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Never Bite the Hand that Feeds You:
Eduardo Pérez Soler interviews Eduardo Pérez Soler |
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Eduardo Pérez Soler got together with Eduardo Pérez Soler to talk about The Rear [The Rearguard], the consultation space that the latter has prepared for the Centre d’Art Santa Mònica. The excerpts below are from their conversation.
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EDUARDO PÉREZ SOLER
I have the impression that with The Rear you have set out to assume a ‘voice of the people’ role that echoes the attacks on contemporary art made by a large part of the communications media and the non-specialist public. It seems to me that with this consultation space you have let yourself be caught up in a kind of populist attitude that can all too easily turn reactionary. Evidently, contemporary art is difficult to understand and this makes a lot of people uncomfortable. Much of the interest of the arts today lies in their complexity. The interpretation of contemporary art is an intellectual exercise that demands a well-stocked baggage of knowledge and imagination.
What is more, attacking new art is potentially dangerous: the most conservative Right, both in Europe and the United States, has chosen to see contemporary art as a clear symptom of the supposed cultural decadence of our society. For example, this is what the Front National has been doing in France.
I think there is an essential error in the claim that contemporary art is complex. I am not at all sure that the creative arts of our time are as difficult to understandas people think they are. In fact, I think that a lot of the most current art is conceived with a view to ease of consumption. Behind the façade of transgression we find nothing but docility and academicism. What many contemporary artists offer us are products intended for unthinking consumption. This is the case, for example, with the YBA, the Young British Artists, who come across as very radical at first glance, but are only concerned with satisfying the public’s appetite for sensation and scandal. Think of Tracey Emin’s bed, with its detritus and bodily fluids: a completely insubstantial work that caused a great stir in the communications media, which is precisely what the artist wanted.
The problem is that the curators and the directors of art institutions, anxious to attract the masses into the museums and art centres, have ended up sponsoring an unreflecting art that entertains, but does not provoke reflection. Many artists and curators today display an anti-intellectual attitude in promoting a kind of art that can be appreciated without any mental effort or specialist knowledge. With this attitude they are very close to the most reactionary Right, which has always championed an art that caters to a ‘natural’ response by spectators with no need of any specialist knowledge. It’s a curious thing, but it’s as if the art museums of the postmodern democracies were realizing one of the dreams of the totalitarian state: the creation of an unthinking art. Ultimately, Tracey Emin’s bed and the landscapes of academicism are not so different from one another.
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Personally, I don’t see it as a problem that more and more people are able to enjoy art, or that more and more people are visiting the art museums. On the contrary, the mass appeal of the museums is a logical consequence of the democratizing of culture. When you come out against the popularization of art you are upholding an absurd elitism. The vulgarization of art —its ‘plebeianizing’, in Frederic Jameson’s terminology— is the price we have of pay to make it possible for everyone to have access to cultural products.
What is more, if ever-greater numbers of people are visiting the museums, it has to be because they find something there that they don’t find in the real world.
Certainly, the museums and art centres offer us an experience of things that is different from the experience we are offered by what you call the ‘real’ world. It is quite obvious that we look at things from a different perspective when the art system sanctions them as works or art. With this legitimating capacity, the art institutions have an extraordinary potential to transform our perception of things. In reality, I have nothing against the art institutions, which is why I accepted the invitation to prepare the consultation space for the CASM. What I am opposed to, however, is the excessive reverence with which we treat the products of art. |
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| Eduardo Pérez
Soler. Photo: Davis |
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So, what are you saying?
I’m saying that we can no longer conceive of art in the way it was outlined by the moderns. Art can no longer lay claim to a hierarchical superiority over other human activities. Nor is it an instrument capable of guiding us along the road to freedom and perfectibility, as many modern artists and critics believed. Anyone who thinks that art has, in essence, a liberating function is an idealist or an innocent.
Having moved on from the Hegelian metanarrative that conceived of art as an idea in process of realization, the activity of art no longer has any contact with a metaphysical ground from which it could claim legitimation. Nowadays the only difference between works of art and ordinary everyday objects is that the former can be contemplated in an art context. Nothing more. And yet we still act as if the work of art were the creation of an individual genius endowed with unique abilities and intellectual powers. We still look at works of art with the raptly imbecilic gaze of the devout believer ogling a sacred relic. There are still people and institutions willing to pay millions of dollars for the creations of personages we treat like heroes and visionaries. The whole business is ludicrous! We approach the art of our time with the awed humility of a hundred years ago; Buddha is dead, but his shadow is still there on the wall of the cave!
So you think there is a need to redefine the concept of art?
I would say rather that what is needed is a new attitude to artistic creation. Basically we need to accept that ontological status of art as an activity is no higher than that of disciplines such as film, let’s say, or advertising or cartoons. It’s true that the proposals art presents us with offer experiences that we don’t normally encounter in our daily lives. Today’s art gives us access to a different reality, and at times it does so by means of products of notable quality. That said, I am very much afraid that more than a few products of the disciplines I have just mentioned possess intrinsic qualities superior to those of the majority of present-day works of art.
What is more, there is another factor to take into consideration: art has less and less social importance. Artistic activity has been declining in influence since the 19th century, thanks to the advent of new technologies with a greater capacity to transmit the experience of the reality of our time. In a quote from Behind the Times that I have included in LaRereguarda, Eric Hobsbawm perfectly expresses this idea: ‘It is impossible to deny that the true revolution in the art of the 20th century was not brought about by the avant-gardes of modernity, but came from outside of the realm of what is formally recognized as “art”. This revolution was the work of the combined logics of technology and the mass market, which is tantamount to saying of the democratizing of aesthetic consumption.’ One of life’s ironies: the vanguard of sensibility is to be found not in the world of art, but in a sphere that many modern artists look down on — the sphere of consumer culture.
Unfortunately, many artists and theorists responded to this phenomenon in the wrong way. Instead of adapting their approach to the new social and technological conditions, they preferred to seek refuge in the abstract and solipsistic realm of elite culture. They chose to carry on as if nothing had changed, as if art were still entrusted with the mission of transmitting a transcendent message and safeguarding eternal values. These artists continued to play the part of apostles of a secular religion instead of adapting to the cultural logic of modernity. We now know the outcome of all of this: art has lost much of its capacity to generate social references and now has a largely insignificant role in our culture!
The Rear
‘In no other period of human history has there been so much well-remunerated artistic activity and so little Art.’
Félix de Azúa, ¡Muérete de una vez!, 2002.
‘One observation returns periodically, to amass still more evidence: some artists transmit energy, others conserve it, and a third group actually impoverishes the world by squandering it on futile endeavours worthy of frauds.’
Jordi Ibáñez Fanés, Después de la decapitación del arte, 1996.
‘To say that history is over is to say that there is no longer any limit to history that leaves out works of art. Anything goes and anything can be art. And given that this situation is not essentially structured, we can no longer adapt it to a legitimating story. Greenberg is right: nothing has happened in thirty years. This is the most important thing that can be said about the art of the last thirty years. But the situation is a long way from being as depressing as Greenberg cry of “Decadence!” implies. Rather, it ushers in the period of greatest freedom that art has ever known.’
Arthur C. Danto, After the End of Art, 1997. |
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