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SUNDAY SPECTATOR
June 3, 2012
Cheap irony
Walking along Toronto's Queen West, recently, I was struck - not by a bicycle coming up behind along the sidewalk, as usual - but by a poster wheatpasted along the street, on pillars and posts and electrical junction boxes. In superb sansserif typography, it asked, "What would Joni Mitchell do?"From my gentle inquiries I gather it was the production of the graphic conceptual artist, Cecilia Berkovic. And therefore, not an advertising outrider for a new Joni Mitchell album. It echoes, in that me-too Canadian way, a similar wheatpaste performance by Jeremy Deller, in England a few years ago, on the text, "What would Neil Young do?" Deller won the Turner Prize, though not for that composition. Most of his work looks like graffiti to me, and not very good graffiti. (Alas, the masters of this art tend to work anonymously.) I doubt the art world would agree with me; but Deller might, for one of his more memorable comments after winning the prize was, "I am not a technically capable person." The Turner committee instead praised his "generosity of spirit, across a succession of projects which engage with social and cultural context and celebrate the creativity of individuals." That's a very nice way to describe a wall vandal. Berkovic, by comparison, is a class act. Her typography is up to ad-agency standard, and the other projects I've glimpsed, which mostly play with photography, all have "high production values." Not only is she "provocative" in the approved institutional way, she is a fullfledged feminist and progressive who satirizes commercial depictions of women, tourist promotions, "constructions of beauty in the natural landscape," and so forth. With membership in a prominent art collective, and a seat on the board of a leading art gallery, her career trajectory is assured. According to the website of the latter (Gallery TPW) her "editions" are printed with archival pigment inks on gloss Fine Art paper, and have a display permanence rating of 150-plus years. They start at a "wallet-friendly" $120. Let me not detain the reader with further innuendoes upon the breathtaking hypocrisy that informs every aspect of contemporary art production, or the smugness that provides hypocrisy with its body language. Let me content myself by adding that our taxes subsidize all of it, and if we pulled the plug it would go away. For I wanted to answer the question. I have no idea what Neil Young would do - never met the guy - but from second-hand knowledge of Joni Mitchell I would guess the first thing she'd do in any trying situation is light a cigarette. This is something I happen to have in common with Joni, so I can only applaud. But what if we were to find her in a strictly enforced non-smoking environment (such as Ottawa)? There is a graffiti artist buried in all of us, and my first instinct upon seeing that poster was to add, underneath: "Panic, probably." By the grace of God I did not have an archival-quality felt pen on my person at that moment; and later, the desire passed. "Irony" is another constant component of contemporary "fine art." In this case, the attitude toward Joni Mitchell herself, conveyed by the poster, is ironic. The artist probably likes Joni's music, but is slightly worried that this might be uncool. The "inner conflict" is half-wittingly conveyed in a message that combines uplift, with aloof sneering. Yes, it is ridiculous to ask what Joni Mitchell would do, and the artist knows it. There is a wink there, toward others who will get it, and we may feel ourselves superior to those who don't. In-group selfidentification is at the root of almost every "provocative" gesture in contemporary art, and we should perhaps welcome it, because the other provocative gestures are more purely psychopathic. The irony must resonate, to make award-grade, salable avant-garde, just as the image had to resonate, in "traditional" art. In the most famous instance, itself the boilerplate for innumerable modern ironies, Leonardo painted a smile on an unknown woman that seemed to comprehend everything a woman ever smiled at. It was as if to say, "Here is the eternal feminine." Cheap irony, which has come to govern official and subsidized esthetic judgment, merely resonates against the traditional, and received. Here, the artist makes fun of the whole notion we should ask what anyone would do. That kind of "mentoring" belonged to the age of hero-worship. For the old-established moral titans, we have substituted the transgressively hip. Which is why "gangstas" today enjoy better press than the selfless, devoted types, engaged in works of real charity. But we could go deeper than that because, in this case, the resonance goes deeper. The poster is a "success" because, with all those "high production values," it "comments" on a question that for many, many centuries was at the heart of all Western Civ. The question in question was, "What would Jesus do?" Young, house-trained Christians in all our national cultures had it drilled into their minds. And so far as they were intelligent and thoughtful, they dwelt upon nuances of the question. It actually had nuances. David Warren
© Ottawa Citizen
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