ART OF THE SPECTACLE: A Memoir in Two Parts (Part 2)
Painters have been working under the gaze of live audiences since time began—perched upon scaffolds in lofty chapels, interacting with model or sitters for portraits, or adding a finishing touch to their latest creation on varnishing-day. During the medieval period, aspiring painters were apprenticed to professional artists, from whom they learned every aspect of what was then a trade; from sweeping the atelier floor, to working on their masters’ pictures. Admission to the guild required young artists to produce a singular work of art, or masterpiece that demonstrated their professional command of form, style, and technique. Academies formed during the Renaissance required students to produce diploma pictures that demonstrated these skills. Technical virtuosity gave way in the 20th-century to the self-expressive individualism of Action Painting, and Performance Art, which of course changed the way art students were taught.
The first collegiate art program in the United States was established at Yale University in 1869. Its first dean was John Ferguson Weir, whose father was at the time head of the drawing program at West Point; where it was believed that cadets who mastered the fine art of drawing would be keener observers, serving as officers in the field. Similar programs at military engineering academies, such as Woolwich and Mézières, provided the paradigms for the U.S. Military Academy’s rigorous drawing curriculum. They also provided the rationale for shoehorning a fine arts program into an institution that had been founded to train Congregationalist ministers in theology and ancient languages. The first Master of Fine Arts degree in America was awarded by the University of Iowa in 1940. MFA programs proliferated in postwar America, due in large part to the increased accessibility of higher education under the GI Bill of Rights. It later became a way for young men to extend their draft deferments during the Vietnam War.
Just as medieval masterpieces had been eclipsed by Renaissance diploma-pictures, academy salons were by replaced MFA thesis exhibitions, for which bodies of work had been created to make a statement. It became de rigeur for student exhibitors to compose blustering manifestos; grammatical logjams, seasoned with arcane jargon, that made Finnegan’s Wake read like Alice in Wonderland. To quote Robert Louis Stevenson,
“If my work speaks for itself, why should I interrupt?”
The art that was on the wall had been conditioned by countless tutorials with faculty members and visiting critics. When Fairfield Porter politely asked me why I was wasting my time in an MFA program, I had to explain to him that those of us who were not born to wealth had to earn a living. A terminal degree might lead to a faculty appointment at a college or university, where one’s work-schedule included time in the studio. I’ll always wonder what might have been, had I taken his advice.
Our mentors decried preciousness, advocated risk-taking, and admonished us to pursue a personal vision. Terms like slick, or facile bore pejorative connotations. Displays of technical virtuosity were scorned as grandstanding, despite the popular acclaim heaped on celebrities like Salvador DalÍ and Lee Liberace. Like the amateur paintings of Chinese literati, a degree of naivete signaled the presence of both intellect and sincerity. Many years later it dawned on me that earning a coveted degree in painting had as much to do with developing performative skills, as did one’s studio practice. If an exhibition exists to make a statement, it stands to reason that individual artworks are little more than supporting players. There’s nothing precious about regarding paintings, drawings, prints, and sculptures as just delivery-systems for aesthetic experiences.
Solo shows began with the shift from a commission-based economy, to a speculative model in which artists commissioned themselves to produce bodies of work for unknown buyers.
The art gallery as such did not exist prior to the 19th century. Its emergence as a business-model for selling art in a primary market coincided with the rise of international expositions—such as London’s Crystal Palace in 1854, and theatrical presentations by showman-artists such as George Catlin, whose Indian Gallery toured Europe and the United States in the 1830s and ‘40s. For a modest fee, Charles Willson Peale and his sons would usher visitors into a bedroom on Arch Street in Philadelphia, to view Adolph Ulrich Wertmuller’s 1787 Danae Receiving Jupiter in a Shower of Gold.
Frederic Edwin Church toured monumental show-pieces such as Heart of the Andes in America and abroad to pay-per-view audiences. Gustave Courbet’s monumental painting, The Painter’s Studio: A real allegory summing up seven years of my artistic and moral life, completed in 1855, embodies the Bohemian beau-ideal of the artist as a defiant, egocentric, solitary genius that arose from the revolutionary fervor of the 1830s and ‘40s. the artist portrays himself as a roughneck Napoleon, admired both by rustic proles, and cultural elites of the Parisian demimonde.
The headliners of Emile di Antonio’s 1972 documentary Painters Painting were the artists. They were the stars. Their works were the set-dressing. Poised in a director’s chair, Robert Motherwell sits in front of his artworks; like a big-game hunter with freshly-slain gazelles. Eleven years later, PBS launched The Joy of Painting starring Bob Ross; an update of John Gnagy’s live on-air demos that first broadcast in 1946—just when a skinny kid from the Iron City was completing his freshman year at Carnegie-Mellon Institute. Andy Warhol went on to produce and art-direct, paintings, prints, films, and music. The underground King of Pop was instantly recognizable by his black turtleneck sweater, fright wig, and Polaroid Swinger camera. Artists who think they’re not in showbiz must be living under a rock.
Most of my classmates at Yale came from middle-class backgrounds, which meant that while we tried to develop artistic careers, we would have to support ourselves by other means. Following our professors’ game-plans, many of us pursued academic jobs, for which competition was fierce. Bernie Chaet called a series of meetings in the fall of our second year, to explain how to research job opportunities, and then how to apply. He showed us how to create a curriculum vitae, craft a cover-letter, shoot and label slides of our work, round up references, and conduct ourselves at interviews. According to Bernie, a candidate that can get the interviewer to do most of the talking will be remembered as a brilliant conversationalist.
Our baptism of fire came at the College Art Association annual meeting in mid-February. Frigid winds battered Chicago’s Conrad Hilton Hotel. Its lobbies and corridors swarmed with MFA students from around the country. We were easy to spot; conference badges pinned to our Sunday best attire, with portfolios tucked under our arms. While it didn’t occur to me at the time, we were all hustling auditions. Working behind the scenes, Bernie, Bill Bailey, and Bob Reed passed us leads and room numbers. Bernie wore his name tag upside-down, as though anyone might be fooled by this ruse. Rushing to an interview, I shared an elevator with a couple of guys from UT Austin. They asked where I was from. When I told them, one turned to the other and said, “If we kill him now, do you think it’ll improve our chances?”
My final performance at Yale was as school marshal at the university commencement exercises in the Old Campus. Over a black cap and gown, I wore a velvet hood of chocolate-brown, lined with the university colors of blue and white. My duties were to march onstage, and collect a hollow tube; symbolic of the diplomas that would be presented to us later. I have no idea why the faculty picked me for this adventure, except for the fact that I was taller than my classmates. School of Art diplomas were distributed in a garden ceremony behind the Yale Art Gallery, where I was further embarrassed by being presented with a massive loving-cup upon which were engraved the names of all previous recipients of the Ely Harwood Schless Award for excellence in painting.
Three years after my graduation from Yale, I found myself at the epicenter of a media circus. A group of figurative painters from Philadelphia had been rounded up for an Art in Public Places show, in the ground-floor lobbies of the Federal Courthouse in Philadelphia. For the back page of the exhibition catalogue, our ad-hocexhibition committee met in my loft at 309 Cherry Street, where photographer James O’Neal shot the group from a tall stepladder. Neal had staged the scene, but the Yale photo was in the back of my mind, as our bohemian ragamuffin posse mugged for the camera, like rockers on an album-cover. Each artwork filled a whole page in the book, but so did our group portrait.
The opening went off without a hitch, but a whisp of pubic hair in a painting by Martha Mayer Erlebacher. One of the judges demanded that it, and all the other nudes in the exhibition be removed from high-traffic areas. as such artworks would shock children and scandalize nuns. Within hours, television news crews arrived at the courthouse. As one of the organizers, I was interviewed for newspaper stories that ran under headlines like “No Nudes is Good Nudes.”
We cherished the notion that our mission in life would be to embody the spirit of individualistic self-expression; producing virtuous works of lofty aesthetic value. In hindsight, there was something else. We had been carefully trained in how to talk the talk, walk the walk, and talk the walk. From our preliminary interviews to our final critiques, we had been shaped into infotainers by our years in graduate school. Half a century ago, reality television did not exist. Neither did the Internet, social media, or booty-twerking TikTok reels. The meteoric ascent of mass media has created a world in which, as Guy Debord predicted, reality and the spectacle have become inseparable. With images comprised of ones and zeroes, three-dimensional printers, and non-fungible tokens, a pencil-scratch on foolscap may as well be Cor-ten steel or marble, as structures for an experience. It’s a collaborative process.
I had another thought. Living in a world of ones and zeroes for more than half a century, we have seen the rise of social media, non-fungible tokens, and artificial intelligence, Perhaps the primary focus of exhibitions has undergone a subtle shift; from privileging virtuous objects, to being discrete social events for which the artworks are set-dressing. Let’s compare a Chelsea exhibition to a Broadway show. A playwright’s message is delivered by actors, dancers, and musicians, in a staged environment. When the curtain falls in the final performance, the players disperse. Props and sets are broken up, repurposed, or cannibalized for the next show.
Perhaps art exhibitions are moving in a similar direction. A conceptual artist preparing for a museum show was reportedly advised by the curator to procure their materials at Home Depot, in order to avoid shipping costs. When it closed, the show had been documented; digital images were uploaded to The Cloud, and the art was reinstalled in a dumpster. Were more visual artists to follow this playbook, they would save many thousands now being spent storing artworks that, in all probability, will never again feel warming glow of gallery track-lights.
Playwright Arthur Miller once commented that he was doubtful that theatergoers were as interested in seeing his plays than watching famous actors play tragic characters he had written—like Joe Keller, Willie Loman, and Eddie Carbone. “The mission of the theater,” according to the Miller, “. . . is to change, to raise the consciousness of people to their human possibilities.” By the same token, the role of all art is to transform the mayhem and terror of human existence into experiences that nurture and uplift us. Today, if works of art speak only for themselves, it’s time to change the subject.
James Lancel McElhinney © 2024
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