Decoration Tuesday May 3, 2005
TV-critic Matthew Collins recently presented a show about impressionist art, comparing it to contemporary work as typified by the Turner Prize winners and entries. Art criticism is sometimes relevant to photography – more so, in my opinion, than some of the work you see in photography theory books, which tend to be very political, postmodern and abstract. The result is incredibly dry, based as it is on a thorough ‘deconstruction’ of anything and everything, including simple visual enjoyment. You can’t just derive pleasure from looking at a photo, you have to classify it, locate it in an ideological context, and recognise your own ‘scopophilia’, a term that Freud used which was developed by film theorist Laura Mulvey in relation to the visual pleasures of the cinema, which also applies to still imagery.
Contemporary art, Collins said, is actually not rebellious or subversive at all because it has been thoroughly institutionalised. It’s embedded within established culture and – in my opinion – carries some of the worst aspects of fashion and celebrity marketing you would expect in the advertising world. No surprise then, because it was funded and promoted by Charles Saatchi.
Apparently, the personal lives and ideological attitudes of some of the famous impressionists really were wild and anti-establishment. In their time, they were never mainstream. Collins acknowledged the ubiquity of the Manet poster, or mug, tee shirt or canvas carry bag, but challenged the idea that impressionist art is merely banal and predictable. It’s certainly familiar, but that in itself means nothing. In particular, he questioned the assumption that ‘decorative’ art is automatically shallow, or art that is like ‘going on holiday’ is intrinsically dull. This is how the contemporary art culture operates, trying to be sharp, edgy or confrontational with the typical work from people like Damien Hirst and Tracy Emin. But when its repeated year after year, it’s really time to assess if it does have any more shock value, because a predictable shock is not really a shock at all. It’s rather boring.
There are established photographers almost equivalent to Hirst or Emin, in the sense that they produce work that is anti-beautiful, anti-meaningful, or just wholly banal, intrinsically no different from the kind of snapshot you would discard, when you get your holiday film from the lab. Bad is the new good; meaninglessness is the new meaning. It’s an interesting intellectual exercise, but what you re left with are photographic images that fail to offer any kind of sensory reward. They are concept photographs, like an unmade bed, that are ultimately boring or unpleasant to look at. They might make you think about culture differently, and your assumptions about it, and that is a useful process. But when pursued for its own sake, embedded within an intellectual discourse that necessarily justifies and explains it, it does get boring.
I like my visual pleasure. I get a gentle aesthetic thrill from seeing something beautiful. I like holidays, as opposed to a dreary life occupied with socio-political this, or socio-political that, or ideological something else. ‘Decorative’ art can be an inspiring and nourishing experience, like clean air or good food compared to city pollution and endless fried chips. Being elevated away from the concerns of university sociology, or newspaper columns, is not automatically trite or bourgeois or complacent. An obsessive or exclusive preoccupation with political and material conditions is itself facile and predictable. It diminishes the human spirit, and denies the possibility of transcendence, like enjoying a photograph is Marxist false consciousness – you don’t understand the way you are being oppressed, and the inescapable circumstances of exploitative society and the need for a revolution. Rubbish. I do understand those things, but I’m not fixated on them or governed by them, like there is nothing else in life to consider.
The aesthetic experience is ultimately like sex in the sense that it is hugely pleasurable, non-intellectual, and is a healthy and nourishing component of life. Trying to ‘deconstruct’ and politicise it is ultimately a dreary and boring enterprise, and perhaps we need to enjoy the simple pleasures of life – like a beautiful photograph – as affirmation against the joy-killers of political and intellectual culture.