CULTURE: Who's afraid of Modernism?
The Movement for Classical Renewal, that's who
The world is, in many ways, a puzzling and unsatisfactory place, full of things that really ought to be much better than they are. So what’s to be done about it? In the case of the Movement for Classical Renewal, the solution, it appears, is to produce a manifesto, attract some signatures and to publish the result in The Jackdaw.
And as with so much about The Jackdaw, there is doubtless something to be said for all this. The Jackdaw is the fine art fanzine — exuding monochrome magnificence in the face of its glossy shelfmates — that journalist and critic David Lee took to publishing after his memorable time at Art Review, and in its short life it has managed to carve out for itself a reputation as the guilty pleasure of choice for a surprisingly large swathe of the local art world. Why ‘guilty’? Mostly, because Mr Lee’s journal is largely devoted to denouncing, with varying degrees of wit and originality and frequent usage of the word ‘bollocks’, that very art world, its rites and its priestly class. There is no more energetic deflater of Arts Council-fattened reputations, no sterner critic of Saatchi and Serota, no more ardent opponent of insider cosiness and complicity. The Jackdaw can be wickedly amusing. But at other times it can start to sound repetitive, bitter and even strangely defeatist in tone, as if the only thing that was keeping it alive is a strangely ineffectual animus against its many, apparently wholly untroubled, enemies.
All of which suggests that it was a sensible decision for the Movement for Classical Renewal to place their manifesto amid the pages of The Jackdaw. Who are these people? Their own website provides a more thorough account, and is well worth a look, but for the record, the original signatories are all artists of various sorts: Michael Ivens (a sculptor), Tim Richards (a designer and draughtsman), Chris Fiddes (a painter), Olive Wootton (a sculptor), Iain Stephens (the wood engraver whose adorable little illustrations adorn The Jackdaw itself) and Lee Burrows (a painter). And what is their manifesto all about? Apparently they all believe that
the visual arts have reached a point of crisis. The currently fashionable form of modernism is shallow, trivial and poorly crafted. Art must recover seriousness of purpose and the high levels of skill that it has known in the past.
Doubtless, given ERO’s Tory inclinations, many of our readers will agree with every word of the Movement for Classical Renewal (MCR) manifesto. Some of you, for all I know, will probably want to sign up for all this yourself.
Personally, though, I shall give it a miss — and not just because I’ve had enough of organisations called ‘The Movement’, either.
On one level I understand and sympathise with some of the impulses that seem to me to lie behind this self-confessed ‘crusade’. And yet, and yet ... at the same time there are aspects of their case that strike me not only as shrill and silly, but worse still, manifestly un-Tory in tone. The MCR are not, as far as I know, remotely interested in politics per se, and so presumably this latter point will not preoccupy them unduly. And yet it troubles me for a very practical reason — because it represents what most people sloppily assume ought to be the Tory position on matters of culture, but turns out to be in essence a minor derivative of the liberal modernism it seeks to oppose.
This may sound a strange claim, but I promise it is true. Here’s an example. The MCR starts out by denouncing modernism as ‘the most arid cul-de-sac in art history’, where ‘for more than 80 years we have done little but repeat the formula’ set out by Kasimir Malevitch and Marcel Duchamp:
The gulf between the artist and the general public has never been wider. The repeated debacle of the Turner Prize has branded us all as charlatans. The new century cries out for a new renaissance and a new art. The teaching of traditional skills was abandoned in our art colleges 40 years ago ... the search for novelty and sensationalism has replaced the search for quality.
Now, on the basis of these quoted passages, where does the MCR stand on novelty? On one hand, it is a bad thing that modernism is doomed to repeating the same old tunes and it is clear that ‘the new century cries out for a new renaissance and a new art’, yet on the other hand, it is apparently a bad thing that ‘the search for novelty and sensationalism has replaced the search for quality’, and what’s more,
Prior to the 20th century development in art had been continuous and unbroken since the 13th century. Social upheaval and technological innovation in the 20th century produced the illusion that human priorities had changed, and this produced modernism. Now we know better. The experiment is over. It is time for art to discover its old roots and traditions.
Leaving aside the question of whether ‘development’ in art was ‘continuous and unbroken’ between the 13th and 20th centuries, and indeed the question as to whether modernism was the fruit of the 20th century, and where does that leave us? Well, it apparently leaves the MCR both believing that a fundamental change has taken place in art, and that this is a bad thing.
For make no mistake — this whole issue of development, lineage, call it what you like is clearly very important to the MCR crowd. Halfway through their manifesto, they list six ‘truths’ that they hold ‘to be self evident’ (although this does not prevent them from needing to spell them out), and half of these relate squarely to this issue of progress:
• Great art evolves out of the art of the past. There is no point in straining after originality. You either have it or you do not. Those who have it are often not aware of it anyway. That is as it should be.• The development of art takes the form of a spiral. It propels itself forward by drawing on the past for inspiration without ever quite managing to replicate it.
• There is no such thing as progress in art, only change, as artists reinterpret eternal truths in the language of their own time.
Now you may well think I am making unnecessarily heavy weather of something that sounds perfectly sensible, but there’s a point behind it. The reason this does sound sensible is that that this whole picture of an objectifiable and organic enterprise called ‘art’ — one, furthermore, in which the individual painter is subsumed into the ‘language’ of his time, which in turn naturally changes as art ‘develops’, propelling itself ‘forward’, always ‘evolving’ — is a picture familiar from the modernist understanding of art that is also, conveniently, the default perspective of most educated people in the contemporary Western world. Or to put it another way, the MCR crowd are staking out a particular stance within modernism, because they are seemingly unable to fight clear of its logic in such a way as to attack it from without.
An alternative view, in which ‘art’ is a conceptual newcomer that only clouds our understanding of the paintings, sculptures, illustrations and so forth that various individuals have made, over time, for various other individuals for a host of complicated and often unrecoverable purposes, does not get a look in. And yet it seems to me entirely ‘self evident’, to use the MCR’s phrase, not only that the 13th century maker of devotional images not only had no concept of ‘art’, but that the function he ascribed to what he created may well have had absolutely nothing in common with, say, the functions that Monet ascribed to his studies of haystacks. Contemporary art, broadly speaking, looks like it does because the notion of ‘art’, with its specialised critical language, its specialised ritual spaces and its specialised collapse of function give it license to do so. Revoke that licence, and the ends served by the stuff in the ‘State Art’ galleries so reviled by the MCR crusaders become more interesting, not less so.
There are other points where I think that the MCR is fundamentally mistaken — sometimes surprising so. Take the first and second of their ‘truths’:
• Great art is always accessible and holds meaning for all who see it. It does not need the intervention of the critic because it refers to human situations shared by the artist and the viewer alike.• Great art transcends time because human nature and human needs do not change. But it always bears the hallmarks of its time.
This is, patently, nonsensical. Not least, taken with perhaps a greater share of literal-mindedness than good manners allows, it would mean that if one single human being ever glanced at a painting and pronounced it boring old pants, then that painting could never be claimed to be ‘great’ — which, given the number of people I know who claim to find all art boring old pants, would not be great news for visual culture. Grow up! It is a simple fact of real life that not everyone is ever going to find anything to like in any one painting, that issues of culture and of taste constrain our preferences in these matters in ways that we ourselves are hard pressed to understand — and of course, that the discovery of ‘meaning’ implies a degree of visual literacy which is not only far from innate, but that very evidently grows with age, experience and hard work, and moreover that alters substantially over time — how else to explain why educated Englishmen of the eighteenth century adored the Carracci brothers but shunned Vermeer? Or to put it another way, if I fail to appreciate a Han dynasty horse statue or BaLuba mask as fully as I do, say, Titian’s Pieta, that might have more to do with my upbringing, my cultural limitations and my gappy iconographic knowledge than it does with the relative qualities of the works per se. At the same time, it is also pretty obvious that some Han dynasty courtiers or 18th century West Africans might not come to the same conclusions about relative ‘greatness’ as I did — assuming, of course, that they were at all comfortable with the idea of ‘art’, which might just be an assumption too far.
Of course I see — or I think I see — what the MCR crusaders are getting at, and it’s a worthy target for demolition. There is are strains of minimalist, conceptual or even abstract art — choose your own favourite example, from Carl Andre’s bricks to Marcel Duchamp’s urinal to Kasimir Malevich’s plain white square — that in the real world would simply be bricks or a urinal or a square, but which in the special space of the gallery, lubricated with critical effusions and basking in art-historical self-regard, become ‘art’. Yes, that is annoying. But surely it is ‘art’ that’s the problem here, not the boundless accessibility or otherwise of individual items? Likewise, while critics are often guilty of ‘pretentious obfuscations’, is it really the case that none of the MCR crowd will admit to having their experience of a particular work enhanced by the reflections of a critic, historian or fellow practitioner?
Perhaps it does not matter, but there is an irony here poignant enough to merit passing comment. More than once, reading this manifesto, I was reminded of a fine essay by Peter Fuller called “But is it Art?” (the essay, originally a lecture, is included in Peter Fuller’s Modern Painters: Reflections on British Art, ed. John McDonald, 1993). In this essay, Fuller condemned, with attractive subtlety if not exactly verbal elegance, both modernism and postmodernism. By way of conclusion, he looked hopefully towards a ‘powerful humanist and Romantic tradition’ that had somehow survived the travails of the century before — and in doing so, he paid, as he so often did, an elegant compliment to Ruskin, whose example mattered to this self-confessed ‘absolutist and dogmatist’ who was also a nostalgic atheist, more than anyone else. And of course it is impossible to think of Ruskin without remembering not only the eloquence with which he made the stones of Venice speak to a spiritually turbulent and increasingly ugly nineteenth century Britain, but how he conferred on Turner a depth and spirituality that the scruffy, profane little artist might never have managed single-handed. Because for better or worse, once you’re read Ruskin on Venice or on Turner, neither will ever look the same again. It is possible to regret this, and equally possible to enjoy it. What is not really possible, though, is simply to wish the experience away once it has already happened.
And this, finally, is what worries me a little about the MCR. For all their entirely correct apprehensions about the often discouraging state of the art world, they seem to me to be wishing away too much. Here’s what I take to be a Tory point: like it or not, modernism has happened. To paint without reference to modernism these days is to make a conscious choice that takes account of modernism. But does it really matter? It does — but only if one builds up modernism to be something completely different and discontinuous from what has gone before. This is what the MCR group seem to me to do. My advice to them? To relax a little, to cultivate an air of Tory self-confidence and to get back to their sketch-pads, paintbrushes and maquettes. Modernism is only as scary as you let it be.
Of course creating artists' manifestos is a bit of a modernist tic in the first place, recalling all those Futurist and Situationist manifestos that accomplished so little other than providing enduring entertainment for art historians ever afterwards, and one has to hope that some spirit of — sorry if this sounds post-modern — playfulness and irony is animating the MCR's professed tactics. It must also be said that, like some other movements that have edged in this direction, the overall emphasis on 'quality' in art is slightly compromised by the quality of the work on show on the website. All of which reminds us why, especially in the absence of critics, this emphasis on quality is, although obviously right at one level, totally irrelevant at another — because issues of quality in art really are subjective, really do depend on educated taste and temperament as much as anything else, and hence are at best a contentious indicator of where the 'great art' the MCR group seeks is to be found. Such contention has always been part of the entertainment value of the visual arts. In practice, quality always been at least as important to modernism, and even modernism's offspring, as it has to any other style. Indeed, the idea that style not only had to go in one direction, but that it was important at something very like a moral level, was no small part of modernism's project. To their credit, and despite their pervasive tone of hurt indignation and their enduring belief in 'art', at least the MCR signatories do not take their argument to this sort of length in the way that so many American cultural conservatives seem to do.
Which is perhaps just as well. Not only is style not morally significant — pace the best efforts of some modernists, it has never been homogeneous or unitary either, as any knowledge of the actual art market, let alone any specialist understanding of the market in portraits or military or sporting art, to pick only the most obvious examples, makes all too clear. Such art does not, it is true, win the Turner Prize which exists to reward a different sort of project altogether, and hence doesn't much matter. Nor does such art receive a prominent role in public collections, which may not matter much either. Instead, it continues to appear in churches and clubs, offices and domestic spaces, where it continues to fulfill the various decorative, commemorative and prestige-enhancing roles that paintings and sculpture have long claimed for their own. And while the modernists have fought over their manifestos, prosecuted factional struggles and sought to change the world, an enormous number of painters, sculptors, illustrators, patrons and amateurs have simply got on with what seemed to them obvious and natural and right — the creation of the sort of work which, while cognizant of modernism, was not overly exercised by it one way or the other. All of which is arguably the most Tory stance possible, all the more so for being more or less totally unselfconscious — and one from which the MCR crusaders could learn something, too.
Bunny Smedley is ERO's arts editor, and would recommend The Jackdaw to anyone.
The Jackdaw can be reached at 88 Leswin Road, London N16 7ND or 0207 502 1393; the website at www.thejackdaw.com does not seem to be working at the moment.
Bunny Smedley, March 4, 2003 12:03 PM