Kitsch versus the avant-garde — Part 2
Odd Nerdrum, Kitsch and the Venice Biennale
When I first began to get serious about painting I wanted to make work like the great baroque painter Caravaggio, but I couldn’t find any programs that would teach me how to do so. Instead, the professors told me that this was a foolish idea and that I should give up on representation, which was a dead end. They said, “No-one makes paintings like that anymore.” So for me, painting was over — I’d missed the boat. I gave up looking for art colleges and after a lost year I got a degree doing theater, came to Los Angeles and worked for a decade as a freelance set designer and thoroughly enjoyed myself, but always painted at home, trying to work out how to solve its problems myself. Then in 1996, my friend Christophe Cassidy took me to San Diego to see an exhibit of paintings by a strangely named artist called Odd Nerdrum. The gallery was filled with rich, warm oil paintings of figures wearing animal skins and leather, with pilots’ flying helmets and cloths wrapped around their heads. They looked like paintings by Rembrandt, but with much more imagination. Some of the men carried old rifles, others strode bearing long sticks through an intensely bleak landscape, which I later learned was based on Iceland, like refugees in some future history in which civilization had collapsed and the remaining people enacted strange rituals in an effort to reconnect with a lost past. The dramatic moments captured in the paintings included a group of four emaciated figures seated awkwardly upright in a bleak, deserted plain, all naked except with their shoulders draped in black cloth, their bare legs stretched out before them, their feet intensely flexed upward, with skullcaps on their high cheek-boned heads, eyes closed, but mouths wide open like starving nestlings, longing for a drop of rain. In another luminously warm, brown and yellow painting two almost identical figures, one male, one female, lay beside each other, wrapped almost like mummies, either sleeping or dead. In another, a man brandishing a knife shrieked as he beheld the decapitated head of a horse as if Rembrandt had painted a scene from the Godfather. Each image radiated meaning — each drew me into a narrative of loss, of exile, of alienation from a difficult world, but more importantly, of self-reliance, of strength against adversity, of survival and family. I recognized a subtext of esoteric meaning — there were hints of alchemy, a ritualized order to the refugees’ world that suggested a dependence upon a mysterious, but present, greater power. I realized that these paintings were an experience completely unlike one that any postmodern art exhibit would offer. These were paintings that invited the audience to feel. These were images deliberately made to excite emotional responses, to evoke sentiment.
I walked through the show in awe. Painting after painting exploded like a bomb in my head. They were extraordinary, unlike anything I’d ever seen — and they contradicted everything I had been told. Painting was not dead! It was possible to paint like the old masters and make powerful, relevant contemporary works. I couldn’t believe it! I went home and began a search for books on technique. I wanted to paint like Caravaggio again. I searched for help with painting, and another miracle happened! I found a book by Virgil Elliott — who has since become my friend — that described how to paint en grisaille, in the manner of the old masters I admired, and I painted as much as I could.
Nerdrum is a remarkable and prolific painter, and I started watching him closely, going to every exhibit I heard of that included him. Then, in the noughties he began sharing some peculiar ideas about his work, he started referring to himself as a kitsch painter, and rejected the word “Artist”. What did he mean by this? How could he denigrate his extraordinary paintings by describing them as kitsch? Kitsch was terrible stuff! I knew it as cheesy junk sold in seedy thrift stores and in provincial market stalls to tourists looking for cheap souvenirs. In contrast, being an artist was an honorable profession, with centuries of history — why would he reject such venerable associations with his predecessors in the history of art? To speak of things as kitsch is to place them immediately into a dark context. We use the word as a definitive put-down, an unanswerable, instantly effective negation that squashes any positive interpretation of the thing being described. I thought this was very strange and I wanted to understand where he was coming from. I began digging into the background of ideas that built the negative power of the word. What do we mean by kitsch, and why did twentieth-century avant-garde intellectuals and scholars despise it?
Three philosophers have had a profound influence on the shaping of the avant-garde. They are Karl Marx, Friedrich Nietzsche, and Immanuel Kant.
With his friend Friedrich Engels, Marx was the co-founder of Marxism and published many books, the two most famous being Das Kapital and The Communist Manifesto, which begins with one of the most memorable opening lines ever written, “A spectre is haunting Europe, the spectre of communism.”
Very briefly, and without doing justice to the thought behind his work, Marx’s principal ideas were:
· The labor theory of value — any product is worth the amount of labor that was put into making it.
· Class struggle — the history of humanity is the history of class struggle. All of our social norms and values exist to protect the interests of the ruling class.
· Alienation (literally: to be made foreign) — we are alienated from our desires, our labor, the product of our labor and ourselves by the capitalist economic system.
· Communism — the political and economic theory which argues that the alienation and injustices of capitalism can only be resolved when violent revolution places economic and political power in the hands of proletariat. Reforming the system from within is impossible.
· Materialism — reality is ultimately material. Economics rules everything.
I don’t want to dwell too long on the problems of Marxism, or its failings in its Soviet embodiment, other than to note the powerful influence of Marxist and Soviet aesthetics upon the art world. You could be forgiven for thinking that in these days of the flagrant success of Western liberal capitalism within the art market the influence of Marx would have been eradicated and long ago forgotten. On the contrary, Marx’s presence in the art world was never as obvious as it was in Venice in 2015. Of all places, Venice, the beautiful but useless floating city of gilded halls and mercantile success! In 2015 Venice was the unlikely host of the most Marxist Biennale ever to have happened. It was a huge festival of top-drawer art that brought the glitterati out in force to experience the best of the scene. The United States government continued its long tradition of funding the avant-garde as a policy of its public diplomacy by paying for American artists to exhibit their work at the event.
Why on earth would Marx, the worker’s champion, be a theme at the utterly bourgeois Biennale? The Biennale rests upon three pillars — described on their website:
• Exhibitions in the National Pavilions, each with its own curator and project.
• Collateral Events, approved by the Biennale curator.
• An International Exhibition by the Biennale curator, who is chosen specifically for this task.
In 2015 the Biennale curator was Okwui Enwezor, who called his show “All the World’s Futures”. Here’s what he had to say about his curatorial decisions for the 56th International Art Exhibition:
“All the World’s Futures, will introduce the ARENA, an active space dedicated to continuous live programming across disciplines and located within the Central Pavilion in the Giardini. The linchpin of this program will be the epic live reading of all three volumes of Karl Marx’s Das Kapital (Capital). Here, Das Kapital will serve as a kind of Oratorio that will be continuously read live, throughout the exhibition’s seven months’ duration.
Designed by award-winning Ghanaian/British architect David Adjaye, the ARENA will serve as a gathering-place of the spoken word, the art of the song, recitals, film projections, and a forum for public discussions. Taking the concept of the Sikh event, the Akhand Path (a recitation of the Sikh holy book read continuously over several days by a relay of readers), Das Kapital will be read as a dramatic text by trained actors, directed by artist and filmmaker Isaac Julien, during the entire duration of this years Art Biennale.”
So here was the fundamental text of Marx’s political and economic thought, read as a holy book for a continual seven-month-long event, at one of the most important art festivals in the world. And of course all the artists in “All the World’s Futures” were chosen for their Marxist political activism. We hardly need to point out the irony of the curator’s choices, because the opening of the Biennale is a social event heartily celebrated by the 1% elite of the world who can afford to spend millions of dollars on art, yet here as its centerpiece, presented with the sincerity of religious text is precisely the message of social justice that preaches their overthrow. The regular punters (so to speak) attending the Biennale aren’t everyday plebeians. Getting to Venice is not easy, and depends upon having the kind of disposable income that allows for plane flights, boat trips, hotels and plenty of spare time. Venice is not a place one happens to bump into on the way to the store. It takes a lot of deliberate, expensive effort to get there. Venice reeks of wealth and exclusivity, this island where money and art and architecture and history glow in perfect bourgeois synergy. Clearly, Marx’s influence on contemporary art runs pretty deep if his ideas can prosper here. I’m not aware of any 21st-century art event that pushes a conservative political agenda as consciously and publicly as this. I wonder if anyone will ever hold staged readings of Edmund Burke. Perhaps that’s an open niche market in the art world.
But before we react with anger, let’s consider the thinking that supported a Marx-themed art fair in 2015. 20th Century postmodern thinkers discounted ideology and criticized the Marxist meta-narrative, claiming that history and ideology were no longer relevant in a post-modern world. The postmodern art sold at art fairs is characterized by the disruption of “grand narratives”, by the juxtaposition of old and new, by irony and parody, by multiculturalism, in which all cultural references are given equal authority or importance, regardless of quality or national origin. The grand narrative of class struggle offered by Marx’s old ideas was not current within postmodernity. Postmodern themes all emphasize the breakdown and destruction of the old narratives in favor of unending progress, which was characteristic of the aesthetics of the post-war era. So, presenting Marx as a curatorial theme at the Venice Biennale was a reactionary gesture, hoping to fulfill a conservative Marxist desire for a lost meta-narrative. Really the presence of Marx in the context of the Biennale was merely a pleasant nostalgia trip down memory lane, designed to please bourgeois old hippies who enjoy revisiting the past elite glory days of the last century when Marx and the avant-garde walked hand in hand before they abandoned their bohemian idealism for monied comfort.
