11.07.1996

Pay-back time

Consider last weeks statement by James Lingwood of the Artangel Trust, the agency for public art:

“Culture has become more recreational. Old habits have been broken. There’s a loss of fear and all sorts of people are now prepared to invest time and energy going to arts because they rightly think they will get something back.”

The struggle between the popular and the avant-garde has been a central aesthetic problem for the 20th century. Where, to some, movements like futurism, dada, surrealism and the situationists have contained the creative hopes of humanity, to others they represent fragmented anarcho-bohemia, pulling against the progressive forces of mankind.

Theodor Adorno has written that they “both are torn halves of an integral freedom - to which however they do not add up”. This partially explains, whilst introducing a further problem - if they are halves, why don’t they add up? It is the interstices between the two halves that most post-war aesthetics has concentrated on.

It has been the attempt to make the halves fit that has culminated in post-modernism. In crude terms, this ‘ism’ has arrested avant-garde’s antagonistic relationship to capitalism, secularised it and bought it into the public domain. For some this has seemed like the end of art; for others it has put life into contemporary cultural practice. It walks a tightrope by playing capitalism at its own game - instead of mirroring capitalist alienation in its artistic practice, it endeavours to be as wantonly part of the cultural landscape as possible. It is no surprise that architecture in Las Vegas provided the lead for this.

Crucially though, postmodernism fails in its attempt to be always present by having to raid the past for its inspiration - in its deal with the market, today’s art has given up the rights for the future. And without the future, culture stagnates and becomes “more recreational” - works of art can no longer be consumed as art but only as objects of utility.

This is the sinister meaning lurking behind James Lingwood’s phrases - “Old habits have been broken”, “loss of fear” and “getting something back”. Without any vision of the future or meaning in the present, culture is doomed to endlessly regurgitate the past - a process that congeals farce into kitsch.

Phil Rudge