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| Smiles
Certain & Uncertain Part V Rex Butler |
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The Rise and Fall
of the Smile But hasn’t the question of intention always been at stake in art, as Kant surely proves? Yes, of course; but today all this takes place in a different tone, with a different inflection. Although post-modernism is often said to be an anonymous, authorless art, in fact we see it as the exact opposite. It is only these questions of intention that give the art its meaning, make it different from what it appears to represent; it is indeed this issue of intention that is its only subject. Take, for instance, Sherrie Levine’s appropriation of the American Depression era photographer Walker Evans’ image of a poor sharecropper family. Of course, because Levine is female, we are meant to understand this work as a re-assertion of the individuality of this woman against Evans’ familiarising and paternal gaze, the possibility of a feminine photographic practice within a hitherto exclusively male canon. But, then, we might argue that Levine herself merely appropriates this woman, that she repeats the same phallocentric mastery and claim to authority as Evans. Or take David Salle’s work. The only question we ask any more of it is: is it pornography or an argument against pornography, does it satisfy our voyeurism or turn it back against itself? Or of the billboard work Money Creates Taste by Jenny Holzer: is it critical of the dreams of publicity and consumerism as represented by a place like Las Vegas or is it just another piece of casino neon? Or, finally, of Jeff Koons' Stay in Tonight: is it art or just advertising? Is he condemning the use of a great artist’s name to sell liquor or only doing the same thing to sell art himself? These are henceforth, in the wake of Warhol’s work, the only kinds of questions we ask of art any more. And once the smile was critical, offered a way for art, artifice, illusionality, fiction, to intervene in the world, to open up another meaning behind the obvious one — revealed a void behind even the power of the king. Once, as with Kant, and perhaps even with Duchamp, the spectator actually had to choose between competing meanings, was torn between thinking that the work had a meaning behind the obvious one and had no meaning at all. By the time of the Warholian ‘60s and camp, however, the spectator no longer had to choose, but simply had to recognise this undecidability as what the work was about, this undecidability itself more the subject of the work than any of its overt themes and issues: consumerism, feminism, gayness, whatever. The spectator is no longer subject to the necessity of deciding the meaning of the work, but only has to recognise or cite this as a problem. This is precisely why Madonna is so easily dealt with by her critics, despite their claims as to her radicality and avoidance of any fixed meaning. It is perhaps the distance between the smile of Castiglione (shrewd, penetrating, hard to discern, meant only for a few, based not on class or birth but on aesthetic discrimination and intellectual rigour) and that of Jeff Koons (smug, self-satisfied, meant to be recognised by everyone, each flattering himself that he is the true initiate, the true possessor of the secret, the one who gets the joke, that Koons is not really sexist and chauvinist, is not really banal). What we are seeing today is the end or collapse of art as a critical force, not because it has failed but precisely because it has succeeded too well. Art is now everywhere, because everything and everyone is now aestheticised, blessed with that aesthetic power of irony that was once granted to so few. It is impossible to say when this happened, but perhaps exactly at that moment when art truly became popular, Pop Art. There might remain no more urgent a task for art historians today than to recount this decline from sprezzatura through ambiguity to camp, camp as the dominant ideology of post-industrial democracies, where every man is an artist, as free from the constraints and customs of society as Castiglione’s courtiers, with each of us believing that we only pay lip service to its values and conventions while secretly holding to something else. Today everyone is like that waitress who smiles and says "Have a nice day", while inwardly cursing her customers; but her belief that she is somehow being radical in her conformity, that her conformity is ironic, is just what still enslaves her (think of TV’s Roseanne). As Warhol predicted so long ago, we are all like poor tragic Marilyn Monroe, an ironic smile plastered to our face with nothing behind. Rex Butler © Rex Butler and |
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