What the Market Did to the Avant-Garde: Innovation in Art and Its Institutions
A watchmaker sells itself as avant-garde, a painter charges admission to his own pavilion, and a man in cardboard recites nonsense to two dozen people. What innovation costs once it can be priced.
18 min read
Gustave Courbet, The Painter's Studio: A Real Allegory Summing Up Seven Years of My Artistic and Moral Life, 1854–1855. Oil on canvas. Musée d'Orsay, Paris. Centrepiece of Courbet's Pavilion of Realism, the independent exhibition staged in 1855 next to the official Exposition Universelle. He charged an entry fee.
In a recent advertisement, the high-end watchmaker Tag Heuer announces itself as Swiss Avant-Garde since 1860. The slogan sits beneath a chronograph in brushed steel and is offered without irony or asterisk.
This inversion of a notion associated with radicalism for the sake of high capitalism is perhaps not as alarming as it first sounds, since it is highly symptomatic of the way globalisation has internalised and absorbed currents of the Left. In one fell swoop, an idea associated with bohemianism, artistic experimentation, and with it penury and misfortune, has been repositioned toward a product that most of us can neither afford nor justify buying. That such a company can both sanitise the term of its radical associations and simultaneously profit from them is but one example of the fact that the avant-garde no longer exists in its historically authentic form.
In art, the term survives best in the mainstream media, where it is applied to work that is left-of-field, unintelligible, highly experimental, and uncommercial. One of the sources of confusion for mainstream audiences faced with contemporary art is this very absence of a cohesive avant-garde by which the institution and the academy can be dialectically measured. To the lay audience the difficulty is exacerbated by the lack of any discernible set of rules or concerns within contemporary art, which seems to have more than several sets of rules at once, thus making qualitative measurement seem arbitrary, or partisan. These misperceptions are understandable and forgivable, and they are not the fault of those without the requisite education or knowledge. The problem resides in the so-called artworld itself, and in the limited importance it gives to experimental, not-for-profit galleries and spaces as against commercial galleries, who themselves maintain close de facto ties to major collections and institutions.
There is nothing exceptional in the watch. For at least the last two decades, large corporations like Coca-Cola Amatil, Nike, and Levis have spent large sums finding out the visual, aural, and structural languages of subcultures. They do so not only by observing from the outside, which is now easier than ever with social networking, in many ways a complex system of ad hoc surveillance, but also from within, paying members of gangs and social groups, skateboarders and surfers, for information about new words, new gestures, and ways of dressing. This information provides both the framework and the detail for what they design and how they market their products. The particular languages invented by specific groups are reflected back on these groups for their material exploitation, usually with a swiftness that makes the process invisible. Naomi Klein's No Logo, at the end of the 1990s, gave the apparatus a wider frame; the cool hunter had by then been a paid occupation for some years.
The conclusion to be drawn from this is that innovation within the cultural sphere occurs according to strategies, and within groups, that are hostile to commerce. They are not avant-garde in the strict historical sense of the term, but they represent sites of invention and resistance. It is the same with art, in a slightly more organised way. The artist-run initiatives commonly referred to as ARIs, and their more institutionalised offshoots, the experimental art spaces, are where what we might call the pure art happens: the art of process, production, and discovery, whose translation into a commodity is incidental, if not actively resisted.
The passage from radicalism to conservatism, from penury to riches, is an allegory and a reality across all areas of human endeavour, from politics to art, germane to the transition from youthful zealotry to stolid old age. In art, the pole running from experimental, radical anti-establishmentarianism to the halls of power became discernible in modernity. Experimental art has always been tied, out of hostility and largesse, to money. In a relationship that is always agonistic, experimental, avant-garde, and cutting-edge art plays against the ways in which commerce mitigates the life of the work of art by reducing its energy and insight into something of monetary value.
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In 1648, Louis XIV's chief minister Cardinal Mazarin (1602-1661) established the Académie de Peinture et de Sculpture, which served as the benchmark for the others that followed: sciences in 1666, architecture in 1671, and music in 1672. In 1673 the recently founded art academy held its first exhibition, the purpose of which was not just to impart knowledge but to centralise it, maintained by something resembling objective standards and upheld strenuously by the first of the redoubtable academy's masters, Charles Le Brun. By making the artists compete for honours in the annual Salon, by appealing to what Napoleon would later call every man's love of shining baubles, the state was more assured of attracting able young artists who could then be assigned public commissions.
Ancient Rome had always fostered the spirit of competition to exert its control over the bureaucracy and the military, but never in the arts. Given that in the arts egos are worn so close to the sleeve, peer-group pressure works wonders, and is the mainstay of art's most enduring vulgarisation, the competition. The Venice Biennale still hands out medals; until the end of the nineteenth century, the Paris Salon was the single biggest event in art and had the same topicality as any Documenta in Kassel or Whitney Biennial in New York.
Thus the beginning of the avant-garde, with artists such as Théodore Géricault (1791-1824) and Gustave Courbet (1819-1877), was inextricably tied to politics and freedom as guarantors of artistic authenticity, hence Courbet's Realism. Both artists' masterpieces, Géricault's Raft of the Medusa (1819) and Courbet's The Painter's Studio (1855), were thick with socio-political motivations, and notably exhibited unconventionally. Courbet's was famously shown in his self-named Pavilion of Realism, the seditious neighbour to the official Exposition Universelle. He charged an entry fee. Although entrants were relatively few and appreciators fewer, his example announced that the umbilical cord of patronage had been severed for good, and that it was the duty of the artist to be independent and to take risks.
Charles X, the last of the Bourbon kings and youngest brother of Louis XVI, had been deposed in 1830 after spending six years trying to reinstitute the monarchy and the nobility with the mores of pre-revolutionary France. The politicisation of art in the 1830s was particularly acute; not only were artists galvanised by contemporary events, but major writers such as Hugo and Lamartine assumed important roles in government.
The most famous example of an alternative scene for art originated in Paris in 1863 with the Salon des Refusés, the venue showing the work not accepted by the official salon, now associated with Édouard Manet and the birth of Impressionism, arguably the most popular movement in art of any age at any time. What is highly ironic, and another lesser-known fact, is that the Salon des Refusés was sponsored by the government. Responding to mass protests over the Salon judges' rejection of more than three thousand works, Napoleon III admitted their exhibition, or most of them, in rooms near the main Salon. Ironic or fitting, since it is the inevitable lot of radical politics that it finds itself first defining itself in terms of what it opposes, then ultimately resembling what it once opposed.
The subsequent history of alternative venues for exhibition reveals that they were less dramatically public and more private, intended for the like-minded and sympathetic. This was especially so for the Surrealists, who, although in truth a diverse and fluid group, staged their own semi-formal gatherings. In other cases art germinated in places small and inauspicious. One of the birthplaces of Dada was the Cabaret Voltaire in Zurich, a small venue where people gathered to witness Hugo Ball spouting nonsense dressed in outlandish futuristic costumes.
What both settings shared was the attitude that art was a living phenomenon in which the final work was a punctuation point in a much larger process of not only one artist, but of many artists intertwined. What has not changed across modernism and postmodernism is the need for artists to band together with the like-minded for support and growth. Identifiable or not, there is a discernible continuity in experimental and dissenting art since the late eighteenth century inasmuch as ideas are favoured over financial approbation.
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The role of state power in major art institutions should never be forgotten or undervalued, although these very institutions are at pains to claim their independence. It is the very assertion of independence and a certain purity of mind that makes the conservatism of state museums all the stronger, since it is covert and all but disavowed. From the Art Gallery of New South Wales to the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the exhibitions that are staged are facilitated by corporate sponsorship and by what is most likely to attract visitors. The art collected in such institutions is subject to a vetting process that normally takes account of an artist's provenance, that is, not only as a certification of authenticity but, in the case of contemporary artists, the kinds of private collections that have sought out the artist, and the kinds of venues that have exhibited his or her work. From the point of view of the public institution, an acquisition or even just a showing (where the artist is given an honorarium, the euphemism that dodges the reduction of artistic labour to filthy lucre), the judgment must work backwards from the level of official approval an artist has earned.
Because of this, the kinds of work in public collections are by and large conservative and of a certain order: published examples of works exemplifying an artist's career, in a medium that is preferably not perishable. Installation art and its related ephemera are precarious to stage, hard to preserve, and the costs relating to their re-installation and de-installation difficult to justify.
Private collections are more likely to begin with the work and the artist. Theoretically the private collector has no one to justify himself to, and does not need to satisfy a range of criteria which may include the pertinence of the newly arrived work to others already in the collection. While there are many collectors who collect for profit (well they might, since without such acumen they would not be in a position to be collectors in the first place), it is the relative indifference to history, dogma, and bureaucracy that tends to make private collections so much more interesting, with all their inconstancies, biases, and errors, since errors in judgment have the capacity to unearth unforeseen insights. One major example of this in recent memory is the Museum of Old and New Art in Hobart, set up by a professional gambler, David Walsh.
In both the public and the private case, however, the acquisition and display of works of art is driven by forces well outside the boundaries of what the work of art is and what it sets out to express, communicate, challenge, subvert, or change. The work of art is one factor within the much more forceful vectors of finance and social ratification.
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The birth of dissident art, the art of risk and innovation that questions the social and cultural status quo, can be dated alongside the birth of the institution. The word institution requires some qualification. Art in the Western sense is a shorthand for a series of interconnected institutions, which are also discourses, sites of material and abstract exchange. There is the institution that is art as it is understood in broader historical contours: its changing function and appearance. There is the institution of museums and of collecting. And there is the institution of learning.
The places where innovation in art has occurred have always maintained an agonistic relationship to the centres of learning. In the Renaissance, an artist's workshop was a place where artists learned. The academies of the nineteenth and early twentieth century have the notorious connection with perpetuating the styles and approaches approved by the state and its connected bodies, museums. This has changed somewhat. At best, the art school is now understood as a place where budding artists can take risks and experiment without, it is hoped, the need to satisfy a paying audience.
Since the protest era, for which one may take the convenient marker of May 1968, art schools became increasingly the places where the most audacious art was being produced. They were the petri dish for freedom of expression, personal and political. High on the agenda of art at the time was immateriality: value to the artistic event over the commodity. In this respect phenomena that are too often given their separate categories, such as Performance Art, Land Art, and Conceptualism, all shared the same goals. They wished to subvert the gallery space and to remind the audience that the truth of art resides in the changes and values within the viewer, not according to the monetary or even historical value the work might have.
The most glaring omission in art histories of this period, the period of the Age of Aquarius that wished to rejoin contact with nature over commercialised mass culture, is the birth of alternative art spaces. These were not-for-profit venues, now known as ARIs, intended as melting-pots for intellectual and artistic exchange among artists, writers, would-be curators, and their stauncher groupies.
Modern art is defined, in some sense, by the nature of its opposition to the establishment, in a way that would have been anathema in the Renaissance and professional and personal suicide in the seventeenth century. With modernism, art became pre-eminently confrontational, and political. Politics need not have crystallised in the content of the work; it could also be enshrined within a style, hence according to what a work sought to renounce, which in most cases was the academic status quo. Courbet was not the first, but he nurtured the most tenacious binary between the establishment and those outside it. The wave of innovation, acceptance, and rebirth that characterises the avant-garde mirrors the tides of modern politics in its oscillation between Left and Right. It is one of those curious, disconcerting, or consoling historical symmetries that the avant-garde ceases to be pertinent, or to be at all, once the polarities of Left and Right in politics lose their traction.
It is also this underlying oppositionism within art of the last few centuries that has tended to make the lay public fundamentally hostile to it. In their still relevant and classic book, drawn from research conducted in the 1960s, L'Amour de l'art (The Love of Art: European Museums and Their Public), Pierre Bourdieu and his collaborator Alain Darbel conclude that visiting museums is the result of class and schooling. Public museums are an expression of common citizenry and ownership: the state and everyone owns the works of art within a public museum, however only a very small percentage of society avails itself of them. If this is a problem, which Bourdieu in some sense saw it to be, it has been addressed through the premium given to audience numbers, and through marketing campaigns that vaunt and demystify the artist, who is almost always long dead. Major festivals of living artists such as the Sydney Biennale appear to use visitation numbers as the main indicator of success.
The culture industry, mass marketing, and mass appeal have quashed critical value in the name of popularity. This is a far more serious state of affairs than many would care to admit, and one symptom has been to destabilise the role of the critic, who was once judge and is now a mere explicator. The rise of populism in public museums, and in all quarters of life for that matter, turns Bourdieu's thesis on its head. Curators, who are more and more like glorified events managers, are now gainsaying the likes and wants of a sector of society that does not know what it likes or wants.
A run of Biennales over the last decade and a half has offered an unusually frank survey of how artists are now chosen: as cultural quantities (reflective of difference in terms of exoticism or guilt); as celebrities, what has come to be known as brand artists; as exemplars of a good tendency (artists working in a relational mode, where audience inclusion is what it is all about); or as entertainers, the artists known internally as Biennale artists, who produce works that look and smell like contemporary art but are not too hard to comprehend or swallow. For all these positions, the British art historian and critic Julian Stallabrass coined the term High Art Lite. Even though he was referring specifically to the Young British Artists who emerged in the 1990s, his notion aptly describes the unfortunate way in which contemporary art has manipulated ideas and appearances to maintain a particular impression or belief in being cutting-edge while satisfying the demands of a greater public, primed on the quick shock and the one-liner of advertising and mass-market culture.
The terror of art in contemporary culture has dissimulated itself into a quick fix, into mere cleverness over conscience. Conscience, for many artists, the greatest lion of the group being Damien Hirst, is for the sentimental and the gullible. With this one begins to see the social function of art shift into entertainment and, more uncannily, into a mirroring of art and mass culture, primarily fashion. One could go further and say that what is occurring in the higher reaches of experimental fashion and stage design is in many respects superior to much of the contemporary art of recent Biennales; either that, or contemporary art is now aspiring to be them.
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The radical alteration in the political field is a cause for considerable anxiety and confusion among artists and critics. It is customary to mourn a time when the easiest thing to do as a member of the Left was to oppose the status quo; the shifts in the contemporary Zeitgeist understand that such opposition leads nowhere in particular. Left and Right are highly tenuous and fragile designators, and the prospect of perpetual peace, freedom from hunger, and the emancipation of the poor will never be achieved.
The malaise of our political age was exemplified in the Occupy Wall Street movement of 2011, which occurred primarily in the United States. The protestors knew what they were opposing but not in whose name, without a policy or alternative or strategy outside opposition itself. Its death was imminent, and no heroism surrounds it now except respect for the best of their intentions. Innovation in art is a better version of this. Unlike the recent protesters, it need not have a beginning or end. Its only justification is that it seeks to innovate and to forestall a greater terror.
It is in this vein that Jeffrey Nealon has speculated on a condition he calls post-postmodernism, which he defines as 'an intensification and mutation within postmodernism, which in turn was of course a historical mutation and intensification of certain tendencies within modernism'. Regarding the positioning of art and critique in the present age, for which we have used words such as embedded and absorbed, Nealon writes:
Under postmodernism and post-postmodernism, the collapse of the economic and cultural that Adorno sees dimly on the horizon has decisively arrived (cue Baudrillard's Simulations, where reality isn't becoming indistinguishable from the movies; it has become indistinguishable). We arrive at that postmodern place where economic production is cultural production and vice versa. And I take that historical and theoretical axiom to be the (largely unmet and continuing) provocation of Jameson's work: if ideology critique depends on a cultural outside to the dominant economic logistics, where does cultural critique go now that there is no such outside, no dependable measuring stick to celebrate a work's resistance or to denounce its ideological complicity?
This is a question many artists, critics, and thinkers outside their domain are currently grappling with, especially since it calls into question the nature and purpose of innovative art. If there is no definable cause or zone of opposition, the very task and modality of what one does is called into question.
For at least since the late eighteenth century, however, art has grown into a tool for exploration and explosion: a means by which ideas about life and the world are confirmed or expressed. In his seminar 'Terror on the Run', Jean-François Lyotard described the masterpieces of modern art (not exclusively, but he chose them for their timely relevance) as examples of a terror that, while more striking and visible, has the power to supersede the possibility of a worse terror of mass proportions. To describe milestones such as Picasso's Demoiselles d'Avignon or Beethoven's last string quartets in terms of terror has the welcome consequence of making one admit that their genesis is entirely unaccountable. Unexceptional works of art are accountable; they retain contact with the prosaic and mundane.
According to Lyotard, echoing Nietzsche, great art perpetrates a violence on the world. It is a huge cauterisation, a spiritual wound. We are surprised, challenged, relocated to a place we might or might not want to be. Art at its best supplies the jolt to the surface of complacency and habituation which, taken to the limit, exacts a violence of social and political proportions.
There was no good art that came out of Nazi Germany, Stalinist Russia, or Maoist China, except from those who opposed them.
Hard as it might be to recall, there was a time when even the YBAs were unknown. They exhibited their work in disused warehouses and shop fronts, and the people who visited those venues were not the general public. The ad hoc venue serves the basic function of an artist who wants his or her work to be seen. They are also where the most fertile experimentation occurs. The artist-run initiatives one finds in Sydney, or Berlin, or any other major city, are to be understood as the radical nexus between process and invention on the one side, and institutional and financial consolidation, some would say sclerosis, on the other. Where educational institutions come into play is as foundation stones for this kind of activity: people naturally form groups according to taste and aspiration, and at their best, art schools encourage extreme (if lawful) behaviour.
What the sites and spaces of the art school and the ARI deliver is confirmation that art is primarily a process. The finished work is but a milestone, or punctuation point, in art as an activity. Hence the scepticism of many artists toward works of art on white walls in air-conditioned rooms. In this regard, debates have resurfaced around the display of Aboriginal art, much of which is critically tied to land, to community, and hence to the place of its making.
In June of 1916, in the upstairs room at the Cabaret Voltaire in Zurich, Hugo Ball was carried onto the stage in the dark because he could not walk. His legs were sheathed in cylinders of shiny blue cardboard which came up to his hips, giving him, as he later wrote, the appearance of an obelisk. A huge cardboard collar, scarlet inside and gold outside, was fastened at his neck so that by raising and lowering his elbows he could produce the impression of winglike movement. On his head was a tall, blue-and-white-striped witch doctor's hat. When the lights came up he was already standing among them, immobile, and he began to recite the sound-poem Karawane. Jolifanto bambla ô falli bambla. The audience numbered perhaps two dozen. There was no name yet for what they were watching, and most were unsure whether to laugh.
Cabaret Voltaire closed within months. What it sheltered continued elsewhere. Much artistic innovation in art schools and ARIs comes in forms that are flawed and strange, yet the prescient viewer knows that something is happening, something is still alive. The process of permeation has begun until it appears packaged and digested in a museum.
The slogan beneath the chronograph, Swiss Avant-Garde since 1860, is what the term becomes once it is for sale. The work the word once described is somewhere else, in a small room with a small audience and an uncertain reception. That is the work of art's purpose, its politic, and its consolation.
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References
Julian Stallabrass, High Art Lite: British Art in the 1990s (London: Verso, 1999; revised and expanded 2006).
Jeffrey Nealon, Post-Postmodernism, or, The Cultural Logic of Just-in-Time Capitalism (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2012).
Pierre Bourdieu and Alain Darbel, L'Amour de l'art: les musées d'art européens et leur public (Paris: Éditions de Minuit, 1966); translated as The Love of Art: European Art Museums and Their Public.
Jean-François Lyotard, 'Terror on the Run', in Terror and Consensus, ed. J-J. Goux and P. Wood (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1998).
Naomi Klein, No Logo (London: Flamingo, 1999).
Hugo Ball, Flight Out of Time: A Dada Diary (Die Flucht aus der Zeit, 1927).
