A response to a young person who had been told that there never was such a thing as an alternative art, and all that 1970s stuff was merely feckless, recycled dada, not really serious. No reason for belief.

Kid, your little friends are wrong. They have been affected by the skepticism of a skeptical age. Once upon a time - the late 50s - there was a powerful giant called Greenberg who was famous for his taste. However he was very fastidious about 'quality'; he could not bear to swallow just anything. So he decreed that everything be boned and filleted first. He removed the spirituality from the mondrians, the metaphysics from the rothkos, the anxiety from the gorkys and the politics from just about everything. What he liked had to be flat and 'from the shoulder'. This new cuisine was itself an alternative in its day, a regional specialty (think of Kentucky Fried Chicken, kid.) 

The giant's power spread far and wide because he was a remarkable magician of language. He was able to make 'New York Art' become 'American Art' and he made that become 'International Art' which, in a twinkling, became 'Formalism'. And then, because it made art simpler in many ways, everyone in the world was supposed to eat this. 

(Yes, the metaphors are being mixed, but then a great deal of mythology is like that.)

In order to establish his alternative as mainstream the giant made rules. Rules are different from laws because you can transgress laws but if you break the rules you are out of the game. But some people thought 'Rules?' and then hurled themselves against the ineffable and attempted to wrench order from chaos in what was often called at the time a progressive way. This way of doing things belonged to a fractions group of spirits who lived under the ground and were called The Avant-Garde.

The thing about the avant-garde was that it was always dying or dead. So, fairly soon, no one wanted to be avant. Better to be 'trans', 'post', 'neo' or 'hyper' because to be 'avant' was to be dead - or history as it is sometimes called. Anyway, very soon, all the alternative art spaces were calling themselves contemporary art spaces so as not to become history and die. This allowed them to present postmodern work, which had as its subject 'dying and history'. Irony! Have I mentioned 'irony' yet, kid?

After two world wars avant-garde artists were definitely dead again. When they learned this they started to lighten up. Then they made art that was often wry, absurd, playful, hysterical and anarchistic. There were several waves of this coming from different centers and one form it took was called Fluxus and that was apt because the practice was often in flux what with artists disappearing and then reappearing to say that they weren't really Fluxus. Nobody knew exactly who or where they were and to be frank, kid, nobody but themselves really cared. The one thing that distinguished them for a time was that they didn't have careers. When some of them started to have these they didn't feel so good about Fluxus which was volatile, playful, unheroic, and difficult to contain. This mess was a curatorial trauma called "Career Death!" 

At the time their work was baffling because it was not a 'studio-made' art; it was live, ephemeral, multiple, cheap...yes, an alternative . And it was contained; it was in boxes, envelopes, little books, folders, on records, rubber stamps, postcards and posters. But it was something else - 'Something Else Press' published a great deal of it in fact - and it could be posted, altered, exchanged, performed, read, installed or you could even 'do it yourself'.

There was no money in this and the only way to survive was to marry a beatle. But there were not enough beatles to go round. Yoko Ono (very Fluxus) got the only real one and everyone else had to make do. Artists would form co-operatives, exhibit their work and then fall out with each other. The art was explosive, not retentive (another time we'll have the story of the giant called Freud) but to give you an example: a magazine that documented this art was called 'Avalanche'. There it is, kid. The magic word. (No, not avalanche!)

DOCUMENTATION. The time that our story takes place must have been the most documented period in the history of art. Everyone documented everything. Documentation was the art. It subsumed the traditional criticism; it made rules for some art works and then made different ones for others. Sometimes it got so close to life that one became wary of opening the mail. You couldn't tell if your bank statement was an account of your overdraft or some artist's document showing the inequities of capitalism. Perhaps bank transactions were performance directions working within ostensive manifestations of the superstructure. You started to notice things in that way. (No, you still had to pay real money. That was life, always the problem.)

Later there was a lot of predating of ideas - the initial share-the-art phase was brief - because it was important to establish who thought of certain concepts first. Concepts, have I mentioned that this was now called conceptual? Well it was, and also dematerialized, post-minimal, process, anti-formalist, post-object and ephemeral. The hard part at the time was to get it called art.

There was a lot of it and it moved fast; bowling along, gathering to itself everything that couldn't find a name of its own until, finally - because forms that elude judgment are usually radically dangerous - this 'here comes everybody' hooley of a thing just had to be wound down, examined and reconstituted. It was broken into subsets: idea, body, post-minimal, audio, high performance, political, site-specific, community, feminism, objet trouvé... and then - all of a sudden - it was painting again. It got sorted out and the grunge and the sleaze were removed. (This was neat but, bet on it kid, whatever is swept aside as rubbish today is tomorrow's alternative art.)

Fairy tales about art take place in a land called 'Elsewhere' and by the time they reach the colonized they are twice told. But not this one. It was as fast as the mail. Artists from all over plugged into a global village. Marshal McLuhan discovered this hot-and-cool-media-wired global village and he was cool, and he was funny. He advised people who did not understand him to read Finnegans Wake !

McLuhan in time was swept out as rubbish. But sometimes he can be glimpsed lying in some box of books at a garage sale alongside Ernst Fisher, Mao, Buckminister Fuller, Herman Hesse, Lenin, Alvin Tofler, Studio International and The Whole Earth Catalogue. And, to this very day, if you listen as you watch people using modems, networking, transmitting pixels, you may hear his ghostly footsteps - returning!

My friend, consider how something gets to be known, who is telling us things and why. Who is it for? If nothing can be known absolutely, can doubt be factored into a final solution? How shown? How are we to distinguish truth from fraud; soul from style? What is evidence? If memory is selective... (What do you mean "that's show business"?) 

No, kid, if so much art analysis has become pseudo-science; if memory conspires with photography, pressing time flat, it can only incite these odd images of the 1970s to evoke the radical question WHY IS THERE SO MUCH HAIR AND WHY IS EVERYBODY WEARING FLARES?

That was the puzzle and the riddle is this: what is it that you end up with when artists want it, but that you can't start with in the sure knowledge that artists will use it. It needs theory and money but it really cannot live with or without them; too much of either or both kills it - so does too little. It's a space. And although that space is its time, looking back, that time may shape as a space. It's relative, and when you think you have it - it's gone.

My first is in ASK but not in CONCLUSION
My next is in TRUTH and not in DELUSION
My third is in ART and also in STYLE
Always think 'YES' but never 'SIEG HEIL'
My fourth is in IS but not in WAS
My fifth is in TASK and also in CAUSE 
My sixth is in CULTURE but not in.... 

(No, kid, I didn't know you hated riddles. I always thought.... OK. I'll get on with it, but you have just talked yourself out of knowing the secret of what art is. No, too late. Now you are going to have to read all those books and magazines and work at it forever.) 

Life is complex but if ideas about art are the life of a place, and if people act like life, in the name of art, in that place, then life gets definition because of the art. A common denominator within the focus of that defined art field clarifies something about... Yes...Life!

At the points where the planes intersect; when the possibilities for art and life are laid open, although it wavers, sometimes it holds, and then - ask anyone - it is said to be radiant. That part of where you are that isn't where you think you are. That's the place. A real-time convocation... (Well, if you must know, I said it.) Not 'happy ever after' but 'happy right now'. Then straw is gold, the wolf is slain, the lamp works. This is the moment the alternative spaces were for and these were the elements it served. 

Alternative art came into existence because primary creative energy demanded it. This is different from other exigencies: institutional, curatorial, academic, political, gender, racial, ecological, environmental, the handicapped, the industry, the mission statement, the policy statement, the grant, the four-colour brochure, the advisory committee, the infrastructure, the project officer, the Board, The Department, the City Fathers, the Community, the Trust, the Foundation, the peers, the Endowment, The Environment, humanity at large, the State, the Man on the Clapham Omnibus, the Woman in the Street, the nice, the good, the reasonable, the sane, the money, the mode, the style, the solemn, the jargon....Yes, Child - The Other! 

But: the obsessive, the autistic, the hung-up, the feral, the nervy, the unlikely, the dizzy, the unhealthy, the raw, the beset, the uncalled-for. Well, always look twice and... (It's a shorter list because there's less of it.)

Lists, by the way, feature in much of the art of that time. Their purpose was not to define but to exhaust meaning; attempts to climb out of language; to act in the aftermath of language; to try to sense something prior to language; not to illustrate theory but to test if the visual arts can signify beyond the caul of language. And where does this leave us? Well, it leaves us telling stories to each other and that's the whole story except - talk save us - there is no one whole story AND THAT'S THE REASON FOR AN ALTERNATIVE ART.

(I spoke to you about stomping your foot. In art stories not everybody gets to live happily ever after and these tales are not supposed to make sense in that sense.) Most of what I am talking about didn't work. If it is to work, understand that it is always going to be trouble, because it carries with it tons of shit which is no fun to do, and you must know the magic trick of getting on the money while hitting the bottom line without turning from black to red. 

Kid, it soon is late and this is starting to be endless, but then the art story does not finish. It's about that. Remember to forge a real memory, one that you can take asunder to reassemble whenever you must put yourself together. Spread it out. Almost like spilling water from a tilted tumbler on blankety sheets. See those returning traces. Look. Look. 

Someone smiles for 24 hours through a block of ice.
Someone has people light matches and, one at a time, tell the story of their lives for as long as their match stays lit.
Someone ironing clothes turns and scorches the iron onto her shadow and leaves.
Two actors perform 'The End of the World' in a factory basement - with explosions. 
Around a war memorial someone places army boots in a circle of fire.
A young woman dressed as a budgerigar interrogates a major art institution. 
A clarinettist, whose work demonstrates how the chest and diaphragm work during circular breathing, warms up beforehand with hard-bop passages that come off the walls in sheets. The official performance is silent. 
Someone who collects everything except art shows the collection.
Someone learns that the stones he is using to demystify art are 20,000,000 years old!

Maybe you don't need this. Don't go into it if you can think of one other thing that, in your heart, you believe is better. If you can think of another life - lawyer, nun, brain surgeon, jet pilot - do that thing. Don't do art. Not just because the profession is overcrowded, but if you go to it as a second choice it is going to show in your work. It will be second-rate. Don't do it because you want a job in an industry. Don't do it because you want a job. Don't do it because art needs you. Don't do it if you don't need art and...

Why do it? Well, you get to hang out with artists. (Decide what you think about artists in the first place.) You may get to see faith made provisionally tenable. Stuff like that. You have a lot to think about. Sleep on it into the night. 'Night. Remember it's a communal thing; other people; sharing.... (No, you can't have a glass of water kid. Let's not go nuts here.)

(Apologies to Francis P. Church's Yes Virginia, there is a Santa Claus)

Noel Sheridan is an artist and the Director of the National College of Art and Design, Dublin

Article reproduced from CIRCA 86, Winter 1998, pp. 14-16