THE NEW ART

Tobin Siebers
 

 

Art is no longer made. It is done. It is done, and then it is gone.

Artists come upon art. It happens to them, like an act of terrorism or a brush with an angel. Or they are sent to find out about it by their superiors. Sometimes they are told to clean it up. I am not talking about "found art" in the classic sense. The new art cannot be found and put somewhere else, in a museum or a gallery. It cannot be found because it cannot be preserved. Its presence is recorded by accident, and this record is only the half-life of what happened. Usually the new art is part accident, part clean-up operation, and when the operation is done, the art is gone. It is literally swept or washed away by busy hands. Artists are no longer artists in the traditional sense. They are more like janitors involved in mop-up operations or like reporters sent to the scene of a crime to record the violence and confusion and beauty of human effort.

The new art always looks like a natural force, but it is usually unleashed against nature. Robert Smithson's Asphalt Rundown (Rome 1969) puts us on the right track. As the liquid asphalt slides from the dump truck and runs down the eroded hill, it takes on the look of an abstract expressionist canvas. It is like a colossal version of Jackson Pollock's drip painting. This is only the aesthetic view of the work, of course, and it would be uninteresting if another view of it did not trouble our thoughts. This other view of the work points us toward the new art. It asks us to think of the work of art as not only beautiful but dangerous. What will the asphalt do to the earth, and who is going to clean it up? How long will it take the earth to recover from this act of vandalism?

Smithson's Asphalt Rundown is not an example of the new art, although it puts us on the scent. The new art is conceptualized as an accident that needs to be cleaned up, but its damage is not deliberate or progressive. The new art is not like a strip mine or a "beauty strip" (logging cuts concealed from roadside views but visible from the air), although these also have a strange and scandalous beauty. Vandalism done to nature by the mining and logging industries is too intentional to fit into the new art. They have profits on their mind, and art is too distracted and disinterested to think about high finance. Oil spills would be a better model, because they are often the products of distraction, except for the fact that they risk not to display the human factor important to the new art. Oil spills are like an out-of-control Asphalt Rundown, but it is too easy to forget, when you see them, that human beings are responsible for the damage. The new art always exposes the element of human conflict. It insists that human beings are involved in it. In fact, it always makes us wonder whether this isn't the problem.

The new art is better seen as having a biological element. It is not about spilled oil. It spills blood. Biological hazards instill more awe and thoughtfulness than industrial accidents like oil spills because they threaten to turn human beings into something else. Land artists have long pondered whether industrial changes in the environment are just as aesthetic (or destructive) as artistic manipulations of the land. The new art poses a similar question about conceptions of the human form: can human mutilation, deformity, and mutation be distinguished from aesthetic representations of the body? Modern art, of course, took on the subject of human transformation early in its history, contorting our experience of human flesh and changing the spectrum of colors and gestures associated with our aspirations. The Entartete Kunst exhibition staged by the Nazis in 1937 recognized that certain modern artists had begun to track the sudden and brutal metamorphosis of the human form, and it denounced these works as degenerate and decadent.[1] The images of human beings celebrated by modern art reminded the Nazis of "cretins," "cripples," and "racial inferiors," but the Nazis were never known for good taste in either moral or aesthetic matters, and they failed to recognize the future direction of art. They also failed to understand that change in the human body and mind is most significant when it forces us to face our inherent mutability and not when it presents human beings as bombastically perfect and unvarying. The new art insists on the fact that human bodies and minds are under assault by forces of holiness and evil, ambition and sloth, and nature and technology unleashed by these same bodies and minds. These forces change the definition of the human and are changed themselves by what human beings become.


 
 

 
The AIDS plague is a work in this style.[3] It is the work of many hands, and no matter how hard we try, we cannot blame its existence solely on the work of a virus, because the nagging thought, however stupid, continues to haunt us that its victims must have done something wrong. AIDS victims are like living sculptures. They are ugly and terrifying at first, but we are compelled to accept them as beautiful, if we are to remain human ourselves. Both subject and object of art, both artist and work, they combine with their disease to overcome the narcissism of human consciousness. AIDS spills off the canvas, refusing to be contained in one place. If we could take a satellite photograph of the effects of AIDS on the planet at any given instant, we might catch a glimpse of its art. It is an art of continual transformation of subject into object and object into subject.

The new art is not entirely subjective. That is why there are no Artists anymore, only many, many artists. The new art is not entirely objective. Art works overwhelmed by their objective dimension become decorations or crafts or commodities--like so many coffee mugs seen in the innumerable gift galleries found everywhere today. When we see these objects, we must wonder why the Artist bothered to create them at all because they show no trace of the Artist's subjectivity. Art being made today in the traditional mode always makes the false choice between absolute subjectivism and absolute objectivism.

The new art merges subject and object, so that its power and fascination cannot be attributed to either one. Adorno was right that art is not about the fun of the art lover. But he was wrong when he said that it is about the object. If the object of art is not also a subject, it will never be recognized as an art work. There is always a hint of possession in the new art, of the subject being overwhelmed by the object and the object being changed by the subject as a result. This is why the biological dimension of the new art is so important. It insists on the fact that a metamorphosis into something completely other is being brought about by the fusion of subject and object.

The artworld today is divided between those who further the aims of art as it once existed and those who are on the scent of the new art, which is created by the forces of human conflict, reality, and destiny. Traditional art is found in museums, galleries, department stores, at art fairs, on people's walls. It almost always bears the Artist's name. Sometimes the name is everything: Calvin Klein is an Artist. When people complain about the commodification of art, they are thinking about traditional art, about what art was and not about what the new art is. Of course, traditional art got to the point where it began to comment on the problem of commodification, using the forces of commerce as a source of inspiration. Andy Warhol's work is perhaps the best example. He tried to get in everyone's face with the idea that art has become a commodity. But this cannot take art very far because art has to be real. Art is not successful as commentary and less successful as metacommentary. That is why Warhol's greatest works of art, though still only pale imitations, are his paintings of car crashes and executions.

The new art is not made by an Artist. It is done to artists, like everyone else. This is not a version of the "death of the author" argument. The Artist is indeed dead today because, first, anyone can become, if he or she wants, an Artist in the traditional sense, since the part is offered to everyone as a lifestyle choice, and because, second, no one can avoid becoming an artist of the new art because the new art is something that happens to you. Nor should we think that the death of the Artist is the same thing as the death of the subject. The subject is very much alive in the new art, and it must remain so. Without a human subject, the art work becomes only another consumer object, and it loses its ability to stir powerful and complex emotions such as pity and fear, love and hatred, or appetite and revulsion. Art that has no sense of subjectivity is useful only for interior decoration.

Nevertheless, there are many Artists who sense the presence of the new art and who try to reach beyond the artworld to the realworld to record its presence. Francis Bacon's exploding popes, tortured fleshes, and deformed self-portraits--I am thinking specifically of Head VI (1949), Study after Velazquez's Portrait of Pope Innocent X (1953), and Self-Portrait (1971)--are a vivid recording of the possibilities of the new art.[4] His images imprint a sense of criminality and atonement on the surfaces of the body and on the soul. Andres Serrano's use of corpses and body fluids is an attempt to master the power of the new art. His work is successful because it reminds us of the fact that art has been active somewhere else. He captures traces of the new art, although that art is always gone by the time we look at his photographs, unlike the photographs of Mapplethorpe, by the way, who seems to insist that art exists only within the frames of his work and so shows us little of genuine art. David Arnold's sculptures assembled with frog parts tortured by electric shocks also point us in the right direction.[5] "I'm creating new creatures," he explains, making it clear that a minature Frankenstein complex has touched him. Arnold suffers from artistic egotism, of course. But what Artist doesn't? He makes what can be found in any high school biology class, but he wants to claim it for his genius, when it is the genius of many other hands. Real art is always primary, and it tolerates no imitations. Arnold imitates the art of the laboratory, but high school biology students are greater artists than Mr. Arnold because their squeamishness and delight in dissection are more heart-felt and disturbing. Love, respect, and terror before other flesh or delight in annihilating it are the emotions of the new art.

The efforts of Jubal Brown, a 22 year old Toronto man, reveal something of the strain felt by Artist wannabes today. He puked on Mondrian's Composition in Red, White, and Blue at the Museum of Modern Art and then, figuring out that he was on to something, ingested red dye before puking on a work by French impressionist Raoul Dufy at the Art Gallery of Ontario. His ultimate purpose, he said, was to perform a trilogy, with one performance for each of the primary colors. The death of traditional art makes Artist wannabes into desperate people. They pour their bodies onto the canvas or try to turn themselves into works of art, piercing, shooting, stabbing, or hanging themselves for the benefit of museum and gallery audiences. But, of course, they fail to represent the kind of desperation found in the realworld, and their audiences know it.

Another sign that people are aware of the new art is found in attempts to commodify it. Art moves people without their wanting to be moved. Salesmen would like to be able to do the same thing, to steal the power of art for commerce, and so people interested in making lots of money are bound to be drawn repeatedly to genuine art, like vampires to a blood bank. But commercialization destroys art, and it never succeeds in commanding its power, because art refuses to be commanded. Nevertheless, we are beginning to see signs of the corporate take-over of the new art. For example, the Benetton people understand the new art and want to steal its power. They are a bit too deliberate to be real artists, however, although they are as successful as Bacon, Serrano, and Arnold--which is not to insult these Artists but only to recognize that the Benetton people know how to stir up controversy as much as people in the traditional artworld. This is what happens whenever the old art tries to colonize the new art. But imitations never stir up as much trouble as the real thing. Neither Benetton nor any work of art in the traditional sense will ever capture the headlines of The New York Times for any length of time, as the AIDS plague, mad cow disease, and recent Jerusalem market suicide bombings have.

The new art is sculptural because it must take its place in the realworld. It is made of bodies or bodies that our bodies feed on because that is what we care about. The new art cannot be made by people sane enough to plan works of art. The new art happens to us, that is, if we are both unlucky and lucky. It just happens, and the artists are the people who are too close to get out of its way or who take responsibility for it. It is so hard to predict when art is going to happen that we can count neither on getting a good seat nor on missing a performance, and so we rely most of the time on the various media to record its occurrence, and that is how most of us experience it. The New York Times, Newsweek, Time, and CNN are the museums of the new art. (The National Inquirer, Hard Copy, and other tabloid productions create dada or surrealist versions of the new art because they are not quite sincere, although they know what people like in art.) In fact, most people don't want to experience the new art unmediated by mechanical reproduction[6] because it is too dangerous and too compelling. That is how art is recognized today, as always, by its danger and appeal, and that is what fascinates us about it. Art is--and has always been--about momentary states of human becoming, and the beauty and terror contained therein. The new art redeems an art that has forgotten this truth. It presents us with the death of the living, and the rebirth of something beautiful and also beyond our control.

 

GALLERY OF THE NEW ART (IN VARYING DEGREES OF SUCCESS) WITH COMMENTARIES


 

Bikini Rebirth (July 23, 1946). Source: High Energy Weapons Archive

On August 6, 1945, the U.S. B-29 Enola Gay dropped "Little Boy" on Hiroshima, an atom bomb carrying 15 kilotons of explosive force. On the very next day, the "Fatman" bomb, equivalent to 22 kilotons of explosive force, was dropped on Nagasaki by the U.S. B-29 Bock's Car, raising a mushroom cloud 20,000 feet over the city. The United States took photographs of the bombings from the air, while the Japanese captured the aftermath at ground level in innumerable, disturbing images that have played a significant role in the emergence of the new art.

The artists apparently were not satisfied with these first two attempts and continued to experiment with the form. In July 1946 they dropped two atom bombs, code-named "Able" and "Baker" (the fourth and fifth to be detonated anywhere), on the Bikini lagoon at Bikini Island, an atoll in the Pacific Ocean in the Ralik (Sunset) chain of the Marshall Islands, feeding 75 obsolete warships to the explosions to see what effect the blast would have on them. This image of the Wilson Cloud Chamber effect produced by Baker, one of many from different angles, represents best the cuteness of the nuclear age. Its horror is best experienced at ground level zero.

Between 1946 and 1958, 23 nuclear devices were exploded at Bikini Island. The Micronesian inhabitants, who numbered about 200 before the United States relocated them after World War II, ate fish, shellfish, bananas, and coconuts. In 1968 the United States declared Bikini habitable and started bringing the Bikinians back to their homes in the early 1970s. In 1978, however, the islanders were removed again when strontium 90 in their bodies reached dangerous levels. They sued the United States and were award $100 million in compensation, but the cost of the clean up, which would entail scraping off the top 16 inches of soil from the main island of Bikini, far exceeds this sum, and the operation would produce a million cubic feet of radioactive soil that nobody knows what to do with. Recently, the lagoon, which has graced the cover of National Geographic three times, has been declared a paradise for scuba divers.[7] They see there, no doubt, a visual spectacle as delicious as the mushroom cloud that started it all.


 
Ephraim Bar-Nir Waits for an Ambulance (1997). Credit: Reuters
The twin suicide bombings in Jerusalem's Mahande Yehuda market on July 30, 1997 killed 13 people, in addition to the two bombers, and injured 170. "The terrorists do not come from nowhere, nor do they come from the moon or from Mars," Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu declared in response to the bombings. His intentions were political, but he spoke a truth often ignored because of its generality. Terrorists do not come from the moon or from Mars. They come from the earth, and it is their fellow human beings whom they injure, maim, and murder.

Terrorism inflicts painful wounds on the body politic, but it cannot be represented unless it also inflicts painful wounds on individual bodies, and that is why it is an important part of the new art. The individual body is always the site of political transformation. The personal is not necessarily political, then, but the political is always personal.

Ephraim Bar-Nir Waits for an Ambulance (1997) portrays an Israeli man, burned in the bombings, who has come to know this truth, and his portrait makes us understand it as well. The photograph will remind the art critic of the self-portraits of Picasso and Bacon, but it exerts greater power and fascination for two reasons. It is real, and it has the advantage of not being tainted by the narcissism that affects the self-portraits of most Artists. This human being has been changed forever by the violence of other human beings, and at this point his body knows it, even if he does not. The portrait is a singular and moving rendition of the state of heightened self-awareness called "suffering."


 
Tomoko Uemura is Bathed by Her Mother (1971-1975). Credit: W. Eugene Smith and Aileen M. Smith/Black Star
Beginning in the 1950s, thousands of people in southern Japan suffered paralysis, convulsions, brain damage, and other illnesses after eating fish tainted with mercury compounds dumped into Minamata Bay by the Chisso Corporation's chemical factories.[8] This famous photograph of a woman bathing her deformed daughter, taken in the 1970s by the American photojournalists W. Eugene Smith and Aileen M. Smith, awakened the world to the terrors of industrial pollution.

Here the Japanese affection for the rite of communal bathing takes on a sense of pathos that is nevertheless overcome by the mother's devotion to her daughter: this particular experience of bathing, so anguishing to the beholder and yet so pleasurable to the women, summons anew the comforts of everyday ritual. The deformed body of the daughter protects the body of the mother from exposure, displacing the archetype of the female form to itself, but it is this startling juxtaposition alone that permits the mother's love to be so forcefully represented. No doubt, the eye of the photographer contributed to the beauty of this image, but the presence and emotions of the women make the photograph a work of art in the final analysis. Their relationship challenges the beholder to accept what they have already accepted--and what outraged the world. For even though we must fight to end the needless mutilation of human beings by chemical and biological hazards, a victory there will spell the end neither of changes in the human form nor of the need to embrace them.

A Pipe Discharging into Minamata Bay (1971-75). Credit: W. Eugene Smith and Aileen M. Smith/Black Star
I add another photograph connected with the Minamata Bay disaster to make a special point. At first glance, this image would seem to provide the context for Tomoko Uemura is Bathed by Her Mother. It illustrates the specific cause of the suffering displayed in the more provocative image. Viewing it in isolation, however, soon proves that it is the secondary work, because the photograph of the mother and daughter actually creates the context in which to view it and not the reverse. The absence of the human form from A Pipe Discharging into Minamata Bay makes it a bad choice for our gallery, even though the Smiths would never have taken the photograph, if not for the concerns motivating the new art.

 
Move Over Joe (1997). Credit: Naum Kazhdan/The New York Times
"After clamoring from grown-up collectors," writes The New York Times (3 August 1997), "Hasbro created its first female action figure in military gear--a helicopter pilot equipped with gun-metal gray jacket, pistol and French braid."

The military and toy industries are among the most active sites of the transformation of the female form today. The sprightly G. I. Jane action figure, hardly the counterpart to the war-weary G. I. Joe, summons all of the anxieties created by this transformation. Her most interesting physical characteristic, aside from her model looks, is the "French braid." It is a "survival," to use Edward Tylor's word for the archaic residue that lurks in modern forms, of woman's reproductive function, and it troubles the brain with a few nagging questions.

Is the French braid the regulation haircut for female helicopter pilots?

Does the French braid represent a "last ditch" effort by G. I. Jane to preserve her individuality against the military-industrial-complex?

Does she hope to be assigned some day to the CIA where she might meet a sexy British secret agent, a Mr. Bond, for whose benefit the French braid will come undone?

Is G. I. Jane positioning herself for a future career in Hollywood, the news media, or politics?

More likely, the French braid is the symbol of a collective, not an individual, fantasy, one that appeals equally to little girls and to adult men. It is a sign of "prettiness," "sexual interest," and "marriageability," but it also symbolizes our culture's unwillingness to incorporate women into male society. Female sexuality has not been incorporated into this society because it is too important to the fantasies of men in power. G. I. Jane's French braid nourishes the same fantasies that led to Tail Hook and similar, recent scandals in the military and the government. It is at once a symbol of women's sexual difference and the violence directed against it.  

Pig Plague (1997)[9] should be conceived as belonging to the variety of new art whose strangeness, everydayness, and appeal inspired the creation of kinetic art, the mobile invented by Alexander Calder, and assemblages composed of biological materials (for example, Meret Oppenheim's Fur Tea-Cup, Robert Rauschenberg's Monogram, Joseph Beuy's Fat Chair, and Jannis Kounellis's Horses, Horses).

Animal flesh is central to the new art. This is because the symbolism linking animal flesh to human destiny is primordial: our treatment of animals, spanning from the days of animal sacrifice to those of the modern factory farm, takes its justification from the ritual belief that animal bodies may be manipulated to change human bodies. This explains--in addition to "family resemblance"--why the rosy-skinned pig bodies in Pig Plague are so easily personified. Indeed, the pigs symbolize the presence of human beings more readily than the machine, which is in fact the location of the only human being in the image. The work fascinates and shocks because it combines a series of contradictory and powerful associations. First, the composition, texture, and color of the work are pleasing to the eye. Second, the pink, fleshy carcasses of the pigs, which cannot help being seen as foodstuff by their mainly carnivorous audience, whet the appetite. Third, the dead pigs revolt the senses because they are being treated like diseased trash and because they recall the many images of mass human burials found throughout the twentieth century.

This sculpture in motion is arrested, of course, by the action of the photographer who captures the tension between the active, mechanical loader and the dead, resisting swine corpses. A better vehicle for its mechanical representation would be film, since the mobile interaction between human machine and animal body is the real subject of the work. For only this action summons the emotions of dread and hope that always attend the manipulation of animal flesh by human hands.