Elizabeth Newman, Untitled [1989]

STOPPING STUART KOOP I spend equal time grateful for the opportunities I've had in the arts, but otherwise scheming to leave, to stop, to do something else. I'm sure prevarication in the arts is endemic for all sorts of reasons, including the dearth of opportunity for many [artists, curators, writers, administrators], the high competition, the difficult work, the appalling money, as well as the wearing pretensions and dubious social relevance. Many colleagues and acquaintances express the same ambivalence. Indeed, many dash in and out of the arts as they see fit when given the rare chance. Thus the borderlands of the artworld are populated with uncertain, furtive, and slightly fugitive professionals. And I must admit, resigning from the arts has occasionally afforded the greatest pleasure and relief. Each time, it seems there's a great virtue to stopping. It's not a characteristic of the artworld easily captured in surveys. Typically, the occasional employment or engagement of artists is rendered as a weakness of Australia's developing artworld, as if full employment is possible and desirable. Certainly this has been the tone of the ongoing survey of professional artists in Australia by David Throsby et al., commissioned by the Australia Council, and now in its fourth edition launched around Australia in late 2003. Advocacy groups like the Council regularly herald the findings with appalled, sardonic phrasing resonating with the report's various glib titles over the years, including Don't give up your day job [2003], But what do you do for a living? [1994] and When are you going to get a real job? [1989]. The current report suggests there are around 9,000 professional visual artists in Australia, earning a median income from their art of $3,100. Typically, artists are employed otherwise too: two thirds hold more than one job; one third are in unrelated non-arts employment; one third are unemployed for two out of five years; and one third are 'funded' at some stage. Over half cited 'critical timing' and 'support and encouragement' as crucial factors in their careers. All of which indicate the fluctuating fortunes of Australian artists. But in and amongst these overlapping figures, shrouded in vagary, and despite the narrow view of the survey, we might expect to find a few people starting and stopping with the best intentions, irrespective of economic factors; those who seize the odd golden opportunity, only to then recant or retract or desist for longer periods for very good, often complex and profound reasons. And it's in this stopping that there's an alternate story to that of hardship and duress as routinely declared in the reports. Perhaps the best paradigm case of stopping is Marcel Duchamp, who gave up art for fifty years. He produced the first of his readymade works in 1913 [a bicycle wheel fastened to a kitchen stool]. However, it wasn't until 1961 that the first definition of the readymade was tendered by Duchamp in 'Apropos of "Readymades"'.1 In fact, most of the readymades were not publicly exhibited but only occasionally viewed in the privacy of Duchamp's studio by friends and acquaintances. While there's no doubt Duchamp wanted to be a serious artist, his method and time frame were radically different from the conventional career paths for artists at the start of the century. As a 'failed' cubist - his Nude Descending a Staircase was rejected from the Salon in 1911 - Duchamp resolved to give up art and 'make a living' instead. I had to make big decisions then. The hardest was when I told myself 'Marcel no more painting, go get a job'. I looked for a job in order to get enough time to paint for myself. I got a job as a librarian in Paris in the Bibliothéque St. Geneviéve. It was a wonderful job because I had so many hours to myself... And that led me to the conclusion that you either are a professional painter or not. There are two kinds of artists: the artist that deals with society, is integrated into society; and the other artist, the completely freelance artist, who has no obligations... I didn't want to depend on my painting for a living... The danger is in pleasing an immediate public; the immediate public that comes around you and takes you in and accepts you and gives you success and everything. Instead of that, you should wait for fifty years or a hundred years for your true public. That is the only public that interests me.2 Duchamp stopped for forty-nine years, from 1912 to 1961 when he recommenced his public life as an artist. Thierry de Duve regards this decision - to 'get a job' - as a fulcrum moment in Duchamp's transition from painting to the readymade, evidence of his radical circumvention of a typical career trajectory.3 According to de Duve, Duchamp passed from a 'retinal' conception of painting commensurate with the opportunities open to painters in 1912, to a reconception of painting altogether in the readymades as an alternative means of securing this professional status in the much longer term and according to different criteria. Stopping, then, was not simply a virtue under the difficult circumstances of the day, but a very clever and thoughtful strategy, from which follows almost a century of radical anti-institutional and anti-art practice in Duchamp's wake. Indeed, in his Theory of the Avant Garde, Peter Bürger suggests the original negation or refusal of artists like Duchamp established a "dialectic of the boundary" between art and life characterising contemporary art; that is, art "cannot get beyond an attack on the institution" and "in failing, seems only to reinforce the institution's boundary".4 This aporia, then, this constant crossing back and forth, or to-ing and fro-ing across the institutional boundary, surely also manifests in the sporadic employment of artists. Reports on the economic status of the artist are then anathema to critical contemporary art, taking no account of alternative social and aesthetic values, or those institutional critiques advanced over the last century; in short they take no account of the fact that many frequently make a point of transgressing this boundary, if not leaving the artworld altogether, once and for good. Melbourne artist Elizabeth Newman stopped making art in 1992, just before her final show at Anna Schwartz Gallery. "I made the work and had the show in that year but I already knew that I wasn't going to be making anymore. I knew that was it."5 Like Duchamp, and in terms redolent of Throsby's report, she stopped painting and got a job, for the next ten years studying and practicing psychoanalysis. At that time, Newman was highly regarded, a Victorian College of the Arts painting graduate, and well represented in group and solo exhibitions - certainly by all measures a successful young professional artist. Her painting was reductive and critical, keyed into several major themes of the 80s, stripping painting back to its elemental form, taking historical cues from abstract expressionism and colour field painting [i.e. American modernism]. Her works featured bold and awkward gestures and monochrome canvases, highlighting "the inaugural moment between the signifier and the real, language and being". Other series featured objects affixed to the canvas [a child's pyjamas, a plate], or short elliptical phrases painted over in careful strokes ['Members Only', 'I believe in other possible worlds', 'An extreme openess']. I was reducing further and further the means of art to get rid of all 'the fluff' around painting. I tried to indicate the parameters of painting, highlighting its structural co-ordinates, making something obvious that people mightn't want to see. The intention is always to make something slightly wrong, or bad, or slightly funny, such that there is self-consciousness in viewing the works - you cannot gaze with complete abandon or comfort. In order to interrupt the viewing, I have sometimes stuck things in, or on the painting that shouldn't be there - objects, other pictures, text, handwriting - as a way of mutating the boundary between high art and everyday life, collapsing the distinction between the pure and mixed, between painting, sculpture, writing and photography, between original expression and the discourse that comes already made.6 Perhaps it's a logical step from such a reduction of painting and a critique of its reception to stopping altogether. Stopping is certainly integral to practice; many artists - including Newman - start each work as if 'from nothing', and it's easy to extrapolate from the question of what to paint, to the question of why paint, to the ultimate questions of why produce art at all. Thus the question of what to do, whether to bother, and for what purpose, arises with each new work. It is the stopping and starting that renders the 'genuinely creative moment' that most artists seek. Whether they are leaving their studio for six months to work a semester in the public service, or have a baby, or whether they are driving to a local factory sourcing parts for a work, or whether they start work in occupational therapy, or whether they are just thinking about how to reach new audiences outside the museum or gallery, or how to break free of convention in some new formal or technical development. These are the frequent short trips - real and metaphorical - which artists make across that institutional boundary in and out of the artworld, which make of that boundary or border a frantic, permeable space of transition, a space of possibility and disappointment, of golden opportunity and wretched dismay. To stop and not resume, then, can seem a kind of fulfilment, concluding an endless, perhaps frustrating and enervating dynamic, resolving that dialectic of the boundary after all. Indeed, Newman says: Why make art at all? With such an excess in the production of gadgets, objects and images we live with, my interest is in taking something away. There's so much stuff - I'm more interested in creating a gap or an absence. The archetypal artist in this sense is Gordon Matta-Clark. He doesn't make anything new, he just puts a big hole in something already there, quite literally. That's an idea which is very important to psychoanalysis, the idea of lack, of circumscribing a hole, the concept of symbolic castration, and articulating that hole with signifiers so that there's a negative space.7 It's precisely in this sense that stopping is also a continuation of critical practice, wherein the reasons for stopping are as significant as the reasons for continuing to make art, and the hole we come to address is a hole in the production of art, a hole in a career, a hole in the lives of artists. For if the critical artist, seeking social change - or at least relevance - through their work, ultimately concludes of the impossibility of doing so by making art, then my favourite artists are those who for excellent reasons give up, or who never started making art in the first place. Thus an aporia might be solved; art and life are co-extensive with being more generally. As Newman concluded after ten years: There's a time for acting and there's a time for being silent. For waiting. Art and psychoanalysis are similar in that way. In both endeavours you work with signifiers, you create new signifiers, and those signifiers have a transforming effect. I see them both as practices, in the sense of praxis. Paintings and words are both signifiers. It's about how to try and find a practice for one's life. To deal with knowledge and its particular relation to truth, rather than the discourse of capitalism which renders the subject an empty subject. Making art or training to be an analyst - I guess they're both ways of dealing with one's subjectivity and finding a way to live in this world.8 Notes 1 Marcel Duchamp, 'Apropos of "Readymades"' [1961], in Michel Sanouillet and Elmer Peterson [eds.], The Writings of Marcel Duchamp, New York: Da Capo Press, 1973: 141-142 2 Marcel Duchamp, 'Regions which are not ruled by time and space' [edited transcript of a television interview with James Johnson Sweeney [1956], in Sanouillet and Peterson, op. cit.: 133 3 Thierry de Duve, Pictorial Nominalism: On Marcel Duchamp's Passage from Painting to the Readymade, trans. Dana Polan, Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1991 4 Peter Bürger, 'Aporias of Modern Aesthetics', in Andrew Benjamin and Peter Osbourne [eds.], Thinking Art: Beyond Traditional Aesthetics, London: Institute of Contemporary Arts, 1991: 5 5 Elizabeth Newman, interviewed by the author, 2003 6Newman, unpublished manuscript from 2002 presented at a psychoanalysis conference 7Newman, interviewed by the author, 2003 8 Ibid. Newman recommenced her 'art' practice in 2001 and continues to work as a psychoanalyst. She will be showing at Clubs Project, Melbourne in April and May 2004.