The oft-hyped 'cutting' edge of contemporary art may  indeed need some blunt ripostes, but how blunt? Peter Fuller could hardly be faulted for his willingness to challenge fashions that advertise themselves as   innovations. His polemical rhetoric, however, was often too blunt to articulate the difficulties he bravely tackled. Indeed, it is hard to read his work without noticing a series of unresolved contradictions, contradictions that reflect a gulf between polemical aspirations and  sustained critical insight. In the early pages of 'Art and Psychoanalysis', for example, Peter Fuller said that 'those who know anything about my work will not need to be reminded of the influence which Karl Marx has had upon me.' (p. 12)

This influence nevertheless became increasingly hard to recognise in his rush to affirm the transhistorical value of art objects. His idiosyncratic approach to psycho-biological aesthetics aspired to be materialist, but more often idealised the traditions of 'fine art' and the 'body'. The assumption that the historical preeminence of painting and sculpture is necessarily a material condition for contemporary art is nevertheless ideological, an ideal born out of love of art perhaps, but one whose faith all too often becomes reactionary and blinkered. While socialists have often found it difficult to articulate the value of art, the terms of any materialist account necessarily confront the dominance of capitalist ideas of value. The current homepage slogan of Saatchi and Saatchi, for example, claims that 'ideas are the currency of the future'. The impact of new kinds of media - from photography and film to contemporary information technology - is a central concern of any art that has sought to free itself from contemporary ideology. Advertising entered the soul of modernism and its avant-garde movements long before contemporary artists signed their pacts with the devils of hype, sound-bite whimsy and corporate branding. Art's opposition to craft and commodity production makes any simple faith in the status of 'art objects' naive. Art's materiality is defined by its resistance to literal-minded conceptions of the object and, more awkwardly, the objectivity of capitalism. What then motivates impatience with those who seek to develop art through

new conceptions of material embodiment? Many of those who value Peter Fuller's polemical contempt for conceptualism, video, photography, performance and installation art are too quick to take solace in a kind of flat-earth, flat-canvas fundamentalism. Much of the work sold, curated and repackaged in the name of  contemporary 'art' could indeed be understood as a curious sub-set of the advertising industry, revealing the triumph of publicity over public meaning. Many neo-Dada toys and gimmicks merely recycle old avant-garde jokes. There is nevertheless a persistently philistine misrecognition of the diversity of work currently produced.
The struggle to renegotiate art's critical relation to contemporary society takes many forms. Resistance to art's history and its status as a mode of bourgeois property means that many of these forms share a utopian conception of aesthetic value but articulate such values differently.  As the history of the Tate Gallery dramatises, English modernism remains something of a contradiction in terms. Part of the difficulty is the extent to which polemics, such as those generated by Carl Andre's bricks or the Turner prize, confirm art's inability to achieve critical autonomy. Anyone interested in art's future needs to uncouple petit-bourgeois scepticism for modern art in general from the more considered but no less contradictory high-brow hostility to modernism and its post-modern avatars. The critical question, then, is how to avoid reproducing blunt positions that succeed only in confirming art's marginality. It is a fallacy, for example, to pretend that there is a 'current orthodoxy' rather than a confusing and inarticulate diversity of practices, experiences and values. Capitalist media often prefer talk of fashions, trends and new faces, but no-one really believes the hype. Our contemporary sultans of spin may produce marketing strategies that isolate comedians and one-liner art-forms for popular ridicule, but such forms of false populism belie the lived complexity of those who are engaged in the aesthetic dimension. Public institutions, such as museums and art history departments, need to be challenged for the limited and uncritical agendas they often promote. But the difficulties faced by publicinstitutions can hardly be separated from the way private interests have dominated the history of art, and society more generally. Peter Fuller used to quote Marcuse's conception of art's truth and its autonomy, but what his own writing more often reveals is the way art remains anything but autonomous from contemporary social controversies. The conversations and arguments that make up so much of art's social being suggest that it is a mistake to argue for art's autonomous aesthetic value or for the preeminence of 'art objects'. The aesthetic questions that matter are also social and political. Some people have an eye for a bargain, whereas others have an eye for the subtle shades of the good life. For as long as people are not allowed to embody their aesthetic values freely and to be more than 'objects', art's freedom remains an ideological  illusion. In this sense, 'authentic' art articulates new forms of social possibility. Just as a blunt palette-knife has its uses but is limited as a tool, so the blunt edges of argument tend to reduce the big picture of art's contemporary existence to a black and white cartoon.

 

 

Cover Drawing                                                          ROSE  WYLIE