Anti-Art

# 42

Anti-Art

In the nineteenth century in France a few men began to be bored, peeved, annoyed, and almost disgusted with socially approved art. Though the word “bourgeois” is used in English, its French ambiance, a blend of propriety, self-congratulation, materialist pride, vulgar knowingness, and veneration of a cold classicism summed up in the phrase Beaux Arts, represents a world unto its stolid self, a world that gave more maverick souls conniptions. What those souls craved was disruption. The world as represented by the bourgeoisie made too much sense. The only antidote to the self-assurance that lavished attention on the mediocrity of empty technique, sentimentalism, improbable virtue, and mythological folderol was to blow it up.

In France, as in other modern societies, art existed within societal frameworks—organs of taste, academies, prizes, and fellowships—underpinned by tacit and not-so tacit notions of the permissible. The liberators saw themselves as overturning a very large apple cart—part social (to hell with your stuffy, life-denying conventions), part epistemological (your knowingness is worthless), and part aesthetic (art is much larger than your convenient faith in some deluded decorum). Everything was permissible. Every immemorial notion was open to mockery. If this demanded a degree of seeming senselessness, that was all the better. Jarry, Stravinsky, and Cézanne—to choose three very different people—existed on the same modern page. Whether they flaunted their attitudes or were modest did not matter. Personality varied but the intention—to make it new—did not. The agreement between the ghost of the aristocracy and the servility of the bourgeoisie seemed both stagnant and pointless. Beauty was little more than a stick with which to hit invention over the head. Quickened by the endless parade of industrial marvels, invention proposed that novelty possessed a value in its own right, much as beauty once had. In the world of airplanes and automobiles, paintings of nymphs skipping through Arcadia had had it.

The cleverness of an anti-artist such as Marcel Duchamp lay in understanding how much value novelty had, if properly purveyed. Duchamp’s ready-mades were the modern version of turning humble water into witty wine. They were at once audacious and comforting: see—the everyday is not the everyday. Duchamp showed how seemingly arbitrary art might be—“Look, I put this and that together, though I could have put that and this together”—and yet how insinuatingly revelatory. The art of anti-art (or was it the anti-art of art?) was, as Duchamp vigorously stated, a matter of ideas. The idea came first. No animating notion of beauty or truth spurred the idealistic artist. There was, rather, an understanding that too much had been made of the past while the present was ripe for the various taking. The rebellious modern artist was not quite so rebellious; what the world offered, the artist took and manipulated according to his or her lights. The lights could be primitive or worldly, hyperbolic or minimal, surrealist or realist. There was room for temperaments. Though it took decades, those set exercises, the anointed paths to Art that the academy doted on, went up in the smoke of improvisation.

It was not a large step from the improvisation of objects to manufacturing them and the riddle of what an “authentic” Warhol constituted. Warhol, another witty figure, albeit a drolly American one, relished such confusion. Like Duchamp, he assailed, in his deadpan way, the ghosts of romantic sincerity and genuineness. He was not at all rebellious; on the contrary, he was obedient, a servant to the impulses of a modern, commercial society. “Don’t sweat it,” might have been his motto. To a world eagerly seeking images of itself that were somehow sanctified by the ministrations of art, he offered balm. Whether it was art, anti-art, or simply stuff made no difference to Warhol. He was catholic in the basic sense of that word. Part of his appeal was that his affected cynicism had something child-like in it. As with Duchamp, a species of wonder lingered in his creations.

Anti-art opened a new wing of The Palace of Concepts about Art. Among other nifty tricks, anti-art brought to The Palace the ability to turn the internal into the external. The recondite soul of art became part of the materialist, consumer onslaught. Art joined The Economy. As craft traditions faded in the deluge of machine-made goods and as the world of aristocratic patrons faded (to be replaced by foundations), the societal balance between the caring that went into craft and the tasteful brio of sensibility also faded. What were wanted were excitement, change, and conceptual alertness. That vast amounts of money could be involved only made the atmosphere headier.

Unless some political hierarchy tried to impose them, the heterogeneous nature of modern times meant the abolition of standards about what art constituted. There were too many people with too many notions. Inherently unpredictable, the subjectivity of art became even more suspect in modern times. The studios and ateliers of the past had churned out product that was connected to various symbolic functions—angels, cupids, and putti, for instance. Warhol’s Factory presented product as product and eliminated subjectivity: Marilyn Monroe symbolized Marilyn Monroe.

“You call that art?” onlookers railed throughout the twentieth century. In the sense of a coherent vision emanating from a coherent society (however rigid, complacent, or simplistic), they were right to call modern art into question. Despite the Temples of Art that attract throngs, modern times set the stage for anti-art—a farrago of identity assertion, new media, political attitude, performance, self-consciousness, jargon, and appropriative chutzpah. Many artists continued on the inward path—Rothko’s name can stand for many—but explaining that path’s importance became harder. To embrace the whirligig of time meant that art must bow to change for the sake of change. Yesterday’s outrage became today’s standard; experimentation became another received category. It was not to deny the savvy of Duchamp and Warhol to say that anti-art was a modern fashion. The sustenance it provided was like a soda dispensed from a machine—quick, available, but not especially nutritious.