Lack of Irony

1 L a c k o f i r o n y Note: you are reading an excerpt from: James Elkins, “Failure in Twentieth-Century Painting” (unpublished MS) Revised 9.2001 This page was originally posted on: www.jameselkins.com Send all comments to: [email protected] Part Two – 2 – 3: Lack of irony I cannot tell you who told me or in what footnote it sat hidden. This and other disjecta membra, the abused here drawn together with pain for their further dis- memberment, I offer to the presiding judge of our art, self-pleasured Ironia. — Geoffrey Hill1 There are only a few times I have laughed out loud in an art gallery. When I saw Hofbauer’s Poutnik (Pilgrim, 1905) in the Veletriní Palác, Prague, I took in the rounded grassy hillside topped by a prehistoric dolmen, and I noticed the little fire burning in its passageway. I saw the bowed figure in the purple cape walking slowly up toward the dolmen. He looked intent on his druidical mysteries. That would have been enough, but then I focused on what was behind just behind him: a black panther, following along like an overfed housecat. That is when I laughed—it was just too much. Hofbauer (1869-1944) was the same generation as Frantisek Kupka (1871- 1951), and the two of them shared a humorlessness that has vanished from more recent Czech painting: but that fact doesn’t help me see druids (or religion, or painting) as Hofbauer did. I also laughed (though not so loudly) at the Bulgarian painter Boris Georgiev (1888-1962), who painted Eternal Road (1925, National Museum of Art, Sofia), where a semi-nude hero rests, adopting Hippolyte Flandrin’s famous pose, on a clifftop in an exotic arctic panorama that looks like a Fredrick Church composition painted by Puvis de Chavannes. Impossible peaks tower above him. Far below, ships head out to sea (though one crashes on a rock), past the ruins of unnamed Part Two – 3 – 3: Lack of irony civilizations from an ancient past. The sun sets, bathing the cold landscape in a warm light. In his Wanderer and His Sister (1919), the hero (as always, a self-portrait) strides through another part of his lost world, accompanied by the ghost of his dead sister. This time the technique is excruciatingly tender, as if he were painting his neurasthenia. It doesn’t help to know Georgiev spent much of his life wandering the world and mourning his dead sister. Time and again, looking at a painting and trying to distill the essence of its unacceptableness, I’ve come back to lack of irony. Many other faults can be overlooked, or swept away by compensating strengths, but it can be hard to reconcile serious twentieth-century painting with deep unyielding seriousness. If irony is taken generously—say, as an awareness that painting is painting, and not religion or politics itself—then there is a chance that irony might be our leading criterion for success: at least that’s what promts me to put it in this first chapter. [ passage omitted ] Dead seriousness How, then, can a work fail to be ironic, aside from taking up subjects like the Holocaust or swearing allegience to the concept of the avant-garde? One way is by staying deadly serious when it is unnecessary. I don’t mean to make that sound as if it is difficult. One of the most absurdly self- involved artists of the end of the century, the Norwegian Odd Nerdrum, sees nothing silly about painting himself in Rembrandt’s clothing, in a pastiche of Rembrandt’s style. Artist’s self-portraits tend to be vehicles for convincing the viewer of the artist’s serious purpose, which the viewer might not have doubted to begin with. Nerdrum also paints himself strolling through landscapes that are manifestly demonstrations of his own imagination. Courbet inaugurated the pompous-artist-in-the- landscape genre with Bonjour, Monsieur Courbet, and Nerdrum is only carrying on a dubious tradition that also includes such dubious precedents as Boris Georgiev’s self-portraits as a wandering genius.2 Part Two – 4 – 3: Lack of irony There has never been a lack of dead-serious people. In Wolfgang Wegener’s dour Blue Hours—Horse Market in Havelberg the world is almost empty, with a few shriveled forms and a wobbly car. His effort to conjure the sad and comical atmosphere of the horse market led him to muffle what he saw under a heavy blanket of damp atmospheric paint.3 Giselbert Hoke makes wide landscapes with scratchy little houses, like withered remnants of things Saul Steinberg might have drawn.4 The scenes look serious to my eye, but they wouldn’t if she had let herself draw her houses and ships a little bigger—then they would have been cartoony. Hoke owes her seriousness to Klee’s scribbly little forms and semi-abstract landscapes. Dado’s screaming melted carcasses look like Yves Tanguy’s landscapes scattered with Otto Dix’s mangled soldiers.5 Plain old dead seriousness is a common condition, and many painters and other artists have it like the common cold. At least I haven’t been able to see a pattern in its comings and goings. After all, dead seriousness (or at least piousness, or minimally earnestness or straightforward unironic purposefulness) was the normal condition of premodern art. The Old Master galleries of museums are filled with works of unrelieved seriousness, and it is only in the twentieth century that unserious, ironic works have been able to find places in the mainstream of artmaking. There are many scattered cases of ironic meanings in earlier paintings, but they are marginal: Italian cassoni depicting lighthearted classical myths, Dutch tavern scenes with rollicking peasants, the odd optical trick or bit of cleverness.6 Seriousness of the species I’m describing only became a fault in the last hundred years. Irony, as Geoffrey Hill says, is our unhappy but witty idol. [ passage omitted ] Serious political art In Bucharest there is a group called the Grupul Pentru Dialog, formed to sustain public awareness of Nicolae Ceausescu’s reign in the face of increasing apathy. In 1999 their headquarters had a one-room exhibition space with videos of Ceausescu’s broadcasts from the 1970s and 1980s. Two walls had books from the Ceausescu era, and one wall was decorated with Part Two – 5 – 3: Lack of irony enlargements of the Romanian TV guide, listing the day’s propaganda. The whole display could have been mistaken for an American installation piece lampooning the false happiness of 1950s America, but in the foyer I saw a very different kind of reminder of Ceaucescu’s regime: a painting called Hommage (Omagiu, 1978) by an artist named Eftimie Modalca.7 It depicts Ceausescu surrounded by happy workers and signs of flourishing industry. During Ceausescu’s reign a number of artists began painting such things, and when Ceausescu was executed they disappeared into other jobs. On the same visit I talked my way into one of the public auctions of Ceausescu’s property. There I saw more of the same, including a tapestry featuring a portrait of Ceausescu surrounded by workers. The auction catalogue for the day I visited lists about a thousand items, from a china vase with Nicolae and Elena’s portraits, to a minature throne “symbolizing the historical continuity and state activity of the Romanians, with sculptures representing Dacians, Romans, and great leaders in Romanian history, along with the portrait of Nicolae Ceausescu” (starting bid $2,600).8 Plate [ ] reproduces a painting auctioned in August 1999: Stephen the Great leans out of a painting and clinks glasses with Nicolae and Elena Ceausescu. Apparently the portraits of the Ceausescus are taken from a photograph, because Nicolae looks out of the picture as if he’s acknowledging a crowd. I wonder if it is even possible to begin to gloss such a painting adequately. The disparity between what appears as emptyheaded cowardice on the artist’s part (but which may well be an equally vacuous adulation) and the horrors of Ceausescu’s regime seems just too great. Serious political art mostly is done outside the avant-garde, and sometimes outside the art world. There is an interesting museum in Chicago, a little off the beaten track, called the Vietnam Veteran’s Art Collection.9 The paintings there are almost all politically oriented. Some were done during the war, and others were done after the soldiers returned to America. The collection is run by several veterans, and they are deeply committed to the political messages of the work. Between every couple of paintings or sculptures are real munitions: anti-aircraft guns, field radios, Part Two – 6 – 3: Lack of irony Kalishnikovs. The museum demonstrates better than and I know just how hard it is to get politics to stick to modernism. The paintings range from Pop to neoexpressionism, and their politics varies just as widely: but whatever they have to say about the war runs off their artistic content like water off a duck’s back. One painting uses a collage style dervied from Rauschenberg to tell a patriotic story: but Rauschenberg’s put collage to very ambiguous purposes, and despite claims made by some historians he did not use collage to tell straightforward stories the way the Vietnam veteran does.10 The work in the museum is therefore a misunderstanding of Pop collage—which wouldn’t necessarily matter except that it means viewers cannot bring any of the meanings and strategies of Pop collage to bear in understanding the work’s message.

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