David LaBella An essay by
David J. LaBella

Artists, and, particularly, those who produce what we call Modern art, are at once both the most self-conscious (“Look at what I did”) and the least self-conscious (Look at what they did”) artists: by focusing singularly on creating the “new”, and by dismissing what has come before (the foundation, perhaps, of their method), they offer work that could only represent a departure even from similar work that preceded theirs. Changing times, evolving social context, and shifting mores and moralities all validate their assumption that they have tapped into totally original interpretations of what they are affected by.

“Another unsettling element in modern art is that common symptom of immaturity, the dread of doing what has been done before.” -Edith Wharton

One wonders, though, if, when everyone is convinced that what they offer is new, that it is just as possible that nothing is new - if, in spite of the dynamic forces of change and their effect on our consciousness and sensibilities, Modern art merely creates work that is different rather than anything genuinely new; if the range of creative possibilities is ultimately limited by the human condition and the capabilities of our senses. In art, as in any ideology or system of thought, there is the danger of making decisions or statements after first convincing oneself that, since one has been anointed or chosen to do so, one must therefore be in the right at any and all times. The subsequent tendency of those figures to then selectively judge information and events in order to create a factual basis for their pre-determined beliefs, corrodes true creativity and subordinates progress to ideals and canons that may do much more harm than good.

“In art, all who have done something other than their predecessors have merited the epithet of revolutionary; and it is they alone who are masters.” -Paul Gaugin

Gaugin, himself a seminal figure in the evolution of Modern art and whose work fed into several schools of the genre that arose nearly simultaneously in the years that followed close behind the hey day of the Impressionists (Primitivism, Post-Impressionism, Synthetism), realized that the liberating ideas of the Impressionists were in no way ends-in-themselves but rather a beginning, and that, even if he perhaps could not visualize where the ensuing process would lead, art would never be the same.

 The true beginnings lie much farther back in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, a by-product of the Enlightenment, when Rationalist thought and the advancement of the scientific method encouraged artists and thinkers alike to examine life and existence from different perspectives, and to conclude that classical religious thought did not necessarily explain the world and the position of humankind within the larger universe. America’s Declaration of Independence and the war that followed validated the idea that men could apply an expanded system of rights based on citizenship and common purpose to a method of governance that promoted their wishes and rejected rule based on heredity and class structure. The European mirror-image of the American experience was the French Revolution, which lasted much longer, turned citizen against citizen, and offered only a temporary and hopelessly ineffective substitute for aristocratic rule, but that, at the least, did bring an infusion of new social and political thought into European society. While, ultimately, the French Revolution was far more of a social rather than a political event, the challenges to centuries-old institutions and attitudes that it brought forth fostered debate and political and social discourse on an unprecedented scale. From the violence and turmoil of the early decades of the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries sprang the earliest beginnings of Modern art. Romantics, Realists, and, later, Impressionists argued against traditional, idealistic art and classically-inspired, academic and governmentally-sanctioned  national art and the long-established artists’ unions that ensured that only the artistic works that conformed to the rigid doctrines and forms recognized by the critics would gain any audience. By the end of the nineteenth century, the entire artistic landscape had been rendered unrecognizable to anyone who might have only known the classical ages that had come before; the demons, once set loose, had procreated and multiplied, and the clock could never be turned back. It became necessary to consider many different works in many different mediums from many different schools and sources, and the process accelerated during the dynamic period that spanned the end of the nineteenth century and the first decades of the twentieth.

“There is no abstract art. You must always start with something. Afterward you can remove all traces of reality.” -Pablo Picasso

Embedded within Picasso’s words lies the seed of the conflict between the classical and the modern: Picasso’s work was always firmly grounded in imagery drawn from the knowable and the graspable. Yet, after that point, one could say that in the execution of the work the bond between the objective and the subjective was stretched to the breaking point, rendering classical criticism irrelevant, and making it necessary for the artist’s intent to be presented concurrently with the actual work. Classical art demanded that the observer understood its intent and reference points drawn from history or culture; the abstract medium demanded no more than for the observer to accept unquestioningly the artists’ explanation of their visual interpretation of their intended meaning as it was draped upon the framework of the imagery. The former went to great pains to detail in the work each of the allegorical and historical matters it wished to acknowledge; the latter goes to great pains after the fact to present a thematic narrative that can be applied to the work as it is viewed. The classical treads ground that has already been visited by the consciousness of the culture that produced it, and the modern leads the culture that it exists within down a path that only the artist is completely conscious of.

“I remember being handed a score composed by Mozart at the age of eleven. What could I say? I felt like de Kooning, who was asked to comment on a certain abstract painting, and answered in the negative. He was then told it was the work of a celebrated monkey. ‘That’s different. For a monkey, it’s terrific.’ “ -Igor Stravinsky

 The danger, of course, that lay within this evolution from the classical to the modern, was that the dictatorship of academic criticism that defined classical art would be replaced by a dictatorship of the artists and their particular personalities – just as when an economic or political system is relieved of a burden of strict regulation, inevitably individuals assume the role occupied by convention and writ and come to associate their efforts with their own character. The insistence that responsibility be taken for the artifacts of any society or culture derives from the values that society chooses to outline the opportunities, excesses, dreams, and limitations that combine within the threads of a shared history; that responsibility can be shared widely in an open, democratic society or can be hoarded among a self-sustaining elite. Modern art began as a movement that established itself outside of the traditional elite that both grew out of and served the artists, critics, governments, and national ideals of the culture it represented; in succeeding as it has throughout the century and more that has passed since its beginnings, it has built its own elite of artists, critics, buyers, promoters, and venues that sustains all who buy into the notion that their work is no less valid (or, being “new”, even more valid) than that of their predecessors. Classical art had passionate defenders who decried the passing of what they held to be unassailable objective standards that validated work; the leading figures of the modern era have elevated the subjective and the discretionary quality of their work to the same status, and stand no less adamant than the classicists in their insistence that things are so because they say they are so. The overwhelming primacy of personality in the marketplace, the hyper-sensitivity to each other of the buyers and brokers who make and break kings and queens at will, the celebration of quirky-ness and opacity as hallmarks of desirable work, of advanced skill, and of discerning patrons...was this not inevitable, when the ivory towers of the conventional and the traditional were sacked by the onrush of modernity?

“Skill without imagination is craftsmanship and gives us many useful objects such as wickerwork picnic baskets. Imagination without skill gives us modern art.”
-Tom Stoppard

{abstract art is}...”a product of the untalented, sold by the unprincipled to the utterly bewildered.” -Al Capp

 In the end, surely it is not surprising that we have come to where we are now? The speed and the extent to which Modern art took hold and branched out into its myriad of schools and movements throughout the early twentieth century could not, in retrospect, have taken anyone by surprise. The vacuum created by the dismissal of traditional art drew the attention not only of Western artists who were no longer bound by the demands of convention and traditional criticism, but also of those artists who were influenced by the wider world they lived in – and the medium became heavily influenced by African, Native and South American, and Asian cultures that had been routinely ignored by classical artists. Each successive school of Modern art purported to represent a departure from what had preceded it, even when separated from each other by only a few years. It was as though each new movement, once established for a period of time and having found a consistent audience and a somewhat widespread exhibition, became suspect and “conventional”; and, therefore, subject to replacement as soon as possible. Expressionism and abstraction became consumed by the ideal of endless innovation that had created it, and new work was constantly touted as reactionary against the mainstream, as more worthy of consideration by means of its freshness and purity, and as more likely to escape becoming conventional and commercial. In fact, the opposite was often the case, as the act of innovation itself became more important, and more public, than the individual works themselves – the restless urge to reject the standardization and codification of the new medium into something understandable and approachable took on its own dynamic and flourished in the twentieth century. Criticism, buyers, and the marketplace sought to exploit, and to profit from, the newness as much as or even more than from the works themselves.

“Art is the human disposition of sensible or intelligible matter for an esthetic end.”
-James Joyce

The endless Brownian motion that has characterized the progress of Modern art through the years – random, lacking a clear direction, repetitive – demonstrates that within the realm of human creativity there are limits in what we are able to produce, given the senses and tools at our command. Reaction against what is in vogue, the posturing of the artists and their patrons, the cultivated attitudes meant to validate their relevance – one is left to wonder if it might not be the case that the work would be better off if some of this superfluous baggage would be ignored by the art press and the brokers who, perhaps, have concentrated as much power in their hands as had the academic critics of the past. The general artistic movement of Modern art has divided and subdivided itself into so many splinter groups and schools  that successively narrower versions of, essentially, the same forms of art have dissipated the vitality and originality of the genre; relegating advancement to repetition and redundant categorization. There are artists at work today who, intended or not, create works that so closely resemble a Rothko or a Pollock that one wonders how the work can be justified as original.

 But, then, is it not also true that I am as guilty as any of them? As a large-format photographer, working in the field to capture still images on film one by one in a fairly laborious process that has not changed substantially in over 150 years, using no electronics save, perhaps, a light meter – am I nearly as creative and original as I might prefer to think? Is it not true that I seek out and work in many of the same landscapes as so many of my predecessors and peers? Do I not also photograph some of the same locations I have worked in before?

If so, then my errand is no less of a fool’s errand than is that of anyone else...and I am no less susceptible to the same criticism that I make in my disparagement of Modern art. The punishment that fits the crime, then, is to take Joyce’s words to heart, and to understand that my sensibilities are no more than that – my sensibilities. Others have theirs, and use them to cast light on the products of their imagination as they see fit, and the world is better for it. The evolution of Modern art has been at work long enough that, as with biological evolution, the offspring, many generations later, no longer exhibit exactly the distinct characteristics of the original. Artistic cross-pollination, mutation, the blending of cultures and influences, the globalization of artifacts and ideas, and the long-overdue acceptance of ability as something not guaranteed by class or birthright – all of these factors have infused art with a wealth of riches unimaginable to anyone who applies a narrow point of view in their appraisal of the work of others. The near-organic process that has diversified Modern art and that has kept it in the forefront of the marketplace for all of these years, is, no doubt, a by-product of the urbanized, democratized society we live in. Pluralism (some would call it Balkan-ism) obeys its own rules, however opaque they may seem to me. I will abide by mine, and the world will turn... differently to others and in other places, but turn just the same.   

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