In a way, the whole programme of "critique" and French philosophising is based on working this wobble. Nothing feels more clever than a counter-intuitive truth, and to the intellectual mind nothing feels better than feeling cleverer than everybody else. But such counter-intuitive truths are rare, and thinkers in the last century or two have had to strive ever more desperately for a repeat of that first exhilarating Copernican rush. In the case of Foucault, Derrida, & Cie., the counter-critique must surely be that they have merely discovered a way to generate the sensation of a paradoxical truthiness out of nothing and nowhere, and for no purpose other than the self-gratification it can afford. Why else bend such a useful tool as language itself until it breaks, revealing that – gasp! – it is just, like, some random noises we make, and is not and never can be the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth, so help me Kant?
Something similar happened to painting. After several centuries of refinement of representational techniques, aided by technological improvements in painting materials, it seemed suddenly to dawn on certain practitioners (who – coincidentally? – were largely French and had begun to consider themselves artists by calling, rather than artisans) that, wait, this is just paint! We're just making marks on a flat surface with paint! A fairly banal revelation, you might have thought – the sort of thing that occurs to you in the dizzy depths of intoxication, but is quickly rejected the following morning – but one which went on to energise the art of the 20th century and, via various convolutions, probably reached its end-point of usefulness with a conceptual work like Michael Craig-Martin's An Oak Tree (1974): a glass of water on a glass shelf, installed on a gallery wall to certain precise specifications. Which is a very long way indeed from Impressionism, and a work which could equally well have been given the title, in a tip of the hat to René Magritte, "This is Not a Glass of Water". Well, yes, Sir Michael, I get it, but it is a glass of water, really, isn't it?
Which reminds me of a favourite anecdote about Picasso, which is the best non-theoretical insight into the Long Debate on "representation" I know of. Here it is:
"Just then my eye was caught by an unframed canvas standing on a shelf above Jacqueline's head and to the right. It was a portrait of a girl—Jacqueline, I would have said—in tones of green and black and white. She was shown in profile, looking off to the left, and Picasso had given the face a mildly geometrical stylization built up of triangular forms which emphasized the linear treatment but at the same time preserved the likeness. I pointed to the painting. 'How would you explain to a person whose training made him look on that as deformation, rather than formation, why you had done it that way?' I asked him.'Let me tell you a story,' Picasso said. 'Right after the Liberation, lots of GIs came to my studio in Paris. I would show them my work, and some of them understood and admired more than others. Almost all of them, though, before they left, would show me pictures of their wives or girl friends. One day one of them who had made some kind of remark, as I showed him one of my paintings, about how 'It doesn't really look like that, though,' got to talking about his wife and he pulled out a tiny passport-size picture of her to show me. I said to him, 'But she's so tiny, your wife. I didn't realize from what you said that she was so small.' He looked at me very seriously. 'Oh, she's not really so small,' he said. 'It's just that this is a very small photograph. ' "Picasso, interviewed in The Atlantic, July 1957
In the best version of the story, which is probably apocryphal as I've never managed to source it, Picasso then turns over the photo and exclaims, "My God! You poor man! She's also completely flat!"
Our beliefs – our true beliefs, I mean, not the sort of rote professions of faith that society demands of us – can be hard to identify, simply because they are the air we believe we breathe, and the solid ground on which we trust we walk. For example, it did occur to me recently that for my entire life I have held a profound but irrational belief in the idea of "tempting fate". Profound because it has directed so much of the way I have conducted my life; irrational because, well, it's a pretty insane idea, isn't it? However, recognising the irrationality of this belief is not going to stop me behaving as if it were true; that would be tempting fate.
Similarly, the idea that real art is obliged to question (or, in art-speak, "interrogate" or "challenge") our unexamined, complacent beliefs has itself become one of the unchallengeable core beliefs of contemporary art. No self-respecting contemporary artist is about to stop behaving as if this were true, even though it self-evidently isn't. That is, until some new mould-breaker gives everyone permission to drop the ridiculous pretence that art students are thinkers with greater insight into the nature of Life, the Universe, and Everything than "ordinary" people. I have no idea how and when this belief came about, but I'm pretty sure that all those artists we revere in the big public galleries did not have their fingers crossed behind their back as they delivered yet another crucifixion scene to the service door at the rear of the cathedral. Neither did Holbein, by drawing the Tudor aristocracy of England with such breathtaking realism, or John Constable, with his endless studies of clouds, intend to challenge anything more than the inability of previous painters to get things right. That desire to get things right may in itself be quite subversive in an unfair world – the truth will set you free – but that is an idea from a rather different domain than art.
People of an artistic disposition, in my observation, tend to fall into two categories [1]. Consider the way red-headed, pale-skinned folk know, or are advised, how to dress (I recall many such conversations between my mother and sister). Essentially: if in doubt, wear dark green, and never, ever wear red. It just works, looks right, and is in accordance with some unwritten folk theory of colour. Those who value such practical wisdom are the instinctive artists, the colourists, the lovers of shape and form, often with a conservative preference for "natural" beauty. Then there are the contrarian redheads who insist on wearing whatever the hell they like, decking themselves out in red and purple stripes precisely because it's what they're not supposed to do. These are the conceptual artists, whose work is all about transgression, challenge, and rejection of norms, who tend to celebrate the urban and the artificial, and reject "natural" categories (like, say, gender) as constructed impositions on their liberty. In the past, the latter wouldn't have got much work; today, they run the show.
I think this is what can make a contemporary art gallery such a confusing place. It will quite likely be full of work that, like some deeply conflicted and angry teenager, is simultaneously demanding your love and attention while telling you to piss off. Look, I'm turning the lights on and off! Isn't that brilliantly annoying, you boring bourgeois scumbag? I hate you! I demand you give me money and prizes! Unfortunately, those of us who venture into art galleries (as opposed to the sort of people who own or fill them) generally have a craving for something visually exciting, and are not looking to get a self-righteous lecture about our complacency. However, like the parents of that angry adolescent, we sigh deeply, suspend judgement, and look for something to like, and to remind us of the dear child we once knew who used to draw those lovely pictures. After all, as I have said in these posts many times before, we should all be alert to that "Hendrix Moment" [2], when something is so new that it makes no sense yet, and seems to be all noise and no signal.
Such was certainly the case when Henri Matisse and André Derain hit the scene in 1905, earning themselves the label of fauves (wild beasts) which they immediately adopted as an ironic badge of honour. A few years ago we were in Paris, and there was an excellent show of Derain's work at the Pompidou Centre. It was fascinating to see the full span of the career of a painter who seemed, like a weathercock, to change styles depending on who he'd most recently been hanging out with: Matisse, Picasso, Cézanne, and a succession of others all seem to have had an instant transformative effect on his work. But there can be little doubt that those earliest "fauvist" works have now moved decisively from "all noise" (wild beasts!) to "all signal" (lovely paintings!). Who could object to having a Matisse or one of Derain's paintings of London on their wall? [3]
At the same time in the Pompidou there was an exhibition of the contenders for that year's Marcel Duchamp Prize (yes, there really is such a thing, and it is not a miniature gold urinal). Here, I found myself distinctly back in noisy territory. It's antediluvian, I know, but I much prefer my art to be two-dimensional and conveniently framed on a wall. I'd like to think I'm not one of those who find it hard to separate "art" and "interior decoration", but I do get impatient with large-scale, immersive installation work that can only be successfully experienced in a gallery setting. How is it that white-cube galleries and pitch-black projection rooms have become the only spaces where such contemporary art can exist? Do any of even the wealthiest private individuals with an interest in buying art even have their own installation space, to be filled periodically with a new assemblage of health-and-safety hazards? It just seems so elitist, and so completely reliant on institutional support and funding.
Anyway, for what it's worth, I do remember enjoying the "conceptual" work I saw back then by Lebanese artists Joana Hadjithomas and Khalil Joreige – basically some core samples drilled in Athens, Paris, and Beirut hanging from the ceiling in long glass tubes – who did, in fact, turn out to be the prizewinners. Although I would have enjoyed it equally as much if it had been a display of core samples hanging from the ceiling of a geological museum. In fact, I think I would have enjoyed it even more, because then their aesthetic qualities would have been my own discovery, and I would not have felt so insistently nudged in certain directions by the statements of the sociologically and archaeologically bleedin' obvious that accompanied them. As Keats wrote in one of his letters: "We hate poetry that has a palpable design upon us — and if we do not agree, seems to put its hand in its breeches pocket." [4] Which is a nice way of saying, "Give me the art, but spare me the statement." After all, telling me what I should think about your work is just tempting fate...
1. Yes, yes, I know... One of my own personal revelations was delivered on a Christmas cracker motto on Boxing Day 1973: "There are two types of people in the world: those who believe there are two types of people in the world, and those that don't". For decades I believed this was a truly anonymous piece of folk wisdom, delivered to me by chance. Then I discovered it is actually Robert Benchley's Law of Distinction.
2. Yes, yes, I know... I should think of a more contemporary example than Jimi Hendrix, who died in 1970, FFS. Suggestions welcome. But not Harrison Birtwistle, thanks, still just noise to me.
3. I read a fascinating article in the New Yorker ("Modern Art and the Esteem Machine", by Louis Menand) which provoked the humbling thought that once we, too, would most likely have scorned Matisse – Matisse! – as did sophisticated Americans in 1913: "The general American public, in the period when modern art emerged, around the time of the First World War, had no interest in it. Wealthy Americans, the sort of people who could afford to buy art for their homes, had no taste for it. Even the art establishment was hostile. In 1913, a Matisse show at the Art Institute of Chicago instigated a near-riot. Copies of three Matisse paintings were burned and there was a mock trial, in which Matisse was convicted of, among other things, artistic murder. The demonstrators were art students."
4. I'm never sure why the hand and the pocket are singular, but I expect this was a tellingly aggressive gesture in 1818. "There, I put my hand in my pocket, and wish you good day, sir!"
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