I have been meaning to re-type some old writings on art so as to be able to post them here (They mostly need re-typing as files containing them have been corrupted). Here is one. It appeared in the London magazine Art Monthly in 1993 (February, ps.
25-26). I attach at the bottom a file containing the image with which the article was illustrated.
Modern Art
In a dark room of the main space, a tall sarcophagus shaped structure, made out of cardboard boxes, had been painted in gay pink and white tablecloth squares. A cheap burial chamber perhaps? Ho ho ho. Elsewhere, two bones on springs were stuck on a stone. Cathy Sharp showed two photos, one of a woman’s high heel and body seen from below through a glass floor. Roddy Thomson had put up reproduced photos of sculpted Roman heads in two rows, with a ledge and a real mousetrap replacing eyes and nose along the bottom row. And there was a butterfly in a light bulb with a live bulb above it producing the illusion of artificial light in the bulb below; ‘If it’s shown with the GALLERY you have it’, ran the catalogue. Much of the work was not identified by artist.
Though it is easy to see this sort of humour as a trivialising form of self-defence, the show’s slapdash air of indifference matched my indifference towards it too neatly to be dismissed so easily. In an essay in his book Begriffsfelder (Merve, Berlin, 1985), the German critic Hannes Böhringer notes that, as an avant-garde aesthetic can take anything as its object, indifference to its objects is built in. Anything could do. But, instead of tracing this aesthetic indifference back to some point in the history of modern art, Böhringer locates it directly in the modern city, where we all live now, farmers included. The city is characterised, following Luhmann, as an ever more highly differentiated functional system; being nothing more than bearers of functions, individuals are exchangeable and equivalent; who they are a matter of indifference. Social indifference is the reverse side of the social differentiation into which everyone is interwoven.
This social indifference becomes, in aesthetic indifference, a form of perception. Where Simmel, in 1900, in his Philosophy of Money (Routledge, 1990) saw money as the abstract medium of perfect exchangeability, equivalence and absence of qualities which characterise the relativism of modern life, Böhringer suggests that the contemporary art world is where this relativism has come fully to life in perception. For him, contemporary art is an elementary school of perception, where the degree to which anything could be anything else – the total relativity or functional interdependence of everything, mediated by the money economy – has been learnt in modern culture. But for this to be learnt, it already had to be the way things are.
Like other, older complexes of aesthetic feelings, indifference is a receptive attitude: to be indifferent towards an object, that object must be already there. It cannot be produced by the aesthetic attitude, it must be something extra-aesthetic … like the modern city.
Artists have turned the latent aggression of social indifference – silence in the Underground – into an experience of the undifferentiated weave of things. Böhringer shows that similar – but not identical – experiences are age-old. For the Sceptics, the perception of a lack of differentiation in things brought serenity. Indifference is not deciding, not turning things into a hierarchy, a contemporary variant of which could include ‘good show’, ‘worth reviewing’, ‘striking work’, ‘impressive CV’. The Greeks called this point Ataraxia, where the mind reached an imperturbable and functional equilibrium. Contemporary art has antecedents which go back further than the first Readymade.
A corollary: if this indifference is a key element in current art, then criticism which sees this art primarily in the context of recent work may obscure the fact that contemporary art is primarily an experience of contemporary life, not a commentary on anything. Perhaps more sociology and less criticism is needed. So, differentiating the work in the show by describing it this way or that, as worth a review, to begin with (ho, ho, ho, I hear it reply), fitting it to whatever my conceptual pattern may be, is also an expression of actual social indifference: I treat it the way I want, I don’t care, differentiating it my way. And the artists, no doubt, will be indifferent to what I write. This could, after all, be any old review of any Modern Art show.
But all this talk of indifference is just another exercise to which, thanks to the work, I also end up being indifferent. ‘Thank God for Modern Art’, said the bishop, when they were done.
N15, Dec 19-Jan 1.
Here is the image with which the article was illustrated.
