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Friday, December 02, 2005
I've been reading Johanna Drucker's Sweet Dreams: Contemporary Art and Complicity, which despite being overpriced at $40-45 (I lucked out and found a review copy at the Strand for $20), is frankly, the book I wish I had written, if I were given to writing books. What's great about it is that it unseats the deep-rooted notion that the avant-garde in art is necessarily a critical endeavor, or rather that art that engages with so-called popular culture can only do so in the name of irony or critique and not out of love or admiration or jealousy. It basically asserts that the art world is part of our everyday world subject to the same market forces, technological advances, and other trends, and is not some rarified world apart where the smart people stand to one side and wag their fingers at the rest of the hapless sheep.
In any other field, this would not be big news, but for art, it's a huge paradigm shift. The traditional notion of modern and postmodern art rests on the idea of critique, that the artist (isolated, quirky, tortured soul locked in the garret) is somehow able to transcend mere mechanical and monetary concerns and create works that reveal something intangible, sublime, or unknown, all while deconstructing or ignoring the forces of capital and political power. The story of modern art has been nothing short of Joseph Campbell's hero myth -- the traveler who transcends in the name of all of us and returns bearing gifts. And while postmodern practice has claimed to debunk this telos, it has merely refracted it off in a different direction. So the avant-garde that used to mean technical innovation and investigation into the nature of perception and presence has been transformed into one of institutional critique and site-specificity.
But Drucker is not saying that art is merely another commodity, and she is careful to differentiate her position from the art-for-art's-sake and art-for-beauty's-sake schools of thought (i.e. Dave Hickey). It's not that contemporary art has given up on advocacy or critique. It's more that co-opting or citing pop culture is not an inherently critical undertaking -- in fact, a lot of contemporary art that uses pop and mass media as its source is in fact not progressive at all, or is at least ambivalent about its relationship to that source.
This is all a very long-winded and clunky way of saying that Drucker's book finally frees contemporary art from the leftist critical agenda that it has often been shoe-horned into. As someone with roots in the "identity art" of the 80s and early 90s, I find it hard to believe that I actually find it liberating instead of scary. I guess it charts a slow coming around on a critical level to what most practicing artists have known for a long time -- that artmaking is a productive activity engaged with all facets of contemporary life, both hopeful and retrograde.
All of which reminds me of a conversation I had with one of my thesis advisors back in grad school. I was doing a series based on images from women's fashion magazines and framing my work as "ambivalent," meaning I was half in love with the seductive, lush, commerical images and half critical of the ways in which they represent unattainable goals. My advisor told me that ambivalence was basically fence-sitting and that if I wanted to really say something, I had to take a stand. I understood her point, but it seemed dishonest to me, or at least not true to my experience. To me, ambivalence was a stand. So, that was a pivotal moment (although I didn't realize it until much later) -- a transition from thinking of art as a medium for advocacy (an essentially utopian enterprise) to thinking of it as a reflection of a current state of mind or reality, with all its messiness and indeterminacy. So artmaking isn't inherently meaningless, it just doesn't have to mean (or critique) anything. Which seems like such a simple thing.
3:47 PM
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