The idea of cultural stagnation could be said to derive from imitation and repetition without context. Recycled forms of music and art, to say nothing of ‘classic’ TV comedy keep being revived for a new generation where every day of the last century exists simultaneously. Someone who hadn’t lived through it would be forgiven for thinking that time and place had become irrelevant. The origins of pop music, modern art and TV comedy of the likes of Monty Python, belong to an age where anything seemed possible, and everything seemed new. That most of the stars and artists have passed on makes little difference. We continue to see them as younger versions that defy ageing. That doesn’t mean though that there isn’t a youthful avant-garde out there but that the tidal wash up of a century of cultural ideas continues to swamp us. New TV streaming channels trying ardently to create content to meet a market need and artists looking for an approach that still seems novel, even if it’s well past its used-by date, means that it may take some time to digest it all. The idea that culture develops in a linear fashion is one way of looking at it, however in stagnation terms, it could be said that while Peter Allen wrote that “everything old is new again”, there is nothing new.
For example, any survey of popular movie streaming channels will reveal what the ancient Greeks worked out a millennium or so ago. There are only five story lines with variations. The journey either singly or in a group that may take you there and back; the group trapped in a location with monsters either animal or human; the love triangle; revenge; filial dispute and whatever passes for comedy – although comedy in itself can be any of the other five. For all of the variations in plots, most films, plays and books are predictable as is popular music. The AABA formula and the 12 bar blues format dominate composition while in the classical field you are far more likely to hear Bach, Mozart and Beethoven than something new. Jazz is somewhat different in that it’s improvised – until Alexa selects Louis Armstrong, again and again and again.
Is the same true of art? That depends upon how you look at it. We know that tastes change, materials-use changes and the uses to which art can be put alters only subtly from personal explorations to propping up religious belief, to propping up power structures to a means of protest. Figuration and abstraction, still life and landscape remain as staples in the common perception while doubts about installation, performance art and AI continue to divide the audience. Deliberate attempts in history to slow the pace of artistic change such as the strictures of the English and French Academies in the 19th century eventually had to give way to the influence not so much of public taste as technology. Would the Impressionists have ventured outside without trains to carry them or oil paint in tubes? Who knows. Would the offset compositions of Degas have evolved naturally without the aid of the camera? Again, who knows. The examples multiply as the exclusive hold of one medium such as oil painting or fresco lessens as technological innovation evolves.
The earliest form of art though comes with cave painting, and it is possible to look at it as a series of beginnings from which we have hardly strayed. Primarily those extraordinary renditions of animals, often utilising niches or protuberances in the rock, are imitations of the observed phenomenological world. Making copies of the world is a constant and so is pattern making. The cave paintings are covered in specific patterns from ladder forms to crosses which have no reasonable derivation in nature. Some of this pattern making evolved into writing but there has always been a human need to seek out patterns for their own sake and modernism continued this tradition from the straight lines of Mondrian to the hatchings of Picasso to the coloured approximations to music of Kandinsky to the minimal art of Judd. It’s not so much a case of stagnation but that pattern making may well be wired into our DNA just as is the need to reproduce the world.
One line of reasoning current in neuropsychology is that ancient cave artists used psychoactive, mind-altering drugs to enter a spirit world where animal and human co-joined. The brain naturally produces any number of chemicals that resemble plant-based hallucinogens but the ingestion of drugs to enhance perception is as old as time. All artists in the end are shamans and magicians seeking a way into the subconscious The therianthropic forms that appear on so many cave walls seem to belong to a spirit world where the artists travelled with an animal spirit guide seeking enlightenment which they could share with the tribe and while we moderns consign drug taking to the fringes of society, in contemporary times Brett Whitely killed himself with Heroin making the attempt to mine his subconscious while others such as the Surrealists sought a similar path through dreams and automatic writing. They certainly weren’t the first with the likes of William Blake and Hildegard von Bingen delving into mysticism. Again, seeking a path into this spirit world would seem to part of our DNA.
Perhaps little has changed since paleolithic times. That mix of depictions of the seen world, surreal dreams and geometric forms dominated cave painting. While we have no way of knowing, those cave artists and their society may well have told stories of heroic journeys, filial and family disputes and monsters lurking in dark places. The idea of stagnation depends upon where you view culture from.
We live in the era of personal and societal disfunction where ethical and moral strictures, religious mores, discussion of mortality and time have all been consigned to the garbage can. All we have to go on is hindsight and the belief that anything worthwhile has already happened. Peter Allen may well have been right in suggesting that we will go on recycling the past forever.