Re: The Commodification of the avant-garde: Clemente, Basquiat, Haring

["Chris Kromm" <ckromm@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

I have the perfect passage that speaks to this phenomena, which I'll post
soon: the last chapter of Terry Eagleton's classic Marxist look at aesthetic
theory, "The Ideology of the Aesthetic." A truly illuminating rumination on
the role of the avant garde, and how it relates to post-modernism.

Chris

----- Original Message -----
From: Louis Proyect <lnp3@xxxxxxxxx>
To: <marxism@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>; <pen-l@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>
Sent: Saturday, February 12, 2000 12:41 PM
Subject: The Commodification of the avant-garde: Clemente, Basquiat, Haring


> (This is the final installment of a series of articles on "Art and
> Revolution." Earlier installments can be read at:
> http://www.panix.com/~lnp3/mydocs/culture.htm)
>
> The brochure for the Francesco Clemente exhibit in the Guggenheim Museum,
> which closed about a month ago, stated that the neo-expressionist artist
> was a product of the turbulent 1960s and 70s in Italy. But as I began
> walking down the ramp of the famous Frank Lloyd Wright designed building,
a
> sense of consternation began to mount. In the entire exhibit, there was
not
> a single work that addressed social themes. Not only was the primary focus
> on bodily functions, either sexual or digestive, the imagery was intensely
> private.
>
> His 1987 "Semen" is fairly typical
> (http://www.artincontext.org/artist/c/francesco_clemente/images.htm).
> Unlike the German expressionist paintings of the 1920s that depicted the
> moral and social rot of the Weimar Republic, Clemente's work is a rather
> solipsistic affair that shows a naked man swimming in--you guessed
> it--seminal fluid. So as I passed by painting after painting in a similar
> vein, I felt challenged to understand how the Museum decided to link the
> artist with the political rebellions that shaped me and artists like the
> kind shown in the Marxism web-page gallery.
>
> Turning to a recent interview with Clemente, we discover that despite the
> semen-swimming iconography, the artist did identify with the '60s. He
says,
> "In 1968, all of a sudden, there was a great hope for change-all the
things
> you didn't like might change into something else, and the artists seemed
to
> be the people doing it, not the politicians."
>
> However, like many radicals from that era, the artist turned away from
> perceived excesses. After moving to Rome in 1970, Clemente encounters the
> terrorist Red Brigades, whom he labels as embodying a "Third International
> sort of point of view." Leaving aside Clemente's rather fuzzy notion of
> what the Third International stood for, he recoils from the Red Brigades
> and begins to embrace a "post-1968 skepticism."
>
> Although converted to a fashionable skepticism, he does not allow himself
> to abandon radical politics entirely. He turns to a blend of Marxism and
> postmodernism that became de rigeur for high-flying journalists and
> academics in the 1970s and '80s. His mentor turns out to be another
artist,
> Aleghiero Boetti, who was ten years his senior and evidently had an innate
> ability to pick up on trendy ideas and personalities. Clemente relates his
> tutelage underneath Boetti: "I had endless discussions of ideas and of his
> work with him and his wife. The imagery, the iconography of his work was
> eclectic, covering ground from people as far apart as Jasper Johns and
> Bruce Nauman, and in terms of ideas, from the French philosophers, Lacan,
> Foucault, Deleuze, ideas of order, ideas of autonomy, and again, a
critique
> of politics."
>
> One supposes that the "critique of politics" he refers to would predispose
> against painting pictures of unfashionable subjects like workers or
> peasants. It is doubtful that the investment bankers gobbling up canvases
> in this period would have wanted something so gauche on their living-room
> wall as a Nicaraguan picking coffee.
>
> Another key influence on Clemente was the controversial German artist
> Joseph Beuys, whom the interviewer holds in contempt, while others regard
> as the most influential artist since WWII. He asks, "Do you see the
quality
> of a dilettante in Joseph Beuy's work?" Clemente replies, "No, Joseph
Beuys
> seems the archetype of the grown-up artist." Beuys' work, leaning toward
> the cryptic, is a clear stylistic influence on Clemente. For example, the
> "Rose for Democracy"
(http://arts-sciences.cua.edu/art/nmh/332/ces/ces.htm)
> is defiantly apolitical despite its title and shows a flower in a beaker,
> allowing the spectator to invest his or her own meaning into this
> Rorschach-like work.
>
> Leaving aside the merits of his work, Beuys is one of the biggest art
world
> phonies of recent years. Most notably, he claimed to be a Stuka dive
bomber
> pilot who after being shot down in 1943 over the Crimea, was kept alive by
> nomadic Tartars who swaddled him in fat and felt to keep him warm. A close
> associate Caroline Tisdall describes this as "a mythologised event," a
> polite term for bullshit.
>
> After becoming a professor of sculpture in Dusseldorf in the early 60s,
> Beuys hooked up with the Fluxus movement, whose neo-Dadaism was nominally
> associated with protesting bourgeois society. One of his closest
> collaborators was Yoko Ono, another founding figure of Fluxus. In 1963
> Beuys and the local Fluxus-ites performed an "action," titled Siberian
> Symphony. The action climaxed with Beuys placing lumps of clay and twigs
on
> a piano keyboard, tying a length of piano wire to a dead hare, then
ripping
> out its heart. In another action, Beuys sprinkled washing powder and the
> contents of a rubbish bin under a piano's lid in order to "improve" the
> sound, before attacking it with an electric drill.
>
> Despite all this posturing, Beuys believed in a rather old-fashioned, if
> not authoritarian, vision of "social sculpture," which involved molding
> people's consciousness as it was a piece of clay. To this end, he said it
> was more important that his students became good parents than great
artists.
>
> The Fluxus movement had a big impact on the contemporary art world, not
> least of which was on the career of Andy Warhol, the subject of a previous
> article in this series. The combination of the desire to shock, to remain
> apolitical, and to explore sexually taboo subjects was the Fluxus
> movement's main legacy to Warhol's own experimental efforts in the 1960s.
> Of course, after he is shot by Valerie Solanas, he turns away from this
> scene entirely and becomes a society figure painting mostly banal
portraits
> of fellow jet-setters.
>
> From the Fluxus movement and Warhol's career, Clemente learns how to
> position himself in the marketplace. He discovers that it is good business
> to be a bit iconoclastic as long as you stay off the hot buttons of class
> struggle or radical politics. He also learns that the art world, the
> investment and real estate worlds have overlapping concerns, which is how
> to circulate hot commodities.
>
> Warhol and Clemente got along famously. Warhol biographer and inner-circle
> member Rene Ricard details their relationship in the catalog for the
> Guggenheim show. Captioned "1982," the section from Ricard's piece titled
> "Chronology" notes that:
>
> "In January, Warhol paints a three-panel portrait of Clemente wearing a
> suit and tie. Clemente exchanges three geometrically shaped canvases with
> stitched-in padding for the portrait. These have never been exhibited.
>
> "In February, Warhol's INTERVIEW publishes an interview with Clemente.
DeAk
> is the interlocutor. The photograph accompanying the article is by Robert
> Mapplethorpe. Clemente's appearance is striking. He patronizes the Astor
> Place barbershop, where for $5 they machine-clip his hair and beard,
> leaving a short stubble. This 'three-day growth' will be extensively
copied
> by fashionable men."
>
> I suppose all this became inevitable after Jackson Pollock agreed to allow
> his drip paintings to be used as a backdrop for a Vogue Magazine fashion
> model spread in the last years of his life.
>
> Through Warhol, Clemente came into contact and developed close bonds with
> Jean-Michel Basquiat, the young artist of Haitian descent whose career
> began as a graffiti artist. He signed his cryptic messages SAMO, which
> stood for same old shit. These messages consisted of somewhat challenging,
> but unfocused, words like, "Playing art with daddy's money." From the
world
> of the streets, he began showing in galleries with other "taggers." One of
> the works that gained him fame and fortune was the raw and powerful
> untitled 1982 work which is commonly known as "Skull."
> (http://www.broadartfdn.org/c04.Basquiat.html)
>
> Unlike Warhol and Clemente, Basquiat never learned to float above the
> surface of the glamorous world they moved in. He was consumed by it. Easy
> access to drugs and cash-bloated customers could never satisfy him. Like
> John Belushi and many rock stars, he was killed by hedonism. His
biographer
> Phoebe Hoban writes, "Place him in a pressure-cooker art world where
> quantity matters more than quality, aggressive art dealers push prices
> through the roof, avaricious new collectors speculate wildly, auction
> houses create instant inflation, and the media magnifies the entire circus
> through a hyperbolic lens. Add the race card, drugs, and promiscuity at
> every level. Then call it the burnout of an art star."
>
> Basquiat's work is closely related to Clemente's thematically. Nominally
> taking racism, materialism, capitalism, pop culture and mortality as its
> theme, it tends to deal with them in only the most allusive fashion. To
> satisfy the demand from art-collecting junk bond dealers, Basquiat was
> forced to paint on demand. At his best, Basquiat improvised slashing,
> cartoon-like images with powerful themes; at his worst, he foundered in
> what Hoban calls, "flaccid name-dropping doodles and fashionably
> wild-looking pastiches."
>
> Basquiat probably could have had a more productive career if he had
> detached himself from the human riff-raff gathered around Studio 54,
> downtown galleries and Park Avenue penthouses. But that would be like
> saying he would have been better off if capitalism did not exist.
> Capitalism tarnishes everything it comes in contact with, ironically the
> world of avant-garde art in the 1980s most of all.
>
> The other artist closely associated with Warhol was Keith Haring
> (http://www.haring.com/), another highly successful artist who got started
> as a graffiti "tagger." Basquiat, Haring and Clemente all were friends and
> respected each others work. Furthermore, there is ample evidence that
> Haring received inspiration from the same muse. Haring, like the others,
> painted cryptic images that suggested something was wrong with the world,
> but somehow never developed either the insight, nor the appetite, to
> develop the kind of work that characterized an earlier generation that
knew
> how to name the enemy of humanity with consumate clarity.
>
> As should be well-known by now, Haring was gay and died of AIDS. To his
> credit, much of his work was devoted to raising awareness about AIDS and
> funds as well. Haring was deeply indebted to Warhol, another gay artist.
In
> a diary he kept on a European trip, Haring explored the problematic of
> Warhol's relationship to bourgeois society:
>
> "Andy was probably the only real Pop artist. One thing that I was most
> impressed by in a recent show at the Foundation Of The Disaster series was
> a paragraph in an accompanying pamphlet about the paintings. It was a
quote
> from Lawrence Alloway about Pop art, saying how in the beginning of Pop
> there was a breakdown and fusion of life and art (a celebration of popular
> culture) that was first embraced by Pop artists. Then, little by little,
> the painters withdrew from this area and took their ideas back into the
> form and arena of the art 'establishment'. This, it said, is the point
> where Andy separated from the rest of the group and remained true to the
> original ideas of Pop art.
>
> "Andy remained a Pop artist. He reinvented the idea of the life of the
> artist being art itself. He challenged the whole notion of the 'sacred'
> definition of art. He blurred the boundaries between art and life so much
> that they were practically indistinguishable.
>
> "He challenged the whole commodity-oriented direction of the art world by
> beating it at its own game. He became a teacher for a generation of
artists
> now - and in the future - who grew up on Pop, who watched television since
> they were born, who understand digital knowledge. I honestly think he was
> the most important artist since Picasso, whether people like it or not,
and
> a lot of them don't. The museum and auction worlds didn't know how to deal
> with him."
>
> There is, shall we say, a certain generosity of spirit that is evident
here
> which owes much to the student-teacher relationship. However, there is
> little doubt but that Haring was subject to the same ineluctable market
> forces that characterized Warhol in his later years.
>
> In the end, Haring became a one-man industry just like Warhol. He sold
> millions of dollars in kitschy items turned out by his underlings who
> operated in factory-like assembly lines just like in Warhol's studio. In
> the end, whatever message he had about challenging either the art
> 'establishment' or the 'establishment' in general were lost in a blizzard
> of promotions at department stores or charity balls. Swatch wristwatches,
> just one example, designed by Keith Haring, that cost $50 when they first
> appeared might be worth as much as $5,000 today.
>
> Even the dedication to fighting AIDS can be challenged in some respects.
> After all, the charitable efforts mounted by Haring and others simply
> reflected the refusal of the government to fund health-care in the 1980s.
> If Haring and Warhol had focused more efforts on political organizing than
> in schmoozing with ruling class figures, including Nancy Reagan, then
> perhaps the death toll would have been less. Alexander Cockburn comments:
>
> "Typical is Under One Roof, a gift store in San Francisco. This boutique
> carries an expensive selection of merchandise on the cutting edge of the
> epidemic: Keith Haring tote bags, T-shirts with the words 'We're cookin'
up
> love for people with AIDS,' 'Awareness Watches' and teddy bears sporting
> red ribbons.
>
> "AIDS has become a veritable sanctuary for kitsch, from the panel in the
> AIDS quilt featuring an envelope addressed to 'A Better Place' to Andre
> Durand's painting 'Votive Offering,' depicting, in Harris' words, 'an
> ethereal Princess Di surrounded by saints, placing her hands on an
> emaciated PWA person with AIDS while dying men in the hospital beds around
> her strain at their dripping IVs like lurid scarecrows pleading to touch
> the hem of her skirt.' From Di to Whoopi Goldberg, the epidemic has
offered
> celebs a marvelous way to advertise their generosity.
>
> "There's a decent reason for the role show business has played: Washington
> wasn't doling out money. Desperate for private contributions during the
> Reagan-Bush years, activists turned the disease into a commodity, into
what
> might be called the AIDS 'product,' introduced through a blitz of kitschy
> public appeals." (LA Times, June 19, 1997)
>
> Clemente, Basquiat and Haring are the final products of a capitalist
> society that has not only exhausted efforts not only to criticize itself,
> but that has cut off all possibilities for allowing the "Other" to
> criticize it. The co-optation of avant-garde artists is simply the logical
> conclusion of a systematic commodification of everything, including
> subversion itself. If and when a new radicalization starts up, one can
> assume that the iconography of such new movements will look a lot
different
> than they did in the 1980s and '90s, when capitalism not only disoriented
> the political left, but the cultural left as well.
>
>
> Louis Proyect
> Marxism mailing list: http://www.marxmail.org/