Modern art has lost its way: it is produced and consumed by a tiny minority with decreasing social and political impact. The following article by Peter Fuller, based on a speech he gave to a conference of the Institute of Contemporary Arts in 1978, takes up the crisis in art. Although three years old the article has fully retained its relevance.
In 1963 Robyn Denny, among others, signed a letter to The Sunday Times attacking amateur artists. It began: 'a professional painter is one whose profession is painting'. Fifteen years later, even that is questionable. Of course, the apparatus of a profession — including professors, Royal Colleges, institutes, academies, journals, and above all a nation-wide network of training schools — persists, What then is missing?
Before we can answer this, we must go back into history. The category of the professional artist, as distinct from the master craftsman, is relatively new, It did not become clear in Europe until the 17th century, or in some places until much later. This distinction may not be absolutely clear in each specific instance: but it is of very great importance. John Berger has written: 'The craftsman survives so long as the standards for judging his work are shared by different classes, The professional appears when it is necessary for the craftsman to leave his class and "emigrate" to the ruling class, whose standards of judgement are different.
Professional artists have related to the class that ruled, or aspired to rule, in many complicated ways which have varied from society to society, and from artist to artist within the same society. One thing has remained constant. Until our own time, the professional has become a professional through his specialised training, through which he acquired the skilful use of a particular set of pictorial (or sculptural) conventions: conventions of composition, drawing, perspective, anatomy, pose, symbolism, and so on. These conventions corresponded closely to the social experience, the literal point of view, of the class which the professional was serving. The transition from the shallow, pictorial space of high feudalism to vanishing point perspective, which was perfected in the bourgeois era, was not just a development inherent to art, As the ruling ideas of an era are the ideas of its ruling class, so that class's way of seeing and representing the world determines the dominant character of the era's visual tradition. But professional conventions were never taught as historically transient modes: instead, they were held up to be the only way of recording universal, Eternal Truth,
But John Berger has remarked that to those classes which did not rule, such professional painting appeared to be 'so remote from their own experience that they saw it as a mere social convention, an accoutrement of the class that ruled over them: which is why, in moments of revolt, painting and sculpture were often destroyed,'
In Britain an indigenous, professional, Fine Art tradition did not emerge until very late by European standards. The reasons for this are complex. They lie partly in the puritanical aspect of the British Reformation, but more significantly in the character of the English Revolution of the 17th century. This completed the precocious destruction of feudalism in England. The great land-owners were free to annihilate the peasantry through enclosure, and to establish capitalism throughout rural England long before it grew up in the towns. In the late 17th and early 18th centuries these agrarian capitalists comprised a ruling class the like of which arose nowhere else in Europe. They 'patronised' artists directly, and the art of the time is bound up with their world view, depicting the land, live-stock and country houses. Many preferred, as had the Stuart kings before them, to import foreign painters who had been apprenticed in European studios.
The modern professional tradition did not emerge until the mid-18th century, when this class lost its exclusive hegemony. An open market in pictures was then established, providing apparent 'professional independence' from specific patrons; a training school opened offering an alternative to the old master-pupil system. Artists' professional organisations sprang up. The Royal Academy, founded in 1768, quickly acquired a monopoly over both the market (through its annual selling exhibitions) and education (through its schools). Thus it dominated the profession as a whole until the late 19th century. The Royal Academy was more than an artists' salon: it provides the clue to the true secret of 'the Englishness of English art'.
The new 'modern', professional Fine Art tradition had been thrown up by the upsurge of a mercantile and emergent industrial bourgeoisie: and yet within it no new way of seeing the social or material worlds developed. Far from trumpeting the industrial revolution which the bourgeoisie was effecting, artists referred to it, if at all, obliquely through apocalyptic art. Landscape, and the genres associated with the old agrarian interests thrived, and even reached unprecedented levels of development. Why?
The class which entered upon the titanic enterprise of the industrial revolution in Britain did not have to overthrow an Ancien Regime. The prior, land-owning class was already capitalist. British bourgeois intellectuals thus failed to produce a new global vision of the world; British painters developed no new way of seeing or depicting it, appropriate to a historically triumphant middle-class, Instead artists clung as long as they could to the old agrarian genres, which appealed to the landowners and industrialists alike,
Of course, there were tensions between the old agrarian capitalists and the new middle-classes, tensions which I believe distantly subtend the great efflorescence of empirical landscape painting in the early 19th century. But, by the middle of the 19th century, the two classes had fused into a single hegemonic bloc, peppered with all sorts of anachronistic, political, social and cultural excrescences — like a monarchy, a House of Lords, and a Royal Academy — which were the inheritance of a peculiar history, It was this bizarre, even if globally and perhaps historically successful, class which mid-19th century professional artists served so well. Indeed, their history had been such that the professional painters could not challenge it. They depicted the world from the ruling classes' point of view without so much as straining the professional conventions in which they had been trained. (This accounts for the peculiarly surrealist quality of Victorian painting when seen today.)
In England, there could be no radical, bourgeois art. 1848 in Europe formed Daumier, Millet and Courbet, who forced academic conventions to the utmost to make them speak of the experience of peasants and workers, of which they had not been designed to speak. Theirs were glorious failures. 1848 in England produced only the whimpering, retrospective fart of Preraphaelitism. Without even having to think about it, mid-19th century English professionals knew what they had to produce, how they had to produce it, and for whom. Criticism was straightforward. Has this painter acquired sufficient technical skills? Has he applied them to an appropriate subject, from an appropriate ideological point of view? Yes, and he was a good artist: no, and he was bad.
Let us desert these Victorian painters at the high point of professionalism, and return to our opening question. What is missing from contemporary professional practice? A recent sociological study reported: 'Half the tutors and approaching two-thirds of the students of certain art colleges agreed with the proposition that art cannot be taught.' Understandably, the authors then asked: 'In what sense then are the tutors tutors, the students students, and the colleges colleges? What if any definitionally valid educational processes take place on pre-diploma and diploma courses?' Smart questions. The authors reported that nearly all tutors 'rejected former academic criteria and modalities in art', but none had any other conventions to take their place.
When Andrew Forge tried to define painting for his British Painting 1974 exhibition, he came up with 'coloured flat surfaces'. This definition is so general that it could include as paintings, a table-cloth, a field, bathroom mats, linoleum, a lawn, tiles and the living-room wall. Even so, it leaves out much modern painting, which is not flat, more which is not coloured, and a fair amount which is neither coloured nor flat. I'm not blaming Forge. A better definition is not possible. Because there are no longer any clients for whom the Fine Artists' professional skills are necessary, there is no agreed set of pictorial skills and conventions which the student artist can acquire to carry out a definite social function. We have the skeletal apparatus of a profession, but not the profession itself. We have entered the epilogue of a way of making visual images which characterised some societies for about three centuries, but which is now being swept away by history.
Some people have tried to correlate the decadence of the Fine Art traditions with 'the crisis of capitalism'. Douglas Cooper has accused the Tate — over bricks and blankets — of wasting public money on 'the freaks and follies which are being passed off as creative art during the last decades of the capitalist era.' It would be nice if he was right. But, even if the archaic structures of the existing British state are teetering, monopoly capitalism has good reason to feel, if not complacent, then reasonably confident about its survival in the immediate future. These commentators are simply failing to consider the visual tradition as a whole.
If we wanted to estimate the strength of any European, early feudal society, we would be very foolish to do so, say, through its free-standing easel paintings in oils alone, We would not find any; yet the chances would be that both the visual tradition, and the society which contained it, were strong: its art would have been expressed through manuscript illumination, stained glass windows, wall-paintings and tapestries.
It is just as absurd to assess capitalist society, today, through its Fine Art traditions of paintings and sculpture alone. We are surrounded by more visual images than appeared in any previous society in history; they comprise a torrential mega-visual tradition (of which the Fine Art traditions constitute only the tiniest component) of TV, cinema, newsphotography, colour supplements, reproductions of all kinds, but, more especially, the giant bill-boards and road posters of commercial advertising. This great stream belches down upon us everywhere we go, every minute of every day,
Sadly, this voluminous mega-visual tradition attests to the unnerving health of international monopoly capitalism. This mega-visual tradition has also given rise to new professionals, just as slavish and unquestioning in the service of the monopolists as their predecessors, the 19th century painters, were in the service of their ruling class. William Frith made a painting of Derby Day in 1858, the culmination of 15 months incessant labour. He employed a whole team to produce it including around 100 models, a photographer who took pictures on the race-course for him, and J Herring, a specialist, who painted in the horses. So many people thronged the picture when it was first shown that a special rail was put round it. Frith then issued a popular print which sold in tens of thousands.
That makes us smile because a modernist painter like Hoyland dashes off a new work and gives it the name of the date on which it was painted, because it is about nothing, except painting itself, and sells it overseas before it has been seen by anyone in England. A reproduction of it would be lucky to sell 20 copies here. But the techniques used to make the Frith painting have not disappeared: advertising images are produced with the same infinite care, marshalling of resources and personnel, and with the same intention of mass reproduction. Indeed, so close are they that the Frith painting has been used — without alteration — as a bill-board for the Sunday Times, Of course, advertising posters present a different point of view (that of the monopolists) and serve a different social function (they offer promises rather than mirrors). But they, rather than modernist painting, are in the direct line of development from 19th century professionalism.
Indeed, it is within the mega-visual tradition that all the visual advances are being made. At the Royal Academy today they are queueing not for Motherwell, not for Courbet, not even for Leonardo — but for the hologram exhibition. And in one sense, they are right: as fully three-dimensional images holograms undoubtedly constitute the biggest advance in the representation of the visible world since photography. And yet even at this stage, holograms are sponsored by Guinness: their future can easily be discerned in their present appearances. They are, if you like, the 'moments of becoming' of yet another great leap forward by the spectacular entertainers, popular pornographers, and, above all, advertisers. One thing is certain: in ten years time, fifty-foot, three-dimensional images of Guinness bottles, detergent boxes, and cigarette packs will hang in the sky all the way down the Thames.
You may not relish this thought: it drives me to despair. But suppose that you were looking back on these times from the future. Who would you take as being more representative of the visual tradition as a whole, and of the kind of society from which it springs: the professionals of the residual Fine Art traditions, with their piles of bricks, 'pure' colour formalist paintings, folded blankets, and grey monochromes, including if you like, their board-room portraits, and wild life pictures; or the spectacularly versatile new professionals of the mega-visual tradition, who have unleashed into the night sky enormous three-dimensional images of consumer goods? In the 19th century, the Fine Art professionals were the exclusive producers of the visual tradition. Today, their total output constitutes nothing but a culturally marginal and contingent moment within it. The future seems to lie with the mega-visual professionals, Fine Artists play with their pasts.
The only mystery is, why do we have even an apparatus of a profession? Why have Fine Artists survived, at all? The answer is largely political, The modern welfare state was erected immediately after the last war. John Maynard Keynes had advocated increased intervention by the state in the economy to ameliorate some of the most 'unacceptable' effects of capitalism, especially periodic deep recession, and unemployment. Keynes also described the mechanisms through which this could be effected. In the short-term, Keynesianism as applied by politicians seemed to work: by the late 1950s the ruling class was euphoric about full employment, indefinitely rising material standards of living, and an eternal, well-regulated, future for capitalism. Today, of course, Keynesianism is in ruins. The Arts Council, established in 1945, was one of the first components of the welfare state. Its architect, and first chairperson, was Keynes himself. Married to a ballerina, a Bloomsbury habitué, he had spoken of the prostitution of the arts for financial gain as 'one of the worser crimes of present-day capitalism.' In the welfare state, all that was going to change.
In 1948 Keynes wrote: 'The purpose of the Arts Council... is to create an environment, to breed a spirit, to cultivate an opinion, to offer a stimulus to such purpose that the artist and the public can each sustain and live on each other in that union which has occasionally existed in the past at the great ages of a communal civilized life,' But the Arts Council was also to differ from any previous patron, state or otherwise, It would not commission, or offer any direction whatever, Keynes said he thought that everyone knew that the work of the artist was by its very nature 'individual and free, undisciplined, unregimented, uncontrolled'
He claimed: 'The artist walks where his spirit leads him. He cannot be told his direction; he does not know it himself.' But he expected new work to 'spring up more abundantly in unexpected quarters and in unforseen shapes when there is a universal opportunity for contact with traditional and contemporary arts in their noblest form.' The Arts Council was, for the visual arts, only the tip of an iceberg of state patronage of this 'hands off' kind, patronage which included museums, later regional arts associations, and above all, the enormous, expanding art education system.
There is no doubt whatever that the thinking behind this experiment was political. Robyn Denny has elsewhere described the CIA involvement in the early Abstract Expressionist movement, Similarly the initiation of a golden age of 'individual and free' artists, sponsored but not directed by the state, was intended to cock a God Almighty snook at the miserable Socialist Realist system in the USSR. As Gombrich put it speaking of Socialist Realism: 'This attempt to control the arts from above has made us all aware of the real blessings we owe to our freedom.' But the arts policy of the welfare state back-fired on those who devised it. The real comparison was between Socialist Realism, and advertising in the West — between the roles of their respective, culturally central visual professionals. And of course those roles were not so very different, Sure, the Socialist Realists were ruthlessly 'controlled from above': but so were all our artists working for the great monopolies, and their agencies. Which is the bigger lie, to paint the joys of an oppressed Soviet proletariat? Or to make an image to be seen by countless millions suggesting that drinking Coke rather than Pepsi contributes to world peace? There is little to choose.
Meanwhile, our Fine Art professionals find that they have been given every freedom except the only one that matters, the freedom to act socially. Levi-Strauss once called non-representational painting: 'A school of academic painting in which each artist strives to represent the manner in which he would execute his pictures if by chance he were to paint any,' Is it surprising that this has been the dominant form of our so called 'individual and free' artists in Britain and America?
What is to be done? For me, the position is clear. These curious, quirkish anachronisms, the Fine Art traditions of painting and sculpture and the whole professional apparatus which attaches to them, are now vulnerable because their political usefulness has expired. They are becoming an embarrassment to that class which once had such high hopes of them, They must be defended, and preserved, at all costs. Why? Because only here it seems to me is there even the remotest hope of visual truthfulness and imaginative creativity emerging again. It will not come from the Socialist Realist system, or from the modern advertisers. But, in order for this to happen within the professional Fine Art traditions, artists, supported by critics, must begin to demand the right to act socially again. That is why the recent efflorescence of mural painting the length and breadth of Britain seems to me so important. Not so much for anything which has yet been achieved, as for the potentialities — unprecedented in the last 20 years — which it is opening up.
But to individual professional Fine Artists, I would say this; in the past, there were two ways of making great paintings. Those who took the first route sought the fullest expression of the possibilities inherent in existing bourgeois pictorial conventions, Vermeer's, and Van Dyck's sumptuous work was achieved in this way. But even more challenging was the course followed by those who sought to develop or strain those conventions in such a way that they spoke of experiences of the visible world, and of social life, which had hitherto been excluded from painting because they were opposed to the point of view its conventions had been designed to express. This was the route taken by Goya, Courbet, Millet, Daumier, Gericault, Hals and Van Gogh. Both alternatives relied on a vigorous, culturally central, Fine Art tradition. Because capitalism has finally destroyed the traditions of Fine Art which it created, or inherited, neither of these alternatives is now possible.
But this is not to advocate despair. If you are a socialist, you do not believe that you have to choose between Stalinism, on the one hand, and Monopoly Capitalism on the other. You are prepared to work, through history, for a third alternative, that of genuine socialism. Few now believe that this will be magically created through inexorable, inevitable historical processes alone. Yet genuine socialism is a possible future. Holograms clearly show us what our highly probable future in the immediate short-term under Monopoly Capitalism will be like.
If you wish to create significant work today, I believe that you have to create a visual moment of becoming, which speaks of those unrealised human potentialities which will be realised in the possible future of socialism, Your visual equivalent of that future will keep alive a flicker of hope for it in a seemingly hopeless present. 'But', I am always asked, 'what does a moment of becoming look like?' It is not a question of style; it has nothing to do with overt political content. It is hard to be exact, because such work has not yet been realised visually, though plenty of artists seem to me, despite inevitable contradictions — we are all in unknown territory — to be pushing forwards in this direction.
When I have been able to recognise this, I have acclaimed them and will continue to do so. But I am not a Stalinist. I refuse to prescribe. What I can do is to urge artists to avoid the waste-land of imitating 19th century academicism; to reject the Socialist Realist solution, once again being pushed so hard by Stalinist elements; to turn away from arid formalism, and post-modernist antics alike, and to dare to take their standards from this possible future. Historically, you are in a unique position. Seize the time!