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After Shock
John Haberin New York City
Peter Halley and the Shock of the New
I am as suspicious of Expressionism as anyone, I suppose. It comes only naturally to a proper postmodern.
I distrust its conventional ideal of beauty as coming from the artist's soul. I hate its all but religious loathing of the flesh. Maybe it explains why I also dislike some of the raunchier, most publicized art today—and why I find protest against "shock art" so trite and offensive. The Modern looks for an antidote to all the Expressionist shouting, and it finds one in Peter Halley, but did he really find the cure? Is self-expression still possible, least of all in abstraction?
Escaping prison
In spirit, not to mention geography, those shrill installations in New York and London these days are far from central Europe. But then Modernism's shock has to keep changing its faces simply to exist. No wonder that, just weeks after Peter Halley, MoMA exhibits the art of Egon Schiele. Austrian Expressionism still has the power to shock. For now, though, the back room in the drawing galleries turns to an artist who can only fear and loathe Expressionism. Halley, a contemporary painter known for his cool abstractions, takes over the joint, for "New Concepts in Printmaking."
In the past Halley has filled block-like outlines with black, grey, and pale shades of yellow and pink. It looks like circuit diagrams for the simple-minded—or prison bars for the unwary. He applies his color mechanically but not flatly, at times with a thick, rubbery medium that makes the art even more industrial. Now he papers a room from floor to ceiling, and the one familiar bit comes across as a footnote to the artist and his working model. These walls include flowcharts about behavior modification and what I could easily call cartoon landscapes. I could, that is, at my peril.
Can such opposites in spirit get along, or are cartoons just how marketing controls the behavior of children? Is Halley softening up, or is his attack on fine art extending from grand old color-field painters to Keith Haring's followers. Can it challenge the subtle pleasures of geometric painters like Stephen Westfall today? A soft Halley amounts to a contradiction in terms. Yet Halley is still on the attack, even if one has to be enrolled in his legions to know. Along with his difficult prose, he provides textbook illustrations for postmodernist theory.
Critics these days often see art as less liberating than painters like to think, even in contemporary self-portraits. Museums have become giant corporate institutions with equally corporate sponsorship. Galleries are in business to make money. Both serve their purpose by categorizing artists and publics. In one famous theory dear to the heart of modern painters, they get to define art itself. The offended public should be jealous.
Critics have learned, too, from Michel Foucault, the philosopher and social critic. They often point to art's faith in the individual, but not as a sign of creativity and artistic freedom. Instead they connect an all-encompassing observer to the system of penal institutions and mental homes. Halley goes on from there in his own curious fashion, creating visual parallels between the color fields in abstract painting and, yes, prison cells. He sees parallels, too, in circuit diagrams and flowcharts.
Well, okay. I have to go now. But I found relief in the sheer extravaganza of Halley's installation. Painting and individualism have implications that not even he can control. Even as he contracts art to a prison, his artistic, unrealistic restrictions of actual circuitry show the limits of his own propaganda as art. It also sells short actual art from prison today.
The offence keeps changing
The broader public thinks of "shock art" and the trendy Brit pack as an offense against decency. A few Romantics instead see Expressionism as a gesture of creative rebellion. Thankfully, it is both, but it is also more. It is above all a creation of its time, of a collision between past and present. Before art can shock, there must be a series of shocks, each with its moment in art history. In the long run, the public can absorb anything.
In the Renaissance, artists were more than willing to offend. When art had the tough job of promoting a nation or a god, clearly someone out there had to suffer for it. Modernism offended, too, but the job had changed. The anger at Manet's nude Olympia meant the first true shocks in art. Manet shocked by asking what purposes art and its viewer can share, other than making art. And the protests grew with the first great performances of twentieth-century music and theater.
Before long, artists reflected on their art long enough to stop taking shock as merely inevitable. With Egon Schiele and others, it became personal. With works such as a urinal from Marcel Duchamp or Meret Oppenheim's fur-lined teacup, it became self-conscious. It tested the limits of art institutions and human understanding.
Once Jackson Pollock appeared in Life magazine, the meaning of shock in art was about to change once more. Now art had entered more than the museum. It had its fifteen minutes of fame, and it reached a culture calculated to deaden shock. In Andy Warhol's silkscreens, such as the automobile crashes and Warhol Shadows, deadening in response to death can have a poignancy and shock of its own.
Robert Rauschenberg changed things once again with his most famous image, a "combine painting" of a stuffed goat with an automobile tire round its neck. Before Andy Warhol, it looked ahead to a strange time after the poignancy is gone: it looked ahead to dead cows in the Royal Academy today. With it, Rauschenberg opened the trap of shock for its own sake, with no real consequences outside of art. With it, too, shock discovered the still-greater freedom of laughter, and the best art is still laughing.
Halley and Schiele share more than they think. They accept the burden of self-consciousness as they overlook its history. Their laughter is caught in their throat. Like Hamlet's "Denmark's a prison," Halley's analogies set out to reduce the world, but they remind one of art's power to unleash metaphor. If Schiele plays a part to achieve expression, Halley uses fictions to debunk artistic freedom. They are two sides of the same circuit board.
Peter Halley ran at The Museum of Modern Art through February 8, 1988. A related review catches up with an even larger Halley installation.