Do the visual arts have a future?

Scan page 15

portrayal of Black-white relations Today the visual arts are in serious trouble. Interest in them has palled, and sales are down. Reasons for this are not hard to find. Since the Impressionist years, the visual arts have been dehumanized— divorced from all social and political meaning. More and more, they are mired in irrelevant abstraction.

As far back as the early 20th century, Mondrian in painting and Brancusi in sculpture pioneered movements toward pure abstraction. Mondrian is reported to have said, "Yes, all in all Nature is a damned of the great French Renaissance in painting that began with David's somber Death of Marat in 1793, and ended with Picasso's powerful Guerica, an evocation of horror and pathos.

Since the death of Picasso in 1973, no painter or sculptor has emerged who even remotely approaches the stature of a Monet, a Cezanne, a Renoir, or a Daumier—to name a few. A falling away of the arts after a period of sustained and powerful creativity, lasting centuries, is not a new phenomenon.

The Italian Mannerists, for example, were at their wits' end, scrambling to find ways to perpetuate the great traditions of Italian art as represented by the classical perfection of Raphael and the power of Michelangelo. The task was beyond them. They finally gave up and began to turn art on its ear.

In her book, "The High Renaissance and Mannerism," Linda Murray summarizes some of the salient traits of Mannerism, equating it with "subject matter either deliberately obscure, or treated so that it becomes difficult to understand ... distorted proportions of scale-figures jammed into too small a space ... vivid color schemes, employing discordant contrasts."

Is it "art?"

Murray's analysis raises the question of whether much of what is called "art" today is even art at all.

Paul Mattick JI., writing in The Nation, notes that "the idea that there exists an aesthetic sphere untouched by social and political meaning is an ideological fiction." This seems a very significant point, one Jungle Fever, a film written and directed by Spike Lee. Music by Stevie Wonder.

"Jungle Fever" is a terrific movie. It's about real human beings living in the real world of Harlem and Bensonhurst, N.Y.

"Jungle Fever" is not a political movie. There are no proposals for how to deal with the devastating social conditions it reveals: racism, sexism, oppression within the family—and most poignantly-drug addiction. This is not a weakness, however, because political solutions to social crises are not necessarily the province of art.

This movie's province is the illumination of the lives of several characters in their family, neighborhood, and work settings. At the end of the film, we know these characters. (How many movies can you say that about?)

The main character is Flipper Purify (Wesley Snipes), a successful Black archiusually brushed aside in the art world.

By Mattick's criterion, most contemporary "art" will be found wanting, or at best borderline, its social and political meaning hard or impossible to read. Take, for example, Juliari Schnabel's "Fox Farm Paintings. " Ken Johnson, writing in Art in America (April, 1990), sees these paintings as "metaphorical expressions—part visual, part verbal—of a pervasive mood of our times, one of apocalyptic despair." But Johnson confesses that what the paintings actually mean is "a puzzle which, one suspects, the artist himself hasn't solved."

Puzzles and abstractions, carried to extremes, deny mood. Failure to convey an identifiable mood based on the personal experience of the artist works to the detriment of today's art, depriving it of social and political meaning.

Painting for the market In the final decades of the 20th century, contemporary art has maintained a precarious existence in a multitude of galleries, museums, and money marts of the great auction houses, here and abroad.

Because it is trendy—the reputation of an artist sometimes rising and falling within a single season—there has been difficulty in establishing a firm market for its sale. Yet it often brings high prices.

In general, contemporary art may be described as the plaything of a monied elite and of art professionals, whose appreciation of and interest in it has been largely reduced to what Marx called "callous cash payment."

In America, today's art is firmly tect, loving husband, and father. Purify lives in Harlem. He's trying to become a partner in an architectural firm that has made lots of money because of his projects. He works a lot of overtime.

Flipper has an affair with Angie Premiero (Annabella Sciorra), the skilled temporary secretary hired by the firm to work for him. Angie goes home from her job to cook dinner and clean up after her widowed father and two macho brothers.

Angie's been going with her boyfriend for a long time and is a little bored. She lives in Bensonhurst, the New York Italian neighborhood where an African American teen, Yusuf Hawkins (to whom the film is dedicated), was murdered by racist punks in 1989. tem, hence the artist is a prisoner of schools, galleries, museums, foundations, etc., all with powerful boards that include a sufficient number of wealthy board members able to dominate their operations.

In order to succeed, which today usually means "making it big," the artist has to "paint to the market," to quote Arthur Danto, writing in The Nation. Otherwise he is forced to do something else with his talent: "teach, illustrate, decorate."

The corporate power brokers who run our society and its art enterprises are well aware of art's potential as an enabler of social change (read, revolutionary change), hence their wish to keep it as it is, safe yet looking progressive-outwardly daring, outrageous, and "radically" avant-garde, and inwardly escapist and dead. No need to disturb the masses, whose interest in contemporary art remains near zero!

What about the future?

How long will this malaise in which contemporary art finds itself last, and what is the future of art in America? Generally speaking, a government such as ours, fueled by greed and imperial ambition, and always disguising its intentions, does not inspire great art, except for stimulating those opposing it from within.

As the clock runs down for capitalism, as a flagging economy sinks into insolvency, and a somber, desperate mood seizes the people, there may yet be a role for some iconoclast artists. Let them paint life in our society as it really is in all its savage inhumanity!

Let them look deep into the plight of the unemployed, the homeless, and the hungry, and decipher their misery for others.

In this way, American art will have a future, a future as the catalyst of a kind of class struggle not yet seen in America!

sing their support for the war—a satirical put-down of an actual pro-war video made by Hollywood personalities in a conscious effort to slow the spread of the anti-war movement, which had mounted giant national mobilizations on Jan. 19 and Jan. 26.

Michael Sullivan, who plays the part of Marine Lance Cpl. James (Jamal) Sullivan has a wonderful singing voice, and the performance level of all the ensemble players, musicians, and behind-the-scenes crew makes for exciting theatre.

But-and this cannot be ignored-there is a strong political message in this play. Unfortunately, it is not a good one. Several characters seem to express the hope that there could be someone like JFK or Bobby to run against Bush in '92! Tracon ism, and the show's view that a rightwing This message of unapologetic liberalconspiracy (rather than the whole ruling class and its servants in both the Democratic and Republican Parties) is responsible for all that's rotten in the piece of political entertainment.

The film introduces us to the people in both their lives. This movie is peopled with the most believable characters-both Black and white—in any film I can think of. Director Spike Lee has a handle on the United States of America as a whole and on its racial sickness.

This is the kind of art that people hundreds of years from now will look at as they study the anthropology of 20th-century America; it will reveal truths about our society that the surviving plays of ancient Greece reveal about that society.

Take, for example, the scene in which Flipper's wife Drew (Lonette McKee) is being comforted by her women friends. Their angry discussion covers a wide range of women's grievances against men and Black grievances against white racism. "We just rolled the cameras," Newsweek magazine quotes Lee, "and the women forgot about that script. I think it was all from their personal experience, and that's why that scene works."

And that's just the way that scene, and a lot more scenes in "Jungle Fever," work on the viewer. See it.-C.S.