C95
article
SCOTLAND
REVIEW
 |
| Installation
shot, Department, Intermedia Gallery (Lucky star,
2000, by Deborah Holland in foreground, untitled by Kim
McKinney in background); courtesy Intermedia Gallery |
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| Claudine
Hartzel: Installation shot, slide installation at Department;
courtesy Intermedia Gallery |
In
a recent article, Robert Johnston, a Glasgow-based artist and
writer, criticised the pervasive evil of the 'good idea' in contemporary
art. Recounting a unproductive exchange with a college tutor,
where he had been informed that he needed a 'good idea' to ground
his work, Johnston came to the conclusion that he "hated good
ideas." His irritation and disillusionment
with any art that can be reduced to a movie-pitch hook is interesting,
timely and astute within the context of Scottish art. Bringing
to the surface many undercurrents within the art scene, Johnston's
remarks highlight how the logic of the good idea, for better and
for worse resides at the heart of Scottish art.
For Johnston 'good idea' represents a constellation of insidious
strands in contemporary art. The good idea propels the kind
of art which, in its streamlining of artistic aspirations down
to a single idea, frequently demonstrates as much depth as a
puddle. Johnston's dissatisfaction - "if there's one thing I
can't stand it's the kind of art whose whole raison d'être is
the good idea" is understandable. In part I share it.
In Scotland, with an artistic culture almost exclusively funded
by state bodies, the good idea has a dual identity. Firstly,
with a government determined to make art accountable for its
subsidised support, such art can often appear the ideal tool
for making art accessible, socially inclusive and responsible.
Secondly, the absence of a domestic, private market2 means that
a good, easily pitchable, quickly graspable art idea, reducible
to a thirty-word paragraph, is a prerequisite for playing the
state-funding system.
The 'good idea' also propels the juggernaut of superstar curating.
The ubiquitous presence of the thematic group show requires
artists who make easily identifiable, signposted 'good idea
art'. Making 'pieces' about any of the big ideas on the curatorial
shopping list (gender, memory, globalisation, ...) provides
the necessary grist to the curatorial mill.
Johnston is rightly skeptical of the kind of work propelled
by a slavish faith in the need for a good idea. While I'm sure
he wouldn't deny that all artists need some kind of pitchable
angle, his fear is that it can easily result in banal, one-dimensional
work (to illustrate the vacuity of one-liner art, he recounts
a writer's retort to a young author who proclaimed he had a
good idea for a book - "But you need thousands of good ideas
for a book"). Depressingly it perhaps also signifies a loss
of faith, which has seen art being granted some intellectual
respectability by use of outside spheres of knowledge (for example
theory and science) - the kind of art which only functions as
a reference point to other interesting areas of culture, but
intrinsically is empty of meaning. Crucially this art appeals
to the vanity of critics wishing to demonstrate the size of
their library.
Anything can be read into it.
While his criticisms are illuminating (not least because, within
the context of Scotland, they are so rarely uttered) his article
is doubly interesting for pinpointing a group of artists who
he feels represent an unofficial response to the tyranny of
the good idea. In reviewing work by Hayley Tompkins, he identifies
a loose group of associated artists (Jim Lambie, Cathy Wilkes,
Mary Redmond and Victoria Morton3) who he regards as resisting
the imposition of the good-idea logic. Devoid of clearly labelled
signposts as to meaning, intellectual propriety, it is their
esotericism, their blank indifference to making their art easily
digestible, which sets them apart. As he says, "there is no
way in and no way out." So for him what is interesting about
this powerful strain of Scottish art4 is its implicit attempt
to block the limiting spirit of the good idea. In many respects
this feels like the age-old squaring up of usefulness versus
uselessness, utilitarianism versus artistic autonomy. It's no
coincidence that, in both the work Johnston champions and other
strains of Scottish art, there is a use of design and architectural
motifs (the epitome of functionality, usefulness) but in a manner
where functional objects fail to function. It's a kind of teasing
come-on to those looking for an art that does something useful.
Dysfunctional functional art.
It's difficult not to recognise the return of a familiar strand
of artistic practice in all of this. When Johnston writes of
Tompkins work that "it's weird, esoteric and mysterious, also
very beautiful a lot of the time, and redolent of real seriousness,"
I hear the voice of abstract, modernist painting. This feeling
of déjà vu is compounded by Johnston's faith that the works'
vagueness, mystery, guarantees them a power to move people.
It's peculiar that he identifies these strains as a critically
resistant grain against administered culture, against being
reduced to a movie-pitch idea. After all it was the similar
championing of abstract art's esotericism, it's uselessness
within the commodity culture of America, which ultimately transformed
into its good idea, its selling point. It was precisely this
proclamation of uncontaminated individual vision, unfettered
by restrictive logic (its autonomy, its supposed lack of contamination
by filthy lucre) which served, for example, the CIA in making
artists like Jackson Pollock the marketable epitome of American
cultural freedom.
However, it was the monolithic weight of such ideals as beauty,
the mute primacy of the visual, artistic autonomy, etc., which
pressed so heavily on the heads of a whole generation of artists
who later produced critically engaged art (from conceptualism
to feminist art, one of the shared points of departure was an
intense alienation with the uncritical and universal use of
such terms as beauty, taste, etc.).
Johnston's use of the term 'beauty' is particularly curious.
On the one hand there's almost something courageous about using
such a contested, highly subjective, ideological term with theoretical
impunity. While I can share his boredom with the movie-pitch
turn to contemporary art, and his desire to see the return of
a more direct, 'honest' art, it is perverse to offer beauty
as the universal category capable of liberating art from the
shackles of the good idea. The problem for me is - what if you
don't find the work beautiful, what if it singularly fails to
move you? Because of the pronounced faith in esotericism there's
an alienating aftertaste for those who simply don't get it,
who feel bored and out of place. Compounding this estrangement,
the aura of vagueness is likely to become a block on discussion.
Either you just get it or you don't.
In response to reading his article, I tried to think of any
examples of beauty in recent art I'd seen. I couldn't get much
further than the Carnivalesque show at the Edinburgh's City
Art Centre. A large travelling show, this was an exhibition
where my tastebuds salivated at the sight of a vulgar, base,
grotesque cornucopia of arses, copulating animals, the lame
and the defiled. Relativists would no doubt claim that's fine
and my tastes or lack of them have an equivalence with Johnston's
eye for beauty. However, beauty always comes down to taste,
and despite such protestations of equality, it's difficult to
escape the feeling that if one of the primary criteria for validating
art is beauty, then some people's taste on the matter will always
hold more sway and power than others'. Carnivalesque offered
a potent reminder that the exhibiting artists, who in their
own ways parodied and mocked the pretensions, follies and good
ideas of their own respective epochs (from Goya to Leigh Bowery),
were rarely in their own time afforded much cultural pedigree
or authority
In a more pragmatic vein Department at the Intermedia Gallery
possessed a 'good idea'. Namely to exhibit a highly disparate,
heterogeneous group of seven, Glasgow-based women artists. While
it thankfully had a relatively loose thematic brace (department
- contemporary consumerism...) it managed to offer an insightful
cross-section of practice. This disparity in approaches was a
welcome relief from the usual tone of group shows, where the curatorial
reliance on a good idea usually shoe-horns out any art which hints
at something beyond the thematic premise. In Department, practices
often thought of as mutually exclusive found themselves rubbing
shoulders. From the immersion and entanglement within popular
cultural dreams of Deborah Holland's gold casts of children's
wishing wands (one part Jasper Johns flashlight to three parts
fairy godmother) to Claudine Hartzel's romantic and poetic slide
installation and on to Sally Chapman's large-scale abstract paintings,
Department managed to offer examples of practice often neglected
within mainstream Scottish art. The good idea is an insidious
aspect of contemporary art, undoubtedly partly responsible for
inspiring much banal work. However, retreating into a rather hermetic,
esoteric private enclosure feels as backward as it is forward.
Like it or not all artists in Scotland are entangled in a gordian
knot. The last thing we need is the tyranny of taste replacing
the tyranny of the good idea.
1Robert
Johnston, review of Hayley Tompkins exhibition at the Modern Institute,
published in Untitled, Issue no. 23.
2It should be remembered that Scottish
artists of course do very well in foreign markets.
3See Scotland reviews in CIRCA
87 and 89 - Ed.
4These artists are highly successful.
Jim Lambie recently won one of the Paul Hamlyn Awards of £20,000stg.,
Cathy Wilkes exhibited in the Becks Futures exhibition; but how
much they constitute any kind of group is highly contentious.
There appear as many internal differences between them as there
are similarities.
Carnivalesque, City
Arts Centre, Edinburgh, October-December 2000
Department, Intermedia Gallery, Glasgow,
November/December 2000
John
Beagles
is an artist and writer.
