6 MAY 1995, Page 49

Art

Small expectations

Giles Auty

he Spectator's editor asked recently whether I could encapsulate in a paragraph where and why my views diverge from the modernist orthodoxy which dominates offi- cial art. My answer is that I can't but I will have a try in a page.

On one of my rare appearances on British television, I asked my fellow arts panellists on The Late Show a brace of innocent-seeming questions. The first, in response to being told that I couldn't stop the clock, was a request to be shown where the clock was. Clearly, my second query struck the editors of the programme as even more bizarre, since they used their `instant edit' facility — on a live show — to erase my next request completely. What I asked was if any of my fellow panellists was a Christian.

The purpose of my first question was to point out the underlying fallacy of a deter- minist creed. In short, the inexorable movement of the clock's hands does not happen because the existence of such a clock is an illusion in the first place. The force of this particular myth vanishes the second we realise the extent to which our destinies — both individual and collective — lie in our own hands. What may seem inexorable are the consequences of our actions — but the original right to choose remains. To apply this to art, we are thus not under the slightest obligation to toler- ate poor art sold to us on the false premise that it is an inevitable consequence of an indifferent age.

This said, the point of my next 'Christian' question had nothing to do with the doc- trine of free will. What I wanted to demon- strate was the valid part that continuity of a certain kind plays in the lives of hundreds of millions of people. One of my fellow panellists had just stated she believed that art changed forever about 25 years ago when 'we' realised that anything could be art and that everyone was an artist. In fact, We' collectively never recognised anything of the kind; the case for conceptual art cre- ated by non-artists has never been argued to any intelligent person's satisfaction. Apart from the year to which she referred 1968 — when every good North London socialist knew someone who knew someone Who was nearly hit by a police baton in Paris, the modernist creed contains instances of other years after which it was claimed that nothing in art could ever be the same again. Modernism is essentially a schismatic doctrine through which we break with past beliefs and traditions because we deem them, in our new-found wisdom, to be wrong or no longer relevant. Thus, at earlier moments of this century, Cubism, Futurism and Dada assailed the conventions of the fixed single viewpoint, the fixed moment of time and the supposed sanctity of the art object.

Certainly each movement introduced an interesting initiative which may have helped redefine our subsequent artistic insights. But did these movements really change everything forever and sever, rather than just temporarily stretch, the cords that bind us to our artistic past? This is where orthodox modernists and I part company. Picasso, say, was a startling innovator yet he certainly did not think or claim he had `gone beyond' the achievements of Spanish predecessors such as Goya and Velazquez, of whom he remained always in awe. It is confused believers in a sub-Darwinian the- ory of art who have made 'evolutionary' claims for Picasso and for other formal 'innovators. Modernism strikes me some- times as a state of permanent adolescence, in which the tyro cannot begin to grasp the magnitude or continuing relevance of the tradition he tries to topple. I am inclined to the view that no one with a mature under- standing of the wealth of our artistic her- itage can be a modernist. The thrust of modernism relies on a form of ignorance about the past which is sadly encouraged now, rather than eliminated, in our art schools.

What, then, sustains modernist domina- tion of our living artistic culture? The basic answer is power and propaganda. Lacking grounds for rational domination, mod- ernists tend to take the pragmatic road favoured by Marxists. In fact, both mod- ernism and Marxism are unsustainable Utopian creeds which can be enforced most easily by totalitarian means. Mod- ernism cannot bear the voice of dissent because dissent has reason rather than power' on its side. After decades of surren- der to Marxist and modernist domination, few people desire either form of hegemony any longer. The citizens of Eastern Europe have largely rid themselves of the former yoke, yet th6se of Western Europe still remain in thrall to the latter.

Outside journalism, it is almost impossi- ble for anyone with my Views to gain any official position in living art here, even though my thoughts may concur with those of a majority of thinking people. By enjoy- ing total power, modernism has no need of I've read the book, now I'll try the author.' popularity. In fact, its intellectual defences have always been thin since they rely so much on rhetorical use of language. Rhetoric helps keep the day of reckoning at bay but the insurmountable problem that would-be modernist as well as Marxist potentates face is the inconvenient one of visual evidence. It is easy enough to talk of progress in art or agriculture until harvest comes along, then acres of barren art and barren fields finally give the game away. Neither modernism nor Marxism excel at fulfilling their promises.

Why did I mention Christianity? Simply because it is an example — and a very good one — of the way long-standing traditions can still inform and influence the lives of great numbers of thinking people. While not discounting the worth of new or recent inventions, I am influenced similarly by appreciation of a great breadth of art his- torical achievements. To me, these seem no less real or relevant than art which was made last week. Novelty is not a virtue in itself — but neither is continuity. In daily life most thinking people blend elements of radicalism and traditionalist in their per- sonal philosophies and in actions which affect most areas of their lives.

The problem of modernism is that it shows overwhelming bias towards the radi- cal at the expense of the continuous. In a nutshell, this is where modernism forfeits the sympathy of a thinking public.