Part 3 B - Contemporary Conservative Artists
Is art that doesn't fit the liberal canon of "modern art" necessarily conservative?
Last time, I promised to examine a few examples of contemporary conservative art. Since our mission in this series is to discover whether there is such a thing as a conservative aesthetic, today we will explore a few living artists.
Jon McNaughton
WIKIPEDIA: “Jon Austin McNaughton is an American artist and Republican. He is known for his paintings depicting American conservative political figures, in particular prominent Republicans, and Christian imagery. He began his style of political painting during the Barack Obama administration, creating works in support of the Tea Party movement. He subsequently became a supporter of Donald Trump. … He painted his first political artworks during the 2008 US presidential election and then came to prominence in 2009 during the Obama presidency when he started painting more conservative-leaning political scenes.” - link to Wikipedia
McNaughton’s work is, for me, mundane, poorly conceived and amateurish in execution. If conservatives want to lay claim to him, so be it. I will have no part of it. Let’s move on.
Charles Ray
Charles Ray has had a pretty good career, yet I had never heard of him until I started doing this research into conservative art and artists.1
“Charles Ray (born 1953) is a Los Angeles–based American sculptor. He is known for his strange and enigmatic sculptures that draw the viewer's perceptual judgments into question in jarring and unexpected ways. In 2007, Christopher Knight in the Los Angeles Times wrote that Ray's "career as an artist…is easily among the most important of the last twenty years.” - Wikipedia
“Most important?” Hardly. Ray’s work is interesting though and follows a success trajectory common to other artists of our age group.2 Schooled in the early 70s he did some quite respectable performance/installation work based on the canon of modernist sculpture before turning “awkward,” (I don’t know how else to describe it) around 1980. There is a sense of humour even in these early works; they are almost parodies of performance art of the time.
Charles Ray’s work defies categorization. “Ink box,” shown above, looks like a minimalist cube that might have been produced as far back as the 1950s or 60s, a tradition that carried on right through the 1990s. But the “box” isn’t what it seems. It is not black metal or painted wood but a glass box filled to the brim with ink. One can only imagine the anxiety of standing beside it, wondering whether any tiny disruption, a finger, or the vibration from a passing train, might cause it to spill. I wonder about the folks who helped install it; Where did they get so much ink? How did they manage to not spill any? What happens when the work is removed from the gallery? How is it stored?
“Ink box” is ironic. It pokes fun at more conventional modernist art. But it also evokes some deep feelings. The entire history of ink seems stored in the box. And the very materiality of ink, including its smell, is overwhelmingly stated.
The Charles Ray work that I remembered seeing, (but not who the artist was - see footnote 1), was “Family romance,” shown above. I didn’t notice the title at the time and am disappointed to know it now. It gives the piece a creepy sexual innuendo that I find repulsive.
However, as I saw it flipping through an art magazine many years ago, the sculpture stuck with me because of the clever/weird scale of the child figures. The child figures are bulkier and more imposing than the parent figures. It’s a satirical comment, perhaps, on never growing up, helicopter parents, infantilized culture and so on.
What is remarkable about the work, apart from its striking effect, is that it arises out of a simple principle or concept: what if you took a family and made all the members the same height but otherwise proportionally correct. It is a ridiculous idea, and yet…
Ray’s early work is traditional but in an unexpected way; it is particularly well-informed about art. “Ink box” refers to not only minimalist boxes but also to their predecessor abstract colour-field paintings of the 1950s. Ad Reinhardt’s black paintings come to mind.3 Ray as a young artist was heavily influenced by the work of Anthony Caro, a modernist sculptor, and Ray’s early abstract work shows a kind of allegiance to, or respect for, previous art. In this sense, it is conservative.
“Family romance” is also interesting because of the realism. Realism invariably is associated with conservatism unless, of course, the work is carrying an explicitly counter-cultural or political message as one sees in “socialist realism,” for example, or in the realism of Wyeth, Rockwell and Kinkade, discussed previously.
Visit Charles Ray’s website to see more of his unusual and original work.
One does not have to be hitting the audience over the head with an overt conservative political message the way McNaughton does to be participating in a general conservatism that favours reproductions of the real. The real is, after all, more accessible to more people. It fits neatly into art historical tradition and tends to be uncontroversial. Which brings us to the next artist:
John Currin
John Currin (born 1962) is … most recognized for his technically proficient satirical figurative paintings that explore controversial sexual and societal topics. His work shows a wide range of influences, including sources as diverse as the Renaissance, popular culture magazines, and contemporary fashion models. He often distorts or exaggerates the erotic forms of the female body and has stressed that his characters are reflections of himself rather than inspired by real people.
His paintings hold conversations between the grotesque and the beautiful, and range in inspiration from classical artists such as Fragonard and Bouchard to Norman Rockwell and underground cartoonist Robert Crumb. - Wikipedia
Currin is often described as a conservative or maybe a radical conservative (an oxymoron if there ever was one). Like Charles Ray, his work is embedded in art history. It’s normal enough to welcome you in, but then it plays with your expectations as to what an artwork should do or say.
David Pagal, writing for the Los Angeles Times, put it this way:
“John Currin’s paintings are catnip for art historians. In terms of style, substance and composition, as well as scale, palette and paint handling, the roots of Currin’s [pictures] run back to Northern European painting from the 16th and 17th centuries. To get there, they travel a meandering path through Italian Mannerism, French Neo-Classicism and what the Nazis called degenerate art — just about anything ambiguous enough to require viewers to think for themselves.”4
Currin has been described as a conservative because he is being authentic to himself. He has his own obsessions (or preferred subjects), his own way of rendering them (highly original in the weirdness), and he appears to not give a damn what other people think. He has taken a lot of criticism, but his persistence has earned him the support of patrons and museums alike.
Some tentative conclusions
Conservatism in art does not necessarily conform to a conservative political ideology. Neither is art conservative just because it is patronized and collected by card-carrying conservatives. That would be easy.
People who have been educated to appreciate art patronize it and people who can afford it collect it. And yet distinctions can be made. Seeing the differences between artworks and their uniqueness is intrinsic to the process of appreciating art. Whether or not an artwork is conservative depends on its subject matter and technique but also on how it fits into art history and how it represents or comments on contemporary life.
In Part A, I looked at a few older artists generally considered to be conservative. We saw common features: realism, tradition, craft, a focus on the local, and sentimentality, which we could say are part of the ethos of conservatism.
In this Part B, I am looking at a few contemporary artists who have been considered conservative. The work of Charles Ray and John Currin, or Jeff Koons (discussed previously in this post), has something in common with the work of the older artists Andrew Wyeth, Norman Rockwell and Thomas Kinkade. What is notably different is the twist or sense of irony. Ray, Currin and Koons are critical. Their work resists or goes against the grain of mainstream trends in contemporary art. They are unafraid to be outsiders, and that aligns them with people who value individual liberty, plain speaking, frankness (calling it as you see it), and a certain skepticism towards established academic doctrine about art, in other words, people generally considered to be conservative.
Before going on, I’d like to mention a couple of Canadian artists who might be similarly aligned with conservatism.
Eldon Garnet
Eldon Garnet was the founder and editor of IMPULSE, a Toronto art magazine I did some production work for back in the day, very back in the day. IMPULSE was “unaligned,” you might say, neither left nor right; Garnet was interested in the most radical art theory coming out of Europe and New York, a NY publication called Semiotext(e) in particular. Primarily a photographer, Garnet has done some interesting public sculptures, all realist but formally unusual in some provocative ways.
Little Glenn is Eldon Garnet's human-size bronze statue of a young working-class boy pulling a 22-foot-tall (6.7 m) stone obelisk in a four-wheeled cart. On the obelisk are carved the words "To serve and protect", the motto of the police force of Toronto, Ontario, Canada. Little Glenn is located on the intersection of Bay and Grenville, in front of the Metro Toronto Police Headquarters. It was erected in 1988 as a part of a composition of three human-size sculptures by Garnet surrounding the police station. - Wikipedia
Garnet’s public sculptures are evocative. They have a kind of psychological tension like that seen in Alex Colville’s paintings (discussed previously here). Though realistic, the tableau (a stage-like setting or arrangement of characters or objects) is “different,” unexpected. It’s as if the sculpture is trying to tell us something, but the something is abstract; it cannot be exactly or simply expressed.
Evan Penny
Evan Penny makes highly lifelike sculptures from silicone and other materials, often with a distortion in scale or angle. It’s like he translates the kind of image distortion that can be done with digital programs like Photoshop into real things. The effect is wonderful, but also strange.
“Evan Penny is always hovering on the cusp of this kind of intelligently questionable representation. When we say that something is realistic, we mean that it corresponds to the way things look and act in the domain of appearances. Penny plays with those expectations. What makes his sculptures so compelling, and so unsettling, is that their energy is in direct proportion to how far they depart from reality; their strangeness is measured in our appreciation of the distance between what we anticipate and what we get.” - Robert Enright in Border Crossings Magazine
To pick up from my previous tentative conclusions, I see in Garnet and Penny’s work a similar kind of resistance or critique of conventions of contemporary art, they are outsiders. Their realism places a high value on accessibility to the public, not just the art-informed. But the unusual and unexpected qualities of their sculptures also wants the viewer to have a distinct kind of experience. Such experience may be called aesthetic, perhaps because we have no other word for it.
A Final Thought
In writing about conservatism and art, I am trying to discover whether there is such a thing as a conservative aesthetic. It troubles me that the arts are so closely aligned with the people of the left, with leftist academia and with leftist ideology more generally. It is not that I am against such things (not exactly). But I am concerned at how little balance there is. Do we not live in a capitalist society? How then does one explain that our cultural life is almost uniformly critical of capitalism and all the things associated with it?
There may very well be good reasons for this lack of balance. I am coming to think that there is no conservative aesthetic that might be located opposite to a liberal aesthetic. Conservatives value things differently than liberals do. Liberals value aesthetics. And conservatives? What do conservatives value?
That is for next time, when I’ll look more closely at whether there is an aesthetic of power, and whether certain forms may be considered conservative, outside of ideology.
Thanks for reading.
Some articles about the topic of conservatism in art:
https://c2cjournal.ca/2016/09/conservative-art-its-complicated/
https://fineartviews.com/blog/29554/the-rise-of-politically-conservative-art-just-under-the-surface
https://quillette.com/2019/04/09/conservatives-need-to-start-taking-art-seriously/
About this series
This is Part 3 B of a series on conservative aesthetics. The premise of the series is that the left owns culture, and the right, if it hopes to actually govern the whole of the people or to grow its base, needs to find its way into the discourses of culture. Because I’m an artist, I’m looking at the visual arts, so for conservatives “the way in” means art theory, art criticism and art production.
Part 1 is What's Wrong with the Right: The right is unfunny and culturally retarded. There’s a lot of work to do.
Part 2 is Conservative Eye for the Woke Guy: Tie a Hermès scarf over that man bun, we're going for a ride, uptown! - Aesthetics associated with conservatism; A look at a contemporary art star from a conservative point of view; Observations on the arbitrariness of right/left when it comes to culture.
Part 3 A Conservative Artists is a look at three conservative artists from the recent past: Andrew Wyeth, Normal Rockwell and Thomas Kinkade. (Canadians Alex Colville and Don Ningewance are mentioned also.)
Part 3 B is this post; a look at several contemporary (living) conservative artists: Jon McNaughton, Charles Ray, John Currin and Canadians Eldon Garnet and Evan Penny.
To come:
Part 4 The Power of Form - What is aesthetic “form,” what kinds of form does conservative art tend toward, and specifically whether there are special forms that convey the idea of power separate from ideology.
Somewhere in here there will be a note or post about the movie The Brutalist, releasing in Canada on January 24th.
5 - Funny Business - why the right has no sense of humour and what to do about it.
Somewhere in here will be a post tentatively titled Venues, Values and Virtues - Are conservatives only interested in real estate or do they have values or virtues that benefit from culture?
Part 6 - Ways of Seeing Right - How to critically appreciate art from a conservative perspective.
Actually, it’s not quite true that I did not know of Ray. I had seen an image of this sculpture, Family Romance, and it stuck with me, just not the artist’s name. I had a heck of a time finding the image again and the artist’s name. Searching for an image by describing it to ChatGPT or Google s is interesting experience. It’s all about the query, getting your words just right. It took several hours but eventually “we” got there.
Ray was born in 1953, me in 1952. There might be something to be explored here about our cohort, middle boomers, too old to be part of the 1960s renaissance (pop art, minimalism, conceptualism) but too young to be 1980s post-modernists (identity politics). For another time.
It is quite funny to look at reproductions of Reinhardt’s black paintings online. Dull black squares, they look like placeholders, like someone forgot to put the image in there. Coincidentally, I have been reading a review copy of a new book, Popular Modernisms, by Professor Bruce Barber. The book has a chapter dedicated to Ad Reinhardt in which he notes that Reinhardt, like Ray, did not fit in well with his times. He made cartoons mocking the “high art” world, and stood somewhat aloof socially and politically. I am thinking I should do a separate post about Reinhardt. Also for another time.