-1 PROFITING FROM NEW ART: JULIAN

SCHNABEL AT THE TATE [IN 1982]

JOHN A. WALKER (COPYRIGHT 2009)

A young American painter - Julian Schnabel (b. 1951) - currently enjoys the rare

privilege of a one-man show at the Tate Gallery. Thousands of hard working

living artists are ignored by the Tate. They must be wondering why Schnabel and

not them. Is the intrinsic aesthetic quality of his work so remarkable that a one-

man show was inevitable, or are there other reasons for his rapid elevation?

The art market

Within the Western economic system some works of art are commodities: they

have exchange and investment value. Art does not merely reflect the general

economy, it is part of it. From the economist's viewpoint, artists are small

independent producers manufacturing works 'on spec' for a market. (Most

artists own their means of production but they generally lack capital and control

over the means of distribution, marketing and publicity.) There are many more

aspiring artists than patrons and collectors, consequently the market in art is

extremely competitive. Immense overproduction ensures that the majority of

artistic enterprises are doomed to commercial failure. However, a few artists

succeed; like Picasso they become wealthy and celebrated. (It is reported that

Schnabel's paintings have rocketed in value from $2,000 to $50,000 in three-

years.) The success of the few lures on the rest.

The artworld

Who determines which artists succeed? In the West it is the artworld; that is, an

elite urban minority consisting of artists, dealers, collectors, patrons, arts council

officials, museum curators, critics, art historians and their associated

institutions, organizations and journals. As far as modern art is concerned, the

artworld's taste prevails over that of the general public and the popular press.

Although the artworld, like the rest of the economy, is divided into public and

private sectors, the two sides are interdependent and frequently collaborate

('collude' might be more apt). Schnabel's exhibition is a case in point: it is a show

mounted in a public museum with the help of the owners of Schnabel's paintings

- Doris and Charles Saatchi (experts in advertising), Mary Boone and Leo

Castelli (American dealers). The help of Anthony D'Offay is also acknowledged.

(Simultaneously two of Schnabel's paintings are on display at the D'Offay

Gallery in Dering Street in a mixed show of new painting.) Dealers are happy to

co-operate with museums during the early phase of a painter's career but once

there is a queue of buyers waiting for canvases they are much less willing to lend

to museums and exhibitions - to 'subsidize' the public sector - because it ties up

capital.

An exhibition in a public museum of an artist previously shown in private

galleries signals wider public recognition; the show functions like a hallmark of

state approval. For the artist it is promotion of an extremely valuable kind: all the

public museums throughout the world become potential customers; demand for the
artist's work is almost bound to increase, and as a result it will command higher

prices. The generosity of the collectors and dealers in lending Schnabel's paintings

to the Tate cannot be regarded, therefore, as entirely disinterested. Even when such

people do not benefit financially from their support of new art, they gain in terms of

social and cultural prestige.

The taste of the few

It should be recognised that power within the artworld is not equally distributed.

The taste of a few dealers and collectors is often decisive for the direction art takes.

Museum curators tend to follow their lead. By the time the art journalists arrive on

the scene, the result of the game has already been fixed; their cries of 'hype' are thus

too late to have any effect.

To succeed in the art market artists must produce the kind of work the

influential ones require (dealers have no use for community murals with socialist

messages and speak of them with contempt); it must satisfy their taste and also their

craving for something new. A degree of originality is an essential pre-requisite for

commercial success because the operation of the market demands it: to distinguish

the new products from the old and from rival contemporary works, the new items

must possess novelty and shock value. The whole history of modern art is the story

of a succession of fresh generations of artists anxious to displace their elders, of new

movements whose aim is to supplant established ones. Again, Schnabel is a case in

point. His works cleverly blend the old and the new: he satisfies the preference of

the market for 'easel' paintings (rather than videos, performances and conceptual

art statements) but he also introduces various novel features: gigantic size, rough
supports, masses of broken crockery embedded in thick paint, a deliberately crude

and 'bad taste' style of painting, an unusual melange of motifs and references.

To make a quick and large profit from investment in art is difficult with established

artists because their prices are high and they rise comparatively slowly. (They may

even fall if the artist suddenly becomes unfashionable.) If, however, a new star can

be created then rapid and large increases in value can be achieved. This is a

primary reason for the periodic emergence of new artists, new dealers and new

styles.

Neo-Expressionism

Schnabel is not alone in the sort of work he produces - complete outsiders and

eccentrics are not liked by the market - he is part of a new movement in painting

rampant in America, Germany and Italy which has been variously labelled 'Neo-

Expressionism', 'Violent painting', 'New Wave' and 'Energism'. Neo-Expressionism

is 'the next thing' in art and has been welcomed as such by the artworld after a

nerve wracking period of uncertainty and 'pluralism' following the rather arid

achievements of the Minimal and Conceptual art movements of the 1960s and

1970s. Dealers have breathed a sigh or relief: the engine of modernism has started

up again.

The role of the Tate

Apparently, the Schnabel exhibition is the first of a series to be devoted to new

artists. A sub-group of the so-called 'Friends of the Tate Gallery' has been formed -
'Patrons of New Art' - with the help of the Saatchis. It is planned to use private

funds to purchase new art and, eventually, to house it in a 'Museum of New Art'.

(Are they aware, one wonders, how rapidly new art becomes old art?) Thus the

Schnabel exhibition is an instance of private initiative in art patronage advocated by

Conservative politicians. Public museums can always use more money but there is a

danger of loss of integrity and independence in private ventures of this sort.

It seems axiomatic that the Tate should display examples of new art whenever

possible but how should this be done? Is it really the Tate's role to act as an

extension of the private gallery network? Should not the Tate provide a critical

context for the understanding of new culture? Should it not fulfil an educational

role? Consider the Schnabel example. American art magazines, especially

Artforum, have been carrying articles on Schnabel and on the phenomenon of

Neo-Expressionism for several years now. Some of the opinions expressed in these

articles are extremely critical of Neo-Expressionism - reactionary

expressionism ... the debasement of art to kitsch ... a pastiche of historical

consciousness ... an exercise in bad faith ... cultural cannibalism ... cynical work ...

a declaration of presence signifying only the ambition of the artist to be noticed

(T. Lawson) ... Expression for the sake of expression ... decline by way of

popularization ... manufactured spontaneity ... reactionary throwback ... an art

made to sell ... the primitivism and simplicity of the child's mentality (D. Kuspit).

In the Tate Gallery catalogue essay by Richard Francis - which provides the only

contextualization of the Schnabel show for the visitor - there is no hint of the

mixed critical reception given to Schnabel's art (Francis only quotes articles by
the artist's friends), of the controversy aroused by Neo-Expressionism, of the

underlying ideological and political issues at stake in the debates. Instead there is

sycophantic praise couched in pretentious, mystifying prose. Also in the catalogue

are a hermetic poem and artist's statement, and a photo of Schnabel in a desolate

landscape setting. (The intention seems to be to recreate the aura of profundity

and intellectual depth that was the hallmark of the Abstract Expressionists.)

Visitors to the Tate are not treated as adults, as people capable of benefiting from

an open and honest discussion of the case for and against the new painting.

Use-value and exchange-value

To return to the issue of aesthetic quality. Schnabel's paintings are commodities

but does this mean they have no artistic and social value? It is necessary to

distinguish between exchange-value and use-value. A loaf of bread has exchange-

value and its sale profits the baker and shopkeeper but it also has use-value as

food. Bread's use-value is not negated by its exchange-value and neither is art's.

Schnabel's works offer the viewer, prepared to overcome prejudices about what

constitutes 'good' drawing and painting, a great deal of optical, tactile and

intellectual pleasure and interest. The complexity of their imagery produced by

embededness in broken surfaces, by sketchiness and by overlapping outlines -

causes the viewer difficulty in reading and interpretation. In other words, the

paintings delay perception. This was a characteristic of modern art praised by the

Russian formalist critics in the 1920s. Unlike so much recent art whose only

concern has been questions of form, materials and processes of production,

Schnabel's paintings do have content: they make references to people and events
external to art.

‘Terrible, terrible, terrible .. .' intoned a woman stumbling across Schnabel's

paintings in the Tate. Evidently she did not realize that they are deliberately

terrible in both senses of the word: bad and awe-inspiring. They are at once

repulsive and exhilerating, humanist and inhuman, bombastic and romantic. Like

Punk, they achieve a genuinely new style by a bizarre selection and scrambling of

past and present styles of art both representational and abstract. They are crude,

provocative, exhibitionist, ironic, over the top.

Like the Abstract Expressionists before him, Schnabel cultivates an

improvisatory method of work: he rejects his own mannerisms and tastes as soon

as they become routine. The result is rapid change, eccentric shifts of direction,

and each work tends to be different. It is refreshing to encounter a group of

individual pictures rather than those tedious series of images playing variations

on narrow themes.

The new figuration

In addition to its connections with European Neo-Expressionism, Schnabel's work

is linked, in some respects, to a new school of figurative painting in New York (e.g.

the work of David Salle and Thomas Lawson) which makes use of commercial

illustration and mass media imagery. His relationship to this school is a matter of

dispute amongst the participants (according to Lawson, Schnabel's work is camp

and decadent). Some of the artists are also writers and theorists; their aim is to

use painting to perform a critique of representation and ideology. (To help us to

understand Schnabel's position in respect of the new figuration a comprehensive

survey exhibition of the work was needed not a one-man show.) One striking

stylistic feature of this new painting is the placing of painted outline drawings

against flat fields of colour or over the top of other images (see Schnabel's 'Homo

painting').

Reality for Schnabel and the others is not just the external, objective world, it

is also the internal subjective dimension of dreams, emotions, memories, myths,

fantasies; thus the subject/object barrier is dissolved. Furthermore, they take

account of the way art and the mass media constantly mediate reality by

transforming actual events into images and narratives, and by creating fictional

worlds. As a result, their paintings are not realistic in a conventional sense. For

example, the coherence of perspectival space is abandoned as images overlap and

figures and faces of different sizes jostle together.

Giantism

Why are Schnabel's paintings so huge? (Only the super rich, museums and big

business have walls large enough to display them; even the Tate would be

embarrassed to own too many.) Is their jumbo size an index of the artist's

megalomaniac ambition, or a Brechtian estrangement device (Schnabel has cited

Brecht)? There is something surreal in sketches of faces greatly enlarged. The

works' scale is that of monumental, public art yet their content and manner of

execution relates more to private mythologies. Schnabel's art is arresting and

intriguing because it is full of such paradoxes.

 No doubt giantism, the stress of materials and primitive handling stems, in

part, from the need to assert painting's identity and special qualities in the face of

the rivalry of photography, film and TV.

The problem for younger artists in relation to the history of modernism is to

surpass the achievements of Picasso, Pollock, etc; this may explain Schnabel's

extremism.

Zeitgeist

Schnabel's works have been called 'fashionable'. This implies on the one hand,

that it is 'the truth of the moment', and, on the other hand, that it is superficial

and hence fated to become rapidly outmoded. The question here is: to what extent

is Schnabel's work an authentic manifestation of the Zeitgeist? (Assuming, of

course, that such a spirit of the age exists.) Are we justified, for example, in

interpreting his shattered plates as metaphors for the broken hopes and

fragmented condition of the present?

The market forces acting upon new art have already been described. In

addition there is a periodic hunger for new art caused by boredom with existing

styles. Continually the world changes, society changes. Living art, we feel, should

register these changes otherwise it will not be contemporary, it will not articulate

our sense of the present. And if change is economic decline accompanied by a

revival of hard line right-wing politics, does this automatically mean a neo-

conservative style of art? (And is Neo-Expressionism that style?) The assumption

here is that there is an underlying spirit of the age which art passively reflects.
But this overlooks (1) the extent to which new art constructs our sense of the

Zeitgeist, and (2), artists are capable of reflecting critically upon change as it

takes place, consequently a shift to the right could result in a more radical,

oppositional kind of art.

This is not the case with Schnabel but it would be simplistic to dismiss his work

as 'neo-conservative' - it is too ambiguous for that (it embodies a complex,

ambivalent response to recent history). For Schnabel's generation to act, to paint,

to satisfy desire is paramount, despite moral uncertainty, imperfection, and the

politically risky nature of the results. Left-wingers, myself included, are made

uneasy by this kind of art, but extreme self-criticism and doubt so easily inhibits

creativity. Nor does having the 'correct' politics necessarily guarantee rich,

aesthetically stimulating paintings. It is surely more socially valuable for artists to

manifest contradictions in their work than to reproduce socialist stereotypes

which only comfort the already converted. One of these contradictions is the very

pleasure of painting itself (to the artist, to the viewer): the luxury of playing with

pigments while others starve; the paradox of enjoying pictures of men being

tortured to death on crosses.

Cultural necrophilia

Schnabel's subjects and surfaces are frequently tormented, at times sado-

masochistic. Pain and pleasure intermingle. Skulls, the skeleton of Death on a

horse, the lacerated torso of St Sebastian, the crucified bodies of Christ and the

thieves are all archaic themes. Does this make Schnabel 'a profoundly traditional
artist' as one critic claims? Surely he is a modern grave robber (some of his works

resemble archaeological sites with shards of pottery and figures embedded in the

'earth' paint) - his attitude to tradition is not respectful but iconoclastic. He can

be accused of cultural necrophilia, of raping long dead traditions because he is

unwilling to confront the complexity of today's reality. There is some truth in this:

he certainly disinters and re-animates the corpses of the past but their effect is

twofold: firstly to acknowledge the residual power of these ancient images even

today (have we not recently witnessed a surprising resurgence of religious

faiths?); and secondly, to undermine them by revealing their state of decay.

Schnabel's critics have discussed emotions but to read his paintings as

expressions of the artist's emotions would be an error. (This is why the label 'Neo-

Expressionism' is misleading.) Take the issue of sincerity: are we to assume that

Schnabel is a Christian because he employs Christian subjects? If he is not, are

we to accuse him of bad faith and cynicism? His paintings do generate a sense of

trickery and fraud but this stems, it seems to me, from the way he makes visible

the hollowness of the language of emotion: by pushing the pictorial rhetoric of

emotion to absurd lengths he reveals the mask-like character of all signs (we can

never be certain 'I love you' is not a lie however sincerely spoken).

A reactionary art?

Art can be reactionary in two senses, artistically and politically. Neo-

Expressionism stands accused of both. Certainly Schnabel reacts against such

immediately preceding forms of art as Minimalism and Conceptualism. Also, he

prefers the highly traditional medium of painting. But can we sensibly talk of a

'return' to painting when its practice has never ceased? (What one can say is that

the most interesting work being done in contemporary art now uses painting, that

painting has recaptured the initiative from other art media.) Is painting to be

dismissed as inherently reactionary because it is a pre-captalist, premachine form

of handicraft? Surely not. Is Schnabel's work reactionary because it is so

dependent upon the past? This too seems dubious: Cézanne himself sought a

synthesis of the ancient and modern. Are Schnabel's paintings politically

reactionary because they don't address specific issues from a left-wing

standpoint? A more general form of this question would be: are there no use-

values for the left in the artistic achievements of the bourgeoisie?

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This article was first published in the British art magazine Aspects, no 20, Autumn

1982. The original article was illustrated but now, if one visit’s the Tate Gallery’s

website for images of the Schnabel paintings it owns, one sees this:

John A. Walker is a painter and art historian. He is the author of many books and

articles on contemporary art and mass media. With Rita Hatton he is co-author of

Supercollector: A Critique of Charles Saatchi, 3rd edn (London: Institute of

Artology, 2005) - distributed by Turnaround Publisher Services.

He is also an editorial advisor for the website:

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