“This recession will bring a sea change in the way we look at, write about, and make art. Adrian Searle reveals what he’s looking forward to
Two weeks ago, I went to an’evening in New York in honour of the dancer and choreographer Merce Cunningham, who died earlier this year. Three spaces had been cleared on the enormous floor of the drill hall in the Park Avenue Armory. On each stage, something different was happening; except it was all the same thing, that thing that Merce and his company did.
A lone man strode through air as thick as cement. Other dancers came together and moved apart, grouping and splintering and spiralling off. Elsewhere, dancers worked the space in worlds of their own. There was a form to all of it, but in the moment of performance it was ungraspable. Things were in constant motion, like overlapping ripples on a rainy pond. It was mesmerising – and hard to know where to look and who to follow.
The dancers were members of the current Cunningham troupe, as well as’dancers who had worked with’the choreographer all the way back to the 1960s. There were schoolkids dancing. Music clamoured and drifted overhead, and the echoing acoustic felt just right. There was the silence of John Cage’s 4’33’, a calm moment, and then we moved on. I meant to stay an hour, and remained for almost four. Sometimes I’d find myself taking respite beside a stage void of dancers, a visual equivalent to Cage’s silent work, finding myself looking at the clear patch of floor as if it’might tell me something. I’bumped into a few friends, but we mostly kept’our distance, not wanting to break’one another’s mood. As well as watching, there was space and time to reflect. The best art always returns you to yourself.
A part of me wanted to keep this experience to myself and not write about it. When it was over, I walked into the evening with a kind of aimless purpose – almost tearful, though it’s hard to say exactly why. The experience was complicated, a relationship between setting and dance, music and’acoustics, the occasion itself and everyday life beyond.
I had gone to New York after speaking in Toronto, in a series of panels and lectures on the current state of art in the economic downturn. The art world is in crisis. First there was too much money; now there isn’t enough. Newspapers and print media are in crisis. Theory is in crisis (does anyone have time to do more than look at the pictures in magazines nowadays?). Curating is in crisis. The’professional critic is in crisis (they’are dropping like flies in north’America). Artists – well, they’re always in crisis, drama queens that they are.
But crisis is good. Crisis is sexy. Crisis shakes you up. And if it changes’our habits when it comes to looking at art, reading about it, or even making it, then that’s probably good, too. Artists, if they’re any good, are engaged in a war against habit, complacency and indifference.
Puffs, gossip and beastliness
Change is good. But pick up a British’newspaper, and you would think it was still 1995. It’s the same old same old: here comes Tracey; there goes Damien. And isn’t that that transvestite bloke, the one who does those pots? It’s not the earnest reviews and analysis that count, the ones that’say time’s up and let’s move on –’the articles I spend long nights worrying over, however urgent they may seem. The stories that count arethe personality puffs, the bits of gossip about who Jay Jopling and Sam’ Taylor-Wood are currently shagging or in the process of de-shagging or un-shagging and what Tracey did next that get the juices flowing. Sex and money, beauty and’beastliness, and little Damien are what count: he’s painting again, haven’t you heard? Watching Cunningham’s dancers, all this seemed very parochial and very far away.
Conceptual art began with Marcel Duchamp’s witty and iconoclastic questioning of the status of the art object, in relation to other kinds of’manufactured items: bicycle wheels,’snow shovels, that famous urinal. He questioned what art was and’what it might become in the post-industrial future. In the 1960s, conceptual art became an art of ideas,’statements, theoretical drolleries and jokes.
Nowadays, there is a mistaken assumption that all sorts of current art’works belong under the banner of’conceptual art. Arguably, you could’look back at John Cage’s music,’his writings and strange hieroglyphic musical notations, or at’Cunningham’s dances and his’collaborations with artists such as’Robert Rauschenberg and Jasper Johns, and see that they have at least’a’tangential relationship to what’came to be called conceptualism. But if the phrase ‘conceptual art’ doesn’t mean that much, nor does ‘contemporary art’. Soon it’ll be old, like everything else.
Oxford’s preposterous debate
A few days ago, I took part in a debate at the Oxford Union. The proposal was ‘This House believes that conceptual art is no art at all’. Interesting or ludicrous, I thought, till ludicrous it proved. Rather than a radical re-reading of an avant-garde movement, the proposal amounted to thin stuff, and one that confused conceptualism with all sorts of other things: the YBAs, Fluxus, the opacity of contemporary art and art writing in general. It was in many ways a preposterous event. I probably made it worse when I stepped up to speak, by doing my version of Bruce Nauman’s video performance piece Clown Torture — jumping up and down shouting No, No, No, No, No, as well as performing my Mark Rothko-Killed-Himself-Because-He-Met-the-People-Who-Bought-His-Art routine. But my team – me, critic Matthew Collings, artist Miroslaw Balka and the departing Tate Britain director Stephen Deuchar – won anyway, by a landslide.
August, serious, intelligent, rigorous: the Oxford Union was a lot less gruelling than the Glasgow Empire on a Thursday night. What shocked me was not just the paucity of argument in the proposal, but the general cultural ignorance behind it, the unexamined prejudices, the kneejerk anti-intellectualism and cultural suspicion of contemporary art. I foolishly thought we’d gone beyond all that, and that an awareness of visual culture was, well, normal. That’s the cloistered critic for you, imagining himself at the centre of the world. However many people one sees queuing for the Turner prize show, or wandering Tate Modern or the Centre Pompidou on a Sunday afternoon, the idea that the art of our time speaks to the wider public, and that people actually get something out of looking at it, might not be quite as true’I might like to think. If Oxford University doesn’t get art, who are the zombies in the art galleries?
The Stuckist Charles Thomson ranted for the motion, as did an otherwise perfectly sensible Oxford student, a smug New Zealander and artist Mark Leckey, who won last year’s Turner prize. Leckey said he was on the philistine side of the debate because he hated everything the YBAs stand for. He wasn’t against conceptual art but what he regarded as the pop version of it, and summed up by saying he was on the side of doubt – which of course I am, too.
I’m for ambiguity, nuance, the kinds of indeterminacy, sublety and open-endedness you get in Cage’s music and in Cunningham’s performances. Robert Rauschenberg once said he wanted to work in the gap between art and life: I can only celebrate that gap and the complications it brings. Doubt is difficult.
Complications and contingencies mess with your head. They might not help you out of a crisis, but they are all we have. Keep dancing.”
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