20th century art began with such promise and optimism.

Kandinsky’s credo of ‘inner necessity’ deemed all things possible as art, and virtually all things have become possible, whether we like it or not. There is now no limit to what can be art, even ‘non-art’. Duchamp’s readymades and Cage’s silent music stretched the boundaries so wide that absolutely anything can crawl right on in. But the use of shock tactics – deliberately setting out to provoke, offend, blaspheme – has become so pervasive that contemporary art is commonly equated with little more than offensive gestures by ‘the man on the street’. The liberating notion of artistic freedom has been taken to extremes which not only hold it up to ridicule, but throw the baby right out with the bathwater.

Of course most contemporary art does not aspire to shock, at least to the extremes of Mapplethorpe, Serrano, or other quasi-pornographers. Far more of it is so bland that its lack of visual impact cannot be fathomed without an accompanying text, assuming anyone can be bothered reading it. And then there is the art of the middle ground, which sounds almost as insipid as ‘middle-of-the-road’ pop music. But it is the shocking art, which captures media and public attention and draws attention away from non-controversial art.

The intriguing thing, as with all revolutions, is how the best of intentions can lead to such dire consequences. Kandinsky, Duchamp, Picasso, Dubuffet, Klee, Miro, the Futurists, Dadaists, Surrealists, et al. were iconoclasts in their own right who took delight in mocking middle-class values (pour epater le bourgeois). The boundaries they pushed were much more rigid than ours, and it is partly because of their efforts that late 20th century art appears to have no boundaries left standing. But there is a difference: However revolutionary they claimed to be, the early Modernist painters and sculptors were still largely concerned with making aesthetically-pleasing visual statements. Sure, they denigrated ‘beauty’ and ‘taste’ as irrelevant and antiquated affectations, and pushed against the prevailing limits as far as they could, but it was by their artistic achievements that we should judge them, not their manifestoes. And their art remains fresh, still offering rewarding aesthetic experiences. There is no doubt in my mind that the early Modernists stand head and shoulders above the artists who followed them into the second half of the century. What went wrong?

The First World War did not destroy Modernism, but World War II almost certainly did. The optimism, the hope, the promise, the celebratory joy of life exemplified by Matisse’s Luxe, calme et voluptue could not continue beyond the totalitarian nightmare of brutality and genocide.

Instead came a nihilistic despair and bleakness previously unmatched, together with a need to wipe the slate clean and start from scratch. Abstract Expressionism was not the pinnacle of Modernism; the high point had already been reached in pre-WWII Europe. The so-called New York School was instead the last gasp of Modernism, a desperate attempt at bold originality by painting sweeping gestures on an expansive scale. But the gestures were fundamentally empty. While Pollock, Gottlieb, et al. were relatively interesting in their formative years, their ‘mature’ work, purged of figurative content, had nothing to say apart from what critics desperate for new American heroes could read into it. Ad Reinhardt, painting reductively about the end of art, was in reality painting about his own vacuity, the void of nothingness intellectualised into Minimalism which was to become another of contemporary art’s afflictions. The rule of ‘inner necessity’ had been reduced to absurdity: ‘when you’ve got nothing to say then say nothing, over and over again, with countless, meaningless variations’. Formalism’s triumph implied that abdication of meaning was now regarded as a virtue - any artist who claimed to be saying something was immediately suspect. As visual art became more devoid of content, the role of theory expanded accordingly to fill the vacuum, a condition, which has persisted down to the present.

Post-WWII art has been marked by a series of increasingly absurd movements reacting against preceding absurdities. Art theory now sets the agenda for art per se, and contemporary artists attempt to justify their significance by quoting from de rigueur French philosophers. Post-modernity is meaninglessness reified; being about nothing of its own so much as ‘something that comes after something that preceded it’. Irony, parody, quotation, and sly-knowingness (or ‘know-nothingness’) flourish as substitutes for genuine belief in something greater than oneself.

The contemporary art world has become analogous to Chairman Mao’s Cultural Revolution, a mechanism for devouring its own heroes by subjecting them to ever more ridiculous tyrannies of ideological correctness. To be praised one minute is to invite denunciation and fall from grace the next. So-called ‘cutting-edge’ artists pay lip service to postmodern theory just as dutiful proletarian artists once quoted Mao.

So where is the artistic freedom and inner necessity of Kandinsky and the other early Modernists? It has not been snuffed out entirely, but the artists who follow that path have been relegated to the margins of contemporary art. In a sense, just about every artist can be said to follow the dictates of artistic freedom and inner necessity, in that every artist has ostensible freedom to choose, and every choice could conceivably follow from ‘inner necessity’. But Kandinsky had something deeper in mind, he was not advising artists to flout every convention under the sun, but to find an individual spiritual essence within and go with that. Like the later CoBrA movement he believed that anyone could find fulfilment as an artist, and that human nature’s innate goodness would necessarily lead to a brighter, perhaps utopian, future.

Art at the end of the 20th century has not lived up to Kandinsky’s dream, but there are those among us who have not yet given up hope. “In the final analysis,” an artist friend used to tell me, “we can only tend our own gardens.”

Copyright © 1999 Max Podstolski

Max Podstolski is an information specialist in Fine Arts and Humanities at the University of Canterbury Library in Christchurch, New Zealand, and occasionally-exhibiting 'primitive modernist' painter. He recently wrote a review of the Encyclopedia of Aesthetics for a forthcoming issue of Art Libraries Journal