I kept thinking about beauty during my three days in Seattle. Questions revolved around visual pleasure–what if the only purpose of art is to make something overwhelming beautiful mixed with a dash of the uncanny? Every effort–strategized or not–to undermine beauty has eventually been folded into its overall definition: Eva Hesse, Albert Oehlen, Sonic Youth. Of course, transgression is material, too.
It was the Ukiyo-e pieces at SAM’s Asian Art Museum in Volunteer Park that got me going. A small show, I found myself picking at art’s mortality–How long does it live? Is something contemporary as long as it can still be used? Is Robert Johnson more contemporary because I play him on my iPod? Art, like the washboard or stereoscope, passes into history; it becomes useless. When you walk into a room where the walls are pasted with Fragonard drawings, you’re quick to realize that the Fragonard part of the equation doesn’t matter so much, it’s just cool wallpaper. The work, unquestionably of its time, stayed there (as will work by Karen Kilimnik, for example–it’s a future someone’s wallpaper). And there’s part of that in the Hiroshige and Hokusai prints, but there’s also some other indescribable element; the formal concerns of each artist are still active and the work is complex. The process of wood block printing is beautiful, and the materials are beautiful–and those beautiful ingredients are invested in images that both capture and skirt reality. They don’t look real and yet they document events, landscapes, trends and activities. And I think that’s the key: the slightly abstracted images have grown even more powerful with the popularity of comics and anime–especially manga. Just check out Hiroshige’s View of the Naruto Whirlpools at Awa as an example.
The point I’ve come to in looking at so much art is an obvious one: there’s too much of a disconnect between what artists say and what they show. Attempts have been made to overcome that gap through connoisseurship or ethics or institutionalization or quality. Social art, for example, often looks pretty horrible and less intelligent than the platform it’s purporting to promote. Land Art and Feminist Art–as I’ve mentioned before–too often embrace the aesthetic of those areas of art making rather than functioning within a broader dialogue (and of course they expand the art conversation, but I don’t know how useful another sculpture made of sticks or another pair of embroidered underwear is to anybody).
I’m not discounting those valuable histories of art making, I’m only suggesting that the ethics of sympathy can cloud the varied roles (and strengths) of art, speech, experimentation and protest. Maybe there’s a middle-ground? The prints at the Asian Art Museum certainly suggest as much, dragging us through the visual pleasure the artists had in creating landscapes and portraits about sex, class, fantasy, social practice and ritual.
I once heard a Jarry Saltz lecture where he said “all works of art
are contemporary”