In Our Time - The Avant Garde's Decline and Fall in the 20th Century

Episode Date: February 25, 1999

Melvyn Bragg examines the social and aesthetic impact of the Avant Garde and discusses whether it has failed in making painting relevant in the 20th century.Avant-garde is in the dictionary as 'anything that is in the forefront of new developments in their media'. Jackson Pollack in the 1960s was seen as one of the leaders of Avant Garde painting. But for the Marxist historian Eric Hobsbawm, Jackson Pollack is merely representative of the uncertainty which has plagued the Avant Garde visual arts movements in the twentieth century, and which has led to paintings' ultimate demise and lack of relevance in the modern age. With Professor Eric Hobsbawm, eminent historian and author of Behind The Times: The Decline and Fall of the Twentieth Century Avant-Gardes; Frances Morris, specialist in contemporary art and Art Programme Curator for the Tate Gallery of Modern Art.

This BBC podcast is supported by ads outside the UK. Thanks for downloading the In Our Time podcast. For more details about In Our Time and for our terms of use, please go to BBC.co.com.uk forward slash radio 4. I hope you enjoy the programme. Hello, next month sees the opening of one of the Tate Gallery's most ambitious retrospectives, Jackson Pollock. In the 50s, he was seen as one of the leaders of avant-garde painting.

Words like wild, bomb and barbaric were used to describe the man and his giant abstract canvases. But for the Marxist historian Eric Hobbesbaum, Pollock is merely representative of the uncertainty, which has plagued the visual arts in the 20th century, and has led to paintings ultimate demise. He applauds instead, and I quote, advertisement in the movies,

which converted the masses to daring innovations in visual perception, which left the revolutionaries of the easel far behind. Professor Eric Hobbsbom's claims about the modern age outlined in his latest book a monograph entitled, Behind the Times, the decline and fall of the 20th century avant-gards. One of Britain's most eminent historians, he's been a leading figure in the British left for over 40 years.

Joining us is Francis Morris, program curator for the Tate Gallery of Modern Art, which opens at Bankside in the year 2000. She is a specialist in contemporary art. She co-created the controversial exhibition, Rights of Passage, Art for the end of the century at the Tate, and she champions new work by many contemporary artists. Eric Hobson, can I start?

With the first couple of sentences of your lecture, you say, the fundamental assumption behind the various movements of the avant-garde in the arts which dominate the past century was that relations between art and society had changed fundamentally. That old ways of looking at the world were inadequate and new ways must be found. This assumption was correct. Can you tell us why you think that assumption is correct? Largely, it seems to me, because the world in which we live in, which is determined by enormous changes in technology,

by enormous changes in industrialization and in the consequence of industrialization, really produces a number of both experiences and realities which simply cannot be adequately expressed in the old idiom unless that idiom is suitable to expressing something, of the 20th century type. You contend that the visual arts, particularly, you concentrate your lecture on the visual arts.

You say that they have failed in our century as an avant-garde. And one of the things you say is that Picasso's Guernica is incomparably more impressive as art, but speaking technically, Selznick's gone with the wind is a more revolutionary work. Now, could you just tell the listeners a bit more about that? Yes, I think that's quite easy. I mean, cubism, for one thing.

tried to present a new way of seeing reality, seeing it in a more complex way, a good deal of it, seems to me historically the avant-garde, has been attempts to see reality in a more complex way, since basically the simple way of seeing reality, namely representational art, was taken over increasingly by photography and other things of this kind. Now, in fact, film has taught us to see a... reality as it were in simultaneously in different dimensions, in different sizes, to see all the way around and way in which the best, the greatest of the cubist or similar paintings,

haven't. They merely tried. I would slightly take issue with that. I mean, I think there is, I'm very concerned about this notion of comparing Garma of the Wind and Gurneika in terms of using a term like revolutionary. I mean, Gernica, a painting that formerly comes out of cubism, was a work that Picasso made after he'd been commissioned by the Spanish Republican government in exile to be shown at the Republican Pavilion in the 1937 Paris exhibition, an exhibition that you have written of and you have no doubt been there too.

A work of fine art by an artist whose own career was at the radical end of a trajectory, modernism. Now what's extraordinary and revolutionary it seems to me about that painting is to take very radical visual means and marry them both with the sense of the political, a response to the destruction of Gurneika using

for the first time Blitzkrieg techniques but also to his own personal history as a Spanish artist and the iconography of women both relates to his mother his younger daughter but also to those kind of popular front images that were seen in Paris

coming out of the Republican, an anarchist tradition of protest, which often used... I mean, you're giving us a very long breakdown on Gernico, which I think a lot of the listeners, which is very, very interesting. But the question is, it puts a very good question, is, is the cinema not more revolutionary than painting this century? I mean, that's the question. It's a good question, and I think it deserves an answer.

I think it's more popular. I think it's more popular. It's evidently more popular. And it's also more revolutionary. You might argue that the radicalism, revolutionary quality of that painting is couched in terms of the ivory tower of the institution of art, but nevertheless, technique or technology apart, I think it made a very radical statement. No, what I'm saying is, it seems to me, that films, photography and modern technology

has taught us to see things in a different way. It has broadened the way in which we perceive reality, including the reality of art, whereas the people that set out to do this by the traditional methods of what used to be called framework and pedestal art, haven't. Let me ask the question.

I think that's a good point. The fact is that film is a new art, let's say for this century, give or take 10 or 20 years, it doesn't matter very much. And it has radicalized not only the way we look at things, literally the way we look at things,

because we now look at things and speed, but it's radicalized the number of people who can look at things with cutting and the plaiting of music and vision together the way we feel while we're looking at things. And so it goes on. And I think that Eric Hobbsbom's saying that he expresses it as you expect extremely carefully that Gernica is incompetent more impressive as art, although that could be challenged as well. But something like Gone With the Wind, or the Disney animations are in a straight sense more revolutionary. Do they move people? I mean, I think, you know, you're talking about seeing and perception. Don't disparage mass audiences. Millions and millions of people were moved by Gone with the Wind and still are. Some to laughter, it has to be said, but a great number to sort of tears and they feel very moved. Ordinary people who visited Goernica when it was on show in London, I think in 1939, the White Chapel Art Gallery,

as part of the National Committee of Spanish Relief, were moved and left their boots as well as their donations. I'm sure that's true. And a lot of people who saw Gone With the Wind were very much. very moved by the plight and the way the black people in Gone with the Wind were represented. You can play this game forever. There isn't one thing. It isn't sort of who was more moved and how many were more moved. The fact is what are we talking about, the avant-garde? What Hobbes-Bohm is saying is in the visual arts, the avant-garde, really ran out of steam

because it was overtaken by the cinema and photography. And a lot of artists themselves, look at Jackson Pollock, is coming into the take quite soon. Pollock himself said, I've got to paint about feelings because photography is taken over representation. Now, can you just develop that a little, Eric Hobsburn, and then? Well, that is in some sense of first challenge, and that's a challenge which the avant-garde really tried to meet, in my view, from the 1880s on, perhaps even earlier. It seemed to me, however, that initially photography took over the obvious function

of the representation of, you know, likeness. initially however it seemed to me the avant-garde managed to save itself by not moving too far away from the basic ideas of representation, the basic techniques of representation, by merely choosing to concentrate on those things which photography couldn't do so well. For instance, colour, which it still can't do very well, and emotion, expressing emotions. and it seems to me that the early avant-garde, say the late 19th century avant-gards,

were actually broadened the scope of the arts and consequently probably became more popular than any other form of visual art that we know. And copied a lot from photography, of course. And they copied a lot of lot from photography, and they also in sense try to compete with it. So in a sense, if you like, Vanhoch and those people are probably have more mass support insofar as visual arts have mass support than any other form of painting.

But for reasons which I can't really explain at some stage in the early 20th century, the visual arts abandoned the representational thing. And once they did so, it seemed to me, they narrowed their vocabulary, they narrowed the language, they narrowed what they could say. There are two points here, Francis. Can we address these one at a time? First of all, do you think that Jackson Pollock to take Jackson Pollock? Do you think Jackson Pollock was right and then feeding it back, as Eric Hobswom did, to the end of the 19th century?

Do you think that that was a crucial question for painters which they made a decision about, not they didn't sit in a room, but that photography particularly, cinematator, had taken over representation and therefore they had to move away from it. That's the first thing. Do you think he's right to know? I think photography had a very profound impact on the development of fine art and in particular in encouraging artists and subsequent generations of artists to find new ways of making relevant art, finding new aspects of the world to address.

And of course, representation, depiction, mimicists haven't gone away, but that they have shifted their ground from bringing the central, obsessional interest in painting and sculpture. So that notion of content has shifted, what is the content of a painting if photography has removed the imperative to describe? But once it's moved away from that, the second part, as you were hearing from Hobbesman's thesis,

is why did it seem to lose its way, as he suggests, or more or less completely? I'm not sure it lost its way, but I think there is a line through the 20th century, and it's a line that has been described as modernism, and it was codified in the 1960s around the time of, Pollock's Hayday, and that was a line that saw art as reflecting ever more deeply on itself. And there's a notion within that trajectory that the endpoint is the autonomous work of art

that has no other parameters outside its own surface, its own materiality. Now, it's a line that I wouldn't argue as one that's entirely straightforward. And I think there is a tendency in your very fascinating discussion of avant-garde to see all avant-gards as ultimately aiming for the same thing. But there is this line, and against it are the moments of rupture, moments that you describe as anti-art, but that are, for example, with Dada and surrealism, that in fact contest that, as you say, narrowing of the formal imperative.

In the 60s, I think it is fair to say, as it's said in this lecture, that broadly speaking, concept, What someone who declared that they were an artist made, did or even said became a work of art. And that was it. And we see that increasing in pace, accelerating to the president. And the idea of, I say that this bare electric light bulb swinging from the ceiling is a work of art. I'm not trying to be erroneical, but I think it happens. You're simplifying conceptual art.

I'm trying to give an example. I'm trying to give an example on a program which doesn't have any, we can't reach out for illustrations. I'm not simply, I'm giving an example. And I've followed this all my life as you have. But I think the argument here is a very good argument that Hobbes-Bom is 24 and has to be addressed. I don't know whether we're really quite getting to it. If it leaves the thing, visual arts,

that it has been cemented to or stapled to for many, many hundreds of years, where is it going then? And I think that has to be answered. Could I actually add something to it? Because I'm making another case, too, you know? merely that it's become, as it were, technologically obsolete, and therefore had to find something else and didn't quite know how to.

What I'm also saying is that visual art, unlike some of the other avant-garde arts or other arts, suffers from a specific problem, named that it never managed to adjust itself to reproduction. It continues, in the most primitive way, to produce one-off objects, which are sold for a high price, which lose their value, as it were, if they are proved to be fake, whereas all the other arts have, in one way another, adjusted themselves to the fact that in the 20th century, what we have to do is to produce repeatable performances or repeatable experiences. Increasingly, contemporary artists are doing precisely

that, and they may have taken some decades to break away from the notion of an aura invested in a unique object. And artists are now taking on strategies from television and from advertising, from other media and from performance, precisely in order to create. In what ways Damien House, for instance, are becoming reproducible in the sense of the theatre play is reproducible, a film is reproducible, a play in the text, a book is reproducible. A novel, yes. In what way? Almost all video artists are making art that... Yes, Julian Waring.

Bill Viola, where the experience of the work of art is about an encounter between the person and a multiple. So what's unique about it is that encounter, the uniqueness is no longer vested in the work of art. And where this comes from, it's very interesting. One of the most difficult areas of art in the 20th century for people to grasp, an area that I find difficulty is with minimalist sculpture.

and the first generation of minimalist sculptures who adopted industrial materials, very abstract, very, you know, very like the light boxes in this room. What that signalled was a notion that the hand of the artist was no longer the most important thing. What was the most important thing was the setting of those objects in a space with a viewer.

That has caused the general public a lot of problems there and the general intelligent public that the hand of the artist is no longer there. Now, you may be bored with this argument, Francis, but it is... People have often... For many, many hundreds of people have looked at works of art, and one of the things they've said,

that is very well done. In a hundred years, I couldn't do that. Now, that is now... is now absented itself, to a great extent. I don't think what that development has done, I don't think it signified the death of painting, but what it has done is massively extended the range of, to put it very simply, options for an artist.

And I don't say that in a casual or in a cynical way, but artists are able to co-opt techniques, procedures, content, from a very broad field. Now, if you come to the Tate Gallery, and I go into the galleries on a daily basis, we have a very large audience, and it's quite young. It's in the early 20s to 30s. I know it's packed.

You can never see the paintings, no right going. But those people don't have a problem. with what you might call installation or conceptual art? No, the question isn't whether they have a problem with it. The question is whether, in fact, an installation is something which is intended to be sold as a one-off piece so that, as it were, if a literal copy is made of that installation, the value of that particular, the original, diminishes.

Is there an art market? Why is there an art market? Why are there museums for pictures and not for books or for works of literature? Because works of literature are not the kind of one-off places which have to be seen. Musicians, writers and others have solved the problem of their income from repeatable objects by the device of a royalty. Every time a book is sold or a performance is made or recorded, you get a little bit.

Artists have failed to do so, even though at present the European Union and the others are trying desperately to find an equivalent way by saying every time a new picture is sold at a high price, the original artist should get a little bit of it. But this is an act of despair to try and save the one-off type of creation of unique objects in a society which is no longer geared to it.

Well, I mean, I'm not quite sure what you're saying because I would argue that contemporary artists response to both the market and to the stranglehold of the market in relation to unique to work, artists are trying to break through that stranglehold precisely by working in ways that deal with reproduction, that deal with mass audiences,

that deal with television. And there is a generation of artists now who are working in that much, wider field. They're working on the internet. They're working in movies. They work as artists, but they are co-opting procedures and techniques from different media. Now, the history of art and the market for those unique works of a modernist avant-garde is a very resistant one, and it's very much bound up with the institution of the art world and the museum. And one of the things that I'm concerned with at the Tate Gallery is finding ways of operating in a gap between

that market and the museum. And one of the things, therefore, we're doing, for example, is finding funding whereby we can bypass a market which is about creating a work of art and selling it to a collector. We're enabling things to happen. But you see, that's my point, that there is no future. There's obviously always going to be a scope, let us say, in haute couture, for a single one-off dress, which will be worn by the wife or girlfriend of the billion. and nobody else will have a dress like that. But as we know, that that is not the future of Old Couture. Can I come to the figure of Andy Warhol,

who seems to me to be a very important figure in this argument. Now, Andy Warhol, in the 60s and on, was a very important figure to what is happening in modern art. For you, Eric Hobson, what did he signify for you about the avant-garde? I think he signified the abdication of art as an so to speak autonomous pursuit. I don't like Andy Warhol

but looking, thinking through the sum total of his works I think what he did was enormously impressive in some way as in a negative way because of the sheer determination

not to create anything, not to change anything simply to echo reflect the realities of the consumer society in which the artist is embedded, in which we are all embedded. Advertising without the gloss, really, in a way, yes.

Advertising without the gloss, more than that. That advertising is, to some extent, the symbol and the symptom of a way of living. It's often also art, in a way, as you yourself. Oh, yes. Oh, yes. Indeed. in fact it seems to me that the scope of modern industrial production and of advertising

in actually stimulating even stimulating the kind of art that Francis appreciates is very important What about Warhol for you, Francis? Well, what's really very interesting is that I would not disagree with very much that Eric has just said but I would disagree with the one aspect

of your argument that brings your own aesthetic judgment to bear, you clearly don't like Warhol's work. Now, I think what's extraordinary about Warhol is that he does suddenly engage, a very popular way, with contemporary life. And it's amusing and it's ironic, and it's, there's a critique. But he, more than any other artist, I think for today's generation, evokes the 1960s, and evokes the icons of the 1960s. And he showed who those. icons were. I think, you know, his dialogue with commerce, with commercialism, with the advertising

industry is absolutely fascinating. I think he's a crucial key figure. But I would not argue that that signified the death of anything. I think it opened up a field. It expanded the field for art. Well, we must disagree. I personally think very highly of Warhol. What I don't think highly of his conceptual art, but that's another matter. I think we'd be a little late to start entering into this particular debate. I think that's what the debate is about, really. Well, I think we've got time to just take, as we started with a quotation from this first paragraph,

let's finish with the end of the first paragraph. You say the assumption was correct that the art and society relationship change fundamentally, but you also say, what is more, the ways in which we look at and mentally apprehend the world have been revolutionised. However, and this is the core of my argument, you're right, in the visual arts this has not been achieved

and could not have been achieved by the projects of the after. Now that's a, to come back to the final challenge, Francis, what if you'd say about that? I think Eric, in that paragraph, is referring to abstract art and its failure to engage socially or politically with the modern era. I would argue that there's a great deal of... Not abstract art only. But traditionally, what we would call modernist avant-garde's. I would argue that there is a kind of end point in that history and that after that end point around the 1960s with the

advent of conceptual art, artists, and the art community and the institution of art began to be able to do precisely that, to apprehend the world in a revolutionary way, and communicate it, and to have a relevance on a very broad basis. I would say they disintegrate as art. I think something remains what it is we don't know, and what the future it is and we don't know, but it's going to be very difficult to judge by the tradition. canons of art including the avant-garde up to the 1960s. How does what is happening in conceptual art affect collectability?

Because collectibility for a long time in Western painting and Western sculpture has been a big factor in art, has been maybe one of the driving factors in it, and we know about the patrons of the very greatest artists, Turner and so on. How is conceptual art allied to collectibility? Well, what's interesting is that the market has developed strategy. for marketing conceptual art. I mean, a case and point is ultimately the false additioning. And when I say false is it's not in the technical nature of a photograph to be a limited edition. And yet artists impose limited editions.

And therefore, there are various strategies to bring reproducible mass marketable art into the art market and create an income for both dealers and for artists for the superstructure and the creators. At the same time, a secondary market is developing via mass editions, as it were, secondary editions. And I think what one's getting is a diversification in the market. Institutions all over the world are finding ways of supporting art and the making of art, which doesn't mean buying it.

Is there a sense in which the museum art of individual artist has long been bypassed by photography, advertising and civil. and it clings on because of sort of a cultural hold. I'm putting the devil's advocate case, and not much else, a heritage cultural hold. And actually, Eric Hobbesbaum's case about the images, the way in which the world is seen through images, has really been taken over by the cinema and photography.

I think there's an argument that one can support. On the other hand, I think there is a future and a relevance to the institution of art, and in particular the museum, because art does have a separate space. and it's a cliche to say that art is useless from having to be to create something that's physical. Can you give us some examples of this?

You've talked a lot about these works which are liberating and so on. Can you give us some examples? Well, for example, a project that I'm working on at the moment with an American art, a conceptual artist, heaven forbid, Chris Burton from California. He's an experimental artist, and by that I mean that he sets a question in a work of art and seeks to address it.

and the question that he's addressing in the project that he's working on for the Tate is about capitalism. And what he perceives is at the end of the 20th century, people like us, ordinary people, have very little insight into the way the world works. We don't know how the food we eat is grown. We don't know how the clothes we wear are made. We don't know how the machines that transmit images on our television sets are put together. And what he's tried to do in his project, which has been supported by sponsorship,

it's not a project that is a work of art that will necessarily go into the market is he has created a small, highly transparent or visible factory, an assembly line that will take in raw materials at one end and at the other end

will create an object which is a small aeroplane and this aeroplane will be launched from the end of the production line and will fly in what is a beautiful and aesthetic arabesque. So there's a work of art at one end.

it's a work of art that also in terms of its content is something from the wider world. Now what do you make of that, Eric Hobsbubb, finally? I would say if you want to criticize capitalism, there are more, I don't mean more efficient or effective ways of doing it, but ways which will communicate the sense of what you're trying to do more effectively to larger numbers of people

than by the technique which you've just described. I think, if I may just add one, final point that what burden is doing is not giving you a lecture, but creating a space for you to infer what you will? I think much the same could be said to Eric Hobsbombs lecture, which

is now published as a book called Behind the Times, The Decline and Fall of the 20th Century avant-garde. Thank you very much to Professor Eric Hobsform and to Francis Morris, the curator for the Tate Gallery of Modern Art, and thank you for listening. We hope you've enjoyed this Radio 4 podcast.

You can find hundreds of other programmes is about history, science and philosophy at BBC.com.com.com UK forward slash radio four.