In art, just like religion, the smallest differences make the deepest schisms. When I was a student at the Ontario college of Art in Toronto in the 1970s, I felt the schisms with all the vigour of youth. I was in the Experimental Arts Department, and I never considered crossing the threshold of the Advertising and Design Department.
I agreed with Advertising and Design on the importance of sensations, that was just part of seeing after all, and we also shared some knowledge of art history, the canon of Western art. But the decisive difference had to do with practicality: I was convinced that instrumental goals would remove any possibility of successful art. The muses don’t care what our clients want, and I didn't care whether I had clients.
It seemed obvious that a lack of interest in every-day usefulness would result in more important insights: a pox on the manipulators and instrumentalists. I echoed Oscar Wilde, “We can forgive a man for making a useful thing as long as he does not admire it. The only excuse for making a useless thing is that one admires it intensely.”(fn1)
J. M. W. Turner wasn’t concerned with the Whigs and Tories, and Andy Warhol wasn’t trying to sell soup. And as with Ad Reinhardt, I wasn’t interested in self expression (fn2): I considered art to be applied epistemology, thus art was about insight, meta-consciousness, and awareness. And all of this inevitably lead me to the idea of content as subsumed into the material substrate. The content was equivalent to the visible such that a distinction between form and content was impossible. I have since softened that edge to make room for a metaphorical connection between perception and understanding. No perception is without metaphor, and nothing is ever truly useless.
I have come to realize that the goal of communicating a new vision was an inconsistency in my thinking that I was vaguely aware of. That goal was still a kind of instrumentality, and I thought it had an insidious practicality of its own. Nonetheless, I still pursued it.
I think that was because I was gripped with Oedipal urges towards my tradition, the Western canon, and I believe that was probably the case for most of my Experimental Arts Department colleagues. I saw the work of previous generations as needing improvement or replacement, and this urge was strong enough for me to overlook the inconsistency in my thinking.
I think this sprang from an unconscious absorption of a flaw in Modernism. Early on, in the debris of World War I at the beginnings of the twentieth century, the seeds of “revolutionary” movements were strewn everywhere, movements, such as Futurism, Constructivism, dada, Surrealism, Expressionism, non-mimeticism, and so on. Based on this revolutionary understanding, Modernist artists, or their interpreters, misapplied the theory of evolution to art. This ultimately made art unforgiving, just as it had done for commerce. Aesthetic Darwinism and Social Darwinism cause too much damage. Too much and too many are left out.
Technology and industry are inescapable and they infect the understanding of art, so without reflection, I thought that art made progress over historical time. Now I believe that a science-model for art history is the most fundamental error of Modernism. That the historical changes of art are a development, a progress, a furtherance, is a mistake: Art is always the same.
Artists have various opinions about what art is, or what it should be, or what it does. Perhaps it’s a skill, a conception, or something else, but those differences are truly irrelevant. Those opinions fail to notice that art is simply about art regardless of what art might be. My opinions about goals and uses only apply to my own work, and I think they have no bearing on a general understanding of what art might be. Accept it all, admire it all, and be suspicious of any claims of purity: It is the sin of radicalism.