Reading Benjamin Buchloh is like taking a hit to the solar plexus. He doesn’t pull any punches, nor should he.
I recently read ‘Figures of authority, Ciphers of Regression: Notes on the Return of Representation in European Painting’ published in October Vol. 16, Art World Follies (Spring 1981), published by MIT Press (kindly sent to me by Becky Hunter). Buchloh states,
“Paradoxically, however, both traditional Marxism and standard liberalism exempts artists from their responsibilities as sociopolitical individuals: Marxism through its reflection model, with its historical determinism; liberalism thorough its notion of the artist’s unlimited and uninhibited freedom to produce and express. Thus both political views extend to artists the privilege of assuming their determinate necessity to produce unconscious representations of the ideological world.” Man!
I admit, I don’t fully understand the Marxist side of his comparison, but I understand completely what he is talking about from the liberal side. When I was in school, that is exactly what we were being taught, ‘express yourself,’ to such an extent that it became facilitated self indulgence. It was all about expression, we never discussed any responsibility we were going to have as future artists. Is this being discussed now in art school? I don’t know, but it doesn’t sound like it.
With an art world increasingly run by market dictations, perhaps this is a fundamental question we need to ask ourselves as artists; what is our responsibility to society as an artist? If we expect society to support us and our work, we must certainly, then, owe a debt of responsibility to society through the art we make and present.
What do you think?
