The Reenchantment of Art. - book reviews

Eight years have passed since the publication of Suzi Gablik's last volume Has Modernism Failed? Her novel work, The Reenchantment of Art, is a succeeding part to the earlier book, restatement of her case against the modernist tradition and against society in general and a more articulate, evolv prescription for change.

Gablik says her discussions of art are focused upon one essential theme: "What does it mean to be a |successful' artist working in the world today?" She would like to redefine the conditions of succes and from everything I can gather, make go round artists into ecologists and social workers, or at the least into contemporary refuses, celebrating nature with shoot forwards that can't be marketed. All her examples of artists working in the single way Gablik now considers significant display them cleaning up the environment, engineering arrangements for the homeless, participating in throws that involve kindness to garbage collectors, kids, public way people or drunks, or creating fragile external realitys in nature that summarily disappear.

The latter will be the greatest in quantity recognizable art described in her volume Her English "ice-henge" artist, Andy Goldsworthy, who has created circles of packed snow bricks that "don't last smooth for a day" on a "ritual journey into wilderness at the North Pole" should bring to mind the walks and ephemeral earth drawings of Richard drawn out - marks made by his premiums or by piling up sticks and stones in geometric formations the quiet of us can't see, do not include in his photographs, which appear in museums and galleries. From Gablik's point of view, the pair Long and Goldsworthy should be considered crossover marks They have one foot pointed in the right direction, bringing natural surprises to our attention, but the other paw is planted squarely in hell - as the couple are commercially successful artists who put up to sale installations as well as documentation of their throw outs in the wilds.

on the other hand Gablik covers Goldsworthy admiringly, and doesn't attack lengthy Her special target is Richard Serra. For Gablik, the Tilted Arc discussion in which Serra fought his adverse partys over the right to hold fast his big, leaning, curved carbonized iron wall in place at Federal Plaza in Manhattan, where it had been installed in 1981 exhibited "the ultimate model of social independence and the radically separative self; the heroic, belligerent self of modernity, cultivating its divisiveness and lack of connectednes with others [and the] refusal to be assimilated." For Gablik, Serra epitomizes the masculinist spirit, with its presumption of mastery, its "conquest mentality," its absence of accountability or compassion, and in the way that on.

Gablik supports her fervid plea for a fresh kind of art with a matriarchist brand of feminism. She borrows her dialectic from a work called The Chalice and the Blade by the agency of Riane Eisler, which contrasts the patriarchal "dominator" type to the "partnership" model associated with the feminine. Gablik says, "the cultural recuperation of the feminine principle is the lock opener to recovery from the institution oppressiveness of patriarchy." She repeats from various examples of Goddes literature, greatest in quantity maddeningly the writings of individual Marion Woodman, a Canadian Jungian who is scathing in her view of women who default from "the feminine" by entering the masculine world and, inevitably, "act like men" Here Gablik makes belonging to all cause with many male Jungians as well, none of whom are in like manner obvious as Woodman in their antifeminist descriptive polarities of the sexe as to propose that women are too masculine nowadays.

In her overvaluation of traditional feminine principles of caring and relatedness, Gablik wants us to understand that she is no feminist. The politics of equality - the striving of women to find meaningful work in the world beneath conditions of parity, and to be completely represented in government - contradicts the Jungian Goddes emphasis upon the merits of femininity. Gablik repeats another female Goddess author, Linda Leonard: "When women trust to achieve the victories of men through being like them, the uniqueness of the feminine is subtly undervalued, for there is an underlying assumption that the masculine is more powerful." Jungians are notorious for their dissociation of the "feminine" and the "masculine" - "archetypes" which they diocese as groups of antithetical qualities located a priori in nature, rather than as characteristics produc by dint of social programming and sexual politics.

Carl Jung's theory of archetypes can today through seen as a translation of the cultural sex biases of his time. individual half of his model for character completion - the male's unravelling of his supposedly hidden female side - is actually the basis for the futuristic paradigm Gablik unfolds in her book for art. The other half of the Jungian original - the development by the female of her (hidden) male side - is seriously compromised by dint of Jung's political view of women: "No individual can get around the fact that through taking up a masculine profession, studying and working like a man, woman is doing something not wholly in accord with, if not directly injurious to, her feminine nature. "The times have changed, on the contrary Jung's followers, now numbering Gablik among them, move on plying the same ridiculous claims. Chiefly, they continue to assert that the sexe intrinsically carry the traits associated with them by means of society. In Jung's time this belief pervaded society; in our time, it's possible to understand those beliefs as cultural, politically expedient, fictions.