Saturday, September 25, 2010

The death of Fluxus was the death of art: a perspective on the decadence of contemporary art

The world of art today is full of things that are silly, trivial, random, easy to do. An artist wanders round a gallery wearing an animal suit (Mark Wallinger). Richard Long walked through Scottish countryside, and the Scottish National Gallery of Modern Art bought his snapshots. Michael Landy destroyed everything he owned (not easy psychologically, but not exactly requiring skill). Banksy stencils images onto the walls of buildings and people try and steal or sell the wall. Duchamp defaced postcards but the Chapman brothers defaced very expensive Goya etchings (earlier Robert Rauchenberg erased a drawing by Willem de Kooning, but he told de Kooning about it). More complex artworks are typically produced by the artist creating a list of instructions and passing them on to a fabricator. And yet the artist claims the product as something original to be sold for huge amounts of money.

Although this style of art, requiring minimal effort, goes back to the early 20th century, in the beginning it was the creation of skilled artist-theorist-provocateurs who had already established a reputation in other areas (e.g. Duchamp and Malevich begun as more conventional painters), and it did not become a mainstream activity until the early 1960s. The first art movement to really specialise in it was Fluxus, which had roots in the late 50s avant-garde music scene but flourished in the 60s.

Fluxus composers produced musical pieces involving one note, or silence, or the smashing of a violin, or nothing but the composer and orchestra wrapping baton and instruments in brown paper. They extended this to produce scores that could be applied in other areas of life. Ken Friedman instructed "Play baseball with a fruit" or "Someone sneezes. A year later, send a postcard reading, 'Gesundheit!'" Yoko Ono suggested, "Hit a wall with your head." Larry Miller said, "Chew a nice piece of notebook or drawing paper".

Many of these things would be unexceptional if done by a modern artist, perhaps on a film which they would be commissioned to produce or would sell to a gallery. But the key for Fluxus (and for related phenomena like Cornelius Cardew's Scratch Orchestra) was not to create art works that had value and could be exhibited in themselves, but the opposite. They wanted to provide an artistic democracy, things that everyone could do, and which therefore could not be sold or exhibited, because why would you pay to buy or go to see something you could make or do yourself?

A Fluxus manifesto explained the contrast:
ART

To justify artist's professional, parasitic and elite status in society, he must demonstrate artist's indispensability and exclusiveness, He must demonstrate the dependability of audience upon him, He must demonstrate that no one but the artist can do art.

Therefore, art must appear to be complex, pretentious, profound, serious, intellectual, inspired, skillfull, significant, theatrical.

It must appear to be valuable as commodity so as to provide the artist with an income.

To raise its value (artist's income and patron's profit), art is made to appear rare, limited in quantity and therefore obtainable and accessible only to the social elite and institutions.

FLUXUS ART-AMUSEMENT

To establish artist's non-professional status in society, he must demonstarte artist's dispensability and inclusiveness, he must demonstrate the selfsufficiency of the audience, he must demonstrate that anything can be art and anyone can do it.

Therefore, art-amusement must be simple, amusing, unpretentious, concerned with insignificances, require no skill or countless rehearsals, have no commodity or institutional value.

The value of art-amusement must be lowered by making it unlimited, massproduced, obtainable by all and eventually produced by all.

Fluxus art-amusement is the rear-guard without any pretention or urge to participate in the competition of "one-upmanship" with the avant-garde. It strives for the monostructural and nontheatrical qualities of a simple natural event, a game or gag. It is the fusion of Spike Jones, Vaudeville, gag, children’s games and Duchamp.
Fluxus was intended to be art that would not be part of the art world (today you can pay a fair bit of money for one of their nice little boxes, but nothing like a Banksy.)

One of Mieko Shiomi's scores did say:
Air Event
Inflate a small rubber balloon in one deep breath and sign your name on the surface of the balloon.
(this is your lung)
You can buy the lungs of other performers at an auction.
But it is unclear what prices were paid, if ever an auction occurred. The main criticism of Fluxus is that often one doubts that the actions were ever performed.

Despite the democratic ideals, Fluxus members went on to become stars. John Cage became an acclaimed composer and his works works became increasingly conventional. Joseph Beuys was a charismatic public speaker with a limitless skill for self-mythologising (turning a minor plane crash into heroic works in felt and lard). Yoko Ono married a Beatle and tried to use their celebrity to end war. George Maciunas ruled the movement like a little dictator, excommunicating those who disagreed with him.

Today we have a situation where "anything can be art". Many viewers feel "anyone can do it", but only a small number of people are allowed to do it in galleries and profit from it. Perhaps Fluxus only existed because of the publicity skills and celebrity status of its founders. Perhaps it is impossible to have a democratic art. But insofar as contemporary art draws on Fluxus's concepts of art works while redirecting them in entirely opposite directions of elitism and selfishness (the artist's greed), they have inverted the original ideas of Fluxus and created an art of dubious theoretical basis that naturally invokes resentment and contempt in audiences who know that not only could they create such works, they should be creating them. Fluxus dreamed of destroying the importance of art, but this only succeeded in the public mind, not in the auction house.

Friday, September 24, 2010

The art world's greatest printer's error

One of the most famous essays in the philosophy of art of the last 100 years was Arthur C Danto's The Artworld (The Journal of Philosophy, Vol. 61, No. 19, [Oct. 15, 1964], pp 571-584.) He advanced the groundbreaking but now commonplace idea that we know something is art not by some innate property of an artwork, but because the art world (critics, academics, curators, artists, dealers) tells us it is art:
To see something as art requires something the eye cannot descry - an atmosphere of artistic theory, a knowledge of the history of art: an artworld.
This is a much-quoted passage. However, it appears that many people do not know the meaning of the word "descry" ("to catch sight of, find out, discover" - Merriam-Webster) or else it is not in their spell-checker, and time and time again in even the most scholarly publications the sentence is given as "something the eye cannot decry".

This has an entirely different meaning: Danto means to say there is something in art that makes it art which cannot be discerned just by looking at it; the quote seems to say there is something in an artwork that no eye can disparage. This error makes Danto appear to assert the supremacy of the visual, something he is in fact denying.

"Descry" may be a slightly obscure word, but it was beloved by the Romantics: we find in used repeatedly by Coleridge, in Christabel
I went and peered, and could descry
No cause for her distressful cry;
The Garden of Boccaccio
Thanks, gentle artist! now I can descry
Thy fair creation with a mastering eye
and elsewhere. Frank Kermode was able to quote it correctly in the 1960s, but many people up to the present day have propagated this error, suggesting a complete failure to understand Danto:
  • Gerald L. Bruns, Tragic thoughts at the end of philosophy, Northwestern UP, 1999
  • Simon Frith, Performing rites: on the value of popular music, Harvard UP, 1998
  • Tony Godfrey, Conceptual Art, Phaedon, 1998
  • Daniel Alan Herwitz and Michael Kelly (eds), Action, art, history: engagements with Arthur C. Danto, Columbia UP, 2007
  • James W Manns, Aesthetics, ME Sharpe, 1998
  • Joseph Margolis, Interpretation radical but not unruly: the new puzzle of the arts and history, University of California Press, 1995
  • James O. Young, Aesthetics: critical concepts in philosophy, McGraw Hill, 2005
  • The Critical review, Issue 41, University of Melbourne, 2001
You can find many more on your bookshelf or Google Books.

In fact the gravest fault does not lie with the critics mentioned above: it was even misspelt in the original printing of the article in The Journal of Philosophy, and in reprints such as Joseph Margolis (ed), Philosophy Looks at the Arts: Contemporary Readings in Aesthetics, third ed, 1987, and Stephen David Ross, Art and its significance: an anthology of aesthetic theory, SUNY Press, 1994. (There is further discussion, not online, in Joseph Margolis, "Farewell to Danto and Goodman", British Journal of Aesthetics (1998) 38 (4): 353-374. doi: 10.1093/bjaesthetics/38.4.353 . Margolis had printed the incorrect version at least twice by this point.)

Tuesday, September 14, 2010

Great Forgotten Albums 2: Mecca Normal's "The Observer" (Kill Rock Stars; 2006)

A concept album about online dating written by a feminist experimental semi-riot-grrl art-rock band with no drummer, this might sound a really bad idea or a really good one. Your judgement may be influenced by whether you're a deadbeat man or a cynical and single woman.

Mecca Normal was formed in 1984 in Vancouver by vocalist Jean Smith and guitarist David Lester. Smith has also had a few novels published by small presses, and both she and Lester are visual artists. Their early recordings had an influence both on riot grrl and on the Olympia, Washington twee scene centred around Calvin Johnson. They are frequently of low sonic quality, and make little attempt at writing songs - it's more like someone thinking aloud while someone else tunes up their guitar. This makes The Observer stand out with its mix of catchy pop songs and epic spoken word tracks.

The album starts as fairly conventional alt-rock. "I'm Not Into Being The Woman You're With While You're Looking For The Woman You Want" is self-explanatory, about a man who's looking for "a like-minded woman" but apparently hasn't succeeded. It's an upbeat and catchy opener, with constantly shifting guitars, by turns crunchy and melodic, and succinct summings up of the dating game like the title and: "He says he hasn't found what he's looking for yet. After he's met me."

And there are plenty more failures to meet like-minded people. In "Attraction Is Ephemeral" she describes her time with a seductive and wealthy man, a successful architect: "He says, I love a woman who adorns herself with jewellery. I like a woman who has variation in her wardrobe. ... He suggests I visit a website of Austrian designed underwear. It's expensive but it's beautiful, he says. I stand there by the stove in my slutty outfit the total of which probably cost me $15 including my $1 panties."

She contrasts his worldly sophistication with her own skill at finding discount vegetables: "I don't buy crackers and cheese and pickles and cookies because they're too expensive, and I know the prices of almost everything in the little shops, and if oranges are 50 cents a pound here and 49 cents a pound across the street I will cross the street to save whatever it is, a pound, on my oranges, and brag about it." "He says he'll bring his grand piano out of storage", and all the time she's wondering if they've really connected or if everything he says is "just another line".

"Attraction Is Ephemeral" also introduces sex. "I lie there under him. 230 lb. 'Am I crushing you?' he says. 'Sort of,' I say." Maybe that's why she seems so underwhelmed. "I'll Call You" starts "I want cold impersonal sex during which I'll pretend I'm with someone else." For all the cynicism of its what-people-are-really-thinking lyrics, it's one of the songs you could more easily imagine being played on the radio, along with "To Avoid Pain" with its "Hey hey" refrain.

Some of the later tracks are weaker and break the theme. "The Caribou and the Oil Pipeline" is worthy and dull environmentalism. "The Message" has the rawness and tunelessness of the band's earlier material.

"1922" isn't about dating but is much better: Smith is reflective, outwardly nostalgic but inwardly sad, with lyrical guitars from Lester. "Nothing's automatic, nothing's precise", she says, describing old pictures, thinking about the simple life: "The museums are for men. We know this. Men need history. We need it. We are men. We need to remind ourselves of this." It's funny but always with a harshness in her voice, sometimes barely hidden, sometimes out front, and that links it with the rest of the album.

The album's centrepiece is the twelve-and-three-quarter minute long "Fallen Skier". Over an endlessly repeating riff she describes a first date with a man who arouses both pity and contempt in her, though nothing like love. As you do on a first date, they swap life stories, and she offers a detailed biography of him, a life that never quite took off. He's a "fallen skier, waiter, party guy" - a man aged 47, who had dropped out of school to be a ski bum, later waiting tables at a Greek restaurant "where the staff were encouraged to drink half price on arriving for work", an addict, and is now at college, planning to backpack around Europe. "I don't think he realises it yet but his life has gotten away from him."

She also enumerates his reactions to her, and hers to him, in a series of quotable lines. "No one moves to skid row to get clean." "Will i be playing the part of the woman helping him get his life on track?" "He asks me about this music of mine, is it ever all-out punk? ... I stand a middle-aged woman in a fantastically subtle silk jacket all the way from Japan, Hush Puppies, curly hair flowing in the wind, and this guy's fretting over the possibility that I'm actually Henry Rollins." All in her fantastic delivery, turning on a dime from dry and throwaway, to indignant or tragic.

Time and again she contrasts her own intellectual and creative life with the poverty of his existence: "Carefully I ask if he does anything he might call creative. ... He thinks for a minute and says he doesn't make music or paint if that's what I mean but he does watch TV. Free cable ... I can only half think about being so grey and dispassionate to call watching TV creative."

Although harsh, her lyricism does something to justify this. "Standing on the pier half-watching the sun go down. A cloud of mist is giving great definition to the trees which should have been flat and invisible. I'm thinking of saying something about how the mist is making things clear, but I decide to keep that thought to myself."

How listeners respond to the record will depend heavily on what they make of Smith. She is frequently condescending, particularly in "Fallen Skier", and when she discusses her own faults it is often to boast about them: meanness becomes frugality. But the intensity of her examinating gaze, the brilliance of her lyrics makes up for this. She comprehensively fails to be the observer; like everyone who is dating, sifting through the deadbeats to find a partner, she is the judge.