ART CONTROVERSY: The Ken Johnson comments

Wherein lies the fault: a discussion of the Ken Johnson controversy

….assemblage was a critique, a subversion, of the formal painted ground when Picasso put scraps of newspaper in his paintings. He did so to playfully but seriously “jeu/jou” (a common Picasso fragment – translates to game/day)  to announce the arrival of a new way/world in art, the avant-garde.  Schwitters used assemblage/collage because little material was available after World War I, and it stood for genesis – that art would be made in any circumstances: poverty, post-war apacalypic  landscapes.  Order would be imposed upon tragedy, disaster.

Rauschenberg used collage/assemblage as a re-defined trope to address materialism and its “thingness”, but also as a referential Surrealist/Expressionist.  He also made it freshly urban, the constant churning of street discards as re-purposed, undying objects, even as one purpose for them dies – isn’t Monogram paradoxical while it is poignant?

To return to K Johnson’s assertion that “blacks didn’t invent assemblage”, I think they don’t claim to.  So? Outsider folk black artists made assemblages all the time, and Mexicans have a vernacular aesthetic called “rasquatche”, the re-use of objects as decorative.  While theses groups and cultures did this, many whites planted old toilets with flowers in their front yards, finding this amusing.  So, this point is really a red herring; it’s purpose to devalue the authenticity of expression of the artists and their work.  Appropriation of mainstream culture’s tropes is a concern – to ape the patriarchs is to assimilate, align with power, a sell out, whether done in naïeveté or intent, it can dilute the seminal artistic intentions of the once-cohesive group. 

For Black artists to use assemblage seems appropriate appropriation.  Pop art critiqued itself by adding irony to the existing images.  (Drowning Girl/Why is it that Today’s Homes…etc.) This even seems brilliant on their part. Why shouldn’t black artists do this brilliantly too. 

Johnson seems to think that this direction caused black artists to be marginalized by  the mainstream art market.  Alas, it’s far simpler than that.  There was just too much assemblage/appropriation going on, and it had already peaked with Rauschenberg.  So, the art made had to rely on its politically correct solidarity (a questionable assigned quality, in my book) and its haunting reminders of the crimes and atrocities of racism perpetrated by citizens of “…the land of the free.” – not so many whites want to step up to judgment  when it comes to facing the hypocrisy of  the American lifestyle and values.  The carpet is very crowded with candidates, all declaiming, “not me, I  didn’t do it, I had no choice – the most incriminating confession of all.

So no wonder the market didn’t just step up and pay out.  Maybe if the National Guard had been ordered in, it might have.  But then art is not an emergency, a fact to keep in perspective, and keep those of us who love  and live it humble.

So what ‘s the problem with Johnson?  He seems incompletely informed, to have made opinions that excluded perspectives and historical data that most critics would know  - items I’ve mentioned above that  I would have thought anyone would have considered.  So, Johnson seems to expose covert limitations on aesthetic valuing of Black and women artists, but, oh, look, they are his own as well. 

But Johnson seems to be accusing the mainstream art world justly even with his own amputated opinions – the shadows of racism are long  indeed.

Johnson’s issue with women’s art is similar.  He suggests that some women make “women’s art”.  What is womens’ art?  We all know it when we see it.  Sentimental, pretty, decorative, ragingly hormonal, feminist, dikey, with being defined. with self-objectification, identification with the other.. Well, there’s all that trashy landscape art with dogs and cows from French neo-classicism, the really cute baby Jesus paintings,  the violent sadism of Italian painting-especially those St. Sebastian paintings – I hate those! sentimental imagery of clean peasants working the land, de Kooning’s dominatrixies; homo-erotic wrestling matches and dying pretty boy sculptures; textiles abstract tesserae and tile designs for architecture mostly all created by men, …shall I quit now?

I would think that womens’ art is rejected because of its poignancy.  Women crochet toilet-paper roll covers (and men fix cars) out of innate human needs to use the hands, to create, to fashion.  It’s the fault of society that class determines the form of expression that is available to the members of any given society. 

The hierarchy is not comfortable with these reminders; it guilts them and its evidence of their subjugation of classes. 

That said, the work exhibited in “The Female Gaze”, though some deals with images of women and children, or uses traditional craft materials, does not look like a Midwest gift shop.  A viewing perspective, intended by the curators, is what kinds of art do women make? Is there women’s art?  What do we mean by that?  Why are they underrepresented?  All worthwhile questions, besides reflecting on women’s special biological role and its compelling paradigms and contributions to human society – a reflection to made about male roles also.

David Levi Strauss in Art in America  says a “new critical language” (March 2013) is needed.  In the last 40 years, various perspectives for criticizing art have emerged based on queer theory, women’s studies, psychoanalytic reading, Marxist criticism,  can you think of a few more?  He doesn’t describe much about his brave new language, and I think it’s the least he owes us, after his PC article about Ken Johnson, who I still think is just a bumptious critic and probably shouldn’t be attended to in the first place, but for the usefulness of parsing race and gender issues as they present themselves afresh.