Ken Greenleaf
The Ethics of Making Art in a Difficult and Dangerous World
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There’s a presumptuous irony for me, an American, to be in Kyiv with a talk whose title that contains the words ‘... a Difficult and Dangerous World.’ There’s not a person in this room who doesn’t have either personal or indirect knowledge of someone whose experience of difficulty and danger is way beyond anything most Americans, me included, can even imagine.
Yet America is big, powerful and has a military budget larger than the next seven big-budget countries combined. We’re over-weaponed and scary and there are plenty of people in the US who like it that way and who know less than nothing about the rest of the world. It’s an article of faith by one of the major political parties that Ronald Reagan was responsible for the collapse of the Soviet Union and that America single-handedly won World War Two. They’re willfully ignorant and that makes them dangerous.
As I write this the American elections are about a month away. When the talk actually happens the elections will have been held and I can report either that the rest of the world can breath just a little easier or that US foreign policy is in the hands of dangerous incompetents. Which may be true in both cases, but danger is relative, and one side of the US election is driven by people for whom ignorance is considered a desirable personal and political attribute, and supports plutocratic control of civic and economic life. That may sound familiar here, given what little I know about Ukraine politics.
But this talk is about art, so an inventory of the dangers facing us is maybe not to the point, but there is a thread I would like to follow. There are two significant artists I’d like to briefly discuss who worked at defining an ethos that both informed and tried to explain their methods in the context of the larger dynamics of art. They are Robert Motherwell and Sol Lewitt. I like both of them as artists, especially Lewitt.
Robert Motherwell tried, unsuccessfully, to articulate an ethos of New York School abstract painting. He was one of very few of those artists with an education in philosophy and took it upon himself to articulate its principles. He came up with some ideas about emotional and psychological immediacy in their unfettered approach to abstraction, which was partly true but didn’t go far enough. It then backfired through the bogus idea of Harold Rosenberg’s “Action Panting.”
Sol Lewitt tried, with more success, to analyze art as a human enterprise, as was typical of that moment in Minimalism. He moved the decision-making process back from the work of the hand and made that process an a-priori premise. That resulted in his simply making careful instructions and leaving all execution to others. He expected the viewer to follow his conception. Yet his work, especially is later wall drawings and sculptures, is exceptionally striking. Part of his legacy is that now artists are educated to have a thesis that their work expresses, and that doesn’t seem to work all that well. One can’t, as many of us need to, think in our process, not ahead of it.
What I take from this, and from my own experience, is the need to experience art at its deeper levels. That can include expressive, unconscious creativity, as Motherwell posited, or the trail of conceptual intentions articulated by Lewitt, but by no means excludes the extra-rational levels of awareness that art invokes. Motherwell’s ideas and Lewitt’s analysis fell far short of producing an ethic of art-making, which may not be possible. They, and others, though, including Malevich, induce the idea of looking beyond the surface of things.
I’m not going to attempt any overall ethic about making and thinking about art - better minds than mine have tried and failed. I’m presenting a more modest idea – that when we learn to look at serious art or listen to serious music, we learn to consider it in depth. The surface - the entertainment, the distraction, is no longer enough.
To me, that means it is possible, and necessary, that as artists and viewers we habitually pass beyond that first look. Sometimes it means examining the idea and sometimes it means examining our experience. Or simply having the patience and open-mindedness to let the experience happen. Or applying some critical thinking not only to what the work is about, but to what is happening within us as we consider it. We can examine carefully and in depth.
Serge Momot, for his recent show in Sweden, asked his viewers to simply experience his work. I take that to mean that having made these things with a commitment to the depth of his own awareness, he was asking his viewers to share that with him. That requires two things - one, that Serge is telling the truth (which I believe he is) and two, that the viewer is willing to pay sufficient attention to share it. This is true of all serious art, but it is also true that most art that is made is not especially serious.
Here then, is my rather simple ethical thesis about art in culture. It works for visual art, music or just about anything else. I note here that I’ve been around for a long time, so I have an elder’s right to simplicity. In my youth my ideas were much more sweeping and complex.
If you learn how to look at, read or listen to, art that is made with true integrity and seriousness of purpose, no matter how difficult it may be, then you know how to look past the superficial aspects of anything. It is hard for a politician or anyone else to lie to someone who understands that things may be more complex or deeper than they seem on the surface. Reasonable judgments and critical thinking are not automatic, they are learned. They take time, effort and experience, and most people don’t have the patience to put that much work into it. If it’s not entertaining they move on.
I have nothing against art as entertainment, but it’s been a long time since I’ve listened to pop music or thought that anything produced by Walt Disney was worth my time. There is a postmodernist argument that values are so relative that there is no discernable difference between a commitment to seriousness and entertainment, and that depth of work doesn’t exist and facts are a cultural artifact. I’ve seen academic assertions that physics isn’t real and its discoveries are culture-based and mutable. There is some truth that we understand things based on how we are conditioned to see them, but the speed of light is the speed of light, whether measured in kilometers or miles per second.
It has been said that the Putin regime in Russia is the first post-modernist government, since it declares its assertions are facts, and that whoever can manipulate things effectively wins. This may be true, and it is also true there is a sizeable contingent of the American electorate and political establishment that support the burgeoning plutocracy and promote, indeed celebrate, ignorance as a positive value, that creationism is just as real as evolution if you believe it to be.
So what is an artist to do, facing the powerful distortions of civic life?
Political art is rarely effective, and when it is it is often in service of the state, either the existing one or a desired one. Theatrical actions, when well-timed, can spread useful ideas, like a recent Russian one that went right to the heart of the dangerous politics - religion conjunction. But visual art is private and has a limited audience.
So I believe that the most important thing an artist can do is to commit themselves to doing work with integrity that reaches into the deepest levels of awareness that can be achieved. That may be uncomfortable, may be difficult for viewers to follow and may result in tough career sledding. It can make that popular art-world notion, ‘branding,’ tough to accomplish. But I repeat – the most important thing a work of art can do is to engage the whole awareness of the viewer. An engaged viewer can sense the truth about the work and the integrity of the artist. And anyone who can do that, who can come to your work and see who you really are, will be someone who is hard to fool.
I can’t think of too many things more valuable in life than that.
