After the concept: Art and Criticism

Author: Wang Nanming / Country: Mainland China
Publisher:
Publish Date: 2006-07-01
Features:
1. From Creation to Meaning: Art and the Intellectual
Art and the intellectual have never seen a form of art like conceptual art become a utopian dream. It declares that art is the alienation of society and frankly states that if art is no longer potential, it would rather give up art. In the age of conceptual art, Hegel's prophecy—that art will be replaced by philosophy—should rather be reversed: philosophy will be replaced by art. Philosophy relies on visual entities, and this entity will make philosophy more direct, more stimulating, more conflicting, and more opposing in expressing the potential behavior of intellectuals. As long as the visual defense line remains defending the inherent nature of psychological experience, there will always be an attempt by art to knock down this line, so art is disruptive. Perhaps it can be said that art and philosophy are not about who replaces whom, but rather the dual death of art and philosophy. This is an era in which art is redefined by intellectuals, that is, art is stripped of its painterly nature and forcibly embedded with intellectualism. When art is placed in the continuity chain of Chinese art past and present, art will resist the intrusion of intellectuals. The Chinese art discussed here is the dominant literati art (literati calligraphy and literati painting). The reason is that intellectuals are its gravediggers. There is no independent concept of Chinese art in the visual sense. From the perspective of art categories, it is subordinate to literature (the literaryization of literati art), and culturally, it is dependent on Taoist culture (regulating the dominant Confucian culture). The characteristics of Chinese artists are literati, not intellectuals. Art is the refuge of the literati, eliminating behavioral involvement, and there is no spiritual connection between art and society. They (the literati) are considered dependent, and they bring this dependency to art. Only in this way, once society has intellectuals, in the judgment of the intellectual court, the literati become the most powerful witnesses of this servile personality, and their art theory documents are also their most sufficient confessions. This scope of judgment on Chinese art is far from over. Since modern times, the introduction of Western painting genres has added complexity to the examination of art, but this complexity quickly dissipates like smoke in the deeper examination of art. The materials of Western painting are similarly constrained within the unconscious cultural system of literati art. Here, the value judgment of the literati is still considered valid—art is never spiritual, and art becomes a means of adaptation, that is, art is dependent. It is not difficult to imagine the decline of dependent art because it has abandoned the potential rights of the artist. Of course, there is something more challenging, which has existed since ancient times and descended from the sky. The potential rights are born around the tombstones of intellectuals—in a context of negationism, they bury the past and hope to bury their next generation. This is a rewritten history of art, which is just a fragment of space because it cuts off the time chain. Each fragment protests the spiritual loss in the flow of time, and the history of art is a history of the combination of protests in moments.
The "form" of art ("form" in "formalism") has had a great encounter in the context of intellectuals today—art's negationism has ended its history, and it has been appointed as the "negation archive" by the designer. The "negation" invested in society is not only ideological but also visual, that is, thought and vision have a common spiritual orientation, and the depth of art is shown on the spiritual scale, only the "deep" is "art." The basis for the existence of negationist art is the fact that the history art faces is a history of oppression. Humans (in the full sense) have created things (order) and environments (culture) while oppressing themselves, and humans are essentially "libidinal." If art does not take on "negationism," it will remain in a state of oppression, watching, being silent, and being numb. Art is a sickly refuge, and the spiritual connection between art and society has died in art's suicidal tendency, and it does not want art to fully express spirituality through its form, so art becomes a general means of oppression, and the artist becomes a shameful traitor to spirituality. Only conceptual negationism ultimately strips away the mask of the literati and literati art—traditionally, the literati and literati art are considered spiritual (often described theoretically in this way), but they simply cannot pass the test of intellectuals because the spirituality of intellectuals is negationism. The commonly understood spirituality is similar to understanding the "yi" theory in traditional art, so it is natural to hope to find the answer to spirituality in the "yi" in the relationship between "yi" and "xiang" (the relationship between meaning and form), and to imitate this language pattern). In this way, "spirituality" becomes an ancient and great tradition, while completely unaware that "spirituality" is being humiliated by "yi." The purpose of saying this is, of course, to clarify the difference between "yi" and "spirituality." The value of all traditional categories is now under suspicion, "yi"—the gateway of literati art—only carries an art history without spirituality.
The current situation is still this: when art sets up a banquet for neoclassicism, the "yi" upheld by neoclassicism revives as a deity and is invited to the throne. People cry out for the arrival of spirituality while at the same time indulging in the consumption of spirituality. This is a strange banquet of our time, where the cultural nature of "yi" is recognized as elite, and neoclassical painting suddenly becomes an art seeking "yi." The "heavenly book" of neoclassicism is also manufactured as an artificial cloud, wanting to cover the spiritual dawn of contemporary art. If true spirituality exists, it must be critical rather than descriptive. Spirituality exists in specific relationships and forcibly demands that it make an unambiguous answer in this relationship: willing or unwilling. In this way, "yi"—neoclassicism—has become the object of spirituality's negation in this relationship. If you identify with this object, there is no spirituality. People are reluctant to separate the fundamentally opposing concepts of "yi" and spirituality because they mistakenly believe that "yi" is spirituality. In this way, spirituality is no longer the concept of "negation." Without a universal and abstract "yi," the "yi" we describe today only exists in the inherent cultural magnetic field—Confucian culture and Taoist culture. Believing in "yi" is believing in the culture within "yi."
Art is forcibly recognized as "conceptual," and it will no longer be detached from the inherent artistic concepts. It expresses the spirituality of conceptual art through its destructive form media, like Bois when he burned the crown symbolizing authority in front of the public—this burning must be repeated again and again, endlessly. In this way, art moves from the "representational" art to the "conceptual" art, and the key to the logical transition is that art not only needs subjectivity (subjectivity is often the purpose of representational art) but also needs to be placed in the context of conceptual negationism. In this way, art no longer resolves the long-standing debate in traditional art theory about the relationship between subjectivity and objects (tending toward the imitation theory of objects and the representation theory of subjectivity). Conceptual art, as a conceptual form (where the concept and material form cannot be separated), opposes the elevation of established concepts. In the stage of "art as representation," art undergoes a transformation from objects to "simplification," and simplification ultimately frees itself from objects to become elements. Art becomes the relationship between sensibility and elements. Conceptual art exists between concepts and concepts, that is, the negationist concept of art—how to penetrate the negated concept object. In this way, spirituality becomes the weapon of the potential path of conceptual art, and the essence of art is liberated. As we often say, as long as you give form (all resources that can be used in art) a concept, anything can become art. No form of art can ally itself with intellectuals as closely as conceptual art. Of course, the name of the artist is not ancient—it was only in the early days of "art as imitation" that he could only be a painter, not an artist. Only in the age of "art as representation" is the artist an embodiment of genius and passion. Of course, under genius and passion, art is sensually expressed, that is, it becomes "sensational" art. The call of sensibility has been used as the synonym for the artist, as if any sensibility in any field must yield to it. Although the form of art has changed today, sensibility still remains in art.
In conceptual art, the concept is crucial, but we cannot simply think that art has abandoned sensibility. Rather, sensibility has been spiritualized by the concept, breaking through pure sensibility and making the artist a cultural critic of society, that is, surpassing the sensibility of "art as representation." Only sensibility that is "spiritual" makes art the entity of conceptual art, so conceptual art becomes a conceptual interpretation in the kingdom of all materials (forms). Because once art becomes spiritual, its negationism—otherness, criticism, transcendence—is the theme of art, that is, the farther art is from affirmation and description, the more valuable it becomes. Therefore, the entity of conceptual art exists and is verified by the concept and the concept's deduction, and is spiritualized.
The connection between intellectuals and conceptual art is spirituality, and negationism is the fundamental guarantee of its concept. Here, art becomes the "art of refusal," that is, the artist gives specific materials spiritual sensibility to become a visual entity, using this entity to refuse the obligations forcibly imposed by established concepts. New concepts will soon become old concepts, and spirituality means eternal refusal. The idealism of the sensibility era is poetic, but it is lofty and detached from (or basically detached from) the direct relationship between art and society. Conceptual art intentionally brings art back to the society it wants to negate, so art is the art of intellectuals, not the art of painters. Only conceptual art turns art upside down to understand it. Art needs intellectuals because art needs spirituality, not just sensibility, but this is an unparalleled demand on the literati. To sacrifice the literati for intellectuals is undoubtedly cruel, because even intellectuals are in danger of being literati. We have been moved into the intellectual crisis of postmodern society, as critiqued by Marcuse—the society that has lost its revolutionary subject. Unless we regain the ability to doubt and the ability to negate, but this is always a dual increment of hope and despair—for us, when the intellectual crisis moves into the literati society.
Chinese intellectuals are caught between the cultural crises of the East and the West. Spirituality—negationism not only lacks a market but also faces ridicule, because the literati society has never given birth to negationism and has a phobia of it. This is the tragedy of conceptual art. But culture will eventually wake up from the crisis, and the future of culture depends on the revolutionary subject; the negationist intellectual, when intellectuals march to their front—hell—conceptual art becomes the staircase for intellectuals to descend into hell.
From creation to meaning in conceptual art (this is a general term for this form of art, not just conceptual art), the form culture examines art. Art has moved from creation to meaning, and art has been meaningized. Art is subjected to the examination of concepts, and this examination will expose the dark side of contemporary Chinese art trends, that is, current art, both in practice and in cognition, is contrary to this conceptuality. Conceptual art has changed our perception of art. On a global scale, what makes artists lose confidence is the similarity of vision—artworks' visual similarity is unavoidable, which is undoubtedly a fatal blow to artists who believe in creation. Perhaps the modernist era, which was once seen as the age of creation, has come to its end. Artists have also changed their ambitious creative frenzy, replacing it with none and none. So today, if anyone still promotes the direction of art with creation, they can only be mocked rather than respected, because trust in this view has become ignorance of art. Art can no longer be without similarity, and this similarity has led to a change in the artist's purpose. Art has become an expansive movement, that is, it breaks out of the of creation, finding a new place to stand.
In the expansion, art has brought its calamity—art has left the throne of creation and dissolves into every corner of life. In the past, artists were always tempted by the heroism of romanticism and the theory of style (fundamentally, modernism is also romanticism, or the romanticism of the "superman") to not only break out of the limitations of art but also to use all artistic resources, making these resources the code of the artist's creativity. This is a story of entropy in art history, that is, after the artist greedily seized these spoils, it was as if they had seized all the enemies, making it impossible for the artist to seize new spoils. With this artistic event, the full victory of sensibility art (I still consider this part of art history as the "representational" art and the "conceptual" art, replacing the form of art history division of romanticism, modernism, and postmodernism) has been achieved. Art has fulfilled its duty, and art and creation are a tautology, which has made it taste its true consequences—creation exhaustion. This has left art with no way out and no way forward, unless art is introduced to a form transformation. "New Dada"