Art That Risks Nothing

Also: When JFK staged his own death, the guru of Quantum Leap Advantage at home, revisiting Jean Raspail’s novel “Septentrion,” and more.

Feliciano Centurión, Eye with Ñanduti, c. 1994. Source: Barbican

Dean Kissick’s essay in the latest issue of Harper’s starts with the wildest lede you’re likely to read this year:

My mother lost both of her legs on the way to the Barbican Art Gallery. It was her day off, and she was going there to see an exhibition called Unravel: The Power and Politics of Textiles in Art. She had just arrived in London on a coach from Oxford and was run over by a bus outside Victoria Station. This was on a Friday morning in early May. The next day, in my apartment in Manhattan, I received an unexpected call—my mother never calls me—from a trauma ward in West London. “I’m in a lot of pain,” she said in a loud, anguished, slurring voice I hardly recognized, “but I’m in very good hands.” A few hours later, I was on a flight home.

When I visited her in the hospital, Mom asked me whether the show was worth losing her legs for. “No,” I told her, though at that point, I hadn’t seen it. When I did, two weeks later, my answer proved correct.

He goes to explain how politics has ruined art. The works in the Unravel show, for example, are presented as examples of risk-taking, but they are entirely predictable :

While Unravel pretended to be politically radical—even revolutionary—it didn’t seem to stand for much beyond liberal orthodoxy and feel-good ambient diversity. It offered fantasies of resistance, but had little to offer in terms of genuine, substantive social change or artistic experimentation. The works were almost entirely produced with traditional methods and materials, in recognizable aesthetics, and might as well have dated from half a century ago, if not much earlier.

Such retrospection was not limited to the Barbican. Just before my mother’s accident, I had gone to the sixtieth edition of the Venice Biennale, the longest-running regularly recurring survey of international art in the world. What I found there had been much the same: a nostalgic turn to history and a fascination with identity, rendered in familiar forms . . . In fact, every major biennial I have visited over the past eight years—from Germany to Greece, Italy to the United States, Brazil to the United Arab Emirates—has taken as its themes the deep richness of identity and the rejection of the West . . . The ambition to explore every facet of the present was quickly replaced by a devout commitment to questions of equity and accountability. There was a new answer to the question of what art should do: it should amplify the voices of the historically marginalized. What it shouldn’t do, it seemed, is be inventive or interesting.

This is spot on (and there is much else that is spot on), but Kissick’s wish that we could simply return to the days when artists did whatever they wanted (“you could find the most unusual and preposterous ideas—and open bars, sex, and glamour too”) is naïve.

He notes how Paola Pivi filling “a Swiss Kunsthalle with three thousand cups of cappuccino and a leopard” and other frivolous attempts to shock audiences may have lead to the recent tiresome turn towards politics, but he fails to register how Pivi’s work, which is also informed by certain (political) ideas, can be tiresome.

Kissick suggests that there is a kind of art (produced not too long ago) of pure possibility rooted in the absolute freedom of the artist. But absolute freedom doesn’t exist. Constraints are inescapable. Some constraints are good and lead to astonishing work; others are bad and lead to pedantry (as Kissick notes) or pointless subversiveness (as he fails to note).

Kissick concludes that the new political art is reactionary because it looks to the past:

One might reasonably identify a return to tradition, a longing for the past, with the forces of political reaction. But if conservatives generally have little interest in novelty, neither does anyone else today. Everyone in the world of contemporary art wants to revive a tradition, however recent: Hellenistic Greek sculpture, the Roman cult of Adonis, ancient Nubian wedding ceremonies, Ancestral Pueblo pottery culture, pre-Columbian Mesoamerican song, Mapuche cosmology, Maya Tz’utujil weaving, Incan mythology, African mask-making and the early Cubist painting it inspired, Fifties Americana, the Sixties New Sacred Art Movement of the Osun-Osogbo Sacred Grove, Eighties Beijing migrant-worker cruising culture, late-Aughts contemporary art, etc. Everyone, it seems, wants to escape the present. We just long for different pasts.

And yet, all art looks to the past. All art is a form of preserving something worth remembering (or supposedly worth remembering)—an event, a feeling, an idea. And one definition of great art is that it risks remembering something worth remembering in a surprising (novel) way.

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In other news, Anthony Grafton reviews a new biography of Leon Battista Alberti:

Alberti, as Martin McLaughlin makes clear, was an intellectual of a new kind. An illegitimate member of a great Florentine family, he was born in 1404, and grew up in exile and without means. But he studied the humanities, just coming into fashion in Italy, at the innovative school of Gasparino Barzizza. Before he finished learning the law, he began his career as a writer, producing a Latin comedy that he put into circulation as if it were a previously unknown classical text. He also began to study mathematics, as a form of relaxation. Alberti would pursue the study of both the classics and technical subjects, often together, throughout his life.

He started out as a cleric in minor orders, working in the papal curia in Rome. Many other erudite, hungry clerics haunted Italian cities and courts, looking for patronage. Alberti, however, soon attracted attention as a dazzlingly original writer, in both Italian and Latin. His works, which ranged from a comic mock-encomium to the fly to dialogues and treatises on many subjects, broke new literary and intellectual ground. Soon his interests expanded to encompass the arts of painting, sculpture and architecture, all of which were developing rapidly. He not only described the works of contemporary artists but also produced some of his own. In the 1430s, artists at Ferrara began making medals that looked like outsize ancient coins, with portraits of the good and the great on their obverses. Alberti appeared on the medals of Matteo de’ Pasti and also crafted his own self-portrait on a bronze plaquette. By mid-century he had become a prominent antiquarian and architect, who counselled and worked for Giovanni Rucellai, head of a great Florentine clan, as well as the rulers of Ferrara, Rimini and other cities. And he never stopped writing on new subjects and in new genres. Even after his death in 1472, his works engaged the most discriminating readers. Lorenzo de’ Medici, while relaxing at the baths, had his secretary write to the printer who was producing the posthumous first edition of On the Art of Building. The secretary asked that each gathering of the book be sent to him as soon as it was complete so that he could go on reading them to Lorenzo without having to wait for publication.

Alberto Fernandez revisits Jean Raspail’s 1979 novel Septentrion: “Some writers are unjustly known for one book, no matter how many excellent works they may have written. Such has been the case—in the Anglosphere at least—for the prolific French novelist, travel writer, and explorer Jean Raspail (1925-2020) who had a fifty-year literary career, producing about forty books . . . The one book for which Raspail is known is, of course, his 1973 dystopian novel The Camp of the Saints, which first appeared in English in 1975 . . . Usually falsely derided as a racist work, Saints great fault today seems to be that it was eerily prescient, not only that mass, uncontrolled migration would come to the West from the Global South—not much of a prediction there—but that the powers that be in the West would either welcome this invasion or that they would prove to be morally, technically, and politically incapable of stopping this from happening. Nevertheless, Raspail’s most notorious book is but a small part of his legacy. Admirers of Raspail’s work are now fortunate indeed to have a new translation of his 1979 novel Septentrion.”