That urinal and beyond[2]

Retired Colonels are usually right. Modern art is crap. Well, most of it. A hundred years will do their brutal sorting and make it fairly plain which works have stood the test of time and which haven’t.

In 2000 the Royal Academy hosted an exhibition, ‘1900: Art at the Crossroads’, which gathered much of the art at the World Fair in Paris, making it a representative view of what was considered good stuff at the time. Many paintings were dreary and uninteresting, some were laughably bad (‘of mainly historical interest’ is the polite term). One in particular sticks in my mind, though it’s name and the name of the artist have been erased from my memory – a large oil of a cascading mouintain river in which the water had been replaced, symbolically, by a great, tumbling shower of fat, pink babies (‘water spirits’ I guess they were meant to be), as if Anne Geddes and Roger Dean had taken acid and decided to work as one.

The same is true of novels (that most modern ones are crap). But novels, and novelists, survive only by entertaining a large number of readers. So the medium is inherently more conservative and democratic[3]. The avant-garde is smaller and less avant. And those writers pushing the envelope push it less hard and less far so that it’s easier for the bulk of readers to agree on what does and doesn’t work.

A painting, on the other hand, only has to sell to one person. Ditto sculptures, installations, video works, performance pieces. This world of buyers, collectors, gallery owners and museum directors is a relatively small one, many of whose members are competing desperately with one another to find the Next Big Thing. And the top end of the art market has been whipped into a frenzy over the last fifty years by art having been turned into a commodity, like cocoa beans or zinc futures. As a result contemporary art develops at a viral speed in a way that writing, music, theatre and film simply don’t. And it is therefore commensurately harder to have any sense of what work will last and what will rapidly become ‘of mainly historical interest’.

Consequently, artists are often judged on grounds that have little to do with what you or I experience when we look at their art. Bruce Nauman’s reputation seemed based largely on the huge influence he has had on other artists. Damien Hirst’s reputation seemed based not just on his short-lived ability to shock audiences, but on his much more impressive ability to wrest power away from the buyers of art and use it for his own ends, an ability for which he is much more justifiably respected by (some) other artists. And Jeff Koons’ reputation seems based on his ability to make art that offends all previously received idea of good art (household products as art, porn as art, kitsch as art) and still have it regarded as good (and highly saleable) art. But none of them has ever made an object that has really moved me. And I suspect that I’m not alone in this.

Being deeply moved (whatever that means) has to be the sole measure of good art. But it’s complicated. Good art always expands our definition of good art and tries to move us in ways that we don’t expect (and sometimes haven’t yet learnt). And some art, however, good, will always fail to move us, just us some great novels will always remain closed to us.

So, if you spend time looking at contemporary art, you need some kind of rudimentary map to help you keep your bearings (at least I do).

Increasingly for me it has become the presence of the human hand.

There are photographers whose work I love (Uta Barth is a current favourite). There is some art produced by purely industrial processes which I find hugely resonant (Rachel Whiteread’s House is probably the best of many examples). And I’m not averse to video works, or performance pieces (though I’m having trouble thinking of any off the top of my head which make me want to see them again).

But there is a depth and a richness that art can have when it bears the ghost of the maker’s hand that is rarely, if ever, matched by art in which a concept thought up by the artist is than realised by machinery and technical assistants.

It’s not the stamp of authenticity it gives to an artwork (the thrill that Willem de Kooning actually touched this canvas). It’s the way it introduces time into the work.

Ultimately, all good art is about transcendence (he says cavalierly[4]). All good art takes this finitude in which we are all trapped and stretches and expands it and makes it seem infinite. Listen to the way Glenn Gould or Keith Jarett slow down time so that they are able to place musical notes with superhuman precision. Read the Iliad and see all those dead people walking around inside your head.

Look at a portrait by Rembrandt or Lucian Freud or Chuck Close and you see, not just a representation of the person, but a vivid physical record of how the painter’s hand moved back and forth repeatedly over the canvas, getting to know that face more closely than a lover, turning it from a living thing into something utterly still and flat which, paradoxically, will go on living longer than the sitter and keep on changing every time a new person looks at it, long after both the artist and the subject are dead.

[1]The human hand. From The Countess of Pembroke’s Arcadia by Sir Philip Sidney. A borrowing from Aristotle, I think.
[2]Duchamp’s Fountain.
[3]I like experimental novels. I like the idea that somewhere, writers are pushing back the boundaries. But I can think of very few examples of great experimental novels which have been lost to the world because of the heartless, industrial nature of the publishing machine. I was very excited, for example, when Picador valiantly republished B S Johnson’s ‘The Unfortunates’ (a boxed novel in which you shuffled the chapters before reading). I’m very glad that it’s back in the world and that I have a copy. It’s an interesting read, but not a hugely enjoyable one (even for someone who likes experimental writing). And consequently I am not too sad that no-one has republished his novel, ‘Albert Angelo’, in which holes are cut into the pages so that you can see the future…
[4]Obviously there are plenty of artists driven by the desire to kick over the traces of all that bourgeois ‘transcendence’ shit.