Not A Movement, A Gang

A reconsideration of next steps.

I have been following the work of

Alexander Adams

, an artist, poet, art critic, and cultural commentator who has been envisioning a way for art to survive outside what I’m calling the Monoculture. One of his recent pieces gets into it:

Our Next Steps: Components of an Art Movement

“What are the elements that comprise an art or cultural movement? Here are the components.” They are, sensibly, artists, collectors and audience, gallerists (I’ve never lost my preference for “dealers,” but no matter), critics, salons, and publishing. He concludes (I’m spoiling, but read it all anyway): “We thrive or the movement dies.”

It’s bold stuff. Even if it goes nowhere it’s preferable to whinging. I have one reservation, however: we don’t have movements anymore. The actions of starting a movement, putting all of Adams’s list into place, are still worth doing. But it’s too much to expect a movement to come out of them. The Monoculture comprises most of the institutions and consumes most of the germane resources and attention, and not even the Monoculture can produce a movement.

In a sense this is unsurprising, as the nature of monoculture is reproduction by cloning. But even if it found some way to fecundity it’s doubtful that it could spawn a movement. We seem to be living in a wholly other kind of time. In graduate school in the ‘90s, we were still talking about pluralism as if it were a distinct phenomenon and that it would be followed by something. Something never came. It was still possible to paint the landscape or make abstract sculptures or do whatever you liked after 2000. But unless your artistic commitments were firmly established by then it started to feel anachronistic to work out of a tradition (by which I mean any movement prior to pluralism) but weirdly ersatz to fumble for something new. There was nothing to push against, in the way that abstraction pushed against figuration or impressionism pushed against the styles in the salons.¹ Art needs the villain, as Max Stirner wrote.²

I see some of the work coming out of the graduate schools now and I feel terrible for the students. Much of it is some riff on surrealism, which at least entails a modicum of skill, and superficially justifies the associated self-involvement. But to recall the beginnings of surrealism, when Freud was new and a revelatory erotic irrationality first began oozing into public consciousness, is to notice that none of the recent stuff has any historical force behind it except current-year politics, which is boring.

I don’t buy the entire Dantonian argument, but Danto was onto something when he described in 1984 that a certain narrative of history had come to an end. The last movements of art worthy of being called such were minimalism, basically an emphatic restatement of certain premises of reductionist modernism, and conceptualism, basically an emphatic restatement of doubts about the nature of the art object that also fell out of modernism. Both periods correlate to the later 1960s and early ‘70s. Performance art and earthworks are more genres than movements. “Pluralism,” from the ‘80s, was just a catch-all for “we don’t know what to call all this stuff.” I’m not sure what “postminimalism” even means. So I just looked it up and Wikipedia says that “Postminimalism is more an artistic tendency than a particular movement.” So, basically, another genre, although I can tell you generally what earthworks and performance art entail.

If a movement is beyond reach, what should we organize instead? A gang.

In 1998, Peter Schjeldahl wrote an essay titled “A Gang Theory of Art Education, or Why Artists Make the Worst Students.”³ It describes his thoughts on having taught at Harvard, with no commensurate certifications of his own. It’s one of the finest things he ever wrote.

Artists are people who are subject to irrational convictions of the sacred. Baudelaire said that an artist is a child who has acquired adult capacities and discipline. Art education should help build those capacities and that discipline without messing over the child. By child, I do not mean childish behavior - I mean the irrational conviction of the sacred.

A gang in essence is a cohort that regards externally imposed rules as suspect and arbitrary. Members look after each other and antagonize outsiders according to a mostly unspoken code. Schjeldahl:

All gangs are formed by individuals who, for one reason or another, are misfits, wander to the margin by themselves, discover each other, discover other people like themselves. They bond together. If all they have in common is that alienation, they’re a very dangerous group of kids. But if they have some aspiration in common, they can be intensely creative.

You should read it all, but note especially:

Gang members are extremely competitive, but not with each other. They pool their resources, their information, their knowledge, and attack the world. Teams work this way, too, but I like the concept of the gang because, with art, there has to be an element of condoned anarchy.

And:

In a gang - of art students, say - everybody knows without saying who is the best. It’s very primitive, very hierarchical, in the way wild animals are hierarchical. Everyone knows who’s best, who’s second best. There’s a lot of doubt about who’s third best, because everybody else thinks they’re third best. Except for one person who is absolutely hopeless. This person, as a mascot and scapegoat, is cherished by everyone.

Schjeldahl went on to explore what it meant to be a teacher to a gang, which is also interesting. But excerpted above is the necessary outline for our purposes: social bonding, the ability and inclination to cause trouble, creativity, shared resources, hierarchy - really something more like aristocracy in the etymological sense, ἄριστος (best) + κράτος (power) - and most of all, anarchism.

A movement, by definition, is headed somewhere. A gang need not be, except to take the motorcycles out on the road for the hell of it. If we’re in a time of heading nowhere, the gang is the right model.

Moreover, though Schjeldahl doesn’t get into this, it’s natural for gangs to have enemies. That brings us back to the man that Marx and Engels derided as Saint Max, though for our purposes, and just to toss a little more dirt on the carcasses of Marx and Engels, maybe we should beatify him. Gangs are tough and combative. They exemplify a kind of Yang energy much needed in an art world characterized by excess Yin. They regard the regnant regime with scorn. Stirner: “…the egoist, in all cases where his advantage runs against the state’s, can satisfy himself only by crime.” Art needs the villain. A gang knows by instinct and practice how to find one, and kick his ass for the sheer pleasure of it.

Let’s have a gang.

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1. Coming out of an illustration background to work with Darby in the ‘90s, I wonder if I’m among the last people to get a feeling of what it was like to explore abstraction as if were an act of resistance to figuration, and not just as one possible mode of picture-making among many.

2. “Art has for a long time not only acknowledged the ugly, but considered the ugly as necessary to its existence, and takes it up into itself; it needs the villain.” Max Stirner, The Ego and Its Own, 1844.

3. Archive.