Art History: Still Devolving after All These Years
In 1985, I published this essay on the iffy relationship between art and art history that was emerging from the madcap enthusiasms of the East Village scene—that tirelessly improvised collection of storefront galleries that provided a home for young artists shut out of SoHo’s blue-chip establishments. The New York art world of four decades later also lacks any stable sense of history. I am not complaining. Soon after I became an art critic, in the late 1960s, I became impatient with those critics desperate to find a style, a trend, a historical development they could glom onto, the better to aggrandize themselves. Then as now, I believe that the only art history artists need is the art history they invent for themselves.
History is a repertory of literary gestures, a rhetoric that shapes the rubble of the past into a plausibly unified structure. To know history too well is to be too fluent in those gestures, and too profligate. When fluency becomes extravagance, history’s images blot one another out. Too facile a command of history leaves us as blank as total ignorance of history. Which is it in today’s art world: historical overload or historical blank-out? You can see it either way, just as you could on the East Village scene.
First it is said that the artists there have no sense of the past; the East Village is an exercise in cultural amnesia. Then it’s said, no, that’s obviously not right. The East Village hops, skips, and jumps from Sunday to Sunday under a back-breaking burden of historical knowledge, which in its free-floating manipulability is the same as no knowledge at all. Note all the bright references to German Expressionism, ’50s moderne, Surrealism, the pantheon of superheroes (Jackson Pollock and company), and so much more. East Village artists use SoHo the way Edouard Manet used the Prado. The Museum of Modern Art is to them as ancient Rome was to eighteenth-century neoclassicists. The East Village has a breezy, magpie acquaintance with art history, yet it lacks even the rudiments of a coherent historical vision.
Here I would like to stop and ask myself: why pick on the denizens of the East Village? When have artists ever had a firm grip on history? De Stijl’s promise that its formal innovations would guide the world to utopia rested not on solid historical analysis but on avant-garde faith. And Renaissance painters could offer their mastery of perspective as proof that they were advancing in step with scientific progress only because they misconstrued the nature of their medium. (A painting is a field of imagery inviting interpretation, not an array of verifiable truths requiring assent.) Artists invent whatever history they need, and their inventions are sometimes wonderfully productive.
Picking and choosing from our culture’s long history of visual styles, the young artists of the East Village treat the past as a data bank adrift somewhere outside of time. History devolves into a boundless compendium of image options. I’m reminded of the dense heap of data at the heart of the game called Trivial Pursuit, which asks, “What star of The Mating Game served as one of Elizabeth Taylor’s bridal attendants at her wedding to Mike Todd?” (Debbie Reynolds.) The information is indeed trivial, but the ability to recall it wins you a point. (What recently opened disco features a Mike Todd room complete with art? The Palladium.) The categories that order the information are oppressive, but a knowledge of their content keeps you in the game. (What current architectural trend revives the Baroque, Palladianism, and other pre-Modernist styles? The Postmodern.)
Mix and match bits and pieces of the art-historical past with a modicum of flair and you get to keep your place in the artificial present generated by the East Village game. These days, when a hot painting can look like the right answer to an especially complicated question in Trivial Pursuit, a fan’s response to that painting often sounds like an answer to the same sort of question. How can we face the banality of all this? We don’t know yet. Meanwhile, members of the hip audience stay au-courant by swimming in the scene’s frothiest currents. When they bump up against artists who do not play the trivia game, the hip shrink them down to the scale of artists who do. Or if that’s impossible, the hip cry foul.
Sidebar comment: Art history itself began with a couple white men enamored with Greek sculpture. From its beginnings, then, art history has been western based as prior and contemporaneous artistic achievements of multiple cultures have been ignored or regarded tangentially at best.
I seem to recall that blur, yes. "a breezy, magpie acquaintance with art history" is so accurate.
Magpie is a bird of a different feather than a Great Owl. Perhaps, this comparison shows some of the distinction between how the eclectic post-mod artists and neo-neoists of the 1980's 1990's differ from the Revival in Italy , 1450- 1600, and Baroque artists. A magpie cries, screams and hollers to and from the past, while that slow deep whoot of the Owl resonates into the past. ( as a boy in rural America I had several great horned Owls as pets, "Hoot-Man" and "Elvis"-- I can hear them now in the night ). The screams of the neo-neoists Magpies percuss, indeed, we can say now, percussed, the meanings of historical rapport, while the originating Owls of that 80's-90's era resonate meanings across time.
Some pursuits really are "trivial" while others can be significant. When the Baroque painters did a version of Paris forced to chose his goddess girl, they tapped into the perennial dilemma that men and women face in every generation-- Who will I mate ? To Whom will I pledge my life.?
Of course, It is difficult to remember a comparable "trivial" quote artwork from the east village, because they are all long forgotten.
I am pointing to the resonance and reverberation into the human psyche that many artists sense and execute, not just the historical works.
Personally, I have become fascinated by the Myths behind the music and ballet "Swan Lake ", on the psychic level : Girls beware the Dark Prince, go for the White One. Boys choose the White Swan, don't be mislead by the Black One, sent to deceive. I know that if I can ever paint it out, there will no 'look-alike ' references to victoriana -- only the poignant present case of that difficult dilemma for us all-- the right choice.!
I offer this as a way that I have grappled with historical knowledge and meanings across time, as the perpetual reality of being human, and yet living in our era, working with our unique visual systems and special materials, in order to produce works substantial, rather than trivial.
Thanks for bringing back another wonderful essay !!