daniel buren Photo / Souvenir, London. 1972
painted: memorable images like Rauschenberg’s Bed, a timely redevelopment of Dada’s upending of established values; Johns’s Flag above White, craftsmanship applied to a lovingly deadpan image; Warhol’s Marilyn, with her kissproofsmile and fluorescent allure; Klein’s other-worldly blue surfaces; Oldenburg’s softwares collapsing in on themselves and suggesting accelerated time and decay; Rothko’s brimming, looming visions.
But the boundaries of painting are no longer clearly definable, and it is no longer the sole provider of these memorable visual images. Within the held of art many have come from the photographic records of activities beyond the canvas. Some are from the artist’s involvement in the landscape, be it new or romantic: Robert Smithson’s Spiral Jetty, constructed in the Great Salt Lake; Christo’s (b. 1935) Valley Curtain, civil engineering applied as art in order to stretch a huge orange curtain across a canyon; or Jan Dibbets’s (b. 1921) Dutch Mountain, a cheerful acceptance of the commercial potential of manipulating flat land into hilly land through photographic means.
christo Valley Curtain. 1970-72
Joseph beuys How to Explain Pictures to a Dead Hare. ig6$
On the other hand, in these forms of extended forms for art, strategy too has produced images that are almost icons: Joseph Beuys (b. 1921), head swathed in honey, demonstrating ‘how to explain pictures to a dead hare’ as an affirmation that even a dead hare can bridge the gap between theory and instinct more successfully than an alienated human being; or Jannis Kounellis’s (b. 1936) line-up of horses in a Rome gallery, the life and warmth of the horses highlighting the deadness of the gallery and what it represented.
Behind all the attempts to expand the field of art lie the symptoms of a discontent with its traditional role, and this is something that demonstrably cannot be changed merely by strategy. Painting has become a highly restricted language and interest, a specialist activity in a society rigidly divided into specialist fields, the result of positivist and materialist thinking. To accept such a division is to support the idea that only certain elect beings are creative. Manzoni recognized this trap when he put the world itself on a pedestal in 1961. Art had to be everything. Changes of
media and shifts of style or strategy on their own mean nothing. Art springs from man’s creative impulse. Manzoni also emphasized that man is not, as modern consumer society would have it, just a materialist being. Man and his creativity have a spiritual and inspirational side. ‘You can’t take off from the ground simply by running and jumping,’ he once said. ‘You need wings.’
But such a statement is an act of faith rather than a plan of action. If changes of style lead to culs-de-sac, and strategies grow inward, this means that the whole model traditionally accepted as art needs rethinking. The old model is the one made inevitable by the event that founded modern Western society as we know it, segmented into divided fields of activity: the French Revolution.
ritadonagh Four Weeks in May (Kent State). 1972
Dorothea kockburne Carbon Paprr Drawing.
The bourgeois order set up the academy .system that was to divorce one field oflife from another, to separate scientific analysis from philosophical speculation, technology from science and science from art. The result is modern man’s alienation, his inability to relate spirit and material, or to comprehend the totality of his world. In this divided world, art still stands as an activity without predetermined confines. When this open brief is accepted negatively, it leads to the dead-ends and the triviality that have characterized much of recent art. Taken as a challenge, it could forge a new and expanded concept of art as an interdisciplinary activity, bridging fields of knowledge and linking man's polarities: his intuition and his intellect; chaos and order.