Art is eating itself

In his curious little book about Flying Saucers, Carl Jung took an interesting detour into the psychology of modern art.

His contemporaries, he said, had ‘taken as their subject the disintegration of forms’. Their pictures, ‘abstractly detached from meaning and feeling alike, are distinguished by their “meaninglessness” as much as their deliberate aloofness from the spectator’.

Artists ‘have immersed themselves,’ wrote Jung, ‘in the destructive element and have created a new conception of beauty, one that delights in the alienation of meaning and of feeling. Everything consists of debris, unorganised fragments, holes, distortions, overlappings, infantilisms and crudities which outdo the clumsiest attempts of primitive art and belie the traditional idea of skill’.

‘It is the beauty of chaos’, he wrote. Art that ‘heralds and eulogises’ the ‘glorious rubbish heap of our civilization’. Art ‘productive of fear’, fit for the ‘epoch of the great destroyer’.

Jung was writing in 1957 and one wonders what he would have thought of the destruction of art in 2023, a world in which Oxford City Council have their eye on selling off Biblical and classical paintings no longer deemed ‘appropriate’ in a diverse society. In New York, meanwhile Brooklyn Museum is preparing to hold its summer exhibition, ‘Pablo-matic’, which will focus on what a naughty boy Picasso was.

‘Anything can be art’ is the cliché. A couple of years ago, an Italian artist sold an ‘invisible’ – yes, non-existent – sculpture for £12,000. Responding to the assertion that ‘part of an artists’ function is to make beautiful….something that nobody thought was beautiful up until now’ the late philosopher Sir Roger Scruton dryly replied ‘right, like a can of shit’. Indeed. Piero Manzoni, who produced ninety cans of Artist’s Shit in 1961, wrote to a fellow artist ‘I should like all artists to sell their fingerprints, or else stage competitions to see who can draw the longest line or sell their own shit in cans’.

Take a look around the Tate Modern. There you can find the International Surrealists, roughly contemporary to Jung, with their nightmarish, disembodied parts, monstrously tacked together, clawing as they try to excavate the subconscious. They have Yamashita Kikuki’s Deification of a Soldier (1967) and Yves Tanguy’s 1951 painting The Invisibles, of ‘biomorphic beings set in strange landscapes’ that are ‘partly mechanical, partly organic’.

In an adjacent gallery, ‘Art After Catastrophe’, a sign reads ‘In the middle of the 20th century, artists were asking how to keep making art in an era of suffering and violence’. This self-indulgent explanation says more about the morbidity of the modernists than the uniqueness of the times. Caravaggio, Rembrandt, or Raphael, hardly lived lives in Edenic societies untouched by violence and suffering, yet they produced works touched by transcendent beauty. Yet something has changed.

In the Tate, the dark charred mud of Ferdinand Kulmer’s ‘Brown Picture’ (1960) hangs with Egyptian artist Hamed Abdallah’s Defeat (1963), and South Korean Ku-Lim Kim’s 1964 work Death of the Sun. Kim came to believe ‘that human existence was extremely insignificant’.

According to the description on Graham Sutherland’s 1953 painting of a monstrous hybrid head, one contemporary critic said that it demonstrates ‘the now prevailing cosmic anxiety’–. These two galleries, taken together, couldn’t better illustrate Jung’s observations – the death of God, visualised, with all its muddy dislocated existential dread.

‘The art of desecration’, Roger Scruton called it. A product of the subversive 1960s, ‘repudiating beauty and putting ugliness in its place’. The psychiatrist and author Theodore Dalrymple tells me that a mere glance at Frank Gehry’s Luma Tower in Arles is ‘all that is necessary to understand the egoism, vanity, ambition, mediocrity, search for originality at any price, hatred of the past and utter aesthetic incompetence.’

As you travel through the Tate Modern beyond the mid-century, whether through the intention of the artist or the narrative provided by the Tate’s curators, you are subtly inculcated with a frame of mind, primed to filter the world through a kaleidoscope of power, violence, colonialism, race, gender, climate and radical politics.

Sam Leith

Diane Abbott’s surreal U-turn

In one dark room, you can watch a video installation of by Wael Shawky Cabaret Crusades: The Horror Show File (2010), which uses 200-year-old marionette puppets to depict the Crusades from the perspective of Arab historians. Beyond a ‘content warning’ by the door, I sat with half a dozen children watching the Christian Crusaders spit roast and eat the flesh of what was presumably a Muslim.

In one room, Liz Johnson Artur’s photographs of the 2020 Black Lives Matter protests. In another, Gustav Metzger’s eco-conscious ‘auto-destructive art’.

The entrance to the A Year in Art: Australia 1992 exhibition (also accompanied by a content warning) reads, in strangely creedal language, ‘Tate acknowledges and pays respect to the traditional Owners of Country throughout Australia and recognises the continuing connection to lands, waters and communities. We pay our respect to the Elders of these lands and acknowledge the continuation of cultural, spiritual and educational practices of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander peoples’. Posters by the Guerilla Girls – a feminist art collective – cover the walls of one room. According to the Tate description, ‘the group […] reveal the racism, sexism and homophobia prevalent in art and its history’ and hold ‘Euro American institutions accountable for their actions’.

In the bookshop there are children’s books as far as the eye can see: ‘Self-Care in Underwear’, ‘Courage out loud: 25 poems of power’, ‘We need to talk about vaginas’, ‘Little feminist’, ‘The Boy with Flowers in his Hair’, ‘Julian is a Mermaid’, ‘Here and Queer’, ‘The Hips of the Drag Queen go Swish, Swish, Swish’, and ‘Rainbow History Class: Your Guide Through Queer and Trans History’.

For the adults there are a range of titles on colonialism and climate justice, including Greta Thunberg’s recent tome, primers such as ‘Is Capitalism Working?’ and ‘Is Gender Fluid?’. A Tate-produced series called ‘Look Again’ explores issues such as race, class, visibility and feminism in art.

I bought the one on Empire, by Afua Hirsh. On the first page, she writes, ‘If history is written by the victor, then art – throughout the history of modern European traditions – has been commissioned by the oppressor. Paintings, sculptures, statues and crafts have all centred on the imperialist, flattered the slave owner, sanitised the hands bloodied from violence, then been assimilated into national identities via institutions funded through the profits’.

I am not shocked that the Tate Modern contains modern art. I do not want to limit artistic expression or burn piles of children’s books – in fact, my problem is exactly that artistic expression is excruciatingly limited at the moment.

I am simply observing that certain ‘editorial’ or ‘curatorial’ decisions have been made that reflect on a very particular, comprehensive worldview – a reductive ideology with which we are now over-familiar.

Ideological orthodoxy is only one aspect of the ‘dominant trends of our age’. Where the surrealists stared into the abyss, post-modernists stare at their own reflection. The Infinity Mirror Room installation by Japanese artist Yayoi Kusama, I’d guess, is the Tate Modern’s most popular exhibition. Punters pass through the Infinity Room as if it were a drive thru, and afterwards, staggering in orbit, they gawp at their phones – editing their hot-off-the-grill Insta content. The atrium of the Tate Modern has, let’s be frank, become the artistic equivalent of a McDonald’s carpark.

Like Ouroborous, the ancient symbol of infinity, depicted as a snake eating its own tale, the producers and consumers of post-modern art seem to be engaged in an endless cycle of self-cannibalism. Like Lady Gaga, who recently had someone puke on her as part of a performance, a certain segment of the art world seems unable to find nourishment on anything other than its own vomit.

We have become one of Yves Tanguy’s disturbing ‘partly mechanical, partly organic’ visions.

Where fans once threw knickers at musicians they admired, they now hold up signs on their phones demanding the artist takes part in their BeReal. Musical potential is being reduced to jingle-length backing tracks for pre-teens’ dance-memes. Musician and podcaster Winston Marshall told me, ‘Just as the traditional length of a song was standardised by the 78rpm records to three-four minutes, between 1898 and the 1950s, so to now modern pop music is being shaped by TikTok – the artist has ten seconds to keep the attention of the listener, before they swipe away.’

Everyone’s a creator now prowling for content. We are living in a social-media culture so lobotomised by vanity that it has even become possible for a person to pose outside of Auschwitz concentration camp, as if the railway track were the side of an infinity pool in Bali.

Earlier this year someone sent musician Nick Cave a song written in his style by the AI ChatGPT. Cave described its imitation as a ‘kind of burlesque’. ‘Songs arise out of suffering’ he wrote, ‘by which I mean they are predicated upon the complex, internal human struggle of creation and, well, as far as I know, algorithms don’t feel. Data doesn’t suffer […]  Writing a good song is not mimicry, or replication, or pastiche, it is the opposite. It is an act of self-murder that destroys all one has strived to produce in the past.’

Data doesn’t suffer. Algorithms don’t feel. Yet we are, by all appearances, letting the unholy couple – machines and ideology – set the limits of our creativity. As Australian conductor and Music Editor at the Common Sense Society, Ben Crocker, told me, it seems ‘our burden as consumers of music today is to live with a poverty of invention’.

Where is the courage to struggle? Where are the deep reservoirs of human experience and feeling? Where is the discipline needed to cultivate skill? 

Novelist and Spectator columnist Lionel Shriver tells me, ‘what with all the lists of banned “insensitive” vocabulary and ever-changing prescriptive expressions generated by the left, it strikes me that no one seems to prioritise good writing. Elegance, style, wit, and concision are all out the window. Indeed, even clarity takes a backseat to the aggressive promotion of what passes for virtue. Jargon, unwieldy acronyms, and numbing repetition (how many times a day do you hear the word “vulnerable” on the news?) are the literary markers of our era’.

Value-judgements have become impossible in our stagnant paralysed state. We are besieged by borderlessness – biological, territorial, intellectual, moral. Shriver says: ‘This weird new discomfort with making assessments of any kind – because judgement necessarily means rating some people more highly than others – does indeed entail the negation of beauty, of excellence, of the implicitly rare achievement of the sublime. Great art in any medium is unusual. It stands out. But we don’t seem to value qualities like beauty and pure excellence as Westerners once did […] A fashionably flattering egalitarianism, this impulse to level, subordinates gloriousness to a narrow, pinched version of virtue that seems very Soviet to me. And historically, communist art has sucked’.

If we are being honest, much of what we produce sucks too.

Our duff-writing and crap-speaking is related to the ideology problem, too. In his New Discourses podcast, James Lindsay has recently revived the work of Robert Jay Lifton, and his concept of ‘thought-terminating clichés’. In his book Thought Reform and the Psychology of Totalism, a study of brainwashing in China, he writes ‘the language of the totalist environment is characterised by the thought-terminating cliché. The most far reaching and complex of human problems are compressed into brief highly reductive definitive sounding phrases easily memorized and easily expressed’. Systemic whiteness, structural misogyny, harmful, inappropriate, problematic, outdated…

Orwell made this point in his essay on 1946 Politics and the English Language: ‘Modern writing at its worst,’ Orwell wrote, ‘consists in gumming together long strips of words which have already been set in order by someone else’. The ‘invasion of one’s mind by readymade phrases […] can only be prevented if one is on guard against them, and every such phrase anaesthetises a portion of one’s brain‘.

This problem is reflected in our art, but it is not a problem limited to art. Orwell vividly describes a scene so familiar, it could very well have been last week’s PMQs: ‘when one watches some tired hack on the platform mechanically repeating familiar phrases […] one often has a curious feeling that one is not watching a live human being but some kind of dummy […] A speaker who uses that kind of phraseology has gone some distance towards turning himself into a machine. The appropriate noises are coming out of his larynx but his brain is not involved as it would be if he were choosing the words himself.’

Recently, Keir Starmer appeared on a podcast. Wearing a pair of trainers (significant, I think), he bemoaned the adversarial nature of the houses of Parliament. Reflecting on the way this is reified in the physical layout of the House, he suggested that it might be better if we adopted a horseshoe-shaped chamber, like those in Europe.

Starmer’s comment shows he is aware of the deep relationship between the functioning of Parliament and its physical layout. Indeed, he would like to physically remould it to facilitate European-style consensus politics. Beneath this idea, though, is a rejection of existing layout, and with it, the very bones of the existing system as it has organically emerged over centuries.

Who better to ask about that than the MP Jacob Rees Mogg? ‘Nobody can come into Westminster via Westminster Hall without being impressed with and imbued by a sense of our history. And I’m sitting in an office now looking out over Westminster Abbey; how can you possibly be in this sort of atmosphere without thinking our history is important […] The people who would like a Year Zero and are ashamed of our history would like us to have an office building of a routine kind; why would they like that? Because you don’t have a sense of continuity and history and tradition, and its much easier to be ashamed of something to which you’re not linked. Whereas we are linked in our daily lives, through the buildings we work in, with the nation’s history.’

‘It’s a state of permanent revolution. Because, why should 2023 be Year Zero? Shouldn’t it be 2024, and 2025? So don’t you have to do this permanently? Stability is beneficial for the human condition. But I think if you can’t look back on the past and see beauty you must be devoid of imagination and human spirit.’

Trying to hold onto Year Zero will always be futile, like trying to catch water. If, as Jung believed, art ‘gives shape to the dominant trends of the age’, this is it. We are the epoch of the great destroyers, swinging sledgehammers without regard. It is all around us, in our art, in everything we sweep onto the rubbish heap of our civilization.

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