Artworks

Over the past month, you'll have heard our series on classic books about art that have influenced the way we see and understand the visual arts—from EH Gombrich's The Story of Art from the 1950s, to The Shock of the New, Robert Hughes's book from 1981.

Our final in this series is a very new book, the result of a ten-year project by the American art historian Eleanor Heartney. Art and Today attempts the quite daunting task of tracking the art of our time.

Eleanor Heartney is speaking to Julie Copeland from New York.

Transcript

Amanda Smith: If you've been listening to the Artworks feature over the past months you'd have heard our series on classic books about art, starting with EH Gombrich's The Story of Art from the 1950s, through to the The Shock of the New, Robert Hughes' book from 1981.

For this addition to the series it's a very new book that's the result of a 10-year project by the American art historian Eleanor Heartney. Her giant book is called Art and Today, just published this year. And as the title suggests, it attempts the quite daunting task of tracking the art of our time. Eleanor Heartlney is speaking with Julie Copeland from New York, and she begins with the things she had to grapple with all through the process of writing Art and Today. How is it possible to write a survey of contemporary art in an era of apparent anarchic pluralism?

Eleanor Heartney: My conclusion was that you couldn't use any of the formats that were sort of more conventional for this kind of a survey book. It made no sense to talk about it chronologically because that would assume that there was some kind of logical narrative, which doesn't seem to exist anymore. You couldn't talk about it in terms of media, you couldn't talk about painting, sculpture et cetera because artists insist on going across all of those kind of boundaries. You couldn't even talk about it geographically because there's such a nomadic movement among artists, and so the conclusions I came to was that the only way to deal with art today was to talk about it thematically and to think about it as a series of different narratives, each of them responding to different forces in the outside world; for example, art and popular culture, or art and time, or art and technology, or art and politics, et cetera.

Julie Copeland: But of course art of now or any time does always refer back to what's gone before, to history, so even though it does seem pretty chaotic and anything-goes, most of the art in the book is actually referencing artists from before.

Eleanor Heartney: Yes. As I said, I decided to look at it as a series of separate narratives, so that within each narrative you would have to go back in time to think about...for example, 'Art and Popular Culture', which is the chapter that opens the book, is really very much about the influence of Warhol on contemporary art and how he changed our way of thinking about media and celebrity and the market and all kinds of things. The second chapter which deals with 'Art and the Object' goes back to Duchamp and the way that he brought the urinal into the gallery and, again, totally changed our way of thinking about what an art object can be. So you have to talk about history, but you also have to talk about changes in the world outside of art, changes in politics, changes in technology, changes in electronic communication, all kinds of things.

Julie Copeland: If we just go back to the 60s and the beginnings of pop art and feminist art and conceptual art were all challenging the canon, and I think this is where it gets interesting, which is about where you start. But it also gets much harder, doesn't it, to write about and to assess.

Eleanor Heartney: I went to school in the 70 and I started writing about art in the early 80s, and so in a way I was kind of talking about a lot of changes that were taking place when I was first becoming aware of the world. So yes, there was the whole issue of the death of formalism and the Greenberg notion of what modernism should be, but it's true that the 60s, the reverberations of the 60s and different notions of social organisation and different ideas about utopia, possibilities for the future, and then a kind of reaction against those...a lot of the work that I talk about, actually, is a kind of a reaction against the kind of utopianism that was rampant in the 60s. There was a sense of hope and then there was a sense of disappointment, and so trying to sort of temper those two and bring them together and the idea of the revolution that didn't happen and how do we live in its aftermath.

Julie Copeland: And until about the last 25 years or so, the influences and the dominance of the culture, of the discourse, was mostly white, mostly male and Eurocentric, and the influences were mainly American with Clement Greenberg, who we've mentioned, and Alfred Barr who was the first director of the Museum of Modern Art, and later Linda Nochlin, women started to appear on the scene. But it was, again, easier to look at when you had this white male discourse to deal with.

Eleanor Heartney: Right, there was a sense that you could tell a story, that there was a kind of single story. Part of what I dealt with in the book and part of actually what makes the contemporary scene very exciting is that it became clear, particularly in the 70s...and I attribute in part the feminist art movement and also the move towards multiculturalism and also the globalisation of everything in opening up our eyes to the idea that there isn't just this single, white, American/European, male discourse, but that in fact there were all kinds of other things going on and all kinds of other influences on contemporary art, and that to talk about it in any meaningful way you have to be able to grapple with that.

So that was actually one of the things that made the book fun to work on and one of the things that I've actually been very interested in throughout my career is the way in which all of a sudden all of these outside influences and these formerly marginalised groups and marginalised ways of thinking about art have entered into the mainstream.

Julie Copeland: But if you just take a term, for example...like 'post-modernism' itself is, God knows, hard enough to define or analyse...

Eleanor Heartney: Yes, that's one of those words...when students ask me to define post-modernism I want to run out of the room.

Julie Copeland: And whole books have been written about just what it might be. But artists themselves don't use these labels, do they? I mean, you never hear an artist say, I'm a minimalist or a pop artist or a post-modern artist. Instead they usually say, well, I do it this way, I like colour, I'm influenced by Buddhism, I like fast cars, they don't apply these labels to themselves.

Eleanor Heartney: It's true, artists are very individualistic in that way. So that's a whole other issue as well. You have to have some framework for understanding what's going on, and so these labels are in certain ways helpful but we can't see them as being solely defining. In fact one of the things that I found in working on the book that it was often very difficult to figure out where to place certain artists because some of them really could go into many different categories, and in a few cases I actually put the same artist into several different categories. In other cases I had to pick and choose. But it's very complicated now because artists and art are not a single monolithic entity.

Julie Copeland: Yes, as you say, for example, there are two paintings you've included of the African British artist Chris Ofili and then there are other artists who aren't represented at all. I'm just interested how you chose the artists, given that I presume you started not so much with the artist but with the categories and then where the artists might fit.

Eleanor Heartney: Yes, exactly. It was really very complicated. It was an entire year of trying to figure out the categories. Then there was the whole issue of...sometimes there were artists who I felt I would really like to include and yet it was hard to figure out...they didn't seem to have one of my categories. And there are some people who aren't in the book who I would have liked to have put in the book but I just couldn't make a case for them in terms of the 16 narratives that I was writing. The book...as it is it's seven pounds, you know! To include even more of that...it had to be something you could actually lift without a forklift.

Julie Copeland: Given these multi narratives instead of a master narrative, that led to what I think you call the chaos of the 90s. I get the feeling you thought there was just too much theory in the last decade. But what's the non-initiated general public supposed to make of all this?

Eleanor Heartney: I started writing seriously about art in the early 80s, and particularly in the early 80s, that was the era of theory. In the 80s there was still kind of a sense that there was a narrative that we were all supposed to follow, that there was kind of a reading list that you really had to study, we all had to read these same post-structural theorists and we had to be able to talk about art in connection with them. One of the things that happened in the 90s is that the whole thing fell apart, and while theory still informs some of the work that I talk about in the book, we've kind of been freed in a way from the worst excesses of that notion that art is subordinate to this very often strict and even anti-aesthetic way of thinking about art that to me is almost hostile to the notion of visual pleasure or larger issues in the outside world.

Julie Copeland: Yes, I think that explains this kind of confusion on the part of the non-initiated, the general public, explains the return to figurative or narrative art, the references to popular culture that we've seen since the 60s. It is more accessible, isn't it, than that kind of abstract, pure modernism of Clement Greenberg, or even the conceptual art with all these competing 'isms' where you had to know about formalism or multiculturalism or feminism or Marxism or post-Marxism or post-colonialism.

Eleanor Heartney: I think it's helpful to have those kinds of backgrounds, but I think also that art is supposed to be a means of communication and so it also needs to communicate by itself without a whole body of theory behind it. One of the big changes, I would say, in the last 25 years is that art is much less about a kind of dialogue with itself and its past and more about a dialogue with the outside world. The issue of changes in electronic communication is something that we can all understand because we've experienced it. So art is now, I think, responding to those kinds of things, and so it should be accessible to people because they live in the same world that it comes out of.

Julie Copeland: Eleanor, if we just look at one strand, art and narrative, that is post-modern storytelling. It's post-modern because I think by the mid 20th century modernism and abstraction had stripped narrative and representation and meaning from art, particularly the American abstraction didn't mean anything except form and colour. Could you just talk about how you've structured...and perhaps an example of the kind of artist you've used in this particular strand of 'art and narrative' because I think you actually say somewhere that contemporary artists now are more like novelists. What did you mean by that?

Eleanor Heartney: In a way, contemporary novels and also contemporary cinema...the notion of a narrative, the original 18th century novel that has this very satisfying structure that leads you from this beginning to this end, is in a way something that all of the arts are reacting against, and part of it is because that assumes a kind of certainty about the world that we don't feel comfortable with anymore. So you see this in art, as you see it in novels and you see it in films, this uncertain narrative. There are films like Fight Club where you find out at the end that the person you thought was narrating the film isn't at all who you thought he was.

There's a wonderful piece by Stan Douglas that I talk about in the book which is based on a film from the 50s and he's taken a scene from the film...it's a kind of very paranoid, kind of Cold War film...it takes place in a submarine and he's taken one scene from it, he's actually restaged the scene and he has also redone the dialogue, and what's remarkable about it is you watch it and there's all this urgency between these two characters and they're running in and out of this room in a submarine, and finally you begin to realise that it's actually the same scene being played over and over again with different dialogue. You feel like it's leading you somewhere but in the end it doesn't lead you anywhere at all.

So there's a sense...and I think this is very post-modern, a sense that we don't any longer live in a world where those satisfying narratives happen anymore. Certainly when we look at our political culture, our social culture, this sort of notion of a beginning, middle and end doesn't apply to our own lives and it doesn't apply as well to the art that we're creating now.

Julie Copeland: Against that, feminism was a very powerful force in the return of narrative. It was really women wanting to tell their stories for the first time because they hadn't been able to before.

Eleanor Heartney: Yes, in a way I can't really overemphasise the importance of feminism in opening up all kinds of channels that had been closed off by the so-called modernist era. The reason that women didn't seem to be fitting in anymore to the art world, where there were so few women artists, was not because they were bad or they weren't as good as the men but because the whole way that it was structured was really just about keeping out their experiences, their way of thinking about the world. So in the 70s there was an explosion of different kinds of approaches to art. Narrative was one, autobiography was another, the return of craft, all the things that had been expunged from art by the modernists suddenly came rushing back in because the feminists asserted them as part of their experiences as women and refused to let them simply be seen as somehow marginal and not part of the human experience.

Julie Copeland: Of course feminism and feminist artists have moved a long way since then. If we look at an artist like Cindy Sherman, she's telling stories but these are very dark, enigmatic photos of herself dressed up as all kind of characters, telling all sorts of stories, and you probably don't want to know what's going on in some of her photos. Sometimes she's just dressed as a movie star or a porn star but also historical figures.

Eleanor Heartney: I always think of Cindy Sherman as the quintessential post-modern artist in the sense that you can't really open up any book about post-modernism without immediately being told about Cindy Sherman. She's really quite remarkable. She's very protean. But she was one of the first artists to bring up the notion of what became...the catchphrase became 'femininity as masquerade', the idea that women perform certain roles that may in fact have nothing to do with who they are.

And so her earliest work were a series of untitled film stills where she took all these poses from the 50s...this was work that was done in the late 70s and early 80s, so it was already a sort of nostalgic notion of what women should be, but all of these kind of vamps and lost innocent girls, all the things from B movies of the 50s. She would dress herself up and have photographs taken of her which seemed very convincingly to be film stills from the 50s but in fact they were all invented.

She later went on from that to do a whole series of works that, as you say, became much darker and more disturbing, these strange fairytale images where she accepted...again, using herself, dressing herself up but appearing to be these nasty evil witches and bringing up the way in which women very often, particularly older women, in fairytales are seen as evil and playing with that and in fact embracing that in a certain way.

And then there were works that dealt with sex dolls, and the most recent work actually has to do with clowns. If you think about it, there's nothing more sinister than a clown. Clowns are supposed to be these jolly things but the whole history of art and literature and cinema is full of really evil clowns, and so she plays off of that as well. So it's about bringing back that dark side that is perhaps not always acknowledged.

Julie Copeland: There are a lot of contemporary artists who use video and film and photo stills to stage quite elaborate tableaux. They're hinting at stories of all kinds and confusion of the narrative. And not only women...I just wanted to mention a couple of the male artists like Mike Kelley and Paul McCarthy who produce these very degraded and degrading images of body parts and fluids and excrement, very scatological references, and they're often very humorous, they're funny as well.

Eleanor Heartney: Right, exactly. That whole movement is very interesting. Male artists like Mike Kelley really would not have been possible, I think, without feminism because one of the things that women artists brought back into art was the body. The modernists had really kind of pretty much gotten rid of it other than as a very abstract...the idea that the arm moves the brush that paints the canvas, but other than that the body was sort of unnecessary. But of course women in a certain way are more connected to their bodies, simply through childbirth, through all the changes that women go through, and so the feminists brought the body back, and not the body as the sort of beautiful nude, they were deliberately...

Julie Copeland: Real bodies.

Eleanor Heartney: Real bodies that do real things that often we do in private because we really would be embarrassed to do them in public, and it was a reminder that we really are these physical beings. And so you have people like Mike Kelley and Paul McCarthy who do these very humorous but completely disgusting performances and tableaux, degrading the notion of Santa, all of these icons of childhood but turning them into these completely disgusting and degraded things. But part of the point of that also is the notion that we have to break down these myths that we have, myths about the perfection of the world or the innocence of childhood. But in fact we are real people living in real bodies doing real things with real desires, and that to pretend that we aren't is to really leave behind a huge part of what it means to be human.

Julie Copeland: But, given the horror and the violence and the suffering and misery that the mass media confronts us with on a daily basis, does art still have the power to shock?

Eleanor Heartney: That's an interesting question. Every now and then I think an artwork does come along and seems to shock people, seems to create some kind of controversy. I think maybe there was a time at the beginning of the avant-garde when that was the role of art. I'm not sure that that is anymore, the notion that art should shock, because it's true, as you say, shock is at this point much more effectively conveyed by the mass media, by films, by video games et cetera. But the notion that they could somehow come out ahead of all the shocking things that are already going on I think is something that they're generally not that interested in. Although I'm very interested in art that plays with notions of pornography or art that deals with political issues and tries to make political points and sometimes in doing so uses imagery that tries to shock us out of our complacency, but there has to be a purpose to it. So I think shock for its own sake is not really helpful at this point.

Julie Copeland: I think you've covered a lot of ground there, and one thing that the book does remind you of is just how fascinating, diverse...even if you don't like it, just how interesting it is to hear what artists have to say, to look at their work, at a time when, if you look at the recent art auctions, you'd think that the art market has become the art critic. All I can say is that I hope it's going to be a TV series. Are you thinking of a TV series?

Eleanor Heartney: I would love that, that sounds wonderful. I think it would be interesting from that perspective and that would be great. So yes, any way that I can spread the word I think is wonderful.

Julie Copeland: Well, you're certainly spreading the word with Art and Today and I'm just holding out now for the paperback edition and then hopefully the TV series. Eleanor Heartney, thank you very much for talking to me.

Eleanor Heartney: Thank you.

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Publications

Title: ART & TODAY
Author: ELEANOR HEARTNEY
Publisher: PHAIDON PRESS

Story Researcher and Producer

Julie Copeland and Suzanne Donisthorpe

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