Painting and sculpture have become highly evolved and elevated disciplines dealing with certain powerful areas of the human imagination, and we should not abandon them to contemporary trivia or fashion and especially not to the current vogue for an art of weakly-constructed figurative fantasy. It is in the structured substance of painting and sculpture that their ability to timelessly communicate resides, rather than in subject matter or indeed the often superficial and contingent intentions of the artist. We must continue to recognise the higher achievements of these disciplines as being closer to our own enduring condition of physicality than they are to any manifestation of shallow contemporary aesthetics.
Robin Greenwood
Visual or Literal? Art can’t be both...
How do you judge the Turner Prize? What are the criteria, and do they relate to previous art history? Can we compare one work to another, or to the rest of the art in the Tate, or to the paintings in the National Gallery?
I suspect the answer to the last question is, no, we can’t, because the work in the Turner Prize is mostly literal, and the work in the National Gallery is mostly visual. The criteria by which we judge the work in the National Gallery are for the most part based upon the success or otherwise of the visual structures of the paintings, about which we can endeavour to some degree to be objective. I presume that the criteria by which the Turner Prize works are judged are more subjective, based upon personal feelings generated by the literal content of the work. The visual and the literal can and do exist together in most art, in varying degrees, but as one increases the other diminishes. In the work in the current Turner Prize batch, the visual is almost entirely missing, the literal is totally dominant.
The work in the Turner Prize and most contemporary art in the galleries takes its precedents in literalism from the revolution in art that happened in the second half of the 20th Century. In the Sixties artists rapidly expanded their claims for the physical and intellectual territory that sculpture occupied. This was a different claim from that made by Duchamp’s ready-mades earlier in the Century. This new claim was more profound, being not just a claim for literal objects as art, but a claim for infinite literal space as sculptural space. This presented a huge freedom; acute, beneficial and extraordinary in prospect, it has yet to be in any great part explored; and because of the confusion between what is sculptural and what is simply literal, it came with a downside. The term ‘sculpture’ became a catch-all tag for just about any art activity in real time and space - save for traditional painting - from digging a hole in the ground to going for a walk in the landscape. Artists wanted to explore fully the ‘condition’ of this new spatial context, but for the most part only had literal means at their disposal to do so. So, no sooner had abstract sculpture differentiated the whole discipline from any link with the past, particularly from its previous dire confusion with statuary, than we immediately attained a new and perhaps worse state of misunderstanding, between the sculptural and the literal. The consequences of this have allowed for much if not all of the dumb literalism of contemporary art. Sculpture has pitched itself headlong into the real world, and now it has no idea at all what it is and what distinguishes it from anything else in the world. Many would say that nothing does distinguish it, and that nor should it. Differentiating sculpture from other objects in the world now seems to be thought of as an elitist practice.
This merging of art and literalism in the case of very great art can plainly be seen to be neither good nor true; the finest painting and sculpture are very special and distinguished objects indeed. It is true that just occasionally one encounters art of such overwhelming and apparently artless greatness that it seems closer to life than to art, but such works (like, say Titian’s ‘Diana and Acteon’ currently on show at the National Gallery) have gone the full circle to get there. In the case of most art, the separation from the literal is reasonably distinct. In sculpture, for example, most objects in the world are not built to encompass the extreme conditions of total three-dimensionality which the scrutiny of being a sculpture ought really to require it to fulfil. This failure to be fully and profoundly three-dimensional in a visual sense is true not only of most objects which are casually now labelled sculpture, but also of the best furniture, or complex and beautiful machinery, or 3-D design. It requires exquisitely difficult thought and practise to enable the visual and the fully three-dimensional to co-exist. Most contemporary artists are not going to bother trying to untangle the confusion between sculptural and literal three-dimensionality. It is much too exciting whilst it remains a confusion; too difficult and obscure to unravel; and containing as it does a seductive opportunity to benefit from the ensuing perplexity and mystification, it is seen as an advantage to their art. Whilst the freedoms won for sculpture in the Sixties were real, the popular belief that the literalists and conceptualists have been able to fully utilise and develop such freedoms needs testing to the full. These freedoms require embedding in strong visual form for them to be of proper value as content, and therefore extend meaning. They are potent values that weak form cannot contain; nor can illustration, nuance, mild sensibilities, good taste, literalism or conceptualism. Complexity, uncertainty, and difficulty come with these freedoms, and they are not to be addressed by simplistic notions about ‘issues’ in literal or conceptual art. The truly radical and liberating thing for sculpture to do now would be to begin to unravel the confusion of sculptural and literal three-dimensionality.
Visual structure in art exists as distinct from, and only distantly related to, the literal structures known by the terms of the engineer. It is certainly not quantifiable in the way that actual structural engineering is, yet it determines how we feel, often subconsciously, about a lot of what we see, from art through to design and architecture – including engineering itself. It is why, for example, the Clifton suspension bridge looks so strong and 'structural' and the Millennium Bridge can look by comparison so limp, even though both are structurally feasible in literal terms (the best engineers, of course, will make their structures visible and lucid as best they are able). In our visual terms, 'structural' becomes a qualitative value relating to the most basic responses to arrangements of visual form. More importantly still, visual structure implies more than just aesthetics, encompassing as it does a necessary sense of principle and purpose. So that the good-looking advert or car or film, despite being available for qualitative visual assessment, does not possess visual structure to anything like the degree or depth of a painted masterpiece by Rembrandt or Poussin or one of Degas’s best sculptures, wherein every part contributes to the visual activity of the whole, without redundancy. Painting and sculpture at their best have something unique to offer, which you can't get from any other art form, and you can't get from design of any kind, including even architecture – which gets nearest - and you certainly can't get from conceptual art. This special thing to painting and sculpture is in greater part the resolution without compromise of vast formal and spatial complexities, synthesised into believable and purposeful new visual matrixes. If this is done in such a way as to make the decisions taken during the progressive creation of the art properly available to the eye - one of the reasons Cézanne succeeds so often is his ability to achieve this ‘openness’ of thought and action - then an intelligent and emotive ‘communication’ may be achieved which no other visual media, such as photography, graphic design, even film, can get close to. What is more, such communication operates upon areas of human responsiveness that no other art form can aspire to affect. Painting and sculpture have become highly evolved and elevated disciplines dealing with certain powerful areas of the human imagination, and we should not abandon them to contemporary trivia or fashion and especially not to the current vogue for an art of weakly-constructed figurative fantasy. It is in the structured substance of painting and sculpture that their ability to timelessly communicate resides, rather than in subject matter or indeed the often superficial and contingent intentions of the artist. We must continue to recognise the higher achievements of these disciplines as being closer to our own enduring condition of physicality than they are to any manifestation of shallow contemporary aesthetics.
Robin Greenwood
Poussin Gallery
London, UK
December 2008
