From
time to time, articles appear, proclaiming the death of painting, or the death
of art; both are, to use Mark Twain’s word, premature, and easily ignored.
However, the strange state of American culture in the Trump era, with its
worship of money and its mingled fear of and contempt for creative expression calls
for occasional reflection. We have been living and working for the past four
decades or so in what is termed the postmodernist era. Preceding that was the
modernist revolt in the late 19th and early 20th
centuries, against a by-then debased Renaissance realism. To quote Wikipedia:
...its chief general
characteristics are often thought to include an emphasis on "radical
aesthetics, technical experimentation, spatial or rhythmic, rather than
chronological form, [and] self-conscious reflexiveness" as well as the
search for authenticity in human relations, abstraction in art, and utopian
striving....
Postmodernism arose after World
War II as a reaction to the perceived failings of modernism, whose radical
artistic projects had come to be associated with totalitarianism or had been
assimilated into mainstream culture.... Salient features of postmodernism are
normally thought to include the ironic play with styles, citations and
narrative levels, a metaphysical skepticism or nihilism towards a “grand
narrative” of Western culture, a preference for the virtual at the expense of
the real (or more accurately, a fundamental questioning of what 'the real'
constitutes) and a “waning of affect” on the part of the subject, who is caught
up in the free interplay of virtual, endlessly reproducible signs inducing a
state of consciousness similar to schizophrenia.
George
W. Bush’s administration touted ‘faith-based reality’ over old -fashioned
‘fact-based reality,’ so W was seen by some as the first postmodern president. ne
could argue that today’s alt facts and fake news are now new, but legacies. Nowadays,
we read increasingly, however, that PoMo itself is no more. The philosopher
Daniel Dennett: Postmodernism, the school of 'thought' that proclaimed 'There
are no truths, only interpretations' has largely played itself out in
absurdity, but it has left behind a generation of academics in the humanities
disabled by their distrust of the very idea of truth and their disrespect for
evidence, settling for 'conversations' in which nobody is wrong and nothing can
be confirmed, only asserted with whatever style you can muster."
In
the post-postmodernist age, we are invited to forsake the intellectual
skepticism we imbibed in school (some of us) , the old-time irreligion, and to find
new faith in ... something. Cultural critic Eric Gans posits a ‘post-millennialist’
rejection of politically correct ‘victimary thinking’ in favor of
‘non-victimary dialogue’ that will “diminish […] the amount of resentment in
the world.” Alan Kirby, a British critic, is less sanguine assessing our
current condition as ‘digimodernism or ‘pseudo-modernism’; he enumerates our
faults: "In pseudo-modernism one phones, clicks, presses, surfs, chooses,
moves, downloads," excoriating even —is nothing sacred?—"the drivel
found […] on some Wikipedia pages.”
This
confusion about the intersection of philosophy and aesthetics came to mind as I
absorbed the current Urs Fischer show at the Legion of Honor. Fischer is a skilled artist in the conceptual
mode, i.e., intellectual and provocative , but not emotionally engaging The museum is displaying two bodies of his work:
large bronze sculptures made from amateur-artist clay models, dispersed in the
entrance courtyard, surrounding Rodin’s Thinker;
and mixed-media paintings and sculptures, installed at various points within
the Legion’s traditional galleries, surrounded by Renaissance, Baroque, Rococo,
and Neoclassical paintings, sculptures, and furniture. The juxtaposition of old
and new is so striking that I went back twice to look. I can’t say that the
mashup effect was entirely pleasant or, for that matter, unpleasant; it did, however, reflect our
current confusion about art’s meaning and how it is affected by context, The exhibition, which celebrates the centenary
of Rodin’s death, is a mixed bag.
The
Legion of Honor, you may recall, is a slightly reduced-scale replica, erected
in 1924 on a hill overlooking scenic San Francisco Bay, of Pierre Rousseau’s
1782 neoclassical Palais de la Légion d'Honneur in Paris, If the original Legion celebrates military
valor or other meritorious service on behalf of the French nation, the San
Francisco museum seems the very model of a traditional museum; its Greco-Roman architectural
style (so often copied for banks and treasuries) connotes—unlike contemporary
museums—stability, substance and endurance. A 1923 plaque mounted on the
archway leading into the colonnaded courtyard commemorates “comradeship with
the dead” of America’s Great War, and
Rodin’s Thinker seemingly broods over
“Patrie et Honneur,” Country and Honor, engraved on the entrance pediment.
Sixteen
bronze sculptures made from clay models by amateur artists have been placed
within this classical patriotic setting in what can be described only as,
depending on your tastes, a genius coup
de théâtre or a backhanded slap to patriotism and self-sacrifice, once
considered virtues, but now regarded by most Americans, rightly or wrongly,
with skepticism and even scorn. The juxtaposition between these lumpy
antiheroic works and the classical columns surrounding the spacelike disciplined
soldiers seems odd, but in a good way. Only steps away from George Segal’s Holocaust
memorial, and encircling Rodin’s masterpiece, these bronze turds are inept,
funny and weirdly endearing. Louis xiv
is a sagging ornate throne; napoleon,
a tricorn-hatted head perched atop a column of slumping mud; boy in chair depicts a enervated,
splayed protagonist; man on pile is a
comic version of the Greek hero Prometheus, awaiting his daily evisceration by
eagle; pietà boasts a monstrous
Madonna instead of the eternally young Queen of Heaven; and column two is a saggy, baggy
architectural support member worthy of Dali, an ironic Ionic.
Less
fortuitous are the works installed within the museum — the aesthetic holy of
holies—surrounded by familiar European masterworks. Here, the juxtapositions
become jarring to anyone with affection for Old Master art or historic
artifacts. Fischer’s oddball sculptures, mixtures of hardware-store fixtures
and digital technology, are odd and eccentric, but not with the dopey,
excremental appeal of the works outside. Invisible
Mother, a partial skeleton lying in a chair, and irrigated by water run
though a hose, looks, with its gold coins in the fountain, like a prop from the
Pirates of the Caribbean ride. Fiction,
a sculpture of a table with a few objects, vibrates, apparently (I did not
notice), symbolizing “a mental state of blurriness,’ but there’s nothing tentative
about the dramatic Dutch portraits and landscapes behind it. Dazzled,
a pair of large sculptures of disembodied eyes, is described as critiquing the
artificiality of socially constructed ideals and objects; they look away from a
trio of English portraits and toward a pair of Scottish ones, unseeing,
unblinking. Kratz is a sculpture composed
of a single bed filled with a disastrous amount gravel or cement and close to
collapse; it is an intriguing piece, but the Rodin bronzes around it come from
different worlds (despite the stone-like bases of some of the Rodins) and, like
competing optical illusions, cannot be ‘seen’ simultaneously; they suffer from
the poor chemistry
I
recently ran across the Japanese word tokonoma,
an alcove dedicated to a single work of art. Artworks should be displayed
either in isolation, to encourage contemplation, or in visual conversation with
sympathetic works; pairing antithetical works should be avoided without very
compelling reasons to do otherwise.
