by Charles Greene
One of life’s chief pleasures is the possibility that at any given moment something could come along and completely sweep us off of our feet, that some new creation, idea, or event can have such impact that it reshapes the world around us, and changes the way in which we understand our world. Such happenings are called revolutions, and they are the fuel that drives the engine of life. Revolutionary new products, revolutionary ideas, revolutionary discoveries, the Revolutionary War – these are the things that make the world go round. Movement is inherent in the very name: Revolution, an instance of revolving, that turning and churning, which makes things go. Love is a revolution. Revolutions are that which engender sudden and pervasive change, they shift paradigms, topple regimes – political, cultural, and personal – they are what we nowadays refer to as game changers.
Think of some of history’s great game changers; fire, the wheel, the written language, the Gutenberg press, the iPod, or the forward pass. Or, great revolutionaries like Dr. King, Gahndi, Joan d’ Arc, Madame Curie, Newton, Martin Luther, or Jesus. An endless list of revolutions and revolutionaries define and shape the evolution of the human species. In fact, revolutions set the conditions for our slower, more steady and permanent growth and change.
When philosopher-cum-art critic Arthur Danto declared the end of art over a quarter of a century ago, he was (intentionally or unintentionally) signaling the close of revolutionary possibilities in art. It is hard to identify anything approximating a true revolution in art since Pop, Conceptualism, Minimalism, and Happenings exploded the last artistic canon of Abstract Expressionism in the early 1960s. To be certain, many, many great works of art have been created since Danto’s 1984 declaration, but I can think of nothing that has shifted paradigms, or engendered a sudden or pervasive change in how we understand art or in how art is produced. There have been no game changers.
Going as far back as we can access in the history (and prehistory) of the human project, countless revolutions in art can be identified. The Greek contrapposto revolutionized the way the sculpted human figure stood, replacing the stiff statuary form of the ancient Egyptians and early Greeks with a figure so natural it seemed made of muscle and sinew instead of stone. Giotto’s introduction of dimensionality in painting in the fourteenth century (far ahead of its time) would inspire the formal introduction of one-point perspective in renaissance art, a practice that exploded the flat two-dimensional canvas open into a three-dimensional trompe l’oeil that would become the standard of great art for the next four centuries. Renaissance perspective was the Avatar of its day – a true visual revolution and a game changer (though it remains to be seen if Avatar can be even half the game changer in film that perspective was to painting).
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Revolutions make ruins of history upon which we build today’s mansions of progress. Like life itself, the world of art is built upon the shoulders of revolutions and revolutionaries; Polikleitos’s contrapposto, Giotto’s introduction of depth and volume in the painted form, da Vinci and his willingness to slice into the human body to discover the soul of the underlying structure, Edouard Manet, who unwittingly declared non serviam when he challenged the dogma of the Beaux Arts tradition by re-flattening the picture plane to better reflect the hurry-scurry nature of the modernizing world (and as a consequence inspiring an entire generation of impressionists) and Marcel Duchamp, who rebelled with eyes wide open, battering ram (or bicycle wheel) in hand, to call into question the very idea of art. These revolutions and revolutionaries, among dozens of others, provide the sum and substance of Western art. They are the innovators and innovations that, when manifested in action and matter, swept the world of viewers and producers of great art off of their feet. They were exciting and energizing, and they had real social impact.
It is an interesting fact that the first great revolution in Western art – the recognition of beauty or aesthetic as an integral element to be singled out for praise and worship – can be juxtaposed against the last great revolution in art: The displacement of beauty as an integral element to the work of art. Though it is true that beauty has been part and parcel of the created object going as far back as those inexplicably beautiful paintings of our earliest ancestors found in the caves of Lascaux and Altamira. It was during the period of the Classical Greeks that an open awareness of beauty as worthy of worship in its own right was forcefully and explicitly advanced. The writings of Homer and the Greek poets attest to the power and prestige of the beautiful. Philosophers Aristotle and Plato wrote in-depth on the subject – Aristotle in appreciation, Plato in warning. It was the age of the European renaissance that restored beauty to its position of preeminence in art, after its temporary exile (at least in theory) from the medieval canon of religious image making. The renaissance so firmly entrenched the cult of beauty into Western art that it was unimaginable that beauty could ever be dislodged from its position at the apex of art. Yet, here we are in the twenty-first century where beauty has now, for more than half a century, been demoted to the status of non-necessary embellishment, a superficial gloss obscuring the deeper and more important element of concept.
However, beauty’s fall from eminence was not the real revolutionary act, but only the corollary result of that act. The real revolutionary act was the elevation of concept to the position of artistic preeminence. As concept superseded beauty as the distinguishing element of art, the potential for any-thing to be a work of art replaced the prerequisite of the thing made beautifully, and it is that revolution which has closed the door to all other revolutions. When the door is flung open wide for everything to become art, everything becomes art. Eventually we will not be able to establish any delimiting criteria to distinguish art from stuff.
Perhaps, this is as it should be. Art rose to distinction from within the vast array of stuff that people made; stone tools, idols and figurines for worship, dwellings in which to find shelter, paintings to appease or petition gods, combs, battle arms, wares for storage and food preparation, an endless list of stuff that was (and is still) made. We chose from that vast number those particular things to cordon off and elevate to a higher aesthetic status the things we came to call art. The thing made beautifully simply became the beautiful, and the beautiful disconnected from the purpose of its thing-ness became an object of contemplation. And contemplation begat philosophizing, which in its turn begat conceptualization, and suddenly beauty, the mother of art, grew old and was put into a rest home, too old-fashioned and senile to represent art in the post-modern age of that most conceptual new realm of deconstruction. Beauty lost its starring role and its star status, and was thence relegated to the commercial realm to sell us stuff – all those things that were not art. Beauty was still pretty to look at, had aged quite well in fact, but that was no longer relevant in a post-modern world. It was not edgy enough. But lost in all of the edgy conceptualism of the post-modern was the fact that it was during beauty’s reign atop the art world that art made the most noise. It was while art was still beautiful that art sparked revolutions. The best that it can do now is to create the occasional spectacle.
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Today there seems to be no room for a revolution in art. What more is there to do? What unexplored possibilities still exist? And what else is there to rebel against? Every so-called rebellion seems to loop back to the resurrection of earlier styles and ideas. We see this in movements like Classical Realism, which harks back to Classical Greek and renaissance figurative styling, Realism, and Impressionism. Classical Realism rebels against the conceptual, non-figurative, and non-aesthetic turn that art has taken since the mid-twentieth century. But such rebellions hardly amount to anything revolutionary since they neither create something that is new, nor provoke significant social change. There are no more game changers. And I fear there may be no more to come.
If we truly have reached the end of art as Danto asserts, and there really is no room for another revolution in the visual arts, then precisely what does that mean? What does that mean for the stuff that is still being produced, bought, sold, and critiqued in the name of art? I am sitting here, staring at a series of paintings in my local coffee shop, rectangular canvases covered in various mixtures and applications of colors in oils, works clearly influenced by or imitations of those Abstract Expressionist paintings of the 1950s and 1960s. They are decent works for what they are – explorations of paint and canvas as paint and canvas, following the art-philosophical edict of the critical giant Clement Greenberg – but they are hardly revolutionary. At this point in the “history” of art they are scarcely interesting even to the art novice. What am I to make of this art? At the time that Jackson Pollock, Mark Rothko, Arshile Gorky, and Robert Motherwell were turning out this style of work it was revolutionary, both within and without the art world. They made paintings that first challenged, and then dominated, becoming the standard, and defining the boundaries of excellence in the high arts. Abstract Expressionism, once a visual statement of the new American dominance on the world stage, and the artistic exemplar of machismo, has now, through the softening familiarity of time and its derivative nature become bland (though sometimes pretty) wall hangings to decorate one’s apartment or corporate office. It is now safe, neutral, and conservative.
It’s hard to imagine any art that doesn’t seem derivative in someway. Everything seems to be a recycling of the past, and on those rare occasions where someone does produce something that is fresh or new, it also seems to be ridiculous, affected, or just plain offensive (see the story of Guillermo Vargas and his starving dog exhibition).
Perhaps in the end art will simply merge back into the broader practices of image and object making from whence it emerged. If author Larry Shiner (The Invention of Art: A Cultural History) is correct, and the idea of art is the result of an eighteenth century severance of the practical aspects of object and image making from it’s more purely aesthetic component, then perhaps as the ability of art to erupt into revolution diminishes to the point of entropic equilibrium, it will eventually reintegrate itself into life in such a way that we no longer make the distinction between fine art and commercial art, or crafts, or stuff. There is evidence that this reintegration is already happening as high-end art museums are beginning to display, both as special exhibitions as well as permanent collection items, images and objects from everyday life. We already have bricks and beds and urinals and vacuum cleaners populating some of the best known contemporary museums in the world. On a visit to the Neues Museum in Nuremberg, Germany in 2002 (a decidedly contemporary museum) I saw in the very large window display, which faced out to the street, the body of Volkswagon Beetle hanging as a work of art. Inside there were a number of household appliances and furnishings spanning the 1960s to the new millennium exhibited, including the first generation of the iMac – that colorful bubble of self-contained personal computing genius. The reintegration of art into the world of stuff is well on its way via the rebranding of stuff as art.
So the question now is can we ever go back home? Is it possible for art to recover its past eminence? And is it possible for us to ever recover art? As art slips slowly into the abyss of a Dada dream, reabsorbed into the vast and infinite world of stuff, can art ever again be reinvented? That would be the next great revolution in art.