DaviDattwooD:Don'tleavestonesunturneD

This document was produced for an exhibition at Moana Project Space in July 2016.

1F 618 Hay Street Perthwww.moana-ari.com

© Moana Project SpaceDesigned by DB

Cover:David Attwood Don’t leave stones unturned (detail) 2016

8 July - 30 July 2016

DaviD attwooD is an artist interesteD in the transformative

potential of irreverence anD iconoclasm.

in this exhibition, attwooD presents artworks in the form of reaDymaDes to consiDer the meanings anD mechanisms of

cultural compenDium. relative to this terrain the

reaDymaDe might be thought of as a stone; an obJect founD, useD for

construction or for ornament - kept, skimmeD or thrown.

Department of Culture and the Arts

This project has been funded by the Western Australian Government through the Department of Culture and the

Arts.

is get carter contemporary art?Historical trends in the development of mechanical and digital reproduction have aggravated an epistemological weakness in art. The lack of a definition of art agreed upon by its practitioners and theorists, or even an agreed-upon pathway to realizing such a definition, makes any discussion of its application to subjects beyond the reach of its apparent borders difficult. A case in point is the traditional division between fine art and popular culture – ‘high’ and ‘low’ art – a distinction which feels, at some level, outmoded, but nonetheless accurately describes a division between two distinct fields of creative production. Put simply, any attempt to claim that a product of popular culture is also a work of art, within a context of art appreciation or criticism, faces two significant roadblocks: the institutional1 conditions of the work’s production and reception; and the evaluative distinction that lies behind the ‘high’/’low’ divide.2 The latter imposes an implicit hierarchical criteria upon the candidate for appreciation as art, and the exigencies of the former lend rhetorical support to critics of the process of candidature. In effect, this serves to maintain and further complicate a pre-existing artificial divide between similar creative work produced within, for instance, the context of commercial television, and work made within the contemporary art world. This divide is then replicated in the way work produced in each field is popularly and critically received, reinforcing the division without even raising it for discussion.3

In response to the situation as described, and to lay the foundation for an approach to the problems the continued existence of this divide perpetuates, I have included some basic assumptions concerning its nature which I believe generally hold true:

• There is no innate quality specific to a medium which determines whether or not its finished object qualifies as art.

• Any definition of art which excludes most of the media produced by popular culture is incoherent.

• Evaluative conditions may exist within fields of art production, but to reduce the status of art to an evaluative criteria, as a privileged category, is to give doctrinal authority to the institutions which regulate the production and reception of art.

I believe the first assumption holds true for as long as we take art to be a product of human activity, and not simply a category of objects found in nature. The second assumption follows from the first – unless we also assume that a large audience automatically makes an art object non-art (which would delegitimize most of the historical art canon). The third I believe to be true as a matter of practice: if evaluative regimes4 are given the authority to define art and its boundaries, then it follows that the institutional forces which provide their foundations will also be allotted the same power. This is not ideal for art or for artists.

In the history of Western art, there have been repeated attempts to deny art institutions (academies, critical orthodoxies, the state, etc.) epistemological authority, and to expand the range of acceptable expression that qualifies as art.5 In lieu of reciting a list of examples, I would rather draw attention to the fact that equally prominent attempts have been made in the field of popular culture6 since its early development, and such attempts, in fact, occur whenever an individual attempts to create art within the context of a popular cultural institution. Some attempts, such as Alfred Stieglitz’s efforts to bring about acceptance of photography as an art form, have successfully enlarged the field of art production, while many other attempts to mend the high/low divide have failed and, in so doing, run up against the obstacles I mentioned earlier. To illustrate how these challenges are faced, and the negative effects they have on creative production generally, I will consider the context of the ‘conferral of candidacy for appreciation’ of a film that attained canonical status within its field after a sustained period of insignificance following its release.

Evaluative regimes regulate the process of candidature for works of popular culture without necessarily bringing them into the institutional realm of high art, posing obstacles to their broader acceptance as art similar to those created by the high/low divide itself. Take the 1971 British crime film Get Carter, which today is regarded highly in its field (British film) as an example of cinema as an art form, and is critically received as existing within a broader artistic tradition of its time. The film is a violent portrait of a career criminal returning from London to Newcastle to investigate the suspicious death of his brother, and can be understood as the culmination of a series of violent British crime dramas following the popularity and development of social realism in British cinema following the Second World War.7 Upon its release, Get Carter was poorly received in the United Kingdom due to how it appeared to depict an immoral protagonist without implied moral judgement, and its sales, particularly in the United States, suffered from poor marketing. It quickly fell into obscurity, and only gradually developed a cult following more than a decade after its release, which picked up upon its home video release in the earlier nineties. Its audience increased further when Michael Caine’s protagonist Carter was re-appropriated as an icon of masculinity by British men’s magazines such as GQ and Loaded, increasing its critical exposure and leading ultimately to a cinematic re-release, its critical re-evaluation and its current vaunted status.8

The tenuous climb of Carter to a position of artistic recognition within its field demonstrates how inadequate the opportunities for recognition and reception as art available to film are, as well as those for other creative works produced within popular culture. The creative window provided for its production by MGM, which sought to increase its diminishing European market share, was counterbalanced by the limited scope for its reception, amidst a critical culture constrained by the conservative values thought appropriate for the medium, and further held back by the limitations imposed by its unreliable network of distribution and sale. Additionally, it faced a similar barrier to broader acceptance as art by a pre-existing genre-based prejudice

David Attwood Steps 2016Book and magazine, 22.5 x 30 x 3cm

David Attwood Steps 2016Book and magazine, 22.5 x 30 x 3cm

1. ‘Institutions’ refer to associations of individuals, things and processes. The institutional approach to the distinction between high and low art takes into account the conditions under which an item of, for instance, popular culture is produced, distributed and received, and how they differ from the equivalent conditions of a work of contemporary art’s production, distribution and reception. A TV show is produced, typically, by a team of people, for a large audience. Though not exclusively, contemporary art, I believe, is generally addressed to an audience of existing contemporary art aficionados.

2. This divide itself is a broad generalisation that encompasses and overlaps with several similar but differing binaries. For the purposes of this text I use it to distinguish between different forms (mediums) of cultural production, and the contexts they are produced and received in – between what may be thought to fall within the field of contemporary art and its antecedents, and what may be considered to be part of popular culture.

3. To suggest that this is the primary point being made in Attwood’s exhibition ‘Don’t leave stones unturned’ would be an oversimplification – it is only one of a much greater nexus of questions being raised with regard to the contemporary art/popular culture dichotomy.

4. By ‘evaluative regimes’ I am referring to John Frow’s notion of ‘regimes of value’, which he defines as ‘…the set of institutional and semiotic conditions that permit the construction and regulation of value equivalence and evaluative regulations for particular ends…’

5. Early modernist abstraction typically approached the problem by instead re-focusing attention on the process of art production, while various traditions of realism have tended instead to expand the field of acceptable representation.

6. In this instance, I am using the term ‘popular culture’ to refer to what is commonly described as mass culture in art theory, and which generally describes media that is easily reproducible and thereby accessible to a large audience. In practice, the term is usually narrowed to the entertainment products of broadcast media: radio, television and film; and it can also be extended to popular music and more contemporary forms of digital entertainment, such as video games and internet productions.

7. It grew out of the ‘Angry Young Men’ cycle of social realist dramas of the fifties and sixties, which brought critical prestige to film and literature focused on working-class subjects.

8. Exemplified by the spot it regularly occupies near the top of lists of ‘Best British Films’ released by arbiters of institutional authority (such as the BFI).

9. The growing concentration of film companies into megacorporations, and the triumph of blockbuster-oriented filmmaking over smaller independent productions has narrowed the field considerably.

within the film industry and film criticism. As a crime film (made before The Godfather and the critical success of The French Connection), it was not held in the same esteem as genres historically given critical treatment as art (such as biographic dramas, war dramas, or epics), and the institutional weight behind this evaluative regime worked against it. And while developments in distributive technologies lent new opportunities for its candidature as a work of art, in many respects these developments are mirrored by a multiplicity of growing institutional and creative restrictions in the field of film production which would make it a difficult for a film like Get Carter to be made today.9

In addition to the high/low divide, divisions within each field’s critical orthodoxies and audience communities can only be understood as further obstacles facing any claim to art status for a work of popular culture. If an attempt were made to justify Get Carter as art within the discourse of contemporary art (as opposed to within the art discourse of film), it would involve negotiation with a great number of intransigent, hierarchically-organised evaluative regimes, specifically geared to an institutional context foreign to the film’s medium. The question ‘is this art?’ would imply a completely different approach to its answer if were posed alongside a screening of Get Carter in an ARI than it would were it and the film presented to the editorial board of Screen. The general effect of this variety of independent, distinct critical regimes is to further fragment and stratify artistic production, and to subject it to the whims of institutional forces and equally fragmented epistemological systems. This isn’t to suggest that criticism of these arrangements also implies a criticism of evaluative heterogeneity – different systems and scales of evaluation are necessary when critiquing different fields of art. Neither am I suggesting an unqualified equivalence of value of creative works across evaluative regimes according to their respective prominence. Rather, an equivalence of epistemology – a uniform understanding of art, or an accepted basis for the discussion of such a standard - is the only coherent solution to the obstacles presented.

Dylan Hewson

Dylan Hewson is an artist based in Perth.

David Attwood Stones 2016Book and stack of magazines, Dimensions variable

David Attwood Does ambition force us to compromise our ideals? 2016DVD case, 13.5 x 19cm

David Attwood is an artist based in Perth, Western Australia. In 2016 Attwood was awarded a practice-led PhD (Art) from Curtin University. Recent solo and two person exhibitions include: Inertia (with Clare Peake), Bus Projects, Melbourne (2016); Suburban Similes, Firstdraft, Sydney (2015); Doldrums, Adult Contemporary, Perth (2015); and Green and Gold (with Jurek Wybraniec), Fremantle Arts Centre, Fremantle (2014). Recent group exhibitions include SafARI 2016, Alaska Projects, Sydney (2016); Ken Urban, Contemporary Art Tasmania, Hobart (2015);

and SODA 15, John Curtin Gallery, Perth (2015).

www.davidattwood.net

David Attwood Does ambition force us to compromise our ideals? 2016DVD case, 13.5 x 19cm