The term ‘avant-garde’ continues to be used, in my opinion with far too much frequency, in discussions of contemporary art. It derives, of course, from military terminology, and implies that the art to which it is applied is somehow ahead of the game.
It’s worth taking a look at how this assumption works in practice. Essentially, Western and now world art has witnessed the emergence of a series of avant-gardes since just before the third quarter of the nineteenth century. One may perhaps give Impressionism the honour of being the first avant-garde as we now understand matters. Until quite recently, avant-gardes tended to develop in orderly, quasi-hierarchical succession. Impressionism begat Post-Impressionism. Cubism was displaced in due course by Surrealism. Surrealism was displaced by Abstract Expressionism. Abstract Expressionism was vanquished by Pop Art, and Pop, in very short order, was challenged by Minimalism.
Did these developments take place in total, self-enclosed isolation, as some Formalist art historians might still wish us to believe? Obviously not. The development of late nineteenth-century art, that of the twentieth century, and that of the last decade or so, has obviously been influenced by social and economic factors – perhaps especially by the latter. Successive avant- gardes seem to have been born and died in response to the economic cycle.
One may wonder why this progression of styles has not operated more smoothly than has in fact been the case. Any examination of both critical and popular response to new forms of art, during the period under review, indicates that a period of rejection and opprobrium, not only by the public but still more so by ranking taste-makers of the time, is inexorably followed, first by partial, then by more or less total acceptance. However, the process is never smooth. There are outcries, and accusations, and firm declarations that this or that new development cannot be avant-garde because it does not correspond to the avant-garde that is already in place.
Then there is a sudden reversal of opinion and with it reversals of both financial and intellectual valuations.
In other words, the pattern today is that an established orthodoxy is attacked, conquered and brought low by a rival and newer orthodoxy. The inexorable progress of one of the best-known British artists of the present moment, Tracey Emin, offers a striking illustration of this process. First she was a social and artistic reject, then a sudden celebrity, but one of a distinctly scandalous sort. Now has come absorption, almost canonisation – she was British representative at a recent Venice Biennale, has been elected Royal Academician and is the Royal Academy’s new Professor of Drawing. There may be further steps for her to take – a DBE, perhaps, followed by a Life Peerage (Baroness Emin of Margate), maybe even election as the first female President of the Royal Academy – a counterpart in our own day of the Victorian grandee Lord Leighton.
If one looks at the pattern of development in recent avant-garde art movements – say since the 1980s – one sees that their genesis is usually linked to some kind of financial downturn. Young artists are thrown back on their own resources. Collectors become less enthusiastic about buying high-priced contemporary works. Yet the collecting habit does not go away, so the really addicted art-lovers are tempted out of the ghetto of received opinion. Or, to put it a different way, they start to bottom feed, a change of habit that, inevitably, brings them into contact with emerging artists, since they are the ones whose work can be bought cheaply.
Collectors who are historically well informed are always aware that, despite the self-regarding clamour of critics and curators, new art movements are essentially created by the people who make art, not by those who pontificate. If they are smart, these pioneering collectors look for the two or three artists who seem to have most influence over their fellows, to the point where they dominate a particular group or scene. The early, or to be more accurate early-middle, collecting career of Charles Saatchi, culminating in the Sensation! Exhibition of 1997, which officially launched the artists we now called YBAs (Younger British Artists) to a wide public, offers a case in point. Savvy dealers, especially those who belong to the same age group as a currently emerging generation, become aware of what is happening and begin to offer support. Those with financial and – most of all – intellectual investments in the way things are inevitably take umbrage at these untoward and to them threatening developments, and a war begins. It is a war that the older generation is inevitably going to lose, since contemporary art lives on change. 1997 now seems a long time ago, and there are many signs that the YBA movement, fifteen years on, and more than twenty years since its real beginnings, has reached and passed its sell-by date.
One major problem about this pattern, both for those coming in and for those in danger of being kicked into touch, is that contemporary art offers no objective correlatives. You can say that something is different from what went before, but you cannot find any established external standard that will enable you to say that it is provably better. Vasari, when he wrote his biographies of the leading artists of the Renaissance, was able, so he thought, to use them to tell a story about an increasing capacity to represent reality.
The only form of contemporary image making that follows anything like a Vasarian pattern is photography and its derivatives – specifically digital photography, which has, in recent years, been the subject of an astonishingly rapid technological development. Speaking here as a photographer who has, since the end of the 1970s, had quite a large number of solo exhibitions all over the world, in cities as different from one another as Skopje, Tel Aviv, Kingston, Jamaica, St. Petersburg and Kuala Lumpur, I’m amazed how much these developments have empowered me. From having been wholly dependent on professional laboratories to develop and print, I have moved to the opposite extreme – I capture an image, process it in my computer, and print on my own printer, to exhibition quality. No other person intervenes in the process – the images are mine, from first to last.
Where the visual arts in general are concerned, one notes two opposite but apparently linked phenomena. The first is that art is losing its power to transform. Damien Hirst’s shark in a tank of formaldehyde is not a representation of a shark – it is a shark. When the Chinese artist Ai Weiwei wishes to criticise the surveillance society he makes (or, to be more accurate, has manufactured on his behalf) a marble replica of a surveillance camera.
At the same time, however, attention of the audience is shifting from the made to the maker. Sometimes it isn’t necessary for the artist to make anything at all. The ultimate result of this tendency could be seen in a relatively recent exhibition – the retrospective held in 2010 at the Museum of Modern Art in New York, which was devoted to the career of the celebrated performance artist Marina Abramovic. Since Abramovic is now in her sixties, it was not surprising that the majority of the items were ‘reperformed’ for her by younger people. Her own direct contribution was called The Artist is Present. She sat in the atrium of the museum every day, and members of the public were allowed, one by one, to sit opposite her, without speaking or being spoken to. Some found the confrontation so moving that they wept. In this case the artist and the artwork were completely fused, and the artist took on the function of a shaman. This role, of course, had already been consciously assumed by Joseph Beuys, arguably the most influential artist in West Germany in the 1970s and 1980s, before the collapse of the DDR and reunification.
In general terms, the absence of – one might perhaps say the deliberate abolition of – objective correlatives has tended to turn contemporary art into something closely resembling a religion. Aficionados judge it by faith, not by reason. Once art served religion, now it has ambitions to be a religion in its own right. This attitude has roots in the culture of the Renaissance, for example in the efforts made by Giorgio Vasari and Ascanio Condivi – the two biographers who wrote about Michelangelo in the artist’s life time, the latter with Michelangelo’s active co-operation – to present their subject as a superhuman figure. These efforts were renewed under Romanticism, for instance in the self-mythologisation undertaken by Gustave Courbet. One obvious problem with this situation is that the criticism – one might perhaps say the theology – of contemporary art has completely failed to create any kind of coherent moral structure, of the sort that all world religions possess (though these are also absent, of course, from the curious shamanic practices detailed by some ethnologists).
Another, even more visible, problem for art that is labeled ‘avant-garde’ is that it has become increasingly official. What supports contemporary art today? Despite the activity of private patrons, buying art for extravagant sums at Christie’s and Sotheby’s, the essential structure is institutional.
Contemporary artists make their reputations through showings at museums that are state-supported institutions – certainly in Europe. In America museums owe more to supposedly private foundations, but these too have now acquired an official character. Artists also enhance their reputations through inclusion in various biennial and triennial exhibitions, such as the Venice Biennale and the Cassel Documenta. These too have an official character.
The social structures for art that now exist bear a startling resemblance to many that existed more than a century ago. In particular, we forget both the prevalence and the success of official exhibitions throughout the nineteenth century. I am thinking not only of the annual Paris Salons, and of the Royal Academy Summer exhibitions in London, which garnered much higher attendances than they do now (in the second half of the nineteenth century, the Paris Salon attracted around twenty-three thousand visitors a day) but of the various so-called ‘universal exhibitions’ that made such a stir in the century’s later years. Attendances were often vast. For example, the Paris Universal Exhibition of 1878, staged to mark the French recovery from the disaster of the Franco-Prussian war, attracted more than sixteen million visitors during a run of six months – early May to early November. The Universal Exhibition of 1900, held in the same city, attracted just over fifty million. These exhibitions were certainly not entirely devoted to art, but the art of the day was always a component, and we must assume that quite a high proportion of visitors saw what then-contemporary artists had to offer, within the context of the show. To offer a perhaps relevant comparison, about eight million visitors are expected to make their way to London for the Olympic Games of 2012 – half the number that came to Paris for the Universal Exhibition of 1878, and less than twenty percent of those who came to the same city in 1900. For these visitors, too, there will be artistic events to sample, in addition to the purely athletic ones.
Many people will think this emphasis on the consumers and the ways in which they get access to art is wrong-headed and pedantic. Contemporary art defines its ‘advanced’ position in a number of ways, but very largely through a commitment to controversial subject matter, above all through themes that relate to sexuality and politics. Yet, far from being genuinely shocking or anti-establishment, the principal themes of today’s art are deeply traditional, though they often try to disguise themselves as the opposite. We forget, for instance, that it was the Salon artists who regularly tackled ‘social’ themes – labour unrest, political prisoners, the plight of the homeless – not the incoming Modernists.
Our art scandals today – events that play such a powerful role in promoting contemporary art – are more or less the same as they were in the days before the Modern Movement was invented. In particular, they often dwell on the theme of sexuality, which played a prominent role in Salon art through its history, but which has a much less integral connection to the Modern Movement than it is currently fashionable to suppose. It was hints of sexual outrage brought the crowds to the annual Salons – famous examples are Jean-Baptiste Clésinger’s Woman Bitten by a Serpent (1847) and Manet’s Olympia (1863), both now safely in the Musée d’Orsay.
The truly innovative force of the Modern Movement, in the earliest and most creative years of its existence, was something entirely different from this, and much more profoundly radical. The artworks offered visual shock, a completely different way of looking at the world. It would be difficult to say this about many of the products of today’s so-called avant- garde, cradled as it is in the arms of government. The poor quality of the designs for 2012’s official Olympic posters, created by some of Britain’s best-known and supposedly most advanced artists, has something to tell us about that.