RBG’s Pendulum

On the structure of conservative counter-revolutions.

Emma Kunz (1892-1963), Untitled , c. 1938 (pencil and crayon on graph paper, H 801 mm W 802 mm.) Kunz used a silver pendulum with a jade point she believed was guided by energy fields to produce drawings like this one.

The late Supreme Court justice Ruth Bather Ginsburg often referred to American democracy as a pendulum, one which at times would swing in one direction (say, a progressive one) and then swing back in the opposite (a conservative backlash), but in her view, the pendulum’s movement incrementally (if slowly) led to progress.

I was reminded of this comment (and I will soon explain why) after reading Dean Kissick’s essay in the December issue of Harper’s, The Painted Protest, which has become a bit of a talk of the town for the artworld. Kissick critiques the way in which contemporary art has become entangled with political narratives to the detriment of key artistic values like mystery and emotional resonance. Kissick draws his title from Tom Wolfe’s famous 1975 book The Painted Word, which was in itself a critique of the art of the time, which in his view was dominated by arrogant and empty theory.

The art world’s dismissal of Kissick’s essay has been immediate and fairly unanimous. I do not wish to relitigate nor parse Kissick’s points, which have already been dealt with by others, such as Paddy Johnson in her recent podcast. What I will say is that most surprising to me about his essay was its reverential evoking of Wolfe, who for many of us would be the very last person to consult in regard to art theory. Wolfe had a knack for ridiculing others with his sharp wit and colorful prose, and some of his points about the poor ways in which the ideas of modern art are communicated to audiences are well taken, but his overall aesthetic views in that book were so amateur, misinformed and cantankerous (they made me cringe when I first read them years ago) that not only were they panned and ridiculed at the time when his book first came out but eventually faded into much deserved irrelevance, while the works he ceremoniously panned (e.g. by abex and minimalist artists) have only grown in importance.

The reason I suspect Kissick’s views have become quickly amplified is because they do externalize what was already in the minds of the public and, most importantly, some art professionals. In recent months I have routinely been in conversations where I have heard similar comments echoed in Kissick’s essay, sometimes by curators who complain that all this support of social justice and social practice has gone too far, and are eager to go back to more, shall we say, “aesthetically nuanced” times.

And here is where Ginsburg’s pendulum metaphor might be useful. This critique of the latest resurgence of identity politics in art could be seen as only part of a cycle of oscillations that must be understood both culturally and critically. So here is a bit of a subjective summary of how this has been so over the last three decades.

I first witnessed the cultural pendulum swing in the early 90s, at the beginning of my museum career and at the peak of the culture wars. The then called Mexican Fine Arts Museum in the Pilsen neighborhood of Chicago where I worked, was a very young institution with the mission to spread the knowledge of Mexican art and culture. The museum grew very rapidly during those times, partially thanks to progressive funding initiatives at the city and state level, and indirectly though the impact of the Empowerment Zone program of the Clinton administration, which was designed to revitalize economically distressed areas of the city. The museum primarily served the Mexican community, but we had large groups of visitors especially for their annual blockbuster Day of the Dead exhibition. What I was very aware about was of how the anti-colonialist rhetoric that we were putting out in our education materials and publications, was often received in silence by white audiences, who were clearly too afraid to say anything, which made me wonder at the time how they were (or not) assimilating it. In the next art institutions I worked at, it was clear that the (mostly white) curators were not on board with, nor really interested in, multiculturalism, but instead in what was then called “high-modernism”.

In terms of Mexican art internationally, the early 90s had a very interesting shift from Neo-Mexicanismo (a form of late Pop Art that used folk and religious iconography, like in the works of Julio Galán and Rocío Maldonado) to the embrace of global post-conceptualism, of which the main figure to emerge was Gabriel Orozco and which was enthusiastically embraced by the big museums and biennials, happy to have artists from diverse geographies that nonetheless spoke in that visual language.

One thing I quickly learned about those pendulum movements: solely using the political views of an artist as a measure of the artistic quality of their work is not a very helpful strategy. Certainly, there are many underwhelming works that are inspired on identity and social issues, but there are also equally terrible non-political works. Because of that fact, the justification for a pendulum swing depends then on citing those worst works that are associated with the politics of the movement one is criticizing, which in turn helps discard them in bulk.

The pendulum swung back again around decade later, this time with the disenchantment of global art and its commodification by the art market. To counter the perceived spuriousness and the international homogenization so common to biennials everywhere, but also because of the milquetoast, merely representational approach in art around societal problems, artists wanted instead to create concrete, real experiences and political actions in local contexts: this gave rise to socially engaged art. That lasted also about a decade, with its expiration date being March 10, 2013, the day where Randy Kennedy published an article that pointed at the existence of Social Practice in the New York Times (with interviews of many of us), bringing it to the mainstream. Kennedy’s article was not critical of social practice, but rather a reportage on the phenomenon. What struck me at the time was not the article in itself, but the many negative comments (not visible on the article available online anymore, apparently) by people who thought it was bullshit art, or art that was supported in detriment to more conventional, yet more visually compelling, art forms.

The next pendulum swing toward identity politics in the US has been much more short-lived, roughly starting in the late 2010s with the emergence of the #MeToo and Black Lives Matter movements, now countered by the return of Republican rule, which already promises to impact culture in at least two significant ways. One is by an expansive application of H.R. 9495, known as the Stop Terror-Financing and Tax Penalties on American Hostages Act, which threatens to eliminate the non-profit status of some organizations who “support terrorism”, but which could theoretically be applied to any art museum who, say, mounts an exhibition that denounces or criticizes (or is deemed to denounce or criticize) the US government. The second, even more pernicious, is the self-censorship that is sure to follow, and which in some ways will be rationalized in the grounds of The Painted Protest — that is, the view that art concerned with social justice issues is simply too shrill and superficial and not “nuanced” or “aesthetic” enough, which in turn will give intellectual justification to museum directors and curators to produce a more conservative exhibition program.

There are two ways to understand the cultural pendulum shift. One, perhaps more superficial, lies in considering the mere whims of artistic fashion. I remember Vito Acconci remark once in conversation (somewhat jokingly) that the art world only remembered (or “rediscovered”) him every 10 years or so, meaning that he would get many exhibition invitations, gain prominence, then recede into the background and then after a decade or so would become fashionable again, only to recede once more. Which might be, to an extent, a way to understand how certain trends and ideas gain or lose traction both in academia and the market, like in a permanent rinse and wash cycle.

But perhaps the more useful way to understand these shifts lies in examining the delicate interplay between art and the political zeitgeist.

Three of the primary elements of Thomas Kuhn’s theory in The Structure of Scientific Revolutions were the notion of paradigm shift, incommensurability and crisis— meaning that a previous order would be governed by a certain paradigm that can’t be placed in competition with another because it is rooted on its own assumptions and methods. Only in moments of crisis can new paradigms emerge. This is a more pertinent analogy in my view because, as the Notorious RBG used to point out, pendulum swings do help to achieve incremental progress. And while the notion of progress in art is not like the one in science, art does unfold in a forward-moving direction as a dialogue where arguments are developed, won or lost, and the winning arguments then become the basis for future arguments.

We are about to experience a forceful, regressive pendulum swing— one which will likely be felt in every aspect of public life, with art and culture being one of them. In that battle we are about to undertake it might be comforting to consider this historical rhythm and withstand that regressive backlash with the confidence that the pendulum, sooner or later, will swing back.