Post-Conceptualism to Neo-Surrealism, Postscript
Art is a hot mess: history, crisis, denial and lessons from recent public art stumbles
A version of this essay was first published in fall 2021 in Caesura’s print issue. A line from Die Hard was inaccurately attributed to Bruce Willis’ character. Wrong Life Review regrets the error.
Post-Conceptualism to Neo-Surrealism
The author is dead. The idea is the machine that makes art. It is known. It is the anti-gospel that became gospel.
The project of Modernism, T.J. Clark observed, turned out not to be about harkening the end of history — that is, the liberation of mankind from history — but to “make the endlessness of the ending bearable.” We were promised socialism or barbarism, revolution or the atom bomb. We got both, and neither. History stubbornly persists.
There is a tale that will be very familiar to all the art students of the past half century. Once, art was pictures. It did not know itself. Then it discovered that it was a thing, and it endeavored to find its essence, to do away with every frivolity until it was only and perfectly itself. All ornament cast aside, it found that it did not reside in things, as it had once thought, but in idea and effect. Art lay in a relationship between a thing and its audience. And then art found that the thing itself was insignificant, tiresome even, dead weight. The artist, too, was bogging it down. Art was relationships between people. Art was frameworks. Art was anything. Art was everything. Art was nothing.
Art, unconscious of itself, staring down the end of the 20th century starving and destitute, threatened to liquidate itself in the hope that reality would step in and save it. But reality called the bluff. Reality continued, and art remained — a ghost of a ghost.
Politics failed to attain itself, history failed to end, and conceptualism dissolved art into the brave new self-same always and forever. It announced that it had liberated art and left behind cold, hard detritus.
Not all the art of the past half century has been conceptual, but all art has been conceptualized. What matters is the notion, the choice, the artist’s sleight of hand. In the post-conceptual, all art is a comment on the concept of art.
Attempts to break free of post-conceptualism have failed because they are always snatched back up by the concept. Make beautiful art; it’s a comment on beauty. Make political art; it’s a comment on the politics of art.
Post-conceptualism is not waning because its possibilities have been exhausted. There is always another wordplay on the concept of art, another convention to interrogate, another material arrangement to be made or a group of gallery goers to be rigidly choreographed. It is waning because it leaves us cold; it does not satisfy. It probably never did. But we are now, at least, dissatisfied with our dissatisfaction. Post-conceptualism is coming to an end not because we conjured an art that could uniquely dissolve it, but because its project — to force the end of history by imagining it had already taken place — has been debunked. This is not an endless ending; it is a road to nowhere. Reality invents new things with each passing moment, all of them strange and none of them of consequence. Even fascism is a dollar store knockoff.
Art, at present, is a hot mess. It does not yet know what it’s going to be. It is unsure that it wants to be at all. Some have given up art entirely. Now they stage parties, they play with toys, they attempt to enact what life has not provided. It is a poor, anemic reality. It knows no history but bleeds nostalgia.
Art is awkwardly, feebly relearning how to feel. It is attempting to once again be strange to itself, unknown rather than exhaustively known. Many of these first attempts are quite poor, as a child’s first steps always are, but they are steps. So much of its presentation is groping and infantile, desperate for recognition, delighted in its own reification on the basis that such a nasty bargain might lead to a kind word or momentary embrace. If I amputate my skin or genitals and present them to you, cold world, will you love it? Will you give me an identity and underwrite my existence?
There exists a potentially fruitful tendency toward Neo-Surrealism. Not a stylistic revival — that route has been blocked by the original’s kitschification — but an art that is sensitive to the interminable inadequacy of the present. It rummages through the piled-up past and possible. It desperately misses something it cannot name. It knows that it is unhappy.
Neo-Surrealism is of the senses, but it is not sensible.
Neo-Surrealism is a fortune teller caressing dusty phalanges.
Neo-Surrealism is not surreal. We have reality for that.
Neo-Surrealism is too tired to concern itself overmuch with what art is, but it cares desperately that it continues to be. It is liberated by fatigue.
Neo-Surrealism does not deny that its condition for existence is denial. Neo-Surrealism will no longer suck at the dry teat of the concept. It knows it has not been satisfied. The concept of art has been a poor substitute for art.
The Neo-Surrealist tendency is inadequate; it knows itself to be inadequate. It has none of the 20th century’s swagger. It would prefer to produce a work of art than to declare its essence.
It is neonatal: tiny, fragile, ripped from the womb of a dying mother. Everything is inadequate in a present populated by posts and neos. Art repeats itself ad nauseum. So long as reality remains destitute, so will its sensitive bard. Alexander weeps for there are no worlds left to conquer (says Alan Rickman in Die Hard, barbarically), but the recognition of the barbarism of this fully-conquered world indicates that there may yet be worlds to create.
Postscript, 2023
Two years after I wrote this essay, the need it expresses has not yet been met, but is now even more keenly felt. The fact that art is (still) a hot mess is on everyone’s lips. I want to avoid the habit of each generation to announce the end of art, and then keep doing it anyway. Let’s not be so fucking dramatic. But it’s bad. It’s just bad right now. “Serious” art and criticism gets by on glum recitation of Heideggerian theory and personal branding. The commercial art world marches on in a self-sustaining business that has no need of critics.
I extend my apologies for not having written here in some months. Other obligations demanded much more of time. That’s not precisely the culprit, though: the only thing remarkable about art and culture of recent months is just how unremarkable it’s been.
Two recent contributions to the (always fantastic never divisive) field of public art may finally be a little bit remarkably bad. Hank Willis Thomas’s MLK monument, The Embrace in Boston and Shahzia Sikander’s ironically titled NOW atop the appellate court in Manhattan. In the case of the latter, Sikander’s handless, footless goddess dressed in RBG’s lace collar was inserted in a pantheon of real men who actually lived that watch over the courthouse. All issues of RBG worship aside, why not a statue of her? Could we not find an actual flesh and blood human woman to honor alongside Solon, Manu and Justinian? Apparently not. Martin Luther and Coretta Scott King, too, were unworthy of statues?
By anonymizing the figures and eschewing the “problematic” great man narratives of history, the public, it is supposed, can project themselves into the figure. The self-evidence of this to the committees and commissions that green lit these projects comes from the rot of decades of anti-humanist scholarship that has substituted “bodies” for “people,” hunks of meat and bone in place of individuals with hopes, dreams and inner-lives. Why look at the heroic figures of the Kings when we could have a blob that looks alternatively like hands holding penises or turds? Why memorialize a historical woman when we can have this anonymous representation of lady power? Please.
I bring this up because these examples appear, from a certain angle, as a new form of surrealism: distorted bodies, dream-like apparitions. This tracks only if we see historical surrealism as a collection of depthless signifiers, which of course we do because that’s how we see everything. What appeared in the early 20th century as images of anguish for the humanity that has been denied us arrives at the beginning of the 21st as state sponsored affirmation. Theodor Adorno wrote in the essay that inspired the one above, “Looking Back on Surrealism,” that
… if Surrealism if now seems obsolete, it is because human beings are now denying themselves the consciousness of denial that was captured in the photographic negative that was Surrealism.
These two monuments are precisely the denial of the consciousness of denial he describes. An IRL version of the ‘this is fine’ cartoon. Calcified rah rah alienation.
Oddly enough, a different version of one of these very flops demonstrates an alternative. In an exhibition in Fall 2022 at Jack Shainman gallery Hank Willis Thomas showed an earlier, smaller version of The Embrace, here in polished rather than matte bronze. It was very good: arms desperately grasping on to each other, always striving toward but never settling into the desired moment of comfort. The forms were obscured somewhat by the shiny surface, and as I walked around it bits of my shins and parts of the gallery appeared in reflection. The scale, material and context — this is not billed as honoring the legacy of actual people — makes all the difference. Here the denied humanity — and the desperate need to claim it — was clear. More of this, please.
Man do I feel this sentiment in the realm of classical musical.
So many performers alienated from their own creative agency, desperately presenting themselves like peacocks to each other in ivory towers. Composers acting like puppet masters playing with instruments like they’re toys. Musicians exploiting each other for their chance to suck at the tit of aristocratic patronage, because they never learned what it was like to gig in the real world after they graduated from their boutique conservatory.
Milton Babbitt was right, at least he acknowledged the truth of how irrelevant the pursuit of academic and theoretical music aesthetics alone are to the broader industry and public interest. What good is performing for yourself if you have no way to relate it back to an audience, with no community to cultivate a genre that can be valued and understood by others? You can’t challenge people if you don’t even have anything substantive to say beyond your own self-interest.