Confessions of an ex reviews writer - Paul O’Kane
(a.k.a. Anon)
Today, in the shadow of Tate and Saatchi’s tourist traps, swarms
a deluge of café-galleries in which part-time artists consume
enormous cappucino concoctions, read digestable journals, and meekly
fill forms to satisfy monitoring, funding, and accountability conditions.
Costly bourgeois-hood, demands of artists -stripped of their outsider’s
regalia- only petty-ambition, attention-seeking mediocrity and the swearing
of a pledge to produce the titillating frisson of media-friendly difference
that allows a society blind to its crimes to boast of ‘liberalism’.
The prevailing ‘professional’ harness tethers art to the
misguided dream that all can be equally bourgeois if they wear the right
blinkers and queue to buy, on credit and at high interest, the money
needed to pay for a stylish nosebag.
Three or four years ago I stopped crafting art reviews because I felt the form to exemplify ‘managerialism’. The term, coined by Sarat Maharaj, is accurate in warning that in the bourgeois paradise of a super modernity, curator-stars risk emulating bosses and businessmen while review writers muzzle art’s critique within networks of paternal politeness. But writers, curators, and artists, might yet subvert their presumed relations and roles to revolutionise the supplement to Sunday that art has become.
Nicholas Bourriaud’s ‘Relational Aesthetics’ -the reading rage in art’s academia- provides some examples which admirably renew artist/curator and artist/audience relations, and these offer models to review writers conscious of ‘managerial’ tendencies. But though popular, Bourriaud is not beyond criticism as his thesis presumes the affability and communicative cool of a certain model of privileged artist, thereby excluding less well-adjusted and less socially-skilled voices for whom the greatest challenge may precisely be relations. -and here lies a clue to reading Bourriaud ‘against the grain’.
Meanwhile, laced within a welcome non-British, non-American view of the 90s, Bourriaud tentatively revises some modern art-history, thereby subtly implying that there will be no ‘future’ without the history long repressed beneath postmodern excuse notes. Of all postmodernism’s interpreters, perhaps J.F. Lyotard was ‘the first and still the best’ to suggest that every post modernism precedes a modernism, that: “A work can become modern only if it is first postmodern. Postmodernism thus understood is not modernism at its end but in the nascent state, and this is constant.”
So, if it be in the form of unfettered experiment, ungoverned imagination,
unsponsored expression, uncompromised subversion and unpredictable forms
for unexpected possibility, then let a latent neo-modernism burst from its
self-assembly closet. Any trajectory is welcome that might rescue us from
the consciously careerist blight that has swept art squeaky clean in recent
years, maintaining its playground for privilege and ensuring that artists
doff a cap to the the dolllar and the dull.
A certain neo-naiverty, like the old foundation-course adage that ‘we
still don’t know what art is yet’ may be required to
follow such a trajectory. Okay, we did not once know that art could
be THIS, but now, please let it be something else, anything else!
The adage demands belief in evading familiarity at all costs and
a search for inventive spaces in which those with need might find
a way to say something worthwhile ‘about’ this forest
of symbols where seers are in short supply.
© 2007 Paul O'Kane