Link
to the final part
An Account of Ethics and Aesthetics in Contemporary
Art Practice : Part 2
Follow links for other parts Link back to Part 1 or move on to Part 3
I do not propose that ethics need be at the forefront of every artist's practice necessarily. However, I do argue that a complete abrogation of an ethical awareness, or the establishment of an ethical vacuum, is characteristic of the imaginatively "closed" approach, evident in some of the 'yBa's work, and that this has political implications. What is revealed through attention to ethics is the subtle sense in which an ethical dimension can be placed at the heart of effective aesthetic activity; conversely the lack of it renders work dull and self regarding. This notion goes back at least to Kant, who gave it systematic treatment in theCritique of Judgement, concluding that "the beautiful is the symbol of the morally good". It should be added that Kant understands the symbolic as a mode of the intuitive and for my purposes, aesthetic judgement therefore requires imaginative faculties. It is as if the categories of the ethical and the aesthetic operate in a way that enrich each other and highlight the effect of the other's function. Herbert Marcuse takes up this argument, especially in The Aesthetic Dimension , but I believe that some of his views on the role of aesthetic activity are important in understanding how the ethical informs the imagination (see below).
It is important to consider the conditions in which "closed" work can operate so successfully. The crucial factor, other than the commercial art world and power structures and product relations previously referred to, is the impress of modernity. Baudelaire clarifies the difference between the modern and modernity in the following way "modernity is the transient, the fleeting, the contingent, it is one half of art, the other being the eternal and the immovable." It is important to note that modernity for Baudelaire is not only a relationship to the present, it is a deeper integration of the current with historical and philosophical understanding, that problematises our relationship with both art and the world around us.
It is here that I see the some of the work represented in exhibitions
like 'Minky Manky' or 'Some Went Mad' and recent Bank shows like "Cocaine
Orgasm", as lacking the second important characteristic of modernity,
which is that there should be some interrogation of the languages of
popular culture which characterise their practice. Foucault, in his essay
"What is Enlightenment?" amplifies this aspect of Baudelaire's
thought, "for the attitude of modernity, the high value of the
present is indissociable from a desperate eagerness to imagine it, to
imagine it otherwise than it is, and to transform it not by destroying it
but by grasping in it what it is ".
This "eagerness to imagine" is clearly an aspect of "the
space of the imagination" which I touched on earlier. The importance
of transforming the "value of the present" is at the centre of
my criticism of the irony and detachment that characterises the work
without an ethical dimension. Clearly much of the current work is very
concerned with the languages of popular culture and the need to be of the
current (modern) , but without a wider political or philosophical
awareness this becomes self-conscious and redundant. In much of the
response to the work of "the young British artists" there is a
clear detemination to define the modern and current in an
anti-intellectual position. This operates in many ways, but generally
amounts to a disdain for forms of critical practice, often sidelining it
as old fashioned or earnest or marginalising it.
An example of this is found in John Robert's lecture and article "Mad For It " ("everything "magazine , Spring 1996,) which clearly expresses these attitudes in his hostile comments on the Whitney Programme, a visual arts programme in New York, which has a history of issue-based arts practice. In a further article "Notes on 90's Art" in Art Monthly (October,1996), he continues this theme by claiming "punk, travellers, ecological critique and the new dance -based musics" as part of a new popular oppositional culture. As the yBa culture becomes more incorporated into mainstream gallery programmes and private collections, it is hard to recognise the work as part of any oppositional practice, particularly when the artists themselves are so resolute about claiming their political neutrality and their studied detachment from any socially located meaning, always preferring a position of ironic individualism.
There a well known comment of Sartre's that irony is the last refuge of the bourgeoisie. The notion that an artist could be engaged, that is both politically committed (to social change) and no less an artist, was commonplace in the thirties and forties. It is a notion that has little following in the cool climate of ironic detached work emerging as an aspect of postmodernism. That is not to say that some of the main theorists of the post-modern are not politically committed. Foucault is one example who located his politically activity, influenced as he was intellectually by Nietzche rather than Marx, in specific local campaigns and libertarian causes. Politically active theorists or artists in the current climate are rare.
The term 'critical' has a long history as signifying an oppositional stance. Originally perhaps stemming from Kantian philosophy, in its attempt to found rational and scientific knowledge, as well as correct ethical and aesthetic thinking, and then for a while implying left-wing or Marxist thinking, it now is a term that denotes a wide range of theoretical and aesthetic positions. For a while Kantian ideas have appeared to represent the ideology of a Eurocentric and paternalist Enlightenment. However Kant's ideas in the aesthetic field are now receiving fresh consideration, for example, in Jean-Francois Lyotard's book, Lessons on the Analytic and the Sublime. This is part of a broader attempt to locate an ethical position within post modernist culture and practice such as in the writings of Emmanuel Levinas. These implications for contemporary practice, especially in relation to the sublime, are beginning to be discussed in the art press (see Paul Crowther"The Postmodern Sublime; Installation and Assemblage Art" Art and Design Jan-Feb 1995 .) The sublime here is discussed in relation to the absence of a fixed centre or meaning, described by Crowther as "ex-centric"; a consequence of this is that the whole edifice of modern media and culture is seen as being a source of the sublime. Because this makes aesthetic so much a part of everyday life, it generates on the one hand a popularist approach, but on the other a relativism that embraces commercialism unreservedly. This is made clear by statements of Damien Hirst (Damien Hirst Interview with David Bowie Modern Painters June 1996.)
Ideas linking the world of the consumer with the production of art was clearly evident in the development of Pop art in the 1960's, which many of the supporters of yBa are so eager to claim as their artistic precursors as Neville Wakefield and Richard Flood argued in the catalouge of the "Brilliant" show. However, in "Pop Art , the critical dialogue" Barbara Rose and Donald Kuspit helpfully analyse some of the Pop art legacy. Rose points to the disingenuousness of Pop artists in acting as if they are naive participants in popular culture, while actually being highly educated performers. While Kuspit points to the reification of popular culture as somehow being an honest manifestation of culture;
"Fine art and popular culture have the same underlying logic: they are superstructures simultaneously disguising the real workings of the world they originate in workings that show it is not the best of all possible worlds and generating allegiance to it. ...In a sense, the discovery of their mutuality, and thus ability to assimilate each other, is a way of the use of the one by the other to increase the influence of both.... Pop realism keeps the spectator from questioning media cliche images (and) encourages us to view this cliche image as a kind of dream realisation or self- fulfilling prophecy about the actual, given world: the way it looks on the the media is the way it was meant to look, for that is the way it truly is . Pop art in effect encourages the assumption that the world as known through the mass media fatalistically confirms the actual world. The media seem to say: this is the world, make the best of it, for it cannot be changed for it since it has already happened . It can only be made newsworthy and glamorous- only celebrated , for better or worse. "
Kuspit's point, made in relation to the use of mass media, pornography and advertising by Pop artists in the 60s has relevance in the 'yBa' enterprise where the embrace of the fatalistically commercial is just as apparent.
Many writers involved in the post-modern world deal in a flip and ironic way with both theory and criticism, for example, Jean Baudrillard or the London-based critic and reviewer, Sarah Kent, so that the line between serious theory and the entertainment industry are blurred. I would define the ironic as a refusal to state a sincere political or ethical stance, or if in stating a stance, to continually undermine this, or to change it as suits. It is the opposite of what used to be called 'engaged' or 'committed' or 'sincere'. I have a suspicion, which I hope to explore, that there a sense in which it is possible to speak about an artists practice as being and having an ethical position; in these terms it would be possible to look at Jeff Koons as practising his art with cynicism.
Sarah Lucas' work has received considerable critical attention,
featuring in Shark Infested Waters, the Saatchi collection
exhibition and catalogue of 1994, and most recently a major exhibition at
Museum Boymans van Beuningen in Rotterdam, 1996. As an example of her work
I want to explore the collage "Great Dates" 1992 (Saatch
Collection). Sarah Lucas uses her own image, eating a banana collaged
beside newspaper extracts featuring everyday tabloid sex - and - schlock
stories. In addition cards advertising prostitution services and sexually
explicit photographs are collaged onto the canvas and areas of newspaper
painted in bright colour. Writing of this piece, Lucas says:-
"With only minor adjustments, a provocative image can become
confrontational... I don't take pornography as my subject, I take the
acceptable stuff available at 25p, common currency rather than the deviant
and the marginal."
My view of this work and her engagement with issues of gender and sexuality is that it is precisely the minimalism of her interventions in these areas of debate that ultimately makes the work become redundant as effective engagement. In the catalogue for Shark Infested Waters, Sarah Kent writes of Lucas as "an aesthetic terrorist, pillaging mainstream culture. In doing so she acts as a mirror, monitoring the sexism and misogyny routinely found there."
In this work I see the conflation of the languages used in tabloid newspapers and the commercial possibilities of the sex industry becoming an example of the product relations that Benjamin spoke of. Crucially Lucas does not invest these languages or their treatment of the female body with any significant critical intent. To reproduce the tabloid extracts on a canvas, with her own image, does not provide an adequate reading of these languages that Lucas professes to find problematic. The inclusion of Lucas's own photograph of herself eating a banana makes reference to the role of women in pornographic imagery, however, it does not undermine or even disrupt the fragments of sexually explicit material positioning women as servicing male desire which surround her image. If anything it becomes a trite or teasing provocation. A photograph of the rapist Peter Sutcliffe is juxtaposed with imagery of newspaper 'page 3' girls (topless models) and sports stars. It is hard not to infer that Lucas does not have a coherent theme or concern. The use of the forms of popular culture is unmediated here into a fine art context with unchallenging result.
In "Eros and Civilisation" Marcuse writes:
"Under the predominance of rationalism, the cognitive function of
sensuousness has been constantly minimised. In line with the repressive
concept of reason . . . . . sensuousness as the "lower" and even
the "lowest" faculty furnished at best the mere stuff, the raw
material for cognition, to be organised by the higher faculties of the
intellect." (pp 180-81)
This helps make sense of my criticism of Sarah Lucas's work. The use of sensation, in particular in making reference to gender and sexuality is overt, in a way that for me closes down readings of the work, denying an open reading. If one looks at pieces like "Receptacle of Lurid Things" of 1991 or say some of the phallic work the impact on one's senses is limited. They have a quality of sensation unmediated by engagement or empathy. The spectacle they present is one of a deadening affect. Marcuse would call this "unpleasure", echoing Kant. The sensuous should inform our sensation of a work of art or else the concerns of the work remain alienated, closing possible readings and inviting only a self reflecting irony.
The uses of photography and video by Sam Taylor-Wood are more sophisticated than much of Lucas' but still, to me, seem reliant on a knowing sense of self-detachment from the work and as such towards the viewer. The ambiguity of meaning ultimately becomes dissatisfying and easily passed over. "Wracked", 1996 Taylor-Wood's photographic reconstruction of the Last Supper from a Baroque painting relies on our identification of the apostles as the artist's friends , as members of the 'yBa' gang and London art scene crew. If we don't know this, or even if we do but don't care for the game, the set-up becomes uninteresting, insular. Descriptions of the work (for example the British Council exhibition in Rome 1995) make much of the high art and banality meshed together in this work.
The recent collaboration between Taylor-Woods and Bookworks, a London-based artists book organisation, in the production of "Unhinged" is similarly redundant in establishing connection or our contact with the loose theme of two adults, a young woman and older man as they are shown on and off a film set. The concertina format of the book unfolds to show us these photographic and video extracts from a narrative, but the combination of the partiality of the selection , the absence of text and the banality of the imagery leaves us detached and alienated, passive spectators, unengaged and untouched.
The accompanying press release from Bookworks describes how the "denial of a sequential format excludes the reader from the action and from interpreting the images in one particular way". One starts to feel an all-enveloping banality to the writing accruing on Taylor-Woods work. It seems that more gets written about the absence of purpose and the significance of emptiness in the work than can be supported by the body of work in question.
In connection with this work, I believe that Marcuse's recommendation on the role of the sensuous and our engagement with feeling is crucial for artists to hold and to envision in work. It is integral in this writing to think about work that has a physicality, a sensuousness that feels and sweats, cries and caresses. I find the quality of irony in much current work leads to an alienated experience both for artist and viewer. The work is ironic to the extent that we are not sure what the intention of the artist is, and that they do not care to be clear about this, either to themselves or to their audience.
I now want to consider further ideas of Herbert Marcuse in The
Aesthetic Dimension (and also as discussed by Carol Becker in The
Subversive Imagination: Artists Society and Social Responsibilty which
she edits). Becker writes:
"For Marcuse, art is a location - a designated imaginative space
where freedom is experienced... at times a physical entity, a site .. but
it is also a psychic location -a place in the mind where one allows for a
recombination of experience, a suspension of the rules that govern daily
life, a denial of gravity.... For Marcuse , hope lies in the particularly
human ability to envision what does not exist and to give that imaginary
dimension shape."
The place of the imagination is where we envision change and
possibility. Becker expresses the concern, shared by Marcuse that "political
art" can be limiting in its audience or its vision and asks us to
think more broadly about the circumstances in which the world of the
imagination is a liberating place. She sees the imagination within a
political context by enabling us to take action to change circumstances.
"For Marcuse . . . . Art presents the possibility of a fulfillment,
which only a transformed society could offer. It is a reminder of what a
truly integrated experience of oneself in society might be, a remembrance
of gratification, a sense of purpose beyond alienation."
She continues by discussing how art can allow for this sense of possibility but need not be literal or documentary. She points to a place for eliciting emotion in artwork, where reference to the unspeakable or buried (viz the abject category of Kristeva) can be made. Clearly, as Becker recognises this is a utopian project, and at times apparently romantic and liberal humanist rather than necessarily Marxist in its terms. It is in art's estrangement, in the sense of an alternative transformed and transported reality, a transcendental art removed from "ordinary life" that Marcuse sees the potential for change.
Carol Becker (writing in 1994) comments on how little discussion there has been about what constitutes politically engaged work. She cites lack of metaphor and an overliteral portrayal of a miserable reality as inadequate artistic responses in political art and I would say in art generally. This clearly applies to the work of Sarah Lucas where a style is presented as a miserable reality, which is in turn interpreted as a valid political intervention, whilst remaining in my view devoid of content. I could point to many other examples, eg Jake and Dinos Chapman's work exhibited in 1995 at the London ICA as work concerned with the scatological, the pornographic and the violent which is equally repressive of our sensation and presented in a way that provides little space for engagement or our response. Rather, we are assaulted by the work.
How can it be possible to have art work that could deal with a range of
human experience and a sense of possibilty that does not become
sentimental or nostalgic? To quote Marcuse again:
"The discipline of aesthetics installs the order of sensuousness as
against the order of reason. Introduced into the philosophy of culture,
this notion aims at a liberation of the senses, which, far from destroying
civilisation, would give it a firmer basis and would greatly increase its
potentialities.'
So, sensuous qualities are a necessary, but insufficient condition for
an ethical practice. Here I'd like to consider the writings of Emmanuel
Levinas (1906-95) , a Jewish philosopher, whose belief in our obligation
to each other led him to posit a sense of ethical responsibility to each
other, especially in the recognition of difference and the other, as
opposed to other philosophers who have held as central the idea of the
self explored in isolation. Levinas, in his essay "Time and the Other"
1946-7, writes of the role of suffering as entailing
"the impossibility of detaching oneself from the instant of
existence... In suffering there is an absence of all refuge. It is the
fact of being directly exposed to being. It is made up of the
impossibility of fleeing and retreating. The whole acuity of suffering
lies in this impossibility of retreat. It is the fact of being backed up
against life and being."
The ability to make work that is bold enough to be concerned with an emotional charge demands an honesty in locating feeling and making it explicit, rather than attempting disassociation. The current valorisation of ironic, cool detached banal work is in itself a sign of our disassociation from each other, and the deadening of affect.
Copyright © : Liz Ellis,1997
N.Paradoxa : Issue 2, February 1997
Link
to the final part