a necessary frame

Cynicism is a constant danger for the art community. Its criticality automatically places it at a distance from the mainstream. Yet many artists see their work as postured towards the common mass, “the people,” and oppossed to an elitist class. In Russia Malevich thought of his pure geometry as a universal language, a totally egalitarian language. In Germany Joe Beuys said that everyone was an artist; he thought of his work as a total democratization of art. Yet for their work to retain potentail as revolutionary form and to avoid easy assimiliation, it spoke to a small part of an elitist intelligencia within the arts community. Their work was ideologically egalitarian but refused to illustrate this ideology. It was necessary for the form of the art to be revolutionary and this revolution is initially refused by “the people”.

An artist becomes cynical when their work seems to lack an audience. When the audience seems not to exist, the art’s potential for revolution can seem laughable. But to attempt wide spread, easy assimiliation is to negate the art’s potential as a disruption within the image machine.

The art community too has its own tropes. It has economic motivations. And it is isolated. Art history is full of the rebel cry to avoid or destroy the isolating, elitist framework. The cry is to look in the streets, look at the vulgar and no longer to the alienation of the art system: museums, galleries, or colleges. The cry is to make art that avoids convention, that disrupts and refuses any hegemonic condition. The white space of the gallery removes the object, estranges it from “the people” and can undermine it of its connection with reality. The isolation within the art system can suffocate the art.

Yet the opposite is to rid art of a frame, of its estrangement, a necessary part of its disruptive potential. The paradoxical role of art is clarified by the dual nature of the frame.

The frame creates bounds that allows for clarity of experience. It allows for a necessary estrangement that places art outside of everyday experience. It creates a space of fictitious potential where the ills of reality can be re-imagined and subverted. But the frame must also be broken, so that the art can keep its hold on the common, vulgar, material situation of the everyday. It avoids elitism and touches the present.

To frame is a conceptual gesture. A frame is a context. It functions for the image on a micro scale the way a museum theoretically frames and defines art on a macro scale. In like manner the museum building frames a space, and a city frames the building, a state frames a city, and a nation frames a state, ect. Frames isolate, limit, demarcate. They draw a box around a concept.

If one is to hold onto the paradoxical nature of the frame then one must also let go of an absolute audience. Neither the idealized, non-existent “the people” nor the equally fictitious intelligentsia. Art for “the people” if it is to assume a critical attitude towards the world and itself will be opposed to the seamless integration of art that is made for “the people.” The ideal audience is a person full of the common and vulgar and full of intelligence, not hyper critical to the point of cynicism, nor the uninterested, assured pleasure seeker. This risks the necessary narrowing of the art towards an elusive, unseen minority that can respond.

To damn the frame is to damn the whole art tradition, which includes galleries, museums, and art education. This damning denies art as discipline; it is the dissolution of art and its absorption into another discipline: politics, science, psychology, etc. The institutionalization of the gallery and college can create a stifling tradition, a coded right way of creating, but it can also create the possibility of mentally disrupting this stifling frame.

In modern art an overwhelming amount of attention is given to cultural frames. Artists focused on the way language frames a discussion, creating cultural propriety, and politically correct discourse, or the way our bodies frame an experience, or, in a Marxian sense, the way production frames the material condition of a culture. As a result modern art led away from image (painting) towards object (sculpture). The frame became the object of art and critique; it became the object of distrust.

A cynicism pervades theory now in light of the critique of the frame, a realization of the vast waste that capitalisms necessitates, the notion of a system based on cut throat competition, and built on a foundation of slavery, violence, and patriarchy. The frame, as a metaphor for the administrative powers, now is in crisis, it functions despite itself. The overwhelming power of the frame, reflecting its sublime administrative power, looks haphazardly, unmoored. It does not know what to look at. Its uncontrollable power consumes even as it gazes; it dominates and ravages whatever it looks at despite its good intentions.