Drawing a line, et cetera
The Ends(s) of the Art School and the Search for the Art Particle
1.
BRUTUS: The exhalations whizzing in the air Give so much light that I may read by them. [opens the letter and reads] ‘Brutus, thou sleep’st. Awake, and see thyself. Shall Rome, et cetera. Speak, strike, redress!’ Such instigations have been often dropped Where I have took them up. ‘Shall Rome, et cetera’ Thus must I piece it out. — William Shakespeare, Julius Caesar Everyone is an intellectual, in the sense that everyone uses their head, in the sense also that there are not different ways of using one's head that would correspond to different stances, types of discourse, sciences, disciplines, etc. — Jacques Rancière
The et ceteras above — in the title, in the AI-generated painting, in the Orchard scene, in the Rancière — contain multitudes too tedious and clichéd for their creators to enumerate. “Thus must I,” like Brutus, “piece them out” and find what is sayable, seeable, and knowable in them, and in everything, which most multitudes tediously contend has always only been one thing. Politics. As in the oh-so-clichéd “everything is political”, etc.; and the political is everything, etc.; and all of it, and everyone, etc., is contained and controlled by economics. Including — bear with me here — the blind beggar whom Emma Bovary on her deathbed at the end of the novel hears singing a bawdy song in the street —
“The blind man!” she cried.
And Emma began to laugh, an atrocious, frenzied, desperate laugh, believing she could see the hideous face of the wretch, standing in the eternal darkness like a spectre.
The wind is strong this summer day,
Her petticoat has flown away.A convulsion pushed her back onto the mattress. Everyone drew nearer. She was no longer alive.
— and the green light at the end of Daisy Buchanan’s dock —
Gatsby believed in the green light, the orgiastic future that year by year recedes before us. It eluded us then, but that’s no matter — tomorrow we will run faster, stretch out our arms farther… And one fine morning — So we beat on, boats against the current, borne back ceaselessly into the past.
And the rest, and so forth, und so weiter, and so on, et ainsi de suite, und so überall, etc., is blah blah blah.
The only exception, of course, we are told, and led to hope, is art.
2. Beauty, Truth, Genius, Civilization, Form, Status, Taste, etc.—John Berger, The Way of Seeing
Along similar lines: the image above is a reproduction of Untitled (New York City), (1970), a large-scale canvas — over six feet long by five feet high — covered in oil-based house paint and wax crayon. On the back is written “Cy Twombly 1970”.
The slate-grey background was painted first, upright against a studio wall in the Bowery, with the then-42-year-old artist standing in front of it. Then it was suspended higher up on the same wall, whereupon Twombly, having climbed onto the shoulders of a friend, applied the white wax crayon — the friend moving him back and forth as he looped a continuous wave-like line from the canvas’s top left corner to its bottom right.
Presenting what appears to be the path of a single line, but which is in fact many layers of both revealed and obliterated but continuous lines fluctuating along the same directional path, Untitled is a work that articulates a strong existential sense of unity and diversity. Reduced to such an apparent unity, “each line” as Twombly once asserted in a rare early statement about his work, “is the actual experience” charting “its own innate” but here, also, integrated “history.” It does not illustrate, but “is the sensation of its own realization”. In this way and in this work, Twombly’s line comes to stand as a powerful metaphor for the single but also, ultimately, integrated path that an individual life takes within a similar multiple, diverse but ultimately united whole. — Christie’s catalogue (Post-War & Contemporary Art Evening Sale 14 November 2014.)
Et cetera. Art has “generated” some of the most debased “writing” of the “modern” era. “Art at auction” writing — even worse.
3.
I’m a painter and my whole balance is not having to think about things. So all I think about is painting.” — Cy Twombly in David Sylvester, Interviews with American Artists, 2001.
Untitled (New York City), (1970) is one of many Blackboard paintings Twombly made between 1966 and 1973. It took him 15 minutes to execute (not including the time it took the background to dry) and it sold at a Christie’s auction on 14 November 2014, 3 years after his death, for $69.6 million — a new record for a Twombly. I mention these figures not to in any way deprecate the work. I love being in the presence of these paintings.
The Christie’s auction that night netted $853 million.
A year later, another, earlier chalkboard Twombly, Untitled (New York City), (1968), sold at a Sotheby’s auction for $70.5 million. Total for the night: $294.9 million. Which, according to Artnet, represented a “correction to an overheated market”:
“The market is strong but selective,” London dealer Pilar Ordovas told Artnet after the sale, “and a little selectivity is very good for all of us. We’re seeing an adjustment of the over-optimistic estimates we’ve seen in the last few years.”
“Tonight showed that when the houses put together a sale with sane estimates, they can have a solid night,” said Citi art advisor Suzanne Gyorgy.
Et cetera.
4.
And are et ceteras nothings? —2 Henry 4
There’s another line I like in the Berger book cited above — and in the TV show that preceded it — about how we never just look at a single thing:
we are always looking at the relation between things and ourselves. Our vision is continually active, continually moving, continually holding things in a circle around itself, constituting what is present to us as we are.
Sometimes, however, the circle — think of that bungee cord you used to tie that big box to the back of your bicycle — sometimes it’s not quite long enough and you pull too hard, and it snaps, and one of the two whizzing points at its rupture, plus the hook and its fastener, uncoil and snake straight into your eye at 200 miles per hour.
And leaves you almost as blind as Emma’s beggar.
Yada yada yada.
5.
“And so we beat on, boats against the current, borne back ceaselessly into the past.”
In Lawrence Sterne’s Tristram Shandy, when Uncle Toby, who has been discussing the virtues of unfettered celibacy with his servant and companion Corporal Trim, pauses before the Widow Wadman’s door to muse on what consequences his knock upon it will bring, Trim, uncharacteristically at a loss for words, cries out, “Whil’st a man is free” and gives a “flourish with his stick thus –”
Some seventy years later, Honoré de Balzac, seeking to illustrate the meandering trajectories that a modern life in la comédie humaine might take, re-jiggered Sterne’s “flourish of liberty” on the frontispiece of his first successful novel, La peau de chagrin, thus:
Then, in 2012, in a tunnel 175 metres beneath the France–Switzerland border a year after Cy Twombly’s death and a few weeks before Untitled (New York City), (1970) sold at Sotheby’s for a mere $17.4 million, a quarter of its price in 2014 — we “saw” the even more extraordinary acceleration, at three metres per second slower than the speed of light, of two mere specks — protons — which then collided thus:
What do these lines have in common? Hard to say, see or know. But let’s say for the sake of argument etc, that they map territories of the incommensurable in the public sphere. Not along the usual lines: “science”, “justice”, “faith”, “thought”, “love”, “ethics”, “production”, “war”. Rather, just one: “art”. Or rather, conceptualisation of art. Ideations of art, which, as Jacques Rancière, the French philosopher quoted at the onset, would have us believe, like the “virtual particles” constantly winking into and out of existence in quantum physics, posit that “art is art when it is only art… and art is art when it is not only art.”
These two contradictory propositions can be synthesized in the following way: art is art insofar as it is possible that what is art is simultaneously not art.
Et cetera. These sorts of flip-flops elicit sneers from most corners these days, especially in political circles, but let’s try to square what Rancière is saying, and not saying.
6.
“The ‘politics of aesthetics’… continuously interferes in politics and contributes to weaving the fabric of the political, its words, images, attitudes, forms of sensibility, et cetera.” — Jacques Rancière, A few remarks on the method of Jacques Rancière, 2009
Rancière traces this “aesthetic regime” — which sees art as autonomous from what it looks like, says, or means — back to the mid-18th century, around the time Laurence Sterne was wavering Uncle Toby at the concupiscent threshold. According to Rancière, at that “moment”, for reasons too magically metaphysical etc. to herein enumerate, art somehow overthrew the repressive constraints of its “ethical” and “representative” regimes. He tells us that from then on art’s contradictory and undecidable nature came from the contradictions and undecidability of its categories in this new-born episteme (“the birth of a new paradigm of art”), the toppling of its hierarchies of subjects and genres, and the displacement of the divisions between the liberal and the mechanical arts, between high and low and fine and applied; and, as “words no longer prescribe, as story or doctrine, what images should be”, the impossibility of our ever actually “mapping its territory” — and defining definitively what art is made of, or what the fuck it is.
Seeable, sayable, knowable, not. Et cetera.
Got it? Good.
7.
Anna Wójcik: Could a misunderstanding of contemporary art by the general public be a symptom of a wider crisis of our educational systems? What should be changed in this respect?
Jacques Rancière: I do not have a ready answer. I would certainly like universities to be more audacious in claiming their right to decide what they want to focus on… But if teaching means anything, it means that there are certain people who can teach something specific; that there are certain places that have potential to foster thinking about something specific. I am a huge advocate of the autonomy of the university. Of course, not the neoliberal understanding of autonomy, which pushes faculties to look for their own financing, but autonomy in deciding what your research interest are and what kind of knowledge you share with students — regardless of the system of equivalences in Paris, Krakow, or Florence. Today, universities are not very courageous… in general, European universities have succumbed to powers of governments and markets. — Duncan Thomas, “The Politics of Art: An interview with Jacques Rancière”, Verso Books (blog), 9 November 2015
8.
“He doubts a similar breakthrough could be achieved in today's academic culture, because of the expectations on academics to collaborate and ‘keep churning out papers… After I retired it was quite a long time before I went back to my department. I thought I was well out of it. It wasn't my way of doing things anymore. Today I wouldn't get an academic job. It's as simple as that. I don't think I would be regarded as productive enough.’” —Interview with Higgs-Boson discoverer Peter Higgs in The Guardian, 6 December 2013
The discovery of the Higgs boson particle at the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) in 2012 was deservedly a big deal — it closed the last gap in the Standard Model theory — but it didn’t bring us a fraction of an inch closer to answering the most nagging questions in fundamental science — or fundamental anything. If the constants of nature were different, would atoms still form? Would there still be art?
Bear with me.
Back in 2013, around the time of the Higgs-Boson discovery, I was part of ArtReview’s Power 100 committee. Our list that year of the art world’s most important “players” solicited this response from the artist Richard Price:
You couldn't judge a fruit cocktail. I hate your power lists. Ranking? What are you, in the fifth fucking grade? Luckily you’re in London or I'd come over there and Three Stooge your knuckleheaded domes together.
I suggested at the time that we “use our heads” in the Rancièrien sense and “put aside our differences, pool our resources, and pay Olafur Eliasson, James Turrell and Anish Kapoor to build us a really big shiny ring in the Alps, where we can watch what happens when we Three Stooge our domes into each other at three metres per second slower than the speed of light. Then maybe we’ll actually learn something.”
I was being a knucklehead, of course. But.
The collider’s maker, the European Organization for Nuclear Research (CERN) now has plans for a super-powered Future Circular Collider (FCC), which would cost somewhere between €9 billion (US$10.2 billion) to €21 billion and use the LHC ring as preaccelerator. As of this writing, however, it is not known how or if the project will be funded.
The Large Hadron Collider, which is a pleasant two-hour drive from Art Basel, cost 5.5 billion euros to build. Christie’s and Sotheby’s Contemporary Art sales alone could have paid that off back then in three years, max. Today, they could write the cheque for the much-more expensive FCC with the proceeds of two year’s sales.
The global art market, which, according to Artprice generated €162 billion ($182 billion) in sales last year, could pay it off in about a week.
So, let’s return to my first question, sightly repurposed: Can the art world, spearheaded by the art market and directed by its best art faculties, students, and independent researchers, foster a collaborative project as sizeable and significant as the LHC and the FCC?
What the blazes for, you ask?
9.
Answer these questions first:
i) Are today’s art schools, especially the big famous ones, experimental labs, end-oriented research centres, re-education camps, de-skilling tanks, seed-stage equity venture farms, or the most important relational artworks of our age?
ii) Did the art world engender the art school, or vice versa? Were both created by the art market, or are all three — art school, art market, art world — so far up each other’s arses that you can’t tell them apart?
iii) You there, art school students, what’s the most important thing you learned at school this year? Did you learn it from your professors, your peers, or yourself?
iv) Why does so much contemporary art look like homework?
v) Is it time for degree-granting art schools, as the art critic Jerry Saltz once wrote, “to stress courses in craft and various skills — from blacksmithing to animal tracking?” And, really, are institutions of higher learning the best environments for art instruction, or is the increasing professionalisation of art, by which I mean the almost universal obligation for academic certification, with its attendant conformist tendencies and standardising effects, 100% depressing and awful and evil? Is the MFA a ‘terminal’ degree, in every sense of the word?
(Don’t get me started on creative writing programmes…)
10.
Tangentially related: Should art schools be democratic, meritocratic, or plutocratic? Must aspiring artists shell out scandalous amounts of cash to become “future greats”, or, failing that, certified “professional artists” or, failing that, certified “art professionals”? Is the third calling lower than the second? Calling: is vocation and profession the same thing? Is professional and successful the same thing? If admission to these institutions were free, would it make any difference, or, as in psychoanalysis, are the fees, whether paid directly by the student or granted in the form of scholarships, an essential part of the developmental process? Are art schools, therefore, cognitive behaviour clinics, and crit sessions a form of normative therapy? Or is, as the late great art critic Dave Hickey once said, the MFA’s only and “evaporating” raison d’être “training sissies for teaching jobs?” Or from an even more phlegmatic and funny Hickey rant, should Fine Arts department be pushed wholesale into Athletics, and should students attend for the same sole reason basketball players go to NCAA schools: not to get a piece of paper but to “make it to the pros”? Or should art instead follow the football club model, with youth academies and farm teams feeding new talent directly into the big-league maws of Team Gagosian, Team Zwirner, and Team Qatar?
11.
Now your turn, you there, the art-aspiring types. Are you at a crossroads, trying to decide whether to:
a) major in fine arts;
b) apply for an MFA program;
c) attend an alternative, artist-run school;
d) net-surf and museum/gallery hop yourself into an educated state of art-making preparedness;
e) intern your body and soul to an artist whose work you admire;
f) retreat your quiescent pupa-self to a hidey-hole until, through hard work and/or divine intervention, you emerge a fully formed art moth, perpetually hovering near the dangerous flame of artistic genius and all-consuming creativity?
If any of the above, read on, for I will show you the path on which there is no coming and no going. If, however, you are enrolled in one of the finer fine arts programmes already, and can afford the subsequent debt load, go back to whatever institutional structure has been set aside for you to do what you do — studio, study carrel, the confines of your mind — and do what you do.
If, however, like Baudelaire, you believe that art is a cancer that eats up everything else, and you’re not okay with this, click elsewhere. If you dream of fame and sex and fortune, dream on, but somewhere else. If your hand and eye take a backseat to your mouth, move along. If you network or think you should learn to network, stop where you are. If, for you, the aesthetic has been eclipsed by other values — political, social, moral, relational, dialogical, environmental, conceptual, whatever — hover near the back with a mocking sneer on your face, looking up from time but not deigning to participate. If the phrase “distribution of the sensible” makes your skin tingle, or crawl, close this and take a bath. If you seek approval and guidance from a community of like-minded peers, beat it. I mean it. You there, DIY guy in the white overalls, move a little closer. You with the Lacan book, try the door down the hall. Spiky-haired thing, a urinal, really? I see that it’s fully functioning and not upside down and made in China. Yes, yes, I watched the video and read the Walter Benjamin quote. The uniqueness of urination as a work of art in the age of post-mechanical reproduction, I get it, big deal. Piss off.
12.
The rest of you? It is time to get off the pot. Aesthete, philistine, and everyone else in between, what we talk about when we talk about art, the big questions, the whats and the whys — especially ”what is art?” and “why is this art?” — are tiresome but unavoidable. And essential. The laziest way to describe a work of art is to talk about what someone is willing to pay for it. The same is true of an art education. The whole student debt thing, which the American critic Ben Davis calls the “juicy black carbuncle of a political issue that is going to explode” is easily and safely lanced. Just don’t get too close. Yes, money talks, but do you have to listen all the time? And if not, to what should you be listening? Your heart? Your mind? Your mother? The Higgs-Boson? The full, great, caterwauling arc of everything?
Certainly not a certifiable, non-credentialed knucklehead like me, that’s for damn sure.
Artists make art. Artists, make art.
Et cetera.
13.
Thank you for reading. Apologies now for the crassness that follows: this bit of fritter took up and swallowed a sizeable chunk of my time — just today alone I had to pass on a trip to a vide-grenier in Lannion. And lunch in a creperie. So please, if you can, toss a few coins in my:
A subscription, yes. Please.
Comments too.
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I positively crave likes. To a degree that is embarrassing. If I don’t get them, I feel ill. If get one from someone and then don’t get one from that same person the following week, I curl up into a ball. If I see that someone has read something 68 times and didn’t even once hover their index finger over the button, I get blind drunk and sing bawdy songs in the street. Or bootleg alcohol and try to impress rich people with tales of my war heroism and days at Oxford.
Trust me. You do not want to see this. Or hear it. Or even have to think about it.
Ta.
Great read.
Art by mandate is boring,too.
Chris
nice one—