THE CONSENSUAL WORLD

Whoever came up with the idea of calling this autumn’s major show at the Irish Museum of Modern Art ‘Beyond the Pale: Artists at the Edge of Consensus’ is probably being regaled as a marketing genius. The phrase suggests artworks literally from outside Dublin but also, and more importantly, artworks somehow running against the grain, challenging the hegemonic criteria of Fine Art itself. It has a frisson about it that’s immediately catchy and alluring

On the strength of this catch-phrase, IMMA have brought together a robust selection of contemporary art. That can’t be denied. But the contextualisation offered in the introduction of the show succeeds more as an advertisement than as an explication of its contents. And what it offers is a fatally simplified reading of contemporary art practice, a Post-Modernism-By-Numbers that displays a few bold lines while leaving most of the panel blank.

Let’s be honest, to describe a show dominated by stellar names like Beuys, Warhol, Haring, Hirst, Schnabel, Basquait, Koons (not to mention Picasso and Duchamp) as ‘Beyond the Pale’ either reflects an ironic Post-Modern sense of humour or an aesthetic self-regard badly in need of reality training. For IMMA to introduce the show by saying, “The art and artists in From Beyond the Pale inhabit expanding faultlines which run across boundaries in the dominant framework”, as IMMA Director Declan McGonagle does in the catalogue introduction seems, at the very least, misleading. Far from having weakened or challenged the ‘dominant framework’ the artists seen here propped it up and gave it buoyancy.

The very notion ‘dominant framework’ deceptively suggests an Academy stuffed with grey-suited old men, keenly conservative and rigidly traditional. The same kind of old goats who were behind the notorious Salon des Refusés of 1863. It reinforces the nostalgic notion of a radical avant-garde storming the institutions of official culture and leaving an appalled bourgeoisie in its wake.

The only problem with this seductive allusion is that the avant-garde has long since come to be the ‘dominant framework’. It is one of the glorious ironies of the Modernist era, which many critics see commencing with that watershed rejection of Manet’s Le Déjuner Sur L’Herbe in 1863, that it should come to be the official culture, enshrined and perpetuated by the connivance of the institutional trinity: The Museum, The Gallery and The Academy.

In propounding such an obviously self-aggrandising position, IMMA has here relinquished an opportunity not only to have contributed to the problematic discourse on contemporary art practice but to have given the public a chance to assess the really contentious issues that lay at that hypothetical ‘edge of consensus’.

For example, Declan McGonagle is at pains in his catalogue introduction to acquaint us with the shifting parameters of historical interpretation so central to the post-modern world. But is his assessment of it real? This historical model provided a legitimising thread that ran from the Greeks to the Moderns and buttressed the notion of Europe’s special cultural destiny. The concept of Fine Art itself only emerged at the turn of the 18th Century as an elaborate means of distinguishing the European West from the unsettlingly evolved cultures of nations like Japan and India.

It was as if Europe had been blessed with a vision of the world somehow truer than that of their non-European rivals. Artists were segregated from Artisans and lines of dubious distinction were drawn between the expressive arms of the visual culture. Pride of place was given to the canvas, a value judgement more determined by the portability of the object than by any overwhelming claim on its own behalf. By 1800, the art market had been born and was thriving.

Despite the fact that a high-toned metaphysic of representation went hand-in-hand with it, the baser reality was that art had, by separating itself from ideologies of State and religion, lost what had always been its central claim to truth in the first place. No longer embodying the eternal virtues of the civitas or the church, art began to evolve a language of its own prerogative and, for much of the 19th century, at least, art comfortably conjoined with the bourgeois state, to propagate an aesthetics of beauty and truth reflected in the perceived timelessness of the masterpiece.

Critics have rightly pointed out that, for all their alleged independence, the artist and the artwork had merely shifted the legitimising power exercised through art to enforce the values of the emerging middle-classes: individual effort, physical labour, technical skill and durability. Although many art histories still pay lip service to the idea of the impassioned artist pitted against a philistine culture, materialist critics have long since observed the role of developing technologies in prompting the innovations of the late 19th and early 20th Century. If artists began painting the world differently from 1860 or so, it was in response to the threat these new technologies posed to the traditional areas of artistic expertise and not because of some mysterious contagion of genius.

The photograph, in claiming to produce an unmediated and, therefore, more real view of reality forced the visual establishment to develop those claims to a truer reality that we have come to lump together as being distinctly Modernist.

Prior to the Salon of 1863, that debatable watershed so loved by Art History teachers everywhere, painting was understood to have achieved a perfected status. To toy with the ideals of light, colour, depth and representation just seemed like infantile wilfulness. If Manet was spurned in 1863 it wasn’t because his critics found the work ‘shocking’, but because they considered it crude and undeveloped.

Curiously enough this is the same attitude the new Academy takes to artists and art actually existent outside the arena of sacred, modern ‘masterpieces’, such as can be seen at IMMA over the next few months. In any consideration of the function of art or the role of the artist, this is absolutely central.

As Declan McGonagle should be well aware, the challenge of the Post-Modern era has nothing to do with democratising the gallery. Post-Modernism was never about simply creating pluralities of fine art. It was about the elimination of the category ‘fine art’ itself. It wasn’t about conferring legitimating status on the work of either ethnic or social minorities: it was about relinquishing the claim to that status in the first place.

If, indeed, Post-Modernism gives voice to those constituencies previously excluded from the Museum/Gallery/Academy it seems to do so at a terrible cost. After all, this opening-out runs parallel with a progressive degradation of art’s previous claims to meaningful or truthful embodiment. If we allow greater diversity nowadays it may be because we have ceased to believe that art matters anyway. Far from marking a progressive development, this tendency more aptly suggests that the art industry has lost none of their paternalism even if Museum, Gallery and Academy alike have surrendered the claim to truth that gave them that surety in the first place.

Post-Modernism, since gaining currency in the ’70s has developed two distinctive readings vis à vis the production and consumption of fine art. Its demolition of Euro-centric art history should have ensured a dissolution of the gallery system, as art works themselves became permeable and evasive. Indeed, it was that decade that saw the ‘dominant framework’ most severely challenged. Young artists of the time angrily condemned the machinery of the art industry, rejected its manufacture of cultural elites and repudiated the rewards of fame and fortune it offered.

Any fair account of the last twenty years therefore would have to talk about how the art industry revitalised itself through cannibalising the intellectual strategies of its Post-Modernist critics. Beneath the rhetoric of ‘otherness’ and ‘identity’ the naked greed lies barely concealed. What had ensured the survival of the art industry after virtually everyone conceded that artworks themselves were somehow ultimately useless, was that their status as commodities was too firmly entrenched to be shaken simply because the claims of truthfulness or beauty that had given them their value in the first place were now found to be vainglorious posturing.

That IMMA can offer us a show with such a momentous brief as this and yet ignore the central role of money is certainly revealing. Strictly speaking, the ’80s revival of the canvas (represented here by such artists as Schnabel, Haring and Basquiat, for example) must be interpreted as representing the success of the dominant framework. Far from having challenged the dominant framework the artists on view, for the most part, revitalised it. This is not the ‘Edge of Consensus’ but the very consensus itself. These are works shaped by the demands of the gallery system, the bottom line being that time-based art or site-specific art (to name but two) lack the desired liquidity necessary to compete in the commodities market.

Post-Modernist guru Jean Baudrillard giddily spelt it out some years ago while addressing an audience at New York’s Museum of Modern Art. He rhapsodised about the fact that the art object had become a signifier of only one indisputable ‘value’ - its price tag. Far from being rejected, Baudrillard was applauded by an audience happily prepared to read this simple statement of fact as a scintillating Post-Modernist irony. The true orthodoxy of the moment seems to say, “It may not be beautiful, it may not be truthful, it may not even be art, but it sure is expensive.”

There may indeed be an authentic Post-Modern impulse in that sentiment, but it certainly has a Right-wing consumerist spin to it. If the truly challenging experiments of the ’60s and ’70s went out of favour it was because they could not be made to conform to the market’s need for investment opportunities. It should come as no surprise that a decade of neo-conservative governments in the United States and Britain should have run parallel with an unprecedented growth in the numbers of artists, galleries, museums and the level of auction prices reached by modern ‘masterpieces’. It should likewise come as no surprise that the doyen of American social climbers, Andy Warhol - himself the most represented artist in the IMMA show – should have spent the last years of his life itching to become ‘court painter’ to the odious Reagan’s White House. ‘Beyond the Pale’? Give me a break.

While indicators might suggest that art has never been healthier, my suspicion is that artists themselves have never mattered less. To a scary degree, the collapse of any agreed criteria for assigning or even debating the aesthetic value of art, has created a situation reminiscent of that when William Randolph Hearst sent artist Frederick Remington to come up with sketches depicting the growing Spanish-American conflict at the turn of the century. When Remington wired that there wasn’t any war, Hearst responding by saying, in effect, “You provide the drawings and I’ll provide the war.” Nowadays it’s as if the galleries and museums are saying to artists “You provide the commodities and we’ll provide the culture.”

In the rooms given over to “U.S. Paintings of the Eighties”, at the IMMA, for example, any astute observer will soon note the generosity of the Eli Broad Family Foundation from whom the overwhelming majority of the works are on loan. The catalogue tells us “The Broad Foundation operates as an educational lending resource and is building a collection which reflects the scope and diversity of contemporary practice.”

On the basis of current arts industry practice, “The Broad Foundation” immediately suggests a rich man’s tax shelter which would probably work in two ways. First, it ensures the collection appreciates in value by touring it. This project of guaranteed visibility exploits the obvious fact that the European Historical model is still very much alive. The more reproduced your work is, the likelier you are to enter the canon. Second, even while the Foundation’s asset value zooms up faster than bamboo, it is spared the overheads that insuring and maintaining such a valuable collection might entail. The tour receivers, naturally, pay for that.

On an even more fundamental level it must be asked, “Do museums exist because more people want to see art, because we more firmly believe that people should see art, or because the apparatus of exhibitions, catalogues etc. are simply vital to the maintenance and growth of the financial values placed on the artworks themselves?” We can pretend that no linkage exists between Warhol’s presence in ‘Beyond the Pale’ and the fact that his 1965 ‘Red Marilyn’ is expected to fetch between two and three million dollars when auctioned in New York this week, but my suspicion is that we’d be kidding ourselves.

Reproductions of Duchamp’s more celebrated ‘ready-mades’ from earlier this century are sprinkled throughout, although their purpose is unclear. Duchamp himself considered his own efforts to have exploded the myth of the gallery. On the heels of a war that had proved Europe’s superiority of civilisation to be a self-aggrandising myth, Duchamp’s ready-mades were an attempt to expose the very same contingency of fashion and finance that have now, here, not only captured him but are exploiting him as well to suggest a pedigree for hype-meisters like Jeff Koons and Joseph Beuys. They are there to create a delusion of continuity, to create false categories of aesthetic judgement, to make possible the greatest sleight of hand of all - the packaging of the mainstream as if it were marginal.

If a show genuinely aspired to the condition of ‘Beyond the Pale’ it would have needed thoughtful consideration as to just where that ‘edge of consensus’ might lie. It would, for one thing, have reflected the uneasy re-evaluation of just where the lines between the mega-visual tradition and the fine arts can be drawn, if, in fact, such divisions can be made at all anymore. The true ‘edge of consensus’, I believe, is to be found in phenomena like The Quilt Project, the sprawling collection of thousands of individual commemorative quilts fashioned by loved ones to celebrate the memory of friends and relations who died from AIDS-related illnesses. Invested with authentic emotional meaning it defies theorising as well as commercial exploitation. In its own simple way, The Quilt Project possesses all the virtues of the medieval Cathedral - thousands of contributors coming together to create a repository of affectionate feeling that communicates a sense of hope and compassion directly to a larger community.

Ultimately, art can be nothing more (nor less) than a humble materialist enterprise embedded within the matrix of human experience. It is bizarre that this patently obvious fact should be so divorced from both our current aesthetic theory and practice. In 1994 it is the humane and the committed that have come to stand ‘Beyond the Pale’. Artists who still believe that art can impact effectively on people’s lives are dismissed for their naiveté while the glib, the gimmicky and the grotesque are held in the highest esteem.

By all means you should get to see these shows, but beware of being hoodwinked into endorsing the specious theorising behind it. This is not the edge of consensus but the centre and these are not works that challenge the ‘dominant framework’ but which endorse and sustain it.

A PARABLE FOR POST-MODERNISTS

In the late ’70s I was a regular at the Tuesday night open readings at St. Mark’s in the Bowery on New York’s Lower East Side. These evenings were something of a Village tradition with roots back in the beat movement of the early ’50s. In many ways it was an astoundingly conservative ambience. My contributions weren’t of a poetic nature at all, but rather a series of sketches-in-progress on the idea of what a post-punk comic lounge act might be like.

The only other regular offender against the rules was this other gay boy who insisted on doing performance art things with tape recorders and paste-up words. We got into the habit of heading into the west village together afterwards to gossip and flirt and talk about art. (All of the above seeming somehow indistinguishable from each other – both then, I guess, and now). At the time Kip had recently begun a campaign of subway art, and it became a pleasure whenever I spotted his distinctive electrified babies and dogs.

It seemed at the time that he’d genuinely discovered a way of sabotaging the gallery ethos. Here was a work that was both anonymous and public, capable of impacting itself on people’s lives without the mediating apparatus of institutional culture. It was radical and I remember that we drank to it.

At the time, this guerrilla approach to art seemed a real assault on expectations of what art was or could be. The impersonality of it, combined with its guaranteed visibility, confounded those notions in what seemed an effective way. In time the two of us drifted apart. By the autumn of ’79 those poetry nights just came to seem pointless, and despite a light-weight cruisey sociability, we rarely dished as we had that summer.

Through Kip I’d got to know a circle of terrorist-art types localised around Jamie Canvas on Spring Street. (The last time I think I saw him was at the Whitney Xerox Art show in 1980 - a show organised by Jamie Canvas regular Todd Jorgenson). Michael Stewart was yet another gay boy, peripheral to the Jamie Canvas set but fairly often seen at The Boybar on St. Mark’s Place. I should clarify, before my continuing use of the term ‘gay boy’ raises hackles, that the expression refers to a distinct type. When I use the term (and I often do, even to describe myself) I mean a personality that falls anywhere between being a Mama’s Boy and being The Best Little Boy in the Whole World - infinitely polite and while by no means as meek as a Japanese war bride, always solicitous and deferential.

Anyway, Michael was another gay boy, sweet and soft-spoken with eyelashes as long as my arm and eyes as deep and dark as a pool of night time sky. Like Keith (and let’s admit it ‘Kip’ was always something of an ironic joke in honour of ’70s gay porn star Kip Noll), Michael also practised subway art. Being black, it seemed a more immediate reference to his own background culture.

The whole explosion of graffiti on the New York Subways had started in the early ’70s with ‘TAKI - 153’, the signature reference of this kid named Taki from 153rd Street. By the late ’70s practically every IRT subway car in New York had been spray-painted by Bronx kids who invaded the open-air terminals where they were parked overnight. Some people thought it a menace. Some people thought it cool and distinctive.

Both Keith and Michael shifted attention to the stations themselves. I’ve already mentioned Keith’s now legendary graffiti, so I’ll stick to describing Michael Stewart’s shadowy figures waiting in the half-turned corridors or lurking at the end of a station platform. They were only silhouettes. You knew they weren’t real, yet somehow they never failed to be disturbing.

Sometime coming close to Christmas of 1980 or so, Michael had been stopped in the middle of completing a work on the 14th Street Station of the IRT Lexington Avenue line. He was dragged out by a knot of subway police who were soon joined by a mob of city cops. Michael was beaten to death that evening. Witnesses who looked down from the NYU dorms were horrified to see this boy being beaten senseless by eight or nine cops, but even their testimony wasn’t enough to win a case against the NYPD.

Keith himself died from an AIDS related-illness about five years ago now. I was never sure if his aspirations to big-business success arose from a change of mind about guerrilla art after Michael was killed or if it was in response to his own diagnosis for AIDS. Others have confided that he’d always been motivated by the desire for gratification that money and recognition bring, but that he’d probably pretended not to be because of the sex-thing in our friendship.

I looked at his over-inflated canvas up at IMMA and the thoughts it lead to weren’t comforting ones: all I could think was that he’d sold out big-time. I say all this to admit a bias, but also to give a better picture of this disputed terrain of the modern and the post-modern, of just what precisely lives ‘Beyond the Pale’ and in just what imaginative landscape that ‘Edge of Consensus’ might more accurately be drawn.