Last Chance installation; Erik Van Lieshout, Art Basel
[Editor's Note: As I am facing numerous writing deadlines over the
second half of February, this seems like a good time to give a
retrospective glance to the first two years of Art of the Rural.
Over these weeks I will feature a few new articles, but also many
favorites from the archives. Thanks again to everyone who has read and
contributed; what began as a labor of love has become a project far
larger, and far more rewarding, than I ever could have anticipated - and
I deeply appreciate the readership and participation of such a diverse
audience. In March we will offer new articles and series, and share some
new projects related to our mission.
How the Rural Could Save Contemporary Art was originally published on July 6, 2011. For more information, we recommend a visit to the Rural America Contemporary Artists organization.]
Last week, on the morning before The National Rural Assembly, I had the privilege of attending a roundtable discussion on rural arts and culture hosted at the Bush Foundation in Saint Paul. This conversation was cosponsored by the Arts and Community Change Initiative, the Arts and Democracy Project, the Center For Rural Strategies, and InCommons
-- and these organizations brought together an inspiring cohort of
artists, scholars and arts practitioners working to cultivate the
cultural life of their rural communities.
A
profound number of challenges and solutions were raised in those
discussions; while I will offer a more detailed summary of the events
soon, a few persistent questions emerged and then re-emerged across the
morning's conversation: How do we create and share art that speaks from
our local cultures, yet also reflects the modern economic and global
realities of our places? What is the tension between traditional and
modern (university-endorsed) notions of art-making? Is there a way to
integrate these practices into the stories a community tells about its
past, present, and its future? How does the community's access to
technology (especially broadband) alter this work? And, importantly, how do we impart all of these concerns to the next generation--how do we
offer a narrative of place and culture inclusive to rural youth?
Though these are large questions, and their solutions will be years in the making, I was ultimately struck by how different
these discussions sounded than those that revolve around the
contemporary art world, or even its adjacent academic community. While
there are daunting imperatives in the preceding paragraph, its content
is surely not rural-specific. However, because of the host of pressing
issues facing rural America, many of our artists and arts organizations
must directly engage with these questions of representation and equity,
and with art's tenuous position in communities dealing with crises in
health care, housing and education. Because our work takes place on a
smaller scale, we turn from these issues at our own peril. As a preface
to the roundtable discussion, Dee Davis, president of The Center of
Rural Strategies, offered this timely line from W.B. Yeats: in dreams begin responsibilities.
So, how could the rural save contemporary art?
I'd
like to offer below three recent editorials by respected art critics,
writing for respected arts publications. Each writer, upon returning
from the major summer art shows (here, the Venice Biennale and Art Basel),
identifies specific symptoms of a general sickness in the art world. On
one hand, it's heartening to hear these writers articulating some of
very same concerns of folks engaged in rural arts and culture; on the
other hand, the sickness diagnosed here seems to beg not only for
greater equity and inclusion along economic and geographical lines, but
also for a wider sense of cultural inclusion. I'd like to offer these
three articles, and then suggest that folks consider the rural artists
they know (or those we've highlighted here on in our links and map
resources): from the traditional to the avant-garde, how would a
broader discussion of these artists help to make the contemporary-art-body
whole and healthy?
Writing in New York Magazine,
Jerry Saltz laments "Generation Blank," the coterie of recent
university-trained artists who are "too much in thrall to their elders,
excessively satisfied with an insider’s game of art, [and] not really
making their own work." Here is how Mr. Saltz begins his editorial:
I went to Venice, and I came back worried. Every two years, the central attraction of the Biennale is a kind of State of the Art World show. This year’s, called “Illuminations,” has its share of high points and artistic intensity. (Frances Stark’s animated video of her online masturbatory tryst with a younger man hooked me; Christian Marclay’s The Clock, which captivated New York earlier this year, rightly won the Gold Lion Prize for Best Artist.) Yet many times over—too many times for comfort—I saw the same thing, a highly recognizable generic institutional style whose manifestations are by now extremely familiar. Neo-Structuralist film with overlapping geometric colors, photographs about photographs, projectors screening loops of grainy black-and-white archival footage, abstraction that’s supposed to be referencing other abstraction—it was all there, all straight out of the seventies, all dead in the water. It’s work stuck in a cul-de-sac of aesthetic regress, where everyone is deconstructing the same elements.
Sixth Still Life installtion; Katharina Fritsch, Venice Biennale
In our second arts clipping, András Szántó of Artworld Salon returns from Art Basel and offers two examples of "interesting disconnects" in recent art news:
First, between the ebullience of the art fair and the dark financial clouds roiling over Europe, where states teeter on the edge of insolvency and people are taking to the streets. There is a yawning chasm right now between the revived luxury spending boom and the malaise that grips the bottom ninety-eight percent. The subject kept coming up, quietly but persistently, at parties around town.
Second, during an Art Basel Conversation I moderated on the future of museum collecting, a London-based curator from Bangladesh pressed the assembled directors, and in particular Chris Dercon of the Tate Modern, when and how they will genuinely engage his community and others like it—not just through occasionally showcasing artists, but in a deep way. All agreed that, good intentions and planned initiatives notwithstanding, we’re a long way from making art institutions truly inclusive.
Away From The Flock; Damien Hirst
In "We Don't Own Modern Art - The Super Rich Do," Jonathan Jones of The Guardian
recasts Szántó's question with an eye on the mainstream middle-class
audience that still grants contemporary art its cultural legitimacy:
But who are they, these people? I would genuinely like to know. The popular assumption seems to be that today's art collectors are "Russian oligarchs". Certainly the spectacle of Roman Abramovich's yacht drew attention to the oligarchic presence at this year's Venice Biennale. One thing is certain – the big-time buyers of art are people in the financial sector who are weathering our troubled times a lot better than high street businesses, nations picked on by Standard & Poor's, or public sector workers.
And yet, for the last couple of decades, contemporary art has flourished through an alliance of the rich and the not-so-rich. It is the same educated, probably public-sector-employed middle class (many of whom marched this week) that enthusiastically visit galleries and art fairs. It is these fans of modern art who have helped, by their acclaim, to generate the charisma that makes it apparently worth so many millions.
Of
course, we're already seeing an urban, university-educated, DIY arts
movement that is helping to provide the response to these writers'
concerns; this DIY culture, which is beginning to make inroads to rural
artists and organizations, carries an aesthetic and a sense of
empowerment that we all should observe and then integrate into our work.
Further, as advocates for rural arts and culture, we should consider
what we can bring to broader discussions like those above--and not
cultivate an anti-modern art, anti-intellectual stance that only
denigrates urban and rural audiences alike.
After
reading these pieces, and after an inspiring roundtable discussion, I
take away two beliefs. First, by including to a greater extent the
voices of rural arts and rural groups within our contemporary arts
dialogue, we will make all of the Arts more healthy--and more relevant
to more people. And, lastly, the rural can save contemporary art in much the
same way that contemporary art can come to the service of the rural: by
working across those rural-urban lines and recognizing our shared
responsibility to each other.
