how to be an artist and an activist at the same time.

"Hi Rich,

thanks for this - and for quoting me!! Very flattering...haha.

So here are some reactions to your piece on the CCA website. I think the question of how artists are supposed to "act" is a very valid one, and one which I struggle over a lot also. Personally, I would be really interested to know a little more about why you consider it a 'diluted' reaction to be part of protest marches and more mainstream public activism generally. Why? Is it not possible to maintain a certain artistic distance/integrity whilst also being a part of a larger activist movement? Is not this balance quite fundamental to the very 21st century concept of "participation"??

What I was saying about Duchamp in my article was that he envisaged the artist as medium, as a part of the artistic journey, rather than as some sort of genius observer (although I'm not insinuating at all that this is how you consider yourself! It's just a fine line, you know?). I think Joseph Beuys might be a good inspiration for how it is possible to be an artist whilst also being a meaningful activist. If it's about not becoming just another drowned-out voice amongst the million others then I completely understand. But surely it's worse not to speak at all? Or to just speak into an empty art gallery?

And I like the way you reflect and reiterate what I was trying to pose too - do we have to rewind? I think perhaps we do. But then, I went to the Gauguin retrospective at the Tate Modern today... why were there hoards of people there? What is so truly fascinating about Gauguin to contemporary audiences? These audiences are ambushed by the cuts, and the war and the cult of celebrity??? Gauguin was a globe-trotting artist...he dealt with issues of God in Tahiti...he caught syphilis...and he did some bloody good paintings...but still, what's the political relevance? I left feeling cold...like the whole exhibition was just about trend: the cult of the white middle class masses who read 'Homes and Gardens' and watch 'The One Show'. Sorry, not only do I digress but am scathing to boot!!!!! Anyway, hopefully the above adds some fuel to the fire...let me know how you get on and stuff.

Soph x"

Rewind

Rewind! Has it ever occurred to you that most contemporary art galleries are asking us to rewind? “Look back”, they seem to say, “take a look at all the art that shook the world during the twentieth century! Look at its political agendas, its dense conceptualisation, its experimentalism, its radicalism, its craziness, and its out-of-this-worldliness! Can any of you struggling artists create anything better, potent, or more profound? We think not!”

Clean and perfectly formed contemporary art galleries of the world unite: theory rules OK. The concept of artist as genius creator is not just dead, but has been reincarnated and slaughtered again several times. Technology and the capitalist mode have replaced you artists! We don’t need you to paint pictures or take photos or make nice films, we have it all already – on YouTube, on Twitter, on Sky Arts - we’ve already got the cultural distractions we need thanks. Why do we need more new art? Our artistic fulfilment can surely be met in the countless retrospectives of all those Great Dead Guys: Warhol, Duchamp, Picasso, Gauguin, Van Gogh, Pollock, Beuys…

But for a moment, let us ‘rewind’ to Duchamp, to whom, granted, we do owe something. In 1957, he spoke of the artist as a medium. As a part of the sentence rather than the full-stop. He said that the meaning of a work of art would accrue in the course of its existence. This implies that an artwork is not determined by the initial creative gesture as much as in the realm of the spectator, and ultimately in the work’s historical reception. Surely the task of all these retrospectives at contemporary art museums is to help us look forward by looking back; to provoke new ways of perceiving political situations and temporality and so highlighting what’s going on in our own dreadful present? Obliquely it might be possible for us to study our own ‘realm’ by focussing on realms of the past.

Recently I went to the Reine Sophia Contemporary Art Gallery in Madrid. An intimidating sprawl of crisp white rooms awaited me. One temporary exhibition was entitled: ‘New Realisms: 1957 – 1962, Object Strategies Between Readymade and Spectacle’. White cube after white cube pummelled me with information about the strategies of a group of artists, including Yves Klein, Allan Kaprow, Jean Tinguely and Duchamp himself. These guys were trying to figure out how art could possess a meaning in a world capable of constructing the atom bomb. How could we still claim to be creators when there is something so much bigger and more powerful than us that can at any moment obliterate our whole existence? The thought processes of these artists was obvious and necessary. But it left me thinking: what are we responding to now? The war in Afghanistan? Our obsession with reality TV and with the culture of celebrity? With climate change? With material goals? Corrupt politicians? Poverty? Why do I feel that every time I go to a show by young artists in London their messages are confused and spiralling into a cacophony of issues? Is this the fault of the spectator or of the artist? Has our desire to sell art overtaken our need for it to forge new ways of thinking?

Artists! I ask you:

What is our realm?

How can we enlarge upon it or re-engage its boundaries?

How do we wish the future to respond and ‘historicize’ our art?

Surely if our realm is too multi-faceted and confusing to fit the gallery space then let us remove our work from it rather than put up with the confusion. There is a grave danger in art only being encountered when inside a gallery. Let us challenge this vague normalisation of ‘Art’ that reigns supreme in these big white spaces where anything goes as long as it is on the inside. Let us rewind to Christo, who wrapped up his museum, or to Daniel Buren, who sealed it up, or to Robert Barry, who just put up a ‘Closed’ sign.

On another floor of the Reine Sophia I came across the work of a German artist who grew up in the GDR. Having never previously been exposed to American advertising, Hans-Peter Feldman set about collecting as many images of commodified goods as possible. These consist of anything from lips, to women’s legs, to lampshades. In the final room of his exhibition Feldman had collected and framed as many newspaper front pages of 9/11 as he could find. In a myriad of languages the viewer observes that commonplace image of the collective 21^st century psyche: the twin towers going up in smoke. The viewer of 2010 instinctively gets the impression that this is our realm. There was a silence in that room. Feldman’s work was both a tribute and a declamation of our most precious image distributor: the media. In the static presence of those front pages that said everything and nothing, that were content-less but also pregnant with meaning, I was forced to think about our realm.