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Art History vs Cultural Amnesia

Since the election, I’ve been taking my usual holiday reading/video break (when not following the news with grim, heartsick resolve). This December, I spent watched the Great Courses art history lectures of Professor William Kloss, an independent art historian affiliated with the Smithsonian Institution. Kloss’s professorial demeanor, his drily humorous, courtly lecture style (”I thank you for your kind attention.”) and his encyclopedic knowledge lead me to recommend Kloss’s lectures—on European art from 800 to 2000, 17c Dutch painting, and Italian Renaissance art—to anyone planning a serious art-centric Grand Tour, or seeking a refresher from fake FoxKoch news. Iron butt a prerequisite.

 How do we foster both an informed electorate and an art audience immune to hucksterism? Noah Charney in “The art of learning: Why art history might be the most important subject you could study today” (http://tinyurl.com/jh4zmcr) questions the technical, market-based emphasis of contemporary education,that scants the liberal arts because, in this view, only STEM learning (i.e., Science, Technology, Engineering, Mathematics) “makes money or increases power.” Charney disagrees, citing Berger’s 1972 book, Ways of Seeing, and the TV series adapted from it:

Berger … taught us how to unpack what we do see, to separate the wheat from the chaff, the truth from the fiction, and to uncloak hidden ideologies in visual images. For instance, the subtle (and sometimes not so subtle) way in which women are objectified by everything from Renaissance paintings to contemporary TV ads. This could not be more relevant today, with messages, overt and covert, presented in speeches, the television news, promotional videos, body language (during televised presidential debates, for instance) and more. Our culture is far more barraged by images than Berger’s was in 1972, only heightening the relevance of his lessons (the main addition being that the images, these days, are moving and are consumed on laptops and phones).

Can the discipline of art history, commonly seen as frivolous, save the world? Even Barack Obama, one of the most cultured and thoughtful men ever to occupy the presidency, once mocked art history degrees as the epitome of impracticality. (He later apologized, after predictable pushback from powerful art-history lobbies.) But I would agree, with Charney and Berger, that those in the arts, who struggle every day with questions of presentation and illusion, have better BS detectors than those who scoff at fancy-pants degrees in ‘soft’ disciplines. (We artsters have other Achiles’ heels.) Let’s stop being amnesiacs, unthinking reeds bending to prevailing cultural winds.

Here’s an illustration. Goya, that consummate walker of political and artistic tightropes (matched only perhaps by his contemporary, J.L. David), revolutionary and counterrevolutionary, painted in 1800-1 a portrait of power that is now famous for its sly subvertion and mocking of its subjects. Charles IV of Spain and His Family, a huge work, presents thirteen members of the royal family, accompanied by the painter himself, standing at the canvas, in the shadows. Brightly illuminated and sumptuously dressed, the royal couple, (famously characterized by critic Théophile Gautier as “the corner baker and his wife after they won the lottery”) and their lackluster issue are revealed as vapid nonentities devoid of character or intelligence. Fred Licht in Goya: The Origins of the Modern Temper in Art wonders (as we all do) how the artist, the official Bourbon court painter, got away with this “degrading…description of human bankruptcy.”

The answer is that Goya cleverly patterned the composition on a beloved earlier court portrait, Velasquez’s 1656 Las Meninas (The Bridesmaids), with its tiny mirror at the far end of a huge room, reflecting the king and queen. Since we see what they see, we are, in effect, transformed into the royals in this cleverly constructed, subtly flattering image, safely steering clear of dangerous lese-majesté. Goya flatters his royals, too, ostensibly, with beautiful color and brushwork in their costumes and decorations, but he uses Velasquez’s mirror idea irreverently, to undermine monarchical authority. Licht:

In the Goya, too, the attentive glances of most of the portrait subjects are just as strongly focused on an object outside the picture…. But we look in vain for the one object that might yield a clue as to what all these people are looking at. After all the trouble to which Goya has gone to base his composition on Las Meninas, he withholds the one element that makes Las Meninas take on meaning: he withholds the mirror and its telltale reflection.

Licht: “The mirror is still there, but it is no longer within the picture. It is the picture.” We viewers, as with Velasquez, become the subjects: in this case, the aimless, nondescript, overdressed royals, contemplating our estimable likenesses with considerable self-satisfaction. Pierre Gassier describes Goya’s royals as placed on a "stage facing the public, while in the shadow of the wings the painter, with a grim smile, points and says: 'Look at them and judge for yourself!'"^[

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Expats

 We who are fortunate enough to live in dynamic, diverse and scenic San Francisco are watching the real–estate news these days with increasing feelings of trepidation. With the tech boom, housing prices and rents have been skyrocketing. The latest figures show a median apartment rent of around $3800, with no flattening of the upward trend in sight. This has occasioned various protests against the tech interlopers and their disruptions: blockades of the Google buses that ferry IT hipsters from the Mission District down the peninsula to Silicon Valley; and calls for more low-income housing (some of which is coming on line, to use a now wry figure of speech) and special protections for artists. While some of this may come to pass in the fullness of time, many of us are close to being resigned to exiting San Francisco eventually for the dreaded suburbs, and probably sooner rather than later. We worry about the viability of an art world largely depopulated of artists, except for the lucky, talented few whose work will resonate with the new mogul class.

Rather than continue to bemoan this wave of change, let’s consider how the decentralization of San Francisco’s art world throughout the region—to outlying cities like Vallejo, Richmond, Fremont, Hayward and beyond—may have some beneficial side effects. Artists in general come from middle-class backgrounds, so we’re not exactly bedraggled refuges with our household goods and gods piled onto pushcarts, so the question is: can the art diaspora actually help?

Some considerations:

—Art schools will continue incubating talent in the stimulating urban environment. Artists after graduation will continue to band together for moral and aesthetic support, as in the past. If San Francisco never had a central gathering place like New York’s Cedar Bar in the Abstract Expressionist 1950s, it has had informal, ad hoc affinity groups that operate autonomously but come together at times, some of them served by local nonprofit venues with a mission of presenting the new. Social media have made ‘chilling’ easier than ever, so mere proximity is less important, and new cohorts will form on the urban peri[phery. Artists are nothing if not creative and flexible.

—If the group mind is useful for young artists, groupthink is destructive to mature artists. It is naïve to believe that creativity comes only from bringing a critical mass of talented people together; indeed, sometimes isolation is essential: read Anthony Storr’s Solitude: A Return to the Self. In our contemporary culture of mass distraction, we all need time to think and hear ourselves think. Those artists who have persisted with their work past the blush of youth, into their forties (and beyond!) and have created dazzling, profound and beautiful work—largely unknown (alas) to the art market—bear this out.

—Can contemporary art, which has for several generations set its sights on the authoritative tastemakers at the top of the social pyramid, regain its footing as a vehicle for mass communication and transformation? The modernist, utopian goal of shocking the bourgeoisie in order to create a new sensibility has devolved into the postmodernist goal of pandering to the status-anxious and not necessarily informed collector/consumer. Art education, in my humble opinion, went off the rails when it sidelined the teaching of art history (which should be artists’ common frame of reference) to focus on philosophy and aesthetic theory, which inculcate, despite a superficial Marxism, a cynical pandering to snobbery and self-satisfied irony—some revolution! The art historian Suzi Gablik in Has Modernism Failed? (1984) blamed the modernist retreat from society into pure abstraction for art’s perceived descent into frivolity, but, whatever their faults, modernists took themselves and their art seriously (even those iconoclastic Dadaists). I think that too much Pomo art, despite its stated communitarian ideals (which Gablik championed in The Re-Enchantment of Art (1991), to mixed effect), continues to preach to the MFA/PhD-socialized crowd. Can artists out in ‘real’ American connect with average people? I work in Silicon Valley, where people are smart as can be, but there’s less art consciousness than I would like, certainly. Are there potential Herb and Dorothy Vogels out there who simply never saw art, correctly or not, as important or relevant?

It is received wisdom, of course, that art scenes develop and thrive with a fortuitous combination of surplus money, creative energy, and a critical mass of talent both in the creation and dissemination (marketing) of art. Can a geographically decentralized, somewhat diffused art scene—perhaps less trendy—be a good thing for an art world overly driven by money and fashion, by financial egotism rather than aesthetic ambition? Time will tell, but we will have to make change our friend, as someone in Hillary’s circle used to say. See you on the Facebook holodeck and at the eating court in the mall.

PS. Josef and Anni Albers, Bauhaus culture heroes, loved buying furniture for their ranch-style New Haven home from Montgomery Ward: applied modernism via the American system.— DeWitt Cheng

Artist Cyrus Tilton Leaves Powerful Legacy

 The recent art-world flap over the semi-abstract painting of  civil-rights martyr Emmett Till  points up how confusing it is nowadays interpreting sociopolitical art. Such is not the case, however, with the powerful and sometimes disturbing art of Cyrus Tilton, the young artist who died a few weeks ago of cancer.  From his first show, in 2010, at Oakland’s Vessel Gallery, it was clear that this young artist (he was then thirty-two), was uncommonly gifted both technically and conceptually, and that his would be a career to follow. Blending surrealism seamlessly with social critique, Tilton showed that imaginative art could be trenchantly observant about contemporary life, yet illuminate the human condition in all its complexity.

 A Place In-Between, featured figurative sculptures with moving parts controlled by the turning of a crank, so that the viewer becomes physically and psychically involved with the subjects. “Relation" depicts a man, white as a plaster cast, seated atop a stool; turn the crank, and sepia-toned watercolor paintings flip by, showing him doing a stiff-necked head roll. "The Falling Dream" mounts a white oval sculpture of six slightly rotated faces with varying features (like double Trinities) atop a hand drill’s crank mechanism; the group head has been cut into independently movable eye, nose, and mouth sections, so that new face permutations emerge when the spinning stops. Other, non-kinetic pieces explore magic and metamorphosis, and the transubstantiations of art:  Tilton’s finely modeled figures are broken or incomplete in areas, exposing the steel armatures beneath.

 In 2011, Tilton topped even his ambitious debut show, with “The Cycle,” an three- part show analogizing human depredation of the earth with the recurrent devastations inflicted by locust swarms. Locusts are grasshoppers that mutate when overcrowded; Tilton: "… Something happens to change the balance of the insects' ecosystem and all of a sudden, they're out of control, everything goes into overdrive .... They swarm. They eat themselves out of house and home and move on to another area." With the help of fifty volunteers, Tilton assembled “Individuals,” an eye-popping array of almost five hundred locusts, their whirring wings nicely rendered in gathered tulle; suspended like puppets on fishing line from a loosely articulated bamboo lattice that undulates, controlled by a motorized crankshaft, they drift back and forth, hypnotically, like reef fish in invisible currents.  Accompanying this tour de force was another showpiece, “The Lovers, “a huge pair of breeding locusts fashioned from steel tubing covered in beeswax-infused muslin, anatomically correct in their mouthparts, eye stripes, and tibia spurs. The third element of the show, “Potentials,” comprised mixed-media wall reliefs depicting, with the scientific precision Tilton learned in his work at Scientific Art Studio, in Richmond, cross sections of loose soil embedded with insect eggs and pierced by tunnels. 

 Fortunately, this psychological/environmental artwork will continue to gain a wider audience. The Crocker Museum in Sacramento will be exhibiting “The Cycle” beginning  March 25, 2018, thanks to Curator Scott Shields, and Lonnie Lee of Vessel Gallery has created a Kickstarter campaign to fund the donation of “The Lovers” to that institution. Crowd-sourcing to place our best local art in public collections? Yes, we are all individuals!

Disturbing Subject Matter

 In case you have been in a media fast for the past week, the big news in the little art world has been the heated controversy over the painting by Dana Schutz, shown in the current Whitney Biennial, called “Open Casket.” (If you are already heartily sick of this subject, after wave upon wave of angry rhetoric crashing over your screen, please surf on.) The painting is a semi-abstract depiction of the black teenager, Emmett Till, savagely murdered and mutilated in 1955 by bigots enraged by his alleged whistling at a white woman — a fabrication, she has now admitted. (Sometimes one longs for Dante’s specialized departments of hell.) Till’s mother demanded that his coffin be open so that viewers could “see what I have seen,” in all its graphic glory, and the painter used the photo as a starting point for handling—for processing through paint and painting— her own emotions of fear and insecurity as a mother, she pointed out, in these nasty times of snapping and snarling.

 What could be more important than to educate complacent, ignorant Americans about this stain on national history and honor?  Alas, nothing is ever simple in the art world. The painting aroused fierce opposition from the left, nicely described Robert Smith in her New York Times article, “Should Art That Angers Remain on View?” (March 27, 2017). Two black artists took extreme umbrage at what Smith wittily characterized as Schulz’s possibly  “Inappropriate appropriation.” Parker Bright stood in front of the painting, blocking the view to other museumgoers, while wearing a T-shirt imprinted “Black Death Spectacle.” Hannah Black denounced Schulz’s exploitation of “black subject matter … for profit and fun.” Many in my social media feed denounced the work as typical white hubris continuing to perpetrate the idea of black victimhood; and even, through its opting for abstraction rather than realism, whitewashing black history through aesthetic distancing. And if Schutz had replicated the graphic detail….?

 Race relations in the US are a mess. The interlude of liberal rationality that Obama hoped to inaugurate—the extended teachable moment— clearly failed, a victim to white working class economic rage  exacerbated by eight years of right-wing animus, sensationalism and alternate facts. (If no Alex Jones and Bill O’Reilly types failed to fan the flames on Schutzgate, it’s only because they were distracted by James Brown wig and the premature announcement of the death of Obamacare,.

 But to return to the artwork, which is successful on its own terms, not as a political statement—an interpretation which the artist never claimed, yet one which its detractors opted to emphasize. (To be fait, Schultz does seem to gravitate to s sensationalistic celebrity deaths, at times.) Smith adduces, in defense of creative freedom of speech, several powerful art-historical precedents: Ben Shahn’s moving tribute to the unjustly executed Sacco and Vanzetti (despite his being Jewish and the victims Italian);  Abel Meeropol’s song about race lynchings in the South, “Strange Fruit” (again by a Jewish person, and not just any, but one of the adopted orphan sons of the executed Ethel and Julius Rosenberg; and the white William Styron’s brilliantly complex novel about Nat Turner, the less-than-exemplary or heroic leader of the 1831 black slave revolt in rural Virginia. One could cite many other examples of the depiction of suffering by sympathetic cultural or racial outsiders: Delacroix’s Massacre at Chios, about Turkish atrocities; Dorotha Lange’s Migrant Mother, about the Depression tribulations of displaced Okies; or Grunewald’s Isenheim Altarpiece, still shocking today, five centuries after its creation, with its painfully mortal King of the Jews.  Any crucifixion painting, in fact, rebuts the racial exclusivity idea.. Kara Walker, who explores the horrors of slavery culture in her silhouette drawings, concurs, in opposing the ensorship and destruction of the painting sought by some; Smith: “[Walker] concluded that an artwork can be generative regardless of how it offends or falls short, giving ‘rise to deeper inquiries and better art. It can only do this when it is seen.’”  Another artist, Clifford Owens, similarly declared his opposition to what is in effect, to my eye, a kind of politically correct iconoclasm: “I don’t know anything about Hannah Black, or the artists who’ve co-signed her breezy and bitter letter, but I’m not down with artists who censor artists.”Why so much furor from the art world left then? The painting is unobjectionable in itself — but for its provocative title. The black artist Henry Taylor, in the same Whitney show, depicted, with a greater degree of realism than Schultz employs, the police murder of Philando Castile, and aroused no animosity. It is my belief that certain ideas that were almost universally taught in universities in the 80s and 90s—identity art, postmodernist relativism— have hardened into dogma, and can become  exaggerated and counter-productive. Making, seeing and ‘using’ art primarily or solely as Tendenzkunst, as propaganda, as the hypostatization or reification of sacred truths, is bad for the country and bad for art. Let creative people make their work, and let a thousand exegetical flowers bloom.; but let’s not become cultural commissars. Artists and citizens should be truth-seekers, not avoiders of trigger issues. We have serious challenges; one painting in one biennial—and it’s not as if all blacks are furious about it, as some imply—is a molehill, if that. Let’s keep our eyes on the prize, not minor distractions. —DeWitt Cheng