What if we were to go straight to Manet, where the adventure of modern art takes off? And what if we decided to embark on our adventure not with Olympia or Le Dejeuner Sur L'herbe, but rather with a less well-known yet altogether extraordinary painting, Le Christ aux anges (Christ among the Angels) painted in 1864? An unexpected choice, and all the stranger, actually, because, together with Christ Mocked and the Zurburan-inspired Monk at Prayer, both from 1865, this painting is one of just three religious works dating from Manet's mature years. There are no others. So why on earth go looking for the beginning of modern painting in a religious canvas, and one not even typical of its painter? For all we know, the 136 years that have elapsed between that moment and now have hardly been the historical period most favorable to religious sentiment. Faith, for us, has become a private matter to be settled according to individual conscience. And religious practice is no longer the social mortar it once was. Aren't we needlessly complicating our efforts to understand modernism in painting by starting with a religious picture, when modernity is so typified by a waning of religion in every field, and art itself has not escaped the over - all secularization of human relationships? No one has ever been seen kneeling in front of Christ among the Angels in New York's Metropolitan Museum, where the painting hangs. Nor for that matter in front of a Van Eyck Madonna in Bruges' Groeninge Museum. People possibly commune and contemplate quietly in museums, but they don't pray in them.
How could I resist a discussion of this painting?
The Met is so huge -- and my time spent there so brief -- my visual appetite keeps ordering my feet to move quickly into the the next room - and there's always a next room at the Met.
Yet I've stopped to stare at this painting many times over the past fifty years. I don't really like it. It's so drab, earthbound, and dull compared to all those great religious paintings of Christian art that might be seen in Italy. But it does seem to visualize those remnants of the faith that linger in me, and probably many others, as a kind of after-image.
No one in this scene feels divine - and no one feels dead either.
The central figure feels like he's just woken up from a really serious binge the previous night. He overdosed -- he passed out -- he was taken to hospital -- and now he's still a little woozy. The angels feel like nurses - no, wait - they don't appear professional enough to be RN's. They're more like young hospital aides who have not yet learned how to distance their feelings from their work.
So why do we care about this reckless and well fed fellow? Because he's human -- and we're human -- and mutual concern is the cement that holds our world, and each of us, together.
It's a very moral painting -- but I don't see any connection to the power, glory, and mystery of the gospels.
One thing is certain, though: the religious fervor of the painter bears enormously on the aesthetic quality of a Van Eyck Madonna. It is visible, and even, as it were, palpable. It emanates from the painting. And the fact that the Madonna participated in the rituals of the church where it hung, before being moved to the Groeninge Museum in Bruges, has a bearing on its aura as well. The same cannot be said of Manet's Christ. First and foremost, because it was never intended for church use, and secondly, because it is both visible and palpable that what emanates from it is not religious fervor, but rather human compassion. Manet painted his Christ for the 1864 Salon. Unlike Le Dijeuner sur l'herbe, submitted the year before, it was not rejected. The Salon's audience was even more heterogeneous than any church congregation, despite the Christian credo that everyone, regardless of class or education, is admitted to the house of God, where the common man's faith deserves no less a place than that of the theologian. From here, it's a very short leap of faith indeed to say that the Salon was a modern church ... Why not?-insofar as we can think of a football stadium as a church, and liken a World Cup match to the celebration of a mass broadcast by television to the "cathodic" Church in its entirety. The doors of those 19th century painting Salons were open to the masses, who flocked to them in droves. Perhaps the Salons foreshadowed the great confusion marking the end of the 20th century, with its leisure-oriented society, its thirst for things spiritual, and its lavish consumption of art all thrown together to form a massive cocktail substitute for the religion which we are lacking.
I've never been to the Groeninge Museum -- but the "Annunciation" (detail shown above) visited Chicago about twenty years ago and I spent some time with it.
As a modern humanist scholar, De Duve should probably skip the "aura" mumbo-jumbo that's more appropriate for a New Age bookstore. But I also feel that something like a deep religious conviction drove the artist to achieve an other-worldly ambiance.
What drove Manet to achieve his more quotidian vision ? A need to make visitors to the annual Paris salon feel uncomfortable ? A need to appear more clever than his peers?
William Bouguereau, "Pieta"
Here's another example of a sacred Christian theme painted for a secular setting. This one was entered into the Paris Salon of 1876.
Van Eyck presents divinity in a sacred space.
Manet presents real people in a hospital.
Bouguereau presents costumed actors on a Hollywood set
(even if it's obvious that the artist has been to Italy)
"Le Christ aux Anges" is still called "Le Christ mort et les anges" (Dead Christ and the Angels). Unnecessary to be a practicing Christian to appreciate the painting, but you do need a modicum of Christian culture to grasp its meaning. At the very least, you should know that Christ is the Son of God incarnate among men, that he died on the Cross to atone for humanity's sins, and that he rose from the dead three days later. You need also a basic acquaintance with iconography, and know that although angels are invisible, they are traditionally depicted as young, winged, androgynous beings. Visitors to the 1864 Salon-even those who believed in the God of Abraham or in no God at all-possessed this rudimentary Christian culture. Manet must not have been too sure whether they had much more of it, for, on a stone in the foreground of the painting, he engraved the reference to the Gospel according to St. John, xx, xii, which refers to the episode when Mary Magdalene stood in tears beside Christ's open tomb, then peered inside and saw two white-clad angels, "sitting there where Jesus had lain, one at the head, the other at the feet." Unless, of course, by including this reference, Manet simply wished to underline that he had veered off from the text. The angels in St. John's Gospel watched over an empty tomb, after the resurrection; the dead Christ, for his part, was alone in his grave. Manet conflates the two moments. Art history has produced quite a few dead Christs, most of them prone and in profile (think of those by Grunewald, Holbein, and Philippe de Champaigne, and even, to stay closer to Manet, by his contemporary Jean-Jacques Henner). The famous exception to the profile would be Mantegna's rendering, where the painter shows Christ with his feet foremost, strikingly foreshortened. Dead Christs seated are rare, but they do exist, and two, at least, are supported by a pair of angels, one painted by Veronese, the other by Ribalta. It has been shown that Manet could well have known about them through engravings published in Charles Blanc's Histoire des peintres, and once we are familiar with Manet's propensity for quoting painters he admired without imitating them in any way, we may rest assured that his Christ alludes to a marginal pictorial tradition breaking with the text. What does Manet make it say that is new?
Paolo Veronese, 1580-88
Veronese
Veronese
Ribalta, 1615
Let's compare Dead Christ and the Angels with Ribalta's Dead Christ held by two Angels. What is straightaway striking about Manet's painting is the head-on depiction of Christ. He is looking at us, whereas Ribalta's Christ has a writhing mannerist pose lending him elegance yet not quite touching. It is the angel to the left who, in Ribalta's work, makes eye contact with the viewer, whereas, in Manet's painting, he is engrossed in sadness and pays us no attention. The angel to the right is turned away from Christ in the Spanish painting, while, in the Manet, his gaze is lost in the space between the painting and us. And with Manet it is Christ who makes eye contact with the viewer! His eyes are open, whereas in the Ribalta the eyelids are lowered. On closer inspection, his right eye is open and his left one half-shut, like a dazed person waking from a nasty dream. Manet's Christ looks at us, but doesn't see us. And for a very good reason, too: he's dead. We don't know if Manet had read Ernest Renan's The Life of Jesus, published scarcely a year before he painted Le Christ mort, but there is no denying the fact that, with this picture, the painter offers us a Christ complying with the "critical and rational Christianity" that Renan had been fostering, a human more than a divine Christ, a Christ in whose twofold nature it would no longer be necessary to believe for a religion of love to spread, nonetheless, in this world. Everything happens as if, in order to appreciate this painting for its true worth and get right inside its meaning, belief in Christianity had become superfluous, even if knowledge of the Christian narrative was still called for. God is dead, Manet seems to be saying, thus beating Nietzsche to it, and his painting is an Ecce homo, but post mortem.
yes -- Christ looks like a dazed person just waking up -- with that "nasty dream" of crucifixion and subsequent deification belonging to the previous two millennia. He's in the modern urban world now -- and like most of us -- he's dazed, confused, and may be currently unemployed.
It cannot be said that Manet had anticipated, with the same lucidity as Nietzsche, that the "death of God" would inevitably be followed by the "death of man." Nor that the dreadful 20th century would drag human affairs through the minefield that humanism has become when men have lost their Father and tear each other apart. Two World Wars and an endless litany of local and regional conflicts, the Shoah and Hiroshima, and genocide perpetrated everywhere, all have left the figure of man more than riven-and none of this is Manet's legacy. But the modern painting he so forcefully helped to create- once, thanks to him, it had been set on the track of nonfiguration-was hard pressed, indeed, to defend itself against the charge of anti-humanism that was leveled at it time and again. Cezanne painted his wife's face as if it were an apple or a mere thing, and it was not just the critics who made this accusation, he himself also claimed responsibility for it. We reckon nowadays that, far from reducing a face to a thing, he lent the thing the dignity of a face, but this would have been less obvious to him than to us. Great artists have their own ways of plunging headlong into their doubts, the better to overcome them. Like Plato's pharmakon, their work is both the poison and the antidote. We might call this the vaccine strategy: being inoculated with an infective agent in order to develop the relevant anti-bodies and strengthen the immune system. Artists felt this need before medicine understood its mechanism. It is this selfsame vaccine strategy which prompted the Expressionists to distort the human figure beyond all recognition, the Cubists to smash to smithereens the Euclidean space wherein the figure stands and moves, and non-figurative painters to do away with the figure altogether. With them, anti-humanism appeared to win the day. Abstract art has bumped off man. The truth is quite different, however. The best modern art has endeavored to redefine the essentially religious terms of humanism on belief-less bases. In 1913, when Malevich painted his Black Square on a White Ground, which was exactly that, a black square on a white ground, who could then have understood that he was inoculating the tradition of the Russian icon with a vaccine capable of preserving its human meaning, for a period which faith in God could no longer keep alive? Well, as Marie-Jose Mondzain, a great expert in orthodox iconophilia, said: "Those who refuse the icon refuse to rise from the dead." We've reached this point.
I like the idea of art as inoculation -- but once you've been inoculated against a dread disease, you never need to be inoculated against it again -- do you?
Perhaps we should begin calling certain institutions like MOMA and the Whitney spiritual disease inoculation centers instead of art museums.
You only need visit them once.
A letter from Baudelaire to the Marquis de Chennevieres, curator at the Louvre and in charge of the Salon, vouches for the title which, it would seem, Manet himself gave to this painting, today titled Le Christ mort et les anges or Le Christ aux anges, and given to the 1864 Salon as Les anges au tombeau du Christ. It used to be: Le Christ ressuscitant, assisti par les anges (Christ Rising from the Dead, Helped by Angels). Which radically alters our interpretation of it. Christ's dead yet awakening gaze is not pulling him out of a bad dream, but showing him coming back from the hereafter, with, in his vacant pupil, the knowledge of the unknowable, and disbelief before the spectacle of the world in which he is being reborn. This particular Christ is a Christ proceeding without transition from the Eli eli lema sabachtani which he cried to his Father on finding that he was mortal and abandoned, to the status of that human, all too human (as Nietzsche would have said) man, upon whom his task weighs immensely. This is a Christ touched by loss of faith and by despair, whom only the beholder's gaze can bring back to life. Even though Manet died a good Christian having received the holy sacraments, it is not easy to turn him into a mystic or a priest. Manet was a painter, period. His Christ Rising from the Dead is not a pious image, it's a marceau de peinture offered to the hordes jockeying their way into the Salon to see some art, pass the time, be seen and flaunt their attire, and, in the best possible scenario, brush up on culture a little, maybe even seek out the soul which the materialism of modern life has deprived them of-but definitely not to perform their devotions. Everything hung on the public's reaction. Either the bedazzled crowd would see just an altarpiece totally inappropriate to this free-for-all called the Salon, an out of-place treatment of the subject, painted with an irreverent brush and making no sense whatsoever. And exclaim, like that "very distinguished lady" whose comments were recorded by Thore-Burger: "Who would have thought of such a thing! It's an aberration!" Or, alternatively, the crowd would manage to really look-like Thore himself, who had a discerning eye-and accordingly find "the whites of the shroud and the flesh tones to be extremely true" and, in their enthusiasm, think of Titian, Rubens, EI Greco, and Velazquez. And wonder about the Christ in this astounding painting: "Perhaps he's in the throes of rising from the dead under the wings of two attendant angels." As if the mere willingness to let oneself be visually touched by the picture were tantamount to an act of faith.
Thore was the exception. As was their wont, the critics were for the most part incredulous. To them, Manet's dead Christ seemed more than dead, he seemed inert, dirty, and flat, like a thing that had never lived and never should have lived, for that matter. "The livid aspect of death is mixed with grimy half-tones, with dirty, black shadows which the Resurrection will never wash clean, if a cadaver so far gone can ever be resurrected, anyway," said Theophile Gautier. Not only is this Christ no longer a God, he isn't even a man. His flesh has never been alive: it's as similar to the surface of an inert thing as you can imagine, above all when you compare it to Titian's exquisite renderings of flesh or, to compare comparable things, the vile and festering flesh of Grunewald's Dead Christ or the dark and gloomy flesh, albeit imbued with a velvety mystique, of Jean-Jacques Henner's. It's common knowledge that Manet was invariably accused, Salon after Salon, of painting rubber instead of flesh. Olympias as whores instead of lively and alluring odalisques. Playing-cards instead of people. The same has been said of Cezanne-and similar things have been said of a whole host of artists whose work, with time, we have learnt how to look at and still is being said about some of our contemporaries for whom time has not yet had the chance to do its thing. What are we to do with such verdicts, these days? It's too easy to rely on time, as if historical distance trained the eye all by itself. A little effort is called for, especially if we don't want our contemporary artists to have to wait as long as Manet did to be appreciated-and understood, which could take more time still. From this viewpoint, Le Christ ressuscitant hasn't had the last word, yet.
I'm with Gautier on this one. We both want to feel life pulsating throughout the forms in a painting, and this one is rather inert compared to so many other depictions of a similar subject matter.
TDD doesn't really dispute that -- he just places less value on that kind of visual quality.
But I would still like to keep it on display in a prominent place like the Met -- where it tells the story of Western Civilization as it entered a secular era.
Belief or non-belief in the Gospel doesn't play much of a role in the judgment of the critics of the day. Cultural habit and mental sloth, on the contrary, do play quite a considerable part. We think we're seeing a church painting because that's just what it looks like, and that's enough to stop us from asking what meaning a church painting, painted for the Salon, might have. Or else, we find plenty of fault with it, in which case it no longer looks like a church painting at all. We think we're seeing The Angels at Christ's Tomb because we read the title in the booklet, and we forget to check out St. John's chapter xx verse xii, which tells us that Christ shouldn't have been in his tomb at the same time as the angels. Or else, having checked things out, we accuse the artist of incoherence, unless we prefer to grant artists and poets the license to fantasize, so as not to have to ask ourselves questions. Critics have excuses. With two thousand paintings per Salon to write up, they're a bit over-extended. But historians? They are in a league of their own when it comes to picking images to bits and going through writings with a fine tooth comb. It's thanks to historians, for example, that we know we know Baudelaire warned Manet against liberties taken with the Scriptures, not in the matter of the passage in St. John, but over the wound on the right side, which Manet painted on the left: "By the way, it would seem that the spear blow was inflicted on the right. So you will have to change the position of the wound before the opening. Confirm the matter in the four evangelists. And be mindful of giving malicious people cause to mock!" Manet didn't change the place of the spear blow, either before the Salon opened or after, and he protracted his mistake in the etching and the (mirror-reversed) watercolour he made a few years later, based on the painting. Historians have been at great pains to take due note of all of the above. Some have emphasized the degree to which Manet is a painter of deliberate anomalies. Most of them take refuge behind the texts to avoid interpreting the images in ways misconstruing their meaning for the day and age to which they belonged. Few and far between were those who ventured to offer explanations. Virtually not a single one, pounced upon Baudelaire's above-mentioned letter to Manet, proof enough that the poet was definitely well-informed about the painter's intentions, even before the Salon opened, to conclude that if he talked in his letter to Chennevieres about a painting titled Le Christ ressuscitant, assiste par les anges-whereas the critics would refer to a painting titled Les anges au tombeau du Christ-this was because Manet had decided, in the meantime, not to provide his audience with the clue which would have enabled them to know that, in this painting, Christ is as if snapped at the precise moment when he is travelling back along the road leading from life to death.
TDD's interpretation is plausible -- and as I recall, I've always felt that the painting was a Post- Resurrection ecce homo -- even without reference to the original title or the passage in St. John. The painting presents you with a living man - though more as a puzzlement than an object of compassion
Hurrah for Manet for his timely idea -- hurrah for TDD for explaining it -- hurrah for us for learning more about modernism and becoming more sophisticated.
But once having received that idea -- why would we want to look at it again?
Manet probably learned from Courbet how to refrain from giving his audience the clues to his work. For many an artist coming after Manet-the champion among them being Duchamp-this became second nature. We may well grumble, because this exclusionary tactic justifies the hermetic reputation that has clung to the coattails of modern-or avant-garde-art among the general public. But there is cause to wonder about the strategies that have been abetted by such avant-garde tactics. Are we not, as ever, talking about the vaccine strategy? We all know the witticism: "God is dead, man is sick, and as for me, I'm not feeling any too good, either." To get better, avant-garde artists had to infect themselves with the disease in small doses. Inevitably, the public has had to be inoculated, too. This disease is called doubt-the opposite of faith. The avant-garde wants the public not to believe in appearances. Thus far things are pretty clear, and help explain why the hermeticism of the avantgarde is often perceived as a form of intellectualism. But they are distinctly less clear when it comes to grappling with the paradox of the vaccine strategy, wondering how doubt might vaccinate someone against a loss of faith. Yet it is here, in this very issue, that the true hermeticism, and the real difficulty, of avant-garde art lie. Painters are manufacturers of appearances, and appearances are all they have available to invite the public to go a step further. So, paradoxically, no longer believing in appearances is to give in to them. This calls for something other than intellectual endeavor, questioning, and skepticism; much more to the point, it requires an open mindedness that has as much to do with an openness of the body and the heart: letting oneself be touched emotionally and aesthetically by the painting, and by what it shows. That most distinguished lady, who cried aberration before what she naively took to be church painting, feels excluded, for sure, but not solely because she didn't make the effort to think beyond appearances. What she knew or thought she knew about appearances prevented her from yielding, without putting up any resistance, to what so evidently appears in the painting. Had she done so, what might she have seen? The spear blow, placed on the left despite Baudelaire's admonition, went straight to the heart of that man whose stigmata prove that he has to be recognized as Christ after the Passion, the Crucifixion and the Deposition-the dead Christ. To be that much surer, Manet sketched in a halo for him, as if to reassure himself that our doubts don't stray where they shouldn't. This Christ most probably died with his eyes open, and without any illusions. But no distortion of the holy scripture can get us to accept that no one closed his eyes after death. We must not muddle the vaccine of doubt and the improbability of the image. For today's beholder as well as for those Salon visitors, eye contact with Christ's lifeless pupils cannot make us forget the fact that at the moment of picking up his body at the foot of the Cross, either the Virgin, or St. John, or Joseph of Arimathea must have closed his eyelids. Once we have seen and understood as much, we may well wonder how it is possible to see this Christ other than rising from the dead, and there is no other explanation for the blindness of critics and the caution of historians than their dread before that still dead gaze which stares deep into our eyes, after having looked death in the face. Not to see it is to repress the terror it stirs within us. Seeing it is to let the terror touch us. So the willingness to let ourselves be aesthetically touched can have wide ramifications. Doubt, pulled from the depths of dread in the face of death, becomes the vaccine against the loss of faith. Needless to say, one is reluctant to talk of religious faith, which is still a private matter settled according to individual conscience, but there is no hesitating if it's faith in Manet and faith in his paintings one is talking about. The painting, after all, revealed the clues to its interpretation-all it required was a close look. Christ's hands are moving; they open one after the other, like the eyelids, and in the same order, the stigmata duplicating the half-shut, half-open drawing of the eyes. You just have to compare them with the dangling hands of Ribalta's Dead Christ to' be left in no doubt. The split-second that Manet "snaps" is suspended between the already-dead and the not-yet-risen-again. The angel on the left is still engrossed in lamentation, while the one on the right is responding to life being reborn. It feels the flesh quiver beneath its hand laid on the nape of Christ's neck and in the muscles of its left arm hidden by the shroud. There is no effort required. In a flash, Christ will get to his feet unaided; his left foot is already braced, while his right foot shifts forward. What an amazing painting! In a flash, this Christ, who is no longer a God but just a man, will rise again from the dead.
TDD's insightful interpretation continues and I applaud it.
Meanwhile, he's moving toward an apologetic for the avant-garde:
Yet it is here, in this very issue, that the true hermeticism, and the real difficulty, of avant-garde art lie. Painters are manufacturers of appearances, and appearances are all they have available to invite the public to go a step further. So, paradoxically, no longer believing in appearances is to give in to them. This calls for something other than intellectual endeavor, questioning, and skepticism; much more to the point, it requires an open mindedness that has as much to do with an openness of the body and the heart: letting oneself be touched emotionally and aesthetically by the painting, and by what it shows.
But what if you're still Christian ? What if you still seek redemption and believe that Jesus Christ as revealed by the gospels and/or the teachings of a church is the way ? Why was it no longer possible for a person in 1864 to be touched emotionally and aesthetically by the dead Christ as depicted by Veronese -- or even -- heaven help us -- by Bouguereau ?
Thore didn't have the clue that Baudelaire had, but he rated the painting as persuasive. More or less out on a limb among the various critics, by letting himself be moved by "the extremely true flesh tones," he stood, poised and hesitant, on the threshold of the act of faith that had him saying of the Christ figure in this painting: "Perhaps he's in the throes of rising from the dead." Perhaps ... Gautier, whom Baudelaire had apparently let into the secret, had the clue, though this didn't stop him wondering, skeptically, whether "a cadaver so far gone can ever be resurrected" anyway." Anyway ... Manet put himself into the hands of his critics, and it is his act of faith that is gauged by the yardstick of their doubts. Faith in the faith that his critics may or may not invest in his painting, trust in his public's verdict, which went against him, and in the verdict of posterity, which found in his favor. Herein, it goes without saying, lies his living modernity. But doubt is a fearsome bug which doesn't inoculate against loss of faith once and for all. With hindsight, we may say that Manet must have had an untarnishable faith in himself to keep going the way he did in the face of the repeated gibes of the critics, and that he must have had unshakeable confidence in his public not to offer it the facile insights into the work which it expected. Yet nothing could be less certain. He actually had the wonderful naivete of great artists who cannot even imagine that the public might expect less of art than they, and who, for this very reason, make no compromises. And he very likely thought, in all good faith, that he had put into the painting all the necessary visual clues-eyes stirring to life, hands opening, feet moving, calf muscles flexing-so that entitling his painting Christ Rising from the Dead would have seemed to him to be an insult to the public's sensibility and intelligence. But what about his own doubts? Was he that sure that his Christ would rise again from the dead? Or that Christ had actually risen? Not for nothing did he give us a Christ dead to his divine nature, then born again, as the man Jesus, to his human, too human, nature. We cannot separate faith in God from faith in painting, nor faith in man from faith in God, as easily for the 19th century as we think we can do nowadays. It's not because Manet unwittingly nudged Renan in the direction of Nietzsche that he wasn't troubled by the idea of making a religious painting whose aesthetic quality owed nothing to religious fervor. And he was aware how risky it was to call upon human compassion while throwing his painting to the inattentive and mocking Salon public. Is his Christ really about to get to his feet? He is, after all, locked in the moment before-and painting doesn't have the possibilities of film. Is the tremor of life really coursing already through his flesh? It's only made of oil on canvas, after all. Is the picture really spirited enough so that the Christ it represents introduces himself-presents himself-to us all on his own?
In my case, the answer is no.
Instead presenting me with the Christ of the gospels and the previous millennium of Christian art, this painting only presents me with a well-fed young man waking up after a night of over-intoxication.
And I would question why Manet's effort must be considered an heroic innovation rather than a young painter's attempt to attract attention by shocking his audience with a provocative subject matter.
Though it does appear that Manet's "Jesus Mocked by the Soldiers" , presented to the Salon in the following year, is firmly within the Baroque Christian tradition, somewhere between Rembrandt and Velasquez.
Presentational devices
To present or introduce oneself is to say: "Here I am." To say: "Here I am" is to introduce oneself. Only a living being endowed with language can do this; inanimate things can't. Works of art, however, are things. We lend them human properties; we deem them to be alive and we call them eloquent when they're successful; we treat them with the respect due human beings; and we reckon it's barbaric to destroy them. But none of all this is self-evident. For a long time, in the fact that works of art resemble us, people have seen proof that they talk to us. Anthropomorphism in the visual arts tallied with humanism in the culture, and vice versa. In this sense, humanism is much, much older than the Renaissance humanism of Erasmus and Giordano Bruno, Copernicus and Galileo, Tasso and Thomas More, and all those people who ferried the West along the path that would prompt human beings to do without God. The humanism we are talking about is as old as hominization. And the same goes for anthropomorphism. The very first hand-print on the wall of a prehistoric cave testifies to the inaugural apparition of the human form, just as the red ocher found in palaeolithic tombs is evidence of the fact that art came into being at the same time as the cult of the dead-the earliest sign of the irrepressible need in human beings to fabricate gods in order to palliate their dread before their own mortality. There is no good reason why that fundamental humanism should not survive the cultural wear and tear of Renaissance humanism, provided one weighs up the novelty of this latter and the intensity of the crisis inflicted upon it by the 19th century-the century of Manet and Nietzsche-and then the fearsome 20th century-the century of the Shoah and Hiroshima. How short is our experience of life without God, when measured against the history of humankind! A couple of hundred years if we date it back to the French Revolution? Five hundred if we go back to the Renaissance? Ridiculous. Well, it's this ridiculousness that modern art has come up against, and that the best contemporary art is still up against-in the mourning for God for many artists, and in the resurrection of God-less man for the more radical among them. This is not to be sniffed at. The scope of the task is such that there is some doubt about whether it can be achieved in painting, which brings us back to Manet. Does his Christ really rise from the dead? Does he really come forward on his own, unaided? Though Manet has given us the aesthetic clues to his act of faith, he has given us the clues to his doubt just as much. It could well be that his Christ isn't strong enough to present himself without the help of some presentational device.
I'm feeling left behind as TDD quickly moves from one questionable assertion to another.
Why is it not self evident that "To present or introduce oneself is to say: "Here I am." ?
Why is it not self evident that we lend art works human properties ? How is that different from lending such properties to the voice we hear over a telephone line ?
What about all the contemporary people who have some kind of relationship with some kind of god? Are they not as human as us atheists ?
Why would we assume that the hand prints left in ancient caves were meant to be anthropomorphic? Couldn't they have symbolized some other kind of animal or idea ?
Why would we assume that all gods were created to "palliate their dread before mortality" -- when obviously some gods were given that specific function -- while others were identified with other experiences (sex, birth, rain, earthquakes, etc)
What about those artists - and art seekers - who are neither mourning God nor resurrecting the Godless Man ?
TDD's "we" seems to be a small subset of humanity: his fellow secular academics, students and teachers. With a special concern for even a smaller subset: those who feel that they are missing a traditional Christian experience.
Let's note the extreme ingeniousness and artifice of the device. The large white shroud, against which Christ's body stands out with a frontality never before seen in the treatment of this subject, seats him as if on some monumental throne, but with not a trace of realism. Who has so elegantly arranged beneath his posterior the shroud which he's not even supposed to have extricated himself from yet, if not a theater director who doesn't give a damn about verisimilitude? The lighting, which can easily be linked with the tradition of Caravaggio, and which also pulls off the paradox of leaving Christ's face in dark shadow while his chest and the face of the angel on the right are fiercely lit, would seem to be the work of a stage electrician, painstakingly angling halogen spots, when electric light had not even been invented. The encompassing gesture of the same angel, who appears to be lifting Christ up as if to introduce him to us, but apparently without suffering in the slightest from the muscular effort implied in hoisting this dead weight, vanishes into the folds of the shroud. So where does its forearm end up-a forearm which anatomical verisimilitude ought to show us emerging beneath Christ's left elbow? Manet doesn't really care. He doesn't want to interfere with the exemplary symmetry of Christ's arms, parted like the ones of those Sulpician Sacred Hearts who absolutely have to show you the stigmata, and resting lifelessly on the armrests that the painter-stopping at nothing when it comes to ploys-has provided for them. The arms and the hands are the presentational device for the stigmata; the throne-like shroud that of the arms; and the angel, that of Christ. We should almost skip from Manet straight to Brancusi, with whom we never know where the sculpture starts and the pedestal stops, in order to gauge the pleasure going hand-in-hand with doubt. Obviously, Manet can't help taking back with one hand what he gives us with the other. He shouldn't have grumbled if his audience didn't get it. No sooner are we of a mood to believe that his Christ is coming forward all on his own and addressing us with his "here I am," than Manet pulls the rug from under our feet by showing us a Christ pathetically supported by a "this is my dead-or rising-from-the-dead-Christ; up to you to decide," which is his presentational device.
TDD is reading this painting as if it were a storyboard -- the images that commercial artists make in preparation for shooting a video.
Much ingenuity and artifice is required to make such things -- but paintings can do something much more important -- can't they?
If the viewer of a 30-second television commercial enjoys the vision but does not become interested in buying the product, that commercial has failed. The art director might lose his job.
No such intended response is required for a painting to be great, however.
Or perhaps TDD would disagree.
We might say that the presentational device is what lives on of God the Father when God is dead-fascination with Power in its almightiness. We might say that it's Art with a capital A, the authority of the Museum, the room in the Met where the Dead Christ is coming back to life. We might also say that Manet had his heart set on his bit of Power, and that he painted for the Museum, while pretending to paint for the Salon. Were this so, Manet would have remained on this side of Renan who, for his part, had the cheek to make the resurrection dependent on the "Divine power of love! Sacred moments when the passion of a hallucinated woman gave the world a resurrected God," and the nerve to claim that it's not God the Father who brought Christ back to life, but the love of a woman. The hallucinated woman is Mary Magdalene, the sinner, the woman in love, who-let's recall St. John, xx, xii-discovers the empty tomb and doesn't believe her eyes when, two verses later, Christ appears before her, alive. Like St. Thomas she wants to touch him. "Noli me tangere," Christ says, "don't touch me." Showing surprising and problematic modernity, Renan doesn't realize that he is harbingering Freud and Lacan when he makes the power of the Father reliant on the desire (Renan says "imagination") of the hysteric upholding the Father's very own desire. For the time being, let's note that the presentational device is not God, but rather love. Love of art, as it so happens. And that if it is true that Manet painted the Dead Christ under Renan's influence-or, alternatively, that his sensibility to his time unwittingly drew him to Renan-then it makes no difference whether he painted it for the Museum or the Salon. He had already realized that museums would one day become what the Salon already was-a free-for-all absorbed by the leisure industry, an entertainment specializing in "spirituality," a secular mass just like a World Cup match broadcast on TV And that, in this context, the works must fiendishly appeal to the love of art if they are to come back to life. The Museum, the 19th-century Salons and the Palais des Beaux-Arts in Brussels are only temples of artistic power for those who submit to it as they enter. For art-lovers, they are erotic cabinets where you go to indulge your passion. Those who have railed against the museum are legion. They accuse museums of being cemeteries, filled with works whose life has been drained from them, and arrayed as in a morgue in the drawers of styles and periods. They claim, further, that we must be pretty sick and spineless to visit them so religiously and pay our two cents to the death-dealing cult of art. And they're quite right, if God is dead. Van Eyck's Madonna in the Groeninge Museum in Bruges no longer radiates the faith of the assembled faithful. We're left with the painter's faith. Yet we don't commune in it, but rather, in the sheer aesthetic pleasure into which it has changed. We are taking part in a dead religion whose relics we venerate. How hard modernity has striven to snatch our relationship to art from the fate of this religion which no longer can-and no longer wants to-be coped with as such, but to which the museum returns all the more perversely because it is the place of worship of a cult that is no more. The earliest such efforts at secularization date back to the very birth of museums, in the 18th century, finding a foothold in the invention of aesthetics, which started out by theorizing over our love affairs with beauty-qua-beauty. In the 19th century it was art rather than beauty which became the object of aesthetics. There then emerged the art-for-art's sake theory, which failed to avoid deteriorating into a religion of art. What's the point of having made art autonomous, if it's still not independent of religiosity! W'hat's the point if, meanwhile, Van Eyck's Madonnas have left their churches one by one and ended up in museums-unless we're talking about Ghent's cathedral drawing more tourists who have come to gaze at the Mystic Lamb than people attending Sunday mass! Museums have become churches while churches have become museums, as if religiosity, determined not to die, obeyed a strange law of communicating vessels. The 20th century heroically took up the slack, and it was formalism, from Roger Fry to Clement Greenberg, which expected to complete the secularization of aesthetics. Wasted effort. These days, most art theoreticians see formalism as just one more chapel in the history of art doctrines, and not the least dogmatic, either. "Chapel," "doctrine," "dogma," the vocabulary is eloquent. The more formalism singles out so-called autonomous and "pure" aesthetic quality, free of the dross of the religious being-in-the-world, the more its detractors accuse formalism of fetishizing it. But if aesthetic quality is a fetish, then love of art is altogether akin to both sexual perversion and mystic superstition. We might as well prefer art which -- and we're back with the vaccine strategy again--exposes the fetish for what it is
Or... we might say that Gods and religions do not exist outside the various texts, performances, and installations through which they are experienced -- the elements of which are always changing, disappearing, or emerging. It is easier to distinguish an art lover from a devout Christian than it is to distinguish a love of Christian art from a love for Jesus.
The great cathedrals have always been art museums -- just as art museums continue to be so much like churches. And being places of cultural importance, only highly qualified people can manage them: once trained and chosen by a hierarchy of priests, now they are selectively educated by a hierarchy of university professors -- including TDD, for example.
And in our era of cultural relativism, it might be time to retire the word "fetish" which began as a condescending attitude by educated Europeans towards the sacred artifacts of "primitive" cultures.
The word also has been used to refer to objects that are sexually arousing - but then we might ask "arousing to whom?"
Presenters
And what if we now went to the fetish-work of all fetish-works and the man through whom scandal was ushered in? In 1917, a French artist who'd been living in New York for two years-and was more famous there than in his own country for having shown at the 1913 Armory Show (the biggest art bazaar of all time) a painting in the Cubist vein decked out with a title which his Cubist friends deemed heretical , Nude Descending a Staircase-discreetly submitted, under the pseudonym Richard Mutt, a lowly men's urinal to the hanging committee (chaired by none other than himself, what's more) for the first show to be put on by the Society of Independent Artists. It should be said that the Society of Independent Artists, which had been created six months earlier, had, at the prompting of the same French artist-Marcel Duchamp, not to mention names-modeled its statutes on those of the French Societe des artistes independants, created in 1884 (a year after Manet died) by a group of French painters united around Seurat and infuriated by the discretionary powers of the Salon jury. The same Parisian motto was adopted in New York as in Paris: "No jury, no prizes," "Ni recompense ni jury." So the hanging committee had no power of censorship, and it was not asked to exercise its aesthetic judgment. Anyone who had taken out his or her Society membership card (for the modest sum of six dollars) was entitled to show .. two works in its show, a right which the mysterious Richard Mutt used-or misused-to submit for the approval of the New York public a thing which no one or nothing had ever been prepared to grant the dignified status of a work of art: a urinal! A vulgar urinal which, though spanking new and unused, smelt symbolically of piss and sexuality and, although titled Fountain, and duly signed and dated as artworks are, shamelessly sported its thing-like character. The thing was spirited away before the show and the New York public was not called upon to pass judgment, which hasn't stopped it from acquiring in art history books the status of an avantgarde icon, comparable, prestige-wise, solely with Malevich's Black Square. It was a photo, signed "Alfred Stieglitz" and published, once the exhibition was over, in a small magazine called The Blind Man, which was responsible for handing the work on to posterity. The photo leaves us in no doubt as to the nature of the thing. It was neither a painting nor a sculpture representing a urinal, no. Had it been a representation, the hanging committee, trained at the Ash Can School (the name of the first avant-garde movement in the United States), would probably have gone along with it. But no, it was a urinal, period. The thing was clearly not made by the hand of this Mr. Mutt, who dared to claim it as his own work. It was ready-made. A genuine urinal which the artist-if artist there indeed was-had contented himself with presenting for all to see on a stand, in a position which excluded any use of it and appeared to invite only its contemplation.
As our attention is focused on Duchamp's urinal, it's apparent that TCC will now address that great paradox of modern aesthetics: what is art if it may be anything ? The title of this chapter suggests his answer: art is whatever has been presented as such.
It's interesting to note that the urinal entered the artworld in a no-jury show. Whoever paid six dollars could present whatever they wanted.
But we only know about it because Stieglitz published a picture of it in a small magazine - and that magazine, "The Blind Man" (how appropriate! ) , became important in the history of an avant garde movement, Dada.
It is, of course, pure coincidence that the shape of Duchamp's urinal in Stieglitz'S photo roughly matches that of Christ on his funereal throne in the Manet painting. But it is most probably not a coincidence when the article accompanying the photo in The Blind Man calls the urinal by the name of a god in the title (Buddha of the Bathroom) and the mother of God in the text (which refers to Madonna of the Bathroom). There is every reason to suspect that the article was penned by an accomplice, and that the religious allusions smack deliberately of heresy. The thing doesn't appear designed to resurrect, either as a God or a man. For all this, we don't get away from the alternative imposed to aesthetics-either superstition or fetishism-once belief in God-man incarnate is lost. The thing swings either in the direction of the dead Father haunting the museum-temple, or towards "specialty" collectors come to the museum to enjoy their little perversions. Boy, how we've turned Duchamp into the parodying officiating priest of a cult which focuses, like the Christian mass, on the consecration! "Hoc est corpus meum, this is art," and that's done the trick. All the public has to do is to share, rapturously, in the belief in the Duchampian transsubstantiation, at the risk of seeing the museum-temple occupied by that nihilist god, the power of the art institution. When art for art's sake has become power for power's sake, we've reached that stage. It is easier, today, to deify Duchamp's urinal especially if it's out of derision or desecration-than to find within it human qualities justifying our treating it with the respect due to works of art. Its avant-garde icon status, on an equal footing with Malevich's Black Square, is a misinterpretation - icons, not to put too fine a point on it, were never consecrated. Let's rather use the term "idol" to avoid wavering between sexual fetish and profane Host, which moves us both further away from and closer to the matter of the urinal's humanness-a harder one to deal with. It is hard to decide, for example, that the urinal sufficiently resembles us for us to reckon that it incarnates us. This was the issue in the period of Cubism and budding abstraction, when Duchamp was, officially, a Cubist painter and, secretly, Richard Mutt, but not yet the high priest of the cult that today's artworld celebrates in his name. Does the urinal resemble us enough for us to lend it a life of its own and the faculty of speech? In other words, can it present itself unaided, and say: "Here I am"?
Quite obviously not. It needs a display shelf, a monstrance or some other presentational device-namely, the pedestal it rests on in the Stieglitz photo. There's something suspicious about this photo, though. The only other two photos we have of the 1917 urinal, taken in Duchamp's studio, don't show it on any kind of pedestal at all, but hanging in a doorway in the company of a snow shovel and a hat-stand, also hung up, which would go down in history together with the urinal in the new art category of readymades. Wasn't Stieglitz tampering with Duchamp's intent just a tad? Stieglitz wasn't just any old Tom, Dick, or Harry. He was a very well-known artist-photographer, a gallery director, and a great campaigner for the cause of modern art in the United States. He had also introduced the New York public to Cezanne, Matisse, and Rodin, and in his gallery he championed a handful of some of the most promising American painters, for whom he was God the Father.
On the one hand, this chapter is giving equal attention to Duchamp's urinal as it gave to Manet's oil painting -- as if they were both comparable as works of art.
On the other hand, however, TDD tells us : "When art for art's sake has become power for power's sake, we've reached that stage. It is easier, today, to deify Duchamp's urinal especially if it's out of derision or desecration-than to find within it human qualities justifying our treating it with the respect due to works of art." ---- which seems to tell us that, without its pedestal, "Fountain" is just a urinal.
And now he suggests that Stieglitz was first to display that urinal upon a pedestal. If that's all it took to elevate it to a work of art, perhaps Stieglitz should be given more credit than Duchamp.
In those days Stieglitz considered Duchamp to be a con artist, but he wasn't aware that the con artist in question was lurking behind Richard Mutt. He agreed to take the photo as a protest against the censorship of the hanging committee, but he was as taken aback, not to say shocked, as the committee itself at the idea that anyone might want to pass off a urinal as art. So he prettied up the presentation of the thing, cleverly lighting it, placing it delicately on its pedestal, and using a Marsden Hartley picture as a backdrop. If the pedestal was, indeed, the thing's presentational device, then Stieglitz was the presenter of the thing with its pedestal. In a nutshell, he played, out of loyalty, the part of ringmaster-Monsieur Loyal. The only thing motivating him was actually to make the brand new art institution, the Society of Independent Artists, comply with its statutes, which it had been in such a hurry to betray. Stieglitz was an elitist where art was concerned, but a democrat where politics were concerned, and he sincerely believed that the Society's radical egalitarianism, whereby anyone and everyone could be an artist, would, in the long run, serve the cause of the avant-garde in the United States, even if he had to give an eccentric agitator a bit of a boost to achieve as much. He was trying to find a compromise between his aesthetic standards and his democratic principles, by beautifying the thing's photographic presentation as much as it permitted. Poor Stieglitz. In this endeavor, he was the manipulated manipulator, for the boost in question exceeded anyone's wildest dreams. And Duchamp reaped the benefits, biding his time, slipping a readymade here and there into a Surrealist exhibition, and only owning up to Richard Mutt's true identity as the Second World War loomed, when he published the Box in a Valise, his portable museum. Nobody has ever since managed to remove from his famous urinal the invisible label which reads: "This is a work of art." When we recall how Duchamp's urinal became art, we pay less attention to the fetishist mystique of its consecration than to the politics behind the whole affair. For it has its history, and it goes back a long way. Like its French namesake, the Society of Independent Artists came into being because artists were more than fed up with the arbitrariness of the only institution authorized to hand out legitimacy patents to anyone aspiring to the rank of professional artist. In the United States, it was the National Academy of Design, in France the Societe des artistes francais, itself a rickety offshoot of the countless crises of legitimacy afflicting the Academie des Beaux Arts in the 19th century. The Academie's last official Salon, held in 1880, had been a complete fiasco, with a jury challenged by most of the artists involved and which, faced with the hue and cry, absolved itself of its responsibilities by accepting almost all the works submitted (7,289 in all!). Add to this a director who hung the worst artists in the best spots in order to poke fun at the jury, an unbridled criticism, a disgruntled public, and a deficit of about $120,000 in today's currency, and you will understand why, in 1881 , Jules Ferry (who was not only Minister of Education but also Minister of Fine Arts) decided that the Government would no longer be involved with the Salons. And so it was that the Societe des artistes francais was founded. It took a mere three years for this body to see its jury challenged in turn by artists rallying around Here I am the "anarchists," Seurat, Signac, and Pissarro, who turned their backs on juries once and for all by founding the Independants. It's not easy for us to imagine, in our day and age, the sense of liberation that this independence represented for French artists of the day, and it's harder still for us to gauge its effects, which they themselves only half-understood. The mechanics of it all were twofold. Firstly, people realized that for virtually the first time since I648, when the Academie was created, artists would be able to exhibit in public without having to be filtered by a directly or indirectly State-appointed jury, and they were delighted by this new-found freedom. Secondly, people realized that, under these conditions, anyone could be an artist, and there was alarm over the levelling down and loss oflegitimacy that this might entail for serious artists. As is often the case in the history of avant-gardes, irony decreed that backward-looking art conservatives were quicker on the uptake than modernity's enthusiasts when it came to picking up on the dangers of the latter realization implicit in the liberation promised by the former. It is at such moments that the vaccine strategy becomes a matter of urgency for genuine artists, for they wish neither to take a step backwards nor to lower the standards of their art. From his own experience, Duchamp was equipped to grasp this necessity. Before his Nude Descending a Staircase brought him fame in New York, hadn't it been turned down by the hanging committee for the Cubist room at the 1912 Salon des Independants in Paris? (The Independants had no jury, but they had one or more hanging committees whose role was confined in principle to allocating places; here, it clearly exceeded its brief.) He developed a mood of rancor, a desire to get his own back, and a keen perception of what was at stake. The Independants had already betrayed their principles; it now remained to be seen just what purpose those principles served. So he made up his mind to toughen the test by upping the ante. Because the Americans, in 1916, were grappling with the same institutional censorship as the French in 1884, let's apply the same cure, or the same bug-they, too, must establish their own Society of Independent Artists. And because they will sooner or later be grappling with the same contradictions, let's give them the vaccine, in nothing less than small doses, and too bad if the vaccine kills the patient. This was Duchamp's strategy with his urinal. He was well-placed to sense how the New York Independents would develop-having himself been at the forefront in viewing the academization of the Parisian Independants and having borne the brunt of it. He drew up his plan well in advance, fixed things so that he was nominated chairman of the hanging committee, surreptitiously slipped a banana peel called Fountain under their feet, refrained from attending the stormy meeting of the said committee during which (nobody knows quite how) Fountain was spirited out of sight, solemnly handed in his resignation, worked it so that the thing reappeared as if by magic (here again, nobody knows quite how) in front of Stieglitz's lens without Stieglitz suspecting who sent it to him, published the photo in The Blind Man, let the storm blow over, and bided his time. The Society never got over it, and Duchamp clinched a place for himself in the 20th century which only Picasso could rival. Did you say strategy?
Dada and "Fountain" are now marking their 100th anniversary. They have become more like an historical tradition rather than a fresh, new approach. In 2004, five hundred authorities of the artworld identified "Fountain" as the most influential art work of the 20th Century.
TDD has just characterized its creation, however, as an act of revenge driven by resentment. Rejected by a "no jury" show, Duchamps managed to put himself in charge of hanging another no-jury show, into which he inserted something that nobody could possibly accept as art -- and he even got someone who considered him a con-man to promote it. What a naughty, clever, little boy!
"Nobody has ever since managed to remove from his famous urinal the invisible label which reads: "This is a work of art." - and TDD is not going to even try. He does want to be seen as sharp, insightful, and somewhat irreverent. He wants to summon a wide, skeptical audience of readers. But he probably considers his negative report an "inoculation" against rejection -- because if we don't accept the urinal as art, then we don't accept the academic authority that does - and TDD has a university career. Those outside the academic community might prefer to say "This is a work of conceptual art".
Did you say strategy? Yes, and vaccine strategy, too. Let commodity fetishism (as Marx would put it) vaccinate against the idolatry of Art with a capital A, and let the "anything whatever" vaccinate against the "anyone an artist." We mustn't be so naive as to take Duchamp for a democrat when he inoculates America with the virus of artistic egalitarianism. It's when he injects the vaccine that he is one. In other words, Duchamp is an aristocrat, but an aristocrat who has understood that true nobility only makes sense in a radically egalitarian world, just as the real act of faith only makes sense in a radically belief-free world. In the same way as his Dead Christ was, for Manet, the vaccine for loss of faith in art, so, for Duchamp, Fountain, a ready-made object that anybody could have "made," was the vaccine against the leveling of aesthetic hierarchies. Likewise, though, just as Manet can only be understood in the context of the world of non-belief that his century drafted around him (with or without Renan), so we understand nothing about Duchamp if we separate the "Richard Mutt case" from the history of the Independants, in the wake of which it has become a fait accompli that anybody can be an artist. Needless to say, Duchamp is not just "anybody," nor just an old artist. He is the man through whom scandal was ushered in, and he deserves his place as artist of the century on a par with Picasso. For the latter half of the century-when his influence really started to make itself felt-this place has been interpreted as that of the demiurge, the great appropriator, King Midas turning everything he touches into art. People began talking of a Duchampian or a postDuchampian artworld, a world where, indeed, anybody could be an artist, provided his strategy makes him master of the world in question. What a misreading! When at last shall we realize that the only strategic purport of the readymade is that it gave art back to anyone and everyone? Not for utopian reasons-that would be another misreading (from Novalis to Beuys, a whole Romantic tradition has dreamt that everybody would be an artist)-but quite simply because it's a fait accompli that art belongs to anyone and everyone the minute Salons are open to the masses as much as churches. In these conditions, what's the point of juries and their petty monopolies? The onus is upon the man-on-the-street to say who deserves to be an artist and who doesn't. Added to this is the fact that when artists are independent, in other words, liberated from the supervision of juries, the profession of artist is no longer protected and even the man-on-the-street can be an artist. The world no longer splits into the art-loving public, on the one side, and the artists' guild, on the other, and all a priori division of labour between judging art and making art has vanished. Whence the readymade-an object in front of which both the artist and the public are on equal footing, for neither has made it with their own hands. Both have just one thing to say about it: "This is art," or: "This is not art." The readymade strategy sheds light not on the post-Duchampian but on the preDuchampian artworld. What Duchamp, as an artist, realized in 1917 had already been understood by Mallarme, as a critic, in I874. In that year, Manet (him again) submitted four canvases to the Salon. Two of them, Masquerade at the Opera and Swallows, were turned down. Mallarme rallied to Manet's defence in an article where he wrote: "Entrusted by the nebulous vote of the painters with the responsibility of choosing, from among the pictures presented in a frame, those that truly exist as paintings, in order to put them before our eyes, the jury has nothing else to say but: this is a painting, or that is not a painting." It's worth noting the emphasis laid on the presentational device and on the presenter. Both are crucial. Mallarme was well aware that the worst daubs can aspire to the title of painting if they are "presented in a frame," and only recognized the jury's one right, that of separating them from "those that truly exist as paintings, in order to put them before our eyes." In other words, to present them to us. Let the jury withdraw once the separation has been made; let it refrain from any judgment of taste. It is now up to us, Salon visitors, to decide which, among those pictures "that truly exist as paintings", are good ones. Mallarme required ,the jury to have a presenter's ethics, and was particularly keen that it didn't use its power to decide about aesthetic quality. The jury is responsible for drawing the boundary between those paintings which wouldn't even exist in its eyes without the authority of the presentational device, and those it reckons capable of presenting themselves on their own. Such is the nominal boundary between "that is not a painting" and "this is a painting." Mallarme made these observations eleven years after the Dijeuner sur l'herbe (but not only the Dijeuner-many very mediocre paintings, too) had been labeled "that is not a painting" by the jury and "this is a painting" by ... none other than Napoleon III, who may well have been no authority when it came to art, but was the emperor all the same. It was in fact under his patronage that the 1863 Salon des refuses was opened. The protests of the ousted artists had reached even his ears. With other fish to fry than playing arbiter of taste (but never passing up an opportunity for a little demagogy), he washed his hands of the Academic tiffs and opened, right opposite the official Salon, a pavilion where the masses would have to make do with the rejects. What happened next is history. No one remembers the 1863 Salon, but the Salon des refuses still basks in Manet's glory, Napoleon III'S authority notwithstanding. Mallarme's protest over the half-refusal of Manet at the 1874 Salon, the Impressionist exhibition at Nadar's that same year, and other "alternative" events were among the things that prompted the artists who had been barred from the 1884 Salon to join forces against the Societe des artistes francais, hold their own Salon des Independants in April, and eventually found the Societe des artistes independants in June. Duchamp was mindful of all this in 1916 when, buoyed up by his prestige as both a Cubist painter and avant-garde troublemaker, he proposed setting up an American Society of Independent Artists, with its statutes modeled on those of its French namesake. He had understood all this when, six months later, he submitted to the Society's hanging committee a thing that it could neither include in its Salon without running the risk of discrediting all the Independents in one fell swoop, nor turn down without running the risk of creating a Salon du refuse for a single "work". And he had digested all that when he chose the thing in question in such a way that it banned any judgment of taste being applied to it, yet forced the hanging committee to decide whether or not it deserved to be offered to the public's judgment of taste. The Society's poor hanging committee was transformed by its chairman into a jury, but a very peculiar jury-a jury the likes of which history had not known, but the sort Mallarme had wished for it to be. It shilly-shallied, dodged responsibility, and finally succeeded in whisking the thing away, all the while deciding nothing.
I cannot follow this argument - so many questionable assertions are casually tossed in - and I can't proceed without questioning them.
For example, the quote from Mallarme might just be noting that the rejections made by juries are not accompanied by explanations. Who would join a jury if they had to be ? Unfortunately, the rest of Mallarme's statement cannot be found online.
A good painting or sculpture can present itself . It does need to be visually accessible. Appropriate lighting and height is required. A shelf is quite handy for a sculpture - or a pedestal if you'd like to give it more surrounding space to control. But it does not need any other kind presentational device to validate its worth.
Juries are important because time is important. You don't want to spend hours wading through the haystack to find the silver needle. Juries are needed to perform that service. If you think a jury has done a bad job -- then, of course, look for another. A salon of rejects needs a jury just as badly as the salon that rejected them.
The most common kind of no-jury gallery is run by an art club -- and that's the kind of institution into which Duchamp placed his urinal after he got his colleagues to let him hang the show.
I'm in an art club and we have a gallery that shows anything that any member wants to show.
It works for me because I walk past the gallery every week on the way to the studio. It often has things of interest -- often because I know the person who made them.
But I would definitely not recommend that outsiders make any kind of effort to see most of these art club exhibitions.
Without Stieglitz, it's not certain that Duchamp's urinal would have lived on. Hasn't the photographer, who despised Duchamp but was God the Father to his proteges, unwittingly played the part of the Mallarmean jury that the hanging committee failed to play? Or that of Napoleon III, perhaps? Out of loyalty to the Independents' maxim and counter to his own taste, he decided that the thing which landed before his lens had to be presented to the public. Not that it deserved to be. Because it couldn't be compared with anything artistic, it couldn't even be put among those "pictures presented in a frame" or sculptures presented on pedestals, from which, according to Mallarme, the jury should select the "true" paintings and statues. This is indeed why he put the urinal on a stand before photographing it. It cried out for the presentational device in order to be a plausible candidate for the judgment of taste. And so loud that, not content with giving it just a stand, Stieglitz embellished its presentation as much as he could by using flattering lighting and the Marsden Hartley backdrop. The presenter's ethic didn't work for him unless he confused it with aesthetics. He completely failed to see that Duchamp's strategy actually relied on a presentational device other than the pedestal if Fountain were to go down in history-on a photo signed Alfred Stieglitz! When it was published in The Blind lVIan, it was with three captions: Fountain by R. Mutt, THE EXHIBIT REFUSED BY THE INDEPENDENTS, and Photograph by Alfred Stieglitz. We read the word "by" thrice: three authorial references, that is, references to authorities that it might be instructive to compare. Mr. Mutt may well be the "author" of Fountain, but he's stricdy an unknown quantity; he hasn't done anything with his own hands; so he has no authority. Because of the Independents' refusal of the piece, they also lose theirs, inasmuch as the only legitimacy they ever had is bound up with the collective authority of their self-proclaimed artist members. They are left with the naked power of censorship. The only person with a real authorial ranking is Stieglitz. Of course, he isn't the author of Fountain, just of its presentational device-the photo which represents the thing and by the same token presents it to the posterity of its future beholders. Always one step ahead of his partners, Duchamp knew that not only are paintings and sculptures-even "true" paintings and sculptures-things, and things do not present themselves all on their own, but also that the frames around pictures and the stands beneath sculptures are things, too. In other words, he knew that presentational devices need a presenter; their authority is not sui generis. He got Stieglitz involved, and Stieglitz did have authority-the authority of God the Father within the little inner circle of artists he championed, the authority of an uncompromising gallery director in the world of art lovers, and the authority of a great photographer in the rest of the world. Stieglitz refused to exercise the first two variants, and if he did exercise the third, it was without suspecting that the unknown by the name of Richard Mutt would appropriate it. Perhaps he embodied the Mallarme jury after all, or played the part of Napoleon III, but then against his will. He was so unconvinced that the thing was capable of presenting itself all on its own that he preferred to summon the traditional authority of the pedestal to give it a fair chance. The presenter took cover behind the convention of the presentational device. The fact remains that it's Stieglitz who must be credited, despite himself, with having propelled the thing into the museum, from which nobody, to date, has managed to flush it out.
Anxious perhaps that his first inoculation did not work, TDD has repeated his story of how Duchamp got Stieglitz to validate his "Fountain" - while still reminding us that "nobody, to date has managed to flush it out"
Yet once again, the vaccine has failed to work on me.
If "Fountain" belongs in a museum, it would only be in a history museum, next to other cultural curiosities like the guillotine. Or better yet, a museum of conceptual art -- though I doubt that many would be interested if the other kinds of art were carefully excluded.
PRESENTIFICATIONS
Nobody, that is, except perhaps Marcel Broodthaers, Duchamp's most clear-sighted heir, in his own allegorical way. So what if we skipped to him, now? We're in I964, exactly one century after Manet's Dead Christ and the selfsame year when Arturo Schwarz, a Milanese gallery owner with a passion for Duchamp, issued, with the latter's agreement, a series of a dozen readymades, with eight copies of each, plus two -artist's editions. These figures tally with the number of editions of a bronze that can legitimately be considered originals. Officially rescued from the limbo accorded them, the readymades reconstructed by Schwarz (whose real "originals" had mostly vanished) thus acquired, in that very year, the same artistic dignity as a Rodin bronze, even though no one would dream of calling them sculptures. In the early 1960s we were in the thick of Pop Art and everyone, even a sculptor like Donald Judd, was happier talking about objects rather than sculptures. Duchamp's rating had never been higher. For more than ten years, his influence had been blazing an underground trail in the work of Johns and Rauschenberg in the United States, and in that of the British Pop artists, the Decollagistes, the Nouveaux Realistes, and the Zero group in Europe. He had just had his first major retrospective at the Pasadena Museum in California, and it is no exaggeration to say that a whole generation of artists was feeling the need to take up a stance in relation to his. People weren't talking about Conceptual Art just yet, but the idea was gaining ground that since the readymade's invention, the concept of art had shifted. So that year, the poet Marcel Broodthaers, little read and penniless, as is the lot of poets, decided to try his luck as a visual artist, and wangled an exhibition at the Saint Laurent Gallery in Brussels. The invitation, printed on a printer's slip sheets, read as follows:
" I, too, have been wondering whether I couldn't sell something and succeed in life. It's been a while now that I've been good for nothing. I'm forty years old ... Finally the idea of inventing something insincere crossed my mind and I set to work forthwith. After three months, I showed what I'd done to Ph. Edouard Toussaint, owner of the Saint Laurent Gallery. But this is art, he said, and I'll gladly show it all. Okay, I replied. If! sell something, he'll take 30%. These are apparently normal conditions, though some galleries take 75%. \¥hat are we talking about? Objects, actually. .
....Marcel Broodthaers.
Let's relish the cool wit of these few lines. It's a syringeful of vaccine that Broodthaers inoculates his potential audience with at the very start of his career. Playing ingenue, he declares deadpan that his succeeding in life depends on his commercial success, and he gives honest notice that he is driven by insincerity. When one thinks that sincerity is basically nothing other than the feeling of being honest, the turnaround has a certain piquancy. Having realized, better than anybody else, that the new disease which the vaccine strategy must vaccinate against is precisely art as strategy, he starts by flaunting his own. Since Duchamp's success has shown that anything and everything could be art, provided that it be recognized as such by the art institution, let it be proclaimed for all to hear that artists coming after Duchamp must now master no art other than the art of strategy, enabling them to penetrate the said institution. Thus did Broodthaers claim that he had been coopted by the artworld - he, the 40- year-old good-for-nothing who still hadn't sold a thing. It wasn't the artist, but the gallery owner who said: "But this is art, and I'll gladly show it all." Thus bolstered, Broodthaers embarked upon the production of objects, to which he affixed the ironic label "Belgian Pop Art," which were actually subtle allegorical comments on the situation of the artist who had "sold out before he'd been bought." Four years later, Broodthaers wound up his "Belgian Pop Art" phase and ushered in his "Musee d'art moderne" phase, which opened on 30 May 1968 with the occupation of the Palais des Beaux-Arts in Brussels by a group of anti-establishment artists. In the thick of May '68, when everyone was giving in to a purely imaginary desire to break up institutions, Broodthaers realized that the artist was irrevocably compromised, and all the more so because the artworld in which he was moving was the post-Duchampian world, a world institutionalized through and through and which, with more or less cynicism and more or less thoughtlessness, had fallen in line with this one, circular, rule: a museum is a museum of art if it contains art; everything a museum of art contains is automatically art. To break the vicious circle of this tautology, Broodthaers then gave himself the status of museum director-a real director of a fictitious museum. The Musee d'Art Moderne, Department des Aigles was created on 27 September I968 at his Brussels home and inaugurated by Johannes Cladders, an authentic official of the post-Duchampian artworld. It went through several versions, one of the last being the Section des Figures in Dusseldorf, in I972. In his self-styled role of museum director, Broodthaers brought together in the city's Kunsthalle some three hundred objects in an exhibition called The Eagle from the Oligocene to the present. Some of these objects were acknowledged works of art, others mere things taken from the vernacular culture and natural history museums. Master paintings and beer bottles, ornamented jewels and cigar bands, illuminations and advertisements, pre-Colombian sculptures and military emblems, all these objects bore the effigy of an eagle, and all had been borrowed from public and private collections. Each one of them was accompanied by a small black plastic sign stating, in three alternating languages: "This is not a work of art." In the catalog, Broodthaers pointed out that these signs "illustrate an idea of Marcel Duchamp and Rene Magritte," and juxtaposed on two facing pages the photo of the Schwarz version of Duchamp's urinal and the reproduction of Magritte's La trahison des images, the famous painting where Magritte captions the picture of a pipe with the sentence: "Ceci n'est pas une pipe." Two years later, Broodthaers confirmed to Irmeline Lebeer: "Ceci n 'est pas un objet d'art' is a formula obtained by conflating a Duchamp concept and an antithetical Magritte concept." Such a conflation has the kind of luminous simplicity that can, for a long time, veil the complexity of the underlying thinking: "Ceci est un objet d'mrt" + "Ceci n'est pas une pipe" = "Ceci n'est pas un objet d'art." Broodthaers borrows from Magritte what it takes to deny Duchamp. The surprising thing is this borrowing. Had Broodthaers wanted to reverse the operation sanctioning a readymade, he didn't need to go through Magritte. Duchamp had already put forward the paradoxical idea of a recip1r ocal readymade: using a Rembrandt as an ironing-board, and had put it into practice more than once on his own work-for example, in 1950, when he exhibited in Sidney Janis' gallery a urinal similar to the one Stieglitz had photographed in 1917 in its tipped over position, but affixed to the wall in its "normal" position, and quite low down, "so that even little boys could use it." For lack of a Rembrandt to be used as an ironing- board, Duchamp used a Duchamp as a urinal instead. Broodthaers, it goes without saying, didn't use a Magritte as a pipe. Nor did he "really" want to chuck the uri-,. nal out of the museum. The exercise was of another kind, and brought into play the function of presentational devices and presenters in the post-Duchamp artworld. Any object whatsoever, provided it is presented in and by this tautology-ruled world, is automatically accompanied by an invisible label that reads: "This is art." Just as automatically, in fact, as a painting of a pipe is accompanied by an invisible label that says: "This is a pipe." An equation is thus established between the power of the institution and the power of pictures. Broodthaers has not only grasped that Duchamp's gesture with the readymade had been to reduce the work of art to the sentence sanctioning it, and that it is not the artist who has the authority to utter this sentence, but rather the institutional presenter, but he has also understood that Magritte's gesture with La trahison des images was to have representation reduced to presentation. Even in writing out in full: "Ceci n'est pas une pipe" under the depiction of a pipe, it is quite simply not possible to prevent the image from being the pipe's presentational device. The two gestures, Duchamp's and Magritte's, are linked together by an equation whose middle term is the notion of power, where "power" means, on the one hand, "institutional authority" and, on the other, "persuasive force of figurative images." The perception of this equation is Broodthaers' stroke of genius. It is also what makes the qualitative leap between his "Belgian Pop Art" phase and his "Musee d'art moderne" phase. Nothing records this better than the excerpt from his interview with Irmeline Lebeer, where the conversation shifts from committed art to indifferent art. Indifferent art is made, Broodthaers suggests, "from the moment when you're less of an artist, when the need to make thrusts its roots into memory alone. I believe my shows depended, and still depend, on memories of the time when I used to embrace the creative situation in a heroic and solitary form. In other words-Back then: Read, look. Today: Allow me to present you ... "
Rene Magritte, "La Trahison de Images"
Magritte once worked as a catalog illustrator -- and this is a fine illustration - not so much for pipes as for himself as artist/philosopher.
If that's all he ever did, however, I don't think he would have become iconic -- and I certainly would not cross the street to see him featured in an exhibition. (I saw an extensive retrospective at the Art Institute a few years back)
In contrast to institutional authority -- which, as TDD has pointed out, is the primary content of the exhibitions of Duchamp as well as Broodthaers -- I would offer the persuasive force of certain images - whether figurative or not. Which images have that persuasive force -- and what are they persuading ? Personally, that's up to each of us to determine. Socially, that's the job description of an art critic.
At this point, I'm going to terminate my reading of Thierry De Duve's "Look! -- 100 Years of Contemporary Art".
It was his detailed discussion of a painting by Manet that pulled me in -- but judging from the reproductions, I have no interest in looking at anything made by Duchamp, Broodthaers, or Michael Snow (introduced later in the chapter).
By this point it's apparent that the author is far more interested in a ruminating on existence and authority rather than recounting his visual experience with paintings and sculptures. (and it does seem more of a bovine rumination than a systematic examination) Which might also apply to the kind of art schools in which he teaches.
TDD's latest book, Aesthetics at Large: Volume 1: Art, Ethics, Politics, begins with a long rant against the winner of the 2016 American presidential election. I could not agree more. But whatever you may say about that sordid, ignorant, predatory con-man, at least his temporary authority is the result of a fair election -- while TDD is rather defeatist towards the institutional authority that continues to place things like urinals into art museums. Who selects their leadership - other than the leaders themselves ?
As a closed system, the institutional artworld is better served by art that depends upon institutional authority rather than personal aesthetic experience.
But why should anyone outside that system give it any attention ?
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