As part of the curatorial premise for Documenta 12 in 2007, curators Roger Buergel and Ruth Noack presented the question: “is modernity our new antiquity”?
For the hypothetical Documenta that I will never be invited to curate, I would ask something like: is Post-Minimalism the new folk art?
I understand that the comparison between contemporary art and folk art can seem ridiculous and even sacrilegious to some, primarily perhaps because today’s art is about the individual expression. However, isn’t contemporary art also a cultural language emerging from a community with its own material culture, its customary lore, its forms and rituals?
Perhaps the reason why this can be a difficult topic to discuss is because, contrary to what is sometimes assumed, art since the Post-war era has a yet unresolved problem with the popular arts. The main problem is that we can’t accept contemporary art using them un-ironically because the straightforward celebration of pure expressions of popular culture might seem to put us at risk to look unsophisticated or lacking of our ability to discern the everyday expression from a nuanced, critical discourse. Irony— from Duchamp going through Pop Art and still today— becomes a distancing mechanism to ostensibly offer a critical view on things like consumerism and mass culture.
Popular art usually enters into contemporary art museums in two indirect ways: one, in the work of an “outsider artist” that is recognized by others as meaningful to the artistic context of the period, such as the case of Rousseau for the Post-Impressionists, or Henry Darger and Martin Ramirez for the contemporary period. In a way these are “readymade artists” to be seen with a lens created by the aesthetic discourse of the time in course. The other way is when popular practices are integrated into the fabric of the work of a contemporary artist who engages aspects of their heritage as a political gesture of affirmation or reification of values—but in this case the craft enters into their conceptual language.
What is less discussed is how the patterns of transgression, rupture and yes, even critical detachment, can also become expected behaviors for an art community. In the past I have argued that the assigned social script of the artist is to be a disruptor, so in all their disruptiveness, the artist acts firmly within the prescribed social expectations of what an artist is supposed to do. And the act of making, in its incessant and repetitive cycles of art fairs and biennials, gradually diminishes any expectations of any truly revolutionary development, instead turning it into a transmission of set customs and beliefs from generation to generation.
In that sense, are we becoming traditional craftsmen of rebellious rituals?
Alejandro Diaz, Conceptual Folk, 2016. Acrylic, collage, buttons on canvas 20” x 16”
There was a time, sometime between the late 90s until fairly recently, when every art theory panel needed to include Michael Taussig. For reference (if by miracle you didn’t attend any of those panels) Taussig is a leading thinker on the field of anthropology, but one whose expertise in Walter Benjamin, Adorno, commodity fetishism, and more made him a much sought-after thinking to illuminate us on the relationship between contemporary art production and late capitalism or aspects of ritual in performance— so he could talk just about anything from Lygia Clark to Aernout Mik.
I wonder, 300 years from now, what that generation of Michael Taussigs and other anthropologists of the art world might say about us today— and if the temporal distance might confirm that which we can only barely elucidate within the fog of the present.
They might say that we had a problem in the way we detached the art practice from the social milieu where this said art practice developed and where it gained meaning. They might argue that the liberal impulse in contemporary art during this period struggled between its egalitarian and democratic philosophy and the undemocratic and un-egalitarian means by which it tried to articulate its arguments. They might argue that the spaces of free expression created during this period were in fact intentionally constrained sandboxes of thought for artists to play within the rules that were set out to them, and that anything produced outside of it would simply would not be acknowledged by the institutional or commercial tastemakers of the period. And that the artistic culture that emerged from these practices, while retaining its emphasis on authorship, slowly was diluted into a whole from which (albeit impossible for us to become aware of it) it is hard to distinguish the difference from one work to the next.
The answer to the question of what our art might look like in the future to others might lie in a small but mighty artist project that lasted for around 20 years in Little Italy.
Back in the early 90s, a place named Salon de Fleurus opened. It was a discreet environment in a studio apartment on Spring Street that functioned more or less as a recreation of Gertrude Stein’s apartment in Paris — the unofficial cradle of modern art, where Picassos, Cezannes and Braques hung next to each other, arguably for the first time. The salon included painted actual reproductions of those works intentionally in faded-out colors, as if they were plates from old exhibition catalogues.
Salon de Fleurus, NYC, 2012
With Edith Piaf playing in the background of a bygone-era parlor illuminated by low lights, visitation was only permitted at night in very small groups, word of the place was pretty much word of mouth, and the entire experience was overall enigmatic. A man, identified as “the doorman”, would welcome visitors to the salon. Inevitably a conversation would start, and when the topic would turn to the paintings on the walls, he would say that all those paintings were anonymous. Later on the doorman would elaborate on the notion that Modernism as a construct, seen in historical terms, doesn’t really belong to anyone anymore. In that sense, it was irrelevant whether he or anyone else had personally made all those paintings- the images belonged to posterity.
In a recent conversation with the doorman, he mentioned to me that he once had three visitors from the Netherlands. While two of them were sitting, having conversation with the doorman, the third visitor was walking around trying to figure out what this place is about. “And at some point he stooped and said: "I know, this is an ethnographic exhibition of modern art"!”
Salon de Fleurus might the the harbinger of what the art world will become one day: not a hierarchy of art topped by geniuses and masters, but a remote, exotic village composed from intriguing rituals as seen from the historical distance. Not a list of names, but a rather anonymous group of stories, traditions, and customs. Somehow, in that context, that collective fate of ours, that shared anonymity, feels comforting. I only hope that the anthropologists of the distant future will consider us, and our conceptual folkways, worth studying, and that they conclude that we produced something of value.
For now, as we prepare accept our fate, I often joke with my friend the artist Alejandro Diaz that we should consider launching a conceptual folk art fair.