Hoping For Baroque

by Michael Cavendish

A hundred and five years ago, someone said this to the art scholar Birge Harrison:

You Americans have one great advantage over all others. You have no traditions. You can look straight at nature out of your own eyes, while our [European] vision is clouded and obscured by the inheritance of a thousand years.” [n.i.]

And art in Europe had come glacially out of the age of raw icon and tribal craft, and through primitive painting, and then in flower in the Renaissances, and in dominance and gild in the Baroque phases, and into Romanticism, and so on.

Not fifty years after Birge Harrison’s conversation, American art exploded into a compressed Renaissance of its own, coincidental with the birth of Abstract Expressionism, a near cosmic singularity which then erupted into manifold subgenres of pure and semi- abstract painting, and eventually (but also rapidly) into all of contemporary art as practiced by Americans.

Sometime between 1968 and the 1990s the American AbEx Renaissance completed a circuit, and the hot and dangerous stars that it birthed cooled and took on the weight of posterity. Postmodern imagery and Pop were born. And minimalism, postminimalism, realism, performance, land, light and space, community practice, street, and Taschen-knows-how-many other cognizable subgenres of contemporary art practice were founded and exampled, with the best actualizations of the early movers receiving a canonization.

Not much more than another fifty years on, America now has exactly that inheritance of artistic tradition Harrison’s correspondent invoked as both lodestone and heritage. It took a hundred years instead of a thousand.

Now, American culture is being shaped by outside forces unrecognizable to the previous century. Our borders of influence and soft power have shrunk. We did not achieve the post-1989 state of world pacification and perpetual universal democracy that was glimpsed at the end of Soviet era and the Cold War. We changed as a country on September 11, 2001, and after, as the concept of ‘homeland,’ and its most concrete manifestation, the bomb sniffing Department of Homeland Security were invoked, almost overnight. We are, 15% into the Twenty-First Century, not remotely in resemblance to the post-war jet age America the Renaissance of American art and the birth of pure abstraction unfolded before our grandparents.

Taking a lesson from the confluences and divergences of European art and society over history, we intuit that we have changed and are changing, and that our American art is changing. The question is, how?

And a more pointed question is, with our post-war Renaissance behind us, is American culture and American art entering a Baroque phase, or is it merely going to assume a Mannerist profile, striving to keep audible some echo of the vast boom Americans ignited in art in the 1940s and 1950s.

Some start with a sense of what the Baroque was to the Renaissance in Europe. A favorite essay of mine that sets out a tangible example of the differences, and one that is conveniently neutral to painting and painters, is T.H. Fokker’s ‘The First Baroque Church in Rome,’ published in The Art Bulletin, vol. 15, no. 3, in 1933 (on JSTOR).

In the essay, which is architecture-historical, Fokker describes the building of a church in the mid-16th century that became known as, by happenstance and the judgment of history, ‘the first Baroque church built in Rome.’

What Fokker does is simply take the reader through how the church features were differently built in fact from a set of competing plans rendered in a Renaissance style, until, twenty pages later, what the Italian Baroque meant to the Italian Renaissance, what any Baroque phase may mean to any Renaissance phase of any segment of art, becomes grasped.

In Fokker’s illustration, the Baroque church achieves a complication, an impressivity, an individuality, a dogmatic nature both simple and sumptuous, a materialized rapidity, an aura producing a captivity, a solemn ascendancy, a subordination of surroundings to the focal, and an emphasis on volume.

Fokker’s Baroque sacrifices and leaves behind the symmetry, the restfulness, serenity, harmony, and the neutrality to spatial and volumetric constituents of a structure, that typified the Renaissance ideal.

Some know that between the Renaissance and the Baroque there interluded Mannerism, that attempt to outdo the Renaissance ideal by rendering art with a focus on perfectly executed components that, in an irony, gave the artworks an otherworldly, artificed cast.

America had its art Renaissance in ‘Act II’ of the Twentieth Century. As American Art navigates the Twenty-First, where are we likely headed?

Is it into Mannerism (which we might update to Formalism, a label of disappointment used recently by critics Jerry Saltz and Walter Robinson)? Or is American art, has American art been, heading into a Baroque phase?

My example of the sudden rise of the notion of America as a homeland, and not as the land of rootin’ tootin’, ever expanding, ever wandering frontierspeople, casts a vote for Baroque. But clues to Mannerism also abound.

In other art forms, cinema, for example, I can point to Mannerist offerings, all those new and bloodless and too-slick Star Wars prequels and Star Trek remakes. And in an opposing Baroque we have, just this summer, the film Guardians of the Galaxy, which authoritatively blends 1960s comic books and 1970s music with a 1980s plotline that maniacally and monolithically reframes American tropes from the Westerns and science fiction of the age of Eisenhower and Sinatra to focus on the imperatives of metaphorical Americans’ foibles.

It will seem to be one of the two, Mannerism or a Baroque, for America in the first half of the arrived century.

As a tectonic shift of art epoch, it won’t occur without tears and recriminations. Who, after all, would choose to let a Renaissance slip away? But they do leave, inexorably, Renaissances.

For my part, I am betting on Baroque, and fervently hoping for a realized, imperative art of a maturing, solidifying America that is like Fokker’s church; rapid, dogmatic, sumptuous, demanding, all of it.

[n.i.] Birge Harrison, ‘The Future of American Art,’ The North American Review, vol. 189, no. 638 (Jan. 1909).

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