Just What Is This Art Of Which You Speak?

Saxophone, by the lovely Laura Hanley

“Art,” Marshall McLuhan once said, “Is anything you can get away with.” Sixty years ago this would have been a very cynical take, but today his maxim is elementary. Given the kind of crazy senseless shit that has passed as art in recent decades, a lot of contemporary art is indeed something that must be gotten away with, unlike the painting above.

Two people who have been particularly adept at getting away in this manner are the married wastrels Christo and Jeanne-Claude. This Bulgarian Boondoggler and his scandalously ugly wife are considered by many to be the preeminent avant-garde artists of our time. Last week, they received critical support from Colorado’s congressional delegation for a proposed 2012 project that would suspend six miles of fabric above the Arkansas River. This project would continue the couple’s tradition of defiling public property with their mind-blowingly ostentatious projects constructed under the guise of fine art. Recall their 2005 project The Gates, in New York City’s Central Park. Over 7,500 vinyl gates lined twenty-three miles of path in a venture that cost them $21 million. At the grand opening, Jeanne-Claude declared in typical haut monde fashion, “Let them eat gates,” in what was the runaway winner for Pompous Statement of the Year.

The charitable benevolence of Christo and Jeanne-Claude on display

Gee, it sure was nice of the Bulgarian Boondoggler and his potato-head spouse to conceive such a grandiose project for us unwashed masses to enjoy. Like the time they wrapped the coast of Little Bay in Sydney with erosion control fabric in 1969; or when they ensconced Berlin’s Reichstag in polypropylene fabric in 1995; or several other wealthy bourgeois endeavors that would be unachievable by artists of moderate means who could nonetheless conceive of such gaudy enterprises. The irony in all of this is that aside from the couple’s initial drawings and the orders they bark to their proletarian laborers during the building of these monstrosities, they don’t do any constructing themselves. They’re like a pair of glorified architects whose projects are both temporary and useless. Christo described his work this way:

“Do you know that I don’t have any artworks that exist? They all go away when they’re finished. Only the preparatory drawings, and collages are left, giving my works an almost legendary character. I think it takes much greater courage to create things to be gone than to create things that will remain.”

Wow. Christo is deep. And I think he just made me appreciate the legendary character of Seattle’s bygone Kingdome—the former home of the Mariners and Seahawks. I’m sure the Kingdome’s architect knew it would come down at some point since nothing lasts forever, so imagine the courage he had to have in order design such an impermanent structure.

Powerful stuff. Of course, I fully admit that the Kingdome was hardly on par with a project such as The Gates. I mean after all, the Kingdome was utilitarian, it had a function. What silliness.

Naturally, Christo and Jeanne-Claude aren’t the only hucksters ever to hit the art world. Recall that, in the 1960s, the art community popped a collective boner over the works of a charlatan from Pennsylvania named Andy Warhol. Warhol, as you know, painted iconic images of Campbell’s Soup cans, Elvis Presley, Marilyn Monroe, and Jackie Kennedy, among other familiar objects as part of the pop art movement. He did this during the advent of the mass media age and at a time when mass production and distribution were being perfected by an increasingly mechanized and soulless society. If the works of Warhol serve as an ironic and damning Marxist indictment of American capitalism and consumer culture, it is only by accident and not by intention, and Warhol himself said as much. By depicting universally recognizable Main Street objects, Warhol vulgarized art, and became what you might call an anti-artist.

Pop art was an extremely reactionary movement. Artistically, it was the nuclear age’s radical answer to abstract expressionism and the no-thingness of Pollock, Still, et al. And as pop art was a direct response to abstract expressionism, it was an indirect response to a general anti-iconographic trend which had emerged in the late nineteenth century. As Richard Brettell has observed, many notable works of modern art—including several impressionist works—appear to be “without subject,” such as Monet’s On the Bank of the Seine at Bettencourt (1868), Cézanne’s Houses near Auvers-sur-l’Oise (1873-4), and Gilpin’s early color photograph, Basket of Peaches (1912). While works such as these do indeed depict some-thing, their “deliberate cultivation of the banal” is virtually tantamount to representing no-thing at all.

Subsequently, anti-iconography was taken much further by the abstract expressionists. While abstract expressionism was extreme almost to the point of revulsion, it made good fodder for a vivid imagination. Furthermore, it was legitimized by its inherently emotional aspect. In the case of the ever-troubled Pollock, for example, he managed to scream from his canvasses so convincingly that it is hard to doubt the authenticity of the emotionally charged nature of his work.

By the 1960s abstract expressionism had morphed into less inspiring forms such as geometric abstraction and its hideous progeny, minimalism. It was around this time that Warhol splashed onto the scene. Whereas abstract expressionism had been figureless and lacking in iconography or signage, pop art was at the extreme opposite end of the spectrum. Very often pop art depicted mass-produced objects or universal symbols, leaving little to the imagination. The awful soup cans in particular obviated the need for any contemplative reverie while viewing them because the objects are so commonplace and presented in identical fashion with that which they portray. Whereas Monet and Cézanne had conveyed the banal by depicting unfamiliar familiarities (such as a house the viewer had not seen before per se, but is nonetheless typical and unremarkable as a house qua house), Warhol conveyed the familiar by depicting the familiar. Thus, while his soup cans might have been artistically redeemable had they been painted in way that deviated meaningfully from their real-world models, their replicative nature makes for an uninspired and mundane work. Herein lies the crucial difference between re-presenting an object, and merely representing it, as Warhol did.

“Am I high or is this a painting of just a bunch of soup cans?”

After pop art came all kinds of other weirdo artwork, such as Andres Serrano’s Piss Christ (1987), which is a photo of a plastic Christ on a crucifix in a glass of the artist’s urine. Now, as a godless heathen, I find Piss Christ to be a first rate work of blasphemy. However, its value as a work of art depends almost entirely on its shock value because as far as I can tell, Serrano didn’t have to put a lot of effort into this one. Beyond shock, there is nothing to feel when viewing this work. A far more aesthetically meritorious work would have been a painting or sculpture showing Peter giving Jesus a blowjob. In this case, the work would artistically be more valuable and historically accurate, and would embody the blasphemous shock value that comes with portraying an apostle giving his messiah a hummer. (Pun intended.) There it is, art community. I just wrote a huge check. All you have to do is cash it.

At this point I cannot help but ask, “What will they think of next?” It’s a scary question, but an inevitable one. I do not mean to imply that the artwork of our day is junk, but it seems a goodly number of people are quite ready to accept all sorts of strange art as great art simply because it is unusual. But just because a work ventures into uncharted territory does not mean it carries an inherent artistic value. Value resides in a work’s aesthetic qualities and its engageability. Indeed, the alien is not necessarily artistic, and the artistic need not always be alien.

-Max