One of the popular visions of the modern artist is to equate it with research and self-expression, as gesture, as abstract expression, as performance…
This presupposition induces an indivisible entity. An “I” that would express the artist’s vision of the world, pure and simple. Its authenticity would induce the unique and therefore new and true character of its work. The quality of an artist would depend on the vigor and clarity that he would be able to express, to delimit the intimate contours of his authentic being. And this, while remaining independent of cultural determinations or injunctions, leaving to anthropology the study of individual-culture relations.
The era of modern art seems to me to be the climax of this idea. From a common rise, with the growing centrality of the individual in our societies, the difference and the uniqueness of the artist are the claimed, admired forces. These qualities that the societal strives to put forward, find themselves, in a strange simultaneity, assailed by criticism.
This phenomenon is the culmination of the long joint history of Art with History itself.
One of the important vectors of this transition seems to be the Revolution, where the passage from the human subject of the king to that of the human citizen was decisive for the modern construction of the individual, both in the organization of society , in the social sciences, than in art.
In art, the transition was made by the progressive abolition of representation in favor of presentation. Quote from Marcel Duchamp It’s not the art, but the artists that interest me, or Andy Warhol’s 15 Minutes of Fame are representative markers of the centrality of the individual-artist.
Is this paradigm still valid? Is the artist in 2020 still this eccentric individual, attracting the light by the freedom he has to be himself, by the indifference he displays to the pressure of social norms?
Why does the artist, through his abnegation of the social sciences, constantly disregard the causes that surround him?
Even if culture has always considerably influenced craftsmen, designers and artists, the meaning of this influence has not always been the same. The reason why freedom appears crucial in modern times is that it has become the meta-object of art.
Indeed, during this period, the artist, like the representation, becomes the object of his art. Old obsessions have given way to art for art’s sake.
The hypothesis that I briefly pose here is that this coincidence was only a fold in the Western history of art, which is now disappearing as quickly as it arose. The constituent artistic performances and gestures of the early 20th century were marked by contingency and arbitrariness. These dynamics have been slowly withdrawing, since the 70s and 80s, in the face of the needs inherent in the societal field. Among them: ecology.
Each cause has its own story. The rise of the individual comes with the advent of the citizen in the republic, capitalism and industrial society. The transition taking place around the new millennium comes together with the Anthropocene age, the demands of minorities (feminist, LGBTQ, intersectionality) and the attempt to establish a democracy.
The contemporary artist is a result of this. It’s no longer a question of the self or one’s own freedom, but of a shared struggle – over class, gender, ecological standards, etc. – that weigh on our consciences, and that remain a challenge to put into practice. It’s no longer a question of wrapping entire monuments in plastic, based on the principle of monumentality and the arbitrary freedom of the “man who can”.
Even if upheavals of the modern era persist and will continue, they are disputed: either as emblems of patriarchal domination, or as Trojan horses of capitalism and these networks of plutocratic influence, or as environmental aberrations in the hour where ecology has become the greatest challenge there is.
The mandates can be combined, as in the case of the Bouquet of Tulips by Jeff Koons, exhibited in the Jardins des Tuileries. The protest noise that stems from this creation tears him away from contemporaneity during his lifetime.
It is in this triad of struggles (Capitalism/Oppression of peoples and minorities/Ecology) and the norms they produce that contemporary aesthetics are constructed.
Contemporaneity has the greatest aesthetic difference with modernity in that it is no longer standardized by the individual. It is true that its image remains dominant in society, but its normative capacity here, on the aesthetic level, has become inefficient.
Sister to each other, art and freedom are related. But in recent decades, their relationship has changed profoundly. Would the growing constraints of ecological and social standards damage the freedom of the artist?
Could this be a golden age that we see gradually slipping away? Would there be mourning?
The mourning to be done is perhaps that of self-mourning. Don’t get me wrong, I’m not talking here about the power of desire, joy, or one’s own life. The mourning of oneself is just the mourning of one’s trace, this scratch that one commits on nature, this political violence that one produces on the following. And if the question is not new, its maturity allows it to finally be audible.
The artistic avant-garde, far from the desire to simply enjoy its freedom, lives with these ecological and social constraints in order to imagine how to build a new, collective one, echoing our environment.
Full-footed in the Anthropocene and collapse on the horizon, artists face a major challenge. They find themselves, following modernity, placed on the central cornerstone of the norms that have built the individual. While we have all become artists through technologies and networks like Instagram and TikTok, creators of everything and nothing, Fluxus in spite of ourselves, the time has come when the artist operates a movement of withdrawal, like acts of strength and construction. And this, by putting the primacy to question again, at the same time, its relationship to the environment and its relationship to the collective. Without the collective, ecology stumbles and more broadly all struggles.
Ecotopia is working on this issue to its own extent. First by a withdrawal, a disappearance of the plastic expressionist gesture, by transforming the artist and the group as support for the work: a simple assistant of nature to create the work. Alternately Sherpas from the mountains and then from the sea carrying the fabric that will allow it to carry out its work. In During the fire, the third act of Ecotopia, she goes so far as to take possession of the individuals present, ritualizing the creative process. The latter has the ambition under the aegis of nature, to constantly question the collective relationship to nature.
Aimée Fleury and Benoit Barbagli, 2019, 90 x 60 cm