¿Cuál es la diferencia entre pintar una vista de La Boca y otra de Palermo Viejo-Soho-Sensible-Hollywood, etc?
Sencillo: Las paredes más representativas de las casas de La Boca, son canaleteadas; en Palermo hay más árboles y paredes antiguas, aggiornadas a lisas. Los colores para La Boca son de pomo y para Palermo, mixturados con un touch de blanco para que sean apastelados. Son, plásticamente similares.
enero 30, 2007
Ensayo de Ditte Ejlerskov
Alas, who will free us from the heavy chains of logic?
With the reader’s permission I will begin with a warning: don’t expect any multifaceted discussions, for I will be illuminating a subject about which I have strong feelings. That subject is modernism’s disrespect for representational painting, which I attribute to surrealism’s reception in the modern current. I should also beg pardon for the many quotations, which furthermore attest to the subject’s longstanding relevance. But before getting to that, I will, mostly for my own sake, attempt an overview of surrealism’s history and a commentary on it subsequent and contemporary role.
The second before logic acquired heavy chains.
I think that Dadaism was surrealisms direct prerequisite. But when it said that way, I must stipulate that Dadaism cannot be considered an artistic school. Notwithstanding its meaningful place in the history of modern art, I think of it more as the starting gun for modernism. I see Dadaism as a tragicomic testament to the widespread depression during the First World War. It was, as the writer Paul La Cour so aptly dais, “the swindler's answer to culture”. With the advent of the war, all the beautiful dreams of a better world lay in ruins and Dadaism responded with gallows humor, scorn and ridicule. They wanted to expose the all-too-beautiful ideals that had dominated art and display them in all their pitifulness. Without direct enemies, the Dadaists fought for absolute meaninglessness. And lest anyone doubt the movement’s destructive character, they added the following saying: “The true Dadaists are against Dada”. No matter how unthinkable it seems, in that total nihilism the Dadaists left a legacy that would be fruitful, yet held that no art could be produced for the sake of beauty.
After having battled the intellect, the Dadaists still had one remaining value, namely life in its most elementary form. Some of Dadaism’s familiar faces, such as Man Ray, Max Ernst and André Breton, are also leading figures in surrealism, which the last-named announced with his 1924 manifesto. Surrealism fed the deep distrust of the intellect and reason, but it replaced Dadaism’s defeatist attitude with a new faith in humanity. It would give free rein to instinctual life, intuition and spontaneity. On this theory automatic drawing and painting were invented. These methods were claimed to be free from rational control and moralistic self-censorship, with the artist functioning as a medium of the unconscious. When I study the ideas that Breton, especially, made out to be the deepest life of the soul, I think of mystic ideals of exploding consciousness to make it more spacious. Since the discovery of desire as the most captivating power laid the foundations of great religions and philosophical currents, I must preliminarily conclude that what the surrealists had hold of lies buried far down in humanity’s primal instincts. The dream of the Promised Land lying hidden behind logic and convention had been dreamed for millennia prior to Breton’s manifesto. Spontaneity is part of human nature and I will quote these words from the manifesto simply because I am in full agreement: “Beloved imagination, what I like most in you is your unsparing quality".
It looks to me as if the surrealists were looking in vain to belong to their own time. They energetically tried to demonstrate their kinship to Marxist ideals. However, it is clear that their demand for the individual's right to uninhibited development and their romantic aversion to the intellect in no way harmonized with Marxist theory. One may also remain skeptical as to the kinship to psychoanalysis that they often claimed. Freud himself was skeptical, writing to Breton: “No matter how much evidence I’ve received of the interest you and your friends have for my work, I cannot really understand what surrealism is or what it wants”. The surrealists knew very well what they wanted – to free the mind. Writer André Gide sighed: “Alas, who will free us from the heavy chains of logic?” The surrealists not only cultivated mistrust of reason, they wanted to fight it. They not only allowed themselves to be carried away by intuition, they practiced doing so. But whereas they followed small trails out to extremities, Freud would harmonize. In this connection I find it necessary to go farther into the artist’s profile; to use Salvador Dali’s words: “Beauty is the sum of our perversities”. The surrealists were not looking for harmony.
Zoom out
But when I have understood surrealism on its own principles and zoom out onto the rest of the art world, I sit back with the feeling that surrealism was disregarded in its own time. I put all the blame on Greenberg's 1939 essay "Avant-garde and kitsch”.
After the war, religion was no longer convincing and the avant-garde therefore wanted to imitate – instead of presenting – God, and in that way to create something that worked on its own principles. Art should be its own system, be original, and deal with art. With art for art’s sake the avant-garde arrived at abstraction and non-objectivism and relegated representational painting to the degrading genre of decoration, pandering to beauty, kitsch. But scorn is born of insecurity about one’s own position, and I believe the avant-garde sensed the danger in their closed artistic milieu, especially as new capital began to drive the market. Worst of all was that the elite, who had previously been the art market's precondition, began to lose power to the masses, who were now the biggest threat to art. Their understanding of art was considered primitive. Commercial culture was coming about in all forms, and at the risk of sounding patronizing I might add that workers had no time to philosophize over art for art’s sake anyway – they only wanted to be entertained in their time off from work. Thus it was difficult for the art world to distinguish between kitsch and art, where kitsch was evil and art was good, in Hermann Broch's formula.
Representational painting was also used as propaganda. It was false and evil. Greenberg said that “Kitsch keeps a dictator in touch with the ‘soul’ of the people”. A good example can be found in Rome, where Mussolini built the EUR section at the start of his career, focusing on progress and modernity – futurism, in short. Later he realized that had to be in contact with the 'soul’ of the people, so he came up with the “new imperial” style, which hit the mark with the people, as it gave them objects to marvel over. Avant-garde invented kitsch was crafty, commercial and evil. The conflict left representational art out on the sidelines, away from real art and closer to the masses than the avant-garde. Since social realism was the educational system, there was no political will to teach people about high culture, and to be honest, sixty years later we are still faced with this problem between contemporary art and the masses' view of contemporary art. As Greenberg so succinctly put it, “The alternative to Picasso is not Michelangelo, but kitsch”. In other words, representational painting of 1939 was not worth mentioning, just commercial. Painting died from just repeating clichés. The future of painting was in the hands of the new abstract expressionists, and with such faith behind it a whole new school of abstract art blossomed in New York. The essay “Avant-garde and kitsch” invented modernism and set the market price for abstract expressionist paintings.
To zoom farther out, I think there was also a question of inflation in the obsession with the experimental, where anyone could be an artist by virtue of being innocent and non-commercial. Furthermore, I think that abstract expressionism is one of the most kitsch-ridden styles one can find. Today this is indeed the masses’ expectation. The avant-garde has become a cliché, so it is impossible to protect oneself against kitsch by being avant-garde. Everything of cultural value becomes diluted one day, because the elite no longer have the economic ability to lock it in. As Roger Scruton points out, all the culture that was sublime a hundred years ago can be bought in copies in any airport. Scruton also says that "the opposite of kitsch is not sophistication; it is innocence".
To finish with Greenberg, he thought that two cultural phenomena had arisen in society: the avant-garde – guided by high-cultural experimentation – and kitsch, the sure, commercial, people's art. And although he took back much of what he said in the essay, I think it is now clear that his theory of commercial culture was correct. Greenberg assured his readers that there was no middle way between avant-garde and kitsch, but does that mean that there is now no representational painting to be found without it being inferior by definition?
Zoom in
To address how surrealism is seen today, it would be natural not to abandon my earlier focus on Dali. He is one of those who represent all of art – a myth – kitsch. He has been taken out of his philosophical context and reduced to decoration in the same manner as for great historic works such as Da Vinci’s La Gioconda. Important works have been subjected to rape, and the inspiration the artist put into the work has been replaced by sentimental incomprehension. As I see it, this is just what has happened to several of the surrealists, mostly due to their digestible visual impact. The works were created in a high-cultural context and thereafter underwent unavoidable degradation at the same time as they were exalted in the public eye. The basis for the inevitable kitschification of representational painting lies in people's desire for beauty and the fact that the masses' needs dictate that kitsch is bad style. I could assemble a comprehensive cavalcade of works produced in a high-cultural context that have become the people's icons – works thus fated because they were too good.
Kitsch is thus the people’s intuitive bad taste. With that claim high culture is elevated to a sophisticated level. But when it comes to art I often think that the definition of bad taste is a defense mechanism, whereby we can avoid discussing the content by haughtily dismissing the form. I do not think that surrealism deserves such disrespect, but I find it again and again. Isabel Carlos said to me, after considering one of my paintings, that surrealism is a form that most artists identify with way at the start of their careers, then leave behind altogether. Contemporary art must for nothing in the world relate to surrealism, lest it become too banal and folksy. The worst thing is to be kitsch without knowing, in which case one simply has bad style – and who wants that in an art contest where what counts is good style?
Let me quickly mention that the postmodern version of kitsch leads me to think of eating one’s vomit, which holds no form of nutrition. Artists such as Andy Warhol and Jeff Koons knew that the worst would be to produce kitsch unintentionally, so they did so intentionally and figured they had invented a sophisticated parody of the art of the masses. They made "art". I do not entirely understand all the fuss over quotation marks. Are they used because one is afraid to say things directly and needs to hide behind condescension and irony? Or because one in fact has nothing to say? The artist acts as if he takes himself seriously; the critic acts as if he judges the work, and finally we have a buyer who has been persuaded of the work’s worth. False feelings are the coin of the market. Scruton notes that the intention to unintentionally produce kitsch is impossible, the same way that it is impossible to behave unintentionally. Michael Pierce, in his 200 essay “The reluctant death of modernism”, says that “Modernists have been so concerned with irony and distance that they have regarded kitsch with contempt – the problem for them was that kitsch was concerned with pathos – about what we like to call the human”. So I am no0t the only one who feels it is forbidden to talk about the human in a world where the thing is to have good style and create art for art. Here I see the formal artist who operates in his safe-art orb without respect for art that speaks of non-formal things, protected by the values of modernism. Since I will not in any case get through this without quoting Odd Nerdrum, it is just as well to do so here: “The ruler of the modernist hell got the name of kitsch. Kitsch became art's antithesis."
Art is a question of communicating things relating to the forces that drive us as people, not as artists – and this is where I think the surrealist problem becomes relevant for contemporary art. If we only refer to our own group we no longer meet the demand of documenting our time, because there is, in fact, a contemporary world on the other side of the gallery walls. But we can no longer understand it and thus face difficulty defining it. Art has talked about art for many decades and only superficially focused on the external world, so it has become deeply essential to the people who use it. The problem for many artists is just that (and let me straight away offer myself by way of illustration) we want to talk about art in an artistic context. This is where we want to be. We want to be accepted by the art elite, not the masses. But is there any way at all I can combine my overall motivation with the places where I want to exhibit? I will gladly talk about art, but I also want to talk about the forces at play in my life as a person. I want to meet the demand of documenting my time, but can I understand it at all? Breton describes desire as the only master humanity needs to understand. If we recognize art as testimony from different extremities of humanity and society over time, I can easily see the connection between our present reality and the testimony art is currently producing. For as long as humanity does not recognize desire as the only power, desire will control society. And that is why I believe that today we cannot accept surrealism, for example. We have a defense mechanism that protects us from the fact that society no longer serves people, but that people, in their cycle of need, serve society and strengthen the outer guard. If we realize that, we also realize that all the glorification of the modern breakthrough – and here I mean in everything contained in the term, not just in art – is itself a myth and that modernity has now taken power from the humanity that created it. But can an art-political defense mechanism that amounts to good style keep us from the truth?
This problematic faced surrealism from the start. Despite the public's love for their new concept of humanity, they were only later accepted by museums and some works were suppressed for many decades on political grounds. It is clear that modernism and postmodernism have had difficulty accepting art that sought to speak of the unconscious when they themselves want to discuss the very outermost layer of abstraction – concrete art. The result is significant today: modernism, as the strong current it has been, has created endless taboos in art. Both the public and art producers have for many decades done all they could to live up to good taste. It is dangerous to go out in the deep waters, where strong feelings are in play. It is better to stick to safe art (the contemporary aspect of which I will in no way refuse to comment on!) that uses a language that doesn’t need to speak of people, but affords a safer zone, wherein there is only the question of art - formal art. In that forum we can now relate to one another on a theoretical level, where we can speak of tendencies that really are about people, but in some larger systems, namely politics and theory. When someone comes along and wants to talk about practice and feelings, we regard it as a bit embarrassing and pathetic. We are children of postmodernism and surrealism is still alive on the sidelines.
In the time since the modern break-through we have developed everything necessary to the maintenance of our cycle of desire. Today we do not even see the machine that keeps the cycle going, much less the cause of its running. Nonetheless, I think the modern break-through has been optimal for humanity, as it challenges the intellect and I believe we should celebrate it and enjoy all of its potential - until it collapses. Modernism is an intellectual movement that will not confront humanities instinctive hangover, but I think that surrealism’s interests emerge in pace with humanity's discovery of the machine that keeps our desire going. Until then art that speaks in overly passionate terms is rejected with the epithet “kitsch”. The best example in a long time is Michael Kvium’s show at Aros in Århus, which is loved by the media and public while found embarrassing by the art world.
As a serious contemporary artist, one has always to be on the lookout for clichés. Flirting with clichés must only be done with a certain understanding of kitsch and the knowledge that all one’s artistic effort will be lost if the limits are crossed. John Currin is an artist who flirts with these limits and can serve as my ideal in the search for a new direction. He says that "critics don't know the value of magic in art” and that they “often have a deconstructive mode of analyzing art with the help of signs that all have a cultural identity – that art shall refer to some other art”. I also think that method of reading art is passé, and I think Michael Pearse expresses it fantastically well: “Post Modernists are like Cuban revolutionaries who, aging and outdated, cling to their decrepit system”.
So who is going to give André Gide a valid answer?
It looks as if this text ironically enough is ending with a cliché, that is, a critique of modernism.Therefore, I will end by denying that this is the case by concluding that I think modernism and its works have left an incredibly precise testimony of their time – the time when one does not speak of the unconscious, but works the surface. It is the time when society is not controlled by humanity, but rather humanity is controlled by society.One can indeed wonder why I have come so far afield from the subject of surrealism, but I will briefly explain why I think it is relevant in this context. I think that what the surrealists wanted to describe was humanity in its purest form – instinctual humanity and its spontaneity. But what modernism did – as the far more dominating tendency – was to hide the instincts and focus on the outermost layers, those that protect the public and direct us away from our own core, so that we live somewhere on the surface, with no idea that we are being controlled.
If you think this has been a one-sided communication, I will defend myself by referring to my warning at the start of the essay, and must therefore unfortunately state that I am not prepared to make surrealism more comprehensible. Before it can be made comprehensible it must be given its due attention, and it does not seem as if modernism will allow it space for that. Until this might happen, André Gide will have to stand alone with his question: “Alas, who will free us from the heavy chains of logic?”
From Ditte Ejlerskov's blog.
With the reader’s permission I will begin with a warning: don’t expect any multifaceted discussions, for I will be illuminating a subject about which I have strong feelings. That subject is modernism’s disrespect for representational painting, which I attribute to surrealism’s reception in the modern current. I should also beg pardon for the many quotations, which furthermore attest to the subject’s longstanding relevance. But before getting to that, I will, mostly for my own sake, attempt an overview of surrealism’s history and a commentary on it subsequent and contemporary role.
The second before logic acquired heavy chains.
I think that Dadaism was surrealisms direct prerequisite. But when it said that way, I must stipulate that Dadaism cannot be considered an artistic school. Notwithstanding its meaningful place in the history of modern art, I think of it more as the starting gun for modernism. I see Dadaism as a tragicomic testament to the widespread depression during the First World War. It was, as the writer Paul La Cour so aptly dais, “the swindler's answer to culture”. With the advent of the war, all the beautiful dreams of a better world lay in ruins and Dadaism responded with gallows humor, scorn and ridicule. They wanted to expose the all-too-beautiful ideals that had dominated art and display them in all their pitifulness. Without direct enemies, the Dadaists fought for absolute meaninglessness. And lest anyone doubt the movement’s destructive character, they added the following saying: “The true Dadaists are against Dada”. No matter how unthinkable it seems, in that total nihilism the Dadaists left a legacy that would be fruitful, yet held that no art could be produced for the sake of beauty.
After having battled the intellect, the Dadaists still had one remaining value, namely life in its most elementary form. Some of Dadaism’s familiar faces, such as Man Ray, Max Ernst and André Breton, are also leading figures in surrealism, which the last-named announced with his 1924 manifesto. Surrealism fed the deep distrust of the intellect and reason, but it replaced Dadaism’s defeatist attitude with a new faith in humanity. It would give free rein to instinctual life, intuition and spontaneity. On this theory automatic drawing and painting were invented. These methods were claimed to be free from rational control and moralistic self-censorship, with the artist functioning as a medium of the unconscious. When I study the ideas that Breton, especially, made out to be the deepest life of the soul, I think of mystic ideals of exploding consciousness to make it more spacious. Since the discovery of desire as the most captivating power laid the foundations of great religions and philosophical currents, I must preliminarily conclude that what the surrealists had hold of lies buried far down in humanity’s primal instincts. The dream of the Promised Land lying hidden behind logic and convention had been dreamed for millennia prior to Breton’s manifesto. Spontaneity is part of human nature and I will quote these words from the manifesto simply because I am in full agreement: “Beloved imagination, what I like most in you is your unsparing quality".
It looks to me as if the surrealists were looking in vain to belong to their own time. They energetically tried to demonstrate their kinship to Marxist ideals. However, it is clear that their demand for the individual's right to uninhibited development and their romantic aversion to the intellect in no way harmonized with Marxist theory. One may also remain skeptical as to the kinship to psychoanalysis that they often claimed. Freud himself was skeptical, writing to Breton: “No matter how much evidence I’ve received of the interest you and your friends have for my work, I cannot really understand what surrealism is or what it wants”. The surrealists knew very well what they wanted – to free the mind. Writer André Gide sighed: “Alas, who will free us from the heavy chains of logic?” The surrealists not only cultivated mistrust of reason, they wanted to fight it. They not only allowed themselves to be carried away by intuition, they practiced doing so. But whereas they followed small trails out to extremities, Freud would harmonize. In this connection I find it necessary to go farther into the artist’s profile; to use Salvador Dali’s words: “Beauty is the sum of our perversities”. The surrealists were not looking for harmony.
Zoom out
But when I have understood surrealism on its own principles and zoom out onto the rest of the art world, I sit back with the feeling that surrealism was disregarded in its own time. I put all the blame on Greenberg's 1939 essay "Avant-garde and kitsch”.
After the war, religion was no longer convincing and the avant-garde therefore wanted to imitate – instead of presenting – God, and in that way to create something that worked on its own principles. Art should be its own system, be original, and deal with art. With art for art’s sake the avant-garde arrived at abstraction and non-objectivism and relegated representational painting to the degrading genre of decoration, pandering to beauty, kitsch. But scorn is born of insecurity about one’s own position, and I believe the avant-garde sensed the danger in their closed artistic milieu, especially as new capital began to drive the market. Worst of all was that the elite, who had previously been the art market's precondition, began to lose power to the masses, who were now the biggest threat to art. Their understanding of art was considered primitive. Commercial culture was coming about in all forms, and at the risk of sounding patronizing I might add that workers had no time to philosophize over art for art’s sake anyway – they only wanted to be entertained in their time off from work. Thus it was difficult for the art world to distinguish between kitsch and art, where kitsch was evil and art was good, in Hermann Broch's formula.
Representational painting was also used as propaganda. It was false and evil. Greenberg said that “Kitsch keeps a dictator in touch with the ‘soul’ of the people”. A good example can be found in Rome, where Mussolini built the EUR section at the start of his career, focusing on progress and modernity – futurism, in short. Later he realized that had to be in contact with the 'soul’ of the people, so he came up with the “new imperial” style, which hit the mark with the people, as it gave them objects to marvel over. Avant-garde invented kitsch was crafty, commercial and evil. The conflict left representational art out on the sidelines, away from real art and closer to the masses than the avant-garde. Since social realism was the educational system, there was no political will to teach people about high culture, and to be honest, sixty years later we are still faced with this problem between contemporary art and the masses' view of contemporary art. As Greenberg so succinctly put it, “The alternative to Picasso is not Michelangelo, but kitsch”. In other words, representational painting of 1939 was not worth mentioning, just commercial. Painting died from just repeating clichés. The future of painting was in the hands of the new abstract expressionists, and with such faith behind it a whole new school of abstract art blossomed in New York. The essay “Avant-garde and kitsch” invented modernism and set the market price for abstract expressionist paintings.
To zoom farther out, I think there was also a question of inflation in the obsession with the experimental, where anyone could be an artist by virtue of being innocent and non-commercial. Furthermore, I think that abstract expressionism is one of the most kitsch-ridden styles one can find. Today this is indeed the masses’ expectation. The avant-garde has become a cliché, so it is impossible to protect oneself against kitsch by being avant-garde. Everything of cultural value becomes diluted one day, because the elite no longer have the economic ability to lock it in. As Roger Scruton points out, all the culture that was sublime a hundred years ago can be bought in copies in any airport. Scruton also says that "the opposite of kitsch is not sophistication; it is innocence".
To finish with Greenberg, he thought that two cultural phenomena had arisen in society: the avant-garde – guided by high-cultural experimentation – and kitsch, the sure, commercial, people's art. And although he took back much of what he said in the essay, I think it is now clear that his theory of commercial culture was correct. Greenberg assured his readers that there was no middle way between avant-garde and kitsch, but does that mean that there is now no representational painting to be found without it being inferior by definition?
Zoom in
To address how surrealism is seen today, it would be natural not to abandon my earlier focus on Dali. He is one of those who represent all of art – a myth – kitsch. He has been taken out of his philosophical context and reduced to decoration in the same manner as for great historic works such as Da Vinci’s La Gioconda. Important works have been subjected to rape, and the inspiration the artist put into the work has been replaced by sentimental incomprehension. As I see it, this is just what has happened to several of the surrealists, mostly due to their digestible visual impact. The works were created in a high-cultural context and thereafter underwent unavoidable degradation at the same time as they were exalted in the public eye. The basis for the inevitable kitschification of representational painting lies in people's desire for beauty and the fact that the masses' needs dictate that kitsch is bad style. I could assemble a comprehensive cavalcade of works produced in a high-cultural context that have become the people's icons – works thus fated because they were too good.
Kitsch is thus the people’s intuitive bad taste. With that claim high culture is elevated to a sophisticated level. But when it comes to art I often think that the definition of bad taste is a defense mechanism, whereby we can avoid discussing the content by haughtily dismissing the form. I do not think that surrealism deserves such disrespect, but I find it again and again. Isabel Carlos said to me, after considering one of my paintings, that surrealism is a form that most artists identify with way at the start of their careers, then leave behind altogether. Contemporary art must for nothing in the world relate to surrealism, lest it become too banal and folksy. The worst thing is to be kitsch without knowing, in which case one simply has bad style – and who wants that in an art contest where what counts is good style?
Let me quickly mention that the postmodern version of kitsch leads me to think of eating one’s vomit, which holds no form of nutrition. Artists such as Andy Warhol and Jeff Koons knew that the worst would be to produce kitsch unintentionally, so they did so intentionally and figured they had invented a sophisticated parody of the art of the masses. They made "art". I do not entirely understand all the fuss over quotation marks. Are they used because one is afraid to say things directly and needs to hide behind condescension and irony? Or because one in fact has nothing to say? The artist acts as if he takes himself seriously; the critic acts as if he judges the work, and finally we have a buyer who has been persuaded of the work’s worth. False feelings are the coin of the market. Scruton notes that the intention to unintentionally produce kitsch is impossible, the same way that it is impossible to behave unintentionally. Michael Pierce, in his 200 essay “The reluctant death of modernism”, says that “Modernists have been so concerned with irony and distance that they have regarded kitsch with contempt – the problem for them was that kitsch was concerned with pathos – about what we like to call the human”. So I am no0t the only one who feels it is forbidden to talk about the human in a world where the thing is to have good style and create art for art. Here I see the formal artist who operates in his safe-art orb without respect for art that speaks of non-formal things, protected by the values of modernism. Since I will not in any case get through this without quoting Odd Nerdrum, it is just as well to do so here: “The ruler of the modernist hell got the name of kitsch. Kitsch became art's antithesis."
Art is a question of communicating things relating to the forces that drive us as people, not as artists – and this is where I think the surrealist problem becomes relevant for contemporary art. If we only refer to our own group we no longer meet the demand of documenting our time, because there is, in fact, a contemporary world on the other side of the gallery walls. But we can no longer understand it and thus face difficulty defining it. Art has talked about art for many decades and only superficially focused on the external world, so it has become deeply essential to the people who use it. The problem for many artists is just that (and let me straight away offer myself by way of illustration) we want to talk about art in an artistic context. This is where we want to be. We want to be accepted by the art elite, not the masses. But is there any way at all I can combine my overall motivation with the places where I want to exhibit? I will gladly talk about art, but I also want to talk about the forces at play in my life as a person. I want to meet the demand of documenting my time, but can I understand it at all? Breton describes desire as the only master humanity needs to understand. If we recognize art as testimony from different extremities of humanity and society over time, I can easily see the connection between our present reality and the testimony art is currently producing. For as long as humanity does not recognize desire as the only power, desire will control society. And that is why I believe that today we cannot accept surrealism, for example. We have a defense mechanism that protects us from the fact that society no longer serves people, but that people, in their cycle of need, serve society and strengthen the outer guard. If we realize that, we also realize that all the glorification of the modern breakthrough – and here I mean in everything contained in the term, not just in art – is itself a myth and that modernity has now taken power from the humanity that created it. But can an art-political defense mechanism that amounts to good style keep us from the truth?
This problematic faced surrealism from the start. Despite the public's love for their new concept of humanity, they were only later accepted by museums and some works were suppressed for many decades on political grounds. It is clear that modernism and postmodernism have had difficulty accepting art that sought to speak of the unconscious when they themselves want to discuss the very outermost layer of abstraction – concrete art. The result is significant today: modernism, as the strong current it has been, has created endless taboos in art. Both the public and art producers have for many decades done all they could to live up to good taste. It is dangerous to go out in the deep waters, where strong feelings are in play. It is better to stick to safe art (the contemporary aspect of which I will in no way refuse to comment on!) that uses a language that doesn’t need to speak of people, but affords a safer zone, wherein there is only the question of art - formal art. In that forum we can now relate to one another on a theoretical level, where we can speak of tendencies that really are about people, but in some larger systems, namely politics and theory. When someone comes along and wants to talk about practice and feelings, we regard it as a bit embarrassing and pathetic. We are children of postmodernism and surrealism is still alive on the sidelines.
In the time since the modern break-through we have developed everything necessary to the maintenance of our cycle of desire. Today we do not even see the machine that keeps the cycle going, much less the cause of its running. Nonetheless, I think the modern break-through has been optimal for humanity, as it challenges the intellect and I believe we should celebrate it and enjoy all of its potential - until it collapses. Modernism is an intellectual movement that will not confront humanities instinctive hangover, but I think that surrealism’s interests emerge in pace with humanity's discovery of the machine that keeps our desire going. Until then art that speaks in overly passionate terms is rejected with the epithet “kitsch”. The best example in a long time is Michael Kvium’s show at Aros in Århus, which is loved by the media and public while found embarrassing by the art world.
As a serious contemporary artist, one has always to be on the lookout for clichés. Flirting with clichés must only be done with a certain understanding of kitsch and the knowledge that all one’s artistic effort will be lost if the limits are crossed. John Currin is an artist who flirts with these limits and can serve as my ideal in the search for a new direction. He says that "critics don't know the value of magic in art” and that they “often have a deconstructive mode of analyzing art with the help of signs that all have a cultural identity – that art shall refer to some other art”. I also think that method of reading art is passé, and I think Michael Pearse expresses it fantastically well: “Post Modernists are like Cuban revolutionaries who, aging and outdated, cling to their decrepit system”.
So who is going to give André Gide a valid answer?
It looks as if this text ironically enough is ending with a cliché, that is, a critique of modernism.Therefore, I will end by denying that this is the case by concluding that I think modernism and its works have left an incredibly precise testimony of their time – the time when one does not speak of the unconscious, but works the surface. It is the time when society is not controlled by humanity, but rather humanity is controlled by society.One can indeed wonder why I have come so far afield from the subject of surrealism, but I will briefly explain why I think it is relevant in this context. I think that what the surrealists wanted to describe was humanity in its purest form – instinctual humanity and its spontaneity. But what modernism did – as the far more dominating tendency – was to hide the instincts and focus on the outermost layers, those that protect the public and direct us away from our own core, so that we live somewhere on the surface, with no idea that we are being controlled.
If you think this has been a one-sided communication, I will defend myself by referring to my warning at the start of the essay, and must therefore unfortunately state that I am not prepared to make surrealism more comprehensible. Before it can be made comprehensible it must be given its due attention, and it does not seem as if modernism will allow it space for that. Until this might happen, André Gide will have to stand alone with his question: “Alas, who will free us from the heavy chains of logic?”
From Ditte Ejlerskov's blog.
enero 20, 2007
Por la muerte de Carlos...
Fuego de tu mano
queda en el mundo, quema
suciedades terrestres,
llena la copa del buen ojo,
el que mira oleajes de amor y de dolor,
ese fuegofunda ciudades,
soles que no se ven,
para alos mazos que golpean
en pabellones del espanto,
piedra es contra la perra de la injuria,
las mañanas sin leche,
las llagas del corazón,
el fuego de tu mano arde
dentrísimo de vos, desde vos,
empeñado en alzarlo que es y lo que no fue,
mares/mareas/vida/siempre...
Poema escrito el 18 de enero de 2007 por la muerte del pintor Carlos Gorriarena. Fue leído ayer por Cristina Banegas en el entierro del artista.
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