Art. It should be Moving, Fun and Moral.
Published in C Magazine, Issue 80, Winter 2004
When something is moving it makes you feel love and that life is precious. It helps to make you feel not-alone. This activity is one of the central functions of art.
There are a lot of ways for art to be fun. There's wow-factor fun, like Damian Hirst and Matthew Barney. There's the fun of understanding the context of the work's production/reception (we could call that the fun of “taste”, with a nod to Pierre Bourdieu). There's slapstick fun, there's high tech fun, there's the fun of appreciating virtuosity, and there's the fun of being called to arms.
Defining morality is more difficult. Like taste, morality is understood to be “subjective”, to shift according to context. For this reason I will accept as moral works which seriously engage questions of morality, and works which do less harm than good.
Let's bring these criteria to bear on the recent exhibit of works by the American painter John Currin (Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago, May 3—August 24, 2003).
I give Mr. Currin two of a possible three.
I acknowledge that, while they didn't move me personally, these paintings do have the power to move. Currin mostly depicts ethereal twenty-something blondes bearing burdens: outsized breasts, giant heads on needle-thin necks, pocked and stippled skin, consumption, etc. This archetype (the fragile/damaged woman) is familiar from Hollywood narrative cinema, folk songs, 19th Century novels and, of course, painting. Its use is intended to make the viewer (or reader or listener) feel tenderness and a desire to protect; as well to make them feel that there is something worth protecting.
Most obviously, these works are replete with the Fun of Appreciating Virtuosity. Some of them are also comic and smutty, the fun offspring of Alfred P. Newman and Norman Rockwell. They are also full of references to famous paintings from art history, which gives certain viewers the bonus Fun of Knowing the Context, or the fun of “taste”.
Because the paintings move the viewer by objectifying the female body, however, they aren't Moral. I know it's completely out of fashion to complain about objectification (and perhaps to call for morality at all), but the women in these works embody an ideal, humans strive to achieve ideals, and Currin's ideal is so frequently disfigured or infirm. It's not Moral to cause women to strive to be invalids. The paintings do more harm than good.
They are sadistic and frivolous at the same time.
Sadistic in that they are the artifacts of a compulsive, ritualized practice of representation of the object of desire. *I can't help feeling that Currin represents his subjects as deformed or bedridden in order to manage his feelings of inadequacy in relation to them; that he disables them on the canvas in order mitigate his fear of being harmed or abandoned by them in life. Frivolous in that only questions of technique and historical relevance are manifest in the work.
Or maybe that's not frivolity. Maybe it's worse—another iteration of the frantic, ass-covering scramble for “relevance to the art-historical discourse”. As long as an artwork can make that claim, it need not contend with the criteria I've set forth here.
This, I allege, is the trouble with contemporary art. This is what we learn in art school. This is the reason art loses to popular culture. Popular culture is moving, fun and moral—not always, but often enough.