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

[Louis Proyect <lnp3@xxxxxxxxx>]

(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/