Attending the Fondation Louis Vuitton’s Basquiat x Warhol; Painting Four Hands exhibition prompted me to reflect on the nature of art, the meaning one can ascribe the small snapshots we can view on gallery walls, and the extent to which museums, art galleries and the Fondation Louis Vuitton overreach in their opinion of a work’s worth.
To take this question at its core one must firstly acknowledge that anything is art. Talking specifically about the visual arts, anything from my scrawlings as a toddler to van Gogh’s The Starry Night can be considered to qualify, but rationally these pieces cannot all be equal. If one builds on that point, a clear way to differentiate between art is that good visual art must surely evoke. It must trigger emotion simply through itself as a medium, without the addition of an explanation as to why the piece has meaning, or what the viewer should feel when looking at the piece. If a piece is viewed without an accompanying description or details about the artist and still does not have inherent emotional impact, it stands to reason that the piece itself is not inherently evocative, or good,art. It is here where modern art often fails, either in full because it evokes no emotion in any reasonable person regardless of any exhortations, or in part because only with detailed explanation can the viewer gleam any meaning from the piece. Art which triggers no depth of emotion is simple illustration, and art which relies upon an explanation lacks inherent emotiveness.
When we read a book, the writer has thousands of words to convince us, to paint us a proverbial picture of people, motives, ideas, hopes, dreams, desires. In a painting, a sculpture or a photograph, the artist has one limited snapshot in which to convey an entirety of emotion without giving extraneous information to the viewer. Conveying emotion through this medium has always been difficult, from “ancient” art to the modern. Take A Sunday Afternoon on the Island of La Grande Jatte by Georges Seurat, one of the best examples of the popular pointillist movement. Inherently, the picture evokes beautifully the vibrancy of the scene, the coolness of the water and park, the emotion of those gathered; one feels almost present in the scene. Beyond these emotions, however, the painting has its beauty and little else. Any further interpretation requires knowledge of Seurat’s political beliefs, his personal life, his recorded conversations and other extraneous material. However, just like when we read Shakespeare or watch a Coppola film, we rely only on the information supplied and take this painting at face value, which is that this is a beautiful and tranquil painting yet little more.
Why do we approach modern art so differently? Warhol is obviously renowned as one of the titans of the pop art movement, his infamous Campbell’s Soup Cans universally recognisable as a symbol of the 1960s and the ascendency of an artistic movement for which meaning increasingly relied on the extraneous. Basquiat is one of the modern darlings of neo-expressionism, whose worth has only increased in the decades following his death. Characterised by overwhelming colours and shapes with indistinguishable figures and meanings, and drawing from pop art and dadaism’s irreverence for meaning, neo-expressionism perfectly captures modern art’s lack of inherent message.
Basquiat and Warhol are clearly talented artists. Warhol is arguably on of the 20th century’s greatest illustrators, with his pieces interesting for their depictions of ordinary items in such a prominent position. Basquiat too has a clear sense for boldness in his work, and the partnership between the two artists is a conceptually amusing idea of collaborative art. Unfortunately, the Basquiat x Warhol exhibition follows modern art’s obsession with overanalysing pieces without inherent meaning to the general public. According to the exhibition, in the yellow piece above “a black figure… alters the painting’s narrative in the context of Warhol’s industrial emblem of progress and promise of prosperity for the white American middle class”. In reality, it is a piece utterly up to the interpretation of the viewer with little in the way of a clear and inherent message, and by ascribing this specific meaning to the piece the gallery overreaches in such a way that the viewer is unable to simply take their own emotion from the viewing.
Another example is Ten Punching Bags (Last Supper). Very simply, this piece is a series of punching bags decorated with Christ’s face by Warhol and then graffitied by Basquiat in his signature style. For an observer, the meaning that can be taken from this piece is so infinite it is meaningless. Could it be a depiction of anti-Catholicism, an “assault” of Christ? Could Basquiat’s “Judge” refer to religion’s judgement of sin and evil? Could it simply refer to nothing at all, just a series of images and words that amused the artists on that particular day? The Basquiat x Warhol exhibition states, in fact, that “it evokes lynchings… racism, violence, and injustice in a somber period marked by the AIDS epidemic”. In many ways, modern art wants to break free of the bounds of its own medium, not content to portray a message distilled into one impossibly small vessel. In fact, communicating all of the messages which Ten Punching Bags is alleged by the exhibition to convey, without any extraneous explanation, would be almost impossible in a visual art medium. This is why, when one mere painting is able to paint an entire emotional picture, it is all the more powerful.
Otto Dix is one of my favourite examples of truly injecting a clear and emotional message into a minute medium. Trench Warfare, painted after Dix’s traumatising experiences in the First World War, is a bleak and harrowing view of the death and destruction the artist experienced and which was etched into his psyche. The broken figure, darkened palate, thousand-yard stare, blue-black sky and deep red ground portray a clear message that war is hell. Without knowing the author, without the backstory of the painting’s meaning and intentions, the piece is able to evoke clear emotions and portray a clear message.
Modern art is still able to achieve this too. Şakir Gökçebağ’s beautiful Cosmos displays an oriental rug fading away in different areas, held together by the clear intimation of what it used to be. While a “meaning” for this piece may be less obvious than Dix’s Trench Warfare, Cosmos can be easily interpreted by the viewer. The evaporating edges of a once-beautiful whole create an evocative and intriguing picture, open to ideas of loss and fading memory. Where the piece is spoilt is in the explanation; Gökçebağ states “There is basically no difference between oriental rugs and other objects. In addition to being objects in and of themselves, they also have a very strong relationship with space”. In the same way that Trench Warfare would be ruined by Dix stating that the picture represented the universe’s rebirth in the modern age, Gökçebağ diminishes his own work through his overreaching explanation.
For evidence that a piece need not have concrete “meaning” to be emotionally impactful we can look at William Turner’s A mountain scene, Val d'Aosta. A classic of Turner’s brilliant landscape style, A mountain scene is turbulent, nebulous and mesmerising without a single distinct aspect. Even so, it is clearly distinguishable as a landscape and no description of the importance of the Valle d’Aosta or the experiences the painter had there are necessary. Again, an explanation which attempted to assign meaning to this painting beyond its deep emotional and melancholic appeal to the viewer’s heart would end up mocking the simple beauty of the piece.
This is not to say that all art must have meaning or emotional depth to be worthwhile, or that art without these things is without worth, just that there is a general trend to ascribe great depth to art that has no inherent meaning to it, or to greatly exaggerate the meaning a piece may have. Take Joan Miró’s brilliant Painting (Head and Spider). I have no explanation for why I love this piece so deeply, except perhaps because of how utterly hilarious it is that 9 lines on a dappled background constitute a masterpiece for many people. But sparking amusement and joy is in no way without worth, and Miró’s piece can be enjoyed perfectly well as it is; a painting without inherent meaning for which the viewer can ascribe any thoughts they may have, even if those are simple amusement.
At the end, the pieces which are the most guilty of the overreaching described above are the Piet Mondrians and Yves Kleins of the world: utterly meaningless pieces elevated to a status where meaning must be ascribed to it to justify its inclusion in the discourse. In essence, this type of modern art is a rejection of the exact idea that meaning must have any part in art whatsoever, and by hanging alongside its contemporaries it mocks the art which strives so painfully to impart a message in the tiny space with which it can exhibit. Any importance which the viewer can find in these pieces can also be found in an empty sidewalk, a clear sky, a piece of trash or an Yves Klein blue.
Once the postulating is all over, however, the importance of art remains outside of any objective attempts to critique and value individual pieces. Discussing what we had just seen, and the ridiculous attempts to intellectualise non-intellectual pieces at the Fondation Louis Vuitton exhibition, my aunt made the most lucid point; “At the end of it all I will walk away from this exhibit feeling happy inside, and that’s all that really matters in the end”.
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