Imaging The Artist: Going to Eleven
(The following is a transcript of remarks from the Canadian Art symposium "Imaging the Artist," held in Toronto on February 26, 2005)
I have recently come across two striking appropriations of the idea of the artist, both from The Simpsons. I mention them not just to steal their jokes (although they're good jokes), but also to indicate what happens in cultural constructions of the artist under current conditions of mass culture.
There are two separate episodes from two different seasons; the latter refers back to the first, and they offer an illuminating twinning of artist images.
In the first episode, Marge, the long-suffering housewife holding together this benighted all-American family, resuscitates a desire to be an artist which has lain dormant for some years of her life. It has to do in part with a fan letter she sent to Ringo Starr, a portrait she did of him and his reply, his enthusiastic reply, being lost in the mail for decades.
To resuscitate her aesthetic ambitions, Marge takes a commission to do a portrait of Montgomery Burns, tyrannical overseer of the nuclear power plant and reigning billionaire of Springfield. Mr. Burns, thinking about sitting for Marge, says, "Can you make me beautiful?" (If you've seen the cartoon, you know how absurd that is.) Marge says, "I don't think that will be a problem," to which Mr. Burns replies, "I'm no matinee idol, you know." Marge tells him she has "the gift of being able to see inner beauty."
Clearly this shows one kind of construction of what the artist is and can do; that is to say, he or she can, via a special gift, transfigure not only the commonplace, but the ugly. The artist as seer.
After various plot devices, the portrait is done. It is a nude—which, if you've ever seen Mr. Burns, you'll find rather appalling. When the painting is premiered and the curtain dropped to the floor, there are many gasps of appropriate shock. Burns is stooped and scaly, his hands hanging claw-like in front of his shrunken, evil frame. Marge says: "I guess I wanted to show that beneath Mr. Burns's fearsome head with its cruel lips, spiteful tongue and evil brain, there was a frail withered body perhaps not long for this world, as beautiful and vulnerable as any of God's creatures."
A viewer, hearing this, then looking at the painting, says: "He's bad. But he'll die. So I like it." Which is perhaps not exactly what Marge had in mind.
I mention this to set up the second instance of The Simpsons appropriating this idea of the artist, in a now-famous episode where Homer Simpson attempts to build a barbecue pit in his backyard, with predictably disastrous results. There's a great scene where Homer takes a run at his failed attempt to construct this barbecue pit with a patio umbrella, which lodges in the side of it and flings him backwards violently.
Homer tries to dump the mangled barbecue as garbage, and thus it is somehow brought to the attention of an art dealer in Springfield. She comes to the door of the Simpson home and wants to buy it. Homer tells her, "This isn't art. It's a barbecue that pushed me over the edge." The art dealer, rendered here with a pedantic, sophisticated Boris-and-Natasha voice, says, "Art isn't just pretty pictures. It's an expression of raw human emotion. In your case, rage."
She instructs Homer in the new doctrine of Outsider art. It is art that could be done by anyone: "a mental patient, or a hillbilly or a chimpanzee." Homer is enthusiastic. "In high school, I was voted most likely to be a mental patient, hillbilly or chimpanzee!" The artist not as seer but as wacko.
At this point Homer becomes an instant art-world celebrity, and, among other things, takes over Marge's memories of aesthetic aspiration, so that he thinks he's the one in the family who's always wanted to be an artist. "I've always had an interest in art," he tells the furious Marge, "dating back to my schoolgirl days, when I painted portrait after portrait of Ringo Starr." I can't help noting here one of my all-time favourite scenes in The Simpsons. The art dealer's friends descend on Moe's Tavern, the local watering hole, and Moe, its famously ugly bartender, sidles up to some of them at the bar. "So...you guys are Eurotrash, huh? How's that workin' out for ya?" One responds, "To be honest, we are adrift on a sea of decadent luxury and meaningless sex." Moe looks at him and says, "And so where might this sea be located?"
Homer's show is advertised in Art in America. But he finds that something has changed in his accommodation by the art world. His attempt to replicate his initial success is met with stunned disapproval. New works, like Botched Hibachi, Attempted Birdhouse 1 and Failed Shelving Unit With Stupid Stuck Chainsaw and Applesauce, are not as celebrated as the first. The very same Eurotrash art fan says, "You've gone from hip to boring. Why don't you call us when you get to kitsch?"
Homer lies on the floor and says, "I don't get it, why don't people like my art any more?" Marge takes Homer on a kind of lickety-split tour of contemporary art and the history of art, searching for new inspiration. He finds it in Christo. Lisa points out that, among other projects, Christo once put up hundreds of yellow umbrellas along the California highway. "Although," she admits, "they did blow over and kill some people." Homer says, looking into the middle distance, "Killer umbrellas, of course. Exquisite." His final artwork involves flooding the entire town of Springfield. The artist as transformer of the everyday world.
Now, my suggestion here is not just that this is a playful, maybe sarcastic, comment from mass culture to, let's call it, elitist or non-mass culture; but also that it plays with, and puts into question, the very idea of what an artist is. As so often, the multivalent effects of layered irony prompt deeper questions about the very idea of culture.
How have images of the artist changed over time? I want to give you, very briefly, my list of ten more or less historically ordered notions of the artist. And then leave you with a suggestion for the future.
Over the course of the Western tradition at least, artists have been rooted in the first conception, which is to say that they are merely artisans of a particular kind. In Plato's day, for example, there was an understanding that artists were, by and large, to be seen as part of a continuum of workaday creation that included furniture-makers and other kinds of artisans. Given this, insofar as artists declared themselves different, they were dangerous. So in the second book of Plato's Republic, we get the notorious denunciation of the "inspired" artist as a politically disruptive figure. This moralistic denunciation of the artist means that political art will not come to fruition for some centuries.
The second important conception of the artist, therefore, is that of the toiler in the workshop, the dutiful apprentice attempting to acquire mastery. This is really just an extension of the first, such that the artist who painted a given portion of a so-called masterwork might in fact be an anonymous workman who was hacking out an arduous apprenticeship in somebody else's studio. The studio was the genius, not the individual.
We move from this to the third, which is the first significant image of the artist for contemporary purposes, namely the artist as disinterested genius. I don't mean uninterested; rather disinterested, in the Kantian sense of genius in pursuit of the use-free beautiful. The disinterested genius is a source of much influence, not least in disseminating the concept of autonomous art; but, even here, we don't quite get a sense of the individual as the crucial fact. That is, this artist remains largely anonymous, if singular, because he is a kind of servant of beauty itself.
Only in the fourth image of the artist, historically speaking, do we begin to appreciate our own, present difficulties. This is not just the disinterested genius but the romantic genius. That is, the artist as someone different from other people: able to feel things more deeply, perhaps; certainly able to translate feelings more effectively into some kind of making. Modest though she remains, Marge Simpson appeals to the romantic-genius notion when she speaks of "seeing inner beauty."
The fifth category we can isolate is the dandy or, later, the gutter dandy—one of the favoured modes of modernism. Here, in contrast to the Enlightenment disinterested genius or 19th-century romantic genius, we get an interesting distinction—in its way, a logical extension of Romanticism. I mean the idea captured by Wilde's favoured formulation, "I have put my genius into my life; all I've put into my works is my talent." Life itself, as Nietzsche suggested, becomes the work of art. The creation of works is considered, in some ways, secondary to the occupation and living out of a certain kind of life. Because the dandy refuses conformity, his life becomes an extended essay in resistance and self-creation.
That leads almost directly to the sixth category: the artist as social rebel. We might think of this as modernism without the art. Whatever the forms of his or her making, the artist is now understood to be a nonconformist, a "bad-boy artist" indeed. The artist as an outsider, not in the sense of creating Outsider art, but rather as someone who stands against the mainstream or dominant culture. This image, to be sure, is still with us.
It is not a long step from that sixth image to a seventh, namely, the artist as political agitator. The difference between them is simply that the generalized social rebel or nonconformist has no particular political agenda. The political artist-agitator does.
Eight represents a swing against the dangers inherent in seven: the artist as philosopher. Here we witness, among other things, the rise of conceptualism. I was struck by the recent news item that Duchamp's urinal was chosen as the most influential work of art of the 20th century, because it is the most philosophical of works, in that it draws to our attention the contours of the art world itself, the present circumstance where anything can be the work of art. The artist who absorbs this lesson, or repeats it, is engaged in philosophical argument—though often, it must be said, at a rather sophomoric level.
Unfortunately, from that point, things get rapidly worse in the field of artist self-regard, not least because conceptualism too often backfires in the form of jejune philosophy. The ninth category I would isolate, therefore, is a combination of the previous three: the artist as charlatan. I mean the person who is, and cheerfully sees himself or herself as, a manipulator of the art world's bankrupt economies—on the make, cynical, blithely fraudulent.
Finally, though, and happily, we witness a return to the idea of the disinterested genius, but in a kind of new form: somebody who is fully aware of these various modalities of the artist's life but isn't trying simply to recapture an earlier moment. Who is trying to push traditional forms of making in directions that are consonant with both history and the cutting edge. A servant not of beauty, then, since art needn't be beautiful, but of a medium (Rothko, Reinhardt), of ideas (Fluxus, Holzer) or, at best, both (Cornell, Serra, Richter).
Now, paradoxically, the image-economy of the artist collapses, and the artist actually disappears. We are back where we belong, focused not on the artist but on the work: not as "mere object," as Heidegger reminds us, but as experience. Art's postmodern revolution lies not in bringing outsiders into galleries but, reversing the polarity, in extending the art world to every corner of existence. The right question then is not the pointless who is the artist, or even the traditional what is art; but rather, as the philosopher Nelson Goodman advised, when is art.
Turn the knob up to eleven: the best image of the artist is the non-existent one. The artist has disappeared; long live art.
Summer 2005
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