Pavane for an Enfant Terrible
Insolent disruptors in art are going out of fashion. Will they make a comeback?
The image of the artist as a disruptor is inherent to the modern art project. It is hard to imagine how the avant-garde would have even taken place without artists pushing the boundaries of the status quo and performing daring acts that would change thinking around art. This daring attitude used to go much further than a simple intellectual or aesthetic gesture. In its revolutionary spirit, it could be thoughtful and poetic, but it could also be aggressive, often violent, and many times operatic—a combination of a performative gesture that can immediately capture the public attention and drive conversation.
The motivations behind these radical artists have ranged from the political to the need to break with a conservative and/or immovable status quo and its taboos, and their strategies have often been to make us uncomfortable and think harder about aspects of our lives that we tend to accept. For our contemporary era perhaps it was during the emergence of the Pop Art generation, when a very young Warhol, Lichtenstein and others appeared in the limelight before the TV cameras, when the association between youth, innovation and rebelliousness became common.
But after many decades of emerging (and predominantly male and white) artists playing the role of radical, irrepressible rebels in more and more cynical ways, rewarded by the art market, the generational changes and the exacerbated political and social climate of late provide a lens through which the young rebel artist now looks less like visionary revolutionaries and more like self-absorbed and sophomoric individuals.
As an art student, I was fascinated by the various enfant terribles around me. I even romanticized the image around this construct— literally going back to the likely artist who caused that very term to originate, Arthur Rimbaud, who I would read fervently, along with, of course, Jean Cocteau’s Les Enfant Terribles. I looked at older enfant terrible artists and also at my colleagues who embodied that spirit with admiration and not without certain jealousy, as I was a sheltered, clumsy, naïve teenager fairly incapable of violence and absolutely lacking any street smarts (I had a slightly older cousin who would fascinate me with his stories about fighting with street gangs, and even my brother always was much more pugilistic than me). Artistically, I saw how many male artists of both previous generations and also of my own made, or were making, art as delinquency acts, embracing their role of provocateurs, acting in ways seemingly detached from total emotion for conceptual purposes. They were works of confrontation meant to overthrow the status quo of art, but they were also works of sarcasm and irony, of self-serving righteousness, and self-protecting by the safe noncommittal position of saying things such as “I am only asking questions” (I will not mention any names).
While in the late 90s and early 2000s I worked with topics around ambiguity and often presented exhibitions and performances that played with truth, and while they occasionally annoyed a few people, these were mild post-modernist experiments à la Museum of Jurassic Technology, and in truth I could never bring myself to attempt very drastic works. Instead, I gravitated toward education as a medium. Working inside a museum and looking at institutional critique works both inspired me and annoyed me: these were fascinating works that essentially dehumanized those people like me who tried to do meaningful work within art institutions. I wanted instead to make constructive gestures and propose new models. This eagerness to build meaningful communities was often dismissed as corny, as Kumbaya-like gestures of togetherness, or as hippie naiveté. The term socially engaged art emerged.
And then, years later, we all started getting older. And then BLM and #MeToo happened. And we had a pandemic.
Even before those moments arrived, even before we lived through this period where inequities of race, class, gender and health have come to a head and become inescapable from the public discourse, even before all this, being an asshole was no longer a great approach for an artist. Those artists of my generation who depended on being insolent, juvenile and offensive and using the audience as objects to further their work, I suspect, secretly fell into a crisis. Their work from that period is no longer prominently displayed or supported. Museums internally debate the implications of showing work that may be construed as self-centered, misogynistic or racist, or which may have misanthropic overtones. What once appeared as sophisticated social commentary by serious art theorists now could be seen as plain psychopathology. Even works that are admired for their conceptual rigor would not be separated from the ethical standards of its maker. Further, critics started to observe that when an artist takes a destructive approach, say, in wanting to tear down institutions that represent structures of power in the neoliberal era it can instead have the opposite effect of dismantling the existing structures of support available for a given community without offering a replacement, which is ultimately a desired outcome of the right, particularly in the cultural sector.
Making such confrontational art at a time where our social fabric has been so severely tested feels completely out of place, and not much can be said in its defense. Neither, by the way, can also be said in defense of much of the historical art that we have always considered revolutionary. Suffice to do a re-reading of the Futurist manifesto to see its overt racism and glorification of violence. Museums are currently in a deep reckoning about how to deal with works that for long have been considered canonical and yet also carry this problematic baggage.
I want to be clear: it is fair and necessary to debate whether a line warrants to be crossed because of the urgency of a political or social moment, and we also need to live with the fact that disruption is inherent in a lot of important art making. Great art, if it is supposed to make us reflect, can sometimes take us to dark places. But if an artwork takes us to those places in a gratuitous manner, and we feel it is doing so just because the artists felt like doing so, it can make us wonder on whether there is any justification for its approach, or if it is just because of pure sadism or cruelty.
The fact that the spirit of arbitrarily confrontational art is so out of step with this new moment is perhaps a signal of the kinds of needs that we instinctively seek to satisfy today. At the very basic level, art during this fragile period has to function as escape, a form of healing, an opportunity to be in other realities, to think about something else. But for those of us who are professionals embedded in the practice, we understand that art has to be a tool of transformation to confront the broken world and help rectify it— be it by either offering new models of thought or action.
But this is only the present. Who knows— we might come to an idyllic moment where we don’t need art as a force of repair anymore. And maybe then those insufferable old children and their artworks might become cool again.