jeff hogue/ bluelab art org

From The Reenchantment of Art

by Suzi Gablik

On deconstructing Modernism in Contemporary Art

"What I wish to argue for the remainder of this book is that the rational framework of modern aesthetics has left us with an ontology of objectification, permanence and egocentricity, which has seriously undermined art's inherent capacity to be communicative and compassionately responsi­ve, or to be seen also as a process, rather than exclusively fixed forms. I am, of course, aware that the new terms of interdependence and relatedness implied by reenchantment will not be suitable for every artist, however alluring they may seem to some: there will always be individuals for whom the autonomy of the aesthetic attitude, which needs no social or moral justification, is more correct. Nevertheless, I am proposing that our model of aesthetics needs therapeutic attention, because it has lost its sensitivity not only to the psychological conditions of individuals and society, but also the ecological and process character of the world.

Modernism did not inspire what Octavio Paz refers as "creative participation." Rather, its general themes were alienation and displeasure with society. Based on the heroic, but belligerent ego, inflated and cut off from its embedded­ness in the social world, it encouraged separation, distancing behavior and depreciation of the "other." Concerned with the object itself as the chief source of value, it did not focus on context, or on creating meaningful connections between art and society---if these were related somehow, the theory their relationship was never satisfactorily developed. Indeed, having loudly proclaimed the self-sufficiency of art, and hav­ing established the importance of the untrammeled self, the avant-garde proceeded to scorn notions of responsibility toward the audience; its posture was one of intransigence, a style set very early in the launching of the modernist project with the First Futurist Manifesto, written by Filippo Mari­netti in 1920.

"We intend to exalt aggressive action," he wrote, "the racer's stride, the mortal leap, the punch and the slap." This denigration of society in the form of an insult or an assault became a cultural convention of modernism, in which, I shall argue, the failure to relate was actually considered a cardinal virtue, and even the signal mark of radicality. Implicit in much art of the modern era was a form of aggression reflecting a relationship of hostility both to society and to the audience. "I'd like more status than I have now," the Abstract Expressionist painter Adolph Gottlieb declared, "but not at the cost of closing the gap between artist and public."

Alien­ation, the systemic disorder of the modern artist, virtually precluded any connection with the archetypal "other," because of the refusal to cultivate the feeling of connectedness that binds us to others and to the living world.

Where other cul­tures would never imagine the artist over and against society, the following statement by the painter Georg Baselitz, from his Whitechapel exhibition catalogue of 1983, which I quoted in my previous book, is still as strong-minded an example of this prevalent style of self-sufficient subjects and self-suffi­cient objects as one could possibly find:

The artist is not responsible to anyone. His social role is asocial; his only responsibility consists in an attitude to the work he does. There is no communication with any public whatsoever. The artist can ask no question, and he makes no statement; he offers no information, and his work cannot be used. It is the end product which counts, in my case, the picture.

Hidden behind these comments is a personal and cultural myth that has formed the modern artist’s identity—the model of the egocentric, "separative" self, whose perfec­tion lies in absolute independence from the world. Behind modernism itself lies the struggle for autonomy, with its mys­tique of an autonomous art work, beyond all ethical and social rations, and an independent creator, who likes to see himself as independent and in control of things, impervious to the influence of others. Fitting into this myth of the patriarchal hero became the precondition for success under modernism for both men and women—an archetype in which the feminine value of relatedness was virtually stripped away.

Art as a closed and isolated system requiring nothing but itself to be itself derives from the objectifying metaphysics of science the same dualistic model of subject-object cognition came the prototype for Cartesian thinking in all other disciplines as well.

This ideal of "static" autonomy, of the self against the world, locates modern aesthetics within the “dominator" model of patriarchal consciousness rather than the “partnership" model, to use Riane Eisler's important distinction in her book The Chalice and the Blade, a distinction I shall adopt in my own discussion from this point on.

Within the “dominator" system, the self is central; power is associated with authority, mastery, invulnerability and a strong affirmation of ego-boundaries—which is precisely what the modern artist's "self" came to convey. Autonomy disregards relationships, however; it connotes a radical independence ethers. By contrast, in the partnership model, rela­tionships are central, and nothing stands alone, under its own power or exists in isolation, independent of the larger work, or process, in which it exists. Within the dominator ­system, art has been organized around the primacy of rather than relationships, and has been set apart from reciprocal or participative interactions. What I shall argue is has become trapped within a rigid model of insular individuality. To reverse this priority, giving primacy to relationships and interaction, is also to reverse the way that art­ists see their role, and implies a radical deconstruction of the aesthetic mode itself.

The extent to which present aesthetic forms tend to favor "dominator" attitudes of self-assertion over social integration, a hard, intellectual approach over intuitive wis­dom, and competitiveness over cooperation, was most evi­dent for me in the intense controversy that raged for several years over the proposed removal of Richard Serra's monu­mental steel sculpture Tilted Arc from its site at Federal Plaza in downtown Manhattan, where it was installed in 1981. Tilted Arc was commissioned by the General Services Administration in 1979, as part of the government's art-in-­architecture program, and was conceived specifically for the site. The 120-foot-long, 12-foot-high, 73-ton leaning curve of welded steel is an impressive, imposing work-arguably the epitome of uncompromising, modernist art. I think there is no question but that, within the normative values of mod­ernism, it is a very powerful statement. It dominates the space, confronting the audience in an aggressive way to examine its own habits.

This willingness to risk confrontation with the audience, according to critic Barbara Rose, is precisely what gives modern art its moral dimension. "Serra demands abso­lute autonomy for his art;" she has written in Vogue maga­zine, "his works are intentionally self-sufficient. They stand upright and alone, isolated in positions of heroic rectitude, as if the very posture of standing without support, of solitary rootedness, is an expression of resistance to external pres­sures."

Thus, for Rose at least, Serra's work, with its almost mineral imperviousness, is the ultimate model of social independence and the radically separative self; the heroic, belligerent ego of modernity, cultivating its divisiveness and lack of connectedness with others, is best known through its refusal to be assimilated. This is the basic split in our world view that denigrates the feminine principle of empathy and relatedness to others, even while it idealizes the excesses of our culture's dominant masculine approach. Within modern­ism, women have been taught to idealize these masculine val­ues in art as much as men. By now, most people are likely to be aware of the embattled saga of this work, and how its presence in the plaza was so unpopular among the local office workers that it seemed almost to represent another version of the Berlin Wall. As one employee of the U.S. Department of Education stated at the time: It has dampened our spirits every day. It has turned into a hulk of rusty steel and clearly, at least to us, it doesn't have any appeal. It might have artistic value but just not here ... and for those of us at the plaza I would like to say, please do us a favor and take it away.

During three days of public hearings in March 1985, after a petition signed by thirteen hundred employees had been circulated to have the sculpture removed from its site, many members of the art community defended Serra; the consensus was that removal of the work would compro­mise the kind of integrity that makes art in our society the symbol of what freedom means in the world. Certainly free­dom is promoted as a social, political and aesthetic ideal; but what is hardly ever mentioned is the inflationary style that has been paradoxically seen as the self's virtue. In a seventy-­two page brief prepared by his attorney, Serra made the case for his decision to sue the government for thirty million dol­lars because it had "deliberately induced" public hostility toward his work and had tried to have it forcibly removed. To remove the work, according to Serra, was to destroy it. Serra sued for breach of contract and violation of his consti­tutional rights: ten million dollars for his loss of sales and commission, ten million dollars for harm to his artistic rep­utation and ten million dollars in punitive damages for vio­lating his rights.
Within the perspective of the dominator model; of social organization, freedom has become unconsciously linked with the conquest mentality and with "hard" rather than "soft" individualism—that is, with the notion of power that is implied by having one's way, pushing things around being invulnerable. It is the power symbolized in Eisler's book by the "masculine" blade, the approach to conflict resolution that calls for the destruction of one's opponent and lots of muscle-flexing. It also leads to a deadening of empathy-the solitary, self-contained, self-sufficient ego is not given to what David Michael Levin calls "enlightened listening," a listening oriented toward the achievement of shared understanding "We need to think about `practices of the self' that do not separate the self from society and withdraw it from social responsibility," Levin writes in The Listening Self. "We need to think about `practices of the self' that understand the essential intertwining of self and other, self and society, that are aware of the subtle complexities in this intertwining." In Serra's understanding, "site" refers to a specific physical location, with certain characteristics related to size and scale. But it is not perceived as a living, socially responsive field, in the sense that the audience enacts any role in the completion of the work, which presumably is immune to the influence of others. "Trying to attract a bigger audience," Serra has com­mented, "has nothing to do with making art." This has been, as I say, the modernist view; and as an echo of who we are, it is also, as Levin says, an indictment of the character of our listening.

In July 1987, the Federal District Court ruled against Serra. On Saturday, March 11, 1989, the sculpture was finally removed from the plaza and taken off to storage in Brooklyn, after the U.S. Court of Appeals also rejected Serra's claims, in a seventeen-page opinion. Serra steadfastly maintained that he had fulfilled his part of the contract, and warned that every artistic and literary work commissioned by the government was now in jeopardy of censorship. "This government is savage," he stated in The New York Times, which reported the event. "It is eating its culture. I don't think this country has ever destroyed a major work of art before. Every work out there is in jeopardy, at the Govern­ment's whim. . . . They say their property rights grant them power over my moral rights. This is not true in every civilized Western country."
As a critic, what are the grounds for deciding whether Tilted Arc is a successful or a failed work, and whether it should have stayed in the square or been removed? Obviously, there are many aspects to this dispute, but the one of particular interest to me is whether the aesthetic value of Serra's work can be sustained without responsibility to the social feedback he received. The question that is really at stake here is what we understand by freedom, and how this ideal is to be embodied. Just as disinterested and "value-free" scientism does not grow out of any concern for society and contains no inner restraint within its methodology that would limit what it feels entitled to do, in the same way disinter­ested aestheticism reveals nothing about the limits art should respect, or the community it should serve. In effect, thinking of responsibilities and obligations more than of freedoms and rights does not fit in with our present culture's definitions of itself-or not yet.

Scientists, for instance, are not expected to worry about the applications or consequences of their research, nor are they supposed to worry about relating science to human values or needs. Donald Kuspit has written about Robert Oppenheimer, for instance, one of the inventors of the atomic bomb, that he "seemed unaware of the existential implications of atomic power until the trauma of the actual explosion." When he did realize the ramifications of what his work had helped to set in motion, it all but wrecked his life. Within the framework of disinterested aesthetics, art tends toward the same lack of accountability that scientific ideol­ogy requires for itself.

What the Tilted Arc controversy forces us to con­sider is whether art that is based on notions of pure freedom and radical autonomy-without regard for the relations we have to other people, the community, or any other consid­eration except the pursuit of art-can contribute to a sense of the common good. Merely to pose the question indicates that what has most distinguished aesthetics in modern times is the desire for an art that is purely cognitive, purely intel­lectual and absolutely free of the pretensions of doing the world any good. "I do not mean to say that the artist makes light of his work and his profession," Ortega y Gasset wrote in his classic essay of 1925, "The Dehumanization of Art," "but they interest him precisely because they are of no tran­scendent importance. A present-day artist would be thunder­struck if he were entrusted with so enormous a mission-art is not meant to take on the salvation of mankind."

Accord­ing to Ortega, it is not that art has become less important than it was to previous generations, but that the artist himself regards his art as a thing of no consequence. When I was in art student in New York City during the 1950s, my teacher, Robert Motherwell, devoted an entire semester to the study of Ortega's essay. More than thirty years later, I would ven­ture to state that the logic of most art today continues to play out the same dynamic. Its philosophical underpinning has not really changed that much. Modern aesthetics does not easily accommodate the more feminine values of care and responsiveness, of seeing and responding to need.

Crucial to releasing the creative dynamics of partnership is that it must be wrought, among other things, from a radically different epistemology of care and respon­sibility, in which the artist does not stand aloof from any intention of being in service to the common good, or to the community.

Whereas male myths, and the myths of modern­ism, typically have focused upon tasks of separation and mastery of self over environment, within the model of part­nership it is a question of trying to realize a context in which social purposes may be served (to quote cultural philosopher Jurgen Habermas) "by finding beautiful ways of harmoniz­ing interests rather than sublime ways of detaching oneself from others' interests." This represents a fundamental chal­lenge to the concept of self that we have just been describing, a different model of communicative praxis and openness to others than the historical self of modernism, one that does not use the image of the hero as its archetype but is more like the shaman. Mutual cooperation for the common good is an ideal, within the partnership model, that serves as a template for a different understanding of moral responsibility, not as issues of rights and laws, but rather as imperatives of respon­sibility and care, as Carol Gilligan points out in In a Differ­ent Voice. When a particular cultural idea like freedom becomes so abstract and overvalued, as in the case of Serra, that it finally assumes control of the entire personality (or collective mentality) and suppresses all other motivations, then it becomes dogmatic and limiting. "It is impossible to have true individuality," writes David Bohm, "except when grounded in the whole.

Anything which is not in the whole is not individuality but egocentrism." The ego is the prime impediment to this deeper understanding of wholeness. The ego works from a need to win, to come out on top. In the case of Serra, if the artist wins, he becomes a hero; if he loses, he becomes a victim. In the dominator model, one either fights or capitulates. But in the zero-sum game that has been cre­ated here, there is really no possibility of any acceptable res­olution. Modernism's fundamental mode was confronta­tion-the result of deep habits of thinking that set society and the individual in opposition, as two contrary and antagonistic categories, neither of which can expand or develop except at the expense of the other. "The paradigmatic rela­tion between work and spectator in Series' art is that between bully and victim, as his work tends to treat the viewer's wel­fare with contempt," Anna C. Chive wrote recently in an essay entitled "Minimalism and the Rhetoric of Power," in Arts magazine.

"This work not only looks dangerous: it is dangerous." Serra's "prop" pieces in museums are often roped off or alarmed, have on one occasion even killed a workman, and have injured several others. Chive sees Minimalism as the zenith of "nonrelational art," impersonal, unyielding, authoritarian. In the dominator model, the assumption has been that one could be a great artist only by being against everything and everyone. But if the principle of linking, or partnership, is to become the basis of a new consciousness, then the notion that art and society are at odds with each other-the old adversarial relationship-will need to be revised. And if all levels of experience and the world are now perceived in terms of relationship, it represents the paradig­matic defeat of radical autonomy and the old avant-garde mandate for oppositional practices, which have informed the world view of modernism. If these notions are indeed over and done with, then we will need a new model, one that breaks down thought forms and energy patterns leading to separation and divisiveness, and is more attuned to the inter­relational, ecological and process character of reality.

Writ­ers such as Bohm and Eisler stress that none of these values is intrinsically good or bad, but that the imbalance charac­teristic of our society today is unhealthy and dangerous. Being committed to disembodied ideals of individualism, freedom and self-expression while everything else in the world unrav­els makes no sense anymore. However, we are still, in our everyday understanding of art, equating superior works with these old Cartesian models; our attitudes are not yet tuned to valuing participation and social integration, or to accept­ing states of flux and becoming.

The issue of interconnect­edness has not yet penetrated our emotional responses, and certainly not our values.

Were we to reframe our notion of freedom in the light of these holistic and more systemic models-to syn­chronize with the conceptual shift occurring in science from objects to relationships-freedom might lie less in the solip­sistic ideal of doing whatever one wants, and more in the accomplishment of "bringing into relationship." A very dif­ferent kind of art emerges if it originates from what Cather­ine Keller has termed the "connective" self-that more open model of the personality which welcomes in the other. "Like the serpents wound about the Hermetic Caduceus," she writes in From a Broken Web, "the image of relational intertwining works healingly upon the neurosis of the reparative ego." To experience the "connective" self in action, we need to con­sider the work of a different artist, Mierle Laderman Ukeles, who has been unsalaried artist-in-residence at the New York City Department of Sanitation since 1978.

Ukeles comments: For me, it was a matter of finding the minimalist and process art at the end of the 1960s sterile and socially remote. If art's function is to articulate a notion of human freedom-if that's what art does-then the problem is how to make the notion of freedom relevant to every­body, not just an elite group. It has to be connected to the world-but then you immediately have restrictions. How much of my own personal freedom do I have to give up to live on the earth and not destroy it, or to live in a community? Action painters were engaged in a notion of pure freedom. I love that notion of freedom, but you can only talk about freedom when you can deal with the air and the earth and the water. The people who are dealing with this also belong in the dialogue. What I wish to argue for the remainder of this book is that the rational framework of modern aesthetics has left us with an ontology of objectification, permanence and egocentricity, which has seriously undermined art's inherent capacity to be communicative and compassionately responsi­ve, or to be seen also as a process, rather than exclusively fixed forms. I am, of course, aware that the new terms of interdependence and relatedness implied by reenchantment will not be suitable for every artist, however alluring they may seem to some: there will always be individuals for whom the autonomy of the aesthetic attitude, which needs no social or moral justification, is more correct. Nevertheless, I am proposing that our model of aesthetics needs therapeutic attention, because it has lost its sensitivity not only to the psychological conditions of individuals and society, but also the ecological and process character of the world.

photo credit Murshida Fatima http://www.sonic.net/fatima/oldphotos1/oldphotos1.htm#OLD%20PHOTOS