Chris Navin

From Mick Hartley: ‘Playing In The Gallery‘

‘It’s no surprise at all that the latest Turbine Hall installation at Tate Modern is a glorified playground…

‘…The two quotes on the website give an idea of the level of desperation:

“I’ve spent a lot of time in the Turbine Hall… but I’ve never felt as exhilarated as I did on a swing installed here by Superflex” – Evening Standard.

“When you get on that swing – and I haven’t been on one for more years than I’d care to mention – you immediately reboot” – Donald Hyslop, exhibition curator.

These people need to get out more.’

Do we really need adults on swings?

I’ll try and remain neutral on ideas I think were once the radical and innovative syntheses of Romantic and Modern artists, thinkers, and schools, as they become institutionalized within museums dedicated to all things ‘Modern.’

It seems Man’s natural impulses towards the spiritual, the metaphysical, and the sharing (especially when kids are in tow) come to the fore in vague and navel-gazing types of ways.

It seems that this particular metaphysical legacy fails in important ways to deal with people (us) often as we are.

The Temple of the ‘Self’ has many altars, and I get more than a hint of the pathetic, the ignorant, and whiffs of authoritarianism at these types of things.

***Of course, I don’t think it necessarily diminishes the quality of some works…the heights reached by particular individual Romantic and Modern artists and schools which have since arisen.

On that note, some previous links and quotes:

Donald Pittenger, at Art Contrarian, and formerly of 2 Blowhards, has been looking at modernism. From the banner of his blog:

‘The point-of-view is that modernism in art is an idea that has, after a century or more, been thoroughly tested and found wanting. Not to say that it should be abolished — just put in its proper, diminished place’

Tom Wolfe on Max Weber on one conspicuous use of art in the ‘modern’ world:

‘…aesthetics is going to replace ethics, art is going to replace religion, as the means through which educated people express their spiritual worthiness…‘

Somewhere apart from Medieval, Christian, Classical and pre-Enlightenment forms of authority and social hierarchy; somewhere away from the kinds of patronage, inspiration, rules, money that bent and shaped previous Art, emerged the Enlightenment and came the Romantic, Modern, and Postmodern.

***As for ideas to fill the holes, there’s definitely one path from Hegelian ‘Geist’ to Marxist class-consciousness to the revolutionary and radical doctrines found in the postmodern soup…but there are also problems with the liberation of the ‘Self’ from Schopenhauer’s ‘Will’ to Nietzsche ‘Will to Power.’

Thanks, reader: