Mark Prince on the rejection of relativism

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David Maljkovic Retired Form 2008

The New Transcendentalism

IN AN INTERVIEW FROM 1965, Frank Stella distinguished between the surface issues of his painting and the transcendental or metaphysical content which earlier abstract artists had aspired to: Its like what they left us to do, and if we succeed in solving most of those problems or dealing successfully with them, then the generations that follow us will maybe go back to the transcendental.
Stella was speaking at the threshold of Postmodernism, which has imposed a stubborn, unnegotiable filter through which all belief is automatically rendered relative and all value non-hierarchical. Try to imagine reversing the process and you come upon a resistance comparable to reading time-travel stories when the premise suddenly wobbles as its underlying contradictions become apparent.

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problem, and therefore it makes sense that it is to Modernism and its myths and archetypes that artists first turn when looking for alternatives to the relativistic status quo. This could be an inversion of the progress which saw the metaphysical pretensions of Abstract Expressionism unravel into the more down-to-earth materialist mindset of early Minimalism on the back of Clement Greenbergs linear narratives of flatness and opticality. However, Modernism is mostly perceived not as the true light that has been mistakenly mislaid, but as a mysterious historical phenomenon, like an extinct religious cult, for artists too young to have experienced anything of it first hand. Richard Wrights wall paintings combine modernist abstraction with signs associated with gothic and religious imagery. In his Turner Prize installation last year, there were intimations of something evanescent about to be revealed from the elaborately patterned gold leaf. Even aside from the obvious historical connotations of this material, Wrights Baroque symmetry of eruptions and flowerings might have been intended as a Blakean vision of heaven or hell. His work is overpainted when an exhibition closes nothing remains to be sold and he has spoken of this erasure in political terms, as a rejection of the commodity status of the medium: I am not against painting on canvas per se; the problem is the ease with which painting is absorbed into the market, which of course facilitates its easy consumption. There are too many unnecessary objects. Wrights wall paintings are a minimal, site-specific inflection of the existing interior more than a descendent of the full-bodied mural, but their denial of the art object goes deeper than this lack of material assertion. Wright brings the diamonds and stripes of formalistic abstraction into conjunction with gothic curlicues, gold leaf and cloudbursts, refusing to recognise any essential distinction between the two vocabularies. He sets up a dichotomy which allows him to project his art beyond formal confines. Transcendence, in these terms, is to transcend both the art object and the art market with its streamlined utilitarianism. If it is sellable it can be reduced to its function as a commodity, and Wright would like to hinder that automatic divisibility. Modernisms reduction of art to its formal basics becomes synonymous with the commodified art object, gothic with its dematerialisation. If this remains a relativistic equilibrium, the coherence of Wrights language depends on reconciling its binary terms in the process of the work. Wright has said: I reject the idea of pure art ... I would not call the faade of Cologne Cathedral or the ornamental art of Islam decorative, I would call it ecstatic. Contrasting purity and the decorative with ecstasy, he polarises an idea of art as a hermetic, self-referential language with an ideal of outward-looking commitment for which he has chosen a term with religious associations. Is he dressing up secular aesthetics in the language of faith? That the idea of pure art, which for the 20th-century Avant Garde was a ticket to the absolute and the unknown, should now be seen as confinement and limitation if not materialism is an indication of how far we are from modernistic transcendentalism. Making the leap from Greenbergian purity to ecstasy, Wright uses two examples of religious art. Ecstasy conflates religious feeling and aesthetic pleasure, both terms

Isa Genzken Wind 2009

Artists, however, are also stubborn, and the trail beyond postmodern irony has come to seem a seductive territory. Credulousness, having lost all credibility, appears full of potential again; but when critics use the term post-ironic, are they suggesting that transcendental value has become a possibility again, or that it is being adopted by artists as subject matter for commentary and critique? Is this a symptom of a dubious desire for faith, superstition, the promise of absolutes? To seek the magics from a position of disabused rationality would seem to be oxymoronic, if not patronising. But perhaps there are many productive grey areas between entrenched scepticism and categorical values as, for instance, HA Williams suggests when he says that the academic study of prayer may lead a man to pray. Modernism is the most recent manifestation of art which presented itself as the only possible solution to a

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which present themselves as circumventing critique. His references to 1970s and 80s punk and goth culture via the design features associated with them reflect the ability of those cultures to crystallise a radical outburst of pure energy which aimed to overrule the pedestrian qualifications of intellectual deconstruction. But this is not a return to pre-Enlightenment enchantment, or even 19th-century Romanticism; ecstasy is knowingly deployed as an antidote to the prevailing culture of rational irony. Sciencefiction imagery also fits these specifications by departing from rationality while comprehending a rational basis for its imaginings. As a metaphor for the unknown and unquantifiable, it is a post-Romantic cartoon version of religious iconography. In the collages of the Croatian artist David Maljkovic, images of abstract public sculpture from socialist 1960s Yugoslavia are pasted into photographs of glittering seascapes like science-fiction idols looming up on the sunlit horizon. With their burnished geometrical facets the forms are symbols of Modernism and utopian aspirations. The Romantic appearance of these images is deceptive because their currency is the language of clich, a set of meanings which are understood to be already obsolete. They are ironic commentaries on transcendental projections, a deflation of Modernisms immodest pretensions. Science fiction is the flipside of nostalgia, and both are vulnerable to sentimentality and the imputation of naivety. Maljkovic, however, never renounces his cool. Holding himself aloof from the fervent visionary commitment of the Avant Garde, he can appear cynical, translating historically rooted idealism into a temporally undifferentiated retro sublime, drawing on the energy of his sources, while never fully committing himself in return. It should be said in mitigation that there is a sense in which the artist working between these extremes is in a nowin situation, either dallying with belief from a comfortably urbane distance, or else relinquishing critical authority too easily. If, in line with Wrights statements, the anything goes of pluralism has become hard to distinguish from the laissez-faire of capitalism, the subversive gesture may lie in separating the art object from its glib ability to be all things to all people; to force politically correct, market-friendly relativism to take a position. Richard Hawkinss series of Celestial Telegraph Paintings, 2008, humorously enacts this unmooring from agnoticism. Developed around a series of Native American spiritualist anecdotes, the paintings are conceived as telegraphic devices capable of picking up messages from the spirit world. The feathers attached to the corners of the canvases are would-be aerials, dyed in fluorescent colours as though electrified by the signals they are receiving. Hawkins gently empathises with esoteric Native American spiritualist practices. By vicariously enacting those beliefs, rather than reporting on them with the condescension of a civilised bystander, he risks appearing ridiculous. A sweeping equivalence is drawn between the transformative power of metaphor in art and the alchemical claims of spiritualism. Bad Medicine, 2008, inlays a square panel of thick, swirling, brightly coloured oil paint in a rectangle of check towelling material also roughly smeared with paint. A black feather droops from the bottom corner like a haplessly

>> Rather than a wholehearted affirmation of superstition or transcendental value, it is more a matter of defying the convention that relativism has become.
disconnected lead. The painting might be a magic carpet which has travelled through abrasive atmospheres to deliver its fragile message. Its stubbly, overworked materiality is essential to the metaphor of its being released to mystery. Hawkins makes a camp performance of investing basic materials with metaphysical meaning. He sets up the metaphor with the deadpan delivery of a comedian confident that his joke will take. For Barnett Newman, a zip was both more than a stripe and more than a metaphor: it was a dividing, divining line magically activating space, an embodiment of human singularity or isolation or dignity. For Stella it had become no more or less than a band of pigment of a certain width. Chronology undid the alchemical process. Isa Genzkens recent installation in Berlin, entitled Wind, 2009, was preoccupied with this process of transfiguration. The minimilism of her early concrete sculptures has been transformed, in the course of her career, into elegaic monuments to mortality, secular totems. A row of towers were set up along the length of the gallery as sculptural elegies to the recently deceased Michael Jackson. The towers were decorated with mirroring CDs, and draped with cheap transparent fabrics and layers of semi-transparent acetate. On the gallery walls, images of a dancing Jackson and Michelangelos David sculpture faced each other in a series of collages. Photographs of cats glued to the sides of the towers resembled effigies of ancient Egyptian queens. Jacksons post-surgery features were also feline, his eyes ecstatically half-hooded, his figure frozen in mid-moon dance, that nose like nothing from nature. The installation was a symbolic apotheosis of pop trash, with Jackson transfigured as an immortal king. The flickering surface of Genzkens collages sprayed with silver and gold paint, and layered by segmented metallic sheets is the equivalent of Wrights gold leaf. A classical minimalistic ground is overwritten by the energy of her process, partly destroyed, partly decorated. The commitment she brings to these gestures aims to justify the temerity of a narrative which presents Jackson as more than just another piece of postmodern media fluff and a few sheets of Ikea chipboard as monuments to human transience. Classical motifs the monolithic tower, the monumental figurative sculpture are brought into conjunction with contemporary ephemera, as though a star could be transformed into a god by the sheer insinuation of sculptural process. Genzken and Hawkins resist framing their spiritual narratives as dispassionate rhetoric or objective commentary. They always leave themselves open to the possibility of wholly identifying with the beliefs they are representing, the object of the belief becoming synonymous with the arts resolution. The tone of Cyprien Gaillards 16mm film Cities of Gold & Mirrors, 2009, is pitched to oscillate

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Cyprien Gaillard Cities of Gold & Mirrors 2009 film still

between these mutual states of critique and assent (see Profile AM328). Set in the Mexican coastal resort of Cancn, it envisages capitalisms distortions and betrayals of tradition as a catastrophic spectacle. The film launches itself beyond objective parameters by presenting its reportage in the apocalyptic language of supernatural or occult imagery. Cancn was only established in the late 1960s as a magnet for tourism, but it stands on the site of ancient Mayan ruins. We watch a gang of US teenagers alight from a tour bus and begin downing bottles of liquor in a single draught: they might be the degraded ghosts of the Spanish conquistadors who colonised Mexico in the 16th century. Apart from an occasional manipulation of film speed, the images are presented as straight footage, although they resemble special-effects kitsch and dystopian science fiction. An office blocks mirrored faade trembles repeatedly before collapsing into dust. Decorative vegetation creeps between floors as though about to overwhelm the modernistic atrium of a luxury hotel which is styled, architecturally, to resemble the sloping sides of Mayan stepped pyramids. A nightclub ceiling traversed by spotlights looms menacingly like the descending spaceship in Spielbergs Close Encounters of the Third Kind. Geographical Analogies, 2006-09, groups Gaillards Polaroids of landscapes and cityscapes in vitrines, each containing nine pictures arranged in a diamond-shaped grid. Although they are set at a 45-degree angle, all the Polaroids were taken, perversely, with the camera at a diagonal, so the images are level despite each pictures tilt. Combinations tease out visual similes between locations across the globe. The concrete grid of a dilapidated 1960s housing faade is shown to mimic the stonework of a Gothic cathedral window. A park monuments silhouette resembles the stalactites of a waterfall, photographically frozen. The verticals of urban obelisks are balanced by rural standing stones. Gaillard sees signs and elicits farfetched connections; his analogies transcend historical and geographical limitations, revealing the aura of lost worlds

lurking under the surface of the everyday. In the eccentricities of layout and framing, modernist conventions have been imposed on the photographic material like a set of arbitrary occult parameters. The taxonomical approach has a portentous, paranoid edge to it. Placing an unnecessary tilt on the standard square format of the Polaroid, the diamond is both a paradigm of formalist art and an esoteric window onto the world. It is as though Modernism is the default frame through which supernatural content requires to be viewed. If Gaillards occultism is a detached manipulation of preexisting signs, in a strictly postmodern vein, it also represents a desire for what cannot be explained by the deliberate archival structuring which projects it, a content which has not already been articulated and which would elude analysis. What that might amount to remains an intimation, like the horror film which is only frightening as long as the monster remains unseen. It is ironic that neoconservative critics of the 1970s saw a revival of religion as a possible solution to modernitys fragmentation of societys stable values, whereas here we have Modernism itself viewed as a repository of transcendental meaning. The direct reversal brings us back to Stellas predictions of a return to what he had been instrumental in breaking away from. We can also speculate on the connections between a striving to reinstitute categorical value and the international resurgence of fundamentalist religion. The comparison makes it clear that these challenges to the relativistic orthodoxy may unironically flirt with the gestures of faith, but they issue from a secular vantage. The leap from the terra firma of relativism to a position which spurns those critical qualifications is dramatised. Rather than a wholehearted affirmation of superstition or transcendental value, it is more a matter of defying the convention that relativism has become, a defiance that recalls the adversarial spirit of Modernism at which it looks back with yearning, but always ambivalently.
MARK PRINCE is an artist and critic based in Berlin.

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