An Account of Ethics and Aesthetics in Contemporary
Art Practice : Part 3
Liz Ellis
Follow links for other parts Link back to Part 1 or Link on to Part 2
This is an area that has received much critical discussion amongst contemporary cultural writers, who refer to the legacy of the Enlightenment in considering current political and cultural events. Following Jean Baudrillard 's writing on the Gulf War many cultural critics were angered by his apparent moral and ethical detachment from the issues and were concerned to combat this (see for example, Edward Said or Christopher Norris). If art is potentially, an act of freedom, as Herbert Marcuse would have us believe, then the possibilities of the subjective imagination must be the determining factor. He compares the scorn that traditional Marxist critics held for the "inwardness of personal experience with the attitude of capitalists for the unprofitable dimensions of life."
If one took the work of Bank, the small London based group of artists /curators one is struck by their complete abnegation of anything as personal as lived experience since this would be seen as an embarassing lapse of style and ironic detachment. What Bank do is invite other artists to show in their state-funded space, acting as curator and administrator, to which they then add their own pieces, often creating the whole enviroment, and certainly the title of the show and its publicity, which then usually reflects on the invited artists in an ironic way. Although they sell the invited artists work on display when they can, and sales have been made of the better known artists, taking a commission, salaries are not drawn from Banks funds. Nevertheless they attract considerable kudos for themselves from their shows, blurring the distinction between commentator and curator, artist and critic. Much effort is made to create a club atmosphere almost to the point of an unstated dress and style code. Having recently acquired a lease on a warehouse near Old Street through Arts Council funding, they curate exhibitions with a combination of free-enterprise thinking and detached irony that repeatedly stops short of making an engagement with any critical position.
John Roberts celebrates the work of Bank as using practices of "behaving badly" to unsettle an academic and intellectual framework that has a base in the work of Mary Kelly, Victor Burgin, Hans Haacke . My difficulties with the work of Bank and John Roberts' claims (Everything magazine Spring no 19 1996) for the value of the Bank endeavour stems from the failure of the work to lead anywhere. The use of sensation as an end in itself (evident in their frequent Zombie references, links to cocaine, drug culture) are ultimately unsatisfying as they accumulate, deliberately refusing to accrue or resolve. It is possible to read the references to drug culture as an actual blocking of affect, with the references to contemporary drug use as both making one more detached and at the same time heightening sensation of self in isolation to others, while supporting a booming style economy.
The use of the languages of commodification, and pornography require more critical engagement than simple repetition. This simulation as stimulation ultimately becomes redundant. I am interested at how readily the retort arises, that if one is critical of these works or indeed of these artists, one is being over serious or, a worse crime, earnest, as if this is an unacceptable loss of cool or style that reflects uncomfortably on the critic. Better to be detached, an flaneur, an ironic observer, than a passionately involved arguer, whose very engagement is somehow an admission of emotional messiness and the breaking of current social style codes. John Roberts ( "Mad For It " Lecture in June 1996 ) speaks of the "shattered expectations " that surround the practice of Bank artists in their ironic reflections of the everyday. As expectations go, its hard to feel that the circumstances surrounding a small group of graduates from the London colleges of Goldsmiths' and St Martins have been shattered too disastrously, or that their perceptions are obviously linked to anything "authentic" or plainly about the "everyday".
In parallel with Bank one can see on a wider stage the claims behind some of the currently fashionable young British artists such as those shown in "Brilliant " at the Walker Arts Center, Minneapolis. The artists include Sarah Lucas again, but also Dinos and Jake Chapman, Damian Hirst etc. One notes the self congratulatory title, which is presented typically as if ironic. (The two most recent Bank show' titles, "Cocaine Orgasm" and "Fuck off' working to similar effect). The work is seen as being avant garde, avowardly advertised as reflecting a new energy within British arts practice. I am interested in how the work, in its banality and strategies to create detachment combined with a deliberate aesthetic and moral perversity sit very comfortably within a freemarket conservative ideology.
This group of young, mainly male, almost entirely white young London-based artists have used their state-funded education and state supported and exhibited art practice within the last vestiges of a welfare system in Britain to make works of spectacular cynicism. There is a complete failure to engage with the any ideas of difference. It is also worth noting that the deliberate absence of identity politics in much of the "young British artists" debate means that the traditional young white profile of the artist is continued. I detect a certain relief in John Roberts writing that the few young women represented in this debate are not making overt reference to feminist thought ( presumably the success of Black and gay artists and writers in addressing cultural hybridity are further examples of impossible earnestness of thought , and as such, deeply un-stylish. This positive absence of debate around difference begins to assume an unsettling edge in its definition of "British.") Neville Wakefield's earlier scorn for post-structuralism also refers disparagingly to the foreign philosophy in a way that shares a broad anti-European suspicion noticed by two recent speakers at the Turner Prize debate, Tate Gallery 1996; Hans Ulrich Obrist and Ute Mete Bauer.
Mark Harris writes of the "Brilliant" exhibition in Art Monthly Feb. 96 that "It might be worth considering what possibilities of political radicalism are concealed or found intolerable by the acclaim shown this now familiar group of artists making works that 'thumbs its nose at authority' ? Other than glancingly , the following issues, randomly chosen but critical to the period marking the emergence of these artists, are just not in evidence : Aids, Racism, Gay or Lesbian Activism, the consequences of the Gulf War, the intentional creation at British Government level of a new economic underclass, Economic colonialism, or the evisceration of organised labour or the decline of the welfare state. From artists regarding themselves as Thatcher's children and described as transforming 'boredom into the impetus for action and provocation' you'd expect to see occasional instances of deep engagement.
Simon Ford, in the March issue of Art Monthly, continues this political placing of this group of artists by pointing out how easily the myth of independence has grown in a culture that is so approving of the free-market and privatisation. Pointing to the promotion of 'yBa''s through the Eton-educated, Conservative minister's son Jeremy (Jay) Jopling's agenda in his London gallery "White Cube", Ford points out that there are no oppositional intentions in this gallery owner's work, a clear refusal in his "non - political " agenda to promote critical work. It is time that the right-wing embrace of commercialism is recognised in this currently fashionable work. Other galleries are springing up, such as Entwistles in Cork Street and others around Fitzrovia and elsewhere that carry this agenda even further. The objects of fashionable dress and style become the very substance of art work, embracing consumerism uncritically. The previous generation of galleries in the eighties e.g the Lisson, exhibited artists who expressed traditional aesthetic feelings often in minimal sculptural terms. The current position whilst exaggerating the commercial strategies has turned matters on their head - artists who deal with minimal feeling in unaesthetic terms. The refusal of the artists to acknowledge themselves within the orthodox arts establishment wears thin as they become more assimiliated into the Saatchi collection and contribute uncritical lifestyle articles to the British Sunday newspaper's colour supplements. Our relation to the modern world is not problematised in the work but instead uses the language of ironic detachment.
I am struck by the consistent refusal of such work to have any sense of history or space for the imagination of the viewer. The moral and ethical relativismism inherent in such work has implications within our current political climate, where the valorisation of the individual and erosion of a sense of community or society has clear social and political implications.
In the final chapter of The Ideology of the Aesthetic, "From
polis to Post modernism" Eagleton writes of the avant-garde response
to the cognitive, ethical and aesthetic as "...quite unequivocal .
Truth is a lie, morality stinks, beauty is shit. And of course they are
absolutely right. Truth is a White House communique; morality is the Moral
Majority ; beauty is a naked woman advertising perfume. Equally, of course
they are wrong. Truth, morality and beauty are too important to be handed
contemptuously over to the political enemy."
Eagleton also writes of the political ambiguity in considering ideas of
the aesthetic: "There is in the aesthetic an ideal of compassionate
community, of altruism and natural affection, which along with a faith in
the self-delighting individual represents an affront to ruling class
rationalism. On the other hand... (L)ived experience, which can offer a
powerful critique of Enlightenment rationality , can also be the very
homeland of conservative ideology."
The link between the aesthetic and the ethical is to do with the sense of possibility in achieving change. Of course it is not any change that is desired, but change for the better. How is it possible to consider change without becoming a utopian romantic, a member of the Conservative moral majority or alternatively adopting a position of cynical detachment. Kant asks us to consider the link between art and ethics in relation to 'the good'. The activity of exercising aesthetic judgement requires an assessment of 'the good', which is currently deeply unfashionable and suspect within intellectual circles. Whose 'good' has always been the correct question at this point.
However, leaving the stage to a post-modern relativism creates an intellectual vacuum that is too readily occupied by right-wing ideologies of the free market and consumerism. The true banality of much of the 'yBa' enterprise is made more overt as it becomes ever more incorporated into the commercial mainstream. Irony has political and ethical implications. That is not to say that at times irony cannot be used in the service of 'the good'. The point about aesthetic and ethical judgement is these judgements must be made; they cannot hide behind a veil of detachment without substance, sensuality or commitment. The lack of critical discussion and the silencing of opposition, partly through media complicity and partly through the endorsement of the political hegemony of the current art establishment, prevents an adequate testing of the moral vacuity and inertia of much contemporary practice. I regard it as important that we now reconsider the position of ethics in contemporary art practice.
Copyright © : Liz Ellis,1997
N.Paradoxa : Issue 2, February 1997