The ‘journalist’ Nick Cohen has set his poisoned pen to the murky world of modern art and come up with an article of the most boring, repeated non-specialist opinion that basically translates to ‘it’s in a museum, how can it be subversive and oh also where are the paintings? i like the mona lisa do you have that one?’
‘As a writer on the Observer,’ he points out, ‘I oppose racism of all kinds. Of course I do. Yet even the most tolerant journalist would be hard-pressed to deny that Bourriaud is the type of French intellectual who makes the English wish the Channel was a thousand miles wide.’ I’d be willing to dismiss this as a (trying-to-be) funny comment if not for his following it with a reduction of Nicolas Bourriaud’s 14-page essay that opens the book on Altermodern: Tate Triennial, to ‘In short, Monsieur Bourriaud believes that he is not French.’ (Altermodern is a theory concerned with globalisation). This is the absolute worst kind of reduction; the kind that views any philosophy or theory (read: continental theory) with suspicion unless it has ‘evidence’ or ‘application to the real world’ when at its best, philosophy should (as Deleuze and Guattari said), create concepts, provoke, and transform the history of thought. That is its power and greatness, and it is the enduring legacy of post-1968 conceptual art that it engages with this history of thought! Cohen’s unwillingness to engage with theory and philosophy resounds throughout his article, but lacks consistency. While Cohen rubbishes Bourriaud for a lack of empirical data (‘His theory, unsupported by anything as mundane as evidence…’), he goes on to rubbish Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri without seemingly having read the book, a far more pernicious crime: ‘Bourriaud quotes with approval the pseudo-leftist line of political philosophers Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri that anyone in the postmodern – sorry, Altermodern world who is against America or the West is somehow a radical worthy of support.’ This doesn’t sound like any Hardt and Negri I’ve ever read, in fact, it’s pretty far from any of their arguments. Would it have killed him to have cited a source or used a quotation? It is fitting, I suppose, for a man who once lumped together Nietzsche and Heidegger as ‘Nazi philosophers’ [1] (let’s be clear: one was affiliated with the Nazi party, the other lived half a century earlier).
But listen, I can live with that. I’m used to it in Nick Cohen’s articles. I’m worried about something else. Cohen makes some interesting arguments w/r/t the ‘two forms of modern art,’ private sector art (epitomised by Damien Hirst) and public sector art (everyone Bourriaud likes), however, there is a worrying implication in his statement: ‘(The Tate) does not show art for oligarchs, but art which can be theorised at conferences and taught at the universities.’ On the surface this seems perfectly reasonable. Why should art merely be for the academy? Isn’t art for everyone? Yet, for me, this statement contains an unfortunate anti-intellectual undercurrent. Those who study art in universities, who teach it, theorise it, write about it, think about it constantly, have passionate love affairs with certain works, in short, live it, why should they not be allowed a deeper intellectual engagement with the stuff to which they’ve devoted their lives? Why do we instantly think suspect any work that requires a bit of reading to reveal hidden (and multiple) meanings beyond the optic? Because, one of the qualities of thinking is that in many ways it is very similar to working. In no way am I trying to dismiss aesthetic pleasure as a quality of the artwork, but rather I am arguing that aesthetic pleasure is but one of the many things that can make an artwork vital, worthy, provoking, wonderful. The debate over relational aesthetics, as argued, I think, respectfully, by Claire Bishop and Grant Kester and others, doesn’t even come into this. It’s instead something a bit more dismissive and sweeping. It’s similar to Laura Cumming’s review (also in the Observer), where she states: ‘Bourriaud talks a lot about time and space… in fact, he just means history and geography’ [2]. No, he doesn’t. Nor would anyone familiar with a basic understanding of Doctor Who. In the way that anyone who now says Tracy Emin’s bed isn’t art because ‘it’s just a bed’ seems laughably conservative, I wonder if the British broadsheet reviews of the current Tate Triennial will seem like similar museum pieces (with the exception, possibly, of Adrian Searle’s).
Back to Cohen, his central point, that ‘the central claim of the Tate, and indeed, nearly all public sector art promoters that such work is subversive now feels absurdly dusty’ is a cause for concern. It’s something to think about. I don’t remember Bourriaud making the case that Altermodern was meant to be subversive at all, but if he did, we should consider and discuss this. But why did Cohen have to illustrate this point with a tedious reference to Duchamp and then: ‘The sight of a watercolour would be far more transgressive.’ All I hear are echoes of ‘my 5 year old could have painted that…’
Lost in all this, of course, are all those potential viewers who will be turned off by the reviews, and their seeming assertion that it’s all ideas and nothing to look at. But one of the highlights of the Tate Triennial for me was Scottish artist Charles Avery’s series of drawings and maps, which are the some of the wildest, most intense images I’ve seen in a long time.
In any case, the Cohen article is here:
http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2009/mar/01/tate-britain-bourriaud-art-market
Take a look at the comments section – it’s good to see that at the very least, Nick Cohen has once again sparked a nice little debate, and that the boring, modern art sympathisers like me are chiming in.
[1] http://nickcohen.net/2006/10/02/free-and-singular/
[2] http://www.guardian.co.uk/artanddesign/2009/feb/08/altermodern-tate-britain-triennial-2009
Hello there!
Easy, Tiger!
Hello, thank you for visiting Dangerology online. I know I have ignored our (online) relationship, I never even texted you or anything, but I just got into this thing, you know, where I was doing shows every night, and never producing any new work… you know the score.
