ChrisThompson.ca

I discovered this local textile artist almost by accident last year and I return to her Flickr portfolio often to admire these bizarre and imaginative plush creations.  This series is called “Choking Hazard Dolls” and incorporates components from old dolls that have been reworked with found objects and surgically precise stitches. Inspired by cartoons, comic books, international animation, pop-art, sewing accidents, and childhood nightmares. this anonymous Vancouver textile artist has explored the darker side of her creativity.

Scott and I went to Europe in June 2007 and while sightseeing in Amsterdam, I visited the Reflex Modern Art Gallery.  The gallery, small and several blocks from the Rijksmuseum, was exhibiting large photographs of women (and one man) variously standing and sitting alone in modernist interiors.  The photographs were enormous and filled the walls.  I was immediately drawn to the cool tones and slick quality of the images.  I found the portraits, by an artist named Erwin Olaf, variously compelling, peculiar, disturbing and provocative, and when we got back to Vancouver I sought Olaf’s website in order to revisit them at length.

I was nearing the end of a survey course in visual studies and so I decided to put some of what I was learning to use.  I employed Stuart Hall’s theory of representation and its corollary, social constructionism, to analyze this series.  I also engaged Stuart Hall’s notions of viewing positions and adopted what cultural theorists call a negotiated-to-oppositional point of view.  I wanted to examine whether social constructionism would help me appreciate Olaf’s art.  Would enlisting representation theory help identify and decode the conventions and rules employed in the photographs and the impact those conventions have on the ways I perceive and understand Olaf’s art?  Could I sort out why I liked it?

So why use Hall’s theories of representation and viewing positions, why arrange them side by side with social constructionism?  What is the intriguing peculiarity created by yoking together these models of representation into a single configuration?  I was learning that culture is made up of representations, and it would be impossible without them.  Here’s an example of what I’m talking about.  I operate within, am a part of, and must negotiate on a day-to-day basis a mainstream culture which has actively and consistently used ideological and repressive state apparatuses to naturalize and normalize the marginalization of my sexual orientation and to perpetuate a discourse of generally violent homophobia.  I am by nature excluded from a great deal of the heterosexist interpellation and encoding which takes place everywhere all the time and which heterosexuals assume is simply normal or natural, if it’s even noticed at all.  As Hall and his fellow cultural theorists emphasize, all representational systems are implicated in power relations and this is abundantly clear through my gay blue eyes.

In fact, it would be almost pointless to point out that I am particularly interested in and perhaps can’t help but see the operation of power in culture because I identify with and am a part of a marginalized sub-culture—in fact I can go further and suggest that no marginalized person would not actively look at and consider (at length) the marginalizing operations of power.  So I tend to view the world from a somewhat oppositional point of view.  But I am still part of an overwhelming capitalist culture and I am still encoding and decoding signs using a conceptual map that I have been taught and which I share with others.

This reflective posture I was trying to adopt while studying Olaf’s art enabled me to engage such theories of representation as Hall’s, using them as interpretive strategies to describe some of the interactions and relationships between the images I was looking at and power in culture.  I found the process difficult and even a little irritating, but eventually I saw the value in it, and since then I’ve been more aware of how I inevitably operate within a system of constraints that facilitates certain insights and prohibits others in order to effect some control over me.

So.  The photographs.  The modernist interiors which form the background in Olaf’s images drew me into considering formal Modernist concerns such as structure, organizing principles and the arrangement of colour.  There were a total of fifteen Grief photographs on Olaf’s website, seven in landscape format and eight in portrait format.  Grief is, in fact, two series: Grief, composed of the seven photographs in landscape format, and Grief Portraits, composed of the eight photographs in portrait format.  The aspect ratio of the Grief images is 16:9, while that of the Grief Portraits is approximately 3:4.

Attention to modernism includes attention to the décor, the hairstyles and the clothes, all of which seem to reference the early 1960s.  Examining one photograph in particular functioned by synecdoche to describe the series, and I chose the one where a woman with grey hair stands in a pink dress with her face in her hands.  The first observation I made, in fact what first caught my eye, is the furniture—it looks expensive and I want it all.  The richly stained and artistically configured wood of the coffee table and the sumptuous leather and shiny, highly polished stainless steel or chromed metal of the sofa and ottomans suggest affluence and a particular and refined taste.

Though I risk lapsing into soft decor porn, I have to continue and point out that the sofa is reminiscent of a Le Corbusier sofa loveseat, features an external metal frame and cushions of honeycombed honey-brown leather.  The ottomans match the sofa and are aligned with one another at ninety degrees to it.  The lines are clean, straight and precise, but the seats do not look brand new; the leather has the delicious patina of regular use, and there is the impression that someone of not unsubstantial size has perhaps been accustomed to sitting on the right-hand seat on the sofa.  Leaning against the sofa on this side is a dark, thin attaché or portfolio which is only just visible.  It intrigues me.  What secrets are inside, and what cultural program of suspicion compels me to suggest these possibilities?

The woman in the picture is alone and stands somewhat off-centre to the right in the photograph, at approximately the golden ratio.  She is facing the window and turned slightly toward the camera and consequently visible in profile.  Her hair is grey-white and arranged into an elaborately awesome and time-consuming up-do that exposes her neck which seems slightly slack with age.  She is Caucasian, not obese, and in fact what portion of her legs are visible below the hem of her dress suggest, in tandem with its cut, that she is in fine physical shape with an hourglass figure which has withstood the decades.  There is a barrette or hair-band just visible above her forehead.  Her head is bowed, her eyes are closed.  The woman wears a salmon-colored dress of relatively stiff fabric which has long sleeves fitted to high armscyes, a well-tailored bodice, wasp-waist and a full calf-length skirt which is probably worn over crinoline.  The dress is attractive, stylish in a retro sort of way, and well-fitted.

She looks like she’s on the cusp of crying, I see it in the sag of her shoulders and the angle of her head.  There’s no happiness to her stance, no joyous spontaneity to the tilt of her head, no calm peaceful gaze of contemplation resting upon the yard on the other side of the window.  I doubt very much whether she is aware in any meaningful way of the room around her; she seems captivated by thoughts which consume her, ensconced in a throne of melancholy pensiveness which separates her from the world.

I found that a lot of tension is created by the contrast between an evident internal disorder and a pristine, predictable setting.  The subjective and personal clashes with the resolutely objective and impersonal; there seems to be a struggle to contain an emotional catharsis, to repress the expression of emotions which might fracture the illusion of Golden perfection.  I wonder: is this photograph (and the series) a depiction of how a big rich European patriarchy grieves the loss of the patriarch?

Armed with my theoretical tools, I turned my attention back to the study photograph and note that it is a woman in a room.  A woman who looks sad and hopeless.  A woman who is made to look sad and hopeless by the artist.  Never mind any intention that the artist may have; that’s not supposed to be my concern.  My concern is recognizing that the artist has perpetuated a patriarchal discourse on women which presents them as passive direct objects of an undoubtedly male gaze.  It seems unlikely to me that a woman operating in contemporary thrice-post-feminist discourse would consent to photograph a woman in a setting which perpetuates a stereotype or myth of incapacity and immobility in the face of male agency.  Or maybe she would.  Regardless, the woman in the photograph has been cast into a countenance of needing comfort which, I suspect, most people feel unwittingly compelled to offer and this renders her powerless.  Further, I might suspect that there is even a sense of the woman being cast as an accessory, representing yet another successful purchase, another object with a rich and well-documented provenance in the patriarch’s superiorly grand modernist home.  Hers is not to feel or weep or think, even; she seems held back and restrained from outright sobbing by the social expectation that hers is simply to bear children, to bear witness to his rise to power, and to bear the burden of being left behind, all whilst looking fresh and fantastic!

Interestingly, I found myself considering a certain satisfaction which eclipsed the empathy that I trust the dominant-hegemonic viewer feels without reservation.  Here is the image of a woman who is made to seem a wealthy matriarch of a large, attractive family caught in a humbling position of weakness.  Since I am viewing this image from the margin, I might feel some pleasure knowing that her source of power and wealth has been dimmed, if not completely destroyed.  Will her position as a grande doyenne bourgeoise be threatened by the loss of her husband?  Do I consider that a just and fitting reward for a hubris which the privileged are expected to commit?

The woman is wearing long hair which is elaborately styled and a (frankly) gorgeous dress.  The discourse of beauty is in operation here; women must, even when in the throes of despair, wear high heels and sweep up their hair and be ready to anticipate the needs of the world of men around them.  The slick and attractive composition of the image frames it in a desirable and sophisticated glamour.  There is artifice here, and I am forced to wonder: does the artifice extend to her grief?  Does grieving correctly mean that we are to draw the curtains shut and ignore the world?  Are we to isolate ourselves and seek chemical numbness?  Is there a formal programme of grief which we must follow in order for it to be acknowledged as such?  Is the woman truly grieving because she feels grief or does she feel compelled to play a role and secretly rejoice at a sense of patriarchal weight being lifted from her shoulders?

So cultural studies is not supposed to be about answering questions–it’s about asking them.  And there is an expectation from the oppositional side of the viewing spectrum that images require decoding in order to see how power is distributed and knowledge is organized.  By identifying several discourses, such as those of sexuality, consumerism and beauty, and considering how they and other signs in the photograph can be decoded as operatives of dominant and hegemonic ideologies, I tried to examine how grief is represented in this image and how this representation can be codified into a set of conventions and rules of conduct which tell us what to see and, by extension, how to think.  Is there anything I can identify that helps me understand why I like these slick, modern portraits?  Yes, maybe.  I still can’t afford to buy it, though.

Between classes this fall I’ve been writing letters to Bryan Newson, the City of Vancouver Public Art Program Manager, about the hosted light installation by Diana Thater which stretches 149 metres up the side of Vancouver’s downtown waterfront Shaw Tower. It’s a column of LED lights that are computer programmed to dissolve from green to blue, beginning at the base of the tower and stretching uninterrupted to the very tip of the tower.

The light dominates our skyline as seen from Burrard Inlet. It’s a fantastic sight, when it’s not in need of maintenance. There have been gaps in the light for 18 of the last 24 months, burnt out LEDs which Shaw seems to repair too slowly. Since the owner and developer were required to implement the hosted art by the City, I wrote to the City in June 2008 and asked them to compel Shaw to effect some repairs on Diana Thater’s art.

By January 2009 the lights were almost all repaired, but by June even more LEDs needed replacing. If the art installation were smaller, less conspicuous or if it were, in fact, repaired in a more timely manner, I wouldn’t have contacted the City right away about it, but write them I did and they contacted Shaw. Jason Harmston of the Shaw Tower Building Operations responded with a charming and eloquent PR email about how proud the Shaw Tower is to host the art, about the difficulty in obtaining WorkSafe variances for a swing bridge to effect the repairs, about the out-of-warranty hardware…

Basically it’s December 2009 and for 18 of the last 24 months one of the wealthiest corporations conducting business in our community has been derelict in its duty to maintain public art in the very community that sustains its profit margins. It really grinds my gears. What’s the point of public art that falls into immediate and perpetual disrepair? This isn’t dada, this is lightbulbs and laziness, and a complete lack of consideration for the people who live here.

I call my partner Scott an armchair architect because he doesn’t have an architecture degree but he lives, breathes and loves architecture. Scott regularly contributes to forums about architecture and development and he’s thinking about taking some courses in industrial design. His strong and well-developed opinions about what constitutes good design and development are inspiring me to take a closer and more critical look at Vancouver and the buildings that are being erected in our community.

Please write to the City of Vancouver and tell them you want a Vancouver that doesn’t look like its skyline is perpetually in need of maintenance: publicart@vancouver.ca.

Land art or earth art has existed for millennia. Materials such as rocks, sticks, soil, plants and so on are often used, and the works generally exist in the open and are left to change and erode under natural conditions. Particularly large works are sometimes known as earthworks. In most respects land art has become part of mainstream public art. I am especially interested in hill figures, turf mazes, stone-lined labyrinths and geoglyphs.

A hill figure is a large visual representation created by cutting into a steep hillside and revealing the underlying geology. It is especially designed to be seen from afar rather than above. In some cases trenches are dug and filled with rubble made from material brighter than the natural bedrock. The new material is often chalk, a soft and white form of limestone, hence the alternative name of chalk figure for this form of art. The creation of hill figures has been practised since prehistory and can include human (gigantotomy) and animal forms (cutting horses is known as leucippotomy) as well as more abstract symbols and, in the modern era, advertising brands.

Hill figures are common in England: examples include the Cerne Abbas Giant, the Uffington White Horse and the Long Man of Wilmington.

Historically, a turf maze is a labyrinth made by cutting a convoluted path into a level area of short grass, turf or lawn. Some had names such as Mizmaze, Troy Town, The Walls of Troy, Julian’s Bower, or Shepherd’s Race. As a group they were (and still are) commonly known as “mazes”, although the terms “maze” and “labyrinth” are no longer considered interchangeable. Unlike a maze, which is an entertaining puzzle with many dead ends, a labyrinth is unicursal: it consists of one path which twists and turns but leads inevitably to the centre. In some turf labyrinths, the groove cut in the turf is the path to be walked (sometimes marked with bricks or gravel); more commonly the turf itself forms the raised path which is marked out by shallow channels excavated between its twists and turns.

In the past turf mazes were generally confined to Northern Europe, especially England, Germany and Denmark. Hundreds exist elsewhere in Scandinavia, Lappland, Iceland and the former Soviet Union, but their paths were normally marked out with stones, either on grass or on flat areas of bare rock. Some of these stone labyrinths are very ancient.

Geoglyphs are large (generally greater than 4 metres) drawings, designs or motifs produced on the ground, either by arranging clasts (stones, stone fragments, gravel or earth) to create a positive geoglyph (stone arrangement/alignment, petroform, earth mound) or by removing patinated clasts to expose unpatinated ground (negative geoglyph).

I think the most famous negative geoglyphs are the Nazca Lines, gigantic geoglyphs located in the Nazca Desert, a high arid plateau that stretches 53 miles between the towns of Nazca and Palpa on the Pampas de Jumana in Peru. They were created by the Nazca culture between 200 BCE and 700 CE. There are hundreds of individual figures, ranging in complexity from simple lines to stylized hummingbirds, spiders, monkeys, and lizards. The Nazca lines cannot be recognized as coherent figures except from the air. Since it is presumed the Nazca people could never have seen their work from this vantage point, there has been much speculation on the builders’ abilities and motivations.

The largest geoglyph is the Marree Man in South Australia, a particularly unusual example of land art because the artist remains to date anonymous.

The so-called contemporary land art movement was launched in October 1968 by the group exhibition “Earthworks” at the Dwan Gallery in New York. In February, 1969, Willoughby Sharp curated the historic “Earth Art” exhibition at the Andrew Dickson White Museum of Art at Cornell University, Ithaca New York. I think the best known artist who worked in this genre was the American Robert Smithson, whose 1968 essay “The Sedimentation of the Mind: Earth Projects” provided a critical framework for the movement as a reaction to the disengagement of Modernism from social issues, espoused by the critic Clement Greenberg (whom I rather admire). Smith’s best known artwork, and probably the most enduringly famous piece of all land art, is “Spiral Jetty” (1970), for which Smithson arranged rock, earth and algae so as to form a long (1500 feet) spiral-shape jetty protruding into Great Salt Lake in Utah. How much of the work, if any, is visible is dependent on the fluctuating water levels. Since its creation, the work has been completely covered, and then uncovered again, by water.

Many of the artists associated with ‘Land art’ in the 1960s and 1970s had been involved with Minimalism and Conceptual Art but according to the critic Barbara Rose writing in ‘Artforum’ in 1969 had become disillusioned with the commodification and insularity of gallery bound art. The sudden appearance of Land Art in 1968 can be construed as a response by a generation of artists, mostly in their late twenties, to the heightened political activism of the year and the emerging environmental and women’s liberation movements. Much land art from this period was ephemeral in nature and now exists only as photographic documents.

Modern land artists have tended to be American, with other prominent artists in this field including Nancy Holt, Walter De Maria, Hans Haacke, Alice Aycock, Dennis Oppenheim, Michael Heizer, Alan Sonfist, and James Turrell. Turrell began work in 1972 on possibly the largest piece of land art thus far, reshaping the earth surrounding the extinct Roden Crater volcano in Arizona. Projects by the artist Christo (who is famous for wrapping monuments, buildings and landscapes in fabric) have also been considered land art by some, though the artist himself considered this incorrect.

In 1998 a group of artists started a project in Amsterdam called Indoor Land Art Programme – ILAP, and had shows all over Europe. More recently, the artist Seth Wulsin has adopted Caseros Prison in Buenos Aires and its demolition as an art work that, while extending beyond land art, also bares many conceptual resemblances.

Contemporary Australian sculptor Andrew Rogers has created a series of geoglyphs around the world called The Rhythms of Life. The Rhythms of Life project is the largest contemporary land art project in the world – 10 sites in disparate exotic locations located from below sea level to altitudes of 4300 metres. Up to three geoglyphs (each up to 660 feet x 660 feet) are located in each site. By completion the project will have involved up to 5000 people (550 people worked in Bolivia, 852 people in Sri Lanka, and 1000 in China).

I love the timeless and monumental qualities of land art. I can imagine its reinvention a thousand times over during the course of history.

Some interesting books I read while writing this:

Andrews, Max (Ed.). Land, Art: A Cultural Ecology Handbook. London: RSA, 2006.

Beardsley, John. Earthworks and Beyond: Contemporary Art in the Landscape. New York: Abbeville Press, 1998.

Boettger, Suzaan. Earthworks: Art and the Landscape of the Sixties. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2002.

Cook, Lynne and Karen Kelly (Eds.). Robert Smithson: Spiral Jetty. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2005.

A rhetorical contextualization of Brian Jungen’s art within the post-modern paradigm

That the city of Vancouver, and the province of British Columbia as a whole, are promoted by our government both domestically and abroad as Canada’s Pacific gateway to corporate prosperity and profit is an unmistaken and unabashed truism in today’s economy of commoditization.

That Vancouver has also been known as a terminal city, as being the last meager hope at the dead end of the line for generations of predominantly European migrant workers and disenfranchised Canadians is an inevitability of its location at the western frontier of the nation.

Notions of perspective and contradiction are especially relevant when viewing the art of Vancouver’s Brian Jungen. Jungen’s art, which erupted onto the scene about a decade ago, makes provocative use of antipodal perspectives while exploring the post-modern idioms of globalism and pluralism, commodity and value, all the while embodying physical manifestations that have led Jungen to spectacular public impact.

In his pivotal 1962 book The Gutenberg Galaxy: The Making of the Typographic Man, Herbert Marshall McLuhan described how electronic mass media collapses barriers of space and time in human communication, enabling people to live and interact on a global scale. To the contemporary Canadian such a statement is obvious and self-evident at best, but within the contemporaneous context of nascent post-modernism the idea of a Global Village meshed rather cleverly with the emergent art world trend toward juxtaposing elements from popular culture(s) and electronic technology.

Fast forward forty five years, and in the resultant post-modern global art market it is especially commendable when an artist gains critical notice. The sheer size of this global market makes it a rare and especially meritorious event indeed for an artist to achieve popular acclaim and enduring presence in Western cultural memory. To achieve popular and not critical acclaim, of course, art needs to be accessible and attractive to the public. Andy Warhol, for example, responded to this challenge posed by the modern Western capitalist paradigm with pop art. Warhol succeeded by understanding that the modern person exists in a fiscally-driven shopping jungle and that desirable art is art which, amongst its saleable qualities, exists as portable, possessible objects easily recognized and negotiated as commodities.

One of the reasons Brian Jungen has catapulted to fame is this especial Warhol-esque quality which his art possesses and which makes it attractive to the late 20th and early 21st century consumer. That it is made from the same stuff as (modern) dreams is interesting and relevant to the consumer: the ubiquitous plastic lawn chair is metonymy for a split-level in the burbs. The coveted Nike Air Jordans are synechdoche for African American urban überkooldom. The baseball bat is iconic, a metaphor for family recreation and national good-times. The viewer has personal relationships with these objects. The objects have emotional and historical mass which trace gateways into the Californicated topography of our collective cultural memory. That Jungen’s art is composed of these deconstructed commodities which are reconfigured in surprising and unexpected yet aesthetic juxtapositions is genius of a sort that Warhol would approve.

I wrote this after reading Greenberg’s seminal essay Avant-garde and Kitsch which was published in 1939.

Clement Greenberg	Hello Chris.
Chris	Hi Mr. Greenberg, it’s a pleasure to meet you and a little surreal since I was just sitting here in my lush garden on a lovely teak chaise sipping a gin and tonic whilst reading a collection of your works. Am I dreaming?
Clement Greenberg	I see that you just finished reading my seminal first essay “Avant-garde and Kitsch.” What did you think?
Chris	Well, it says here you wrote it in 1939 and it was published that fall in the Partisan Review. (Please, have a seat.)
Clement Greenberg	That’s right. (Thank you.)
Chris	It also says you became an editor of the Partisan Review in January of 1940.
Clement Greenberg	That’s right.
Chris	Hmm.
Clement Greenberg	This is important to you, in some way?
Chris	I’m not sure, let’s come back to that. Anyway, you asked me what I thought of the article. Honestly, I didn’t think it was very readable.
Clement Greenberg	Do you mean that you found it difficult to understand?
Chris	No, although I will admit parts of it left me scratching my head and wondering what the hell you were talking about. Like the ending just came out of left field, all of a sudden you were talking about socialism saving culture or something—
Clement Greenberg	Well remember, first of all, that I wrote the essay in 1939. The Second World War had just begun. The Nazis and the Soviets were in Poland. Italy was fascist. It very much a politically motivated essay, in part a response to the destruction and repression of Modernist Art in Nazi Germany and the Soviet Union and its replacement with state ordained styles of “Aryan” art and “Socialist Realism”.
Chris	Yes, I understand that. I knew that you were closely tied with the American abstract art movement which came to be associated with democracy and social, political and artistic freedom. It was an “American” art-form, a symbol of progress and a brighter future, particularly when practiced by the Abstract Expressionists like your good friend Jackson Pollock.
Clement Greenberg	I think some might actually refer to Jackson as an action painter but yes you’re on the right track.
Chris	So this essay was your grand reveal as an art critic.
Clement Greenberg	I wouldn’t word it quite like that, but this essay was the first to be widely read.
Chris	You start the essay by problematizing the disparity within the frame of a single cultural tradition such as poetry, giving us the example of the difference between a poem by T. S. Eliot and a Tin Pan Alley song, or the disparity within painting by considering the difference between a painting by Braque and a Saturday Evening Post cover. You meant Norman Rockwell’s art by that, right?
Clement Greenberg	Yes.
Chris	Okay. So you make an issue and a fact that there is a huge divide between these similar things. That there is very little in common between a painting by Braque and a painting by Norman Rockwell except that, essentially, they’re both called paintings.
Clement Greenberg	Go on.
Chris	Then you start in on Alexandrianism. I think you’re saying that a mature or static society risks lapsing into artistic sameness, that the same themes end up mechanically varied in a hundred different works, and yet nothing new is ever produced. You give examples like mandarin verse, Beaux-Arts painting and Roman sculpture. It seems like you’re saying that we stay away from controversy and get stuck in a paradigm and don’t change things.
Clement Greenberg	I said there is a risk of that happening. Paradigm, though, is a good way of putting it. Thomas Kuhn?
Chris	Another discussion.
Clement Greenberg	Agreed. I’m going to go fix a gin and tonic. [Returns] So you were taking us through the essay.
Chris	You seem to say that around the same time Marxism was being developed and broadcast to the European intelligentsia, which I might add was also when photography was beginning to demonstrate its superior ability to literally represent a subject, a part of Western bourgeois society took this information and these changes and produced something new: bohemia and avant-garde culture. It was the new advanced intellectual conscience which allowed these bohemians to isolate and reject a concept of “bourgeois” in order to define what they were not.
Clement Greenberg	That makes me think of Edward Said’s Orientalism (1978) and his concept of the Other.
Chris	You’re only saying that to tease me. I read part of that yesterday. I’ve been studying the gaze, the Other and the notion of discourse this week.
Clement Greenberg	Yes, I know.
Chris	Listen, am I dreaming? Can you read my mind or are you in my mind? Are you a personality bud about to disenfranchise from my self-construct and take me on the first step along the path to becoming a man-Cybil?
Clement Greenberg	No, Chris. Get back to the Marxism.
Chris	Well, the bohemians, the new avant-garde caste if you will—
Clement Greenberg	Caste or class?
Chris	Class, I guess. You write that it was with the moral aid of revolutionary political attitudes that the bohemians were able to assert themselves as aggressively as they did against the prevailing standards of society.
Clement Greenberg	But not too aggressively…
Chris	Right. Because unless they wanted to starve in a garret as you wrote, they needed to sell their art.
Clement Greenberg	A tough spot to be in.
Chris	Well I wonder about that. I envision that there is a topology of tension which artistic and cultural production in a capitalist society must negotiate. (Grandly) It’s simply the way art instantiates itself in our Western capitalism.
Clement Greenberg	It’s important to avoid making grand over-arching statements in this day and age. The contemporary cultural paradigm isn’t too fond of them.
Chris	Yes I know. Local knowledge and all that. I disagree with this. I think I still retain some of Formalism or Structuralism’s investment in a deep structure. I like to think almost anything can be organized into an equation.
Clement Greenberg	Well, that’s a shame.
Chris	Don’t be like that. Let’s keep it professional.
Clement Greenberg	Conceded. I apologize.
Chris	[sighs] Accepted. Anyway, I was saying that there is a tension to being an artist in a capitalist society, that the bohemian avant-garde is tied, as you put it, by an umbilical cord of gold to the bourgeois because the aristocratic patron has disappeared. Personally I think that in Western society the aristocratic patron has morphed into the government-funded museum or gallery or arts council, such as we have in Canada, or the Arts Foundation a la U.S. Eastern Seaboard model, but I digress. Back to the bohemians. You wrote that if they can retire from public life altogether and divest themselves of all politics and other worldly concerns, they can keep culture moving in the midst of ideological confusion and violence by expressing their art without subject matter or content. Art for art’s sake. Pure poetry. All relativities and contradictions resolved or beside the point. You know, I have to say this is very antagonistic to current trends in cultural studies like pluralism and post-structuralism.
Clement Greenberg	I have been criticized for being too narrow in this essay.
Chris	It does seem to say that a developed art is an art which is unconcerned with politics which really is anathema to the way things are viewed today. Then you go into all this Aristotle stuff—
Clement Greenberg	You realize that I later came to reject much of the essay.
Chris	I’m going to skip that part for now.
Clement Greenberg	In fact, let’s stop going through the essay, Chris. Just tell me in your own words what you think about what I wrote.
Chris	Okay. Well, you seem to be dividing art into high-brow and low-brow, or avant-garde and kitsch in the capitalist paradigm. It’s reductionist and binary and you privilege the high-brow over the low-brow. What you call kitsch is what we would call mass-produced art or commercial art or even, if you’re going to be a little snarky, the left-over materials of capitalist culture. Maybe popular culture. I agree that it is a product of the Industrial Revolution. People can read and write now. They have time to relax. They’re not in the fields all day. People are urban and bored. They need something that doesn’t require concentration or training. Kitsch is fun and bright and easy and entertaining. It’s profitable.
Clement Greenberg	I didn’t call it fun and bright and easy and entertaining, but I did write profitable.
Chris	What I don’t understand is what you mean by the best artists are artists’ artists, or the best poets are poets’ poets. I guess you mean that only other artists like their work or other poets? You even called the New Yorker Magazine high-class kitsch. I never thought of it like that.
Clement Greenberg	Don’t lose track of where you’re going.
Chris	Right. You write that kitsch is the dominant art-form in Soviet Russia and in Nazi Germany and Fascist Italy. These nations endorsed it as official in order to appease the population, the common people, who felt that they were in closer contact, that they could have more in common with their leader this way. That is, you suggest that since these totalitarian regimes coudln’t raise the cultural level of the masses—though why that should be you never adequately explain—they flattered the masses by bringing all culture down to their level. You know, that’s a little bit elitist.
Clement Greenberg	I’m not sure it’s quite elitist but I do understand in hindsight how that can be read as elitist.
Chris	Same thing in some circles. You write just a few sentences later that if the masses wanted avant-garde art, that Hitler, Mussolini and Stalin wouldn’t hesitate in satisfying the demand. I’m not so sure that would have happened. Do you really think that’s the way it works? Do you think the population would know what to ask for if there was no avant-garde to be aware of and specifically crave?
Clement Greenberg	Well, at the time I did, but I already mentioned that there was political motivation to this essay. And I was only 29.
Chris	Mm-hmm. And now this is where you confuse me a little. The last page or two. You’re talking about art, in some weird sort of Marxist-elitist fusion, and then you end by saying that capitalism spells the doom of art and culture and society as a whole, and that we need socialism in order to preserve culture. I’m sorry, I just don’t think it’d very well written. It doesn’t flow. The essay doesn’t slide into this statement or even lead up to it, it just seems a little kaboom there’s the solution, but I don’t see how it is a solution to the problem you introduced. And this whole socialism thing. That doesn’t sound very American to me. Didn’t that get McCarthy after you during the early fifties and the Communist witch hunts?
Clement Greenberg	Oy vei. You don’t know.
Chris	Wise guy. It just seems incommensurate to me. One the one hand you advocate Marxism which dispels any notion that there is room for class or elitism in the grand solution for humanity, and yet you advocate high-brow art over low-brow art, claiming that the latter is basically capitalist junk made for profit, and that the former should exist as avant-garde art for art’s sake in order to make humanity a better species.
Clement Greenberg	You’ve read this article quite thoroughly.
Chris	Yes.
Clement Greenberg	You sound like you understand many of the main points but you feel like you’re getting mired in some of the finer details.
Chris	Yes, that’s right [sip].
Clement Greenberg	When I wrote this essay I believed that only socialism could elevate the taste of the masses.
Chris	I remark upon your feeling that they needed to be changed, and specifically that you considered them in need of being “raised”.
Clement Greenberg	The essay introduces the seeds of my notion of Modernism. Listen, I grew to believe that Modernism provided a critical commentary on experience. I believed that it should constantly change in order to adapt to kitsch pseudo-culture, which was itself always developing. I believed that the best avant-garde artists were emerging in America rather than Europe. I thought, and still do think, that avant-garde and Modernist art is a means to resist the leveling of culture produced by capitalist propaganda.
Chris	Well that makes sense. But piles of fat in the corner of a room? Someone painted in gold glitter walking around with a dead hare and making talky sounds at it?
Clement Greenberg	I agree that the definition of art is broadened and challenged by the avant-garde and not always in a way that everyone finds relevant or appealing. But the avant-garde explores the conditions under which we experience and understand the world. It does not simply provide information about it in the manner of an illustratively accurate depiction of the world. It can`t always be comfortable or easy to look at. It challenges. If you want realistic, literal depictions…
Chris	Right, that’s what photography is for. So what you were basically saying is that there’s high-brow art which is good and low-brow art which is not as good (and which is often old watered-down high-brow art), that high-brow art and specifically avant-garde high-brow art which is abstract and inspired by the medium is what keeps culture from stagnating in a capitalist society. You believe that Marxism gave intellectual impetus to new movements in art and society by denaturalizing the bourgeoisie amongst other things, and that the resultant social revolution included the creation of a new class, the bohemian, who rejected the bourgeois standards but accepted that s/he operated within the bourgeois markets of capitalism.
Clement Greenberg	Go on.
Chris	Well, if I want to try “reading” your essay more critically, I guess I have to say that you were really transparently motivated by religion and politics to write this essay but your understanding of the latter at least was a little superficial. For example, one of the first British socialists, William Morris of the English Arts and Crafts Movement in the 1850s, espoused the philosophy that art should be affordable, hand-made, and that there should be no hierarchy of artistic mediums or differences between fine art and applied arts. He wanted to introduce Marxist or socialist principles to the vocabulary of the arts by including the more commonplace crafts of the masses within the realm of the arts. It was the Modernists like Virginia Woolf and the Bloomsbury Group who fought to keep artistic endeavour exclusive, esoteric, and elitist. You seem to fall into the second category, the elitists, despite your so-called Marxist tendencies.
Clement Greenberg	We’ve already discussed the political reasons for this essay. You mentioned religion?
Chris	Yes, I’ll get there. I find this Marxism of yours confusing and illogical, perhaps even hypocritical or maybe it just demonstrates that you didn’t fully understand Marxist principles. William Morris worked closely with Marx’s daughter and Hegel himself to found the British socialist movement. He proposed what I am confident are incontrovertibly Marxist changes to art. You claim to be a Marxist. Yet you also claim that kitsch, or popular art, is inferior to avant-garde or high-brow art. The two stances are at antipodes. Which is the more consistent point of view? As we have indeed discussed, I can only surmise that this is largely a political decision based on the ideology of the day. And then you write that it is only through Marxism that the low-brow culture can be elevated. Wow. So are you a Marxist or what? Wait, don’t answer that. It’s rhetorical. It seems to me that you became part of the hegemony. You took advantage of events in Europe to introduce an idealism based on democracy and Western-style freedom, one that gained expression in the art world and Western culture in general through deliberately non-European, patently American forms. And finally, though we’re not really supposed to think about things like this these days, which in and of itself is a demonstration of the power of discourse and hegemony, I also wonder that if, as a Jewish American, you felt it incumbent upon yourself to advocate whatever position was in opposition to the anti-Semitic Nazi regime, including its programs of so-called “Aryan” art. So. My final word? I appreciate where you’re coming from and I can appreciate that you were only 29 when you wrote this essay, and there are some very interesting and relevant ideas in it, but in a word, this essay is flawed.
Clement Greenberg	Admittedly. You know, Chris, I later came to identify the threat to high art as coming from middle-brow taste, which in any event aligns much more closely with the Academic than kitsch ever did.
Chris	Okay. Well, I think that’s enough for now. I’m going to try reading Towards a New Laocoon next.
Clement Greenberg	I’ll pop by when you’ve finished reading it.
Chris	Sounds good to me. By the way, I like your suit, is that linen?
Clement Greenberg	Why yes it is.
Chris	It looks heavenly. How’s Helen doing?
Clement Greenberg	Just fine. I’ll tell her you asked after her.
Chris	Yes, please give her my best.
Clement Greenberg	Good-bye, then.
Chris	Bye-bye.
Clement Greenberg	Oh Chris, just one more thing.
Chris	Yessir?
Clement Greenberg	What was all that business about me becoming an editor of Partisan Review after I wrote this essay?
Chris	Well it just seems odd that after one single essay you were made an editor. No offense, but the paper’s not that great and so I can only surmise then that neither was the Partisan Review. I also wonder that they must have been strapped for help. Or maybe you were really, really charismatic and they were beguiled by your charms. Or maybe you brought an infusion of capital with your editorship…
Clement Greenberg	Good-bye, Chris.
Chris	Bye Mr. Greenberg.

2008