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Mark Prince on the rejection of relativism > FEATURES 02

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IN AN INTERVIEW FROM 1965, Frank Stella distinguished between thesurface issues of his painting and the transcendental or meta-physical content which earlier abstract artists had aspired to: Itslike what they left us to do, and if we succeed in solving most ofthose problems or dealing successfully with them, then the gen-erations that follow us will maybe go back to the transcendental.Stella was speaking at the threshold of Postmodernism, which has imposed a stubborn, unnegotiable filter throughwhich all belief is automatically rendered relative and all value non-hierarchical. Try to imagine reversing the processand you come upon a resistance comparable to reading time-travel stories when the premise suddenly wobbles as its

The NewTranscendentalism

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Artists, however, are also stubborn, and the trail beyondpostmodern irony has come to seem a seductive territory.Credulousness, having lost all credibility, appears full ofpotential again; but when critics use the term post-ironic,are they suggesting that transcendental value has become apossibility again, or that it is being adopted by artists as sub-ject matter for commentary and critique? Is this a symptomof a dubious desire for faith, superstition, the promise ofabsolutes? To seek the magics from a position of disabusedrationality would seem to be oxymoronic, if not patronising.But perhaps there are many productive grey areas betweenentrenched scepticism and categorical values as, for

instance, HA Williams suggests when he says that the aca-demic study of prayer may lead a man to pray.

Modernism is the most recent manifestation of art

problem, and therefore it makes sense that it is to Mod-ernism and its myths and archetypes that artists first turnwhen looking for alternatives to the relativistic status quo.This could be an inversion of the progress which saw themetaphysical pretensions of Abstract Expressionismunravel into the more down-to-earth materialist mindset ofearly Minimalism on the back of Clement Greenbergs lin-ear narratives of flatness and opticality. However, Mod-ernism is mostly perceived not as the true light that hasbeen mistakenly mislaid, but as a mysterious historicalphenomenon, like an extinct religious cult, for artists tooyoung to have experienced anything of it first hand.

Richard Wrights wall paintings combine modernistabstraction with signs associated with gothic and religiousimagery. In his Turner Prize installation last year, there were intimations of something evanescent about to berevealed from the elaborately patterned gold leaf. Evenaside from the obvious historical connotations of thismaterial, Wrights Baroque symmetry of eruptions andflowerings might have been intended as a Blakean vision

of heaven or hell. His work is overpainted when an exhibitioncloses nothing remains to be sold and he has spoken ofthis erasure in political terms, as a rejection of the com-modity status of the medium: I am not against paintingon canvas per se; the problem is the ease with which paint-ing is absorbed into the market, which of course facilitatesits easy consumption. There are too many unnecessaryobjects. Wrights wall paintings are a minimal, site-specif-ic inflection of the existing interior more than a descendentof the full-bodied mural, but their denial of the art objectgoes deeper than this lack of material assertion. Wrightbrings the diamonds and stripes of formalistic abstraction

into conjunction with gothic curlicues, gold leaf and cloud-bursts, refusing to recognise any essential distinctionbetween the two vocabularies. He sets up a dichotomywhich allows him to project his art beyond formal con-fines. Transcendence, in these terms, is to transcend boththe art object and the art market with its streamlined utili-tarianism. If it is sellable it can be reduced to its functionas a commodity, and Wright would like to hinder that auto-matic divisibility. Modernisms reduction of art to its for-mal basics becomes synonymous with the commodifiedart object, gothic with its dematerialisation. If this remainsa relativistic equilibrium, the coherence of Wrightslanguage depends on reconciling its binary terms in theprocess of the work.

Wright has said: I reject the idea of pure art ... I wouldnot call the faade of Cologne Cathedral or the ornamentalart of Islam decorative, I would call it ecstatic. Contrastingpurity and the decorative with ecstasy, he polarises anidea of art as a hermetic, self-referential language with anideal of outward-looking commitment for which he has cho-sen a term with religious associations. Is he dressing up sec-ular aesthetics in the language of faith? That the idea of pureart, which for the 20th-century Avant Garde was a ticket tothe absolute and the unknown, should now be seen as con-finement and limitation if not materialism is an indica-

tion of how far we are from modernistic transcendentalism.Making the leap from Greenbergian purity to ecstasy,

Wright uses two examples of religious art. Ecstasy con-

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Isa GenzkenWind2009

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which present themselves as circumventing critique. Hisreferences to 1970s and 80s punk and goth culture viathe design features associated with them reflect the abilityof those cultures to crystallise a radical outburst of pureenergy which aimed to overrule the pedestrian qualifica-tions of intellectual deconstruction. But this is not a returnto pre-Enlightenment enchantment, or even 19th-centuryRomanticism; ecstasy is knowingly deployed as an anti-dote to the prevailing culture of rational irony. Science-fiction imagery also fits these specifications by departingfrom rationality while comprehending a rational basis forits imaginings. As a metaphor for the unknown andunquantifiable, it is a post-Romantic cartoon version ofreligious iconography.

In the collages of the Croatian artist David Maljkovic,images of abstract public sculpture from socialist 1960sYugoslavia are pasted into photographs of glitteringseascapes like science-fiction idols looming up on the sun-lit horizon. With their burnished geometrical facets theforms are symbols of Modernism and utopian aspirations.

The Romantic appearance of these images is deceptivebecause their currency is the language of clich, a set ofmeanings which are understood to be already obsolete.They are ironic commentaries on transcendental projections,a deflation of Modernisms immodest pretensions. Sciencefiction is the flipside of nostalgia, and both are vulnerableto sentimentality and the imputation of naivety. Maljkovic,however, never renounces his cool. Holding himself alooffrom the fervent visionary commitment of the AvantGarde, he can appear cynical, translating historically rootedidealism into a temporally undifferentiated retro sublime,drawing on the energy of his sources, while never fully

committing himself in return.It should be said in mitigation that there is a sense inwhich the artist working between these extremes is in a no-win situation, either dallying with belief from a comfort-ably urbane distance, or else relinquishing critical authoritytoo easily. If, in line with Wrights statements, the any-thing goes of pluralism has become hard to distinguishfrom the laissez-faire of capitalism, the subversive gesturemay lie in separating the art object from its glib ability tobe all things to all people; to force politically correct, mar-ket-friendly relativism to take a position. RichardHawkinss series of Celestial Telegraph Paintings, 2008,humorously enacts this unmooring from agnoticism.Developed around a series of Native American spiritualistanecdotes, the paintings are conceived as telegraphicdevices capable of picking up messages from the spiritworld. The feathers attached to the corners of the canvasesare would-be aerials, dyed in fluorescent colours as thoughelectrified by the signals they are receiving. Hawkins gentlyempathises with esoteric Native American spiritualist prac-tices. By vicariously enacting those beliefs, rather thanreporting on them with the condescension of a civilisedbystander, he risks appearing ridiculous. A sweepingequivalence is drawn between the transformative power ofmetaphor in art and the alchemical claims of spiritualism.

Bad Medicine, 2008, inlays a square panel of thick,swirling, brightly coloured oil paint in a rectangle of checktowelling material also roughly smeared with paint. A

disconnected lead. The painting might be a magic carpetwhich has travelled through abrasive atmospheres to deliv-er its fragile message. Its stubbly, overworked materiality isessential to the metaphor of its being released to mystery.

Hawkins makes a camp performance of investing basicmaterials with metaphysical meaning. He sets up themetaphor with the deadpan delivery of a comedian confi-dent that his joke will take. For Barnett Newman, a zipwas both more than a stripe and more than a metaphor: itwas a dividing, divining line magically activating space, anembodiment of human singularity or isolation or dignity.

For Stella it had become no more or less than a band ofpigment of a certain width. Chronology undid the alchemi-cal process. Isa Genzkens recent installation in Berlin,entitled Wind, 2009, was preoccupied with this process oftransfiguration. The minimilism of her early concretesculptures has been transformed, in the course of hercareer, into elegaic monuments to mortality, seculartotems. A row of towers were set up along the length of thegallery as sculptural elegies to the recently deceasedMichael Jackson. The towers were decorated with mirror-ing CDs, and draped with cheap transparent fabrics andlayers of semi-transparent acetate. On the gallery walls,

images of a dancing Jackson and Michelangelos Davidsculpture faced each other in a series of collages. Pho-tographs of cats glued to the sides of the towers resembledeffigies of ancient Egyptian queens. Jacksons post-surgeryfeatures were also feline, his eyes ecstatically half-hooded,his figure frozen in mid-moon dance, that nose like noth-ing from nature. The installation was a symbolic apotheo-sis of pop trash, with Jackson transfigured as an immortalking. The flickering surface of Genzkens collages sprayed with silver and gold paint, and layered by segment-ed metallic sheets is the equivalent of Wrights gold leaf.A classical minimalistic ground is overwritten by the energyof her process, partly destroyed, partly decorated. Thecommitment she brings to these gestures aims to justifythe temerity of a narrative which presents Jackson as morethan just another piece of postmodern media fluff and afew sheets of Ikea chipboard as monuments to humantransience. Classical motifs the monolithic tower, themonumental figurative sculpture are brought into con-junction with contemporary ephemera, as though a starcould be transformed into a god by the sheer insinuationof sculptural process.

Genzken and Hawkins resist framing their spiritualnarratives as dispassionate rhetoric or objective commen-tary. They always leave themselves open to the possibility

of wholly identifying with the beliefs they are representing,the object of the belief becoming synonymous with thearts resolution. The tone of Cyprien Gaillards 16mm film

> FEATURES 02

>> Rather than a wholehearted affirmationof superstition or transcendental value,it is more a matter of defying the conventionthat relativism has become.

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between these mutual states of critique and assent (seeProfileAM328). Set in the Mexican coastal resort of Can-cn, it envisages capitalisms distortions and betrayals oftradition as a catastrophic spectacle. The film launchesitself beyond objective parameters by presenting itsreportage in the apocalyptic language of supernatural oroccult imagery. Cancn was only established in the late1960s as a magnet for tourism, but it stands on the site ofancient Mayan ruins. We watch a gang of US teenagers

alight from a tour bus and begin downing bottles of liquorin a single draught: they might be the degraded ghosts ofthe Spanish conquistadors who colonised Mexico in the16th century. Apart from an occasional manipulation offilm speed, the images are presented as straight footage,although they resemble special-effects kitsch and dystopianscience fiction. An office blocks mirrored faade tremblesrepeatedly before collapsing into dust. Decorative vegeta-tion creeps between floors as though about to overwhelmthe modernistic atrium of a luxury hotel which is styled,architecturally, to resemble the sloping sides of Mayanstepped pyramids. A nightclub ceiling traversed by spot-lights looms menacingly like the descending spaceship inSpielbergs Close Encounters of the Third Kind.

Geographical Analogies, 2006-09, groups GaillardsPolaroids of landscapes and cityscapes in vitrines, eachcontaining nine pictures arranged in a diamond-shapedgrid. Although they are set at a 45-degree angle, all thePolaroids were taken, perversely, with the camera at a diag-onal, so the images are level despite each pictures tilt.Combinations tease out visual similes between locationsacross the globe. The concrete grid of a dilapidated 1960shousing faade is shown to mimic the stonework of aGothic cathedral window. A park monuments silhouetteresembles the stalactites of a waterfall, photographically

frozen. The verticals of urban obelisks are balanced byrural standing stones. Gaillard sees signs and elicits far-fetched connections; his analogies transcend historical and

lurking under the surface of the everyday. In the eccentrici-ties of layout and framing, modernist conventions havebeen imposed on the photographic material like a set ofarbitrary occult parameters. The taxonomical approach hasa portentous, paranoid edge to it. Placing an unnecessarytilt on the standard square format of the Polaroid, the dia-mond is both a paradigm of formalist art and an esotericwindow onto the world. It is as though Modernism is thedefault frame through which supernatural content

requires to be viewed.If Gaillards occultism is a detached manipulation of pre-existing signs, in a strictly postmodern vein, it also repre-sents a desire for what cannot be explained by the deliberatearchival structuring which projects it, a content which hasnot already been articulated and which would elude analysis.What that might amount to remains an intimation, like thehorror film which is only frightening as long as the monsterremains unseen. It is ironic that neoconservative critics ofthe 1970s saw a revival of religion as a possible solution tomodernitys fragmentation of societys stable values, whereashere we have Modernism itself viewed as a repository oftranscendental meaning. The direct reversal brings us backto Stellas predictions of a return to what he had been instru-mental in breaking away from. We can also speculate on theconnections between a striving to reinstitute categoricalvalue and the international resurgence of fundamentalistreligion. The comparison makes it clear that these chal-lenges to the relativistic orthodoxy may unironically flirt withthe gestures of faith, but they issue from a secular vantage.The leap from the terra firma of relativism to a positionwhich spurns those critical qualifications is dramatised.Rather than a wholehearted affirmation of superstition ortranscendental value, it is more a matter of defying the con- vention that relativism has become, a defiance that recalls

the adversarial spirit of Modernism at which it looks backwith yearning, but always ambivalently.

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Cyprien GaillardCities of Gold & Mirrors2009 film still

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