Stories That Fill the Center

Abstract

In her provocative writing on the contemporary world, Has Modernism Failed?, critic Suzi Gablik (1984) asserted that postmodernist artists reflect the consumerism more than they challenge it. She attributed this disquieting break with our predecessors to the advance of a bureaucratic, managerial type characterized by mass consumption and economic self-seeking (1984, p. 16). In contrast, she recounted familiar stories artists' presentations that were conceived to subvert our expectations Duchamp's readymades, Rauschenberg's Erased Drawing (of a de Kooning, that required forty erasers and a month erasing to accomplish successfully), and the work a variety conceptual artists. Not yet coopted into the production commodities, such artists manifested their consciousness the increasingly professionally manipulated world, dominated by galleries with their promotional and investment strategies. In doing so, they continued to align themselves with what Kandinsky described as an unconscious protest against materialism, and the demand that everything should have a use and practical value (Gablik, 1984, p. 21). However, they no longer were naive about their dilemma: whether to adopt a singularly individual stance toward making art, sometimes referred to as art for art's sake, or to recognize that any intention to make for society is controlled by the gallery system's dominance public access to art. By the 1970s we were very aware the emergence altemative modes conceptual, antiform, earth, process, body, and performance that Lucy Lippard (1973) chronicled as the dematerialization the object. The impermanence and even immateriality these art objects were conceived to remove them from any possibility being merchandise. As we now know, even these dematerialized works developed a strange magnetic effect, attracting records, notes on scraps paper, journal accounts, photographs, video tapes, and transcripts interviews, a myriad minutiae, the debris and residue these processes that coalesced under the term, documentation, and that could, it turned out, not only be exhibited but also could induce collectors to compete for their possession; with a bit ingenuity this art, too, was incorporated into a market system. Gablik is not arguing for a world in which artists masochistically sacrifice any comfort or even sustenance for the spiritual enrichment others, but she does point out that the impact in our society is severely diminished by the forces professionalism, bureaucracy, and commercialism (p. 56). Artists, themselves, seduced by managerial emblems advancement, begin to think their lives as careers, and careers depend on advertising, promotion, and the manipulations public relations. The inducements increasing economic rewards can trap artists into dependency on the complicated bureaucratic machinery which now organizes and administers the consumption in our culture (p. 56). One result may be that we experience an emptiness at the center: artists in their own lives, centered on nothing but themselves,