Modern Art as a Failure of Reason, Progress and Creativity.
By Arto Juhani Heino (c) 2016
Cubist Guitar by Arto Juhani Heino, 1982.
I will start this essay with a simple acknowledgement that it is not the artists personal outlooks that strike me with offense but their lack of sympathy with their audience, where sympathy should be the hallmark of great artistic achievement. Rather these artists revel in their ability to aggravate, distort, bamboozle, shock and show disdain to their audience , a gift to offend is held up like some great virtue of genius. It does not take a great mind to be a callus communicator, rather it takes a special type of cruelty to consider the ideas by Art Historians as a deep and meaningful dialogue with the viewer, this being said, it actually describes a Hegelian dialect with our society.
To summarize the Hegelian Dialect as comprising three dialectical stages of development: a thesis, giving rise to its reaction, an antithesis, which contradicts or negates the thesis, and the tension between the two being resolved by means of a synthesis. The abstraction being the thesis, its reaction to the viewer being the antithesis, and the resulting fallout being the synthesis. All three have been predetermined and the results have been noted and used to push all and any agenda deemed useful in the arts to the benefits of others that have been predetermined.
Soto Portego by Mark Rothko
It seems to me that Rothko, Man Ray and his fellow art conspirators were some of the weaponized human chattel to begin a metaphysical world view called “modern art” in Europe, America and the rest of the international connections. They and many others helped to facilitate a vague minded elitist take over of the artistic academia, teaching students to go beyond the representational and focus on the abstract concerns, as all those who paint and draw, you are already mechanically and methodologically driven by abstractions involving color, line, direction, shape, execution and physical expressions. They simply hitched the reigns onto this existing fact and drove it as far as could be taken, using every verbal assault that could be mustered from Marxist Psychology, its progenitors and a new list of word salad that have been introduced and is still with us today.
Photography as Art by Man Ray
So the abstractionist from the beginning of the twentieth century were basically taking a normal well rounded artist, versed in their mediums, visual skills and hand crafts then placing an opaque lens to one of their basic tenets, the visual explanation of their abstracted physicality. So being handicapped in such a manner, they can no longer spell out the meaning in their work to the audience, they now must make it totally incomprehensible, by using the characteristics of artistic communication and purposely misspelling and randomizing so as to confound the observer and misdirect the true intentions to form a metaphysical assault to the viewer. A form of intentional lying with all the misleading dialogue built into the forms within the artwork.
This has been a successful method to discredit artists from being connected to the audience, where now you must be “educated” to understand. The methods used in Art Schools have been a form of cultural Marxism and has served as a rich pallet where freedom of personal expression, without conscience, has been placed as a virtue beyond approach. Any non representational art has been elevated and considered worthy of public display. Semi-Abstracted works that have a particular stylist flare, has now taken the stage, where the infantile mentality is displayed without a murmur of dissent from critics, they have been trained well in this dialogue from the doctrine masters.
Mangalated by Arto Juhani Heino 2009
Comic book art has also taken this and other fantasies and made a complete imaginary world where generations of children follow the physiological mapping that is truly devoid of any real history or science, where the metaphysical has almost a tangible reality, de-connecting any life enhancing observations to be replaced by a magical reasoning that captivates and entrances the young readers. The complete brain training of young minds has its highest expression in comic book art, one of the greatest successes besides the films of Hollywood.
This cultural subversion has been completed by all the major art institutes, where the nihilistic qualities rain supreme and irrational dialogue between the observer and artist is a requirement, otherwise the labeling of representational art is considered quaint, parochial or just plain derivative of inane craft-work, devoid of profound understanding or perception, that is, according to the standards written into the doctrines of modern art institutions, which were written to exclude those who would like to start the true narrative of our current society. As modernism is not a cultural movement so much it is a false premise made for its own demise, purely a means to an end, a destruction and deconstruction of our reason.
Looking earlier to an earlier art movement of Impressionism, it was never a revolt against the traditions of the art salons, it was the simple expressions of artists notations taken during the changing light and color of day, a quick shorthand to capture those fleeting moments. This art-form was never new, as all artist for thousands of years employs its techniques when painting from a live scene, the rendering can be then taken further as required. The much used method of studies, drawing, planning and draftsmanship is the other way to approach a subject, this methodology had also been swallowed by the modern academics and replaced with fanciful “isms”, where the representation of geometry was now akin to a religious experience.
Pablo Picasso was a prime example of the self proclaiming that was very much of the tradition of the invading subversives and political revolutionaries at the time, he was encouraged to reflect the cacophony of a degrading society and a cultural war created by the bankers and by his portraits of mankind. This was not an art movement but a careful and deliberate assault on every aspect of visual notation and a way to annihilate any aesthetic progress by destroying the essentials of the artistic traditions and the observational histrionics. His work was enthusiastically promoted as a new outsider art that was actually insider art masquerading as such. The redefinition of art history was left to the the “Cultural Marxists”** to define and elaborate for the next 100 years.
Portrait of Dora Maar by Pablo Picasso
It has become a morass of symbology describing a degraded world without virtues but only shapes that define a metaphysical construction, built to delude you from questioning its authenticity, and only question the interpretation of the narrative. Where traditional art needed no such acclimatizing and re-education, as all is revealed in simple allegory obvious symbols and masterful light and shade, where rendering was the physical craft of expression, not the expression as a philosophical tenure.
Quoting George Braque (1882-1963)- “Truth exists. Only falsehood has to be invented.”
Here is a classic example of explaining clearly what the great cubists had invented for public consumption, they already knew when the story of modern art was to be written, that it would find a completely invented form with its shallow vestiges and all its circular arguments made by those abstract pioneers.
Quoting Pablo Picasso (1881-1973), “Nature and art, being two different things, cannot be the same thing. Through art we express our conception of what nature is not.”
Here is another gem for the grist, where the reality that nature and art are actually the same thing, only the physical representation is not the physical nature, but the nature of the materials and the nature of the human who wields them are very much the same thing. His last sentence explains nothing, as it is self contradictory, “through art we express”, expressing is human nature at its most profound, where “conception” now becomes an abstract that has been invented to explain away the two dimensional description of a visual scene or an idea from the mind.
Where in reality painting has never been any more than a descriptive language used by artists to convey a meaningful dialogue with the viewer, it is in the nature of the artist that he be as truthful to his intention as possible, otherwise he cannot be an artist, only a charlatan, masquerading as a gifted craftsman, while just being a well versed house painter.
Modern Life by Arto Juhani Heino 1986, Gouache on Board
Artojh's Renderings 