Art Papers
November - December, 1990

The Social Underpinnings of Art
by Claire Wolf Krantz

Widely changing ideas about art in the past decade are forcing many artists and critics to shift from focusing on art's formal and aesthetic or evaluative dimensions to its actual functioning within our society. Schooled in modes of categorical descriptions and their boundaries, we are accustomed initially to address new work with such orienting questions as who is the artist (and often, how important); what kind of art is it (and how significant); and what is the style or medium. These questions once operated as ways of sorting difficult visual and conceptual data in order to create meaning. Our conceptual framework was based on minimally understood assumptions about shared sociological and cultural perspectives, beliefs which are increasingly problematic in today's complex world. Such categorizations often degenerate into static means of naming and valorizing objects as embodiments of the artworld's favored styles, mediums, or authors. And though some of the most interesting current art and theoretical writing questions and attacks certain boundaries and concomitant sacred cows, such as artistic genius, these questions are still framed by boundaries that continue to focus our understanding and evaluation of art in a particular way. Thus, we cannot break out of the traps inherent in our very conceptions and descriptions about art, which lead to endless and repetitive discussions about the pros and cons of pluralism, or regionalism, or the presence or absence of an avant garde, sidetracking us from other, perhaps more interesting potentialities for art.

As an alternative focus, I confront new art with questions that center around what the art does, instead of what the art is. Of course, this "doing" is generated by the art's creators and receptors; art only exists within frameworks of interpretation. But the shift in interpretation, to words using verb forms rather than nouns, begins to illuminate the work from new positions within changing, interactive forces. This altered perspective, implying movement rather than stasis, leaves the discussions that sort, grade and rank work aside, and allow critics such as myself the freedom to explore other issues more broadly. (In some specialized fields, such as anthropology, social history, or Marxist criticism, such methods are used as a matter of course. I wish to broaden an awareness of a functionalist point of view so that it becomes understood as an aspect of all work.)

Now, new relationships can emerge among the critic, the artist, and the work. For instance, the artist's intention can be examined critically, as well as how those intentions are realized. This distinction is important, since artistic intentions are generally located beyond the pale of critical debate while their actual embodiment in a piece of art bears the whole focus of artistic appraisal. This way of examining only the artwork itself, rather than what the art says, is a problem originating in art's self definition in aesthetics. Although we no longer define art in terms of beauty, we do continue to understand it within the larger aesthetic framework that focuses on art's object hood and its ability to be categorically isolated and define. This separation between aesthetics and function is in itself a construction which may no longer be useful; therefore my shift in focus does not pretend to eliminate either aesthetics or categorical references from criticism. They will continue to be a part of our cultural vocabulary and should play a role in identifying data. But artwork must not be unreflectively conceived and understood within historically and culturally based and totalizing boundaries, which limits the artist's choices and the spectator's perceptions. As we begin to focus on issues such as the work's intentionality and contextualization, we can also foreground its unintended outcomes without stirring up old arguments and tensions among critic, artist, and public regarding the acceptability of these issues in the critical dialogue.

Shifts in focus imply multiple choice in time, rather than static hierarchies and exclusion from a nucleus of truth. To extend a theoretical model to one of practice, I will address a number of issues in different works of art from a functionally conceived point of view. First, I will briefly review some aspects of Daniel Buren, Richard Serra, and Anselm Kiefer's works. This overview of their works and its criticism, already familiar to an international audience and widely discussed from many points of view, can illustrate how a shift in viewpoint subtly, but fruitfully, changes all aspects of an artwork's existence. It is followed by a more detailed analysis of Chicago-based artists Robert Peters, Gerda Meyer Bernstein, Esther Parada, and Claire Prussian, whose works radically differ in approach and intentions, thus enabling me to demonstrate the flexibility of an analysis based on multiple functions rather than a hierarchy of categories or objecthood.

I will begin by discussing Daniel Buren's widely acclaimed "Deux Plaleaux", an installation constructed in the Cour d'honneur at the Palais Royale in Paris. Deux Plateaux is a 3,000 square meter public plaza partly surrounded by the Palais Royale and two double colonnades creating the Galerie d' Orleans, which separates the new Cour d'honneur from the Palace's garden. Using colored, vertical stripes to mark off and identify spaces, Buren has created a signature style to inscribe his presence on a place, and to transform it visually. These stripes have a double function: to effectively "stand for" Buren, and to create new understandings of designated sites by amplifying and illuminating them both structurally and symbolically.

To create this site, Buren charted a grid on which stand 260 gray and white striped marble and cement composite columns of different heights. Holes in the pavement covered with galvanized steel grates expose additional subterranean columns and an H-shaped structure with water flowing through it -- an underground fountain or river alluding to both natural and constructed waterways. References to social and architectural history is evidenced by the striped columns' placement in line with the colonnade that fronts the facade of the Palais and the Galerie d'Orleans. Thus, Buren's columns rhythmically echo and balance the structural and decorative elements of the buildings themselves as well as defining a space of their own. In addition, they refer to different functions because of their different heights: the tallest become architectural supports, while lower ones recall sculpture and furniture. Particularly in the short columns, references to use become use itself, becoming focal points for chatting groups or benches for lunching or resting visitors.

Although Buren's stripes are confrontational in their inability -- either through their configuration or color--to blend into the space as innocuous decoration, they are not destructive to the aesthetics of the courtyard. In his 1988 Artforum article, "Site Work," Buren says, "So what are we talking about, if not about painting, sculpture, architecture, or theater, since none of the territories proper to these domains can be seriously claimed? Each territory is lightly grazed, but just touched at its borders; at the same time, each territory keeps its distance from its neighbor, because the central concern is the site itself, the 'skin.' What the work DOES have to do with is what it does. It makes a place in a site and site in place. It is from site, in site, through site that the work takes place, places itself, poses itself, exposes itself."

In this work, Buren superbly realizes his desire to recreate himself within the site via his stripes, and to simultaneously act as instructor/shaman in illuminating the site's structure and function. In doing so, he not only amplifies the viewer's understanding of this and similar structures but, more importantly, he allows for an interactive process by providing open-ended structures for the public to gather in, to sit on, to look at, and to think about.

Anselm Kiefer presents an alternative example of a complex use of a signature style. In massive paintings, he combines his distinctive expressive paint handling with photography and other materials such as straw, lead, and sand to denote meaning and to link his work to a tradition of German expressionist painting. Unlike Buren's cool and cerebral work, individually conceived as relationships in specific places, Kiefer's highly emotional and expressive works are described as emanating from his own center to suggest transcendental meanings and feelings; they express a wide range of ambivalent ideas and emotions about his German heritage, particularly in relation to Germany's recent Fascist history as it pertains to its mythic and historical past. A general discussion of Kiefer's widely debated work reveals an accumulation of certain personal themes, media, materials, and meanings, juxtaposed and layered to suggest larger truths. Power packed with gestural painting, textured surfaces, muted colors, nuances, and suggested meanings, one Kiefer piece hanging alone is awe-inspiring; a roomful is overwhelming to the point of discomfort. But it is only in the aggregate through time and space that his work takes form, as an individual's expression within the social setting of contemporary Germany.

Loaded with signs and symbols that often vacillate between historical or mythical meanings and Nazi-imposed ones, it is impossible to separate often highly-charged viewer responses from the artist's understandings of them. For instance Kiefer's references to Nazi-built architecture invites multiple ambiguous readings of their meanings. Pastoral themes symbolize myths and events in a way that suggests his attraction to and fascination with Germany's fascist history rather than any clear indictment of it. Compositional devices emphasize a specific view of German history and mythology: Kiefer's heroes loom very large, his rooms massive, imposing, and resoundingly empty or full of symbols that are frightening in their implications. Repeated references to fire resist warming or life enhancing interpretations; Kiefer's fires glow with destruction, or illuminate pathways towards annihilation.

Kiefer's massive scale suggests attitudes of assertiveness and expansiveness, characteristics which have been likened to Germany's historical relationship with Europe, while interpersonally it suggests properties such as ambition, consumption, and domination. The work becomes an emblem of Kiefer himself, suggesting connections to his audience in which he is very large and the viewer small, subsuming the viewer's persona to his own.

In my opinion, arguments favoring or damning his work in terms of its neoexpressionist significance or its aesthetic quality miss the point entirely. What must be addressed is that space charged with his ambivalence toward aspects of German society that belong to the present as well as the past. His work must be shown, viewed and criticized as a living, breathing entity, operating within a societal dialogue, because its importance lies in what he says -- and doesn't say. As authentic testimony of one German man, and to the extend that he speaks for a segment of the German population, his message must bear careful attention-

The methods by which we address artwork, and the ultimate outcomes of those methods, are highlighted most dramatically in the tragedy surrounding the destruction of Richard Serra's Tilted Arc. This site specific sculpture was commissioned by the Federal government to be a permanent structure for a small square in the lower part of Manhattan. It became controversial because its essentially formalist, aesthetic goals confronted, dashed with, and subsumed those of the public for whom it supposedly was made. This massive sculpture was a tall, curved, and slightly angled wall running diagonally across a small plaza surrounded by tall buildings. Cutting the plaza in two and obscuring its occupants' vision across it, the wall controlled people's movements through the space and intensified their claustrophobic responses to the city's density. Wishing to demonstrate the hostile environment created by New York's tall buildings and small open areas, Serra paradoxically also wanted to compete successfully with its massive architecture. By forcing his audience to participate in a phenomenological encounter with the work, as they experienced its overpowering presence every time they entered the square, he underscored his attitude of himself in relationship to his viewer. Pitting himself as the individualistic, creative genius against the more collective and commercial aspects of architecture, and the generally unenlightened status of the public, this project aesthetically and functionally expressed his vision. Serra's understanding of the public sculpture is a didactic one, in which the artist demonstrates his conception of the truth to his audience, in contrast to Buren's more interactive conception of education, where the public can play a part in its definition and function.

Serra's sculpture elicited complaints by some of the site's regular users, who claimed that they already knew that city planning in New York is dehumanizing and that their rights to free use of public space were being violated. Public hearings were held in response to citizen pressure, which eventuated in the sculpture's removal. A public outcry highlighted complex issues regarding censorship and violations of freedom of expression, conflicting ideas about the uses of public spaces and public money, and less well-defined issues about the presence of uses of power.

This controversy exemplifies how methods of evaluation enter into every aspect of art. The consequences of conceiving public sculpture as an exclusively formal category, best solved by an art "star," led to the work's objectification and subsequent susceptibility to destruction. Moreover, the respect Serra elicits as an artist cannot override the ultimate judgment of each work in context. Largely because of his own unyielding aestheticism, Serra ultimately subverted his own program of enlarging the public's understanding of their responses to art. By not questioning Serra's assumptions for his work, the governmental body that commissioned it failed to effectively evaluate and publicize Serra's plans for this particular place, which were clear and submitted in good faith. The consequences of this failure ultimately resulted in a sculpture which may have been aesthetically sound, but dysfunctional for its community. Tragically, it inadvertently precipitated dangerous precedents for censorship and became a smokescreen that put all Americans' freedom of expression and power over their own work in jeopardy.

This tragedy is larger than Serra's personal one, and is emblematic of our need for imaginative ways to extend the way we conceptualize and talk about the arts. Bob Peters, Gerda Meyer Bernstein, Esther Parada, and Claire Prussian not only use widely different means to illuminate our societal and interpersonal practices, but they also attempt to expose their own complicity in these practices.

Bob Peters works as a kind of visual sociologist, using particular I formats, such as large-scale installations, books, or performances, to mimic and display social practices. He collaborates with a group of people to research a targeted subject, gathering objects such as portions of texts, items from everyday life, photographs, and audiotapes for display in different settings. Always exploring the personal operating within the social sphere, his accumulation of objects acts to illuminate or explore their subject.

Recent work, developed around the subject of money, focused on its existence in our society as a central organizing feature, affecting every aspect of our lives. "Money, The Most Destroyer of Form," was exhibited first in a storefront at purpose in the central part of Chicago. The building was painted, the display windows exhibited the visual materials, and sound from an audiotape of 28 observations about character, function and psychology of money played continuously and was projected out into the street. Here, the art intermingled directly with ordinary people passing by. The work was subsequently enlarged and displayed at public museums galleries in New York and Chicago. Peters' accumulation of objects and visual texts created dense layers of meaning and information, augmented by his audio tapes. The viewer could listen to part of the tape, walk around the room and look at objects, or read texts at will. The theme expanded in a random  fashion, as the viewer in a sense began to repeat the experience of the research team as they gathered their information from a variety of resources, synthesizing it into a repository of information, but never packaging it into a unified, directed whole.

Peters work successfully reflects his deeply held belief that art can play a variety of active roles in our society. In contrast to romantic picture of the artist as individual genius, he truly operates within a team, and gives credit to the participants. Peters' method of presentation also reflects his respect for his audience. Rather than leading the viewer in a sequential set of steps to a preordained solution, Peters presents them with an overwhelming amount of diverse material with no simple resolution or prescription for its use. Peters' theme is clearly stated, that money is part of the way we organize every aspect of our lives, but his presentation of how he comes to this conclusion allows the viewer to explore his materials in an open forum.

A brilliant alternative presentation of this research, Gold and Do Not Spoil, is a book made in 1988. He organizes materials such as popular, scientific and scholarly texts and pictures, games, photographs, vignettes, and aphorisms in a similar way as the installation to enhance our understanding of money's status in our lives. Its theme is how our Western culture creates itself and its perceptions about the "other" through its monetary operations; a situation in which money homogenizes, neutralizes, and quantifies difference. In his choice of subject matter, method of presentation, and positioning of himself, Peters' work provokes important new insights into the importance of questioning one's role as an individual as a part of a social system.

Whereas Peters' work tends to be highly verbal, cool, distancing and conceptual in his exploration of broad sociological issues, Gerda Meyer Bernstein directly confronts specific societal issues which relate to her own past eliciting strong, emotional responses from the viewer. Dealing with themes related to societal persecution and tragedy, and individuals who participate in these events, her work reflects a strong point of view and direct, almost brutal expression of it. Born in Nazi Germany and emigrating to the United States as a child, her memories of persecution, violence, fear, and loss sensitized her to such inhumanities and became the deeply felt core of her work. Her individual mixed media pieces as well as large-scale installations are shocking, rough, jarring, and often anti-aesthetic. They shake the complacency of those who distance themselves from these events to reveal that tragedy ultimately affects everyone; no one is guaranteed immunity.

Bernstein's "Army of the Disappeared", installed in various museums throughout Germany in 1987, and in NewYork's A.I.R. Gallery in 1989, foregrounded the specificity of the men, women, and children listed as missing in Nicaragua, Guatemala, and El Salvador. In this piece, Bernstein framed 90 black and white photographs of missing people in black frames and attached them to metal poles of various heights scattered upright in a bed of black slag. The date when the person disappeared was written on the back of each photograph, while in a corner of the installation was a pile of stones, evoking the image of graves. From a distance, the installation as a whole resembled a horrific, dead forest, in which many photographs were present but mute, much in the way newsreels convey facts. But as soon as one entered the work, crunching through slag and looking closely at the photography, the faces became real people, and this came to excruciating life as a mass tragedy of the destruction of human beings.

In her work, Bernstein is able to use the experience of her own past to personalize, and thus make meaningful, the horror of societal terrorism and genocide. Rather than expressing her feelings directly about her own past, she distances this source of emotion somewhat to make it available to others and thus awaken the understanding and conscience of the viewer. Unlike Kiefer's ambivalence in confronting the past, Bernstein's stance is clear, and her aim is less to exorcise her own memories than to be an agent in eradicating present-day tragedies. Bernstein's presentation of her material refers to the depersonalization of statistics and the media's treatment of the horrific events of the twentieth century, but it also forces us to confront each victim's individuality. In sharing her convictions about our mutual responsibility on a personal and societal level, she also reveals, on a deep emotional level, the horrendous outcome of our shirking those responsibilities.

In order to appreciate Bernstein's work, we must bracket our desire for aesthetic experiences to accept the appropriateness of her dramatic and harsh treatment of her subject matter. In contrast, Claire Prussian's paintings and drawings are small scale, understated, beautifully well-crafted narratives which explore general themes about women's everyday lives in American society. Like Kiefer, she uses her own experience and perceptions as paradigms for larger social issues -- in her case, as potent revelations of middle class relationships. But, different from Kiefer and more like Bernstein, her position in her drama is unambiguous. As a young woman, Prussian's works depicted women and children in the interiors of Chicago's apartment buildings, street scenes, playgrounds, and parks. Gradually she concentrated on the women themselves, as she began to mark their bodies with signs of their hidden, interior selves.            

During the 1980s she explored the subject of aging, using self portraits or portraits of her friends and neighbors to emphasize the woman within a milieu which acts to describe and define her: the blemished, aging body, and glittering accouterments which are used to cover aging's effects. One of the most searing aspects of her paintings is her evocation of eroticism in conjunction with aging bodies. In this society, sex is supposed to belong to the young, and Prussian's images of sexuality and aged nakedness evoke responses of distaste and avoidance which bring into sharp focus our societal taboos against both aging and women.

Prussian successfully confronts issues each of us must face in the process of living. Moreover, her work suggests that some of our negative responses to life processes are not intrapsychic, but connect to unhealthy aspects of our society. Critics have spoken about the beauty of her art, its subconscious sources and energy, and its use of particular techniques and media, but her strength lies in what she says, and how her message affects her viewers. Just as Bernstein's images imply that terrorism implicates all of us, Prussian's oeuvre suggests that cultural attitudes towards women's aging affects everyone in some way. The straightforward presentation of subject matter belies its emotional impact, causing us to examine our own responses to the work in order to understand it. Our complicity with societal malaise then becomes the basis for a dual response to the piece: an identification with the images coupled with a violent rejection of them. Here Prussian's goal of increased personal understanding of certain issues carries with it the possibility of social change, for any serious confrontation with her paintings must generate a reexamination of related personal attitudes and actions.

Didactic in intent, but never detached or preachy, Esther Parada's work talks about people, including herself, within a context of a larger society. Using photographs, printed texts, and computer technology, she combines formal inventiveness with subject matters which are sometimes intensely personal and sometimes highly political. Even the most personal of her images selfconsciously examine their context within a framework of time and place, while the most political mixes the context with the particulars. Focusing on specific contemporary social events, she intermingles photographs and texts about these individuals, places, and events to make them immediate and freshly seen, and thus to counteract the distancing effects of the media. Her political pieces center on American attitudes towards Latin America, and more recently, toward the United States' own Revolution, and how these attitudes shape our policies and actions at home and abroad. Her work speaks about different levels of experience, linking hers with those of other people, in ways that make them become accessible and compelling.

"The Monroe Doctrine: Theme and Variation" is a photocomposite using various photographs and texts which reveal U.S. attitudes towards Central and South America during the 19th and 20th centuries. Interwoven with maps of the continent are photographs from different time periods of American officers reviewing the Nicaraguan National Guard, with superimposed texts of quotations from American statesmen revealing the attitudes Parada wants to expose and reexamine in light of contemporary events. Her documentation and presentation of our country's actions are often widely different from our perceptions of ourselves and our nation and disquieting commentaries on how our press and leaders are sometimes complicit in misleading us.

Using more personal data, her "Past Recovery and Memory Warp" focus on time; measuring it, stopping it, and revealing its passage. Parada's memories of people in her family extend beyond the subjective to reveal the multiple layers which constitute the fife of any person. In Past Recovery, a 1920 family portrait becomes the matrix for numerous photos  of her family at different times and at different ages, revealing resemblances and differences in time and space. Instead of being isolated, the past is woven into the fabric of the present, to reaffirm and yet question her filtered experiences which become memories.

"Memory Warp" (198o) is based on a photograph of Parada's father, onto which are woven photographs of objects and texts that further enrich the variety of his life. These photographic traces of his possessions -- old pictures, business ledgers, sheet music and memorabilia from his own parents -- are densely layered, fragmented and variegated in focus, finally emerging as a complex commentary on the meaning of photography as it documents and reveals the residue of a life.

Parada's mixture of the personal and public becomes a larger statement about the interconnections between an individual and his or her society, thereby proposing that all attempts at separation are artificial and futile. Her multiple images and the variety of their sources reveals not only how truth is sometimes willfully distorted by our government and the media, or how difficult it is to ascertain the truth, but also how multiple layers of experience create multiple truths which can only be spoken of as an interweaving, a warp, as opposed to a single entity.

In discussing the above artists' works, my avoidance of pure formalistic analysis in favor of an operational one assumes that all art has function, even when unnoticed. Instead, I focus on how the piece's aesthetic and formal dimensions are used, both internally, to carry out the artist's intention, and externally, to discuss how the artwork actually affects the viewer. This emphasis places less importance on the signature of the artist than on what the artist has to say, and how it is said. Thus, my attention becomes specific to each piece, or group of works, as they interact in a particular context, and avoids the mistaken idea that everything that an artist does, and all of his or her ideas, are equally valuable or valid for all time. It undermines the myth of the artist as isolated, unquestioned genius, playing the equally problematic roles of starving prophet or Hollywood star. It seeks to end artists' marginalization, restoring their rightful place and validity in a living, changing society.
In this view, the idea of the personal also changes. I replace the stereotype of the artist, whose essential nature is revealed through a kind of alchemy (which combines an active touch and novelty) with the conviction that the personal lies in the artist's choice of subject matter, how that subject matter is handled, and the integration of personal choice and social context. This interactional analysis encourages moving from a passive to an active form of speech that energizes the artwork rather than naming it. Finally, it highlights the individual artist's interactions with ideas, materials, and social contexts, in which his or her personal qualities such as authenticity, conviction, flexibility, and toughness, play different roles in contributing to the work's quality, its effectiveness, and in the final analysis, its art.