The Limits, Part II: Gratuitous Activity and Avid Complicity

Michael Waugh, the brilliant artist (who exhibits with Schroeder Romero) and Associate Director of one of my all-time favorite alternative art spaces (Momenta Art), offered a thoughtful response to the post on whether there are ultimate limits in art. Mike and I have been friends for years, and he elaborates on his thoughts on his blog here, but I disagree with several of the points he makes in his comment and want to explain which and why. First Mike's comment though:

Schjeldahl's idea that art is “the privileged zone of gratuitous activity” is pretty commonly held, the idea being that art patronage guides art – as it has for millennia. In the modern era, this idea is used to reduce art to a kind of philosophical “play” in which philosophical, moral, formal (etc.) beliefs are “tested,” at best, illustrated (and made accessible so that they can enter the zeitgeist) at worst.

But, Ed, I really thank you for your blog entry because it got me thinking of some connections.

I just finished a biography of Thomas Jefferson, and I’ve been thinking about the revolutionary ideas that exploded across the globe in the 18th century with the French and American revolutions. Before Jefferson, democracy was envisioned as merely overturning the hereditary nature of aristocracy (John Adams and Washington did not believe every citizen deserved a vote because the general population was too dumb). The real revolution happened with Jefferson, in which the abstract democracy held power not an aristocracy. One of the cornerstones of this Jeffersonian change was the evolution of the 4th estate, journalism, as the vital seed that empowered the voters to make decisions and limit the aristocratic pretensions of those in office.

So here’s my point: in a democracy, the rich and the elected are not supposed to hold the ultimate power, an informed public is supposed to wield that power. The “rule of law” referred to by the Leone article has been a phrase behind which the Bush administration has hidden because they have taken it upon themselves to interpret the rule of law, which is not their role ESPECIALLY when faced with “threats of a nature unlike any that it had previously faced” that the law did not foresee.

OK, so how does this relate to art, Burden, and Schjeldahl? Well, there may well be artists who merely produce work for rich patrons – just as there may well be journalists who cater to the ideology of their owners (read: FOX news) or their advertisers. Powerful people, governments, and corporations may well try to (and often succeed) at directing and limiting journalism. But that is in violation of our democratic system.

So it is with art: Powerful people, governments, and corporations may well try to (and often succeed) at directing and limiting art so that art merely reflects the tastes and beliefs of collectors. When this happens, art fails to serve what is supposed to be the seat of power: the people.

What is incredibly troubling to me is that the trajectory begun by the Duchampean impulse has been co-opted so that “avid complicity on the authorities’ part, kept being redrawn to corral the effacements.” This means that many artists have become modern day court jesters, ridiculing or testing the limits of the norms set by the powerful – without challenging the basis of those norms and doing nothing to challenge the undemocratic consolidation of power in this country.

Wealth and heredity were supposed to have been replaced by democracy, by the people. If we hold this truth to be self-evident, then the patronage that artists should seek is not rich collectors but the democracy itself. I don’t think this has ever really been realized: serving the people does not mean making simpering public art. Serving the people should mean that art, like journalism, should help to expose the structures of power that can lead to the un-democratic entrenchment of that power. In the most banal sense, this could mean exposing the random nature of societal norms, shocking people into wakefulness. But once people are awake, a rigorous critique is not just necessary but required.

The problem in the arts, like in the rest of our society, is that the Jeffersonians never envisioned corporations or global capitalism. Just as this 5th estate (corporate capital) has shifted the balance of power in politics and in journalism, it has shifted the nature of patronage in the arts.

The struggle in the arts, in journalism, and in our daily lives is to find a way to put checks on institutionalized power. Mere delight, mere beauty, mere effacement do nothing to serve the patronage of democracy.

I totally agree that journalism's role in our version of "democracy" is to empower "the voters to make decisions and limit the aristocratic pretensions of those in office." I disagree that art is supposed to serve that same role, however. But let me back up.

I understood Schjeldahl's term “the privileged zone of gratuitous activity” to include artists, not only art patrons. In other words, I think by "gratuitous activity" he means art making, not collecting or patronage. The "privileged zone" therefore is the elbow room society (as a whole) and the taste makers in particular give to those who engage in that gratuitous activity. The most influential members of that society as a whole may be the art patrons who fund/support that activity, but even they can't protect an artist who too greatly abuses the privilege (think, again, the Chocolate Jesus artist).

Looking then at Schjeldahl's statement in context:

In pragmatic terms, art is a privileged zone of gratuitous activity, with boundaries maintained by the agreement of the vested authorities. Artists of the Duchampian sort delighted in effacing the boundaries, which, with increasingly avid complicity on the authorities’ part, kept being redrawn to corral the effacements.

I understand Peter to be saying, not that the art is being made solely to please rich patrons, but rather that the vested authorities collectively make decisions that promote/preserve certain efforts by artists and, essentially (if only temporarily), reject others. In other words, when an artist pushes beyond the known boundaries at any given time, the vested authorities can either 1) reject the product or 2) redraw the boundaries to include the new, boundary-breaking work. I personally do this constantly (i.e., redraw my own boundaries to include some new idea into what I consider a worthy exploration or approach to art making). I pride myself on being open minded toward this end. I consider the alternative (limiting my personal boundaries to thereby exclude new or cutting-edge ideas) to be a lapse of responsibility. That doesn't mean anything goes, but it does reflect my belief that the boundaries are (and to my mind, should be) ever-expanding. If an artist jumps out too far ahead of my comfort zone, I'll admit it and reject the work, but to think that I currently possess enough knowledge to conclude my boundaries should be chiseled in stone is antithetical to why I'm interested in art in the first place. Therefore, it's a bit unfair to me, I believe, to suggest I'm in any way attempting to contain or control an artist because of this complicity. Quite the contrary, I'm attempting to give the artist more elbow room (that "privileged zone") in which to attempt his/her gratuitous activity.

But getting back to Schjeldahl's point, this complicity on the part of the authorities does indeed create a crisis for artists, but it's not one of being reduced to a court jester serving at the pleasure of the uberwealthy, but rather of not being able to use transgression (which we've come to expect and, quite frankly, I've come to find tiresome) to distinguish oneself and having to find some less-worn avenue toward attention.

Mike's argument to me boils down to one of his final thoughts: "The struggle in the arts, in journalism, and in our daily lives is to find a way to put checks on institutionalized power."

I respectfully, but wholeheartedly, disagree. The role of art is NOT to put checks on institutionalized power. The role of art may sometimes be to speak truth to that power, perhaps (when addressing the matter at all), but to "find a way to put checks on institutionalized power" is to let an individualized political point of view (and let's face it, no single artist fully understands, let alone represents the will of "the people" [as if that were some definable homogenized majority]) guide the decision-making process in art production to such an extent that the truth will , in all but the very rarest of cases, be compromised, resulting in propaganda, not art.

Having said that, I believe that speaking the truth to the powers that be is an incredible thing for art to be able to accomplish. I believe it's something that art perhaps can do better than other messaging toward capturing the imagination of enough people to effect real change. But if an artist is more interested in change than he/she is in expressing the truth via his/her work, the result will be something less than art, IMO, and won't serve anyone well. Least of all the artist. The tricky thing about expressing the "truth," you see, is it cannot emerge from an individualized political point of view. It cannot emerge from a position that dictates its role is to check the power of corporations or authoritarian governments. It can only emerge from objective analysis, an honest expression of the whole picture, and that rarest of gifts only a few possess, insight. A good dose of talent doesn't hurt either, but....