Contemporary Artists – who belongs and who doesn’t

“   There's a myth among amateurs, optimists and fools that beyond a certain level of achievement, famous artists retire to some kind of Elysium where criticism no longer wounds and work materializes without their effort.”

Mark Matousek

    The curator of a major US art museum recently declined my work with apologies that their area of concentration is in collecting Contemporary Art   It was an odd slight, filled with unstated assumptions, which has led me to reflect upon a 30-year career in the studio and what makes some artists contemporary in the eyes of a curator and others not.  It is ultimately unclear to me how one actually avoids being contemporary - and then, contemporary with what or with whom? 

     I realize the curator wasn’t trying to offend, but for one who’s not dead yet, such language sets in motion chains of thought, which have been incubating for decades.  I make my living as an artist and I address little else but matters that are of my time.  Is concern for the planet and its extinctions “so twentieth century“ as to be passé or has it all become so numbingly hopeless that “contemporary art” has been reduced to inbred fiddling while Rome burns and a certain mix of fashionable attitudes and “looks” is all that matters anymore - albeit ones that are in a continual state of abstruse, introspective flux?

    It’s an odd thing, this desperate attempt at being so up-to-the-minute and cutting-edge as to be little more than a bleeding & infected finger-on-the-racing-pulse at all times.  Just what is this newest latest thing I may not have noticed in time and become passé!  As a visual artist I’m not supposed to show anything more than a year old.  Colleagues now routinely post-date their work to shoehorn it into a show just as Picasso and Matisse once antedated work to appear to have been the first to come up with some seminal innovation.  A professor friend just told me that she’s losing interest in academic art and just wants to do woodcuts again - not just woodcuts, but pictures with birds and horses and things she actually loves. Not that she would dare show them to her colleagues; they’d have a hay-day with her for being a hopeless romantic and exposing emotion in her art.

    Classical musicians on the other hand, had better not perform anything done within the last few years and expect to have an audience. I recall a concert at which the distinguished silver-haired director introduced a piece of chamber music as belonging to the “dreaded modern portion of our program” - by Leos Janáček, composed a decade before his own birth (1923) – nothing newer and yet more dreadful than Janáček need apply.  Something perverse is at work here and sabotaging that which makes the living arts a meaningful part of our culture.  A living composer can’t get performed while a living visual artist doesn’t dare show last year’s work. Well, excuse my French, but what in the hell have we come to?

   These extremes I describe are not exaggerations seen by a rarified few in academia, but norms with which most of us in the arts must somehow choose to deal.  This is a deformation of the very point of art as a universal human experience that should transcend race, class, time and especially shop-talk.  I don’t see my discipline as being well-served by its recent inward devolution. It feels like a caricature of culture – recall Alice through the Looking Glass when the Red Queen snaps at Alice, that hers is; "A slow sort of country! "Now, here, you see, it takes all the running you can do, to keep in the same place. If you want to get somewhere else, you must run at least twice as fast as that!"

     Pointing out the maniacal aspects of the society in which we live is well and good, but is itself also nothing new.  Alice Through the Looking Glass was first published in 1871.  I’d always hoped that fine art, as a calling, would take me down a path that diverges from that hypertensive one, to a way of life that is whole and nurturing to the soul rather than some arbiter of taste insisting on my hewing to the party line and life on a treadmill. I’d envisioned slipping the noose of the necktie and three-Martini lunch for a thirty-year lunch break - to a more meditative approach – one that might offer hope of stepping aside from the rat-race long enough to arrive at alternative visions – to those indeed harboring some hope. 

    The curator, if present, would by now be rolling his eyes.  Anybody in my graduate-degree-bearing position is supposed to know the drill and is clearly being obstinate by insisting on pointing out the king’s nakedness.  “Come on – we all know what we’re talking about, when we say contemporary. You’re being disingenuous.  It’s art that pushes the envelope  - not duck stamps or kittens playing with balls of yarn. Some art is a decorative consumer good and some art asks the hard questions, makes us uncomfortable, begets change; even leaving the very object of art itself behind - and that’s contemporary! “  OK, I went to school and read those books too.  With a little good will, that’s a plausible starting point. I suspect we can all agree that Hallmark Cards are not that kind of contemporary art.

    The intent to deal with important issues of the day is clearly a large part of the equation.  So why then, am I not contemporary, with my recognizable imagery informed by environmental concerns, while documentary photographs of polluting oil wells or deformed babies have crossed over from photo-journalism and into the ranks of contemporary art?  Is it because nobody thinks they have time to read or make subtle discerning judgments painted in shades of grey?  “Hit ‘em with a two by four and be done with it!”   There’s an advertiser’s attitude lurking in there somewhere – pare it down to its essence and don’t expect anybody to dwell too long over subtlety.  

So what happened to the art of inclusion, pulling you in and leading you down the primrose path?  Come walk alongside me through the woods until the internal chatter about housing developments, taxes, EPA regulations and interest rates slows down and eventually ceases.  Then keep walking, in silence past the wondrously differentiated trees that you are finally beginning to notice, and out into the snow-covered field with last summer’s milkweeds and goldenrod and into the harvested corn-stubble and just keep on walking.  Walk until you are far from all edges and keep going - into the soft falling snowflakes, muffling all sound and obscuring all details until you slowly disappear into the whiteness that envelopes all names, theories and egos.

    But I guess that sort of thing isn’t contemporary.  Assemblages and conceptual pieces that are indistinguishable from those of the 1960’s do seem to count as contemporary, as do many other recycled ways of working.  Digital media aren’t that new anymore, but they are still hip and contemporary.  New and arresting ideas are great, but “thought-provoking” is, like beauty, in the eyes of the beholder.  One person’s brilliant thesis is somebody else’s one-liner and another’s solipsism.  Brilliant insights in one field are the self-evident beginners’ position in another. I must persist in irritating my curator by wondering if he (and his kind) haven’t abandoned common use of English and slipped instead into their own rarified jargon -  one to which they’ve become accustomed, but which is in actuality unclear enough to be obfuscating and even misleading. The way his profession speaks of contemporary art is just too slippery to let pass unremarked and the inconsistencies too glaring.

     Collecting contemporary works of art by living artists is clearly an appropriate activity for a museum.  You’ll get no argument from me there, but the question is; “which contemporary art?”  I’ve long been bothered by who owns the right to confer contemporary status on one living artist and deny it to another - to say nothing of the dodgy, slip-shod way that “Contemporary Art” has come to be used. It’s an expression, rife with unstated implications, but one which I once grudgingly accepted, cognizant of there being indeed, an identifiable dominant “look” that comes of most any time period.

    I’ve long been on the wrong side of this “contemporary” look, with its increasingly rusty “cutting edges” and quaintly dated appeals to avant guards, but I also understand its appeal to those entering the academies.  Being part of a movement and redefining its edges is exciting and provides its own adrenaline source.  There does, however, come a point at which one needs to outgrow this eternal fascination for the latest newest thing and settle into doing something concrete with the depth of a mature individuated artist with something of one’s own to say.

    There are many mass movements, schools and styles of art, whose place in history is real.  Their categorization is a useful convenience, making it easier to talk about art history.  There is clearly an attraction for the arts writer to classify these phenomena as they are happening - to be the first to put a name on them.  The catch is that you may be doing damage to gestating new ideas by naming something that still needs to pass through its vulnerable growth stages and find its place – not as part of somebody else’s manifesto, but as the unique expression of an individual.

    Each time has its ideological aesthetic divides and somebody is always ending up on the right or wrong sides of that divide – picked and pecked at by colleague and critic alike in a rising crescendo of violence being continually perpetrated upon those who eschew the current lines of demarcation – perhaps quixotic and really just tipping at windmills – perhaps exploring legitimate and meaningful inner worlds – perhaps a step ahead of the contemporary – or perhaps merely original.  Hard to say, but somebody always does step forward and indeed say.  There’s just so much at stake (isn’t there?) - establishing once and for all, who belongs at the trough and whom we must at all costs exclude.

     We seem to fight the hardest over the smallest things – like cockerels on a dung heap or perhaps more aptly, like siblings vying for the attention and love of their parents.  Artists hurt nobody and yet are themselves often the subjects of completely inordinate abuse for not being correct enough – not meeting somebody’s agendas.  We often come in for the roughest treatment of all at the hands of our own colleagues.  Not being contemporary enough is a favored criticism - yet what is this undefined up-to-the-minute quality we should all embody and according to what arbiter of correctness? There is a history of new art movements (the avant guards of other times and lexicons) and how they’ve affected the artists of their time.  It’s not all copascetic.

     The Italian futurists are an instructive example.  They had their theoreticians and manifestos on embracing the brave new world of cold steel, whirling gears and glories of mechanization.  They wrote convincing polemics and were consequential about their avowed politics - enough so to sign up en-masse for the military, where the glorious modern industrialized slaughtering machinery of the First World War chewed up most of a generation of Italy’s promising young artists.

    Many new isms and theories arise from the heads of clever thinkers and spinners of elusive word-webs.  They attract others from out of the lonely darkness of being an artist alone with one’s own demons and muses into the warm light cast by that seductive flickering flame of their cause.  But, rather than flourishing in that light of liberating new ideas, many go down in flames or at best, cease to be the servants of their own muse and become subsumed in something more political – somebody else’s ideas and polemics. Artists certainly benefit by talking to colleagues and can suffer from the deformations that isolation can bring about.  However, I also see the darker side of most art movements written in the demise of those individuals being declared out of fashion (or worse), who’ve lost hope and abandoned their own visions.

    The artists I respect tend to regard themselves as followers of a highly personal calling, even a spiritual journey, rather than as participants in a movement.  Staying the course of a personal vision isn’t easy under the best of circumstances and is, more often than not, a lonely life-long proposition. It’s harder still when the pressure to join up and be one of “us” is ratcheted up. The communists of the old east block were fond of offering party membership to artists, which everybody knew was a double-edged sword.  Accept and sell out for a good price or decline and never be shown anywhere again.  Now that’s a high price for following your own vision and maintaining integrity, but imagine the price to be paid on your death bed for not having stayed the course – especially for those of us who have no real Goebels or Stalin breathing down our necks, but just a few art critics that nobody outside our world reads anyway.  Was it for the money or the promise of being included in the “right” crowd of our day that we allowed our vocation to pass us by? 

     From one generation to the next, I’ve observed new movements that are little more than thinly veiled recycling of ”looks” from the past. Neo-primitivism typically follows on the heels of severely intellectual trends in art.  Newly rediscovered expressionism, installations and happenings (excuse me, performance art) tend to displace the small, detailed and highly anal.  Severity of thought and exclusive manifestos often breed pranksters and coyotes with a taste for humor, dada and absurdity.   Mannerism and stylization are embraced by those being force-fed a diet of realism - although sometimes it will instead be some recycled form of abstraction.  Yesiree-bob, always exploring that new ground and breaking the mold!

   Then again “same old - same old” really is dull.  I run through the typical museum - room after room of dusty installations, video monitors in darkened rooms playing to empty rows of chairs, collages and aging assemblages of dribbled glue, cobbled together structures, tires and newspapers growing brittle and dropping bits of high-priced detritus into the dust pans of maintenance men who must really wonder about the people with too much time on their hands and money to burn, for whom this is so exceedingly valuable.  Still, I do keep going back to these shrines of my discipline - to revisit old friends, but also in search of something new to rekindle my fires.  There is a lot of digital kitsch out there today, which is no more exciting than yesterday’s undisciplined squirt and blob slop, which is no better than sappy sentimentality, trite patriotic agitprop, maudlin religiosity, or any of the myriad of other varieties of shameless pandering – and bigger doesn’t make them any better either.  Uninspired is uninspired no matter how or when it’s done.

     There is without doubt a higher calling for high art and a legitimate expectation that it bring something new to the table.  I just have a hard time accepting fashion as the new vision – whether that be the latest “look” or the currently fashionable sophistry of words being wound around that “look”.  The greatest rascals have long hidden behind ideology and mass movements, invoking change as its own justification.  Politicians with little else to offer are always demanding we throw the corrupt scoundrels out in their eternal agitation for change at all costs.  In art I tend to see much the same dynamic at play - the most superficial tendencies marching in lockstep behind words like “contemporary” or “cutting-edge” and imitating whatever is to be found in the latest blogs and art magazines in a feedback loop of self-perpetuating self-stimulation and inbreeding.  Imitators imitating other imitators.

      Blogs and glossies may be new source material for today’s imitator, but the phenomenon is hardly new.  I recall a museum filled with works of the mid-nineteenth century Munich School, which like most of you, I too had never heard of.  I whipped through the show, went back to several favorites, and only then read the museum’s didactica.  Son-of-a-gun if the several pieces I returned to weren’t by the founding members and the rest, by their followers.  I wouldn’t wager much on being able to do that on command, but it is a recurring experience in my museum-going. Genuine artists have their imitators and we, their colleagues, know the difference.

    Today, I find myself less willing to accept that “contemporary” label at face value than I once was – really questioning if there is such a thing beyond the celebration of those just putting on the style, talking today’s talk and strutting the fashion of the day.  Fashion is OK for designers and industry, mining various looks from the past, but art isn’t just a business.  Art is an aspirant for the eyes of eternity and answers to higher gods – jealous gods at that.

     For an art critic/historian, art can easily become the raw material with which to illustrate theory – a professional deformation, for which they must continually be on the lookout, i.e.; putting the cart before the horse.  Discovering a tendency or movement is the critic’s livelihood and lumping or splitting of categories is what taxonomists of any kind do.  Sometimes the data fit neatly and other times they must be massaged - inconvenient outliers dismissed, unlike tendencies found miraculously to be ultimately about one and the same – and voila! You have something like modernism, which as best I can tell, is assembled from a highly heterogeneous mix of ideas and people who never had much use for one another – many of whom led rebellions of taste, style and even substance against each other – in short, a Chimera.  Art historians embrace the mainstreams of art because they make for a good narrative with continuity, but as an artist I find that it is usually the less-than-mainstream oxbow or feeder stream that turns out to contain the life-sustaining waters. The stuff that has fed my soul has typically been from the hands of leaders without followers; those whom art historians often proclaim minor, because they spawned no new movements in art – at least not big ones and not right away.

     What I do in the studio is a spiritual discipline akin to meditation or prayer and it is this quiet undercurrent in the history of art that I seek out and hope to find in museums.  The spiritual content of art is something we talked about often in the art academies I attended in Europe.  Yet, in my experience, this crucial aspect of why we make art is mostly dismissed in US art departments as the personal baggage of each student and thus not really open to discussion.  That potentially controversial discussion tends to be displaced with less troublesome political talk – racism, feminism, polemics on aesthetics and generalized art-speak – anything to avoid poking the hornets nest – the big obvious one, hanging there at eye-level and daring us to come close. 

   There is a tacit agreement in this society, that universities are where you learn job skills and not where controversial matters of the spirit are to be discussed.  People send their kids to be schooled and expect them to come back home ready to make money, but untouched by new ideas or changes of heart.  Since art is among the least useful of all jobs skills available at a university and 98% of graduates will clearly be doing something else for a living, it leaves me to wonder what rewards professors find in their calling, if not to help people find themselves, find joy in creation and ultimately to explore ideas and values that they would not encounter back home. I find this development curious indeed, since we seem, as a culture, to be desperately afraid of being thought less intellectual and cultural than our European counterparts and written off as dwellers of provincial backwaters. By avoiding the thornier aspects of our discipline, we ensure that those fears will become self-fulfilling.

    Rebellion against the established order is a time-honored path for youth, but then so is the search for ideals and spiritual exploration, which inevitably lead to a gentler and longer-lasting evolutionary move beyond the established order.  Either route can be encouraged with the expectation of bearing fruit.  I speak at university art departments and find the kids very open to what I have to say – indeed hungry for one showing his cards and speaking from the heart.  Rebellion is predictable - as predictable as is much of the artwork done in art academies as a statement against the system – as predictable as the promiscuous imitation of various avant gardes of the past by would-be revolutionaries of this day. Unless some deeper thinking attends the rebellion, it is not of itself particularly novel or interesting.  It might incidentally be seen as a revolutionary position in a revolutionary field to accept the tools of the past as legitimate means for expressing one’s new ideas - but we begin to descend into the levels of a reflection looking at a reflection of itself here.

   Among the criticisms I might proffer of current American culture is that we do not live in awareness of our historical context.   By that I mean our sense of history is very abbreviated and the ideas that make it to the public level of discourse seem to be breathtakingly uninformed by our own western history and culture.  There is a truism we’ve all heard about those who do not study history being damned to repeating it. If anybody should have a sense of history and being fully anchored in a continuum of ideas outside the mainstream of money talks and bullshit walks - it is us, the artists.   We have never been well-served by any of that vast armory of economic weaponry arrayed against us. We are by nature a throwback to the primal gift economy – like the granny baking endless cakes and cookies, always giving and wondering when the recipients will awaken from their self-centered monetized torpor and see fit to reciprocate.  At best, a few of us will be clever enough to work the system and get our hands on some of the money for a while – but at what cost!

    I can live with low-life advertisers appealing to our vanity and the usual desires to be sexy and youthful-looking, but when the arts devolve to an excessive youth-centeredness and embrace rebellion all too easily, it is an abdication of our sacred trust.  We aren’t supposed to be the lowest common denominator.  It’s not the calling we answered oh so many moons ago when, as kids, we fell in love with the line going down and what could be done with paint. Even the youth so many of us worship don’t want us to be juvenile, but to be actual adults doing the real work we were born to do.  

     We’ve now had several generations of artists throwing out the past and rebelling against those who themselves rebelled against somebody before them.  Eventually you have rebels serving rewarmed rebellion to those who aren’t quite sure what it is they’re even supposed to be rebelling against.  The rebel without a cause is who many of us have become. 

    When I was a student in Prague and then in Vienna in the 1970s, we too saw ourselves as the next avant-garde.  It was all pretty exciting to discuss penning a manifesto over cheap wine and see ourselves as striking out in unison against the moribund establishment in favor of the next big thing, which would inevitably bring the last big thing down to its knees - hard, in a heap of pain and humiliation. Of course the establishment needing a downfall was nearly the opposite in Marxist Prague than in the western spy-capitol of Vienna.  Not having that much in common with one other finished off what gravity, drink and inertia had began. Our avant-gardes lacked content and were, for good reasons, stillborn.

     In Vienna there was at least the next generation of Wiener Aktionists in our midst, following in their professors’ footsteps in a vain attempt to keep the movement alive or at the very least to gain a footnote in the history books for having been a part of that once-great revolution. Fortunately, the participants had enough sense of self-preservation that they’d politely line the performance area with plastic sheeting (school policy), spray stage-paint around instead of excrement and blood and then proceed to hack off rubber prosthetics instead of their own precious members. Not a Schwarzkogler among them.  Very progressive I’m sure, but also not that shocking, because the impact of these “aktions”, like the pornography they were modeled after, suffered from habituation and would have needed continually to be goosed up to a higher octane level to avoid becoming pedestrian – and that is clearly an unsustainable and physiologically self-limiting growth curve.

    There was in Vienna a second well-established but less known movement at the time – that of the Fantastic Realists, whose work was far less revolutionary in a superficial manner, but which did take as its models Breugel and Bosch and whose content was far more mythic – reminiscent of Marquez and the magical realists of South American literature.  The students who went off in that direction seem to have done so alone and with their own psychologies, where they found enough substance to explore, that most are still making art thirty years later.  Prague’s Socialist Realism, like most government-sponsored political art, didn’t go far once the state paychecks and security apparatchiks ceased appearing.  The dissidents on the other hand were people I admired, but today they mostly seem to be living on their past reputations, since the oppressive government they once courageously opposed, has withered away. The art they made back then has earned its place in history, but for the most part, it hasn’t aged well.

     But back to that conundrum of what makes some art contemporary and other varieties not: Contemporary once just meant “not dead yet”. Whether the art being made was imitative or rebellious, constrained or wild, perhaps just syncretistic; it was done by one’s contemporaries who were also one’s colleagues and who all affected the culture - for better or for worse – until some sort of consensus reality coalesced of it all.  For those not content with allowing it to happen organically, I suppose a little agitation is necessary.  There are predictably recurring cries for artistic freedom arising from some artists as well as contradicting demands that everybody march together as one that arise from others.

    Post-modernism appears to be another recurrence of the desperate cry for a marching society to join up with - and a new way of imposing a brand new, much improved orthodoxy on art and excluding any miscreants who don’t get with the program – though the program itself is pretty spurious.  Some people just need that higher cause to join - seeing history marching inexorably forward as though there were a teleological principle at play – some endpoint to which it knowingly, if circuitously, marches.   We can either be on the bandwagon or be reactionaries instead, destined for the dung heap of history. Exciting for a short spell maybe, but getting a bit dated – kind of like twice warmed-over Marxism. You wonder when food poisoning might set into this questionable-smelling fare. There are of course clever folks in the Post-modern camp who try to sneak out in front of the parade and claim that being diverse is exactly what makes us all post modern, but it has the lame feel of a political party before a tight election, appealing to the big-tent notion of inclusivity - while anybody worth talking to, is slipping out the back for a beer and a smoke.

    “Contemporary Art”, for better or worse, has come to be associated with the postmodern brand and is not at all about diversity of expression, but quite the opposite.  “Contemporary” has also come to mean something quite different than just “not dead yet” and has instead accumulated unstated agendas that go well beyond just cataloging the diverse artwork being made today. “Contemporary Art” now excludes a great part of the truly broad spectrum of today’s working artists, despite professing pride in its diversity.  The expression “Contemporary Art” is used analogously to the damning of certain behaviors as “inappropriate”.  You can be alive and making serious artwork with real content and skill, but being labeled as less than contemporary is like having “inappropriate behavior“ appear in your employment files.  Unlike accusations of illegal, immoral or unethical behavior, there’s no way to answer being fingered as inappropriate – or un-contemporary.  You’ve become an out-of-touch-pariah, with no recourse but to accept your lot as something tainted and somebody who should be reporting regularly to the unmarked door at the Office of Aesthetic Control.  Neighbors with impressionable children will be notified of your movements.  Museums with grants to garner and non-profit status to protect will shun you and certain politicians will have opinions on what to do with your kind. So who is and who isn’t contemporary or legitimate -- a part of the canon?

   I find myself periodically revisiting that “contemporary” ground at moments like these, when I appear to have been cast on the wrong side of the divide.  It does give me pause when a well-educated curator, with decades of experience, scads of publications and plenty of public accolades, casually passes my work by as something less than contemporary – implying that it’s been seen too many times to hold much interest.  That’s hard on one’s ego, but I suppose new is in the eye of the beholder and like the well-established curator, I’ve been around the block several times and am not easily impressed or depressed.  When I hear somebody declaiming too vociferously on the cutting edge nature of their work, I think of the lady who protesteth too much and expect to pull the curtain aside to encounter something quite different – most likely rediscovered mannerisms and the plowing of old ground.

     Now don’t get me wrong, revisiting old ground and variations on a theme are time-honored things to explore, but you can’t have it both ways.  If you claim to be the breaker of new ground and the paragon of Creativity with a capital “C”, then you have staked out a position that verges on divine trespass and is exceedingly hard to defend.  The Gods have a way of singling out the sin of hubris for particular attention.  You’ll need to offer far more than recycled flavor of the month or seizing upon a cool old movement and exploring its potentials to pass muster. That is something I would call lower case “c’ creativity, which in my experience is more than just good enough.  It’s the only thing that’s real.  One should at some point gracefully adapt to an appropriate level of humility and see one’s self as part of a long continuum of creative individuals whose worth you will not supersede with precocious cleverness, ever-so-unique brilliance, networking, social media connections or blind dumb luck. 

     You can however settle into doing the real work, pay your dues and eventually join that august pantheon of dead and living artists as an equal – not because some foundation of self-important scoundrels and fools proclaims you an equal (which they never will), but because you will stand up some day before the tribunal of your own daemons and find yourself adequate.  Nobody else knows this the way we do.  They can all be fooled.  Our own self-critic cannot.  I know damned well when I am being a fraud and must go to the matt with my demons. This is what is required of the master artist alone and in the studio at the point when you accept your own authority and can no longer defer to teachers, manifestos or a movement.

      Artists of the past will eventually become the colleagues upon whose shoulders you realize you stand and the peers with whom you carry on a quiet dialogue in the studio – one that spans the centuries - indeed, millennia. The subtle voices you’ll learn to hear, if you become humble and pay attention, will be those of very real colleagues and not some pedantic fuddy-duddies either. Rembrandt would have loved spray paint and Leonardo would have been surfing the web, but they’d still be doing kick-ass art – at least on a good day.

    But back to my contemporaries: I value my fellow living artists as colleagues, but I am also critical of those who have not paid their dues or produced the goods and especially those who make questionable claims for their work.  I must indeed frequently bite my tongue, lest I do damage with my ever-so-important opinions. Art is after all just art, while psychological damage can create serious psychopaths who may remember my address decades later and look me up with machete in hand.  Still, there are moments when being critical is legitimate.  The world is chock-full of sentimental commercial claptrap meant to be pretty, but which fails to be beautiful.  People who paint nudes or crucifixions had better know their stuff and the history of what they are wading into.  The bar has been set high and the failure rate is huge. The world is also full of conceptualists who’ve just discovered that pollution, cruelty, racism and unfairness exist and who need to browbeat us with simplistic symbols of these recently uncovered evils. Life can be unfair. Imagine that.

    Conversely, there are also wonderful primitives, inmates of asylums and other “outsiders” doing art that in no way corresponds to any current art movement and they’ve been quite popular for several decades – no doubt supplanting most of the un-PC dead white guys in the art history books by now.  There are also people from non-western cultures making art that stands well outside the canon and they seem to find acceptance in the world of “Contemporary Art”.  Then there’s feminist art, minority art, indigenous art, folk art and LGBT art in the steadily balkanizing mix of the contemporary scene.  Do you need to know the origin of the maker for it to count as “Contemporary” or is the art itself enough? Where is that line between contemporary and not so contemporary?  Is there a line?

     Content or ideas would seem like the ultimate line of demarcation, at least between meaningful high art and lesser, merely decorative art. Art is akin to writing in that there are time-tested ways to manipulate materials that have been explored for a long time and which are relatively successfully taught. There are precious few James Joyce’s, who can effectively break the rules and still communicate.  It catches one’s imagination when they do, but who can actually read him for long? We dabble and perhaps imitate these rule-breakers for a while, getting excited in cycles of diminishing amplitudes, but then it runs its course.  Mostly those who use language well, will make our juices flow with exciting ideas and comprehensible sentence structure.  Good composition and draftsmanship – ditto.   When dull plodding theater gets promoted as performance art, turgid thinking and stilted simplistic prose as conceptual art and shabby videos pawned off in lieu of good film-making, I tend to think that the practitioners would do well to study their newly adopted discipline itself - which has its own history, pedagogical norms and professional standards.  How much experimental theater can anybody stand, before wanting to see somebody who has gone to the effort to get it right during the dress rehearsals?  Saying something is ultimately what art is about.  Being genuine and saying it well are of paramount importance.

    For my money, the watershed moment in recent western art was the advent of photography - the equivalent of a cataclysmic earthquake, restructuring continental shelves and the map of the entire art world.  Post-modernism and digital media are little more than tremors and aftershocks from this big event. When we became obsolete as recorders of history and portraiture, everything changed.  Meaning was no longer arbitrarily provided by recording important events and personages or by simply doing the bidding of a customer or employer.  From the moment when photos became the means of documenting events and personages, all artists (even those with lenses and darkrooms) were forced to take on a new role as providers of content or accept much-diminished roles as illustrators, recorders designers and decorators.  That is gigantic. 

      Artists are now expected to bring philosophy – or at the very least, original ideas to the table. We can argue till the cows come home about which ideas matter - if the medium is itself the message, if art is about refined thought processes and is therefore Apollonian by nature or a sensual experience and thus Dionysian; if perhaps we are sign, symbol or myth makers; or if it is the beauty of mark-making itself that matters most when all words have become debased and messages redundant.  Modernism is ultimately not a single worldview, look, or way of working.  What little common denominator we have is that we are in search of meaning and goaded into that search by the need to present something more than a mere snapshot (even as a photographer) or at least have a good long convoluted argument that justifies the snapshot.

    The new modernist role in art requires curiosity and intellectual engagement, which has resulted in art education moving to the university setting -  and properly so.  My own mentor, the exiled Czech painter Jiří Kayser, served me well when he refused to give me recommendations to art school until he saw that I had learned the lessons of mathematics, philosophy, biology, history and languages first.  He knew the kid could draw well enough, but that I’d need a real education to make anything worthwhile. His tough love, served me well.

    We’re all post-photography modernists today and can’t help ourselves.  It’s like water to a fish – you don’t even see it, but it defines your world.  Rather than viewing art history as a concatenation of short-lived isms and soon-dated fashions, based in minimal differences of attitude and style, I find it more useful to look at our history more as geologists look at epoch-changing events – as a series of dynamic equilibria, sandwiched between violent changes.

    Certain historical events are pivotal and then there’s no going back.  The meteor crashes and the ensuing climactic changes cause a massive extinction of biota.  Black death or the Huns come to town and everybody you knew is dead.  All is different and will be forever.  To a Christian, the only important historical inflection point is the advent of the savior.  To a military tactitian, the bomb changed everything.  Photography changed the stage-set for all artists with that same kind of finality.  You will not un-invent photography. 

  After a cataclysm, during the ensuing periods of relative stability, the individual is again more meaningful and can influence events in his life, rather than just be tossed about by massive forces and simply hang on in a desperate hope to survive.  Within the context of art history, modernism is such an interlude between large earth changes and a context within which we can hope to mature into spiritually evolved beings and make art that touches another.

  We have a relatively stable system just now, which is conducive to personal evolution.  That doesn’t mean a static system, but one that is resilient enough to withstand perturbations and eventually regain its balance.  There will be changes because it’s a dynamic equilibrium like any eco-system and all our activities will be as statistical fluctuations around a mean – until some day a new and larger perturbation of the system forces it past a breaking point.  A new equilibrium will then establish itself.  Maybe little green men will land, maybe a second sun will appear – perhaps a pandemic that changes all the ground rules.  Who knows?  Meanwhile we will probably be something like modernists for as long as we have a civilization that seems recognizably ours.

   From today’s vantage point, the art of medieval Europe seemed pretty stagnant, though for them the variations from one century to another and from Byzantium to Holy Roman Empire probably seemed meaningful.  What I propose its that all modernist artwork will also seem like that a millennium from now – perhaps a time of great flowering and excitement that could never happen again – perhaps something else, but Post-modernism will be seen as analogous to a renegade 13th century scriptorium in upper Saxony that dared to introduce punctuation into its lines of black-lettering. Sorta cool, if you’re, like, into that kinda thing…

     It may sound as though I am belittling post-modernism, but in truth I am instead questioning taxonomy that calls this anything more than a set of unrelated, disparate styles that are coincidentally contemporary with one another but which in truth exist within the far larger context of nearly two centuries of post-photographic art – or modernism.  There is undeniably a discernable change now taking place among academic artists and students and it does correspond to the post-modernist timeframe, but it isn’t itself post-modern by any standard I’ve encountered. 

      Something happened when any idiot could point and shoot a camera. Standards took a while to cave in since the days of photogravure, tintypes and dark rooms, but today’s landfills, archives and attics are overflowing with meaningless snapshots that are cheap, easily manipulated and no longer even compelling as documentary evidence.  Recall the Christmas cards you receive in relentless numbers every year, with badly posed family portraits of people on the verge of divorce, baring their teeth in faux-smiles.  Ouch!  Who knows what to make of it all?  I don’t.  But, I do believe that the ease with which every kid today dances through Photoshop and their casual dismissal of it as a mere tool are telling signs that say much about how this ripening generation will redefine the borders between fine art and the applied arts.

     Those professing post-modernism are still a mighty unstable and heterogeneous lot and their movement carries all the problematic attitudes of a polyglot and thus an ism profoundly unsure of itself. Ostensibly new and better than the out-dated modernism, post-modernism is however, only separable from its presumptive modernist progenitor by use of the finest of razors and discerning dogmas applied by the most correct of thinkers – few of whom agree with one another.  I guess we all need to separate from our parents and prove our mettle. Maybe art movements are like that as well.  I just don’t see much reason to take it more seriously than that either.  While most of us wonder what this post-modernist animal is, (if indeed it even exists as a separate species), there are others already making reputations based in burying it.  These writers are busily redacting history by finding proto-post-modernist tendencies among earlier modernist artists while also hop-scotching on over the now-moribund post-modernism.  Pretty abstruse I must say.  Is this group still arguing about which piece in the early 1980s was the death-knell of Post-modernism and what has superseded it?

    So what else might be seen to define today’s “Contemporary Art” as opposed to yesterday’s “Contemporary Art”?  Borrowing from the past seems to be proffered as a frequent criterion – appropriation, referencing other peoples’ ideas and looks, referencing one’s self, one’s own iconography, one’s childhood toys, one’s precious effluvia.  But haven’t artists always done this, even if perhaps less overtly?  Is there a Roman statue without some covert reference to classical Greek statuary?  There is clearly a lot of revisiting of Phillip Guston and Man Ray taking place – to say nothing of Magritte, Duchamp, R. Crumb, Andy Warhol, Max Ernst, Hugh Hefner, Walt Disney, Comic Books, SpongeBob Square Pants and all things TV - in cycles of increasing frequency and shorter and shorter duration.  I suppose it isn't so different in principle from my embracing Rembrandt or Durer and conveying what I have to say with that kind of language.  Professors tell me the kids are mostly doing wallpaper for the moment.  Vuillard was doing that nicely a century ago – Matisse too…Nothing new, though what you do with it can still be of interest, or not, as the case may be…

     I see little that is truly new but I still enjoy the variety of individual expressions – often immensely so.  Virtually everything coming from the academy seems to have already been done in some fashion before us.  Clever people in their billions have blundered into virtually every blind alley of human endeavor and plundered virtually every culture and avenue of self-expression.  I am hardly alone in these observations and find that many of my older colleagues tend not to be that interested in the latest hot new talent to hit the streets of Chicago or New York, so much as aspiring to see Lascaux, perhaps the Louvre or the Sistine Chapel.

    I’m fortunate to have seen a lot of great art. The internal compulsion I now feel is less driven by the need to see all the rest of the art out there than it is by the need to make use of my gifts and fully discover who I was born to be.  I am far less interested in what was born whole in a flash of blinding insight from the head of Jennifer or Jason, just graduated from the cutting edge school of art and design and instead wonder what Thomas Mann or Meister Eckhart had to say that was worth their time in old age – or maybe look in on Ivan Albright and Morris Graves - perhaps make a pilgrimage to the Gilcrease Museum in Tulsa to study the drawings of Thomas Moran.  That is the kind of profoundly human and deeply insightful artwork I hope to find in the museums.  Sure, I want to be thought worthy and have my own stuff exhibited. I have an ego. Ultimately, though, I want to know what our deepest thinkers saw as worth creating when facing the grim reaper.  They were all at some point contemporary artists working in a specific time and place, addressing things that once mattered. What makes them fresh and interesting to this day is that, for the most part, their art transcends that historical moment and still addresses that which is most human in us to this day.

     So back to what actually is contemporary:  I’d say it’s two-fold: 

One is the marketplace of money and ideas.   It’s real and matters to some extent.  By this I mean what is currently fashionable in academia and in the galleries – hip now and soon to be quaintly dated. A common denominator seems to be that this is mostly art that is about art and which is highly self-referential – at its best pushing the boundaries of its own field and at its worst, incestuous fads.  It should be preserved while easily available, but it seems of secondary interest to the timeless art of any day – the stuff that isn’t so easily pigeonholed, because it strays further from the safe harbor of academia.  

       The second category of contemporary art, which I believe is the most worthy of preservation, is less obviously timely, but rather transcendent – born of this day without necessarily being identifiably of its time.  Such art may well frame the questions of its day presciently, but often has no obvious look that easily dates it. The examples I most hope to encounter aren’t to be found in the social circuit at all.  These round pegs in a world of square holes don’t appear in the glossies or lecture circuits.  They are the prophets, sages and shamans – the oracles of our time - who plumb depths of which others know but little and who bring back the message we actually need to hear – not the one we already have on our tongues and keep desperately trying to convince each other that we were hip to, long before all the terminally unhip and dull-witted others caught on.  This is where the gold is and what I want to see the curators of public museums and non-profits spend their energies ferreting out and making available to the public – to me.  They are in a privileged position to help overcome the din of that first marketplace-driven group with that, which is by nature quiet and deeply meaningful.

    The most memorable words I have heard an artist pronounce on these matters came from the lips of Magdalena Abakanowitz when she spoke at the sculpture museum of Meijer Gardens in Grand Rapids. She was old, but the fire still burned clearly in her eyes when she closed her talk by turning to us, the artists in her audience and asking: “ Consider carefully – are you here to be decorators… or shamans? ”  

Ladislav Hanka,   October 2011