USA TODAY essays  |  reviews  |  view artists' work

Make it new

Gordon Burn, The Guardian

After the gaudy spree of the 1960s, American art foundered. Now critics are talking about a renaissance. Yet beneath the bright colours and glossy surfaces, Gordon Burn discovers a sadness at the heart of the latest generation of US artists

"Tomorrow's world - today!" The motto of the 1939 New York World's Fair is one that sustained Gotham as the cultural capital of the world throughout the second half of the 20th century.

USA Today, the title of Charles Saatchi's show of his latest, mint-fresh acquisitions from America at the Royal Academy, is, appropriately perhaps, not so ringing, less ebullient. It is the name of a mainstream newspaper. "It follows that the exhibition title makes me think of the war in Iraq," said one of the contributors, the Los Angeles-based sculptor Matthew Monahan. The war and the political environment it has created is a kind of viral link between the work of artists as different as Rodney McMillian, Dan Colen, Matthew Day Jackson and Josephine Meckseper.

"New York, the city that is always its own photograph, the living memento of my childish dream of escape, called to me," John Updike writes in Of the Farm, an early, little-read novel, "urged me away, into the car, down the road, along the highway, up the Turnpike."

New York called, and Updike heard it on the family farm in Shillington, Pennsylvania, much as contemporaries and near-contemporaries such as Jasper Johns (born in Augusta, Georgia), Robert Rauschenberg (Port Arthur, Texas), Ellsworth Kelly and James Rosenquist, along with Andy Warhol, Roy Lichtenstein, Frank Stella and Donald Judd, heard it in their small towns and provincial cities and came running.

Ignorant of, or ignoring, Marcel Duchamp's observation that "artists throughout history are like gamblers in Monte Carlo, and in the blind lottery some are picked out while others are ruined", they huddled together in slum neighbourhoods in lower Manhattan in the way that has since become traditional, with the rats and the cockroaches and the cracks in the wall. Willett Street under the Williamsburg Bridge was one such area, and it was there that Rauschenberg and Johns encouraged each other as they planned to take on the abstract expressionists and all their works. Rauschenberg once said that Willett Street was "the grimmest neighbourhood" he ever lived in. "It seemed frightening to be inside, and even more frightening to be outside."

This was all at a time - the mid-1950s to early 60s - when Jackson Pollock, Mark Rothko and Willem de Kooning had established New York's hegemony as the art capital of the world. America, partly as a result of the newness and vitality these artists represented, seemed young, powerful and capable of producing anything at will. "America embraced the new," Robert Hughes once noted, "because its enshrined social and technological myth was one of progress. With a little prodding, it was willing to embrace almost any 'radical' cultural change as therapeutic. Its cultural industry was announcing fresh, temporarily unnerving changes and telescoping the future into the present ... Manhattan was the capital of change - the Rome of instability."

In the 25 years up to 1970, the inven-tion of artists in America - their ability to "make it new" - seemed inexhaus-tible: abstract expressionism begat colour-field painting, which begat the proto-pop of Johns, which begat pop art proper, and an age in which commercial objects for the first time became works of art. This was in response to the market conditions that would ultimately create the post-industrial world. As Warhol was forever telling us, the strange thing about the 1960s was not that western art was becoming commercialised, but that western commerce was becoming so much more artistic.

So America was on a roll; it was the endless wave. And everybody - art impresarios and art stars, dealers, curators, critics, collectors - was delighted to ride it. But then, as the gaudy spree of the 1960s abated, something happened: young American artists started to prepare themselves for entry into the booming art industry by studying for degrees in fine art at university. Increasing numbers of them seemed to look on the practice of art as a perfectly viable profession, in which it was not unreasonable to expect a decent financial return. The rapid expansion of the art market - more and more galleries, more collectors, escalating prices, and the social rewards that went with being a recognised artist - attracted bright young men and women who might never have thought of becoming artists if they had been born 10 years earlier.

"A dry, academic smog pressed down on the art scene," the New Yorker writer Calvin Tomkins gloomily reported. "A great many of the college-trained young artists had been spoon-fed large doses of minimal and conceptual art in school, and they tended afterward to think in terms of an art reduced to its basic essentials of shape, line and colour, or else an art in which ideas took precedence over physical artefacts."

"Floor and drawer art", as the sculptor Richard Serra referred to the fashion for conceptual, documentary and installation work, failed to produce a major American artist in the 1970s. "If we had thought about it from the perspective of old car freaks," the American curator and critic Dave Hickey wrote, "we would have known and surely would have predicted that the General Motors of the art world - the museums and universities - would ultimately seek to alleviate their post-market status and control the means of production ... Within 10 years, the art world was on its way to becoming a transnational bureaucracy. Everybody had a job description and a résumé ... I was face to face with a generation of well-educated and expensively trained young artists whose extended tenure in art schools appended to the art world had totally divorced them from any social reality beyond it."

If Julian Schnabel hadn't come along when he did in the early 1980s, the market, ever ready to buy into the cult of the driven and angst-ridden artist, would have had to invent him. Wall Street was in full flood; the bull market had started its five-year run, which lasted from 1982-87; and art, in addition to the varieties of glamorous lifestyle feedback it offered, had become the smart place for futures traders and hedge-fund managers to put their money. Schnabel's paintings on horsehide and broken plates, which were priced at $2,000 apiece in his first show, had jumped to $40,000 apiece by his third. At the head of the queue was the bright young collector from England, the newly rich advertising executive Charles Saatchi.

Saatchi bought Schnabel in bulk, along with other big, deliberately crude, neo-expressionist canvases by Schnabel's American contemporaries David Salle and Eric Fischl, and their counterparts in Italy and Germany. The emergence of European painters such as Georg Baselitz, Sandro Chia and Francesco Clemente gave rise to a rash of speculative articles about the end of US chauvinism around this time. "Contemporary art is no longer a New York exclusive," Tomkins announced at the end of 1981. "Ever since abstract expressionist painting became the dominant international style, a great many people both here and abroad have seen this city as the primary source of advanced art ... The notion that nothing of interest could be happening anywhere else in the world has caused much irritation among European artists and dealers ... Now the wall of chauvinism, real or imagined, appears to be crumbling."

Nevertheless, when Saatchi opened his first private gallery in north London in the mid-1980s, the emphasis was squarely - with the single exception of the German Anselm Kiefer - on new work from America. Warhol, Judd, Cy Twombly and Carl Andre were among senior artists featured in the first shows from Saatchi's collection. New York Art Now, in the autumn and winter of 1987-88, brought together a group of young artists whose work had never been seen outside America up to that time. Peter Halley's cool Day-Glo paintings, Philip Taaffe's "appropriations" of the works of Barnet Newman and Bridget Riley, Robert Gober's creepy wax castings, Ashley Bickerton's logo-littered constructions and, pre-eminently, the former commodity broker Jeff Koons's pristine vacuum-cleaner and basketballs-floating-in-fishtank sculptures - all of these had an instant and profound effect on the thinking of Sarah Lucas, Damien Hirst and their fellow students at Goldsmiths College, who made repeated trips across London to see them. Saatchi's shows by Koons and the so-called "neo-geo" school were instrumental in firing up a generation of young British artists who, for the first time since the war, were able to crowd their New York contemporaries off the international stage.

"You dropped the ball," I remember a European dealer telling the young American painter Sean Landers around 1994. Landers stared into his drink. He didn't deny it. So what happened? And what, besides the art world's notorious impatience for innovation and appetite for the briefly new, has happened since George Bush's re-election in 2004 to cause the (mainly European) art journals to start talking about a "renaissance" in American art? Or to inspire major London galleries such as the Serpentine (whose Uncertain States of America is still running) and the Royal Academy to mount survey shows of artists who are still, outside the collecting elites, largely unheard-of in their own country?

Several artists in USA Today also had work in this year's Whitney Biennial, a show that was taking place, as its British-born co-curator Chrissie Iles admitted in the catalogue, "at a moment when world opinion of the United States is at its lowest ebb". The tendency towards "obfuscation, darkness, secrecy and the irrational", Iles added, "could also be said to reflect the mood in the larger world". Matthew Monahan, a participant in both shows and hotly collected by the Rubell family in Miami as well as Saatchi in this country, agreed that the Biennial had "a nightmarish feeling", but added that it also had "a pop/punk sensibility typical of US art".

This contradiction - if that's what it was - was addressed by the Whitney's director, Adam Weinberg: "For many Americans, such events [as the Iraq war and Hurricane Katrina] exist more as the crackle of background static than as a palpable presence ... This situation gives rise to at least two realities that discomfortingly coexist: one of anxiety, exasperation and despair; and another of exuberance, energy and wishful thinking."

There are two writers who nearly every one of the 40 artists in USA Today are sure to have read. One is Hickey, whose book Air Guitar, an exuberant and wide-ranging collection of his art-theoretical and autobiographical essays, has attracted a cult following since its publication in 1997. (Hickey used to be a rock writer, and an art dealer; he was in a band, was deeply embedded in 1960s underground culture, and is a long-time resident of, and persuasive proselytiser for, Las Vegas.)

The other is David Foster Wallace, whose 1,079-page novel Infinite Jest became an instant campus classic when it was published a decade ago. Around the time the book came out, Wallace was asked to describe how it felt to live in America, and this was his reply: "There's something particularly sad about it, something that doesn't have very much to do with physical circumstances, or the economy, or any of the stuff that gets talked about in the news. It's more like a stomach-level sadness. I see it in myself and my friends in different ways. It manifests itself as a kind of lostness. Whether it's unique to our generation I really don't know." Wallace made this observation some years before the events of September 2001 and the subsequent war on terror.

Writing about Infinite Jest in the introduction to the story collection The Burned Children of America - a kind of literary equivalent of USA Today - Zadie Smith also recognised that, post 9/11, "Underneath the professional smiles there is a sadness in [America] that is sunk so deep in the culture you can taste it in your morning Cheerios . . . You can be unsatisfied in America, or unfulfilled, you can be unrecognised, unappreciated, you can be unbalanced, unemotional, unnutritionally satisfied and un-numerically rewarded, you can be unrepresented and unspoken - but you cannot be unhappy ... And yet there remains this sadness ... Wallace identified it: many, many people followed him."

According to the catalogue, the works in USA Today make "a firm case for the claim that the US has regained the right to be considered at the heart of all that is exciting, innovative, subversive and questioning in art today". No doubt Dash Snow, Lara Schnitger, Kelley Walker and the other emergent artists in the show will have had any sadness mitigated, no matter how briefly, by being brought into the Saatchi collection and seeing their work displayed grandly at Burlington House. But they have read their Hickey and so they know the advice he offers vis-à-vis collectors and other art world "spectators" in Air Guitar: "They just love the winning side - the side with the chic building, the gaudy doctorates and the star-studded cast. They seek out spectacles whose value is confirmed by the normative blessing of institutions and corporations. In these venues, they derive sanctioned pleasure or virtue from an accredited source, and this makes them feel secure, more a part of things."

They will know, too, that Saatchi's great trophies of the Britart years, paraded at the Royal Academy in Sensation in 1997, had been offloaded at Tesco-like profit within only a year or two of the show moving on. Read the entire article here




  back to top  |  back to reviews

Copyright 2003-2006 © The Saatchi Gallery : London Contemporary Art Gallery : Site map