Art and criticism
Right conclusions
Giles Auty
Some months ago I received an interest- ing telephone call from a BBC producer of art programmes who wanted to talk to me turilY apparent capacity as a `right-wing art critic'. The subject he wished to discuss was 'political' art and the reasons why it is generally received, in the West, with some- thing less than critical acclaim.
As I was not and still am not altogether sure what a `right-wing art critic' is sup- Posed to believe, I could not confirm my suitability or otherwise for the proposed programme. However, in trying to make sense of the questions I was asked it struck me that what my interrogator really meant by `political' art was imagery of an overtly left-wing or anti-government nature. In this country, so far as I know, there is no such thing as 'gallery' art with a clear, right-wing or pro-government message, although there are, of course, plenty of examples in newspapers. My objection to most political art of today — as distinct from that of earlier times by noted practitioners such as Grosz and Kollwitz — is in its failure of expres- sion rather than in the nature of its message. In stating this, I confess to a certain aesthetic conservatism. Probably I am more radical in my political than my artistic views but it is all too easy to forget that aesthetic conservatism can be and often is quite distinct from political tradi- tionalism although they share a common language. , From the beginning of this cen- tury modernist liberals appropriated much of the aesthetic vocabulary which has posi- tive associations: progressive, advanced, evolutionary, experimental and so forth are. just a few of the adjectives which spring readily to mind. But art must not be ruled by semantics. By grabbing all the good' language, modernists probably took their biggest single step — albeit unwitting- ly — towards the creation of many baseless but enduring myths. Why else has it taken nearly a century for critics of so-called progress in art even to start to ask, Progress towards what?' By the time this issue appears we will be at the end of another year, suffering, in a climate of fresh moral dilemmas, from ever increasing fin de siecle unease. Looking back on this century it has become in- creasingly clear that much of the rich, bright promise of the first years has re- mained unfulfilled. In art the movement we know as modernism had already passed its zenith by the middle years of this century. Since 1980 or even earlier we have added the term post-modernism to our artistic vocabulary. Were the seeds of destruction planted already in those first, heroic, modernist years?
The obverse of the language of progress is the language of reaction. Political and aesthetic conservatives will be only too familiar with its lash. Reactionary, tradi- tionalist, die-hard and so forth are all words which carry a negative loading, often alien to their basic meanings. Thus to dislike modern convenience foods or tower blocks might have been described at one time as reactionary attitudes. But who would now care to say such 'reactions' were anything but right? From the outset, the vocabulary of modernism placed critics of the movement at deadly disadvantage. While the descrip- tion 'modern' itself benefited from its apparent associations with technological progress and even more from its wide- spread use as a term of unqualified praise in the communications industry, any con- trary viewpoint was damned from the start by descriptions such as 'reactionary' or `anti-modern'. Those who put their heads above the parapet were shot down and ridiculed. Sir Alfred Munnings lived to rue his intemperate outburst at the Royal Academy dinner in 1949 when he voiced the reservations many felt about the un- challenged dominance of modernism. To- day Munnings's point of view is being reassessed belatedly in two exhibitions currently being held in Manchester City Art Galleries. Munnings paid dearly for his `anti-modernism' yet, here, once again, the term in itself suggests a vituperative anta- gonism rather than what may have been little more than the re-assertion of tradi- tional values. Even so distinguished a figure as the historian E. H. Gombrich picked his words with extreme care when voicing the reservations he felt about cer- tain new directions art appeared to be taking. In its latter years modernism suf- fered from too easy and complete a hege- mony and from too little constructive criticism from within or without.
Today this picture has changed and greater freedom has been won to consider art in a longer and broader historical context. Without such context, criticism becomes shallow and ephemeral; little more, in fact, than the noting of passing fashions.
Modernism is a vague and elastic term for an idea which is most strongly characte- rised by rejection of the past. To throw all tradition overboard is thus a more 'mod- ern' action than one in which even minor links with the past are retained. The danger of severance is isolation; a con- scious decision, if you will, to cultivate only a small corner of the garden. The modern movement in painting atrophied in precise proportion to the degree it cut itself off from all earlier sources of nutriment and rejuvenation.
Time passes and human attitudes change, not always for the better. Conser- vatism in art or life might be described as an unwillingness to discard the valuable. At the least, the story of the baby and the bathwater may turn out to be modernism's most appropriate epitaph. It was a move- ment which produced great artistic heroes but also a lot of poor and muddled crit- icism. This often obscured the movement's lasting merits no less than its weaknesses.
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