Art Critic (New York, USA)
Is the object sacred?
Life is sacred, and its sacredness is confined neither to living things, nor to the diverse objects that for different cultures embody “the sacred.” As the life of the planet itself suffers from human activity, questioning the sacredness of an art object seems irrelevant. And yet art continues, as does human activity.
Traditionally, humans projected their beliefs into the objects and images they created, thus making them sacred. Often this activity was patronized by religious institutions upholding the status quo of what passed for “sacredness.” As rational inquiry unsettled many of our historical beliefs, a new institution, the museum, emerged to pass judgment over the value of objects, upholding the appeal of the sacred through studied discursive and visual rhetoric.
However, objects once treated as sacred have gradually, and with increasing pace, become more secularized. Today’s intensified world of commerce estranges art objects from the sacred, reflecting a transition from religious and national traditions to secular and international exchanges. Despite widespread hype and abuses, often fueled by artists themselves, the art market has further established its independence from the “doctrines” of museum curators and art critics. The 2006 Whitney Biennial’s narcoleptic attempt to find meaning and direction in today’s art and culture yet again came up empty-handed, as have all major international survey shows of the past 20 years. An exception to this was Lisette Lagnado’s 2006 Bienal de São Paulo, though predictably politically-correct in its choice of artists, presented a keen visual quality in artists’ works and in its overall installation, and remained relevant to the political and social affairs of today’s world.
Museums as collecting powerhouses no longer influence the general art market or artists’ careers. If they do, the influence is short-lived. A redundancy of over-designed museums, dotting every street corner, weakens their monolithic authority.
Counter to this, the new secular art world seems to be both in touch with the artist’s mind, and fully independent of its traditional interpreters or “sham shamans.” No single institution, gallery or critic possesses significant influence or power. Yet today a lone artist of the highest rank, Maurizio Cattelan, who often toys with the scale of things, can outmaneuver the loftiest institution.
One day, Cattelan was inspecting a Tibetan sand mandala in my New York loft, and he accidentally kicked its pedestal, realizing a great fear of mine whenever I entertained guests. I asked him, “Please kick it again, but harder, and sign it. We’ll donate the proceeds to Tibet House.” Taken aback, he refused. Cattelan’s greatest work, La Nona Ora (The Ninth Hour) (1999), enacts a similar encounter between human authority (Pope John Paul II, a pedestal, a museum, an object) and nature (a meteorite, a kick, a terrorist’s or artist’s reprisal). His effort to have the last word on every aspect of today’s art discourse is pivotal.
The balance between critical thought’s relentless assault on reverence and the market’s emphasis on commercial value may have diminished the symbolism that once gave objects their power, but it has never diminished the urge to make things. Object-making has always been the sacred act.
To me, the most sacred artistic activity occurs on stage. It springs from artists who strip away the nostalgic, melancholic aspects of the sacred: Bertolt Brecht and his descendants, Samuel Beckett, Jean-Luc Godard, Joseph Beuys, Wooster Group, and Ballett Frankfurt, now the Forsythe Company. Such artists meld Brechtian notions of alienation with textual deconstruction, breaking the hypnotic trance that constitutes the modes of authority, power and control inherent in performance and ritual. They achieve consummate reality.
In art, objects have been essentially declassified in favor of performance itself. In the work of Beuys, Bernd and Hilla Becher and Matthew Barney, objects are the residue of performances. In the case of the Bechers they result from information gathering. For Beuys and Barney they constitute the afterlife of public and private rituals. It is less important that these artists express the sacred in their performances. More significantly, their performances diminish the sacredness of art. Indeed, Beuys’ early objects and Fluxus multiples suggest it is everyday objects and their use that are sacred.
Art continues to mutate into disciplines beyond the confines of the visual. The field of pure sound leads art into new trajectories. We already celebrate contemporary virtuosos of ambient sound: Brian Eno (ambient electronic), Ennio Morricone (kitsch astral pointillism), Pierre Boulez (fragmentation, deconstruction), Luigi Nono (sonics), Miles Davis and John Cage (detente, silence), Morton Feldman (relative time), Ryuichi Sakamato (theme and mix), Laurie Anderson (social narrative and counterpoint), Sonic Youth (noise, abstraction), and Yoko Ono (vocal shake).
Originally backgrounds for B movies, Morricone’s accompaniments were necessarily subordinate to the visual. Nevertheless, he fashioned startling consonances out of diverse musical traditions, mixing high art (classical, opera, electronic, avant-garde musics) and low (pop, rock, noise, found). His facility for synthesizing musical genres merits careful examination as a means of understanding the future of art and music. This future increasingly involves questions of ambience and design, a sacred part- or lost-object representing the drive to fulfill a drive, an action, a performance.
I once envisioned 20th-century art history as a march towards the conceptual, but as the century closed, I understood it as a paradigm of performance. So often concrete and inert, art could instead accept inapprehensible infinity as evidence of our ultimately ignorant existence. In this way, it might stop celebrating the miniscule knowledge we do possess. If it is not too late, humans, ever the historical victims, might overcome the fear of the unknown that they camouflage with rituals of rational proof on the one hand, and elaborate superstition on the other. Instead, they might celebrate rituals of the casual, the prosaic, the present, and embrace the unknown.
© 2006 Diego Cortez – New York
