In a journal article about a month before I started art school, the art critic Hilton Kramer lamented that, viewed from 1985, American art after 1945 was suddenly looking very different. In the 80s, critics and art historians were accusing the New York School artists of "aiding and abetting the influence of the American political system." Their attempt to embrace universals and reject social realism was being
challenged. Their art had now become Cold War propaganda.
These were the group
of artists I saw on my first field trip just a couple weeks into my
first term. These were the artists I would cut my teeth on. At the very moment I was inheriting their aesthetic, their aesthetic was suddenly being disregarded. From this point on, artists would run scared. We could be accused of anything.
If we'd ever worried about being grossly mislabeled as political activists—or unwitting political gears—we might have thought that it was working with recognizable imagery that would get us into trouble. When you make pictures, chances are excellent that people will misinterpret what the artist
means. Someone will take offense, calling the work patriarchal, sexist,
colonialist, imperialist, racist, ethnocentric or otherwise othering. It's been a long time since we had a reliable store of stock narratives and shared symbols to work with, so any use of recognizable imagery will be open to interpretation. But if the minimalists and pure abstractionists could be accused of politics, any artist, no matter what he or she makes, is suspect.
I think this futile situation may be one of the sources of our current ills. It's not the plurality of art that's the problem, it's the plurality of ignorant responses to it. I imagine that artists have conjured a few ways to deal with this dilemma. Here are a few imaginary strategies I came up with to avoid being called a
Communist, or, equally bad, an
Imperialist.
Strategy 1:
Try hard to say nothing at all. This would certainly suit any collectors whose goal has been a shameless extravagance that can't be served by any depth. And corporations that collect certainly long for art that is safely vacant of specific narratives and symbols that might offend. So make something so weird or so literal that it can't really mean anything.
Strategy 2:
Retreat into a vision that is so personal, no one could ever fool themselves into believing that they know what the artist means. This is the exact same thing as
Strategy 1 except the artist serves the purpose of giving value to self-indulgence instead of callous indifference.
Strategy 3:
Directly appropriate popular culture, not as a critique, and not to cause us to look deeper, but simply as a reproduction of what we already ogle all day. The meaning is vacuous to begin with, so that's safe. And the desire we feel for popular imagery is so widely shared that most viewers would take it for granted that these popular references are shared narratives and symbols.
I don't really believe that any of these strategies would work; someone's always going to give you a hard time. But the strategies I invented (or did I?) illustrate how an artist might shut down in fear of being labeled.
At Tri-C and OU, we had critiques. Through these critiques, I came to understand that what we are working with is a communal vocabulary of meaningful signs, symbols, shapes, forms, colors, and conventions. As artists, our job is to nudge culture further and shake up meaning and language to keep it alive. You can't say something new if everything you say is new. You can't have total meaninglessness, either. And you can't have a completely personal vocabulary. Nor can you simply mimic what everyone already says.
If you want to say something new, you have to place it in the context of something old. Perspective comes at the intersection of the known and the unknown. We, as artists, have to dive into the unknown and take our viewers on the adventure with us, using what we already do know as a lifeline. If we are bold enough, what we come up with in our explorations will be so strong that it will stand up to accusations of politics and ideology.
