Even a cursory glance at the history of art in the last century or so suggests radical change occurred with great frequency – at least that is how the history is written. The neat divisions between recognised movements, the all-embracing groupings of artists lumped together to prove a point – this is the pattern of Art history with which we are presented. When Robert Hughes wrote the Shock of the New the rift with the past was obvious. The form, the thinking, even the role of the artist had changed dramatically and the expectation was that it would keep on changing as any and everything became fodder for an artistic voraciousness. This state of affairs lasted until post modernism when the flood of ideas and approaches dried up and became a trickle of appropriation. At least, that is the way the history is written.
The assumption that everyone accepted this version of events, is just that, an assumption.
The resistance to the whole idea of ‘modern’ art, rooted in something loosely termed Realism, persists today and the last century is seen largely as an elitist fiction. Each time a major portrait prize such as the Archibald comes around there is inevitably a questioning as to what constitutes portraiture let alone a good portrait or a good painting with the winner is often at odds with those who believe that photographic detail is an essential criterion, that a good portrait is a copy, a mimetic representation, something close to photography. In the mid nineteenth century when photography was in its infancy one observer commented that every painter should be eternally grateful that photography had freed painting from having to reproduce nature and had left it free to explore paint and paint application – what became the essence of modernism – and yet the desire to paint photographically still prevails today almost two centuries after the invention of the camera. A recent comment that I read attached to a realist portrait that this was ‘real painting’ and it seemed to deny that modernism had ever happened and while this may well be a minority opinion, the insistence on mimicry as a basis for art persists. I have come across any number amateur artists and hobbyists who have established an impressive level of technical skill with a fine brush marking out each individual hair. For them this is art. But I can also add to that list a number of recent graduates from art schools who style themselves as Realist painters and demonstrate admirable levels of technical competency but have yet to produce Art. Perhaps for them this a step in a process whereas the hordes lining up to have their realist work hung in public forums see Art as something quite different.
One of the purposes of art, particularly Contemporary Art, can be perceived as radicalisation. Change didn’t just happen but was an active process. The Shock of the New was as much about New as it was about Shock. The expectation was that each new change in direction would alter thinking and society. Some of this change is and was political, some social and some artistic. Political art from the 70s onwards took on an increasingly activist edge often dedicated to anti-capitalist or anti-oppressive politics while war, gender politics, colonial fracture and social injustice, continue to foster deeply felt artistic outrage. As part of the history of art, we accept this purpose, just as Goya’s gruesome examples of mans’ injustice to man and the social commentary of Hogarth have their place. The depictions of less than heroic soldiers by Dix and Grosz infuriated the Nazi regime but as images designed to radicalise society they have become little less than curiosities.
On the other hand, Cubism, Fauvism, Surrealism and in fact any 20th century art movement built upon a history of the avant garde even though the ideas had roots stretching back much earlier. The look of gestural abstraction can be traced back to the airy paintings of Turner and the surfaces of Impressionism for instance while the pattern work of Islamic art amongst many other examples becomes the genesis for flat geometric art no matter what the polemic.
Burying a ten metre pole in the ground or building an immovable monument in Death Valley where few will ever venture may well come under the heading of radicalisation as a generation of artists rebelled against capitalist excess and the current fascination with the collective denies the artist-hero. Where an individual artist may choose to avoid social messages that quickly date, the collective by nature of its disparate members offers a platform where the power of the many outweighs the limitations of the few and subjects such as the rethinking of colonial excess and giving voice to those excluded from the process by traditional structures can all be undertaken. Whether the at thus produced radicalises or the fact of the group in the first place induces radical thinking is open to question.
The question is though, did any of this alter the views of the man in the street or alter society for that matter. An artist I spoke to this week said that she was one of the 40% of artists who work with figurative realism, pay lip service to modernism and then ignored it. I’m not sure where she got her statistics from but a quick trip through the two major public art events in South Australia might well suggest that there is a sizeable alternate society for whom modernism is acknowledged as an aberration. The traditional portraits, the still lives and a landscape style that begins and ends with Impressionism all point to a way of thinking about art that if not universal, is locked in time. Art is not a radical undertaking and there is no expectation that anything will change.
The ancient Egyptians figured out that rebellion and questioning the divine status of a Pharoah could be avoided by locking art into a straitjacket of symbols. Other power moguls in more recent times imposed Social Realism in the belief that Art, thought and society could and needed to be controlled. Artists objected and those that wrote art history saw value in rebellion as defining both individual and collective will – the dichotomy of civilisation. It’s one thing to protect and enshrine individual rights and another to recognise the need for collective action to drive the economy. Art and artists straddle the fence. For all of that though 40% is a significant number of artists fo whom stasis and sitting on the fence is the norm. Whether that it head-in-the-sand resistance to change or a belief that ‘real’ art lies beyond the parameters of incessant change is anyone’s guess, but my guess is that I could probably be making the same observation a century hence – if I live that long…and the way the science of life-extension is going I could still be here, observing, and the 40% will still be there contributing enthusiastically to an art that defies both time and change. As the saying goes, you can lead a horse to water but you can’t make him drink.