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Obsolescence and the survival of the fittest Whatever one’s opinion of the tent lost in the Great Fire of Leyton, to exult in its destruction is a spiteful mistake. There should be no room for personal prejudice in deciding what merits preservation, especially with work still hot from the fabricator. We need to keep as many as possible of those pieces which, rightly or wrongly (and no one can yet be certain which), have been deemed the significant, original and infamous works of our era. I derive no pleasure from the loss of any artist’s work and those who do to the point of exhibiting their glee need to consider honestly how their own valuations of art have fluctuated during their lifetime. Tastes change. Pictures by Victorian narrative and history painters which in the 1880s and 1890s fetched the equivalent of millions in today’s cash, could have been had for sixpence a dozen in the decades after 1945 when the stock of Salon artists hit the deck. These same pictures are now once again widely admired with the best of them selling routinely in a competitive market for seven figures apiece. During the slump for 19th century art some regional galleries, Leeds for example, unloaded cheaply what they considered supernumerary pictures which would now cost many millions to replace. Personal likes and dislikes ought not to inform the judgements of those charged with the care of national collections. Regrettably, curatorial prejudice in favour of the fashionable is nowadays the sine qua non of preferment. That damn tent: let us remind ourselves of what it actually consisted. It was a five-foot-high blue igloo of the cheap and cheerful type which, in years gone by, were often the subject of ‘Special Reader Offers’ in the Observer – I know, I bought a similar one for forty quid. In bold red numerals along the outside rim was sewn ‘1963 – 1995’. Tracey Emin was born in Larkin’s annus mirabilis (more of which below) and made the tent for ‘Minky Manky’, an exhibition at South London Art Gallery in 1995. The front opening was drawn aside to reveal that the yellow dome and blue floor had been embroidered in various sizes, colours and typefaces with the 102 names of those with whom the artist could remember having shared her bed. Before we gasp with envy at her freewheeling sexual experience, the artist herself was quick to state that only 15 of these names were lovers, the remainder representing family, school friends, Michael Jacksons etc.. Not least because of her frank confessions of rampant promiscuity, Emin is often presented as somewhat of a trollop, but I wish here to defend the girl’s honour. If what she says is true, to have had only 15 lovers by the age of 32 during a period of unparalleled licentiousness is hardly evidence of harlotry. Some would consider that tally over the same period to be positively abstemious. What does Emin appear to have been saying about herself with this tent? She gets lonely at night? Likes a cuddle? Is not averse to a spot of hanky panky? It’s hard to say. For sure it was a piece of unusually presented autobiography and, as much as anything else, an impressive feat of memory. Names which doubtless mean specific weeks, years and cherished moments to her mean bugger all to us, although a couple of minor artists have dined out on having rode the Margate Express and, as a result, feature conspicuously in the tent. The title, Everyone I Have Ever Slept With, introduces sexual overtones which are possibly supported by being splashed across a womb-like interior exposed by parted flaps. But this is a red herring: she said so herself. The originality of the presentation, a tent, is undoubtedly its key claim upon our attention. As a vehicle for expression, however, it is an abysmal failure: a viewer new to the work wouldn’t have the faintest idea what it was supposed to be about. Like many artworks with no meaning of its own it has been the subject of fantastic speculation. Desperate commentators and reviewers made it mean whatever they fancied. Vitally, the tent was also friendly to mockery, a sitting duck of a target and the endless butt of weary jokes and cartoons, all of which attention conspired to make it one of the most discussed objects of the last ten years. As a piece of craft invested with long hours of personal labour the tent is an undoubted loss for the artist, but it is much less of a loss than is the case with, say, 50-year-old paintings by Patrick Heron, some of which also went up in smoke. Many photographs and hours of film document the tent and it is, we are constantly reminded, in the nature of ‘conceptual’ art that the physical object itself is only a part of the whole work and even then not necessarily the most important. Indeed, it has often been argued in The Jackdaw that in much conceptual art the exhibited object is an irrelevance because it adds nothing to written and spoken statements detailing what it’s all supposed to be about. As with so much State Art I don’t believe that first-hand acquaintance with Emin’s tent is essential. Heretical as it may sound, it is in my view not necessary to have seen it in order to discuss its merit. I’ve seen it on at least two occasions and I can’t remember enjoying the kind of epiphany in front of it which occurs before other works whose form, detail and colour only comes into vivid focus when seen in the flesh. It is not sensible, for example, to venture an opinion on any painting without having actually stood in front of it. I saw the tent during its first exhibition but have no recollection of it except that I ticked it off a mental list of things needing to be seen. Weave and texture of the material from which it was made were not expressively significant; lettering was perfunctory and capricious in style (I am reminded of this by photographs); spelling was characteristically haphazard; and colour was folksy-quilty decorative. Crucially for me, there was nothing in the action of actually looking at it which made the work’s meaning clearer than would have been equally apparent by seeing a photograph of it or reading a statement about it. The second time around I probably treated it as dismissively as I do many pieces in Tate Modern; that is, as works which I know from experience own nothing capable of rewarding even a second’s further attention. I have seen them once and, at most, this is all that’s required. Indeed, I would suggest that anyone who needs to see, say, Carl André’s bricks more than once must be verging on educationally sub-normal. Tate Modern is full of objects which, having been seen once, are as spent as a dead match. The tent fell into this category. With conceptual work the ‘art’ is said to reside in the idea, the object only acting as a catalyst, a helpful prod in the right direction. In my experience, except in the rarest cases, the object is, therefore, never an embodiment of the idea so much as a perfunctory, expendable and habitually superfluous illustration of it. Of course, this ‘superfluous illustration’ serves another critical function: it gives the artist something to sell. Without the objectification of their ‘concept’ the artist would, heaven forbid, have to go and get a job. In future surveys of trendy art in the 1990s it would have been desirable to have the tent itself but photographs and a paragraph of clear explanation will suit just as well. It is my belief that it was this general awareness of the merely documentary property of so much recent art which conditioned public indifference to the loss of the tent and of other works like it. I am very unimpressed by arguments that the tent could not be recreated because in truth it could, and without difficulty. Yes the new version would be slightly different to the first, but not so signally that most would notice. In a few years it could safely be passed off on the unsuspecting and otherwise indifferent as the original. Few would be any the wiser. And if they were they wouldn’t care. I am also unconvinced by arguments that if the second version were slightly different that it would mean something else. The problem with this speciousness is that it hadn’t meant anything in the first place. As there was no formal aesthetic dimension in the original, the second could barely be worse and might conceivably even turn out to be an improvement. Besides, many artworks from the 1970s onwards are to a large or small degree different each time they surface. Richard Long’s slate and chalk sculptures are never the same twice – not that it makes them any less boring. Some of David Nash’s ‘concepts’ have actually been growing for thirty years. Other artists’ works only exist as decayed vestiges of what was originally exhibited, from deflated balloons to mouldy and fermenting food. And if the progressively murky condition of his flaking shark – which is demonstrably now in the autumn of its death – is anything to go by, Damien Hirst will soon have to commission the catching of another one. Will it matter? Not in the least, because any dead shark will fit the bill in much the same way that, in another of Hirst’s works, the cow’s head on which flies feast is changed with each outing. Besides, weren’t the Britart generation supposed to be the vocal followers of grampappy Duchamp in their exposing of taboos, their loathing of tired convention and the tediously static, unchanging museum artifact? Indeed they were. They should, therefore, all have the courage of their original convictions, because in truth we don’t need all these works to survive in order only to clutter up a metropolis of warehouses. We get the point just as efficiently from photographs.
*
All this squares with one of the pervasive spirits of our day, that of the planned obsolescence of virtually everything. Nothing, not even art, is built to last. A change has occurred during the last generation which has seen obsolescence become accepted, and throwaway, fashionable art has played its part in the evolution of this new short-term ethos. Obsolescence used to be a dirty word. Those of us born before ca. 1955 took permanence for granted. Throughout my childhood and adolescence Manchester looked reassuringly the same from one decade to the next. Shops were in the same place, the same factory chimneys measured the same horizon, bus stops weren’t a moveable feast, my relatives lived and worked in the same places for the whole of their lives, the same clothes were bought from the same assistant in the same shop year after year, and even the pictures in the City Art Gallery were always reassuringly in the same spot they’d probably occupied since Isandlwana. Nobody ever moved house unless a result of scandal. Indeed, it was not abnormal for older relatives to die not only in the same house but in the same room in which they’d been born. Buildings were made to last and were bottom-heavy solid. Demolition, except courtesy of Messrs Heinkel and Dornier, was unheard of. “Then all at once the quarrel sank...” Perhaps, as Larkin implied, it was in 1963 that the new age began. At some point thereabouts a revolutionary liberation occurred – out went the old, solid and unhealthy and in came the new, flimsy and even more unhealthy. This happened nationwide as sturdy, century-old houses were designated slums and replaced by the concrete pipe-dreams of criminal architects which have themselves since been replaced by yet more jerry-built estates. Factories vanished, replaced by a service sector of non-jobs requiring daft hats. Roads were removed and widened. Trams were replaced by buses and then, once the error was realised, the tramlines were dug in again at bankrupting expence. New roads were cut through, old roads were redirected, then closed, then rerouted again and reopened even wider but with no turn-offs or spurs which ended in mid-air... The result in many cities was and is a permanent but ever-changing eyesore of half-completion. The view at the edge of today’s regional cities is one of a constant jigsaw of knocking down and putting up, of here today and gone tomorrow, all indicative of wilful short-sightedness and waste. Cities are now different each time one visits but still oddly familiar because they all look horridly alike. In this context of senseless flux and deliberate obsolescence a rootless approach to life and art and a disavowal of convention and rules is natural among younger generations for whom permanence is a hard enough word to spell let alone define. Many new buildings no longer even pretend to look permanent. Like the new bubble-wrapped Selfridges in Birmingham they are instantly recognisable, but in this same moment of recognition dawns also the certainty that just as the commodities they contain have currency for the shortest of ‘seasons’ so the building will be tolerated only until a new corporate or municipal identity is required. It is now taken for granted in many architectural briefs that in thirty years something else will be in the air. Permanence is no longer a price worth paying. This has all caused a seismic change in consciousness. The antipathy of older generations like mine to work of the sort recently characterised by critic Robert Hughes as “fast art”, can perhaps be explained by the climate of conservatism and frugality in which we were raised. Many of us will never get used to the idea of such reckless waste and the constant desire for change in the name of unconvincing ‘progress’. The curious anomaly in all of this is that museums and artists have not accepted that new criteria are required for this new age in which obsolescence reigns sublime. We need more realism. Should the State really be employing armies of conservators to devise expensive ways of permanently preserving perishable work, a block of rancid, postwar lard for example? Do we really need to see and smell the lard itself to get the point? Pedants will say yes but only because most of their jobs rely on the status quo. The Great Fire of Leyton has unwittingly done us a service, not for the sad destruction it has wrought but because it has forced us to confront the future. The fire has convinced me that almost the entirety of Britain’s fashionable conceptual art of the last thirty years could be photographed, filmed and logged and then stored comfortably on half-a-dozen CD-roms which might be circulated inexpensively to every gallery and school in the country. We could then enjoy the mother of all bonfires and start filling up our museums from scratch again. David Lee | ||||||
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