Thomas Lawson Last Exit Painting
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Modernism'spretentious desire for eternalvalues is viewed by critic and painter Fwa, Thomas Lawson as symbolic of its surrenderto the social structure it had U. Ri*rad fte,.-f2- originally soughtto subvert.Neither modernism'sahistorical stance nor a fash- ionableand calculatedneoexpressionism are adequatestrategies for the radical Pfrrl nerrta4, for,n*icg-fi,s,Itl t? Ef - artist. Lawson advocatescritical subversion,deconstruction on canvasof the illusions of real life as representedin the mass media. Painting is the perfect vehicle for raising"troubling doubt" about the ideasand methodsof the media precisely becauseit is situatedat the center and not the periphery of the art marketplace. l"ast E:rit Painting Thomas Lawsorr Tlv paintingshne to bedcad; that is,from life but not a part of it, in order ta showhow a painting can besoid to lwte anythingto do with life in tfu first Plua -David salle,cover,May l9Z9 T It all boils down to a question of faith. Young artists concerned with pictures and picture-making, rather than sculpture and the lively arts, are faced now with a bewildering choice. They can continue to believe in the traditional institutions of culture, most conveniently identified with easel painting, and in effect register a blind conrentment with the way rhings are. They can dabble in "pluralism," that last holdout of an exhausted modernism, choosing from an assortment of attractive labels-Narrative Art, Pattern and Decoration, New Image, New Wave, Naive Nouveau, Energism-the style most suited to their own, self-referential purpose$. Or, more frankly engaged in exploiting the last mannerisric twitches of modernism, they can resuscitatethe idea of abstracr painting. Or, taking a more critical stance, they can invesr their faith in the subversive potential of those radical manifestations of modernist art labelled Minimalism and Conceptualism. But what if these, too, appear hopelessly compromised, mired in the predictability of their conventions, subjecr to an academicism Arfxfs S,'$TH,"Chrirtmas tve, 1943" 1982 Mixed media2lt/{ x 18th" or a sentimentality every bit as regressive as thar adhering to the idea of Courtesf Ma6r> Leavin Callery, Los Angeles. @Douglas M. Parker Fine Art? Such is the confused situation today, and everyone seemsto be getring rather shrill about it. At one extreme, Rene Ricard, wriring in Artforum on Julian Schnabel, has offered petulanr self-advertisemenrin rhe name of a Reprinttd from Thomas l:wson, "l:st Exir: Paindng,".{rfozn (Ocrober t98l). Thomas l-awson 145 144 Last Exit: Painring While was force reactionary expressionism, an endless celebration of the author's impor- it still a creative modernism worked by taking a pro- gTammatic, adversary stance toward the tance as a champion of the debasement of art to kisch, fearful that anything dominant culture. [t raged against particularly bourgeois order. To more demanding might be no fun. The writing was mostly frivolous, but order, and this end it developed a rhetoric immediacy, eschewing not only the mimetic noisy, and must be considered a serious aPologia for a certain anti-intel- of tradition of Western art, but also the esthetic distance implied by the structure of representation- lectuaf elite. On the other hand the periodical Octobn has been publishing the necessarily built into anything that is to be swingeingjeremiads condemning, at least by implication, all art produced distance understood as a picture of something else, a distance that sanctions the idea of since the late'60s, savewhat the editors consider to be permissible,which art as a discursive practice. With modernism, is to say arr that owes a clear and demonstrable debt to the handful of art became declarative, we moved into justifications Minimal and Conceptual artists they lionize as the true guardians of the the era of the manifesto and the artist's statement, which brook no dissent. faith. From a position of high moral superiority these elitists of another Modernism's insistence on immediacy the foreclosure of sort, intellectual but antiesthetic, condemn the practice of "incorrect" art and distance inevitably resulted in a denial of history, in greater altogether, as an irredeemably bourgeois activity that remains largely be- an ever emphasis on not just the present, but the presence of neath their notice. Both approaches, of t}e esthete and the moralist, leave the artist. Expressive symbolism gave way to self-expression; art history developed into autobiography. distinctions blurred, and art itself is conveniently relegated to an insignif- Van- guard art became a practice concerned only icant position as background material serving only to peg the display of ' with itself, its own rules and procedures. The most startling result was the liberation of technique; self oi of theory. From both sides we receive the same hopeless message: the least useful result was the pursuit of novelty. As modernist that there is no point in continuing to make art since it can only exist the idea became debased, sparsenessworn insulated from the real world or as an irresponsible bauble. This is only a its deliberate through overuse, the acting-out of impulse, rather than the reflective partial truth. It would be more accurate, although a good deal more com- discipline of the imagination, became the measure of satisfactign and value. As plicated, to argue that while there may be no point in continuing to make a result the modernist insistence on an essential meaninglessness at iertain kinds of art, art as a mode of cultural discourse has not yet been the center of artistic practice came ac- mean less. rendered completely irrelevant. tually to less and From being a statement of existendal despair it degenerated into an empty, self-pitying, but sensationalist, mannerism. Tofuy . modernart b beginningto loseits powet of-negation.-Forsomc years From being concerned with nothingness, it became nothing. The repudia- now itsrejectioru ha,ae bem rinnl repetiliorc:rebellion ha^s tym! intaprocedurc, tion of mimesis, and the escalating demands for impact, for new experience critbisminn rhaoric, transgrcssioninlo cncmony.Ncgdion b u longn cv* beyond traditional limits, inevitably loosened rhe connections between ar- end of art: we are liuing tlc cnd atiue.I am no! sayingthal ue are livios tlra tistic discourse and everyday life. Art became an abstraction, something of of tlu ifua of modernarl- " --octavio Paz,Chiwrcnoftb Mire: Modanr*rfi#Xffi#il meaning only to its practitioners. On the whole modernist arrists acted as though alienated from bourgeois society-it was the only posture that gave their work a significance transcending its own interiority. But for rhe most part posture, Ilespite the brouhaha, the numerous painting revivals of the latLer part this remained only a rarely developing into a deeper com- mitment to social change. In a manner that foretold of the '70s, from New Abstraction to Pattern and Decoration, proved to the final decline of mord authority of modernism, radically individualist be little more than the last gasps of a long overworked idiom, modernisr Qe artists all too often found comfortable niches in the they painting. (The diversionary tactics of so many bemused critics hid this truth society professed to despise, becoming litde more than anxious apologists for under i blanket eventually labelled "pluralism," but as the decade closed the system. that blanket became more and more of a shroud.) These revivals were Of course there had been one important moment that saw a possibility for more truly revolutionary embalmed and laid to rest in Barbara Rose's poignantly inappropriately . a activity, and that was in Moscow in the years immediately following the tided show "American Painting: The Eighties." That exhibition, presented Russian Revolution. This period not only pushed modernism to is logical expression in abstraction, in l9?9, made the situation abundantly clear, and for that we should be but turned that abstrac- tion away from the personal :cward thankful. Painter after painter included there had done his or her best to a more significant critique of produc- tion. Developing implications nascent in work reinvest rhe basic tenets of modernist painting r.{'ithsome spark of life, while the of C6zanne and the Cubists, it concentrated on the basic ingredients, ideological staying firmly within the safe bounds of dogma. The result was predictably and material, involved in the production depreising, a funereal procession of tired cliches paraded as if still fresh; af art. This moment, abandoned by the artists themselves (only partly because of political a corpsa made up to look forever young. pressures) in favor of a totally 146 l-ast Exit: Painting Thomas l:wson 147 ' reactionary andmodernism, saw the first stirrings of a seedthat, when later The end of the century. If modernist formalism seems finally dis- conjoined with the very different, but equally radical, activity of Marcel credited, hopelessly coopted by the social structures it purportedly sought Duchamp, came to fruition just as the modernist hegemony seemed un- to subvert, is bastard progeny continue to fill the galleries. We all want to assailable-demonstrating ihat it was not. see something new, but it is by no means clear that what we have been That fruition has been called Minimalism, and the Mimimalist artists getting so far has any merit beyond a cernin novelty. As Antonio Gramsci subverted modernist theory, at that time most ably articulated by the fol- so presciently observed in his prison notebooks, a period lacking certainty lowers of Clement Greenberg, simply by taking it literally. lf modernist art is bedeviled by a plethora of morbid symptoms. Following the lead of sought to concern itself with its own structures, then the Minimalists would architectural critics these symptoms have been hailed, rather carelessly, as have objects made that could refer to nothing bur their own making. This "post-modern," with that term standing for a nostalgic desire [o recover ,bjgl41:jjg4-:m-worked bu dt@hich in turn an undifferentiated past.