In our post post modern culture, the definitions of what can be deemed “art” have become more and more flexible. Where gradually wider creative phenomena like fashion, design and architecture have approached and entered the arena of accepted art, art’s essence (instigating magical change through aestheticised personal expression, thereby enhancing the experience of life) has become more and more pushed away by superficialities and mass market adaptation – no doubt reflecting the overall contemporary culture as a whole.
This constitutes a problem, and not only on the level of terminology. The problem consists of a demoting of an essential sphere or phenomenon into a commodified area that mainly uses the rational mind to evaluate even aesthetic or emotional spheres. To use an example closer to the core question: art is art, but the art world is not art. The rational handling of and trading with something stemming from the soul doesn’t make the actual handling or trading soulful. But unfortunately this is what has happened, and it’s continuing to de-enchant and de-mythologise the world as we know it.
Art has been the main carrier of human mythologies, which is one reason why it can be called essential. Without substantial and relevant stories created for inspiration, teaching, reflection and resonance humans would still just be base, instinct-driven animals. This mythologising quality is essentially what sets us apart from other animals (not forgetting the complex and in this case almost paradoxical phenomenon of suicide). The meeting of human minds and stories is what defines the very concept of “being human”.
There is also the tricky but ingenious aspect of art as a more general human endeavour, which is something that has helped our contemporary confusion along. Creative skills have always been used for working in the now through organised crafts, which means creating memes of defining the now. Fashion, design, architecture and writing in general have been integrated as parts of active and creative history writing, and definitely with the potential to tell mythological stories in a mosaic kind of way. But it’s only recently that these crafts have attempted to invade a more substantial mythological arena. Why is this?
I would say that technology is to blame, followed closely by greed. A new definition or packaging of an old phenomenon helps sell it again. The onslaught of technology has drained human existence of genuine mythological force. The massive commercial potential in the smaller, faster, cheaper constructs/platforms, filled with smaller, faster, cheaper content inevitably affects us all in negative ways. It’s hard to see the big picture on a small screen. I’m not in any way implying a conspiracy to dumb down human intelligence, but unfortunately this is the inevitable result of a process that reflects a species that has basically negated its libido and reshaped it into a frantic death drive.
Joseph Campbell once listed four key functions of mythology:
1. The reconciliation of consciousness with the preconditions of its own existence. Handling the often sorrowful realisation that human existence is temporal. The creation of an ideal, the “other”, the holy/religious.
2. The formulating and rendering of a cosmological image of the universe in keeping with the science of the time and of such kind that, within its range, all things should be recognised as parts of a single great holy picture.
3. The validation and maintaining of some specific social order, authorising its moral code as a construct beyond criticism or human emendation.
4. The psychological angle: shaping individuals to the aims and ideals of their various social groups.
If we look at the contemporary with the help of this specific model, and integrate both what I would call “real” art and the more ephemeral creative crafts listed above, it’s not a pretty picture. The escapist longing for definitive, holy, authoritarian, religious ideas has created a violent global instability, and the mythological expressions are simplified in extreme dualisms of good versus bad. The previously helpful cosmological image no longer looks at the inspiring as well as awe-inspiring grand scale totality but at the ever smaller particles – an escapist analysis of the intangibly minute only possible via technology. Social order is maintained by ever stricter control, either blatantly dictatorial or via diametrical manipulations (freedom of expression more monitored than ever, freedom of movement scrutinised by surveillance, freedom of thought made ill at ease by the double-speak of political correctness).
The fourth point is perhaps the most interesting one. Although our western cultural sphere officially lauds equality and the nobility of mobility, the tools we use actually stratify more than ever before. Some decades ago, one used to say that access to computers was a class issue. Today, the opposite is true – the person who can afford to be out of reach of technology is at the top of the existential pyramid. Education via fiction, and this predominantly via technology, has created a greater class divide than ever before, as the need for non-critical human slaves/machine operators increases. And as technology itself is on its way to reshape work life (more “free” time for humans means more possibilities/time to consume and be even more enslaved) we will rapidly approach the pivotal moment that science fiction writers have been obsessed with for centuries: the dreaded power switch when intelligent machines become sentient and thereby ruled by self preservation rather than human authority.
A recent visit to New York provided much fodder for thought about this for me. Not only in the usual and quite endearing American way (“Wow, this is the biggest chocolate chip cookie ever!”, uttered by a child who received the cookie in question from the waiter when her parents were busy paying for lunch. The customer care that goes to any length, even potential diabetes, to ensure a safe return not home but to the restaurant in question) but more of a morose kind. On a busy street corner I saw three boys and one adult man. They were all clutching their cell phones, staring into them and then nervously up at “reality”. “There!”, one boy shouted. “No, there!”, shouted another. The adult looked as nervous and giddy as the boys. I realised they were playing Pokemon Go, and after an initial fascination, the scene depressed me. Despite the frenzy, the passivity was so total; their minds so completely immersed in a digital fantasy world alluringly mixed with so called real world landscapes. The invasion of the private sphere has now apparently gone public. It’s a dissolution of human dignity and a fictional entrapment that I fear will not be temporary.
“…with every new advance in technology, man’s knowledge and control of the powers of earth and nature alter, old cosmologies lose their hold and new come into being.” (Campbell)
When visiting the Museum of Modern Art, I was pleasantly overwhelmed by the exhibitions: a Bruce Conner retrospective, items from Tony Oursler’s truly magical collections, Nan Goldin’s “The Ballad of Sexual Dependency” series and a display of Tristan Tzara and Francis Picabia’s DadaGlobe material. It was such a great display of art at its very best: evocative, intelligent, humorous, beautiful, transcending time, thought-provoking, etc. This visit was unfortunately balanced out perfectly by one to the sister museum: MOMA PS1. Where MOMA is “modern”, PS1 is “contemporary”. Although I entered with an open mind, the entire experience was intimidating and even more depressing than the Pokemon Go gang. Floor upon floor of soul-less displays of mental constructs. A lot of the works shown at the time of my visit supposedly celebrated the origins of the PS1 “concept”, with a focus on 1970s performance art. In this, the postmodern lingo runs amok in abstractions and explanations that shouldn’t really be needed if the art itself packed a mythological punch. But this is the arena not of visionary artists but of curators and collectors, defining spheres that really need no middle men (or women) at all. It’s a sterile display celebrating superficiality and smartness rather than aestheticism and intelligence. Great art should need no externalised context.
The displayed photos of Chinese artist Deng Tai nocturnally draped in a red flag are quite beautiful in themselves. But when they become contextualised and, even worse, politicised, the mythology potential dwindles: “Deng is at once visible and illegible, bare and costumed, a fugitive body enacting a private theater in which he is both performer and audience.” Papo Colo: “The MoMA PS1 presentation centers around Colo’s Superman 51 (1977), in which he drags a collection of fifty-one white pieces of wood behind him, tethered to his body with ropes, as he runs shirtless down an empty stretch of Manhattan’s West Side Highway until collapsing from exhaustion.”
Who are these descriptions for? Is it impossible for the works of art to be self-explanatory or communicate via a mythological language that bars that of the curators? Images and symbols usually make more sense than clarifications and elaborations. I kept thinking of the psychology of reality shows on TV, where we first see what goes on, and then have it explained to us by one or often several of the participants. It’s a repetition of the already given that makes it hard (if not impossible) to make up your own mind. And perhaps that’s exactly the point of these dehumanised and de-enchanted pseudo-mythologies?
Almost as if to humour my prejudices, the main exhibition (Vito Acconci’s 1976 Where are we now (And who are we anyway?)) is presented with “Since the mid-80s through the present, Acconci has mixed with a design and architecture studio”. Why am I not surprised?
(This text was originally published in the Norwegian magazine Kunstforum, 2016)
