Lost in the Whitney Funhouse

THE WHITNEY in the spring is a grim faced place. A meagre garden decks its front, and the inside is all stark white surfaces--clean line meeting line. Quite the proper house for art, this ascetic place to go to look but not to touch. The spareness is calculated for hushed awe. Culture lovers tread softly through these rooms of the great and the dead. No spring romps through these solemn halls. For this is the showcase of the Tasteful.

Was it sacrilege then that I saw there in the spring? People pawing the ground in uncertainty, stealing fidgety glances at eachother seeking a clue as to how to react, and when caught, breaking out into a clutching sort of giggling? Now, not all were so unsure of themselves. Some, patrons, most probably, moved sure-footed, nodding their knowing appreciation like privileged insiders. But most everyone else was plainly lost. It was as if a huge culture gap lay between those established who "got it" and the philistines who did not.

On view was a 48-foot-long corridor made of wallboard and lit by a flourescent green light through which you could creep sideways; a black and white photograph of two messes of junk plunked on a studio floor; a large TV screen on which a pair of lips were painstakingly mouthing "lip syne" again and again; another TV screen with a man smearing lather all over his naked hairy chest; a color photograph of a pair of hands waxing the red plastic letters "HOT;" a rusted steel plate called "Dark"--the artist claimed to have written "dark" on its underside; a bunch of dirt, and so on.

I didn't trust any of it. Not me. Yes, we could have talked you and me about this whole shebang as the conceptual art it is named to be. About formal integrity and self-referentiality and art degree zero. And we could have had quite the jargon-full time of it. But there it was the merry month of May, and I couldn't see tuning in to all the fuss. Still, I just wonder whether anybody can say for sure anymore what is or is not a work of art.

*****

IT SEEMS that each new season hails a new style in art, as if the art connoisseurs had finally timed their pacesetting with the fashion designers in Paris. Art lurches from one peak of success to another (Pop, Happenings, Environmentalists, Conceptualists, Structuralists) so that you get seasick keeping up. Once, it took a century for an art to outdo itself, to reach that state of exaggeration from which a new style might explode. Now, you trade in art vocabularies like the diet faddist adjusting eating habits. It's enough to make anybody jumpy with anxiety. And anxiety is no good breeder of art lovers. But anxiety is what we've got. For all the difference it would have made the Whitney might have been empty.

The public, you see, was acting like its gullibility was being tested. People were like wary hustlers laying their ignorance on the line to be bullied. They had come looking for art. But they shied from admitting that art was what they found. Here is what would happen: you enter the exhibit and the first thing you see is a green flashing light. You automatically start to go in the direction it points, and then you realize with a foolish feeling gulp that this is the exhibit you came to see. You wonder if you have been made the butt of a fast one. And plenty were plainly wondering. It was as if a whole system of patterned responses had been planted in everybody's brain. One such response was pitched to a tone of ambiguity-- "very interesting" or "innovative" or "mmm..." --couched in a campy tone that denied any involvement with the art. It belonged uniformly to the slickers, with money, dressed in low-toned chic, St. Laurent Vietnamese army jackets, cool. You know the type--you saw them at the cocktail party in Diary of a Mad Housewife. Others, after following the green light to a dead end, acted rather miffed and wanted their money back--the squares as yet uneducated in the hows and whys of this latest language of appreciation. And then there were the climbers fidgeting in barely disguised boredom waiting for clues.

Now in fable of the emperor's clothes it was a child ignorant of the rules who hollered that he was naked. (Certainly the children had the biggest ball of all at the Whitney.) But you and I lack even rules. And it is a futile effort that searches for them. Ambiguity is all you will get out of this art scene. The artist is marketing wiseguyness (Warhol makes a six-hour movie of a man sleeping and distributes it as fast as his factories can manufacture it; Lichtenstein can't get off his punch line. "It seemed impossible to print something somebody wouldn't hang. Everybody was hanging everything"). The critic lacks an objective basis of taste; the artist refuses form, having already abandoned content; you get lost in the Whitney funhouse.

This traffic in ambiguity has been built into the art world as a whole style of relating, a style of casting doubt. This style is a slippery thing--you can't attack something that uses ambiguity as its Catch-22. The rejected artist was playing a practical joke; the successful artist affects ambivalent seriousness. Having been involved, you don't want to call it nonsense; having seen through the gag you don't want to call it art. Or say you don't find it funny, so you look for political allegory; but you find that far-fetched, so you search for farce, anything for security in meaning. But whether you finally take it seriously or not, you never hold the artist accountable for your choice. Your credibility has been subverted and sabotaged enough to obfuscate his intentions. And so the fraudulent is elevated, the truth debased, and the doubting boobocrats lack a sense of humor.

CERTAINLY there is nothing new about groundbreaking art being greeted with skepticism. The philistines met Gaugin's primitivism with exclamations of "Why, a child could do that!"; the Impressionists were laughed out of the Academie Francaise; Franz Kline's random slashings and Jackson Pollock's random drippings ran another gauntlet of disbelief before being established as art. And as the seventies' Goths buck before art ordered by telephone and manufactured in factories, before pictures of chalked-off earth sites and rocks wrapped in plastic, yet another avant garde rises to vindicate them. But it is an awfully shaky testimony they give. No, what is new is not skepticism among the non-intellectuals. What is new is the absence of skepticism in the place it has always flourished best, the Cultural Establishment. The conservatism that once took the form of protecting the established standards of "beauty" in art against the new and unrecognized, the radical invaders, has become a desperate acceptance of the new for newness' sake. It is the attitude that equates the outlandish with the serious in art.

These New Conservatives--ironically they are also known as the avant garde--cling for security in their belief to the example of Dada. But the kinship claimed is true only at its most superficial. Dada was maligned in its own time only to be later recognized as a serious struggling to escape exhausted convention and revitalize the relevance of art. Now, of course, it is quite respectably ensconced in the annals of art history, its profound commitment to art and its future gratefully acknowledged. But the homage paid to Dada by the New Conservatives has ignored its crucial legacy. For they have re-instated the Dadaist lack of principle in art as the status quo of the seventies. They have made a staple out of all that was revolutionary in Dada.

What Dada did was to release art from the burden of its exclusive past in order to find it everywhere--thought was relative, logic false, final truth non-existent, morality but a plague produced by the intelligence, art meaningless. Duchamp's bottle rack read "art is junk" and his urinal "art is a trick." Nothing was real or true except the individual pursuing his whim, the artist bestriding his Dada. Dada overturned any object, mocked it and displaced it as an experiment in apprehending it. Yet beneath the Dadaist irony lay a desperate protest. Dada was an act of rebellion against a world believed left in mad hands, a completely mad world. Dada was a labor of destruction and negation to liberate it.

And Dada wrought irrevocable change, a change that means all the difference for its latter day 'cousins.' Its nihilistic underside simply made impossible the trust in an objective basis for criticism. Nobody could with any certainty label art good or bad, much less differentiate between art and non-art. The confidence in having critical bearings at all was cruelly undermined.

BUT THE contemporary critical scene has yet to absorb such a blow. While Dada was a shameless exposure of all that has been considered "holy in art," it was propelled by a laughter going so deep that a topsy-turvy admiration set in. This admiration clapped for the funeral of the "holy in art" and substituted a new formula holiness--founded in' a 'mix of playfulness, curiosity, and contradiction. And so is bred the Dadaist caricatuue of the seventies.

The Dadaist de-definition cannot have taken root--for the Cultural Establishment is defending this for its life as the serious in art. And under this authority critics are again culling the straight and the good from the second rate sham in art; the Whitney still thrives. And so, if the status quo is to be preserved, it has to be. For the de-definition of art called for by the Dadaists threatens the very identity of art critics, curators and dealers, and the pride of "people with taste and discrimination." The art establishment, to survive, depends upon an orthodoxy that separates the phony from the real in art. And out of this need grows the new conservatism the insistence upon a standard where none any longer exists.

Duchamp's outspoken "since the tubes of paint used by artists are manufactured and ready-made, we must conclude that all the paintings in the world are ready-mades" was informed by a legitimate, felt purpose. He opposed Reality, ready-made, to art, Venus de Milo. And with the same stroke he sought to administer a purgative to a society riddled with lies for which he found a shameful counterpart in the Mona Lisa with a moustache. He generated an atmosphere of uncertainty intended to liberate the relevance of art. What has grown in the gap left by Dada's failed promise is not only the staunchness of the New Conservatives but also a dangerously pre-emptive sort of subjectivism in contemporary criticism. Here, the critic assumes that his job is to smell out the con. So what he likes he deems "real art," what he doesn't is "anti-art" or "non-art." But this means that when a certain critic goes against the grain of the general consensus and pronounces something "bad" already determined by the others to be "good," he is not only panning a specific work but he is broadcasting the fact that his colleagues have been hoodwinked, taken in by a fraud. For instance, Pauline Kael raves about Tango in Paris six months before the movie hits the country. Everybody spends six hot months panting to see the eroticism that shall change the face of cinema. No movie could live up to such a snowball of projected fantasy. So when it finally arrives and the inevitable letdown is assured, scads of critics jump on the anti-Kael bandwagon. And after a few months of their negativism, it has become radical to like the movie. By this time like or dislike has little, if anything, to do with the subject at hand.

The upshot is fear triggered in the bowels of the Cultural Establishment. And out of fear comes the wary sophisticated cool brought to the contemporary aesthetic experience--the cool so heavy with jargon-full appreciation, that self-consciously watches 'consciousness' react, that talks about 'experiencing' an art it knows not how to judge.

DOUBTLESS much of what was featured at the Whitney was undertaken in the spirit of passionate commitment to art and its future. But no one has any way of knowing that for sure. When Duchamp declared nothingness he sought to free art from the conventions and limitations that had burdened it for so long. He sought to dispell altogether the illusion of art. And if Duchamp's nihilistic assertions had been listened to the whole idea of art would long be abandoned. The idea, that is, of art as something separate from life roped off in a realm of its own, of art as responsible for bringing about a new existence through a revolution in consciousness, as something to be treasured while it mummifies in museums, as something that can accrue priceless value, or, for that matter, be bought and sold at all, and of the artist as a uniquely gifted individual. Instead the dominant assumptions about art would be that it has nothing to say, art is of no consequence, art is play, art is everywhere and anything that can be tampered with or fetishized, everybody is an artist. "Why," asks John Cage, "is a truck in a music school more musical than a truck passing by in the street?"

Cage's point is so logically descended from Dada, but it has been lost upon his public. However serious the aims of Cage and his colleagues (the Pop artists of the sixties, Happenings and Environmentalists) they were ignored as their art was readily assimilated by the public because of its novelty, because the new has come to mean the good in art.

And hand in hand with the apotheosis of the new in art came the elevation of the artist to the status of national hero, the rival of TV and movie stars as part of a culture boom that heralded American art as prestigious commodity for export. But the point of these artists was the lack of point.

Nevertheless, the Cultural Establishment persists in playing pigeon to an enemy art, an art that would subvert its reason for being. It welcomes the abuse applied to it under the name of art. It dictates old conditions for apprehending the new in art. And then, under a front of generous tolerance, it feeds its own preeminence. But what an empty, empty game it plays.