The question is not whether such vapid contemporary
practices as installation, performance, “big photography” and the like are
valid forms of creative expression, dependent though they are on a kind of
literal-minded, overeducated, flatfooted verbal elaboration (the wall text, the
audio tour, the credential-fetishizing CV), but why these synthetic rituals
merit our attention at the expense of drawing, painting and sculpture. Why have
these “new” practices attached themselves, like a cancer, to the visual arts, and
not to the performing arts, or to creative writing?
One can still read a book on paper, Kindle, or ipad, and
still expect proper spelling and punctuation. But hardly any visual artist of any art historical stature (and there is no other kind) since
Jackson Pollock has bothered to study perspective or anatomy. Life drawing,
that quaint empirical practice of delineating the present nude human figure (to
say nothing of the a priori drawing of invention and/or from memory the
Old Masters had mastered), has persisted in art schools for the past several
decades not with the ambition that students master the tradition so much as to
demonstrate how hard, if not impossible, it is to create an image the old fashioned
way. Indeed, a semester or two of such inevitable frustration is as much as anyone
can be expected to take before retreating permanently into video or the auratic
manipulation of space (the kind for which one has to be there), or, to do what
art students have always done at art schools since the Beatles: form a band.
Marxian contemporary theorists, impotent to further the Withering
Away of the State or to facilitate the Dictatorship of the Proletariat, have
succeeded at least in one revolutionary project: shooting the wounded in the
image wars. The humble draughtsman, the last proletarian, agent of the
bourgeoisie, reduced to the slavery of advertising and illustrating children’s
story books since the nineteenth century, routed by photography and ethnically
cleansed by digital editing software, suffer the final genocide at the hands of
superstar curators and Distinguished Professors of Contemporaneity. Herded into
the internment camps of Madison Avenue while photography was still monochrome, even that reservation has disappeared
as “art directors” have long since lost the ability even to sketch on the back
of a napkin. We no longer go to the gallery to see anything as primitive as
marks made on surfaces by actual human beings, but to see aesthetic experiences
manufactured by expensive machines (“new media”), enabled by the linguistically
adept with exegetical texts. Theory furthers the conquest of Capital at the
expense of the human, just to prove it can accomplish something. When the
revolution comes, one will be able to hunt in the morning, fish in the
afternoon, rear cattle in the evening, criticize after dinner, but no longer be
able to draw a straight line (no one has done that anyway since before the
Frankfurt School moved out of Germany). O, Brave New World!
Histories of modern art are written as if the public lost
its appetite for representation and figuration before 1900. This ignores the fact
that illusion has never enjoyed a stronger (long) century. The average eyeball
today spends more time than ever looking at pictures than actual reality, but
God forbid those illusions should be drawn by hand. Puritanical Christianity,
Talmudic Judaism, and aniconic Islam, those warring Ibrahimic religions, at
least can agree on one thing: Thou Shalt Make No Graven Images—by hand. Click,
cut, and paste –that’s okay. But paper and pencil are the Devil’s implements. Even
comic books and “hand-drawn” animation, those last bastions of the analog, are
so larded with faux hand-lettered fonts, Photoshop coloring, and vector-based
smoothness that all evidence of the hands has been processed out, sanitized,
sterilized. Why force a child into a life of cultural disadvantage by giving
them a box of crayons and construction paper? Start them off with a digital
device right away—this will make them better consumers, further deplete the
planet’s fossil fuels, exacerbate the internal contradictions of Late
Capitalism, and hasten the Future Communist State.
In 2004, Rosalind Krauss declared that charcoal was dead,
while attendees at a contemporaneity conference, with their inert ballpoint pens
and legal pads, scribbled down her every word. In 2010, Thom Mayne told an
auditorium full of Carnegie Mellon architecture students that drawing was
romantic, but completely irrelevant to what was happening in (important) architecture
today. (I happened to have witnessed both utterances.) Artists who once
illustrated the Painted Word (that cheesy, dated text by Tom Wolfe) now produce
conversation pieces for Frederic Jameson. Otherwise, they are effaced by Art History;
just ask Arthur C. Danto or Boris Groys. Drawing has been reduced to something
a few of us do in our sketchbooks for self-expression, like diarists compelled
to transcribe their innermost thoughts, or poets who never expect their poems
to be read by other human beings. Drawing by hand has no place in contemporary
art, which may be defined as works which have no reason to exist other than for
theoretical interpretation: a mixture of bad art and bad philosophy. (Which
gives rise to the question: Is it more important for a contemporary artist to
be bad at art, or bad at philosophy?)
One has to wonder how humanity, completely devoid of the
ability to draw, can be understood as being more human than before. What can account for the utter hostility
of the logos to the traditional hand-generated image? Why are we inclined to accept
the cold, hard, indifferent document produced by the camera (even when it is blatantly
manipulated, edited, processed a dozen different ways) as truth, but regard the
illusion produced by the hand of the artist at the ol’ drawing board as apostasy?
How is the twenty-first century mind improved by art that sucks (i.e., is not worth
looking at)? How did things get so bad? Such a circumstance can only be attributed to the emaciated
condition the various illusion-generating technologies of modernity have left
the vulnerable craft of drawing, susceptible now to the pernicious
bullying of the verbally adept but otherwise politically impotent.
[Another way of stating this is: Why must (visual) art history necessarily end up with a shark in a tank of formaldehyde or the mind-numbing fully automated (and mindless) spectacle of the Visionarium variety, but the histories of music, drama, cinema, literature and other forms of creative expression go on, business as usual, as unmolested outlets of humanism? Why do they get to have all the fun while art historians are saddled with such a depressing, unhappy ending? What is it about drawing that gets under the skin of those who are able only to think in words?]
[Another way of stating this is: Why must (visual) art history necessarily end up with a shark in a tank of formaldehyde or the mind-numbing fully automated (and mindless) spectacle of the Visionarium variety, but the histories of music, drama, cinema, literature and other forms of creative expression go on, business as usual, as unmolested outlets of humanism? Why do they get to have all the fun while art historians are saddled with such a depressing, unhappy ending? What is it about drawing that gets under the skin of those who are able only to think in words?]
Let installation continue. Let theory continue. Let the
myriad practices of “new media” continue. And let them go on being celebrated
in temporary biennials that take over resort cities and find housing in repurposed, formerly dilapidated urban buildings in rundown neighborhoods. The
overeducated are entitled to their art too, and certainly their little occasions
for wine and cheese (where else can they all dress in black?). The question, I
repeat, is not the validity of these (pseudo-) intellectual enterprises, but
why this scourge has been visited upon the quaint, workmanlike picture gallery, apparently sparing other
forms of creative expression. After all, one doesn’t
get hit over the head with October when one attends a musical comedy, and one certainly doesn’t expect to have Critical Inquiry shoved up their ass when one goes to the movies (even an art film), ordinarily. But it sure as hell is inescapable in public venues for the once-analog
visual arts.
Since they’re not really being used, a modest
proposition: Surrender the galleries and museums to those to whom they properly
belong, artists who draw (and paint and sculpt). Assuming, in our unabated modernity, these can still be found.
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