Stallabrass response

Contemporary Art. A Very Short Introduction.

By Julian Stallabrass. 

Oxford University Press 2006

Chapter 1. A Zone of Freedom?

Response by Eleanor MacFarlane. February 2012. 500 words.

Stallabrass makes an initial assumption which is a fissure of weakness throughout, and which betrays his fundamental lack of empathy for the psychological implications of art. He states that the purpose of art is freedom, and characterises art practice as a game of random free-association. Although he uses the word free as applied to both art and the financial markets, he applies it differently – the market is free in that it follows its own internal, complex and sophisticated rules, and yet, according to Stallabrass, art is free in that it follows no rules other than the airy whims of individual artists, unless it happens to be art which consciously engages in responding to the political implications of globalism.

Art is not free as Stallabrass insists. Art is all about associations and references. Its apparent freedom hails from the imaginative or artistic leaps which artists make in order to present ideas in fresh and unified ways. He is mistaken to think that art is formed from free ideas floating about in the air. He paraphrases, with shattering cynicism, self written statements by artists, and dismisses artists’ intent as “airy vehicles of thoughts and ideas”, failing to understand that art reinvents itself in innovative and arresting forms in order that associations will be triggered and reframed in the viewer.

Stallabrass exudes an attitude that art with philosophical or psychological intent, or as a disseminator of scientific or cultural concepts, is airy nonsense. He talks of art’s ambiguities as “insistence of the unknowability of art”, as if he sees through as ill-conceived art that is anything other than the political tool employed as he portrays. The spectrum in which Stallabrass contextualises current art practice is one of possibly multiple functions of art: a facet, where others may include the evolution of culture or the psyche of humanity.

Stallabrass reports the state of contemporary artistic debate solely as a reflexive commentary between politics, the market and globalism. That view assumes that the paradigm in which all artists, commentators, critics and gallerists think within is the same. Stallabrass further suggests that painting is near its end; yet new generations will still discover and reinvent it. Art always starts anew when a new hand picks up a paintbrush, and to postulate that the only contemporary art which is relevant is that which is famous and globally traded is absurd. In art, innovative forms do not render previous media redundant.

Art is undoubtedly a commodity, traded like everything else, and forming part of the mechanics of internationalism. Yet art is also experienced in and hails from the personal, and is multiplicitous.

Stallabrass is dismissive of art as a medium of self revelation or personal insight, but I refute that, and contend that art retains its therapeutic and individual validity. To make or understand art in the context Stallabrass offers is immobilising. An awareness of globalised influences is essential, and yet, imbalanced, bereft of psychological insight or spiritual intent - “airy vehicles”, art becomes any other void commodity.

15th March 2012