What is Decadent Art?
It's probably not the first topic of conversation among viewers what Alain David's digitally manipulated images actually depict. You can admire their color, their composition, their harmony, whether you recognize their subject matter or not.
David likes this. It means that collectors can hang them on walls, clothing buyers can wear them around necks, gentlemen can feature them on ties, and none but those who do so will know: they are hiding a one-time obscene image in plain sight.
Here is his only hint: The clothing line featuring this art is called Coochy-Coo.
"I always had a gift for composition," David says, his hand resting on a framed piece called Passion Flower. "I was told from an early age that the talent was innate."
David's manipulated photographs fill the small table before him, bearing names like Tears of Pleasure and Enchanted Longing. He has brought many today, each representing a manipulated variation on the same theme.
He produces them by starting with a photograph - where he gets them is a story by itself - then Photoshopping the hell out of it, regearing its colors, making a special shape of its subject if desired, then printing it on an Epson 3000 printer using special inks.
"Of course, keeping it flesh tone makes it more recognizable," he says.
The
photos already showed in an exhibition called The Abstraction of Venus,
held recently at Passional, a fetish store off South Street in
Philadelphia. But larger things await. David plans to approach the
Museum of Sex in New York City. A
few collectors already have prints by David hanging on their walls,
disguised as modern art. And it's at least possible that the art world
in large might briefly halt its random beatification of merely competent
artists and embrace his enterprise just for its sly fun.
Or
not.
"Art
is a form of expression, of intellectual exploration. But mostly it's
about passion," David says.
Probably,
David's idea represents not just one man's flirtation with the
secretly scandalous. It also shows that sometimes when the muse touches,
she clobbers. Some artists she doesn't sing to, but throws to the
ground and kicks.
Art
has always gone to the edge, and very often over it. A crucifix in
urine, feces rendered in ceramic, a portrait of the Virgin Mary
containing elephant dung - all such works willfully skate the border
where art turns into insult. The question is, When does art indicate
things have gone wrong? When does art become...
"Decadent:
that word scares me on all kinds of levels," said John Dowell, a
professor of art at Tyler School of Art in Philadelphia.
"I think
the function of art really is that it allows us to discover something
about ourselves, and helps us pay attention to the ordinary, and perhaps
become sensible that there is humanity in the world.
"But when I
think of decadence, I think of the German artist who castrated himself
in public, and the artist who had someone shoot him as some kind of
artistic statement. That sort of thing seems to be moving, I think, a
little bit far away for me."
The term
Decadence has usually referred to a supposed decline in moral values,
the deterioration of a culture that has passed the moment of its
greatness. In the 19th century it came giddily into the
language from the pens of critics eager to show how the art of Aubrey
Beardsley and the writing of Charles-Pierre Baudelaire signaled the end
of the civilized world.
After a while
the artists so criticized adopted the term themselves and wore it in
honor. Just as Baudelaire and Beardsley eventually got into the
mainstream, so did a number of 19th century painters progress
in status from dubious outsider to recognized force, as the upcoming
exhibit of Cezanne and Pissarro, opening in June at MOMA, ought to show.
Whatever starts as decadent usually doesn't remain so very long.
"What
made Cézanne radically different from anyone else, was the fact that he
was expressing his individuality in a way that appeared to be completely
mad to everyone else, even to his best friends," said Joachim
Pissarro, curator of the upcoming MOMA show.
"Many
young artists were feeling stifled by the heavily tradition-oriented
conventions that were being taught in art schools. Young artists were
demanding to have more room to express their individuality, and innovate
upon the traditions."
In mid-1930s
Germany the case was not so mild. The Nazis mounted a full assault
against art they considered not sufficiently heroic, not sufficiently
exemplary of racial health and purity - in other words, decadent. This
category turned out to include most of modern art, which presented sure
symptoms of mental disorder in the people who made it.
Modern
artists suffered from decayed brain centers and diseased genes, the
theory went. Most modern artists were not racially pure, so the impure
art they produced deviated from
accepted standards of classical beauty. The abstract and distorted
figures they sometimes used betrayed the distortion of their own minds.
The
Nazis put together an exhibition to illustrate this. It
was to be the state's official condemnation of degenerate art. In
1937 they gathered works, confiscated from the nation's museums,
representing Impressionism, Dadaism, Cubism, Expressionism and many
other influences.
On
the second floor of the former Institute of Archeology in Munich, the
works of Ernst
Barlach, Max Beckmann, Paul Klee, Marc
Chagall, and many
others shared space with slogans designed to ridicule them:
"Revelation of the Jewish racial soul," "An insult to German
womanhood," "Even
museum bigwigs called this the 'art of the German people.'"
It
was probably not part of the Nazi's plan that the degenerate show drew
five times the number of visitors summoned by an equally large show of
Nazi-approved art, which opened in Munich at the same time.
After
the war, art got back to its old business of pushing borders and
breaking rules.
But
even today, some hint of the disdain for that flouting-the-standards
trait remains. At the Incamminati school in Philadelphia, run by
world-renown portraitist Nelson Shanks, students work very hard to
embrace traditional artistic values. Their work is a recognition that,
even given the tendency for excess and outrage, art can still advance
along channels already well known.
"Over
four centuries ago," reads the school's mission statement, "the
Academia del Incamminati was formed in response to absurd excesses in
the art world and today again we respond to the same need in an effort
to reconnect to the dept of purpose of great art."
And
indeed, on the fifth floor studio of an old factory, accomplished
students under Shanks's supervision touch at life studies, assess the
juxtaposition of items in still lifes, and gesture with their work
toward the Renaissance. Incamminati calls it Progressive Realism. What
it stands in contrast to is an open question.
Because,
in truth, when artists set out to push limits, when a crucifix in urine
counts as legitimate, definitions of decadence remain hazy at best.
Perhaps no such definition is possible.
Perhaps
the idea of decadence in art has paled before the idea of excess. "In
decadence you have this term that equates effeminacy and homosexuality
with social degeneration, but that drops out after the second war, and I
don't think it has particular currency today," said
Marcia Brennan, assistant professor of Art History at Rice University
and author of Painting Gender,
Constructing Theory: The Alfred Stieglitz Circle and American Formalist
Aesthetics.
"But
excessiveness is alive in very interesting ways. Excessiveness implies
exceeding boundaries and going beyond limits; but sometimes it's used
as a strategy in deconstruction."
Anyway,
claims of decadence in art have so far always failed to herald the
actual downfall of civilization. Rome lived on for hundreds of years
after Nero and Caligula - to fall eventually after a long immersion in
Christian morality. And western culture did not come to a crashing
halt - according to most commentators - with the strange and often
sensual expression of Cézanne and Beardsley. Yet
cultures still use art as a kind of early warning system. Some see art
as a weather vane showing the direction of morals - appropriately or
not.
The current
faith-based fervor seems intent on expunging every last clue of the
sensual and erotic from the imagery of everyday life, including TV and
movies - probably hoping that the human emotions they express will
follow them into nullity.
But the thing
that looks most like decadence today, art is saying little
about - except in the prices being paid for it.
"Decadence
can imply excessiveness not just in art, but in everything from the
political situation to drug abuse," said Nancy G. Heller, author of Why
a Painting is Like a Pizza, and professor of Art History at The
University of the Arts in Philadelphia.
"In artistic terms I think of decadence as reveling, as using not just
a few colors but many, and not one texture but a bunch of them.
Decadence is really luxuriating in something. I don't see too much of
that in modern art.
"But you
can see it in a lot of other places. The excessive way we live, for
example. I think of the matching his-and-her private jets advertised in
Nieman-Marcus. And you see it also in the real estate boom, looked at
from the point of view of someone having to rent.
"It's not
just a boom, now; it's gotten to the point where it's decadent,
where if you don't have $1.5 million for a condo that doesn't even
have walls, you don't get to own a home.
"These
things could be wonderful, viewed one way. Viewed another way, they
could be the downfall of civilization."
© Rob Laymon for Bucks Magazine
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