Perhaps it is a moot question or at least one without an answer, but what does it take to change the course of art history. Historians tell us that it took an assassination of random royalty in Sarajevo to trigger WW1 and an unexpected invasion of Poland to galvanise countries into action in 1939. Does it work the same way with Art history? That depends who you listen to. However revolutionary Duchamp’s ready-mades were in their day, claims of immediate artistic revolution may have been exaggerated. Few actually saw them in the flesh and while it is fair enough to claim the laying of groundwork for artists over the next half century, long after Duchamp had taken to playing chess, it was an inexorably slow process. Picasso’s Guernica, like his Demoiselles D’Avignon made an impact largely through extensive publicity although he was criticised on both sides of the Atlantic for failing to respond to WW2. It didn’t interest him.
What else might be considered enough of an event to foment immediate change? The exodus of European artists at the beginning of WW2 saw an echelon of Surrealists and Cubists descend on NY along with intellectuals, philosophers and psychiatrists, their reputations as the avant-garde of culture preceding them. The awe in which this phalanx was regarded soon dissipated once the standoffshness, snobbery and lack of English surfaced. They were the past no matter how much the quickly catching up artistic present agonised over their presence. However, their presence probably had the opposite effect just as their leaving created a sort of vacuum into which a phalanx of American artists edged by degrees. It wasn’t the art that triggered change. You can hardly call the slow burn of abstraction in a variety of lofts over decades a trigger. In reality, no one really wanted to know.
The aftermath of WW2, two atomic bombs and footage of Nazi atrocities might also have shifted artists although it hardly seemed to have altered public opinion or artistic sensibility as it rapidly consumed headlines and then faded way leaving a distinct feeling that that was Europe, Japan and a world totally foreign to the average American even if they had returned servicemen, tight-lipped, once again back amongst them. The enormity of the events was beyond comprehension. The alcohol-sodden artists barely surviving in NY lofts were already removed from war with Pollock ineligible to enlist, de Kooning not a citizen, Gorky, Hoffman and Mondrian and most of the others essentially tolerated refugees about to die early deaths.
Gino Severino the Italian Futurist wrote in 1946
‘ It cannot even be said that peace has come after the war……few people…have faith in their fellow man…ill-will and superficiality are so widespread…that disbelief in men seems justified and the truth is so twisted by private interests that one can hardly believe in truth….’
The nett result was a call for artists to retreat within their own subjectivity and search for a different truth. No doubt Severini remembered the war-praising words of the Futurist Manifesto in 1909 and their belief that Futurism would become the adopted house style of Fascism. When the tank and the gun came to dominate life a handful of years later, Futurist painting failed to live up to the self=promoted hype and the reality of WW1. Artistic prediction is a dangerous game.
The words of Severini are just as relevant now. The complexity of living today without a specific threat or focus has essentially rendered a universal moral code all but null and void. The question though is how will any of this manifest itself in terms of a direction, or change in direction in art. A pandemic and a year in lockdown with a burgeoning death count may be just as daunting as was a war in which the whole world was involved. Those that have responded to being ‘jailed’ in their own homes attempted to explain in paint the emotions involved but there was always a sense of hope that lockdown would suddenly come to an end thanks to government intervention and innoculation. Climate change, even with GretaThunberg disclaiming governmental lack of initiatives from her portable pulpit, also lacks a sense of immediacy or reality in spite of the existential threat. As subjects in art both covid and climate change have their proponents but that hope that some god-like figure might step in and engender common sense, prevails. We are still in the delusional stage that pervaded the period prior to both world wars and Severini’s obervations about art still hold true with the pursuit of NFTs and cryptocurrency suggesting an underlying attitude of escape from reality into a fantasy world.
If world events aren’t going to trigger a new artistic direction, what is? One thing I noted was a recent Artshub article that listed, in their opinion, the 15 notable art events that characterised 2021. Beginning with 5000 inconsequential days masquerading as art down to the Turner Prize going to a collective, media coverage of both lists of artists looked like a veiled attempt to influence the world into believing that an artistic corner had been turned and that we were looking at a new direction. Somehow, I doubt it. Nothing I saw on either list will make the annals.
There’s nothing new about a belief that directions in Art can be identified at specific moments in time. In a self-fulfilling prophecy, Greenberg declared Pollock to be the greatest living painter in America and 20th century critics made it their mission to discover new society-defining talent. Even now curators everywhere are looking to make names for themselves through the plausible recognition of disparate artists as a group in an ever-diffused blandness as old ideas are constantly regurgitated with none of the original impetus or pizzazz. Is it that we are still failing to digest the significance of Cubism or Expressionism or is it more the case than humanity has nothing left to say of significance despite the constant analysis by pundits?
It is not just the lack of a direction in which art can go or the mind-blowing prices being paid for investment art but the more that there is nothing to react to or react against that will enlighten the human condition as artists once again retreat into garrets and garages in search of themselves. Is there really another Picasso or Pollock or Matisse waiting in the wings? Certain overblown and over- paid contemporary artists seem to think that they are modern version of an artistic messiah. History may prove them to be wrong…. or right. In the meantime, the best we do is to wait and scan the acreage of Instagram for clues and keep posting – you never know.