The Decline and Fall of the Avant-Garde

By ROBERT HUGHES

ART is in bad shape. Advanced art, that is. The diagnosis: condition feeble. The prognosis: poor. The avant-garde has finally run out of steam, whether in Munich or Los Angeles, Paris or New York; the turnover of styles and theories that gave the 1960s their racketing ebullience (Abstract Expressionism, Minimalism, Op, Pop and so on) has been followed by a sluggish descent into entropy. There seems to be no escape from that spiral.

Dealers continue to exhibit their pet trends as though nothing had happened, but recent art criticism has taken on a glum, apocalyptic tone: "The art currently filling the museums and galleries is of such low quality generally that no real critical intelligence could possibly feel challenged to analyze it...There is an inescapable sense among artists and critics that we are at the end of our rope, culturally speaking."

The writer is not some reactionary fogy whose predictions have finally come true, the way a stopped clock is right twice a day. She is a leading modernist critic, Barbara Rose, and her strictures would not have been made in the '60s, when American art seemed to inhabit an endless summer. Then New York believed in its manifest destiny; it had become the new Paris, or even Imperial Rome. The "mainstream" ran through New York. And it seemed by mid-decade that virtually everyone with something to invest was blundering about in its turbid flood like a shark, snapping up artworks. The culmination of this process was "Henry's show," a huge and partial exhibition called "New York Painting and Sculpture: 1940-1970" that Henry Geldzahler organized at the Metropolitan. If ever an exhibition broke the back of a decade, it was this one. It declared the union of new art, capital and official power to be indissoluble, and crystallized the dissatisfactions that many artists felt with the interlocking, market-based System. It seemed to proclaim the end of an era.

The era was of great significance. It still seems true that American painting and sculpture during those 30 years reached a level of quality and invention that it never had before and may not soon regain. But creative periods do not last forever, and the desire to invent does not guarantee them. By 1970, few serious artists were untroubled by the exploitation of art. And one remedy that was proposed with increasing frequency was the abolition of the art object itself--anything that could be bought or possessed. This was not a new idea. Unfortunately, when used as a principle of art activity, it caused an eddy--even a vacuum--in which the avant-garde is immobilized today.

"Advanced" art--whether conceptual art, process art, video, body art or any of their proliferating hybrids--avoids the object like the plague. The public has retreated, in turn, from it. This is a worldwide phenomenon, and what now exists is not simply a recession of interest (and talent) but a general weariness--a reluctance to believe in the avant-garde as principle. To be ahead of the game now seems pointless, for the game--under its present rules--is not worth playing.

Why did this happen? Those interested in the fate of the avant-garde should reflect on a Viennese artist named Rudolf Schwarzkogler. His achievement (and limited though it may be, it cannot be taken from him; he died, a martyr to his art, in 1969 at the age of 29) was to become the Vincent Van Gogh of body art. As every moviegoer knows, Van Gogh once cut off his ear and presented it to a whore. Schwarzkogler seems to have deduced that what really counts is not the application of paint, but the removal of surplus flesh. So he proceeded, inch by inch, to amputate his own penis, while a photographer recorded the act as an art event. In 1972, the resulting prints were reverently exhibited in that biennial motor show of Western art, Documenta 5 at Kassel. Successive acts of self-amputation finally did Schwarzkogler in.

Resurrected though incomplete, Schwarzkogler has entered the pantheon along with such living eminences of the Viennese imagination as Hermann Nitsch (whose ritual, the Orgies Mysteries Theatre performed in New York last month, consists of covering himself, a room and everyone in range with animal blood and guts) and Arnulf Rainer (whose act is to truss himself, like a plucked hen, in thongs and twine, have photos taken, and smear the prints with black paint).

No doubt it could be argued by the proponents of body art (a form of expression whereby the artist's body becomes, as it were, the subject and object of the artwork) that Schwarzkogler's self-editing was not indulgent but brave, taking the audience's castration fears and reducing them to their most threatening quiddity. That the man was clearly as mad as a hatter, sick beyond rebuke, is not thought important: wasn't Van Gogh crazy too? But Schwarzkogler's gesture has a certain emblematic value. Having nothing to say, and nowhere to go but further out, he lopped himself and called it art. The politics of experience give way to the poetics of impotence. Farewell, Jasper; hullo, Rudolf!

The idea of an avant-garde art was predicated on the belief that artists, as social outsiders, could see further than insiders; that radical change in language (either oral or visual) could accompany, and even help cause, similar changes in life. To keep renewing the contract of language, so that it could handle fresh and difficult experience--such was the hope of the avantgarde, from Courbet to Breton and beyond. And the hope needed certain conditions of nourishment. First, there had to be something to say, some proposition about experience, and this entailed a rigorous sense, among artists, of the use of their art. Art needed to be a necessary channel of information. Otherwise, why should changing it matter? Second, art required a delicate, exact sense of its own distance from society, so as not to be co-opted. And third, there had to be a strict faculty of judgment about one's responsibilities to language. Newness for its own sake lay on the periphery, not the center, of the avantgarde.

These are not, to put it mildly, the conditions that govern what passes for advanced art today, especially in New York. The Avant-Garde Festival, held this fall on a boat moored at the South Street Seaport in Manhattan, was a fair example of the problem: a confusion of irresolute trivia, ranging from a cabin full of autumn leaves (which, at least, the kids enjoyed throwing around), through numerous video pieces, to Charlotte Moorman--who enjoys a fame of sorts as the world's only topless cellist--playing her instrument under water. It was all so affably amateurish, like a transistorized rummage sale, that one gave up expectation.

A besetting problem for experimenters is that people no longer expect to get their necessary information from art; it was this gap that the artist-made video tape promised to close. But an event does not automatically gain aesthetic meaning because it is recorded, handheld, on half-inch tape. Too many video pieces are either bald documentaries or hermetic diaries. Watching a tape of some artist making funny faces at himself has as many longueurs as gazing into the painted eye of a Landseer spaniel.

The inherent purposelessness of anti-object art becomes a real liability in one area: conceptualism. The basic claim of conceptual art is that making objects is irrelevant. The artist's duty is to reveal and criticize the attitudes by which art is made. In fact, painting and sculpture have always done this; every authentic creation is also a criticism, but criticism is not its sole subject. Instead, as Art Critic Max Kozloff pointed out in a trenchant essay on art-as-idea, we get "deliberately undigested accretions of data, documentations without comment, the purveying of information for its own sake, and the measuring of meaningless quantities."

And so a thicket of verbiage protects, and supports, the most banal propositions. Recently, an artist named Jannis Kounellis showed (among other things) a live macaw, sitting on a perch that projected from a steel plate. "The parrot piece," Kounellis explained, "is a more direct demonstration of the dialectic between the structure and the rest, in other words, the nature of the parrot, do you see? The structure represents a common mentality, and then the sensuous part, the parrot, is a criticism of the structure, right?" Stripped of its jargon, this is a not very surprising revelation that parrots are not perches. But at least one could scratch the parrot, which is not the case with more conceptualized works like Mel Bochner's recent piece at the Sonnabend Gallery: The Seven Properties of Between, 1971-72. It consisted of leaves of paper on which were laid stones, labeled A, B, X and Y, with such observations written below as "If X is between A and B, A and B are not identical." What, one wonders, are such minimalities doing in an art gallery rather than a child's primer of logic? Gallery space is not, in fact, necessary: one of Robert Barry's conceptual efforts required that the door of his gallery be locked and adorned with this notice: "For the exhibition, the gallery will be closed."

There are no aesthetic criteria for dealing with such works. If some artist shows a clutch of Polaroids of himself playing table tennis, this is called "information." But who is informed, and about what? "Information" has become the shibboleth of the '70s, a vogue word, as "flatness" was in the '60s and "gesture" was in the '50s. Information is somehow opposed to "culture." For all the pretense of entering the world out there, however, conceptual art remains inexorably culture-bound. Its very existence hinges on the privileged status of art itself, a status drilled into the world audience by decades of institutional art-worship. No matter how nugatory an event or object seems, it is nevertheless special, being art. And within this protective box, the conceptual artist--as Sculptor Robert Smithson acerbically put it--disports himself "like a B.F. Skinner rat doing his 'tough' little tricks."

These matters do not afflict body art to the same degree, even though the atmosphere of suspension and privilege peculiar to the recent avant-garde remains. But the trouble with most body pieces is that they are either so small in conception as to be negligible--for instance, Dennis Oppenheim slowly tearing off a section of his fingernail--or so grotesque in their implications, as with poor Schwarzkogler, that they amount to overkill. Triviality or threat: take your choice.

There is something indubitably menacing about the work of people like Vito Acconci, one of whose recent pieces was to build a ramp and crawl around below it, masturbating invisibly; or the young Los Angeles artist Chris Burden, who had himself manacled to the floor of an open garage, between live wires and buckets of water, so that (in possibility) anyone who cared to might kick over the pails and electrocute the artist. The sight of such gratuitous risk is a vulgar frisson for the spectators, and unlikely to appeal to those who believe that art and life interact best at a distance from one another. At least the psychodramas of body art connote a desperate involvement that is missing from the other, and colder, latitudes of conceptualism. If conceptual art represents pedagogy and stale metaphysics at the end of their tether, body art is the last rictus of Expressionism.

But faced with the choice between amateur therapy and finicky, arid footnotes to Duchamp, the mind recoils. In fact, the term avant-garde has outlived its usefulness. The hard thing to face is not that the emperor has no clothes; it is that beneath the raiment, there is no emperor.

Robert Hughes

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