The Myth of the Artist
by
Rodney Munday
(published in the 2005 summer edition of The Salisbury Review)
Recently, I visited the
Abattoir, the new museum of contemporary art in Toulouse. A
magnificent building architecturally, it was spoilt only by what it
contained – the pretentious vacuity of the type of mainstream art which
has plagued us for nearly forty years and still considers itself to be
fresh.
At every corner there was an “installation” (in my
ignorance, I once thought most art was installed). As with a similar
installation in the nearby church of Les Jacobins, these consisted of
mixed horrors in darkened rooms, accompanied by moans, graunching
sounds, wails and cries, quite fitting for a former abattoir. They were
a kind of intellectually sterilized ghost train, attracting serious
looking people. Young children were not allowed near some of them. A
four year old did, however, approach a piece of contemporary sculpture
made of fairly hefty hunks of stainless steel. He found it quite
attractive and thought it would be worth a feel. (His father is a
sculptor and he has learned that sculpture is tactile). An attendant
rushed up – ’Touche pas, ’Touche pas! - The thing was
indestructible, but of course, it was Art. Yet outside, at the entrance
to the gallery, children were crawling all over a Henry Moore.
So, what is Art? Ever
since Duchamp exhibited his urinal in 1917 we have been told time and
again that it is whatever the artist chooses to call it. Logically, that
is the equivalent of
saying that a farmer who builds houses across his land still has a farm
when it is a building site, because he chooses to call himself a farmer
rather than a developer. Linguistically, it turns the word art into
a ludicrous back-formation, derived from the word from which it is
derived.
With time, the meaning
of a word changes. The difference that we see today with such change,
compared with the past, is that it is determined not by the organic
growth of language, but the decision to call one thing by another name,
because it seems desirable by certain individuals or groups to do so. So
polytechnics become universities, homosexual people are gay, and
artists are those who do not necessarily have any skill, but wish to be
categorized as a certain “type”. Skill then becomes not merely
unnecessary to the artist, but an impediment; his lack of it is an
indication of his artistry. As Stephen Farthing, Master of the Ruskin
School of Art in Oxford has said, “artists have become ideas people.
They have more or less detached themselves from crafts and getting their
hands dirty and have placed themselves in an executive, white-collar
class.” He claims that “a craft based on a dream of creativity” was
a cul de sac. “At the end of the twentieth century few artists
think that the dream is worth the risk, and quite clearly the audience
and collectors no longer require them to take it.” Socially, we
might see this renunciation of skill as linked to the western world’s
movement away from manufacture towards service industries, and thence
(as even these are relocated in the east) towards a condition determined
by and committed to the production of legal constrictions and their
enforcement. Under such conditions, artists such as Emin and Hirst can
be seen as the natural products of a society that produces nothing.
It would nevertheless
be surprising to see much contemporary art called art if it were not for
the fact that “mainstream” art is determined by institutional buyers, or
by individual buyers acting like institutions, with their eyes projected
on monetary value and therefore on trends rather than personal taste.
Taste, of course, can be dismissed as something relative, but before we
do so we should reflect that the painting of the Sistine was
commissioned by a man rather than an institution and that St. Peter’s
was determined by individuals rather than “the Church”. Arguably, the
notion of chacun à son goût resulted in such work because it was
unaffected by the vagaries of group decisions and media hype which are
such determining factors today.
Taking a longer view of
the situation, our idea of art has also been conditioned by the
lingering effect of the Romantic movement. Romanticism liberated the
artist from servitude to the patron (or so it seemed). When it didn’t
really work, the artist starved in his garret – not of course because he
was a bad artist, but because he was misunderstood. Instead of the
Renaissance man, who at his best was “not of an age but for all time,”
we have the man who is so far advanced beyond his own time that his own
time does not understand him. Instead of the admiration of the past
(both distant and recent) which we see during the Renaissance, with an
attendant desire to improve even upon that, we have the abandonment and
dismissal of the past, culminating in the denial of the value of a
person or what he produces simply because he is dead, as in Aragon’s
compliment to Rimbaud, that “he did not allow anyone to salute the dead
in his presence.”
One problem about such
rebellious attitudes to the past is ahistoricity. When the Primitives
at the turn of the last century could ignore or dismiss the original
primitives’ own values and considerations in their art in favour of the
“relevance” of that art to the modern artist, it showed the extent to
which our age was becoming one fettered by its own ignorance. When, in
1977 an “event” took place in which prayer books and registers from a
synagogue were torn up and thrown on the floor, that ignorance
manifested itself in the excuse that the artists had not understood the
significance of the books. Ignorance and Sin are traditionally and
justifiably represented as twins. But that still leaves the question as
to why the relatively modern kind of artistic rebelliousness arises, for
it is generally not for a cause, but for its own sake. Hans Richter,
writing about the origins of Dada, said, “We were all propelled by the
same powerful vital impulse. It drove us to the fragmentation or
destruction of all artistic forms, and to rebellion for rebellion’s
sake.” This is the type of rebelliousness that is associated with
adolescence. One of the worst aspects of puberty is the self-centredness
which is a natural product of biological self- awareness, and that is
precisely what we see in the rebelliousness of contemporary art.
Egocentricity and self-consciousness are two sides of the same coin, and
there is little difference between shyness and self-assertion. Both are
destructive unless they are outgrown. The first tends to the destruction
of individual potential; the second to destruction of the past, and it
is destroyed in the name of progress. Keep going forwards, because it is
inconceivable that you can go back – even if you are heading in the
wrong direction.
“Every artist,” Stephen
Farthing says, “must be able to ask themselves [sic] when they
complete a new piece of work a set of questions. Is it any good? Is it
new? Does it achieve the objectives I set myself or go beyond them? Is
it just a remake of something I or someone else has made before? What
will my audience, my dealer think of it? Will it extend my audience? Will it add to my reputation?
Will it make me famous?” The need to ask these questions appears to go
beyond the natural concerns of an artist-patron relationship to an
unnecessary concern about what other people think, and as such is akin
to adolescent self-consciousness. The desire for novelty, reputation and
fame is simply pubescent self-assertiveness. The implication of much of
what Farthing says is that for the artist today the artist is more
important than his art. This is a natural corollary of the philosophy
which was engendered in France in the 1960s, which devalued creativity,
and upon which conceptual art and post-modernism were founded.
“Deliverance from the confines of the studio frees the artist to a
degree from the snares of craft and the bondage of creativity,” wrote
Robert Smithson in 1968. “Ideas alone can be works of art,” wrote Sol
LeWitt in 1969.
The creation of Adam
has been represented countless times over the centuries, important to
artists as a symbol of the creative act. Today its symbolism shows just
how different the contemporary artist is from his predecessors – not
different in degree but different in kind. The story represents a God
who has an idea, a concept, but until the point where he actually makes
a man in the physical world, that man is not a reality. Once man is
actually created, he takes on an existence outside his creator. Only
then can God communicate with him, because it is only then that he has a
life (if disobedient) of his own. The story is a paradigm for every act
of creation, whether of a child or a work of art. The act of creation
liberates the created from the creator. A work of art which remains an
idea is unborn. Conceptual art is therefore a contradiction in terms –
unless you have made the decision to call one thing by another name.
This distinction
between the created work and the author was described by E. M. Forster,
when he said that the artist will look back on his work “and wonder
afterwards how he did it.” Wonder at the creative process is lost on an
artist preoccupied by himself. Because of that preoccupation he can also
dismiss the art of the past because it is not his. But as Forster said
about artistic appreciation, “we must come back to love. That alone
raises us to the cooperation with the artist which is the sole reason
for … aesthetic pilgrimage.” Or as Irving Stone put it in his novel
about Michelangelo, “every act of creation is an act of love.” To
dissociate the act of art making from the wonder and love of creativity
is to produce a sterile art devoid of value. That is what has happened
with works like Gilbert and George’s Spit on Shit or Serrano’s Piss
Christ . Their objective is to shock and disgust, to desecrate and
devalue. The choice of words for the titles is enough to show that. Coleridge could have done the same thing when he described
the beauty of candle light reflected in a chamber-pot of urine, but his
description is their antithesis; a celebration of beauty in all things,
of earth as the footstool of God, and consequently of man as imago
Dei. Perhaps the
problem at the root of post-modernism is that it is dehumanising. With
destructive self-assertiveness, it paradoxically applies its nihilism
even to the artist himself, following the Structuralist philosophy on
which it is based; that “French Theory” of deconstruction, semiotics and
lengthy neologisms which replaced the author by “the text”. Initially,
Foucault’s comment “What difference does it make who is speaking?” does
not seem very different from Forster’s “The demand that literature
should express personality is far too insistent these days.” But when
Forster continues, “and I look back with longing to the earlier modes of
criticism where a poem was not an expression but a discovery, and was
sometimes supposed to have been shown to the poet by God,” we see the
difference. For Foucault, the author “is a certain functional principle
by which, in our culture, one limits, excludes, and chooses, by which
one impedes the free circulation, the free manipulation, the free
composition, decomposition, and recomposition of fiction.” The
insignificance of the author relative to his inspiration is replaced
simply by the insignificance of the author. The concept of inspiration,
like the concept of creation has been destroyed. So what are we to make
of the self-publicising yet self-denying, uncreative, uninspired people
who go around calling themselves artists? Instead of making something,
they intellectualise endlessly, generally falling into the Swiftian trap
of the Huynhnnms, that super race of purely rational beings, devoid of
sympathy and therefore of morality, who impressed Gulliver rather more
than Swift. Whether these post-modern artists are as intelligent as
Swift’s horses, however, is open to debate.
Words, like people, have a history, and we change or destroy them at our peril, as in doing so we destroy our past and our heritage. I am a sculptor. I have no wish to be called an artist. I shape things, like the Anglo Saxon poet, the scop, and my humanity is enlarged if I can do so as if in the image of ælde Scyppend, the Shaper of men, the Creator. Artist is a more recent word, the meaning of which has become increasingly corrupted. Originally, it meant one skilled in the arts and not just the fine arts to which it later became restricted. During the nineteenth century it attained the status of myth with the concept of the poet seer, and the mythology has continued to develop whilst the word itself has lost the connotation of skill, and along with the word art has become so vague as to be meaningless (“The one thing to say about art is that it is one thing. Art is art-as-art and everything else is everything else. Art as art is nothing but art. Art is not what is not art,” said Ad Reinhardt). It is unsurprising that the contemporary “artist” no longer has to make anything. He has become his own raison d’être, and his own myth.