The commodification of the avant-garde: Clemente, Basquiat, Haring
ln...@panix.com
Revolution." Earlier installments can be read at:
http://www.panix.com/~lnp3/mydocs/culture.htm)
The brochure for the Francesco Clemente exhibit in the Guggenheim
Museum, which closed about a month ago, stated that the
neo-expressionist artist was a product of the turbulent 1960s and 70s
in Italy. But as I began walking down the ramp of the famous Frank
Lloyd Wright designed building, a sense of consternation began to
mount. In the entire exhibit, there was not a single work that
addressed social themes. Not only was the primary focus on bodily
functions, either sexual or digestive, the imagery was intensely
private.
His 1987 "Semen" is fairly typical
(http://www.artincontext.org/artist/c/francesco_clemente/images.htm).
Unlike the German expressionist paintings of the 1920s that depicted
the moral and social rot of the Weimar Republic, Clemente's work is a
rather solipsistic affair that shows a naked man swimming in--you
guessed it--seminal fluid. So as I passed by painting after painting
in a similar vein, I felt challenged to understand how the Museum
decided to link the artist with the political rebellions that shaped
me and artists like the kind shown in the Marxism web-page gallery.
Turning to a recent interview with Clemente, we discover that despite
the semen-swimming iconography, the artist did identify with the '60s.
He says, "In 1968, all of a sudden, there was a great hope for
change-all the things you didn't like might change into something
else, and the artists seemed to be the people doing it, not the
politicians."
However, like many radicals from that era, the artist turned away from
perceived excesses. After moving to Rome in 1970, Clemente encounters
the terrorist Red Brigades, whom he labels as embodying a "Third
International sort of point of view." Leaving aside Clemente's rather
fuzzy notion of what the Third International stood for, he recoils
from the Red Brigades and begins to embrace a "post-1968 skepticism."
Although converted to a fashionable skepticism, he does not allow
himself to abandon radical politics entirely. He turns to a blend of
Marxism and postmodernism that became de rigeur for high-flying
journalists and academics in the 1970s and '80s. His mentor turns out
to be another artist, Aleghiero Boetti, who was ten years his senior
and evidently had an innate ability to pick up on trendy ideas and
personalities. Clemente relates his tutelage underneath Boetti: "I had
endless discussions of ideas and of his work with him and his wife.
The imagery, the iconography of his work was eclectic, covering ground
from people as far apart as Jasper Johns and Bruce Nauman, and in
terms of ideas, from the French philosophers, Lacan, Foucault,
Deleuze, ideas of order, ideas of autonomy, and again, a critique of
politics."
One supposes that the "critique of politics" he refers to would
predispose against painting pictures of unfashionable subjects like
workers or peasants. It is doubtful that the investment bankers
gobbling up canvases in this period would have wanted something so
gauche on their living-room wall as a Nicaraguan picking coffee.
Another key influence on Clemente was the controversial German artist
Joseph Beuys, whom the interviewer holds in contempt, while others
regard as the most influential artist since WWII. He asks, "Do you see
the quality of a dilettante in Joseph Beuy's work?" Clemente replies,
"No, Joseph Beuys seems the archetype of the grown-up artist." Beuys'
work, leaning toward the cryptic, is a clear stylistic influence on
Clemente. For example, the "Rose for Democracy"
(http://arts-sciences.cua.edu/art/nmh/332/ces/ces.htm) is defiantly
apolitical despite its title and shows a flower in a beaker, allowing
the spectator to invest his or her own meaning into this
Rorschach-like work.
Leaving aside the merits of his work, Beuys is one of the biggest art
world phonies of recent years. Most notably, he claimed to be a Stuka
dive bomber pilot who after being shot down in 1943 over the Crimea,
was kept alive by nomadic Tartars who swaddled him in fat and felt to
keep him warm. A close associate Caroline Tisdall describes this as "a
mythologised event," a polite term for bullshit.
After becoming a professor of sculpture in Dusseldorf in the early
60s, Beuys hooked up with the Fluxus movement, whose neo-Dadaism was
nominally associated with protesting bourgeois society. One of his
closest collaborators was Yoko Ono, another founding figure of Fluxus.
In 1963 Beuys and the local Fluxus-ites performed an "action," titled
Siberian Symphony. The action climaxed with Beuys placing lumps of
clay and twigs on a piano keyboard, tying a length of piano wire to a
dead hare, then ripping out its heart. In another action, Beuys
sprinkled washing powder and the contents of a rubbish bin under a
piano's lid in order to "improve" the sound, before attacking it with
an electric drill.
Despite all this posturing, Beuys believed in a rather old-fashioned,
if not authoritarian, vision of "social sculpture," which involved
molding people's consciousness as it was a piece of clay. To this end,
he said it was more important that his students became good parents
than great artists.
The Fluxus movement had a big impact on the contemporary art world,
not least of which was on the career of Andy Warhol, the subject of a
previous article in this series. The combination of the desire to
shock, to remain apolitical, and to explore sexually taboo subjects
was the Fluxus movement's main legacy to Warhol's own experimental
efforts in the 1960s. Of course, after he is shot by Valerie Solanas,
he turns away from this scene entirely and becomes a society figure
painting mostly banal portraits of fellow jet-setters.
From the Fluxus movement and Warhol's career, Clemente learns how to
position himself in the marketplace. He discovers that it is good
business to be a bit iconoclastic as long as you stay off the hot
buttons of class struggle or radical politics. He also learns that the
art world, the investment and real estate worlds have overlapping
concerns, which is how to circulate hot commodities.
Warhol and Clemente got along famously. Warhol biographer and
inner-circle member Rene Ricard details their relationship in the
catalog for the Guggenheim show. Captioned "1982," the section from
Ricard's piece titled "Chronology" notes that:
"In January, Warhol paints a three-panel portrait of Clemente wearing
a suit and tie. Clemente exchanges three geometrically shaped canvases
with stitched-in padding for the portrait. These have never been
exhibited.
"In February, Warhol's INTERVIEW publishes an interview with Clemente.
DeAk is the interlocutor. The photograph accompanying the article is
by Robert Mapplethorpe. Clemente's appearance is striking. He
patronizes the Astor Place barbershop, where for $5 they machine-clip
his hair and beard, leaving a short stubble. This 'three-day growth'
will be extensively copied by fashionable men."
I suppose all this became inevitable after Jackson Pollock agreed to
allow his drip paintings to be used as a backdrop for a Vogue Magazine
fashion model spread in the last years of his life.
Through Warhol, Clemente came into contact and developed close bonds
with Jean-Michel Basquiat, the young artist of Haitian descent whose
career began as a graffiti artist. He signed his cryptic messages
SAMO, which stood for same old shit. These messages consisted of
somewhat challenging, but unfocused, words like, "Playing art with
daddy's money." From the world of the streets, he began showing in
galleries with other "taggers." One of the works that gained him fame
and fortune was the raw and powerful untitled 1982 work which is
commonly known as "Skull."
(http://www.broadartfdn.org/c04.Basquiat.html)
Unlike Warhol and Clemente, Basquiat never learned to float above the
surface of the glamorous world they moved in. He was consumed by it.
Easy access to drugs and cash-bloated customers could never satisfy
him. Like John Belushi and many rock stars, he was killed by hedonism.
His biographer Phoebe Hoban writes, "Place him in a pressure-cooker
art world where quantity matters more than quality, aggressive art
dealers push prices through the roof, avaricious new collectors
speculate wildly, auction houses create instant inflation, and the
media magnifies the entire circus through a hyperbolic lens. Add the
race card, drugs, and promiscuity at every level. Then call it the
burnout of an art star."
Basquiat's work is closely related to Clemente's thematically.
Nominally taking racism, materialism, capitalism, pop culture and
mortality as its theme, it tends to deal with them in only the most
allusive fashion. To satisfy the demand from art-collecting junk bond
dealers, Basquiat was forced to paint on demand. At his best, Basquiat
improvised slashing, cartoon-like images with powerful themes; at his
worst, he foundered in what Hoban calls, "flaccid name-dropping
doodles and fashionably wild-looking pastiches."
Basquiat probably could have had a more productive career if he had
detached himself from the human riff-raff gathered around Studio 54,
downtown galleries and Park Avenue penthouses. But that would be like
saying he would have been better off if capitalism did not exist.
Capitalism tarnishes everything it comes in contact with, ironically
the world of avant-garde art in the 1980s most of all.
The other artist closely associated with Warhol was Keith Haring
(http://www.haring.com/), another highly successful artist who got
started as a graffiti "tagger." Basquiat, Haring and Clemente all were
friends and respected each others work. Furthermore, there is ample
evidence that Haring received inspiration from the same muse. Haring,
like the others, painted cryptic images that suggested something was
wrong with the world, but somehow never developed either the insight,
nor the appetite, to develop the kind of work that characterized an
earlier generation that knew how to name the enemy of humanity with
consumate clarity.
As should be well-known by now, Haring was gay and died of AIDS. To
his credit, much of his work was devoted to raising awareness about
AIDS and funds as well. Haring was deeply indebted to Warhol, another
gay artist. In a diary he kept on a European trip, Haring explored the
problematic of Warhol's relationship to bourgeois society:
"Andy was probably the only real Pop artist. One thing that I was most
impressed by in a recent show at the Foundation Of The Disaster series
was a paragraph in an accompanying pamphlet about the paintings. It
was a quote from Lawrence Alloway about Pop art, saying how in the
beginning of Pop there was a breakdown and fusion of life and art (a
celebration of popular culture) that was first embraced by Pop
artists. Then, little by little, the painters withdrew from this area
and took their ideas back into the form and arena of the art
'establishment'. This, it said, is the point where Andy separated from
the rest of the group and remained true to the original ideas of Pop
art.
"Andy remained a Pop artist. He reinvented the idea of the life of the
artist being art itself. He challenged the whole notion of the
'sacred' definition of art. He blurred the boundaries between art and
life so much that they were practically indistinguishable.
"He challenged the whole commodity-oriented direction of the art world
by beating it at its own game. He became a teacher for a generation of
artists now - and in the future - who grew up on Pop, who watched
television since they were born, who understand digital knowledge. I
honestly think he was the most important artist since Picasso, whether
people like it or not, and a lot of them don't. The museum and auction
worlds didn't know how to deal with him."
There is, shall we say, a certain generosity of spirit that is evident
here which owes much to the student-teacher relationship. However,
there is little doubt but that Haring was subject to the same
ineluctable market forces that characterized Warhol in his later
years.
In the end, Haring became a one-man industry just like Warhol. He sold
millions of dollars in kitschy items turned out by his underlings who
operated in factory-like assembly lines just like in Warhol's studio.
In the end, whatever message he had about challenging either the art
'establishment' or the 'establishment' in general were lost in a
blizzard of promotions at department stores or charity balls. Swatch
wristwatches, just one example, designed by Keith Haring, that cost
$50 when they first appeared might be worth as much as $5,000 today.
Even the dedication to fighting AIDS can be challenged in some
respects. After all, the charitable efforts mounted by Haring and
others simply reflected the refusal of the government to fund
health-care in the 1980s. If Haring and Warhol had focused more
efforts on political organizing than in schmoozing with ruling class
figures, including Nancy Reagan, then perhaps the death toll would
have been less. Alexander Cockburn comments:
"Typical is Under One Roof, a gift store in San Francisco. This
boutique carries an expensive selection of merchandise on the cutting
edge of the epidemic: Keith Haring tote bags, T-shirts with the words
'We're cookin' up love for people with AIDS,' 'Awareness Watches' and
teddy bears sporting red ribbons.
"AIDS has become a veritable sanctuary for kitsch, from the panel in
the AIDS quilt featuring an envelope addressed to 'A Better Place' to
Andre Durand's painting 'Votive Offering,' depicting, in Harris'
words, 'an ethereal Princess Di surrounded by saints, placing her
hands on an emaciated PWA person with AIDS while dying men in the
hospital beds around her strain at their dripping IVs like lurid
scarecrows pleading to touch the hem of her skirt.' From Di to Whoopi
Goldberg, the epidemic has offered celebs a marvelous way to advertise
their generosity.
"There's a decent reason for the role show business has played:
Washington wasn't doling out money. Desperate for private
contributions during the Reagan-Bush years, activists turned the
disease into a commodity, into what might be called the AIDS
'product,' introduced through a blitz of kitschy public appeals." (LA
Times, June 19, 1997)
Clemente, Basquiat and Haring are the final products of a capitalist
society that has not only exhausted efforts not only to criticize
itself, but that has cut off all possibilities for allowing the
"Other" to criticize it. The co-optation of avant-garde artists is
simply the logical conclusion of a systematic commodification of
everything, including subversion itself. If and when a new
radicalization starts up, one can assume that the iconography of such
new movements will look a lot different than they did in the 1980s and
'90s, when capitalism not only disoriented the political left, but the
cultural left as well.
Louis Proyect
The Marxism List is at: http://www.marxmail.org