High Art, Low Art

In 1990, there was a show at the Museum of Modern Art called HIGH/LOW and I wrote this piece about it in FACTSHEET FIVE. It is a follow up to the previous month’s piece on what I called “Proud Mary”.

The current show at the Museum of Modern Art here in New York is called “High/Low” and it attempts to show that from “just after World War I...direct borrowings from everyday ephemera gave artists a special way to confront the look and feel of modern society.” Now, big deal, right? I mean I think this is something that most of us with a little intelligence, and many without, take for granted. The idea that “High” and “Low” form a continuum is certainly nothing new to those of us that have lived through a decade or three in this century. But one of this exhibition’s many flaws is that it does not see the relationship between “high“ and ” low“ culture as a continuum at all. To the creators of this show, ” low“ art means advertising, caricature, comics, graffiti and billboards- pop culture in general; while ” high“ art means the stuff that gets shown in institutions like MOMA. I guess we’re supposed to think that the world of ” low“ art didn’t even exist- until now, of course- because they hadn’t acknowledged it. But to me and everyone else I know that has seen this show, this exhibition is one big moot (exclamation) point. We can move from Soul Train to Sol LeWit without a lot of discussion. By even positing this theory, the Museum is fragmenting into two worlds that which is really only one. This show is a ridiculous contradiction in terms. It is unnecessary to separate the high from the low, and in fact, to do so is to play a ” high“ art game that has been going on for years and holds little interest for the rest of us.

Why, then, should I bother talking about it? Because not only does it set up a false boundary between the high and the low, but it also leaves ” us“ out of it altogether. This is significant. This exhibition does not address those of ” us“ who both accept and reject certain aspects of both ” high“ and ” low“ culture and in fact are doing something much more interesting than either. We live our lives without a division, we borrow freely from anything that is useful to us, be it ” everyday ephemera“ or the ” innovative styles“ of modern art. We reject both worlds in favor of a third world: the do-it-yourself, self-publishing activity that are part of a tradition which I call the Sub-Modern. This loose-knit Sub-Modern ” community“ is where the ” high“ art world goes fishing for new talent. But our little pond doesn’t really need a name. In fact, like MOMA does with High/Low, to name it is to to ruin it, to categorize it, to destroy it, to assure it’s co-optation by the Proud Mary machine I talked about in my last column (Factsheet Five # 37). Nevertheless, I’ll refer to us as the Sub-Moderns now and I’ll tell you why later.

But first, let’s talk about just why this show is so ridiculous. Perhaps the reason that it limits itself to the worlds of painting and sculpture is an acknowldgement that this show, while considered ” daring“ by the New York art mafia, is in fact being presented at least 50 years too late. After all, media such as television, cinema, rock’n’roll and the rest weren’t at the forefront of our consciousness as they are now. By not addressing these most fascinating aspects of pop culture, perhaps they are saying all this hoopla about High/Low isn’t all that relevant due to the advent of today’s ” high tech“ society in which all the world is only as far away as your remote control device. But I doubt it. Unable to drop the obsession with the plastic arts, they predictably position themselves just a little too ” high“ and skimp on the ” low,“ taking themselves, as always, far too seriously. By 1936 Max Ernst had begun ” to transform into dramas revealing my most secret desires what were previously only banal pages of advertising.“ Status quo today. Ernst and his dada contemporaries felt that mail order catologues and such ” brought together...elements of figuration so distant from each other that the very absurdity of this assemblage provoked in me a hallucinatory succession of images.“ No reflection on you, Max, but what else is new? Marcel Duchamp refered to his ” Green Box“ as ” a kind of Sears and Roebuck catalogue.“ To us this is just a useful metaphor but obviously the curators of this exhibition find this reference quaint enough to finally earn a place in the history of ” high“ art.

Every point in this show has been made before. Yeah great, R. Crumb’s comics. Very innovative for them but to us another veritable institution. We’ve known and loved his work for years. Campbell’s soup cans- terrific. The only thing that I didn’t already know of were called ” affichistes“- immense canvases of ripped up posters by some Italian and French artists of the 1960’s. I liked them just as I enjoy the texture of poster-covered walls I see on the streets of the city. Thank you so much but one new ” undiscovered“ ” movement“ does not a revelation make. What MOMA calls ” low“ has been going on for centuries. The only thing new here is that a few scholars have chosen to take a half-assed look at it.

Even the ” logo“ for the show is an embarrasing failure. Based on a cover design for the 1923 book ” On Mayakovsky“ by the Russian B. Arvatov, the High/Low ” logo,“ currently seen all over New York, leaves behind the twisted elegance of the original’s constructivist design and extracts, instead, a cheesey bastardization of it, poorly executed, devoid of life. Like this logo, the show was an unintended parody of itself. In the process, it reduces the world the rest of us live in to an ” underbelly.“

The show is littered with condescending remarks about the ” low“ lifestyle. I found these statements particularly ludicrous:
1) ” Dubuffet follows an openness to the lacerations of gutter life that is a particular part of French tradition from Baudelaire to Jean Genet and Céline.“
2) a reference to James Joyce and Samuel Beckett’s ” reuse of low verbal comedy.“
3) ” A new generation of radical artists expressed their contempt for modernist art only by taking over it’s ironic jokes and turning them into memento mori.“
4) In 1890, ” social scientists examined (graffiti) to understand criminal types.“ Later, psychologists ” came to regard such untutored markings as clues to the mind’s basic creative processes“
5) R. Crumb’s comics...“have also offered a vein of burlesque realism.”
6) Phillip Guston “used images recalled from old comics- bare planks, cobbled, ungainly shoes and naked light bulbs-as the basis for a monumental art of tragic intensity.”

The world of wooden floors and bare light bulbs that this show finds so entertaining is the way most of the world lives- at least the lucky ones that live indoors. While billions of the world’s people spend their lives hovering near the poverty level, MOMA points out that Fernand Léger “saw utilitarian objects valued in a straightforward manner that he felt overturned prejudices about the hierarchy of beauty.” Beautiful or not, this is our lives they’re talking about, folks. “The forces of commercial and political advertising which threatened to turn the city scape into an unending collage” is our reality and we are forced to confront it every day, not just in the ivory rooms of a museum.

So if the Sub-Modern is the do-it-yourself tendency, it, like low culture, has been going on for some time now. I’m sure others of you out there are better qualified to talk about the history of self-publishing than I am. But history is full of Sub-Moderns. We all know for instance, that William Blake published his own books, Thomas Paine his pamphlets, even Gandhi was depicted in the Hollywood-esque film of his life as saying that a revolution cannot succeed without a printing press. From the cave paintings at Altamira to the “little magazines” of the 20’s to the indie labels and zines of the 70’s and 80’s to today’s “desktop” publishing activities, the Sub-Modern tendency to do it yourself is a way of talking back to the shackles of life in the “low” lane.

The self-publishing movement has gained so much steam in recent years that I see it now a completely separate but equal way of life. Our numbers are growing. Factsheet Five is proof of that. Sure we also participate in “high” and “low” culture; but repulsed by both,we in the self-publishing community have chosen a third way to express ourselves, to communicate our ideas. It is neither as banal and commercial as “low” art or as snobbish and pretensious as “high” art. It is a whole other world which borrows what it needs wherever it can find it. It is part of a tendency that a recent show at the MOMA should have or could have addressed but didn’t- the idea of a middle ground between the two that uses the good qualities of both and the bad qualities of neither to forge a wellspring of activity as rich in it’s diversity as it is in it’s commitment to integrity.

Self-publishing has always been possible but the availability of new tools created by the consumer society have both liberated us and trapped us.You’ve got to play the game just to be able to buy the equipment to get out of the game. We are obligated to hold down our jobs, workin’ for the man every night and day, to be able to photocopy a few pages or purchase a Macintosh or home porta-studio. Many of us have heard the touching high art tales of how Charles Ives sold insurance to support his habit of writing obscure music or how poet William Carlos Williams was a physician by day. Today we do the same. While we contemplate our relationship with the rising and falling tides of “culture,” we need our photocopies, our samplers, our tape recorders, our desktop media. Our pencil and paper. With it we create risky works designed not necessarily to subvert but, rather, to simply express our own vision in a “civilized” world turned smelly from so much dead weight. In spite of our “ungainly shoes” and the “burlesque realism” of our situations, we are teeming with life and have every intention of communicating with other like-minded individuals in any way we can. Certainly not everyone can afford a Mac or a video camera so there are still many of us that don’t have the means to create sophisticated sub-modern artifacts. But copy machines and tape recorders are all around us, and a large audience exists for home-made creations in any form. Those of us who do have the means to produce something (anything!) are doing it. Factsheet Five “reviews” it. But how do we create works of value? Only one aspect of the exhibition touched on that question.

If the MOMA show had a chance to redeem itself, it was in the performance series by yesterday’s-downtown-weirdos-cum-today’s-uptown-superstars like Eric Bogosian, Spaulding Gray, Ann Magnuson and Laurie Anderson, who presented works in the museum’s basement auditorium. I would have liked to have seen all these performances. Their words in the little booklet that accompanied the series seemed honest, thought-provoking, from the heart. Like the painters and sculptors represented in the show, these performers know the Sub-Modern world first hand. They started out there and if they can get on the Gravy Train, and that is what they desire, more power to them. It’s not their fault that inclusion in this exhibition has trivialized their work. I did manage to see Brian Eno’s “lecture” at MOMA. Though he, too, talked too much about Jeff Koons, and little about music, thus contributing to the hype about High/Low in his own charming way, I found several of his ideas quite interesting.

Eno began his talk with a discussion of Duchamp’s readymade “Fountain” (noted in the catalogue as a “flat back Bedfordshire urinal with lip plate #1570-KH.” ) Choosing not to acknowledge that the show featured a replica, Eno discussed “the deification of this particular piece of porcelin” and proceeded to nibble the hand of the institution that invited him to lecture.“This is crap really, isn’t it?” he said at one point. Good little bad boy, Brian.

But Eno became the single thought-provoking feature of this show with his discussion of “irreducible value.” He pointed out that no where does the MOMA catalogue for this show mention money. Indeed, a glaring ommision in a world where the prevailing standards of value have so much to do with aesthetic impact. Eno proposed the idea of an “aesthetic gold standard” saying that art, like “money, is a sophisticated game of trust.” Pulling out a dollar bill he explained that money really has no value unless we agree it does. That, he said, is also the game of modern art.

For the creators of this exhibition, according to Eno, “Value is created by making distinctions between high and low.” He said aesthetic value used to be a universal thing, seemingly ordained by God but “he’s gone now- that’s why artists get paid so much more today.” Good line, Brian. All us Sub-Mods in the audience giggled and cooed in response to this clever iconoclasm. But eventually, Eno made his most important statement: “Exposure is the currency of pop art. Obscurity is the currency of high art.”

If that is the case, if there is no universal standard of value, wouldn’t a world of individuals exchanging home-made examples of their own value systems be the logical place for this all to go? I think so. But perhaps an international network of such people is the most we can hope for. I suppose the majority on this planet will always choose to consume “low;” a few others will choose “high” (some because they truly appreciate esoteric, outstanding accomplishments, others because it is the thing to do). But, as always, there remain a few stubborn types like us. Asked to choose between exposure and obscurity, we don’t like the choice and new rules are the result. We don’t buy the sex-crazed futility of mass exposure nor do we want to live the empty life of an undiscovered genius so we choose a middle road instead- the Sub-Modern. We exist -or subsist as the case may be- beneath the surface of the high/low see-saw. We can borrow from both worlds and, in the process, reject their respective limiting standards of value. MOMA has set “culture” up as an arm wrestling match between Michaelangelo and Michel J. Fox but we won’t play. We won’t chase the “high” art carrot that dangles in our faces. We want the so-called profundity of high art and the planks and bare lightbulbs of our real lives.

In an effort to raise a discussion about what motivates us, I spoke last time of Proud Mary, the media machine that eats all that attempts to disarm it. I don’t want to see the eternal Sub-Modern network be a farm team for the Proud Mary machine. Our activities should not be a rehearsal for, or a microcosm of, the high or low worlds. It is an alternative. We each need to delineate our own value system, one that works for us. The only quality that the entire Network needs to embrace would be simply that we each have the right to our own value system. Anarchists and Republicans, Spiritualists and Materialists can learn to live together if the right of each person to their own opinion is held above all other values. Rather than judging people by some universal standard or manifesto, we must simply acknowledge the right of each of us to peruse the pages of a magazine like Factsheet Five and check off the entries that interest us. Nothing is politically correct except our own right to choose what we want to consume and produce. And that includes feeding off the Proud Mary (while she feeds off of us) for some revenue. I’m not blasting anyone for having to work for a corporation or to show and/or sell their work through a commercial institution. We all have to do it to some extent. But I have coined the term Sub-Modern as a way of grouping us together apart from the High/Low dichotomy. I see our network as a working model for international cooperation without an aesthetic or moral gold standard.

So if these activities don’t need a name, why the collective term Sub-Modern? Because catchy names are something I personally value. I like the sound of it. I enjoy thinking up slogans. I call us Sub-Mods because I want to. I saw the MOMA show, I thought, I’m not“ high” art, I’m not “ low” art. I’m not “ postmodern”- that’s last year’s “ high” art hooey while the stuff I’m talking about has been going on from Day One. The tradition of publishing one’s own work is a strong one and its influences have hit all points on the high-low continuum. People like us have always hunted and pecked our way through the rubble of society and created a few works we feel good about. If it is fashionable to the masses, it gets absorbed into the “ low” world of pop culture, if it’s fashionable to the haughty world of high society, we make our protestations, then join the club. I enjoy observing the way Proud Mary eats her young. I have a sick fascination for the way the integrity of the “ Underground” is destroyed by the “ Uberground-“ be it high or low. So I coined this phrase because seeing myself and the rest of you as an Underground Railroad of the Heart fits my value system. If this term Sub-Modern ever gets used again, fine, if not, that’s fine too. Who knows, maybe some jingle-writer will pay handsomely for it. Nevertheless, if you accept this name for any other reason than that it also fits your value system, you haven’t understood a word I’ve said.