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Volume 67, Issue 4
There Is No Such Thing As Art: And It Is A Good Thing
Too! Or Tobi Kahn’s Conundrum of “Reductive Realism”
By Menachem Wecker
I threw the bottle rack and the urinal into their
faces as a challenge, and now they admire them for their aesthetic beauty.
—Marcel Duchamp, 1946
Hornstrumpot! We shall not have succeeded in
demolishing everything unless we demolish the ruins as well. But the only
way I can see of doing that is to use them to put up a lot of fine,
well-designed buildings.
—Alfred Jarry, "Ubu enchaine"
After a successful, impressive career dating back to
the prehistoric era, Art died in the mid-twentieth century. Not only did
it die, it was murdered – assassinated by man and his politics. With the
decline of Abstract Expressionism, the artistic canon became polluted with
inflammatory, confrontational buffoons, who, fearing the tag Philistine,
made it their business to endorse every new object created and to embrace
it as art without distinction, be it glass boxes of sawed-off cow organs
submerged in formaldehyde, a bare room with a blinking light, or the pièce
de résistance, The Virgin smeared with elephant dung. In a world where
multi-culturalism (read anti-culturalism) is vogue, and moral relativity
is masqueraded with pseudo-intellectual banners of postmodernism or
deconstructionism, it is no wonder that the confounded, petrified public,
shunning the racist words “merit” and “talent”, is passionately
picketing its bête noir, the canon of dead white males (da Vinci, Daumier,
Rembrandt, Caravaggio, etc.), and the battle cry is in favor of a more
race-conscious one, albeit one that would have such a broad definition of
art as to include the entire cosmos (save the upper-class white males, to
be sure). As critic Roger Kimball tells us again and again, obscenity and
blasphemy has become the Art world’s raison
d'être; how
else can we account for Britney Spears’ anodyne CDs outselling Beethoven
year after year, and Damien Hirst’s and Martin Creed’s pubescent junk
achieving more distinction than Giotto’s paintings?
The problem of anti-art begins with the grossly misleading vernacular espoused by far too many museum-going proletarians, stolen from Sister Wendy’s skewed aesthetic terminology of hackneyed, clichéd jargon. And now, a story to illustrate this point. A sailor visiting Picasso’s Paris studio once denounced the portraits sporadically dispersed throughout the room, claiming, “These don’t look like women!” In classic Picasso fashion, the artist enigmatically requested a photograph of the sailor’s girlfriend, to which he observed candidly, upon inspection, “Well she’s very cute, but isn’t she awfully small?” To the sailor, a photo is real, while a painting deviating from the linear mold of imitative, external forms is abstract. An imposter impersonating the sailor’s girlfriend, however, the photo Picasso held in his hand is abstract in the technical sense, easily seen, in part, through its smaller-than-life proportions. Offering no such deceitful claims of transcending their nature (pigment and canvas), Picasso’s paintings are real. My teacher and friend, Tom Barron, is always quick to point out that a tree’s likeness is by no means a tree (with apologies to Wilde), while a red dot on a blue square truly is a red dot on a blue square. This is essentially what artist and card-carrying Nabis member, Maurice Denis, said in his "Manifesto of Symbolism" (1890): “It must be recalled that a picture – before it is a picture of a battle-horse, nude woman, or some anecdote – is essentially a plane surface covered by colors arranged in a certain order.”
With this distinction in mind, Tobi Kahn’s
paintings and sculptures (idols?) are charmingly honest; his paint is
paint, and his wood is wood. His motifs recall Klee’s iconography, with
the simplicity of Stella or Rothko. Mr. Kahn’s paintings look
deceptively shallow; lacking are the glittery, flamboyant surfaces we have
come to expect in too much of postmodernist art, whose sole purpose, it
seems, is to distract from compositional errors and aesthetic desolation.
Instead, the paintings attract only the mature viewer who sees through
idolatrous, eye-catching externalities. While the expert viewer sees
the sculptural aspects of the paintings (and the painterly quality of the
sculptures), built up through layer after layer of perfectly flat paint,
the sentimentalist merely looks at the childish shapes. Art critic
and cyber teacher of mine, John Haber (see his extraordinary site at
http://haberarts.com) correctly explains, “The
opposition of telling [emph. his] and being a message is
insightful. No question that one ideal of art and literature is to be
[emph. his] something first, so that interpretation of what it tells must
capture that whole. In that sense, even the modernist like that ‘a poem
should not mean but be.’” Kahn’s artwork has a delightful reality to
it.
In a different context, no doubt, Dean Jesionowski (1987) speaks of “disarmingly ‘realistic’ effects [that] are based on alarmingly abstract construction.” This effect is one that one of my art teachers at Massachusetts College of Art, Ahmed Abdalla, describes as a “specific type of vagueness.” Art must be specific, but it may be rooted in a limitless, world. Unlike Klee, Stella and Rothko, Mr. Kahn’s paintings read as portraits rather than landscapes. “I love what happens,” the artist says, “when you just let your soul fly.” The forms, carefully built up with striking color, seem to fly freely in exactly that way. If we can say he had one at all, perhaps Marc Chagall’s greatest achievement (later improved upon by Dalí’s surrealism) was his credible portrayal of suspended models completely unaware of any laws of gravity; they have astonishingly real weight, and yet they hover balloon-like. Kahn has abstracted away Chagall’s literal figures, but he has thankfully retained their lively energy and rosy freedom. While Dalí and Magritte presented a surreal world in which a frightening reality threatens to literally dissolve before our very eyes, Kahn chooses to illustrate one where all life attempts to ascend heavenward and embrace the spiritual paradise therein.
Is it art though? Fellow member of an online aesthetics group and co-editor of Aristos, Michelle Marder Kamhi insists, “Anti-Art Is Not Art!” (Read the article at http://www.aristos.org/whatart/anti-art.htm). Mr. Kahn’s art certainly comes from a product of more dedication and reverence then the Dadaist clowns, but, stuck in the world of Color Field, it is not anything new per se. And yet, “What moves men of genius, or rather, what inspires their work,” states Delacroix (1824) fervently, “is not new ideas, but their obsession with the idea that what has already been said is still not enough.” Toying with this distinction, I decided to consult Rabbi Shalom Carmy, which always proves to be one of the best of investments, where I learned of Wittgenstein’s definition of beauty. The question, instead of art vs. not art and beauty vs. not beauty, becomes one of proportion – quantity as opposed to quality. Art critic par excellence Clement Greenberg concurs, with his discussion of art as merely an issue of taste. “Is it Art?” or “Is it beautiful?” are questions for cocktail parties, whereas we, the erudite scholars that we are, have a more important terminology. With apologies of insubordination and helplessness to answer the question of art or not art, let me conclude by recommending very strongly that all attend Mr. Kahn’s forthcoming exhibit (free with a YU ID), Microcosmos, at the Chelsea location of the Yeshiva University Museum (Thursday, November 14th 6 – 8 PM, at 15 W. 16th St.). ♦
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