Search for ‘T.J. Clark’ (6 articles found)
Within You Without You
Perhaps there had been a moment in the career of the human animal at which something like self-consciousness became a possibility, and a complex of notions clustering round a blank centre called ‘man’ began to perpetuate themselves. Some people would like to believe that the moment was strongly linked to a specific cerebral mutation or the elaboration of a mental ‘module’ (species-recognition, over to you). Others, me included, stick to the idea that what happened must have been the emergence of a new pattern of cognition directed and deformed by an ongoing symbolic sociality. Maybe it will turn out that the argument here is over-polarised. But Rousseau suggests, and I think the Ice Age material backs him, that whatever its neural or social mechanics, the moment of self-consciousness was inseparable from one of distanciation and self-loss: from seeing oneself as Other, as not known, as threatened or threatening, as ‘taboo’. The true cognitive depth to the palaeolithic sculptures – their challenge, ultimately, to our anthropological schema – seems to me the way they suggest how self-loss and self-consciousness were intertwined.
T.J. Clark: Picasso in England
Picasso, ‘The Source’ (1921); Henry Moore, ‘Reclining Figure’ (1936).
Again the question is distance and literalness. At the root of modernism in painting lay the idea – or better, the conclusion arrived at in practice – that the truth of a depiction now depended on deep obedience, or receptivity, to the whole shape and substance of the coloured thing. The hold of a picture on the world, as well as its internal organisation (the kind of depth it offered, the degree of surface incident, its notion of orderliness or free improvisation), were inseparable from the size and format of the canvas used, or the particular liquidity of the mixed paint. (Of course painting has many other parameters. I am singling out those that were most on Picasso’s and Nicholson’s minds.) Let me take an example from Impressionism. Round the corner from the show at the Courtauld is a flawless Pissarro of the railway station at Lordship Lane. The painting has a strange shape, 17 and a half inches by 28 and a half. And getting the unique reserve and slight greyness of South London light, as Pissarro does here to a T, is entirely a matter – I can’t say how, but the fact presents itself – of making each touch of green and white, each slight stretching-out of perspective, respond to (come out of) the canvas’s beautiful unsettling horizontality. The literalness of the container is modernism’s truth-condition. In a culture saturated by false equivalents, short cuts to non-knowledge, pseudo-pictures, the truth of a pictorial proposal has to derive from the proposal’s overtness, its factuality. This is modernism’s core belief.
I do not think that Nicholson ever quite saw this, or saw how to put it into practice. A friend who knows his work much better than I do cautioned me the other day against trotting out the cliché that Nicholson’s problem as an artist was essentially his ‘good taste’. Agreed. (In any case good taste is not necessarily a handicap, even for a modernist. It never stood in Bonnard’s way.) I think Nicholson’s limitation lay in the fact that he became such a master of aesthetic distance, but stayed so irresolute when it came to making the painting all one thing – all one finite fact. Or to put it another way: he did not allow the encounter with Picasso and Mondrian to disturb a basic certainty he had, I think deriving from his being so at home in English culture, about what the realm of art was, and where it began and ended. A painting’s separate firm standing in the world – its self-fulfilling tone-poem completeness – was for him an article of faith. Art was always art, for Nicholson, by virtue of its internal arrangement. His pictures are always fundamentally – in their formal logic – pictures within pictures. They unfold from a centre, and they depend on the presence within the painted rectangle of another roughly rectangular shape, finished and floating, internally rich in quiet relations, balanced and finite, and unrelated to the actual physical object pinned to the wall – free of that object’s contingency. The case is even clearer when Nicholson goes abstract (the contrast with Mondrian is cruel). And this is what I meant by art in England being essentially in hiding.
Think of Three Dancers again. A Picasso or a Mondrian always exists as a problem for the space around it. The pictures somehow indict their surroundings. Genteel modernism suffers – this is the litmus test – from being on good terms with its world: it cannot see why a painting shouldn’t come to rest quietly in its own art-realm. Again, this has nothing to do with attitude or attitudinising, of the Bacon kind. A Bonnard late bath scene is as sweet and dumbfounding – as homeless and unearthly – as any Picasso monster on the beach.
T.J. Clark at the V&A
Albert Moore, ‘Reading Aloud’ (1883-84)
First, I found myself in the exhibition repeatedly trying to decide how seriously the fine artists of the Aesthetic Movement looked at the achievements of their applied art comrades; or, if the painter and designer were the same person, how the discipline of the decorative fed – in practice, ‘aesthetically’ – into the subsequent oil painting or bronze. Here is where the comparison with things French remains crushing. All through the show I could not escape the implacable shade of Puvis de Chavannes; he acted as a kind of anti-Lord Leighton for me (with Bonnard as anti-Albert Moore). And the lesson I learn from France is this. A great ‘decorative’ artist – a Puvis, a Hodler, a Matisse – always manages to convince us that the orderliness or simplicity that a body takes on in a painting, maybe in obedience to surface pattern, is an order and artifice that the body has in it. Albert Moore, by contrast, whom the V&A makes much of, seems to me to do the opposite. (Quite deliberately and brilliantly, no doubt, but brilliance and meticulousness have nothing to do with beauty.) In Moore’s Reading Aloud, for instance – a perfect foil for Burne-Jones’s Merlin – the tension between the felt muscular stretching-and-holding of the woman on the right and the figure’s adjustment to a two-dimensional scheme seems to me minimal to the point of vanishing. The one does nothing to the other. The ‘geometry’ is not affected by its being that of a body, and the body does not ‘disclose new aspects’ – aspects of itself – by being fitted into a formal order. My notion of beauty is stuck with the idea that form – the point of form – is the disclosure of new aspects.
T.J. Clark on Gabriel Orozco
Orozco is a ragpicker. He takes the modern art background of minimum intervention in the world – the tactics of the ready-made, the found object, collage, assemblage and installation – for granted. They give him his syntax and vocabulary. He knows he comes late on the scene, and he is not interested in making a great fuss about his (or our) belatedness. The shoebox on the floor is infinitely knowing, art-historically speaking: it is aware that it is a rerun, almost a parody, of many previous moments meant to challenge the gallery visitor to ask – maybe splutter – ‘Is it Art?’ etc. And it expects the viewer to know that spluttering is likewise a rerun, a parody. This could be irritating – to be honest, I am slightly irritated by the sophistication of the built-in double bind – but it is the accompanying shrug (the ‘So what else do you expect?’) that seems to me to let Orozco get away with it. The ‘So what else do you expect?’ is addressed to the art world. And Orozco knows – this is the great thing he knows – that the art world expects (loves) the question to be posed in a hectoring or victimised tone of voice. The sound coming out of the shoebox, however, is lightly pessimistic. This is a frisson nouveau.
But for me it is not enough. One way of putting what I want and do not get from Orozco would centre on the question of beauty. Going through the rooms at Tate Modern I found myself asking – again, I was trying not to be the avant-garde police – what kind of visual sensibility is on show here? Certainly one that is tactful and fastidious. Maybe the choice of objects exaggerates this. I would have liked more examples of Orozco’s small-scale almost-found-object sculptures, which are sometimes less well behaved. Part of the time (in the etchings, for instance, or the more elaborate drawings) the work strikes me as tasteful to the point of near vanishing, but usually its low key is its strength. Even the lint hung limply on wires across a room – Lintels, the piece is titled, and it has something to do with the dust-inbreathed aftermath of September 11 – just manages to stir, spookily, with its own grey form-life. It may be true that cuteness looms a lot of the time as an Orozco temptation. The Foucault pendulum billiard table is cute, and so are the pairs of yellow motorbikes snapped in the city, and the axiometric two-wheelers. I couldn’t give a toss for the squeezed Citroen myself, but maybe that is because I couldn’t give a toss for the unsqueezed original – all clunky French futurology, it seemed to me, with the glass always looking five inches thick, as if the least important passenger expected to sit on the elephant leather was Malraux or De Gaulle. But even the pieces I disliked in the show struck me as beautiful. And that was the trouble – because none of them struck me, even the successes, as much else. And the beauty (Orozco himself is characteristically clear and unapologetic about this in an accompanying video) is conventional: it is oriented towards the intricate and symmetrical and carefully casual. He likes the random and momentary in the world, but never the discomposed. (He has learned nothing from the line of photography stemming from Walker Evans.) There was no single object in the exhibition in which I thought I sensed something else besides an intuition of order or balance: something more difficult and unmanageable, something shied away from in the original instigation of the piece, pulling the work in a direction the artist only half understood.
After the Cleveland School
Lord, thou hast made this world below the shadow of a dream,
An taught by time I tak’ it so—exceptin’ always steam.
From coupler-flange to spindle-guide I see thy hand O God –
Predestination in the stride o’ yon connecting rod.
(Kipling, "M'Andrew's Hymn")
Zach Sachs shared T.J. Clark’s essay about “modernism, postmodernism, and steam,” which is built around the same ambiguous symbol that Kipling is using here: steam, as an emblem both of evanescence and of machinery, represents the basic tension of modernism, which is between the anarchic individualistic tendency of modern (pre-1945) thought and the contrary, regimenting tendency of industrial life. It is surprising how close the parallels between literature and art are — when Clark says,
You could say of the purest products of modernism […] that in them an excess of order interacts with an excess of contingency.
he might as well be talking about Ulysses. (By the way, a point this essay brings home is that WW1 was a very minor part of the story, as most of the currents of modernism had been around for years.) Of course it’s much wider than that: earlier this afternoon I was leafing through Russell’s History of Western Philosophy at a Borders, looking for a passage about Locke, when I found a very close echo of Clark's thesis in Russell's remarks about how the English empiricists were driven by their arguments, against their natural temperament, to a position of extreme subjectivism that was at odds with the Zeitgeist.
So, at a minimum, the tension that Clark associates with modernism is at least as old as Hume and Blake. One is tempted to write a long essay about this but it would never actually get written — I’m too lazy to finish anything — and the point of this blog is to record my half-digested impressions without worrying about structure etc. So I’m just going to assemble a few notes.
1. Modernism is, of course, one of two successful responses to modernity, the other being Romanticism. Romanticism wasn’t a formalist movement in any deep sense; its basic tendency (seen from the modernist end of the telescope) is escapist; still, escapism might be fruitful under some conditions, and it might be that current conditions are better suited to good escapist art than to good formalist art.
2. Related to this, High Modernism was perhaps a decadent movement in Empson’s sense that it depended on a tradition that its example was destroying. The best modernist art and literature works largely through unexplained and jarring juxtapositions. The idea always seems to be to force a new emotion into existence by making you think in multiple registers, each with a certain level of vividness, at once. A lot of the juxtapositions only worked while they remained unexpected, i.e., before the first-wave modernists were assimilated. Much of the later work maintains the unexpectedness by stylizing to a degree that makes the tension unimmediate and therefore ineffective. A lot of Pound is no longer readable: the Pound of flesh is now a Pound of maggots. Looking at the pictures that accompany Clark’s text, one is tempted to say that something like this must also have happened in the visual arts beginning around Picasso.
3. An excess of contingency is implicit in an excess of form: why that pattern, one could ask, rather than any other? (The number of possibilities grows with the complexity of the pattern.) Had Keats’s odes been identical except for being acrostics, we might think them less inevitable. In Clark’s terms, Through the Looking Glass is a deeply modernist work, being schematic in the same way as Ulysses and some of the paintings Clark discusses. Victorian writing differs from Modernist writing in lacking the element of direct shock. My sense is that the shock value was primarily about forcing people to look at the work rather than through it, by frustrating their expectations. I don't think this is feasible or interesting at present because the better sort of readers have no expectations at
4. To oversimplify somewhat, the internet has resolved the central tension of modernism; the dominant tendency is currently toward solipsism, and the basic tension is between the world of windowless monads and human nature, which is reluctant to adapt to this world. (The “objective” tendency is represented by neuroscience, which “tells us” that the mind is maladaptive.) So the natural theme of fiction is psychosis, and the struggle to reimagine a reality that is perfectly intelligible on its own terms — which are Leibniz’s — in ways the mind is at home with. There have, for instance, been several novels lately — Tom McCarthy’s Remainder, Rivka Galchen’s Atmospheric Disturbances (very good!), Richard Powers’s Echo Maker (juvenile and lame), etc. — about characters who are obsessed with the fogeyish notions of authenticity and identity. (The latter two are about people with Capgras syndrome, which (for novelists) is a disorder that leaves you convinced that your family and friends are actually exact replicas of your family and friends.) I wonder if Clark has read these books and what he makes of them.
T.J. Clark, 'Modernism, Postmodernism, Steam'
Let me say again what I said at the start. I do not know the art of the present well enough to be able to ask questions of it with any authority; but I think I know the art of the previous era well enough to know what questions ought to be asked. I have been arguing that modernism wished to understand, and put under real pressure, the deep structure of belief of its own historical moment—those things about itself that modernity most took for granted, or most wished were true. The pressure was formal. The beliefs would survive the test of the medium, or they would disintegrate. Mostly, it seems, they disintegrated. Modernism was modernity’s official opposition. It was the pessimist to modernity’s eternal optimism. It cultivated extremism—it seems as an answer to modern life’s pragmatism and technicality (which of course most modernists also loved). Technique in modernism was not problem-solving. It made problems worse.
The question to put to the art of the present, then, is what does that art appear to see as the beliefs in the culture of our own moment that are similarly structural, similarly the core of our present ideology; and how does art envisage putting those beliefs to the test? I have talked somewhat generally about “beliefs,” but of course for visual artists it is beliefs about vision and visualization that count, or, rather, beliefs that take the form of images—of fresh modes of visibility, or dreams of knowledge arranging itself in specifically visual form. We all know that such beliefs are at present the cutting edge of a new myth of modernization. Oursler is typical here. Any artist with smarts is going to see that the dream life that matters currently is the one promoted by the World Wide Web. But how is that dream life going to be put under real pressure? We are back to the problem implied by Marx’s “Teach the petrified forms how to dance by singing them their own song.” Mimicry is not enough. Nor is hectoring from the outside. It has to be singing. But singing involves hitting the right note, being exactly on key. It involves not an approximate knowledge of what the age of the digital believes about itself, but an intuition (of the kind that Manet and de Chirico managed) of precisely the central knot in the dream life—the founding assumption, the true structure of dream-visualization. It is easy to fake modernity’s uncanny. Modernity, as Benjamin reminds us, has thrived from the very beginning on a cheap spectacle of the strange, the new, the phantasmagoric. But modernity also truly dreams. The art that survives is the art that lays hold of the primary process, not the surface image-flow. …
Just as Manet, with one side of himself, fell for the notion of capitalism as pure realm of appearance, present-day visual artists can hardly avoid the glamour of the notion that the verbal is over and the visual has replaced it. But just as Manet in practice discovered that the realm of appearances was also one of identities, fixities, constraints, and determinations, I dare to predict that once the present ecstasy of the virtual and nonverbal is put to the test of form, it too will be found wanting. And I shall stop pretending to be neutral and say why. I shall end by offering artists of the present a few antivisual, antidigital slogans.
Nothing could be further from the truth than the idea that the age of the Word is finished. On the contrary, words are still everywhere. And the image machinery we have created and disseminated is just a means for making those words over into images—that is the trouble with it. The ghost abominates the current means of visualization in the culture not out of nostalgic “logocentricity,” but because it sees our present means of symbolic production as essentially flooding the world with verbiage—with the simplest of words (the most banal and transparent of knowledge-motifs) given sufficient visual form. Sufficient, that is, for the motifs to make their hit, name their product, push the right paranoid button. Everything about the actual configuration of image-making in the world around us speaks to that fact. The system’s notions of image clarity, of image flow and image density—they are all essentially modeled on the parallel (and unimpeded) movements of the logo, the compressed pseudonarrative of the TV commercial, the product slogan, the sound bite. Images are still everywhere telling stories or issuing orders. Web pages, billboards, and video games are just visualizations—magnifications and speed-ups—of this prior and continuing world of the shouted (or whispered) sentence.
And at least [this] bitterness points to a complex of problems which, for the moment, our culture wishes not to recognize. If there is to be a visual art of postmodernity, in other words, I think it will have to begin from [anger, skepticism]. It will have to probe, as Manet and Picasso did, at the concepts that truly organize—that produce—our present fictions of the now. Once upon a time that meant mobility, and the free play of appearances, and the great myth of individuality. Those were Manet’s and Picasso’s raw materials. Nowadays it is the notions of virtuality and visuality. It is time this imaginary was put to the test of form.
