Post Pop: East Meets West, The Saatchi Gallery,

26 November 2014 – 23 February 2015

Sturtevant: Double Trouble, The Museum of Modern Art, New York,
9 November 2014 – 22 February 2015

This may seem a funny moment to proclaim that nothing much is happening in art – certainly not in contemporary art. In many ways, the art world has never seemed more vibrant and active, and this activity is increasingly focused on what is defined as contemporary. There hasn’t in fact been a moment like this in the relatively recent history of art since the mid-nineteenth-century.

What was the situation then? The French Revolution and the Napoleonic Wars were safely over. These had witnessed a great break up of historic art collections, prominent among them that of the Dukes of Orleans, cadet members of the French royal house. The great shakedown was almost over. There was a new generation of collectors, many of them British, far from aristocratic in origin, and enriched by the booming Industrial Revolution. They were proud of their own success, and had great faith in their own time, as superior to the epochs that had preceded it. If one looks at the years of political and economic chaos between 1789 and 1815, as the fortunes of war swayed back ad forth, this is not surprising. Many of them lacked the rigorous classical education that had formed most of the great collectors of the past. What appealed to them was art made in the here-and-now, by their own contemporaries.

Anything else seemed too remote to be really interesting – though, paradoxically, they had no objection to historical subjects seen through the eyes of their own time. Hence the huge success of a number of now half-forgotten Victorian artists.

A good example is Edwin Long (1829-1891), who achieved fame with his The Babylonian Marriage Market, exhibited at the Royal Academy in 1875. In 1882 it was sold to Thomas Holloway, whose father was a baker who later became an inn-keeper. Holloway made a huge fortune manufacturing patent medicines. The price was £6,615 – then a record for a painting by a living artist. It is now in the Picture Gallery of Royal Holloway College.

If one thinks of the soaring success of contemporary artists such as Jeff Koons and Damien Hirst, it is impossible not to see a parallel.

However, it is also necessary to note that not all artists who made huge successes in their own time have crashed and burned in the generations after their death. Titian and Michelangelo were hugely famous in their own lifetimes, so too was Rubens. They have continued to be highly regarded ever since.

One of the disconcerting things about the current market in so-called contemporary art is that it is extraordinarily capricious and uneven. In the words of the Gospel According to St Matthew: ‘Many are called but few are chosen’ (Matthew 22:14). A very few artists, loosely labelled as ‘contemporary’, make enormous prices in the salerooms, but it is noticeable than most of them –Pollock, Rothko, Bacon, Lichtenstein, Warhol, Basquiat – are dead. In fact, most of them have been gone for quite a long time. Jackson Pollock died in 1956. Mark Rothko died in 1970. Andy Warhol died in 1987. Jean-Michel Basquiat died in 1988. Francis Bacon died in 1992. Roy Lichtenstein died in 1997. ‘Contemporary’ in any meaningful sense of the adjective? I think not.

The big auctioneers are, of course, making strenuous efforts to find convincing, still productive replacements for these profitable big names, but with uneven success. An example is the Colombian artist Oscar Murillo (b. 1986). Blessed by the Miami-based Rubell family, major collectors who commissioned a seven-metre-long painting for their private museum in 2012, Murillo has seen his prices rocket in recent years. There has also, however, been a good deal of ‘picture-flipping’ – a quick purchase followed by an equally quick (and very profitable) sale. It’s difficult to see anything radically new in Murillo’s work – it belongs to the graffiti-art tradition pioneered by Basquiat. Plenty of bounce and vigour. Nothing that makes you exclaim ‘Wow, I’ve never seen anything quite like that before!’

Here, perhaps, one is starting to approach the real nexus of the problem. A great deal of the supposedly new art now being presented to us isn’t in fact new at all. Its claim to novelty is that it ‘appropriates’ from pre-existing art. Don’t get me wrong – artists have always looked at the work made by their predecessors, and have borrowed when they thought this would help their own work along. Sometimes these borrowings have be subtly disguised but sometimes, too, they have been openly flaunted. Yet they have seldom or never been as openly self-righteous about these acts of larceny as they are today. The current exhibition at the Saatchi Gallery, Post Pop: East Meets West, is replete with borrowings of this kind. An upside-down Fragonard – a painting already very familiar from the Wallace Collection, but with the brushstrokes meticulously rendered in trompe l’oeil? Check. Several urinals, variants in different colour ways of Duchamp’s famous readymade? Check. A clone of one of Andy Warhol’s paintings of Elvis Presley, an image itself borrowed from a studio publicity photo? Tick again.

Currently at the Museum of Modern Art in New York (until February 22nd), there is a retrospective exhibition of work by a previously obscure woman artist, who worked under the name of Sturtevant (1924-2014). The show is called Double Trouble. Here’s a chunk from the press release, from the museum’s official website:

Though the work of the 1960s and 1970s may appear to be simply mimetic exercises in proto-appropriation, Sturtevant is better understood as an artist who adopted style as her medium and took the art of her time as a loose ‘score’ to be enacted. Far more than copies, her versions of Johns’s flags, Warhol’s flowers, and Joseph Beuys’s fat chairs are studies in the action of art that expose aspects of its making, circulation and canonization.

To make the artist’s intentions clear the museum offered some back-up, in the form of a class on ‘Creative Appropriation’, and a further series of classes called ‘The Modern Studio: Theories and Methods of Theft’:

Each week we’ll make a replica of one of Sturtevant’s replicas. Artists to be copied include Andy Warhol, Jasper Johns, Keith Haring and Frank Stella. This course also examines related uses of appropriation in the work of Marcel Duchamp, the writing of Jorge Luis Borges, and the musical traditions of Jamaica and early rap. No previous painting experience is necessary.

The message in all this is that contemporary art is now a language you have to make the effort to learn – one that ranks somewhere in difficulty between Mandarin and Esperanto. You can’t expect it to speak to you direct. You have to compare what you see to a well-stocked image-bank you already have available. There is another message as well: the terms are now permanently fixed. You can make variations, but there’s no possibility of creating something new. In fact it’s heresy to try to do so. Chinese ink painting got into this kind of mindset in the later years of the Chinese imperial epoch. Artists were no longer trying to paint landscapes as they saw them. They were, instead, trying to make landscape images that were worshipfully ‘in the manner of’ the great Song and Yuan masters.

This contrasts rather strikingly with the message that other museums, the Tate’s various galleries chief among them, are also trying to put across, which is that contemporary art is for everyone – hence their ever-increasing emphasis on performance art and video. These are seen as inherently populist forms. Populism justifies the expenditure of taxpayers’ money. And in addition, there’s no real legacy, nothing to make demands on already over-crowded storage space.

The great thing about performance art is that when it’s gone it’s gone. To talk about the role of museums that present contemporary art as being, however paradoxically, also preservers of the past, is now irretrievably passé-iste. Their job is now to catch the moment, and at the same time to be at least mildly entertaining. Though the curatorial elite occasionally rebels, the current role of contemporary art, when housed in public institutions, is to wear the clown’s trousers.

Babylonian Marriage Market
Edwin Long
1875

George Pusenkoff
Double Elvis (After Warhol)
1996
Acrylic on canvas
210 x 200 cm
Courtesy of the artist

Until recently, art labelled ‘contemporary’ relied heavily on its power to shock, to create public uproar. This was something inherited from successive early Modernist art movements – Fauvism, Cubism, Expressionism, Surrealism. These challenged both established ways of seeing and established ways of thinking. They aimed to change both viewers’ relationship with the external world, and also their perceptions of the inner workings of their own psyches. For this reason they were often condemned, not only for being bad art, but for being socially disruptive.

The currency of early Modernism, and indeed also that of much contemporary art until as late as the 1990s, was uproar. Not for nothing was the big R. A. show that established the YBA movement during that decade entitled Sensation! Figures of children with penises for noses? A gigantic portrait of the murderess Myra Hindley, made with stamps shaped like children’s hands? Just the thing to excite the scandal mongers from the red-tops and bring the punters flocking through the door.

Now the law of diminishing returns has inevitably set in. One can trace this in the history of successive Turner Prize exhibitions. Founded in 1984, it operated for its first few years on the principle of Buggins’s turn, and was awarded to various long-established artists. Suspended in 1990, it returned the next year in a new form, as an award for an artist under fifty. Throughout the next fifteen years there’s was a plentiful supply of news-making candidates. Some of the best known didn’t win – for example, Tracey Emin in 1999 and the Chapman brothers in 2003 (beaten to the post by Grayson Perry). Then a gradual decline of interest set in. Most people, even those most closely involved with the contemporary art world, would be hard put to it to recite the names of the winners since the year 2005. The one they are most likely to remember is Mark Wallinger, winner in 2007, with his meticulous recreation of the late Brian Haw’s Peace Camp outside the Houses of Parliament, a protest against the Iraq war. Appropriation was already beginning to be big.

The 2014 Turner prize, awarded to Duncan Campbell for a video nearly the length of a feature film, met with an almost universally negative reaction. It was excoriated not for being outrageous or offensive but for being boring. Mark Hudson’s reaction in theDaily Telegraph was typical:

Campbell’s po-faced talking down to his audience is just the kind of thing that gives Leftist dialectics a bad name – almost more so than their influence on brutal totalitarian regimes. Even by the standards of our age of appropriation, when works of art cannibalise each other as a matter of course, everything about this film feels dated and second hand … Is this really where the cutting edge of British art is currently at?

Campbell’s crime was not to be in advance of critics and commentators. It was to bore the backsides off them. Waldemar Janusczak, critic of The Sunday Times, reported:

As your human guinea pig, I sat through every moment this dire event has to offer, for which I deserve some sort of medal. But just to be clear, even if my warnings stir a perverse desire in you to experience the torture for yourself, fight it. Art can be graceful, encompassing, stirring. This art is not.

The fact is that, with its reliance on an inflammatory past, boring its audience is the one thing that contemporary art can’t afford.

Shifting the focus just a little, here’s the American web-site Artsy’s list of the ‘Top 14 Living Artists of 2014’, just issued in mid December:

Ed Ruscha (American). Yayoi Kusama (Japanese), Vik Muniz (Brazilian), Richard Serra (American), Gerhard Richter (German), Takahashi Murakami (Japanese), Banksy (British), Damien Hirst (British), Marina Abramovic (Serbian, now American), Ai Weiwei (Chinese), Jenny Saville (British), Cindy Sherman (American), Andreas Gursky (German), Jeff Koons (American).

Admirably cosmopolitan, one may think, though one notes the absence of anyone from France, Italy or Russia – all countries with a great tradition of experiment in art. Yet one also can’t fail to note the total lack of any discernible direction. A bit of Pop. A bit of Minimalism. A bit of technical innovation – not necessarily with much of a point. Muniz ‘worked with scientists to produce innovative new series including microscopic drawings on grains of sand and images made from bacterial cells.’ Jenny Saville exhibited a rather beautiful variant copy of Leonardo’s cartoon of The Virgin and Child with St John and St Anne. Koons had a big retrospective at the Whitney Museum, with a starring role for his 1988 sculpture of [the late] Michael Jackson and Bubbles.

It’s hard to see anything really innovative in this, even in the drawings on grains of sand – a so-what? product if ever there was one. 2014 wasn’t a good year for the art of our time. It isn’t going anywhere – either fast or slowly.