Monday 27th February 2006

Stage 1 Semester 2 Week 5

Dr Ken Neil

What Is the Contemporary?

TODAY’S FOUR SECTIONS:

1. Charles Baudelaire and the authentic moment.

2. Arthur Danto and historical contemporary art.

3. When is now?

4. Embodying the now and enacting the contemporary.

1

Charles Baudelaire 1821-1867

Baudelaire, the great poet translator and critic, is for many one of the most prescient authors of Modernity.

His poetry and criticism seemed to capture the spirit of the modern age, and looked forward perceptively to 20thC culture.

1

For Baudelaire - the artist had to be ‘of his own times’ before he could legitimately claim to be a Modern artist.

It was a mistake, he said, for the artist to look to antecedents within the history of art if one wanted to paint aspects of the present.

“Woe to him who studies the antique for anything else other than pure art, logic and general method! By steeping himself too thoroughly in it, he will lose all memory of the present; he will renounce the rights and privileges offered by circumstance - for almost all our originality comes from the seal which Time imprints on our sensations.”

Pollock in studio 1950

Edgar Degas L’Absinthe 1876

Umberto Boccioni The City Rises 1910

Constantin Guys Equipage in the Park Late19thC

1

“Be very sure that this man Constantin Guys, this solitary, gifted with an active imagination, ceaselessly journeying across the great human desert - has an aim something other than the fugitive pleasure of circumstance.

He is looking for that quality which you must allow me to call ‘modernity’. He makes it his business to extract from fashion whatever element it may contain of poetry within history, to distil the eternal from the transitory.”

“By ‘modernity’ I mean the ephemeral, the fugutive, the contingent, the half of art whose other half is the eternal and the immutable”.

1

Modernity, for Baudelaire, was all about the spirit of the age. To be a Modern artist one had to keenly observe and generate work from the wonderful sights and sounds of the immediate world.

The authentic Modern artist does not seek to move out with the time in which he finds himself.

1

Baudelaire’s Modern art is forward looking and positivist - it assumes responsibility for pushing art into new, uncharted futures, apprehending the eternal from the transitory as it proceeds.

2

Arthur Danto (and the German theorist Hans Belting) put forward arguments (in the 1980s) to suggest, however, that Modern art, as described by Baudelaire and others, is different across time from Contemporary art.

This might mean that, Boccioni’s or Pollock’s Modern art for example or the work of Constantin Guys, although obviously once upon a time contemporary, should not be seen as Contemporary as we might understand that term now after having read Danto and Belting.

Why so?

2

“Contemporary art has no brief against the art of the past, no sense that the art of the past is something from which liberation must be won.

It is part of what defines Contemporary art that the art of the past is available for such use as artists care to give it.”

Danto

Umberto Boccioni ‘Elasticity’ 1912

2

Boccioni, practicing authentic Modernist philosophy, saw the art forms of the immediate past as forms from which the present, dynamic, contemporary (with a small ‘c’) artists must liberate themselves.

In short, he exercised himself over producing artworks which spoke to a Baudelairean philosophy of the unfolding progression of art, both in terms of its forms and in terms of what it paid attention to.

2

Contemporary for Danto requires the artist to break

free from the antagonism towards the artistic forms

of the past, something which Boccioni did not do.

In breaking free, the Contemporary artist also

breaks free from the idea that the present is

destined to be better than the past.

2

Jasper Johns Perilous Night 1982

Jasper Johns’s work, for example, is frequently constructed by ‘present pasts’ - and resembles Danto’s conception of Contemporary. It embraces a post-historicity.

Edouard Manet Dejeuner Sur L’Herbe 1863

2

But Danto’s idea of the Contemporary, logically, can also be seen in examples of historical art.

Manet here famously incorporated a composition from a painting by Raphael as seen through an etching by Marcantonio Raimondi.

2

As we saw in the first lecture, Gavin Turk here famously appears as Sid Vicious, dressed as Elvis as seen through a screenprint by Andy Warhol.

Gavin Turk Pop 1993

Warhol Elvis 1963

2

Martin Creed might be said to share Turk’s Danto-like attitude to art of the past - and possibly negatively so, as no ‘future improvement’ is promised - a danger inherent to Danto’s concept

3

So - when is now?

Now is of course now (I think) but now involves then, and it is the attitude towards the ‘then’ that Danto concerns himself with.

And perhaps our Contemporary attitude to ‘then’ has resulted in a superficial and spectacular version of culture, progress and development has been forgotten and style and posturing has taken the place of positivist art making?

4

Danto sets out a difference between capturing the contemporary spirit of the age of this ‘now’ (which is akin to Baudelaire’s Modernity) and producing artwork which is actually Contemporary.

This might be summarised by saying that there is a difference between

embodying the now and

enacting the contemporary.

4

Ralph Goings, an American

Photorealist painter, can be

seen to be an artist who

embodies the now, utilising

new departures in painterly

technique in the process -

not unlike Degas and Guys.

David Salle Comedy Tragedy 1995

4

4

Perhaps Tracey Emin can be seen

to be an artist who enacts the

Contemporary, by being an artist

whose styles are historical and

contemporary (with a small ‘c’);

she does not seek to take art

beyond the past into its new

future, like a Guys or a

Boccioni, in fact, she darkly

revels in the past as if to make

the very point that her present

moment is constantly wrestling

with the past, and the two

elements are made visible as

part of that struggle.

4

Tracey Emin Just Remember How It Was 1998

Thomas Hirschhorn Altar to Raymond Carver 2005

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