A bug on his back on the windowsill
Feeling the answer
I saw a bug on its back waving its legs about in the small sky above its body and I asked myself, “would it prefer to be on its front?” It was then that I realised that if I had to ask the question, didn’t I already know the answer? This got me thinking. Why is it that so many people have difficulty with such a question? Why do some people wish to argue that the bug doesn’t know or care that it’s on its back? I thought it must have something to do with the world we live in. We wouldn’t accept racial segregation in our public schools or hospitals and we wouldn’t accept it if the vote was taken away from women. Yet some wouldn’t bother to flip the bug onto his belly. Is there something wrong with our society?
Nature or nurture?
In the past, art had been useful in responding to Is there something wrong with our society? For instance, we need only look at what artists have made and we can see their sweet dreams and their nightmares in their responses. I’m not suggesting these responses are the truth. But they are subjective-truths: it is how they responded to the world in which they lived. However, when I look at art today I become lost. Having said that, when I observe society today I become lost. Maybe there is something wrong with me.
It seems to me that contemporary society suffers from some sort of bipolar disorder. Pop-singers want to be politicians; politicians want to be popular. Parents dress their pre-pubescent children in padded bras while worrying about paedophiles. Sydneyites pull beers in London while Londoners pull beers in Sydney. There is an equal number of lives threatened by starvation as there are lives threatened by morbid obesity. People audition their ability to be ‘themselves’ in the hope of being locked in a big house and watched twenty-four hours a day, while others be themselves and break the law and are locked in a bigger house and are watched twenty-four hours a day. I’m beginning to think that today’s artists respond to the dominant aspects of society in which we live. The dominant aspect is confusion.
Confused?
I think we live in a confusing society, not an ambiguous one. An ambiguous one suggests to me a society with more than one possible understanding, one which seems to offer a sense of humility through doubt. Instead I think our society is confused. It is unable to think clearly. For example, a ‘successful’ artist who lives in the same town as me recently submitted a painting in a ‘prestigious’ art ‘competition’ that he didn’t win. His painting was hung upside down and he complained about this. I can’t help but think it is his fault. I could understand someone hanging a painting by Baselitz up the wrong way if they didn’t know that the seemingly obvious orientation for his work would in fact be to hang his painting upside down. I could understand someone hanging a Pollock upside down (and in truth I don’t think it would really matter), but the ‘successful’ artists painting was of a landscape. Every person who has at least one eye that works is familiar with the landscape: the sky, the earth, the horizon. It would seem the artist is to blame, but not entirely.
Football is Football. Everything else is everything else.
Peter Cook’s four final performances were on Clive Anderson Talks Back. One of these performances is as a football coach, claiming:
Football is about nothing unless it’s about something and that is what it’s about – football.
Funny, funny man (I believe he could be the greatest artist of the twentieth century, certainly a better writer of comic tragedy than Pinter or Beckett), but too many artists have tried to say: Art is about nothing unless it’s about something and that is what it’s about – Art. Ad Reinhardt said:
Art is art. Everything else is everything else.
It’s not that I disagree with what Reinhardt is saying; it’s just that it is not that helpful. In trying to understand violence we could say: Violence is violence. Everything else is everything else. Crazy. That’s why Cook is a funny, funny guy. We know he’s joking. We think we know Warhol is joking, and we think we know Koons is joking, we now think Dali is a joke, and we Australians may now think Whitley is a joke, we may even think we know Hirst is joking. But shouldn’t it be clearer than this? And if he is joking, why take him so seriously? Probably because we are so used to the ‘smell’ of clumsy ideas that they no-longer stink.
Art is watching you
It does seem to me that art begins as an idea in our minds (particularly capital ‘A’ art - Art). We see the world, formulate concepts and respond to them through making stuff. However, somewhere along the way we’ve lost the skill to identify the many different styles these responses can take. Some ideas take on the style of sport, while other ideas take on the style of science, and others take on the style of art. I feel this may still be the case, although it seems that we have accepted: Art is art – end of discussion. This is probably why our society was so hopeless at defining the difference between paedophilia and art when examining Henson’s photographs earlier this year. I know if I took those same photographs as a teacher (which I am) I would have certainly lost my job, and most likely ended up in prison. Many are willing to accept Henson’s photos of naked juveniles as art, but remember these could well be the same minds with the same thought processes that were willing to accept Rumsfeld’s remarks on Iraq’s weapons of mass destruction:
We know where they are. They're in the area around Tikrit and Baghdad and east, west, south and north somewhat.
The fact that the weapons were never found didn’t matter to some. The fact that Henson photographs are of naked juveniles doesn’t matter to some, although those same people would be suspicious of their own children being photographed with no clothes on by someone who doesn’t have the support of an institution to say the results will be art. Because what happens to Henson’s photographs that are not good enough to be called art? Does he destroy the negatives and/or delete the files? But the event still occurred. A juvenile was asked to take their clothes off by an adult to be photographed. If I did this and the results were not worthy of being called art am I still innocent? It’s not that I don’t think Henson’s photographs are not art, or are not paedophilia. For many years now I have collected books on Lewis Carroll. One of the books has reproductions of his four surviving photographs of pre-pubescent girls. Because I have this book in my library does it make me a paedophile? Society has made it confusing because we define art and paedophilia so poorly. But can we seriously hope for more in a society that is drowning with Orwellian double-speak:
Spend and save
War on terror
Time is money
Time is not money. Time is time, and money is money. And we know what money is, we know its worth, we know how to use it and what purpose it serves. If time were money surely I could work really hard and extend my life, or buy back my childhood. Clearly not, because we know the difference, but do we know anymore what art is and what art isn’t?
Illustrating events
I imagine I’ve been asked to design the cover for a book. The book is titled: September 11, 2001. It is to be a paperback and the contents are non-fiction. Should the cover have an image of New York, Afghanistan, or Iraq? It seemed to end up being about Iraq. What about a celebrated artwork from the time in which we live: Hirst’s For the Love of God. A diamond encrusted human skull, laced with platinum, certainly contrasts death with money. Arguably the result of September 11, 2001 has resulted in economic collapse by costing the United Sates such a ridiculous amount to kill Iraqis. I can’t be satisfied with such an image. It seems to add to the world’s problems, with over seven hundred diamonds, most likely mined out of Africa, and with an intrinsic monetary value regardless of Hirst’s ‘Midas touch’ and immoral in its construction. For the love of God isn’t satirical as it isn’t a cartoon image of a skull and diamonds, but it is a human skull and it is covered with millions of dollars worth of precious metals and stones. It is vulgar to say the least. The artist has other confusing ideas:
It’s the maximum I can throw against death; perhaps that’s crass, to pit money against death, but it all depends on what it does visually.
It is crass, and it doesn’t all depend on what ‘it does visually.’
It’s the maximum I can throw against art; perhaps that’s crass, to pit paedophilia against art, but it all depends on what it does visually.
Here the problem seems much more transparent. It doesn’t matter how visually interesting the results are if an act of paedophilia has occurred: the image is immoral. I can’t criticize Hirst too much. I think death can be dealt with crassly and the result can even be funny, provided the ideas are identifiable and not just decorative. The Graveyard scene in Hamlet is an obvious example, but many have found it crass, including Voltaire:
Englishmen … take pleasure in the tragedy of Hamlet, in which the ghost of a king appears on stage. … a grave is dug on the stage, and the grave-diggers talk quodlibets worthy of themselves, while holding skulls in their hands; Hamlet responds to their nasty vulgarities in silliness no less disgusting. … It seems as though nature had mingled in the brain of Shakespeare the greatest conceivable strength and grandeur with whatsoever witless vulgarity can devise that is lowest and most detestable.
The grave-digger, who is un-couth but clearly a deep thinker, outwits Hamlet. Hamlet pontificates about death with the sort of pessimism and conclusions that weren’t fashionable when Schopenhauer said them much, much later. But Hamlet is theatre and poetry: an illusion. Remember, Hirst’s skull is a real skull.
That skull had a tongue in it, and could sing once:
…
Did these bones cost no more the breeding,
but to play at loggats with ’em?
I like him not
Because contemporary events are so confusing it is fitting that contemporary art be confusing. Regardless, it is interesting that art of the past is able to shed light on ambiguous interest and difficult ideas of the present. Using Hamlet as an example, imagine Claudius is George W Bush and rather than talking about Hamlet he is talking about Saddam Hussein. Dick Cheney can be Guildenstern, and Donald Rumsfeld can be Rosencrantz.
Hamlet. Act III, Scene 3
George CLAUDIUS I like him not, nor stands it safe with us
To let his madness range. Therefore prepare you;
I your commission will forthwith dispatch,
…
The terms of our estate may not endure
Hazard so near us as doth hourly grow
Out of his lunacies.
Dick GUILDENSTERN We will ourselves provide.
Most holy and religious fear it is
To keep those many many bodies safe
That live and feed upon your Majesty.
Donald ROSENCRANTZ The single and peculiar life is bound
With all the strength and armour of the mind
To keep itself from noyance; but much more
That spirit upon whose weal depends and rests
The lives of many. The cesse of majesty
Dies not alone, but like a gulf doth draw
What's near it with it. It is a massy wheel,
Fix'd on the summit of the highest mount,
To whose huge spokes ten thousand lesser things
Are mortis'd and adjoin'd; which when it falls,
Each small annexment, petty consequence,
Attends the boist'rous ruin. Never alone
Did the king sigh, but with a general groan.
George CLAUDIUS Arm you, I pray you, to this speedy voyage;
For we will fetters put upon this fear,
Which now goes too free-footed.
Donald ROSENCRANTZ [with Guildenstern] We will haste us.
The idea is clear, there is no confusion, but there is ambiguity. We could re-cast Claudius as Churchill talking about Hamlet as Hitler. Regardless we have an insight into the egocentric view of a powerful leader, maybe benevolent maybe not, however, it is ambiguous.
Goodbye Goya?
I think we are more parochial than we think. Living in the twenty-first century we may travel around more, but I can’t help thinking we are obsessed with commenting on the now, living in the now, dismissing anything that is not now. Don DeLillo is a contemporary artist who, in my opinion, does capture what it means to live in our contemporary society. In DeLillo’s novel Cosmopolis the protaganist (if I have remebered correctly) complains about the achronym – ATM – that it has been around for far too long, that it is a relic of a decade gone by, a reminder of the past. I like things old and new, but when I was asked not that long ago: Which contemporary Australian artists do I like? My answer: William Robinson, wasn’t acceptable. Appaerntly he wasn’t contemporary enough (?).
I don’t know which celebrated contemporary artist’s work would be suitable for expressing the events surrounding September 11, 2001, for the cover of our fictitious non-fiction book: September 11, 2001. I think Goya’s Colossus would express the events surrounding September 11, 2001.
Nevermind
When a friend of mine fell in love, he told me that all those silly lyrics in popular love songs made so much sense to him now that he was in love. For me the reverse is true of contemporary art. It all makes less and less sense when I think about the world we live in. And the work of master designer of contemporary art, Andy Warhol, has offered me nothing in times of need - while other ambiguous art forms I’ve come to understand have. There is an ancient Arab saying:
Religion is the falcon with which to hunt.
Keeping this in mind, and the events that have transpired after 11th September, 2001, I read the first stanza of Yeats’s poem The Second Coming.
Turning and turning in the widening gyre
The falcon cannot hear the falconer;
Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold;
Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world,
The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere
The ceremony of innocence is drowned;
The best lack all conviction, while the worst
Are full of passionate intensity.
