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Winter 2000 C95 article SCOTLAND REVIEW
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. 1 Robert Johnston, review of Hayley Tompkins exhibition at the Modern Institute, published in Untitled , Issue no. 23. Carnivalesque , City Arts Centre, Edinburgh, October-December 2000 John Beagles is an artist and writer.
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