C108 Article

Enigma variations: collecting 'new media'

New media take the collector into unknown territory. Here Noel Sheridan sketches the paths that brought us to the flatscreen image and the dangling video lead.

Caroline McCarthy: Greetings (detail), 1996, two-video installation, dimensions variable, collection Irish Museum of Modern Art; courtesy IMMA

 

My elderly maiden aunt, Chrissie, a Victorian lady who dressed wholly in black and who spent her life keeping tabs on the relations, came to my first exhibition and hated it. She collected religious art, 'Our Lady' among others. That big image of The Virgin standing on the tiny tree surrounded by twelve - count them - stars, Fatima.

Aunt Chrissie had a haughty look around my exhibition and wanted to know why I didn't paint like Michelangelo! She collected him. She searched around in her big handbag and took out a postcard of the Sistine Chapel ceiling from her prayer book to show me exactly what she meant.

I walked her around the show, explaining the work, hoping for a favourable report to the relations. "What's this - Brown sun?" she asked pointing to my painting of a brown sun. "God never made the sun brown."

"That's just the title. It's really about...the paint."

We'd just about completed the tour when she pointed to a small painting. "That's quite a nice piano piece," she said. I couldn't believe it. All my talk about harmony and tones was having an effect. "How do you mean, Aunt Chrissie?" "Well," she said, "the size and it has a nice frame; it would look well on a piano."

This article will be about collecting new media and installation work today, but first: The Renaissance. (Extends arms to get firm grip on lectern, Looks sideways at projected slide; the Sistine Chapel ceiling, Allows that image to register, adjusts microphone, and begins.)

Caroline McCarthy: Greetings (detail), 1996, two-video installation, dimensions variable, collection Irish Museum of Modern Art; courtesy IMMA

I should like to begin by distinguishing between patronage and collecting. Great works of art (glances briefly at slide of the celebrated ceiling) such as this, by Michelangelo, had a social function. Pope Julius II was well aware of the aesthetic qualities of the artist, but, I will argue, that was not the point. This art had a use; to glorify God and His Church. Also to evoke awe in the viewer. Collecting art, by contrast, has no use. You may say "Is it not to glorify the collector, the agency, and evoke awe in others?" Perhaps, but that is not my point. My point is: at this time art began being collected for purely aesthetic reasons. And so it was collectors, and this may come as a surprise to many, who initiated what we have come to call 'art for art's sake'. (Pauses, looks out for evidence of the surprised many in the audience. None. Mild coughing.)

It was collectors who lifted the visual arts above the activities of artisans. Yes, no doubt Vasari's Lives, which gave definition to personalities of genius at that time, persuaded some to garner celebrity by association, and artists themselves, who aspired to the status of a liberal 'profession', pressed for that recognition, but, and this is my point: that is not the point.

It was collectors, in particular Isabella d'Este, whose rapacious desire to get works from famous contemporary artists, marked a turning point for acquiring art, foreshadowing the radical shift in the scale of art collecting that led to the eventual flowering that followed. When the Grand Duke Ferdinando de' Medici, in 1601, listed eighteen famous painters, whose works were not to be sold abroad, he made 'concern for the national culture' a new ideology. Not to mention branding.

(Is that a raised hand?) Yes?

Do you mean like 'Rinso'? Branding.

Not exactly Rinso. Rinso has a function. More like Coke. Taste.

The Council of Trent had attempted to distinguish between 'the thing in itself' as having power (anathema) and representations of power (metaphor). But, too late - by then, too many were being ravished by beauty to be terrified by canonical art. And those were your collectors.

I might mention in passing that only five distinct cultural traditions - the ancient world, China with an offshoot in Japan, the civilization of Islam and, of course, all Western societies since the dawn of the Italian Renaissance - display a passion for collecting art for its own sake. Nothing from the great civilisations of North or South America, nothing of Aboriginal culture, nothing from Africa that was useless, and as to the Middle Ages, it was immersed in a...how shall I put it...a kind of...darkness. No collecting.

The first collectors acquired, for the most part, image and text works. The Chinese and Persian collectors rightly treasured and inspired the master calligraphers and illustrators of their time, favoring the medium over the message - 'the touch'. I shall have more to say later about 'the touch', but my point here is that without collectors it would have been impossible to construct history, tradition - all vital to the aspirations of the Renaissance.

My point being: we would have no art history (snigger from lone art student) because art history is inextricably linked to collectors and collections. Provenance. The repository of our memory of things and times past. (Maybe I've pitched this all wrong.)

My real point is that without collectors you would not now have your Matisses, Cézannes or Chardins. (Is that woman knitting?)

As we know, it was the Irish monks who saved civilization (why not? - last refuge of the scoundrel) and we justly pride ourselves on that. (Give yourselves a round of applause.) But it was the content as well as the beauty of the calligraphy that inspired.

(No time to go into all of that - that neither painting nor sculpture were named among the Muses, although 'Rhetoric' used the devices of the visual arts as mnemonics; nor that collections of poetry and plays were in existence prior to the fine-art collections and how the word was once inextricably linked to the image and how it was only when these were separated that the visual image began to give pure pleasure to match that of poetry and music and that it was this mental shift rather than changing styles that marked the advent of what we think of as collecting visual art. (No time for that. Make straight for the Enlightenment.)

The Enlightenment was seriously about collecting. The Encyclopedists regarded history painting and sculpture as ranking highest in its rationalist hierarchy in art. But there were those, yes, collectors, who favored the drawing and the still life for no other purpose than as a thing in itself. In explaining why they were correct in doing this, Kant not only set an underpinning for aesthetics in philosophy - providing a rationale for connoisseurs, dealers, art theorists et al. - he established collecting as an honorable arena for the disinterested contemplation of art works. But to be fair to collectors, they were doing this before he explained why. And what many of them treasured was not the transcendental, but the particular. The evidence of the individual human hand. The touch.

(Need nicotine. Wrap this up)

And that ladies and gentlemen is my point. For collectors it is 'what pleases the eye' that is art. And it is, within that definition, that 'evidence of the human touch' which affords redress to the anonymity, the homogenization, the predictability, the mind-numbing boredom, the utter futility, the soul destroying vacuity, the abysmal...

(Leave now)

...of the modern world. Thank you ladies and gentlemen. (Exits left, weeping)

The point of the above lecture could not have been made anytime after the late 1950s. For by then things had changed, more or less...utterly. Qualities such as 'touch', 'pleasing to the eye' - not to mention the quality 'quality' - became anathema. New collectors came to the fore, acquiring works that: eliminated all evidence of the human touch (most Pop Art) baffled the eye (Op Art) or undercut the idea of uniqueness (multiples).

Multiples never really caught on as serious art collecting in spite of Walter Benjamin's projections and André Malraux's 'muse imaginaire'. Except, that is, for me and Aunt Chrissie and millions more who got their art information from reproductions.

Did Chrissie have the Cistine ceiling? Yes, she did. Did one understand what was radical about Jackson Pollock's art from reproduction. Yes, one did. One could imagine it being bigger, more awesome, Yes, read the measurements then mentally scale it up, etc. You got everything but 'the touch'. (And that was how Conceptualism was born.)

But it was collectors who were there first. Dentists for the most part, if the myth of artists exchanging work for orthodontic repairs in '40s New York has any validity. But the vital collector is always there first. Before the museums, before the magazines. before dentists - unless the dentist is a vital collector and not just altruistic - like state institutions. Subtle exciting difference.

Vital collectors are as obsessive and passionate about art as artists. Artists want to put it out; collectors want to get it in. Sexual? But, of course.

And what about our own Renaissance? Us new Europeans, Tigers.

Something of a dud, I'm afraid. Still too many Aunt Chrissies stalking the land. No one could be quite that Catholic any more, but the same mind-set pervades - video is not art, etc. Some of the most important art being made in Ireland now is in photography, image and text and video, but it's sold internationally. Exiled.

The spiritual health of a culture is, in part, validated by what it collects as art. Otherwise it's just superficial. Predictable. Not Medici. No risk, No expansion of consciousness. No taste as 'critical judgement'. Get it on, collectors.

But video, it's so untidy, so dominant, all those wires.

Not at all. The new technology is flat screens, all sizes, portable. Let me show you this nice piano piece.

Noel Sheridan is an artist currently working on some piano pieces.