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Tired of
the Soup du Jour?
Some Problems with 'New Formalism'
Nick Evans
'Early one Morning', Whitechapel Gallery's 2002 summer
exhibition featured work by the artists Jim Lambie, Eva Rothschild, Shahin
Afrabassi, Gary Webb and Clare Barclay. The exhibition was hailed by Whitechapel
director Iwona Blazwick in its catalogue introduction as a "paradigm
shift in contemporary art." The work of these featured artists, along
with Roger Hiorns and an American contingent including Jason Meadows,
has been identified by the writer and artist JJ Charlesworth as representing
"a new kind of sculpture."
So what is all the fuss about? Fortunately the answer lies close at hand.
In his recent articles in Art Monthly and Artext,1
Charlesworth provides a tentative critical bedrock on which to build the
promotional machine for the 'new paradigm'. These articles chart
the recent historical conditions within the (mainly) British art world,
which gave rise to this "new formalism". They also provide a
generic overview of the concerns and tendencies which unite the disparate
strands of a dozen or so individual practices.
Whilst accepting the broad thrust of Charlesworth's analysis of the
recent historical conditions within British art, I wish to look more closely
at a number of his assertions regarding the necessary conditions for the
ascendance of the new formalism. I wish to outline the way the artistic
co-concerns within new formalism, identified by both Iwona Blazwick and
Charlesworth, often rely on problematic systems of representation. I also
wish to highlight Charlesworth's apparently benign acceptance of
the evacuation of critical content from the contemporary art gallery.
First, a summery of the historic trajectory behind the new formalism,
as outlined by Charlesworth:
Charlesworth identifies the return to abandoned realms of '60s formalism
as a phenomenon that flies in the face of recent practice that deals with
issues of social, political, institutional and cultural representation.
The abandonment of critical discourse in the late 1980s is a result of
an impasse reached when the expanded field of critical discourse found
itself limited through its integration into institutional norms. The institutional
norms came out on top, as critical perspectives were assimilated into
gallery modes of presentation. This led to a deepening disillusionment
on the part of artists since no one could quite decide how to deal with
the problems of institutional assimilation they were facing. Into the
breach leapt the yBas, who couldn't really care less, just accepted
the conservative norms, and indulged themselves and their audience with
anti-critical, populist modes of production. This in turn was great for
the art market, which mushroomed. The consequent expansion of the British
art scene allowed previously marginalised critical perspectives, with
artworks often sited outwith the gallery, to be integrated into the mainstream.
(Charlesworth cites Landy's Breakdown and Dellar's Battle of
Orgreave as examples.)
This is all very well, provided one disregards all those 'alternative'
practices which continued to work outwith the mainstream, enacting strategies
which paved the way for the eventual 'acceptance' of Dellar
or Landy. Charlesworth's proposal suggests that the continuing marginalisation
of seminal figures active prior to the yBa generation, such as Terry Atkinson,
is due to the continuing and inevitable historic repercussions of the
critical/institutional 'impasse' reached as a result of the
integration of '80s critical discourse into the institutional mainstream.
This is untrue, far from passively accepting their marginalisation, artists
such as Atkinson worked, and continue to work, to avoid such assimilation.
Charlesworth's acceptance of a supposed impasse is convenient for
his historical thesis, allowing him to accept simulachral spectacles such
as Breakdown and the Battle of Orgreave as examples of the re-integration
of "marginal radical perspectives." He bolsters their status
as the 'critical voice' of the 'radical academy',
affirming the position of Dellar and Landy within it.
Charlesworth correctly identifies the shift in values which has enabled
the cultural hegemony to expand in line with the increasing professionalisation,
careerism and commercialisation of the artworld, leading to the integration
of previously marginal interdisciplinary forms. However, blithely accepting
works such as The Battle of Orgreave or Breakdown as paragons of contemporary
critical practice is expedient. He uses these examples as a form of rhetoric,
allowing himself the room to present the emergence of the new formalist
'paradigm' as an 'inevitable' response to his defeatist
thesis. This thesis proposes that the move towards 'abstraction'
amongst a younger generation is a natural progression of the late '90s
commitment towards material preoccupations: "the reinvention of popular
or amateur idioms, the return of the handmade and of the craft aesthetic."
The gallery becomes the site for the 'abstract', formalist paradigm:
it represents one of many possible 'products' available to the
cultural consumer. Although Charlesworth recognises the new formalism
as "pragmatic and often cynical ... and conservatively reconciled
to the commercial locus of the unique object", he justifies the importance
of the position it represents on the grounds that it is "one of the
plurality of practices in which questions of form, experience and context
may once again be negotiated."
The implications of adopting a position such as this are ultimately limiting.
It entails a casual shrugging off of the retreat of political content
from the gallery, and an acceptance of a limited field of engagement as
Charlesworth disengages contemporary practices' formalist concerns
from other areas in the "plurality of practice." This is presented
as a re-investment in the formal conditions of arts' presentation,
but its effect is to close down the gallery as a site for the more important
matter of allowing artists to discuss, head on, the contextual terms of
their works' presentation. Accepting the gallery as one of a number
of sites within a pluralised field of cultural activity is all very well,
but limiting the effectiveness of the gallery to the celebration of formal
conditions is not. This is especially important when the conditions are
presented as being beyond analysis or contestation:
"The shape these [formal] resolutions take may appear to reiterate
earlier terms, but they do so only in as much as they articulate the contemporary
aesthetic and institutional possibilities and limitations of gallery art
– the ambiguity towards reference and representation, the hallucinatory
excess of material form and the syntax that develops between elements
once they are placed in relation to one another – all echo the past
but are discovered because these aspects are default values, so to speak,
the pragmatic reality that was once mistaken for an essential." (Emphasis
added.)
This sounds remarkably close to the philosopher Richard Rorty's position,
with his brand of neo-pragmatist anti-philosophy, and it further exposes
a kind of cultural determinism. The values are default and the reality
pragmatic only through a given work's dependence on code signals
recognisable between class and knowledge sectors, and reflecting the power
and influence of a predominantly middle class, art school educated cognoscenti.
The "possibilities and limitations" of gallery art identified
here are a depressing invocation of the status quo.
The works of the new formalists themselves do the most to undermine Charlesworth's
claim that the new formalism has moved on from the preoccupations of previous
paradigms. Whilst they generally rely on tropes and systems of representation
that are coded to appeal to the cognoscenti, and they are undoubtedly
reconciled to and reliant on their gallery context, it is clear that the
new formalists do embrace an institutional critique of sorts. Their critique
may not be based on dry '80s conceptualism but it nonetheless relies
on double coding in an attempt to undermine and parody itself. Rothschild's
piece Early Learning takes the tropes of New Generation sculptor Philip
King and conflates these with articles reminiscent of children's
toys. Jim Lambie's renowned floor piece Zobop is reminiscent of hard
edged abstraction, yet its form is dictated by the constraints of the
gallery space in which it is located. This pushes it into the realms of
a 'critical regionalism', a critique of the international style
and the 'non-place'. These strategies are however, hardly paradigm
shifting and they do little to support Charlesworth's claims that
the new formalism has "no ancestry to be traced" nor that it
is being "constructed from the ground up, in a landscape uncluttered
by the relics of history."
Charlesworth claims that the growth in use of handicrafts or idiosyncratic
manufacture through the late '90s led to a new generation "representing
a particular kind of investment" in art making, and this, along with
the idea that craftwork will make the artwork more "authentic and
resistant to a depersonalised and media saturated culture", revels
in a kind of bourgeois primitivism. In fact this tendency towards primitivism
is borne out in much of the work by the artists identified by Charlesworth.
We can observe the use of neo-primitive identifiers such as "extremes
of combinatory invention"2
in the work of Gary Webb, an attraction for "ancient images and artefacts"3
in the work of Roger Hiorns or Clare Barclay, and a "[p]alaeolithic
sensibility of shamanic magic"4
in Lambie's psychedelic soul sticks. Such references are surely quite
deliberate; the titling works such as Meadow's Bald Eagle after an
animal totem (and the symbol of the U.S), or Hiorns, Barclay and Rothschild's
use of crystals and other new age paraphernalia indicate a knowing appropriation
of the problematic signs of earlier shamanistic art practices and an understanding
of new age culture and shamanism as practiced in broader culture. The
use of such loaded signifiers (with a few notable exceptions) does not
necessarily imply a critique of the appropriation of exotic imagery. Neither
is the appropriation entirely naïve. It is more as if the use of
such signs allows the artists to summon up a notion of the artworld as
a 'totemistic' community, where through the process of an art
education and shared sets of cultural and class values, artists and art
lovers may develop a kinship between all things in the 'artworld-cosmos'.
The acceptance and repeated use of visual stereotypes to communicate with
like minds becomes sentimental cliché; a nod towards difference
which affirms the new formalists' position within the status quo.
In the end these strategies seem to function better as attempts to bolster
the artworld's self image. They reaffirm and uncritically extend
its codes, further reifying itself as 'cool' and hermetic, thereby
placing the broader issues of representation it inadvertently (or sometimes
advertently) raises beyond concern.
Unfortunately, like previous neo-primitive practices, the new formalism
relies heavily and for the most part uncritically on a notional 'other'
in order to generate value. The 'others' in this case range
from the assumed values ascribed to a piece of leather which allow it
to slip between signifying a state of nature or a sex fetish, to the desire
to render art ('represented' through the tropes of '60s
formalism) into the realms of a supposedly more authentic field of visceral
experience via pop music or culture. Iwona Blazwick, writing in the catalogue
introduction to 'Early One Morning', maintains that the use
of a car body shop that is frequented by pop stars to finish the surface
of a Webb sculpture gives the artwork 'appropriateness'. It
presumably then relates to a more authentic (working class and/or pop
cultural) setting, a garage on Old Kent Road.
The 'others' appropriated as signifying mechanisms by the 'New
Sculpture', however, do not hold a dialectical position within the
work. The 'other' has become integrated into the work's
field of signification to the extent that it is in fact presented as 'the
same' but, in the words of Hal Foster, "erupts into the field
of the same as difference."5
Thus, for example, Jason Meadows can combine the:
"possibilities of the abstract formalist paradigm with an anti-transcendent
attitude to the ordinariness of materials and the everyday accessibility
of representational elements [in this case Spider Man and basketball hoops].
Yet rather than being set in critical opposition these different perspectives
are brought into collaboration."6
This 'mixing' of high and low culture does not really raise
the artistic stakes for any emerging 'paradigm'. Neither does
the holding up of such a futile 'collaboration' as a model practice
on Charlesworth's part encourage any hopes for a more politically
engaged or intellectually stimulating gallery practice in the near future.
'Mixing' high and low culture in this way can seem liberatory
when one assumes that the cultural values being confronted rest on pure
notions of identity and stark oppositions. Playing with high and low culture
has long been a given strategy within the visual arts. Far from representing
a paradigm shift such collaborations between high and low culture taken
at face value, without critical interpretation, are in danger of backing
the new formalism into an artistically predictable, politically reactionary
cul-de-sac.
Charlesworth is sensitive to such criticism. But he maintains that the
strategies adopted by the new formalists enable them to embrace idiosyncratic
ways of working which could be seen as an "assertion of cultural
separation or independence by the artist." He places the blame for
potential readings of his position as reactionary and market-oriented
firmly in a historical court. He claims that the historic failings of
formalism have tended to be based not only upon an idealisation of form,
but on a mystification of the contexts and conditions of gallery presentation.
Charlesworth is quick however, to reassure us that it would be an impossibility
for the new formalism to repeat this mistake. Unlike its precursor, the
new formalism relies on "practical accident" rather than a "rationalised
appeal to an ideal" and therefore "reveals" the conditions
of its presentation:
"What [the new formalism] reveals, by practical accident rather than
the rationalised appeal to an ideal, are the actual conditions of presentation
that formalism sought to mystify as essential to the object, rather than
the context of its presentation."
Even if we forgive Charlesworth the absurd proposition that the new formalists
are busy generating "practical accidents" in order to reveal
the context of their works' presentation, it is clear that the confines
of gallery context have nevertheless become a precondition for the smooth
running of the new formalist mechanics. 1960s formalism slipped into a
mystification (tantamount to an outright denial) of the institutional
politics of the gallery; this is not so different from the new formalism's
reliance upon the entrenchment of the unchallenged gallery as a necessity
for the survival of the work in the first place. This entrenchment makes
it increasingly hard to think adversarily about the gallery from within
its four walls, and seems to preclude the making of a work which 'bites
the hand that feeds it'. Worse, in becoming an apologist for the
new formalist paradigm, Charlesworth seems to quickly accept and benignly
anticipate the evacuation of any critical content from the gallery context.
Iwona Blazwick (again in her catalogue introduction to Early One Morning)
claims that the works in the exhibition "trigger associations of
pleasure and pain which go beyond language."7
This seems to suggest that, counter to Charlesworth's claims, the
new formalism is far from a retreat from ideals. This contradiction is
an outcome perhaps of Charlesworth's privileging the new formalism's
place in an art historical lineage over an attempt to deliver us first-hand
analysis of the works in question. When the actual work is discussed we
tend to get readings that err close to mystification.
Thus the new formalism is described as possessing a visceral ability to
universalise experience. Blazwick describes Lambie's work as having
a "sheer visual presence" which is able to "carry us out
of the here and now and to transport us somewhere else."8
Charlesworth has written that Roger Hiorns' work "refuse[es]
to speak ... their sense ... bound up in their function, in the very
fact of their presence."9
These interpretations make a mockery of any common sense potential claimed
for new formalism. Instead we see it carrying on abstraction's tradition
of seeking affirmation through mysticism and maintaining the 20th century's
love affair with the spiritual in art.
Max Kosloff wrote on Rothko that it is necessary to "find that lever
of consciousness which will change a blank painted fabric into a glow
perpetuating itself into the memory."10
The bringing to, and the perpetuation through commentary, of the notion
of abstract art as the purveyor of a higher truth in a secular society
is a necessary tool in the maintenance of market value:
"spiritual atmosphere as a surplus of indefinable uniqueness added
to the materially unique abstract work of art – further enhances
the work's commercial value and social status. Spirituality legitimatises
the abstract works worldly success."11
Spirituality not only legitimises an abstract work's success, it
can also prevent too many conclusions being drawn from its systems of
representation. This obfuscation is enhanced by Charlesworth's assertions
that for Gary Webb the "final resolution of allusion and form [is]
something to be actively fought against"12,
or that "Hiorns' use of materials emphasises the paradoxical
power of non-reference to signify in new and unpredictable ways."13
In the catalogue accompanying 'Early one Morning' Clare Barclay's
works are acknowledged as pertaining to environmental, sexual or gender
issues, their relationship to these issues, however, remains "loose
and ambiguous ... partly as a result of the formal rather than literal
level at which they are played out"14,
whilst Eva Rothschild's fascination and healthy scepticism for new
age mysticism is rendered "ambivalent."15
This inflation of the transitory nature of the signifier to an ideal blurs
the distinctions between the practices of artists identified as sharing
in the new formalist paradigm, and renders fundamental significatory possibilities
within individual works impotent. Charlesworth, however, posits the retreat
into non-signification as a liberatory experience by heralding it as an
acceptance on the part of young artists of the conditions imposed upon
art making in the unassailable context of the commercial world of the
art gallery. He claims that what this in effect leads to is an opening
up of the possibilities for art making, forging a new path separate from
the "critical and institutional dead end of the previous decade."
Unfortunately such a refusal on the part of artists to signify, or on
the part of commentators to exploit the significatory potential that does
exist within the work, plays heavily into the hands of the right-leaning
political status quo. I do not argue here for a heckling, consciousness-raising
work (although a bit of consciousness-raising would not go amiss). But
the new formalism and its commentators need to be aware of its language
of signification, especially when there are class, gender and race issues
involved. Emptying out the negotiation of obvious class or racial assumptions
within the work in favour of the play of signifiers or aesthetic and formal
matters consolidates these assumptions whilst reassuring cognoscenti of
their 'right' to adopt exotic stereotypes or make class representations
without being challenged or self-critical. This can only further consolidate
the already problematic hierarchies of consumption and representation
within broader culture.
The argument for the new formalism Charlesworth pursues is highly historicised,
and actually leaves little room for critical negotiation. It seems to
propose an easy going assimilation of the 'tropes' of familiar
postmodern paradigms (the mixing of high and low culture, an awareness
of difference, a critique of pure form), and attempts to move on from
these via the liberation of the signifier, embracing instead the realm
of the poetic allusion and the reinvention of 'popular' and
'amateur' uses of materials and techniques. Charlesworth rightly
praises the re-emergence within the new formalism of the discursive object,
and the possibilities this raises for making "new meaning proceed
from the presence of things." He does not, however, adequately deal
with the problematic nature of the meanings actually created. The only
potential avenue for a critical reading within Charlesworth's analysis
relies on a passé critique of the conservatism of the radical academy,
which absolves the need for the work to force the viewer to "think
dialectically about cultural exclusion and the popular."16
Instead, in favouring allusive interpretations Charlesworth seems to engage
in a critique of metaphysics that seeks immunity from the possibility
of being read as essentialist. This position reflects a nervousness on
the part of new formalism; it does not want to be seen as overly 'authorial'.
It is as if by taking control of the meanings and implications of its
significatory materials they will cast a totalitarian shadow over the
author.
This slave-like adherence of the new formalism to its Derridean inheritance
is frustrating. A paradigm shift suggests a new beginning; a moving on
from a re-appraisal of what has come before, a sense of progressive engagement
with the trinity of form, content and context. Instead what we seem to
get with many of these loosely grouped new formalist works is a sense
of retreat, a sense of taking comfort in the assumptions of the white
cube, of re-invoking a host of nostalgic references from British 'New
Generation' sculpture, through to retro-design/craft /pop-culture.
Why is it that whilst the world outside spirals in ever tighter circles
of terror and repression, and the potential avenues of avoidance or resistance
become squeezed by the growing dominance of capital and its civil and
military bulldogs, artists retreat further into a hermetic world of abstraction,
formalism, deferred meanings and latent spiritualism? Do artists really,
as Charlesworth seems to propose, have no choice but to accept that the
gallery is now fit solely for the exploration of formal issues? Are young
artists really faced with a stark choice between the play of unlimited
semiosis or the supposed dead-end street of late '80s critical discourse?
That the world is a different place since 9/11 is a truism, but it could
(and has) been argued that there is a need now, more than ever, for artists
and writers to engage with the moral and ethical parameters of our globalising
world. This is certainly not the time for a rehashing of single-issue
driven 'politically engaged' practice. And we need to be wary
of artists jumping uncritically on the bandwagon of the relational aesthetic.
The social context of human interaction can be activated simply through
the relationship between an art object and the viewer. It is not always
necessary or important to foreground the events of everyday interaction
in order to deal with the 'social interactivity' of art.
Instead of throwing the baby out with the bath water, and seeking to hive
off political concerns 'somewhere else', free from the limitations
of the gallery context or the autonomous object, we need to look at the
means through which artists can make politically pertinent contributions
in whatever field they are working in. This does not necessarily mean
that abstraction is out and social realism is in. Such mutually exclusive
dichotomies are long redundant. Instead we need to be investigating the
potential for cultural representations that are open to the viewer, and
seek to engage in a social debate. Socially concerned artists working
directly through objects and painting need not (and cannot) be excluded.
In fact, by accepting the limited frame of interaction inherent within
the confines of a painting or sculpture, they may be uniquely placed to
deepen the level, if not necessarily expand the parameters, of engagement
with the viewer. Works which are genuinely critically engaging, that do
not embrace subterfuge, will undoubtedly find breaching the walls of institutional
gallery spaces difficult, if not impossible. But the institution is by
no means the only 'white space' available to the artist. If
it is possible for idiosyncratic formal experimentation to have a positive
impact on critical discourse, then artists will have to invest time and
effort in making gallery conditions (even ad-hoc ones) available to themselves
and others. In seeking to reinvest in the critical potential of gallery
based art, artists will be forced to acknowledge that coding within work
remains an important, thorny, and inevitable part of visual representation.
But we have to be careful not to restrict the nature of the coding to
meet established expectations, be they the expectations of the cognoscenti,
the market, historical reactionism, or peer group. Comfortable as it may
be in the short term, culture simply cannot afford to restrict itself
through a 'knowing' adherence to familiar tropes, it needs to
be braver than that.
Notes
1. J Charlesworth, 'Not Neo but New', Art Monthly no. 259, September
2002 (from which all quotes are taken unless otherwise attributed) and
JJ Charlesworth, Artext no. 78, Fall 2002.
2. Moffit p.62,
3. Lippard, 'Overlay', p.4
4. McEvilly, 'Art in the Dark', Artforum, 1983
5. Foster, 'The Primitive Unconscious of Modern Art', from 'Art
in Modern Culture', p.207
6. Charlesworth in Artext No. 78, fall 2002
7. Iwona Blazwick, Catalogue introduction to 'Early One Morning–New
British Sculpture in the 21st Century', Whitechapel Gallery, 2002.
8. Ibid
9. Charlesworth in Artext No.78, fall 2002
10. Kozloff, 'Mark Rothko', Renderings, 1969. Quoted by Kuspitt
in 'Concerning The Spiritual in Modern Art', 'The Spiritual
in Art, Painting 1890-1985', p.317
11. Kuspitt, in 'The Spiritual in Art, Painting 1890-1985',
p.314
12. Artext no 78, fall 2002
13. Ibid
14. Andrea Tarsia, catalogue essay for 'Early one Morning',
Whitechapel Gallery, 2002
15. Ibid
16. Roberts, 'In Character' from 'Art and Language in Practice
vol 2' p.120.
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