Paradigm Shift

I entered graduate school with the hope of adressing what I perceived as two great gaps, the surrender of meaning and the degradation of the figure in contemporary art. Why this is so critical for me requires a bit of background. When I came of age it was Morning in Regan’s America, the Me Generation was triumphant, Post-Modernism was at its very flood-tide. I was weaned on Jacques Derrida, Mary Daly, and Elvis Costello. Figurative art was virtually nowhere to be found, was generally reviled in fact, having been cast off its millennial pedestal somewhere in the chaos of the First World War. In the West, over the decades of the 20^th Century there had arisen many movements, revolutions and counter-revolutions in avant garde theories of art, all of which were agreed on at least one point, that the study of the human form was something quaint and irrelevant at best, or worse, something morally suspect, a anachronistic tool of sexual, racial, or aesthetic tyranny. Those who had learned the old school techniques of drawing, painting, and sculpting from life were marginalized and slowly, eventually, died out, taking their skills and insight with them.

By the 90’s there were no more revolutions possible, or rather, art seemed to be in a state of constant revolution as each successive class of MFA’s clawed over one another for attention on an increasingly ignored stage. Shock value replaced insight as a way of making a splash in an intensely competitive, star-driven market. Styles came as thick and fast as New York runway show. Every scrap of meaning and symbolism in the culture was grist to be torn up and reassembled in whatever wacky way most assured of rendering its author appear most iconoclastic until finally there was no thing, no object, no referent, no body left that was not itself in question. And at last, without a base of common experience, the possibility of meaning anything to anyone at anytime had become so questionable a proposition as to be itself fodder for art. The Age of Irony was hard upon us.

And yet without meaning, without purpose, existence is a pretty thin gruel. All that is left is self-gratification, distraction, cynicism. What good is the world’s highest standard of living if it also comes with the highest rates of suicide and depression? I personally was driven back to figurative art as a way of coming to ground or, more, like a man staggering to shore after having been churned on waves so long as to have lost all sense of history or purpose. And feeling ground under me for the first time in ages, I decided to stop and have a long look around.

For me the figure represents something common, a ground with which we all share at least some relative experience. It is a concrete thing which we all recognize and know intimately, better than any other thing in the world. Our hands, our feet, our bellies and stretch marks. It is a thing we look at ceaselessly, furtively, passionately, at train stations, in malls, theaters, from windows and escalators; our stuff, other people’s stuff. Café life, people watching, voyeurism, casual glances; we are always on watch, on display. We know to minutia the eyebrow tensing of a ticked-off mom, the flush of a lover’s cheek, the raise of gooseflesh on a child’s arm. Social animals, we make a life-long study of this stuff. We have to. There is an entire language of gesture and story here universally shared and yet barely tapped in the world of contemporary art.

And there is beauty here as well. We are all the product of what a thousand, thousand generations of our forebear’s found compelling. Just as plants put out flowers which bees find irresistible, and trees have developed tasty fruits perfect for the transportation of seeds through the digestive tracts of wide ranging ruminants, so have the forms of our species conspired to produce a profound aesthetic. There is not about presenting the ideal figure. This is where the argument has long gotten tripped up. Canons of beauty are imposed by society. Nature has far richer treats. Each individual is a universe and, studied, reveals unexpected harmonies, resonances, discords and counter rhythms in the disposition of limbs, features, flab and muscle that are endless and fascinating. And these carry associations and meanings and subtle implications readily accessible to virtually all of us. For any seeking a universal language of art, the human figure is the Rosetta stone!

This is why I have devoted so much of my time to studying the figure. And it is with this tool kit and vision that three years ago I set my sites back on academia. I felt certain that something this solid was worthy of advanced, even life-long exploration. And if “Academia” did not think so, (and after nearly a decade at Reed College, both student and staff, I had few illusions about the institution) then Academia needed a swift kick. I expected to battle every inch of the way. At the very best I hoped to make a small but determined ruckus, likely to go unnoticed in the ongoing swirl of fashionable discourse, but enough to drop a piece of figure work like a seed, or a bomb, in the middle of all that hub-bub in the white cube and see what happened.

And now that I have, it seems no big deal. The little figure piece seems to fit in just fine, as if after a century of exile she had never left. What happened?

In the three years I have been in school something fundamental seems to have shifted. The figure is in resurgence. Witness the triumph of Lucian Freud, Jenny Saville, Ron Mueck, and John Currin. And more, the possibility of conveying meaning is no longer something summarily dismissed by savvy thinkers. Derrida is now deader than painting ever was. Now it seems to be communication, not simple self-expression, that most of us want in our art.

So what happened? September 11^th? Was that obscenely effective iconoclastic act sufficient to wake us up to how absurd our debates had become? I don’t think it’s that easy. Though it may have ended the Age of Irony, the first calamity of the 21^st Century seems to have done nothing to end the Age of Gullibility. But maybe there is something in that. There seems to be a great hunger for meaning that follows hard on the collapse of postmodernism. Fundamentalist movements around the world have for decades shadowed the global hegemony of market capitalism and the “moral relativism” of advanced consumer and intellectual culture. Amidst all the competing alienations of modern life people are desperate for something simple, something reliable, some truth on which to base our lives. The easiest way for many is reactionary, back to the packaged truths of old theisms. Others devote themselves to material acquisition, family, good works. Any pabulum will do for the lazy consumer. (Fox News and Thomas Kinkaide leap to mind…oops! Did I say that?) And on the political front, Fascism is the pretty boy we picked up at the bar and who now, snarling, won’t leave the bedroom.

For artists though, and any who seek more rigorously, a truth from which on which to base our work needs to be much more simple, much broader, and yet capable of great depth. I believe that direct observation from nature via the figure is such a truth. I suspect that this return to the figure is driven exactly by the desire to seek a reliable base on which to build new meanings. It is exactly because of its commonality, its ubiquity in the media, its multivalent potential, and because it has lain fallow in art so long that the figure is back. It is actually fresh! And it is thus that I returned to school to advance my challenge and to prepare to teach. My reasoning is simple. If there is to be renewed interest in the figure in art then let it be of quality. Let it move forward on the terms of an advanced aesthetic and developed technique, and not the paltry work that has for so long passed muster. An audience starving for meaning in a gallery will take whatever it can recognise. This only encourages mediocrity. There is already enough wretched, sentimental, and just plain horrid figure sculptures clogging the markets today. I would prefer to point those interested in a more interesting direction.

So what is the relationship of this discussion to the piece on display? Why a bronze naked woman squatting in a niche in the Henry Art Gallery?

What I most wanted to develop in this piece was a sense of presence. So much figure sculpture, as so much representational art, is exactly that; a representation and little else. And this is the reason why, rightly I think, so many generations of artists and theorists have shrugged off this form. A representation of a thing trying to be a thing is a poor substitute for a thing. Let the painting be a painting, the reasoning goes, and not a picture of a pasture with sheep and some puffy clouds. Let a sculpture be an object, and not a poor doppelganger frozen in an eternal bronze scream.

But in the best art the object is a thing of its own. It has a power. It owns its space. I wanted this piece to own her little corner of the gallery. And if that was all she did, then that is enough. She is not particularly asking for anything else. She is not commenting on anything other than her space and her role in that space. She is not saying, “I am art and you are not.” What she is actually saying is, “If you are art, then so too am I art, as are we all.”

May 2004

Paradigm Shift. Lifesize bronze.

Ltd ed casts available.