In
February of 2005, a fellow named Christo made
news for putting several thousand bright
orange gates in central park. It was a simple,
repetitive gesture, which is the big thing in
the art world these days, and, according to
the press coverage I saw, art lovers loved it.
I have not seen a poll asking whether the
average man on the street thought highly of it
or not; most of the people I spoke to thought
it was a great idea, and some were thinking of
actually traveling to New York just to see it.
I didn't make the trip myself; somehow the
eight-hour commute seemed too high a price
to pay for the chance to see central park
decked out like an Olympic slalom course. It
might have been my loss. After all,
something that massive, boldly cutting a
swath through the ordinary with an artistic
machete you don't get to see everyday.
People may have seen it as simply quirky, or
even liberating, and there did seem to be no
shortage of people on news reports seen
placidly strolling among the gates rapt in
wonder as if entranced by the opportunity to
experience that rarest of all things--an
adult fairyland.
Christo didn't get what he most wanted,
which was the chance to get into a big fight
with the city bureaucracy. They sagely
told him that they thought his proposal was
a great idea and to just go ahead with it.
Christo had already managed to get the
German Reichstag wrapped in plastic over
official protests and was responsible for
that long fabric fence in Northern
California, so he had a record of getting
governmental officials to bow to his
irrepressible artistic will. It could be
that New York just didn't want to spend the
money on legal battles. Or maybe they just
have more imagination.
One thing New
Yorkers didn't have to worry about was who
was going to pay for this art. Christo pays
for it himself out of the proceeds of the
art he is able to sell. He has quite a few
admirers and supporters as befits someone
who likes to make a big splash through bold
gestures and it allows him to circumvent the
biggest obstacle of all to the installations
of gargantuan art: public funding. It gives
Christo's art some integrity. He may be
forcing the people who visit central
park or who live nearby to see his exhibit
whether they want to or not, but he is not
forcing them to pay for it.
But it is Christo's wife, Jeanne-Claude, who
gave us all something to chew on. She made a
comment after the installation was unveiled
that seems consistent with the similarly
bullheaded artistic partner of a bullheaded
artist's character. She was asked what the
art was for. And she replied "We are
creating works of joy and beauty. Like all
works of art created by all other artists,
it is only a work of art. It has no purpose.
It is not a symbol. It is not a message."
On behalf of all other artists, I'd just
like to say: thanks a lot, Jeanne-Claude.
You have, for starters, given hungry
legislators just the ammunition they need
to cut art programs in schools all across
this country.* And you have played right
into the typical man-on-the-street
attitude that art really isn't that
important. It has no purpose,
after all! Artists of all stripes have
often struggled for recognition or simply
for financial survival in a society that
thinks they ought to be doing something
important with their lives like--I don't
know...commerce! Selling stuff. To
have read of the number of artists through
history who were shunned because they
weren't doing something that mattered to
merchant and upper classes is to take a
tour through the history of snobbery--not
artistic snobbery, but the snobbery of
folks who, while understandably impressed
with the power of trade and manufacture to
improve their lives through financial
gain, ended up worshipping the
accumulation of wealth and coupled this
attitude with a palpable contempt for
anybody who thought there were other
things in life that were just as
important, such as the cultivation of
intellectual and spiritual life. It
is, and has been, a typical attitude,
particularly in places where industry and
technology are making impressive strides,
where the all-too-human response has been
that what does not give an easily
discerned boost to the bottom line is,
after all, not really that important.
Keeping in mind that this sometimes
includes human beings as well as what is
going on inside their minds.
Arthur Loesser wrote a very interesting
social history about the piano and people
who played it. Particularly relevant here
are the chapters on England after the
industrial revolution. He relates how many
fine concert pianists were unable to gain
acceptance for doing what they did so
extraordinarily well (we're not talking
about mediocrities here, these are people
who, if they could throw a baseball in
today's America half as well as they could
play the piano back then in Europe
would be millionaires)...instead, some went
into the manufacture of pianos to gain some
legitimacy, or became merchants of
piano-related paraphernalia. At least one
pianist was only granted permission to marry
a merchant's daughter on the condition that
he stop playing the piano, which the family
considered unbecoming a gentleman. After
about a dozen episodes of this sort of
thing, Loesser finally loses patience and,
in place of his usual linguistic virtuosity
and biting wit, writes of yet another
pianist being lured from his art "by that
bustling b@$%!-goddess commerce"!
Of course the history of this belittling
attitude toward art would take up several
more essays, but rest assured, 21st century
America is replete with it. Just recently I
overheard one student counsel another about
a projected course overload "be sure to drop
art before you drop a real
course." I suspect at least 90% of
Americans would agree with this sentiment,
and think nothing of it.
Now I'm perfectly willing to grant the
premise that your art has no
purpose, Jeanne-Claude. That's certainly up
to you. But then you have to go and throw in
the phrase "all other art by
all other artists" by which you
presume to speak for everybody, living and
dead, who has ever created a work of art!
Not that this is anything new. Lots of
bullheaded artists past and present, claimed
to speak on behalf of everybody, because
naturally, their ideas about the role of art
were the only true ones. It doesn't
surprise me that you would take this
opportunity to educate everybody about what
art is, particularly since there are so many
diverse--I mean, wrong, opinions out there
among the populace, and even other artists.
It must be tough being the only person who
knows what's going on.
I know why you did it, though. There is an
ideological war going on and you just
couldn't resist joining in. There are
artists whose work is laden with symbols,
with meanings, overt and hidden, who have a
programme, a message. Sometimes it gets to
the point where the art is mere propaganda,
where the art itself is not art but merely a
not very well cobbled tool for an intolerant
ideology or an authoritarian ruler. There
was a time when such art was on the
ascendancy, and some artists wondered aloud
whether such tendencies were destroying the
quality of art, and the rest told them to
shut up. Even today museum-goers scratch
their heads when told that everything they
see actually stands for something else and
that to understand art they need intimate
knowledge of the philosophic system from
which it sprang. The twentieth century in
part gave us a nice respite from this
over-intellectual but artistically
impoverished tendency and it is nice
sometimes to be able to rest our heads and
simply take joy in what is beautiful and not
ask what brought it about. Let us put away
these bothersome words and look at the world
with the pleasant innocence of children not
yet burdened with the pale cast of thought.
But there
is a problem with this philosophy as with so
many others. Messages in art have given rise
to an abundance of over-cleverness and
arcane idiocy. They have also allowed
artists to speak of things that could not be
adequately explored in words. They have
given artists the ability to communicate
with a society that would not listen to
broad polemics and speeches. Artists living
under totalitarian regimes have been able to
speak out in the only way that will not get
them killed (and even then it may be a dicey
proposition). Artists living under
oppression and in poverty have shown us the
inherent joy of living mixed up with the
tragedy of their social conditions; of
persecution, of war. They have spoken in a
multi-dimensional medium that penetrates us
to our core, and for those few who are
willing, disturbs and profoundly changes us
in a way that only that strange mixture of
fantasy and reality that we call art can.
I don't know if you considered any of that
when you made your statement,
Jeanne-Claude. Enemy combatants in a war
frequently don't give much thought to what
they are destroying in their zeal to get
at their foe.* Your vision of art
has something to recommend it. Putting
away stale symbols and heavy-handed
messages and simply enjoying with the
senses what is before one is certainly one
way to love art. But art need not always
be beautiful. It need not be intoxicating.
When
the Berlin wall fell, the unified Germany
celebrated with what has become one of its
most important artistic symbols--Beethoven's
Ninth Symphony. The Finale exhorts in the
words of the poet Schiller that "All men are
brothers"; Beethoven choose that moment to
slow the tempo down radically and over the
perhaps sappy solo violin the chorus sings
this moral in hushed tones just before the
final joyous outburst that concludes the
Symphony. Beethoven believed very deeply in
this vision for mankind and he would have
produced a very different work of art if he
hadn't.
Similarly, the religious works of Bach are
steeped in symbolism and doctrinal meaning.
While it is still possible to enjoy the
music on a purely aesthetic level without an
understanding of the philosophies that drove
its composition, I would not presume to tell
Bach that those things didn't matter. Nor
should we assume that having such things
present in art weakens the art; surely not
in the case of these two men!
In the twentieth century, soviet artist
Dmitri Shostakovich commented that "there
can be no art without propaganda." As he was
living in fear of Joseph Stalin it is hard
to know whether he actually meant these
words--art was being made to serve the state
then, and Shostakovich was surely saying
what the communist party wanted to hear.
Whatever prompted the comment, it is hard
for me to escape the conclusion that in some
regard he was right. Particularly when one
notes how hard it is for a simple comment,
no matter how innocently intended, seems
connected (at least in the minds of its
critics) with a whole slew of underlying
assumptions and philosophic postulates.
Thus, however much Jeanne-Claude might wish
to liberate art from ideology, I can't help
but detect a strong whiff of nihilism in her
statement. A sense that art must be scrubbed
clean from anything human the way racial
terminology in this country is changed with
each generation out of a sense that each
term is soon wrecked by the pejorative
meanings that hateful and bigoted persons
practice upon it.
Of course I must also present a vigorous
defense of Jeanne-Claude. It may be no
accident that she is French, and our two
representatives of ideological mean in art
were German. Germany during the 19th century
was virtually the capital of meaning,
symbolism, and ultimately religion in
and then as art. Wagner's art in
particular served as a replacement for
religion, with disastrous consequences. As
Hitler swept through Europe, armed with the
music of his favorite composer, whose music
became (not innocently) a symbol of
fanatical racial and ethnic views, France
particularly (which had until the German
invasion changed its mind practically
worshipped Wagner), and then the rest of the
world, recoiled from this horror in art as
it reflected on humanity. Surely it was time
to separate art from the service of such
horrid ideals as this.
But to remove all that is human from art
because it can sometimes be bent towards
evils like this? Should we end the rule of
law because there are sometimes bad laws, or
corrupt judges? If art is to mean nothing at
all, is it really of much use? But you've
already answered that question,
Jeanne-Claude.
I think your husband had a wiser answer to
the reporters at the press conference. In
your defense, those reporters were probably
pinheads who, although blissfully ignorant
of the larger issues at stake in the history
of art and the purposes it has been made to
serve, they had probably heard somewhere
that art was supposed to mean something, and
like the good pseudo-intellectuals they
serve, they figured there was a hidden code
in this work and that the ones in the know
needed the code in order to keep their place
as the ones in the know. Like many artists
Christo seemed to know that this approach is
really a shortcut for really standing before
a work of art and allowing it to affect us
in a way we cannot know until we've done it.
It is like trying to get the answers rather
than working out the problems for ourselves.
Here is what he said:
"This
project is not about talking. You need to
spend time, walking, cold air, sunny day,
rainy day, even snow. It is not necessary to
talk. You have to spend time, experience the
project."
I have a lot more sympathy for this
statement. It sounds like it was made by a
real artist and not a rabid disciple. It
doesn't presume to tutor us on what should
be excluded from our appreciation of art or
life. It is much less assuming. It says
simply you need to be there. The art can't
tell you anything unless you bother with it,
are perhaps bothered by it. The reporter who
wrote up the press conference in The Sun
missed this entirely. Disappointed that its
creator wasn't revealing the work's secrets
in convenient sound-bites, she chalked up
the remark to, I suspect, typical artist's
loathing to give away too much. As if he
could.
Jeanne-Claude, on the other hand, wasn't
using this ignorance as an opportunity to
invite contemplation but as a chance to
fight more battles. She seems like one of
those groupies that are constantly
clustering around artists that are making
noise in the world and is fighting with
words against everything she thinks is a
threat to his vision, including (with a
special relish) other artists.
It
brings to mind an anecdote concerning
another French artist, early 20th century
composer Claude Debussy. Debussy had,
through no fault of him own, a group of
vituperative supporters, so-called
"Debussyites." One day a friend of his
said to him "Claude, these Debussyites
really annoy me." Debussy's response is
illuminating: "Annoy you? They are killing
me!"
But if Christo's comment seems a bit vague,
a disappointment to those who can't wait for
the publication of Artistic Meaning for
Dummiestm the words of an
American composer might prove even more apt.
Aaron Copland studied in France during the
early part of the last century. His words
don't insist on art as an ideological
battering ram, but he doesn't dismiss the
idea that art has meaning, either:
"The whole problem can be stated quite
simply by asking 'Is there a meaning in
music?' My answer to that would be 'Yes. And
'Can you state in so many words what that
meaning is?' My answer to that would be,
'No'.
That seems to say it all, doesn't it?