Flannery O’Conner stated that you could not understand the
modern world without understanding nihilism’s central role in moving and
shaping modernity. She said it was the
air we breathed. As a Catholic I assume she felt that we cannot base the way
we live on either the positivism of science or superficial societal strictures
of what is good and bad. I am not very knowledgeable about Catholic doctrine
but I know unlike the Protestants they believe in original sin and from what I
recall of St Augustine’s “Confessions” you can only overcome it through the
grace of God. To say that we are all nihilists is tantamount to saying we start
out our lives as fallen from grace.
That a devout Catholic living in the conservative 1950’s South
should find herself as Andy Warhol’s intellectual bedfellow only proves the
pervasiveness of the nihilistic strains that permeate our world. These
nihilistic experiences seem to hit us from different directions but genealogically
have the same origin. Warhol’s fame as an artist was due to his understanding
of the role that mass media played in our perception of self; that we are no
longer individuals relating to a small community but have been abducted by
alien forces as it were into the universe of the electronic media. If O’Conner
can acknowledge the nihilism of society and express its fallenness, then could it
be said that Warhol shares with her the same sense of our fallen condition and sees
our mediated condition as a false transcendence?
So how to connect the dots that place O’Conner and Warhol in
the same nihilistic world? Warhol picked up that mass media provides a sort of
transcendence to the ordinary. On the one hand to be lifted up out of one’s
existence and forced into the media is like being reborn in the human
condition, a double dose of nihilism and fallenness. The fifteen minutes of
fame implies transcendence of our mortal coils but only for a moment before we
fall back into the banal. Is Warhol a theologian
of banality?
When I wrote about Guyton and Kassay, in my article on
Zombie Art, who produce ice-cold replicas of High Modernist art, I detected that the
only way to get a grasp on these artist’s success was to see the correspondence
between the nihilist air we breathe and their total lack of anxiety about being
a simulacrum of another person’s style. I threw in some gratuitous rhetorical
flourishes, that painted these artists as being a sort of cultural dead end. But
if you are a nihilist then dead ends are where you want to be. Especially when
you take Stella’s work, which is part of the scientifically based positivist
strain of modernism that looks for building blocks, “sine qua non”s and
relation of parts to the whole, and then bleed it dry so that the copy is a pale memory of the original. What is intriguing is that there are
contemporary artists who paint images similar to Guyton, but who are descendants
of the positivist line of Held, Stella and de Kooning.
David Row and Craig
Stockwell are two artists who come to mind. In the case of Row his work has its
origins in Held and de Kooning. In Stockwell I see Brice Marden. I think
they want the viewer to visually and intellectually experience an event, a movement
of rhythms in time and space, painting that still captures the energy, like the
events that are caught on an x ray in a scientific experience. It is
very Aristotelian. Concepts like energy, time and movement are crucial to their self-understanding.
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| Craig Stockwell |
But the art scene moves quickly and although these descendants of
High Modernism are successful, they are not at the center of the cultural
radar. The name of Raphael Rubinstein comes up often as an apologist for a new
movement he calls “Provisional Painting”. Around the end of the last decade, he
noticed a distinct artistic style, when he made the rounds of galleries and
artist’s studios in New York. It was abstract (Mary Heilmann, Aldrich), mildly
ironic(Christopher Wool) and unabashedly derivative (Stanley Whitney) and in no way wanted
to surpass its influences. He curated a show on the abstraction of the 80's this past year at Cheim and Read to convey that this movement was more than just a recent phenomena, but had its antecedent in the work of for example
Joan Snyder and Jonathan Lasker, although some such as Snyder are incredibly earnest and only look provisional. I suspect, that like Greenberg’s ideas on abstraction
in the Fifties, it got codified and became a self -fulfilling prophecy, where
the artists outside of the movement (if you can call it that) start to think
that this is the new wave to emulate and its ideas begin to infect the academy
and its MFA mills.
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| Stephen Mueller |
What I find astonishing is there is no reference to nihilism
in the samples of his writing, that have appeared on line. If he had read
Vattimo, a contemporary Italian philosopher, who came up with the notion of "weak thought" or "weak ontology", he would have understood the NY scene deductively, so that what was
happening in NY, was already part of the nihilistic
universe that Flannery O’Conner observed. The post–modern condition has its
source in Nietzsche’s vision that God is dead, which takes on more meaning if
you see that he also sees that metaphysics or any
vision of the world where there are absolute truths is dead. However, as a hermeneutician, Vattimo
thinks that thought is backward looking as well as forward looking, so that it
will never abandon the metaphysical tradition completely. The metaphysical past
will always haunt us as something that is still embedded in our language and institutions.
Is not this what is happening with “Provisional Painting”? The edict, that was
handed down from on high that painting is dead, meant that
painting as embodying metaphysical absolutes was past. But can we stop
painting? Can we stop interpreting the past? Is the will to say something about
one’s experience of the world at an end and is not abstraction in its
manifestations in the 20th century full of bits and pieces of
language that we can “bricole” with. You don’t have to espouse the absolutism
of Held or Stella to borrow from their playbook. Vattimo says that traces of that
metaphysics linger that are absolutely crucial to our existence. We can still believe
in the power of the self to envision the world without espousing a
powerful sense of Being and Truth, hence “weak ontology”.
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| Mary Heilmann |
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| Jonathan Lasker |
I think working inductively creates problems for Rubenstein,
when he tries to extrapolate back to Matisse, Bonnard and Giacometti the
provisionality of his acolytes. He sees an erasure in Matisse and assumes he
is only problematizing what he is doing. But Matisse’s work grew out of a quest for
scientific truth, where color has power to push and pull optically. He created
positive visual events as does Row and Stockwell, and, if he erases something, it
is only to bring him closer on his path to a cognitive whole. Genealogically, the late cutouts of Matisse lead right into Rothko and on to the minimalism of Ellsworth Kelly. Giacometti struggles
to pin things down from his existential point in space .The more he tries to
capture what he sees, the further away it moves from him. Nothing provisional
about that. He is a phenomenologist of the experience of man under the Lacanian
gaze of the other. The world provisional sounds so flaccid. How can you not
feel the deep anxiety and sense of failure in Giacometti’s work? Some of the contemporary artists thrown into this bag of provisionalism tell Rubinstein there is nothing
provisional about their work. But little of Giacometti’s angst is to be seen in
the artists that Rubinstein espouses. Vattimo’s “weak thought” would be a
perfect concept to encapsulate where painting is in Rubinstein’s provisional
world. Vattimo sees a weak connection to Being in a positive light as a sort of
enlightened nihilism. As in Richard Rorty’s world, we at best bounce off of each
other interpretively and creatively, to establish horizons of meaning without
insisting that our values are superior. Vattimo
even claims that these are the characteristics of Nietzsche's Superman. When taken in
the context of what Malcolm Bull sees as Vattimo’s misunderstanding of
Nietzsche, we can see that the problem with provisionalist painting today is the
ironic weakness it espouses.
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| Schnable and Aldrich |
For Nietzsche interpretation is evidence of the will to
power.” It is a means of becoming the master of something.” Bull says: ”Interpretive
failure occurs when someone ‘no longer
has the strength to interpret’ for ‘exhaustion changes the aspect of things, the
value of things’. For Nietzsche interpretation and value creation are inseparable.
Whereas the strong ‘involuntarily give to things and see them fuller, more
powerful and pregnant with future… the exhausted diminish and botch all they
see-they impoverish the value’. It is hard to knock a movement that controls
the gallery scene and gets top dollar for its work, but it is only in the
context of galleries with high ceilings that the work takes on any heft.
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| Stanley Whitney |
In a
“Brooklyn Rail” interview Rubinstein sees the
provisional movement as a reaction to the slickness of work by Currin, Koons
and Murakami. I have observed this sort of reactive event in the New York scene
several times over.
Chuck Close comes to New York looking to stand out from the
minimalist crowd, and, according to an urban legend, espouses
photorealism as a means to this goal. Neo- Expressionists react to minimalism
and some of them like Schnable survive to be part of the provisionalist
reaction to world wide corporate slickness. So it goes the agonic battle
between generations. To know that it all functions under the umbrella of
nihilism would be a good critical tool that would help critics understand the
different strains of nihilism and maybe put the fire in the belly of the next
generation to overcome the shadow it casts on all we do.
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| Snyder |
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