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| Installation view of A Sixty-Two-Year Photo-Biography of Ye Jinglu, discovered by Tong Bingxue, 1907–68.
Photo: Maris Hutchinson / EPW Studio |
The art world likes to ask big
art-centric questions like “Can art change the world?” We usually answer
“Yes.” I usually disagree. Art can’t stop famine in sub-Saharan Africa
or cure Zika. But art does change the world incrementally and by
osmosis. Typically by first changing how we see, and thereby how we
remember. Raymond Chandler invented early-20th-century L.A.; Francis
Ford Coppola forged our vision of the Vietnam War; Andy Warhol combined
clashing colors that were never together before and that palette is now
ubiquitous; God creating Adam looks the way Michelangelo painted it;
Oscar Wilde said “the beauty and wonder” of fog didn’t exist before
painters. That’s big. But art as we now know it has narrowed. These days
our definition of
it is mainly art informed by other art and art
history. Especially in the last two centuries — and tenaciously of late —
art has examined its own essences, ordinances, techniques, tools,
materials, presentational modes, and forms. To be thought of as an
artist someone must self-identify as one and make what they think of as
art. This center cannot hold. Why? It is far too tight to let real art
breathe.
Right now at the New Museum is a show that casts a much wider net,
that gives weirder and more idiosyncratic work much more air to breathe —
and which makes everything we’re used to seeing in museums (and even
galleries) seem hemmed-in by comparison. Organized by a superb team
overseen by Massimiliano Gioni, “The Keeper” is a museum full of
museums, possible encyclopedias, indexes of other orders, and miniature
models of pain. Most of the work takes the form of collection: virtual
coral-reef phantasmagorias collected and collated from things as strange
as dead languages, detritus, cats’ cradles, agate, and snowflakes
aren’t included in the current category of art. Often, we call the
people who make collections like these outsider artists — when we call
them artists at all. Many of the 30 makers in “The Keeper” didn’t
self-identify as artists or call what they made art; their work isn’t
grounded in art history; probably they didn’t care about this history
and plumbed other axioms. A few of them are found in art museums. But most are relegated to specialty collections, foundations, barred, or forgotten.
This is because our art history is not chronological; not neutral or
about simultaneous cross-styles, outliers, and other things going on at
any given moment. Our art history is organized teleologically — it’s an
arrow. Things are always said to be going forward, and progress is
measured mainly in formal ways by changes in ideas of space, color,
composition, subject matter, and the like. Artists and isms follow one
another in a Biblical begatting based on progress toward a goal or a
higher stage. Cubism was “a race to flatness”; Suprematism was “the zero
point of painting”; Rodchenko said he made “the last painting”; Ad
Reinhardt one-upped him saying he was “making the last painting which
anyone can make.” In this system synthetic shifts and tics combine into
things we call movements like Cubism, Constructivism, Futurism, Art
Nouveau, Color Field, etc. The problem is anyone who doesn’t fall into
this timeline is out of luck. This paradigm has been in place for 200
years.
I love the art in our museums and galleries. I don’t want museums to
stop staging exhibitions of it. I don’t want them to look like science
fairs, flea-markets, Exploratoriums, laboratories, wunderkabinetts,
or thrift stores. But our idea of art history is dead already; it just
doesn’t know it. Its terms are so specialized and vague they’re only
useful to those in the know. Post-Minimalism only tells you it came
after something called Minimalism. Only aficionados know why Barnett
Newman’s monochrome paintings and Willem de Kooning’s wild style are
both Abstract Expressionist; why the Über-controlled David
Salle is a Neo-Expressionist. Unfortunately, so many academics,
curators, collectors, and artists are so invested in this system that we
see nonstop formalist twists, micro moves in monochrome painting,
photography about photography, readymades galore, formulaic
institutional critique, and ironies you can only understand if you read
long jargon-filled labels. This is Zombie Art History.
But there are different paradigms, different methodologies — countless numbers of them, many of them on display in “The Keeper.” The
artists here short-circuit art history. Not only do most of them not
identify as artists, they don’t see the world in any linear way. For
these artists every object contains the whole world and is part of a
family of forms. They look at the world in a meta way; inspiration is a
compelling force from within. Not art history. In this holistic way the
whole shapes the parts, taxonomical units cohere into clouds, microcosms
mushroom into macrocosms, webs of interrelationship form. These artists
are in search of what might be called ur-forms, conceptual
templates, archetypal systems, secret chords, flows, things here for
millions of centuries that are embedded in materials and in the fabric
of time.
What’s in “The Keeper”? Lolita author Vladimir Nabokov
dissected butterfly penises — in his words, “sculpted sex” — and
arranged them in cabinets to identify individual species. At the New
Museum his beautifully notated Frankensteinian collages of
butterfly-wing patterns show an aesthetic intelligence equal to Kurt
Schwitters, Wallace Berman, and Rauschenberg. At the New Museum is
Korbinian Aigner, a priest, painter, and pomologist (the study of
fruit), who, starting in 1912 and proceeding while he was in Dachau to
his death, in 1966, painted dusky still-lifes of apples on glowing
monochrome backgrounds. His obsessional focus, power of observation,
fleshy texture, and subtleness of color are as mesmerizing as Giorgio
Morandi, as strange as Cézanne, as formally distinct as El Lissitzky. André Malraux, author of Museum Without Walls,
said “We can only feel by comparison.” Neither Aigner nor Nabokov are
in our art museums to let these feelings flow. Neither is Hilma af
Klint, whose 16 glorious paintings from 1914–15 cover two walls here.
Her highly hued work, filled with spirals, squares, circles, and
corkscrewing seashell shapes, shows that she’s not just a great painter;
she’s one of the inventors of abstraction itself. Her plain blocky
fields of color are revolutionary and don’t appear in painting again
until the backgrounds of Francis Bacon. Klint has received
retrospectives but still isn’t allotted her deserved place in art
history. Maybe because she called her work “Paintings for the Temple,”
said she was inspired by “high masters,” and designated her work not be
seen until 20 years after her death. Somehow this cast her as some sort
of zodiacal spiritualist.
Suffering a similar fate is Olga Fröbe-Kapteyn —
who called her geometric paintings “meditation drawings” and founded a
school of spiritual worship in 1930. Her 12 paintings from 1920s and
1930s at the New Museum have such snappy graphic-ness that you might
mistake them for Pop or psychedelic posters of the 1960s. Nearby are 90
wild black-and-white abstract-geometric photographs by Wilson Bentley
(1865–1931) who invented his own camera to made “photomicrograms” of
individual snow crystals. Bentley is in a few museums. But even though
this is abstract photography decades before it became an ism in art, his
work is seen as scientific. At the New Museum the 500,000 pencil
drawing of contemporary Vanda Vieira-Schmidt radiate an original Paul
Klee–Louise Bourgeoisie synthesis. She says they are “countering the
forces of evil in this world” — exactly like Byzantine and early
Renaissance artists claimed. Her work can only be seen a Dresden
military museum.
The funny thing is, however unusual the collections look within the
context of a museum — however powerfully “The Keeper” shows us that
there is more in the category of art than our present system has dreamt
of — in truth I think that all great artists know this cosmic complexity
already. Every maker has an individual idea of what needs to exist;
great imagination is always a force from within. Whether one knows art
history or not, art begins pre-intellectually, beyond language. Art is a
search for new paths of encounter and poetic structures, images and
things that go beyond themselves. Hilma af Klint and Fröbe-Kapteyn might
have said their work was inspired by cosmic forces. Kandinsky said his
art was a “penetration of collected forces.” Franz Marc called it a
“pantheistic penetration.” Marsden Hartley called himself a “cosmic
Cubist.” Marcel Duchamp suspended 1,200 coal bags from a ceiling. This
would fit into “The Keeper” with the string-figure cats’-cradle
configurations collected by filmmaker/ethnomusicologist Harry Smith.
It’s beyond time for a new generation of art historians not only to
open up the system and let art be the garden that it is, home to exotic
blooms of known and unknown phenomena. It’s time to work against this
system. We can’t say painting is dead just as women and artist of color
started to show up in art history. Our art history has stiffened into an
ideology that clear-cuts a medium, pronounces it dead (like
undertakers) and moves on like conquistadors to the next stage. The idea
that art has an overall goal of advancing or perfecting its terms and
techniques is made up. Imagined. Idiotic. Except to those benefiting
from this intellectual fundamentalism. Someday, people will look back at
this phase of art history the way we look back at manifest destiny and
colonialism.
