Simryn Gill, from the series A small town at the end of the century [1999-2000]

ART IN AN ECONOMY OF PLEASURE MICHAEL NEWALL Something is happening to Australian art. For me, this is most apparent not when I'm walking through galleries, but when I'm watching TV. Not the programs either, but the ads. Remember the breakfast cereal ad where a woman out power-walking sees people's heads turn into giant CGI apricots? Once she gets home we see that her hallucinations indicate a desire for a breakfast cereal supplemented with dried apricots. For me at least, the apricot-headed people recall a recent series of photographs, A small town at the turn of the century..., by Australian photographer Simryn Gill, also featuring 'fruit-headed' people. Gill, it should be said, spurns CGI; her images were made by fitting her subjects with masks made from tropical fruit, and the series deals with the serious issues one expects of an artist of Gill's stature, such as the colonialist exoticising of non-western peoples and cultures [the series includes images are of Gill's family and acquaintances in Port Dickson, Malaysia]. I also think of the beer ad where a young couple are asleep in bed; the guy's tongue, again CGI animated, flops out of his mouth and moves off like a fat, pink slug, glistening with spittle, to find itself a stubby of the advertised beer and drag it back 'home'. This ad, edgier than the cereal ad, I guess reflects a younger, 'hipper' demographic who can be expected to find an invigorating horror movie frisson in the 'yeurgh' factor of a disembodied tongue crawling in and out of the sleeper's mouth [without dwelling too much, like Freud might have - or Roy and H.G. would for that matter - on the scenario's more distressing psychosexual implications.] For me, the tongue, and the targeted viewers' presumed responses to it, recall Patricia Piccinini's photographic and sculptural works. I think particularly of her hyperreal 'blobs' of flesh, petted by a child in her installation We Are Family, at the recent Venice Biennale. But I also think of her unsettling but comic, half-animal, half-human sculptures from the same installation. Their hyperreal, monstrous fusions of animal and human, their pink, fleshy vulnerability, and their irrepressible [and likeable] tendency to ham things up for an audience, makes me think they must share some skerrick of genetic material with that hyperactive tongue. And what about the jeans ad where a girl undergoes a strange nocturnal baptism by a group of other cool-looking young people. The jeans I think, were marketed as 'born again'. Here the imagery recalled Bill Henson's photographs. The young lanky models, wan wet flesh artfully lit to gleam in the darkness, looked almost as if they could have walked out of one of Henson's images of ambiguously occupied adolescents or young adults in nocturnal and twilight settings. More could be added to this list, particularly if we extend our attention beyond TV advertising. This is worth doing if only to include Deborah Paauwe in this list of correspondences. Think of the recent Sheridan billboard ad and Paauwe's similarly symmetrical, immaculate images of young women. Let me say up front that I don't intend to diminish the accomplishments of any of these artists [or for that matter, the accomplishments of the advertisers] by foregrounding these correspondences. There is a basic, almost instinctual sense in which we can take a mean sort of pleasure in saying "that's been done elsewhere", especially when 'elsewhere' is a pop-cultural locale. A correspondence used in this way cuts away at its target, saying 'you're not unique' and brings it 'down' to the level of the common culture. For the same reason, perhaps, it's slightly rude to tell someone you meet that they're just like another person you know, and rather more so if their doppelganger is conspicuously down-at-heel. In making these correspondences, I want to put aside these negative connotations and the idea of pop culture as necessarily degraded and degrading, on which they rely. Neither does it interest me greatly whether advertising has appropriated imagery from art, or the other way around. Both certainly occur, and in many cases one suspects that advertising has taken direct inspiration from art [for instance, the above mentioned cereal ad features a shot of two fruit-headed, uniformed school boys sitting on a bench that repeats a very similar scene from Gill's series]. But to focus on art's influence on advertising, or advertising's on art, would be to suggest broader pictures of our culture that do not generally hold. Art does not, at a general level, determine the shape of popular culture, nor does popular culture determine the appearance and nature of contemporary art. Rather, cause and effect run both ways. Some correspondences, it should be added, may show no direct causal connection - but instead are evidence of a more general cultural synchronicity. Why then are these correspondences emerging between contemporary Australian art, and popular culture? It might partly be explained by saying that advertising has got smarter in some respects, and discovered 'high culture' as a resource. But why is it, to put the question another way, that art has become such a useful resource for advertising? It was not always so: some artists will never have much to offer popular culture in this way. Mike Parr is one example: his gritty, visceral and grim performances and documentation, like much work developed from a background in conceptualism and performance art, present few images or strategies that can be used by an advertising agency. Parr's work, in its most recent manifestations uses art to convey a political message. Last year he sewed up his mouth in sympathy with detained refugees, and rigged himself up to a device that allowed people visiting a website to administer electric shocks to him - a slightly less clear but very dramatic allusion to the largely apathetic and malign relationship the Australian public have to the detainees. Parr's intentions are to spur us into consciousness of this situation, and to prompt political action aimed to remedy it. The issue Parr deals with is a new one, and so is the technology he uses, but the general approach is not. It falls within the rubric of 'critical' art, which came to prominence - dominance even - in Australia during the 80s and only now shows signs of waning. Art, on this view, should criticise the dominant culture, its institutions, habits and mores. The critical artist, as Parr does, shows that these enforce and maintain existing social relations, maintaining the power of certain groups, while denying it to others. The latter groups tended to be those at genuine disadvantage in society, such as women, indigenous or ethnic communities, and now of course, the detainees. Critical art is not primarily intended to give the viewer pleasure - it's meant to address a broader, social perspective. Indeed, it tends to analyse pleasure in art, and in particular the ideas of beauty that are often its concomitant, as something which at best is a distraction from serious issues, and at worst plays an active role in sustaining the social status quo. Fashion, to take one example, through promoting norms of beauty, also encourages consumerism [all those clothes, cosmetics and accessories to buy...] and helps sustain prevailing gender inequalities [say, by keeping women busy worrying about their appearance while men can go on running society as usual]. Things, of course, are more complicated and subtle than that, but the place of pleasure in such a picture is clear - it's superficial, a distraction or diversion from serious things. Critical art therefore often tends to avoid beauty and pleasure. Indeed, one of its strategies is to try to upset our perception of these qualities in order to make us aware of the normative role they play in society. Blair French had this principle in mind when he wrote on Deborah Paauwe's photographs in the previous issue of Broadsheet, worrying that, "they don't make me feel uncomfortable as a [male] spectator, and yet, if they are to have any meaning for me, they should."1 While this sort of critical approach retains a sort of dominance [particularly within institutions], it also finds itself in an increasingly tenuous position here and internationally. Martha Rosler, a US artist with a critical stance, acknowledges this, observing that: "Right now there is a protracted tussle within the artworld over a basically conservative aestheticism, a refurbishment of Kant, and the more conceptual-rationalist work from the latter part of the past century."2 Rosler goes on to rail against the 'return' of beauty and the sublime as "revanchist" and "pernicious" for reasons similar to those I've outlined above.3 But despite such spirited counter-attacks, the critical position appears increasingly vulnerable. For one thing, there is the problem of capitalism's ability to assimilate the critical to its own ends. As David Carrier has recently put it: "Political artists and advocates of critical theory face an inescapable dilemma. When they achieve success, they become part of the system they would criticise. In that way, [critical] theorists are like 1960s pop musicians praising revolution who became very successful members of the establishment."4 One might add that if artists don't 'achieve success', then they have little access to the public they want to inform and influence. More immediately, critical art faces various other problems: it's mostly an ineffective way of generating social and political awareness and change, and tends to communicate to a limited audience who are usually already sympathetic to the artists' opinions. While its stocks have risen post S/11, and in Australia with the influx of refugees, the formulaic and one-dimensional quality of some of the work made in response to these issues, and its failure to penetrate the political sphere, suggests there are more effective ways than art to make a difference.5 Paauwe's work, it should be said, is sometimes spoken of as if it is effective as a critical - in this case feminist - statement. The voyeuristic, objectifying qualities of her images of young women and girls [typically 'cropped' to focus on bodies and limbs] can be seen as ironic - the images are, after all, made by a woman. But this critical quality seems vestigial: French is quite right to say that irony, where present in these works, is not discomfiting. Instead these features operate in quite a different - one might say opposite - manner. That is to say, they give pleasure. They are beautiful, sensual and attractive - and, I suspect, for most viewers their voyeuristic qualities make the experience all the more pleasurable, adding a certain frisson. French recognises this too: "In the final analysis is this anything more than a sophisticated, acute yet ultimately vicarious form of visual seduction?"6 French, holding out for something with critical caché, is disapproving, but most people quite like being the subject of a sophisticated visual seduction - a fact the current success of Paauwe's images attests to. One can make a similar analysis of Patricia Piccinini's work. Like Paauwe's it is sometimes spoken of in critical terms: We Are Family has clear references to genetic engineering and cloning. The hyperreal sculptures in this installation portray humans melding comically and pathetically with animals, and children with the wizened, blotched skin of the aged. These latter works refer to the apparent premature aging of clones such as Dolly the sheep, and so it is not hard to find critical comment on recent developments in, or applications of, biotechnology in Piccinini's work. But echoing French's take on Paauwe, it is a fairly 'soft', ambiguous sort of criticism. After all, the half animal/half human hybrids, while portrayed as grotesque sports of biotechnology, also have admirable and sympathetic qualities: they are shown in family groups, they have large, soulful eyes, and look fleshy, soft and vulnerable. This sympathy might also alert us to a feature of Piccinini's works that runs along very different lines to those of critical art - their similarity to monsters in popular literature and film. Piccinini's creatures are unnatural and a source of unease if not fear, but also, like all the great pop-culture monsters [think of the creatures in King Kong, Frankenstein and E.T.], ultimately objects of our sympathy.7 The experience they give is a similar pleasure to that found in these movies - indeed, it seems right, and hardly belittling, to describe this special amalgam of wonder, curiosity, horror and sympathy 'fun', for we call it that when we experience it at the cinema, and usually mean none the worse by it. Pleasure, to take the examples of Paauwe and Piccinini, has come to the fore in contemporary art - not as a subject of analysis and critique, but as something close to an end in itself. Pleasure, it will do well to stress, is here meant in a broad sense, encompassing our experiences of the beautiful, the humorous, charming, delightful, sexy, beguiling, astonishing and sublime, indeed any affect we tend to seek out and value for its own sake. There is no need to add that we find it in abundance in Henson's romantic, sexy photographs; and we also find it in Gill's work. Gill's series A small town... seems to me unusual among those I have considered, in that it is perhaps perfectly poised between pleasure and criticality. A small town... has a wry humour, an abundance of tropical detail and beauty. The fruit masks render their wearers strangely sensuous, like exotic still-lives, and one's eyes tend to linger pleasurably over them. But they also render their wearers mute and passive in appearance, unequivocally driving home Gill's point about our exoticising colonialist gaze. This developing focus on pleasure in contemporary art is, I think, an important factor in the appearance of the correspondences I began this article by discussing. For advertising is also in part about pleasure - attracting and maintaining attention, persuading, beguiling, and so ultimately selling. If art, like advertising, is intended to elicit pleasure, it's probably little surprise that their strategies for doing so have come to overlap in some respects - either being developed in art and advertising independently, or being imported from one realm to the other. Such an analysis brings up many issues. The contrast between critical art and this new art is a contrast of two entirely different value systems, reflecting two different ideas about the purpose of art [reform vs. pleasure] two opposing moral philosophies [deontological vs. utilitarian - the 'right' vs. the 'good'] and by extension, perhaps, two opposing views of how society should be run. The critical approach shares something with centrally-controlled governments. I mean here that like them the critical artist tells us what's good for us and society - he tells us how power should be redistributed to make things 'right' - this, needless to say, is not a job that necessarily adds to our enjoyment of the world - at least not in any immediate or direct way. With the decline of social concerns and critical content in art - perhaps not entirely unrelated to the fate of one centrally-controlled system, communism - perhaps it's inevitable that art finds its purpose in society as being a thing that provides pleasure. In a capitalist economy, we get what we pay for, and once people's basic needs are secured, it is pleasure that they pay for. As Frank O'Hara vividly put it, "In a capitalist country fun is everything. Fun is the only justification for the acquisitive impulse, if one is to be honest."8 All other things being equal, people don't pay to be told what's good for them - given the choice [which for better or worse they generally are in our society] they won't be told what they should be doing, thinking or feeling. In such an economy, for better or worse, it's presumed that we each know what's good for us, and it's that which determines what is produced. In art this means that pleasure will thrive, and everything else will wither. Advertisers, film-makers, and other producers of popular culture in the West have understood this for a long time. Despite the fact that the visual arts in Australia do not exist in an ideal capitalist environment9, here too this world-view is becoming increasingly compelling to artists and, strangely perhaps, to the funding bodies who could decree otherwise. Given this situation, the old critical hegemony seems unlikely to return. Yet many will still find this new situation distasteful at least, and fear, perhaps with good reason, the threat of a culture homogenised by the lowest common denominators of pleasure. The nineteenth century utilitarian philosopher, John Stuart Mill was concerned with a similar problem - he asked, to slightly misquote him, "would you rather be a pig satisfied or Socrates satisfied?" "Socrates", we are supposed to answer - "Definitely Socrates".10 Socrates' pleasures, supposedly, are superior, more complex, and an acquired taste, and so Mill thought that they should be valued more highly than 'baser' pleasures. It might be thought that we could rate some of the pleasures of art higher than others in a similar way. But who's to know what a Socrates' pleasures are? You? Me? And who's to say our pleasures aren't really porcine, like everyone else's? Since one cannot make an edict telling people what is of value and what is not without doing away with individual choice, the only way for those who fancy themselves the possessors of more refined taste to get satisfaction is to get out there into the 'marketplace' of the visual arts with everyone else, and support [buy, curate, lavishly praise in print, or simply make] the art that does it for them. Notes 1 Blair French, 'What Makes Today's Photo-Art So Attractive, So Appealing...', Broadsheet: Contemporary Visual Arts+Culture, Vol 32 No 4: 13 2 Martha Rosler, 'Someone Says...', e-flux.com/projects/next_doc/martha_rosler.html 3 Ibid. 4 David Carrier, Writing About Visual Art, New York: Allworth Press, 2003: 170 5 For an assessment along these lines see, for example, Robert Cook's review of the exhibition Australiens, which showed at the Perth Institute for Contemporary Arts in July-August last year [Broadsheet, Vol 32 No 4: 26]. He found that the artists' well-intentioned " co-option of the political is mostly embarrasingly vacuous". 6 French: 12 7 This thought is due to Anthony Byrt, see page 53 of this issue of Broadsheet. 8 Frank O'Hara, 'Art Chronicle' [1962], Art Chronicles 1954-1966, New York: George Braziller, 1975: 5 9 There is government funding at Federal and State levels, and many artists do not make work for sale, or are resigned to having their work go unsold. 10 Mill's precise words were, "It is better to be a human being dissatisfied than a pig satisfied; better to be Socrates dissatisfied than a fool satisfied." [Utilitarianism, john-mill.com/works/utilitarianism/2.html]