In an
impressive piece of recent autobiographical fiction, the narrator of Sara
Baume’s A Line Made By Walking (2017)
repeatedly sets herself the task of identifying a work of art - usually a work
of conceptual art - which relates to the topic she is currently thinking about.
Frankie, the narrator, lists and thumbnails each work in separated paragraphs
which always begin with a formulaic phrase on the pattern of Works
About Killing Animals, I test myself:
Some of the works are well-known like
Tracey Emin’s My Bed (1998) and Richard Long’s A Line
Made By Walking (1967), but most are more obscure. Though Baume at the end
of her book (pages 303- 307) urges us to go to the works ourselves, I suspect
she has actually and accidentally already illustrated a main weakness of
conceptual art: you don’t have to see it, or otherwise experience it, in order
to talk about it. You just need a description which spells out the idea, the
thought, which the work illustrates.
A great deal of what is called conceptual art is illustrative, and that
means that as art it is almost certainly weak and banal. Often enough, the
realisation of the idea may be elaborate and costly, and sometimes fleeting,
but it is all pretty much irrelevant except as an illustration of how easy it
is to waste time and money. We can debate the Concept all night with only a nod
to the work which illustrated it. There is really no need for us to confront
the work itself, if indeed it still exists to be confronted. Frankie/Baume
effectively says as much herself:
Works about Time, I test myself:
Christian Marclay, The Clock, 2010. A 24-hour film, a collage of extracts… Each
extract represents a minute of the day … I have never seen it for real. Right
the way through from beginning to end. I don’t imagine many people have.
Nevertheless, I love this piece. I love the idea. (p 181)
We would simply laugh at someone who
said of Baume’s novel I have never
actually read it from beginning to end. But I love this work. I love the idea. You can’t love a novel if you haven’t read it,
not even if it’s Ulysses, so how can
you love a work of art if you haven’t seen it? All you can love is the idea.
That’s almost certainly enough; it would almost certainly be a waste of your
time to watch it, even from the comfort of YouTube.
You won’t need twenty four hours to get the general idea.
Back in 1997, as part of the Turner
Prize show, London’s Tate Gallery projected Gillian Wearing’s Sixty
Minutes onto a large screen. This
is a video in which a group of people are lined up and asked to stand stock
still for sixty minutes while they are filmed by a completely static camera. It
would have caused a log-jam in the gallery if visitors had paused for sixty
minutes to watch. The gallery correctly assumed that everyone would give it at most a few minutes, to get the general idea and then move on. I sat cross-legged on the
floor (no seats provided) for nineteen minutes, outlasting every other visitor
in that period by at least seventeen minutes. What would we say about a cinema
film which could not hold its audience for more than a few minutes, after which
they would all leave because they had got the general idea? But Gillian Wearing
was awarded the Turner Prize for her effort.[1]
Suppose Sara Baume had simply made
up the majority of the many conceptual art pieces to which she refers,
and in a work of fiction, who could object to that? There would have been
no loss of idea. However, this
thought experiment does suggest a way of thinking about possible justifications
for the embodied element in actual works of conceptual art.
Since Duchamp’s urinal, the actual
work is meant to secure by means of a certain outrageousness both attention and
discussion; the embodied side of the work is a provocation of a kind which few
of us would be bold enough to offer. One philosopher of art, Elisabeth
Schellekens, singles out this audaciousness - nerve and cheek - as a central
aspect of conceptual art installations and performances[2]. But in highlighting this
aspect, the argument does connect the world of art to the world of pranks
though Schellekens herself only makes the link to jokes and satirical cartoons
(page 86). Another contributor to the volume of essays in which Schellekens
develops her argument, Margaret Boden, does however reference (page 228) the
rather embarassing case of Alphonse Allais, a nineteenth century Parisian
prankster who got there before the po-faced artists of the
twentieth century, already in the 1880s exhibiting a canvas painted
entirely white and titled Anaemic Young Girls Going To Their First
Communion Through a Blizzard.
I think reflection on the Allais case
does allow an understanding of much conceptual art. I think most of it does
belong to the broad category of Pranks. Pranks usually involve
someone in quite a lot of prior thought, maybe mixed in character and motive,
and are realised by means which are intended to discomfort or shock some
individual, group or institution. The pranks performed by
conceptual artists can, however, generally be distinguished from the broader
category of pranks by two important features: a general humourlessness and the
artist’s sense of entitlement to public funding and/or access to public
exhibition space.
So Sacha Baron Cohen (Borat) is a
contemporary prankster but not a conceptual artist because he aims to make
people laugh. And only as a prank would a prankster like Borat seek public
funding or an academic job or space in the Tate Gallery. In contrast, conceptual
artists feel entitled to all those things. This is consistent with the claims
of an institutional theory of art, which is also used by other
philosophers as justification for treating conceptual art as art - for example,
by Dominic Lopes at page 241 of the same collection of essays to which I have
been referring. The institutional theory says that Art just is what
institutions like art galleries and art dealers say is Art. Well, they would, wouldn’t they?
The crossover case would be that of
an artist who has a sense of humour and a distance from the institutional world
of art. The crossover is perfectly illustrated by Banksy who produces things
which are provocative, which are often funny, which are every discussable, and
which Banksy tries to keep at a distance from the “art world”, most strikingly
in a recent prank at Sotheby’s auction room. One of his works had just been
sold for a very large sum, and as the auction participants still gazed at the
work, it self-destructed before their eyes - the coup de théatre achieved by a remote controlled device.
But I think my general claim remains
generally true. Conceptual art fails as art when it invites us to respond to it
without experiencing it. Art is something you have to experience at first hand
in order to respond to it appropriately.
Not so long ago, I wrote a critical
piece [3] about a painting by a
Dutch portrait painter, Simon Maris, which had been re-titled by the
Rijksmuseum in Amsterdam; they had changed its title from Young Negro Girl to Young
Girl with a Fan. From the museum’s online images, I was able to argue that
both titles missed the fact that the “girl” was wearing a plain gold band on
the ring finger of her left hand. Though re-titled, with much attendant
publicity, no one appeared to have looked
at the painting. Several other relevant claims could be made on the basis
of the reproduced images. But then I travelled over to Amsterdam to look at the
painting itself. As I entered the room in which it was displayed, there was an
immediate and fairly dramatic shock awaiting me. What had looked like a
cheerful yellow bonnet in all the reproductions now suddenly dazzled as if it
was a golden halo. In consequence, what I had hitherto thought of as a fairly
formal portrait, albeit an unusual one, suddenly took me in another direction,
towards the tradition of what are called “Black Madonnas”, portraits or statues
of the Virgin Mary with a haloed black face which are found in several, maybe
most, European countries.
The sight of the halo reminded me of
my own conviction: a painting has to be seen. It’s meant to be seen and there
is really no other way of seeing it - properly, so that we can appreciate scale
and the effect of natural light - than by standing in front of it. In Painting as an Art, Richard Wollheim
(1987) said that he was only going to write about paintings which he had not
only seen but spent time with; he gave a three hours per painting guide figure.
That bears some thinking about in a world where a prize-winning sixty minute
video in the Tate Gallery holds the attention of viewers for two minutes at
most, and Baume’s narrator Frankie can claim to love a work she has never watched
from beginning to end.
*
My puzzlement about conceptual art dates back to the early
1970s when Michael Corris and a colleague from the US Art & Language group
visited me in my rural Devon cottage and solicited a contribution for their new
journal The Fox of which three issues appeared and are now
collectors’ items. Well, I didn’t really have anything which I felt appropriate
but I mentioned a draft study of Samuel Beckett’s Waiting for Godot which
would have been my cover story for a second year in Paris as a student with
Roland Barthes had I stayed on after my first year. But I had decided to return
to England and a job, and so it had never been worked up or shown to Barthes
though a version in French existed. Anyway, to my surprise it was accepted
for The Fox and appeared in issue 2 with small editorial
additions which irritated me. But for the life of me I did not understand how
my essay fitted into their project.
That digression does lead to a final point. Perhaps the
core weakness of most conceptual art is that the links between ideas and
embodied work are so weak or so opaque, and the ideas themselves so often
confused, that really all we are offered (in most cases) is an invitation
to free associate. So I think it likely that I got an essay
published in The Fox for no good reason because there was no
editorial clear thinking about what they were about and free association was
the order of the day.
It is notable that in the collection Philosophy and Conceptual Art, from which I have quoted above, even
though contributors have been asked to reference at least some among a number
of selected works of conceptual art, that no one attempts a serious, say,
thousand word piece of criticism which brings to life and understanding a
particular piece of conceptual art in its specificity. It’s my belief that
most works of conceptual art could not bear the strain of sustained
critical reflection and that is a main reason why it does not happen. Of
course, there is plenty of humourless prose produced around conceptual art,
which regularly provides satirical material for Private Eye.
*
Sometimes people know exactly what they are doing. At other times, they haven’t a clue.For an artist, not quite knowing what you are doing is not such a bad place to be. It can mean that you are in the middle of some genuine exploration. Part of my problem with conceptual artists is that I'm not convinced that they are not quite knowing. Either they know exactly or they don't know at all.
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