Get a Life
an autobiographical anthology of theories
Donald Brook
GET A LIFE DONALD BROOK
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
The life I got would have been a different shape and more greyscale had it not been for my wife Phyllis. Much of the material anthologised in this book is reprinted from Artlink magazine and it was Artlink’s editor, Stephanie Britton, who first suggested setting it out in a way that would place the evolution of my ideas within a biographical context. ’People will be interested,’ she said; and overrode my scepticism. In the course of putting it together I became greatly indebted to the supervision of Janet Maughan, who has reversed roles with me since the days when I wrote exhortatory marginal comments on students’ essays. I am also indebted to Helen Davies, who has wonderfully translated so many documents in radically different styles and formats into a coherent form suitable for both printed and downloadable access. I acknowledge with gratitude the encouragement of friends who have urged me to persist, both with getting a life and with reporting it. I also, acknowledge the discouragement of those happily less numerous enemies whose suggestions have been, in their way, no less motivating.
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GET A LIFE
Get a Life is published by Artlink Australia PO Box 182, Fullarton, South Australia 5063 Ph +61 8 8271 6887 www.artlink.com.au ISBN 978-9924842-0-0 Copyright! Donald Brook, 2014 Editors: Stephanie Britton and Janet Maughan! Design and digital development: Helen Davies All rights reserved. This book may not be reproduced in whole or in part without written permission from the publisher and author, nor may any part of this book be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, printing, photocopying, recording or other without the written permission from the publisher and author. Artlink Australia is generously supported by the Visual Arts & Crafts Strategy, ! an initiative of the Australian, State and Territory Governments. Artlink gratefully ! acknowledges the assistance of the Visual Arts Board of the Australia Council; ! The Government of SA through Arts SA for their investment in Artlink.
COVER: This is a picture of the author with his left ear (yes!) bandaged. ii
INTRODUCTION: ! ON STRINGING PERLS Wikipedia tells us that Perl is a high-level general-purpose interpreted dynamic programming language. I do not think that my perls exactly qualify, but people have put it to me that my didactic prose has not always seemed quite as transparent to them as the English of ordinary conversation. So I am here to help. These perls sometimes resemble pearls only because they are suspended on a string. The specks of grit around which they accumulated are not always smoothly concealed. Some of them, indeed, are quite baroque and minimal editing has been applied here and there, not to give them a deceptive lustre but to improve their intelligibility. The autobiographical narrative providing the string on which these perls are threaded is typographically signalled by using a sans-serif font. Some pieces of string strive to elucidate the high-level dynamic programming language of the previous or following perls; others deal more generally with the development of my thoughts about art as well as about history, life and the artworld. General readers may occasionally find the more philosophical or technical or ill-written perls too tedious or baffling to be worth the trouble of engagement. They are invited to forgive, forget, and press forward. The next piece of string will be in plain English. Several short autobiographical essays appear here as perls rather than as string, and they were not written in the chronological order of the events they describe. For example, the very first such passage immediately following these introductory remarks was published in Artlink as recently as 2010. Perhaps this counter-chronology will serve to endorse the Irish dictum that the best place to begin is at the end; but there is another reason. The Artlink essay included a hand-tinted photograph of the author as a two-yearold, preparing to dig his way underground on the beach at Bridlington in 1929. The deceptive innocence of the ice-cream should not distract attention from the more illuminating iconography of the preferred right hand. The device it holds in readiness is I think—or anyhow it should be—the miniature spade with which I have been metaphorically digging ever since.
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Donald preparing to go underground on the beach at Bridlington in 1929
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CONTENTS Perl 1:
‘Muffled sounds: the eartrumpet of the artworld has been struck by lightning.’
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Artlink 30 (2, 2010): 34-36. Perl 2:
‘Old people’ was first published by the ABC on 2 June 2008, on its Unleashed
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website at: http://www.abc.net.au/unleashed/31674.html Perl 3:
‘Depravity-in-Wharfedale.’ Artlink 25 (September 2005): 64-65.
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Perl 4:
‘Art, science and technology.’ Hemisphere 13 (1969): 2-8.
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Perl 5:
‘Art and literature.’ Artlink 26 (4, 2006): 98-100.
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Perl 6:
'Elnathan Mews.' Artlink 31 (4, 2011): 70-71
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Perl 7:
‘1962.’ Art Monthly Australia 198 (April 2007).
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Perl 8:
‘Perception and the appraisal of sculpture.’ Journal of Aesthetics and Art
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Criticism 27 (1969): 323-30. Perl 9:
‘The realities of power.’ Artlink 28 (2, 2008): 74-79.
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Perl 10:
‘Art criticism: authority and argument.’ Studio International 180 (1970): 66-69. 99
Perl 11:
The 1969 John Power Lecture in Contemporary Art. Flight from the object.
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Sydney: Power Institute of Fine Arts, 1970: 1-22. Perl 12:
‘Toward a definition of 'conceptual art'.’ Leonardo 5 (1972): 49-50.
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Perl 13:
‘Post-object art.’ Current Affairs Bulletin 49 (1973): 275-82.
137
Perl 14:
‘Counting children.’ Heat 12 (New Series, 2006): 155-162.
146
Perl 15:
‘Founding the Foundation.’ Catalogue article in Pulse Friction at the Plimsoll
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Gallery, Hobart, 25 October—6 November 1997. Pages 9-11. Perl 16:
‘Painting, photography and representation.’ Journal of Aesthetics and Art
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Criticism 42 (1983): 170-80. Perl 17:
‘Goodbye to all that.’ Artlink 9 (4, 1989): 5-7.
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Perl 18:
‘The horror of the prose.’ (Responding to a paper entitled ‘The horror of the gaze 203 Sydney: Artlink 14 (1, 1994): 6-8.
Perl 19:
‘Art history?’ History and Theory 43 (February 2004): 1-17.
213
Perl 20:
‘Illusion and allusion.’ Art and Australia 44 (2, Summer 2006): 262-265.
236
Perl 21:
‘Noel Sheridan’ (obituary). Artlink 26 (3, 2006): 70-71.
244
Perl 22:
‘For art, against aesthetics,’ in Ian North, Ed., Visual Animals: Crossovers.
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Evolution and Aesthetics. Contemporary Arts Centre of South Australia, Adelaide. 2007: 84-90. Perl 23:
‘Experimental art.’ National Institute for Experimental Arts conference,
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19 August 2011. Perl 24:
Donald Brook, List of publications, 2014
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Perl 1: ‘Muffled sounds: the ear trumpet of the artworld has been struck by lightning’ was first published in Artlink 30 (June 2010): 34-36. Donald Brook
MUFFLED SOUNDS
I am not sure whether the artworld walks past me as if with an iPod in its ear as a reproof, because it thinks that those it has pronounced dead should stay quietly buried, or because my own choice of a subterranean rostrum was imprudent in the first place. This rumination is provoked by a recent essay in which two historians do not quite decide where to lay the blame.1 They write: Brook never became firmly part of the Australian art establishment … because [he] was not at all concerned about Australian identity, or about provincialism, or about regionalism versus internationalism. Brook had argued that there was a difference between dissent within art institutions – within a closed shop – and dissent issuing from art. Only the former, which could be appropriated easily by galleries and their curators, was to remain visible within art discourse.2
I go for inaudibility rather than invisibility, but what calls for elucidation is the distinction between a form of dissent that is perceptible to the artworld and one that is not. Much of what I wrote forty years ago certainly registered as dissent within the artworld, as if it had been opinionated critical grandstanding of the usual sort. My important message—what these writers call ‘dissent issuing from art’—did not try to tell ‘artists of high and serious ambition’3 what they should do next. It tried to tell the artworld that it had entirely the wrong idea about what art is. It has only recently become obvious to me that there is a sense in which having the wrong idea about what art is doesn’t matter very much because art cannot be deliberately made in any case. There is no such thing as knowing how to make it. Back then, however, promoting the right idea about what art is seemed to be important. Naturally, the artworld did not believe that it had the wrong idea about what art is. It thought then and it continues to think that art can be made, and that its vicissitudes and mutations have a history. The
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trick it wanted to master was to be so prescient about the way art’s history will go next that a smart operator will be able to get there ahead of it. The issues here are so hard to untangle that I made a lot of mistakes in the late ’sixties and early ’seventies. I seemed to be promoting something that I called post-object art as if I conceived it as the upcoming style or movement that was about to annihilate abstract expressionism or Antipodeanism or post-painterly abstraction, before being itself overtaken by the next big deal. In more theoretical writings I insisted that this was not what I meant, but those artists who only read exhibition notices in the newspapers and the occasional magazine article could be forgiven for getting the wrong take-home message. I wanted to undermine, not to reinforce, the suggestion that artists need to know what art is in order to make some, just as we all need to know what hors d’oeuvres are if we expect to knock up a batch in the kitchen. My really subversive polemic was directed against the idea that ‘art’ is the word that names the class of works of art. Of course objects that are likely to be classified as works of art can be deliberately made. Moreover, all of the ways in which such things have been made in the past have evolutionary histories. But every attempt I made to speak carefully about this, emphasizing the point that ‘art’ is not the name of a class of things that can be deliberately made, was hijacked by the way casual speech conspires with institutional punditry to obliterate this distinction. There is an easy way of explaining—but alas no easy way of eradicating—the disputes and exchanges of ill-feeling that constantly break out about all this. Fundamentally, the trouble is that the inscription ‘art’ is a homograph4 that deceptively accommodates two very different words. One of them is the word we use in sentences like ‘art is a sort of revelation.’ The other is the word that appears in sentences like ‘some works of art are rubbish.’ Art is not instantiated in every work of art, just as sucrose is not instantiated in every date; and certainly not in dates such as the 17th of September. The artworld uses the word ‘art’ to mean what ‘the class of works of art’ means. It also understands, correctly, that the class of works of art has been historically shaped. It then incoherently asserts that art is what it always was, for Aurignacian cave-dwellers just as it is for Generation Y. This contradiction is so egregious that the need to resolve it should have become obvious at least a century ago: certainly after Duchamp’s cathartic challenge and the subsequent triumph of the so-called ‘Institutional Theory of Art’. The artworld still does not understand that although the Institutional Theory of Art is correct it is not—despite its name—a theory about what art is. It theorises about the way in which some things come to be classified as works of art, while other things do not. The slogan ‘Art is whatever the artworld says it is’ is false. Art is not whatever the artworld says it is. We should say instead ‘Works of art are whatever the artworld says they are’. This is the simple truth. I cannot myself explain what art is in a few words; nor do I need to do so in order to press my argument against the artworld. I believe that ‘art’ is the most appropriate general name for memetic innovation,5 and that new memes drive cultural evolution in a way analogous to the way in which accidentally variant new genes drive biological evolution. Most of the artworld believes, quite differently, that art is a distilled essence of aesthetic goodness. This difference of opinion is not, however, the basis of my immediate complaint. It is motivated by the conviction that whatever one takes the abiding nature of art to be (and whether one is right or wrong) it is impossible to have one’s cake and eat it. If art is what it always was, then art does not have a history. Sadly, an intellectually spineless branch of scholarship called ‘Art History’ has lent its authority to the incoherent doctrine that what artists make is art, and art changes over time. Art History is an ‘academic discipline’ dedicated to the construction of a rag-bag of stories about the ways in which certain 7
loosely related cultural kinds6 have emerged, have changed, and have eventually been superseded. These cultural kinds are constituted by objects that have come to be classified as works of art, often for quite arbitrary reasons. Minoan oil storage jars, Byzantine religious mosaics and bizarre performances for which the performer does not even turn up are typical examples. The stories told by ‘art historians’ are a mish-mash of gossip about social and political contexts and the hare-brained antics of popes and princes. They are stories about the infidelities of artists and the dodgy practices of dealers; about the fickle tastes of patrons, curators and beady-eyed collectors; about the machinations of auction houses and about accidental finds in attics. If it is ever to claim respect as an intellectual discipline Art History must be re-named; perhaps to ‘The Histories of Artworks’ or even to ‘The Histories of Artworlds’. It must then make the best case it can for adoption by university departments of Sociology or Anthropology, against whatever resistance is to be expected. Anthropologists and cultural historians have their own blemishes, but they smell humbug. Art historians are not the only villains in my piece. Since the eighteenth century a world of philosophical aesthetics has sprung up adjacent to Art History, conspiring with the art historians to mislead artists. I have a foot in both camps and once offered the world of philosophical aesthetics a document that I called ‘A transinstitutional non-voluntary modelling theory of art’. This bizarre title was compassionately put down by the editor of The British Journal of Aesthetics, who published the essay as ‘A new theory of art,’7 offering me the incidental encomium that ‘[T]his is the most exciting article to reach me since I took over as editor. It is a privilege to accept it for publication’.8 Whatever got into him, I wonder? My ‘new theory’ has been casually cited perhaps two or three times in thirty years and I think that it may have only once elicited a response from an Australian art historian, who found it extremely distasteful.9 To his credit, though, he seems to have intuited that what I set out to address was the question of what art is rather than the question of how things get to be classified as works of art. It would be difficult otherwise to understand why he charged me primarily with the offence of neo-Kantianism, presumably because Kant is known not to have been much interested in works of art. How otherwise should my neo-Wittgensteinean analytics have scored such a flattering association with transcendental idealism? *** Here is an important caveat. I do not say that there is no relationship at all between art and works of art. The point I make is that this relationship is contingent and accidental. The manifestation or the incorporation of art ‘in’ an artefact is neither a necessary nor a sufficient condition for classifying it as a work of art. This is not to say, of course, that works of art are in some peculiar way disqualified from incorporating the new memes that give things a role in cultural evolution. Indeed, many of the objects that we now classify as works of art were more influential as exemplary embodiments of the new memes that were shaping cultural evolution during the mediaeval and European renaissance periods than is the case today. The contemporary artworld has come to be regarded, correctly, as a branch of the entertainment industry with very little public credibility as the place where intelligent people must go in search of new insights that will expand their minds and revise the social institutions. From this point of view such accessibly popular domains as digital communications, molecular biology and nanotechnology leave the artworld for dead. In spite of this the artworld still has a significant social role to play, distinguishing it from most other branches of the entertainment industry such as sport and tourism as well as from the everyday world of work. It is the principal promoter of the detached mode of contemplation, actively sponsoring an open-minded responsiveness to its presentations. Without this, new and entirely unexpected insights would be crowded out by practical, instrumental, thinking and by the constraints of habit and prejudice. 8
It has been suggested to me that the artworld’s inability to hear what Barker and Green (quoted above) characterise as ‘dissent issuing from art’ may be attributable to some other cause than the homonymic nature of the inscription ‘art,’ taken together with the adverse conditions of subterranean voice-projection. Could it be that I am simply wrong? This explanation strikes me as implausible. I prefer to speculate that the ear trumpet of the artworld has been struck by lightning. This misfortune has had the consequence that only those popular voices of confusion delivered by megaphone are clearly audible, and familiar enough to be believed. Notes 1. Heather Barker and Charles Green, ‘Flight from the Object: Donald Brook, Inhibodress and the Emergence of PostStudio Art in Early 1970s Sydney.’ Emaj issue 4, 2009. http://www.melbourneartjournal.unimelb.edu.au/E-MAJ 2. As above, p.21. 3. I quote the late Clement Greenberg with irony, and some disdain. 4. Homonymity is what may (or may not) make today’s date inedible. Roughly, homographs are different words written in the same way; homophones are different words that sound the same. ‘Art’ as written is a homograph and (when spoken) a homophone. 5. For a more comprehensive account see my recent long essay (in book format) “The awful truth about what art is” (Artlink, Adelaide, 2008). 6. A cultural kind (such as the motor vehicle or the Etruscan sarcophagus) is like a biological kind (such as the Chinese cabbage or the rock-wallaby). In both cases there is an evolutionary history. 7. ‘A new theory of art.’ British Journal of Aesthetics 20 (No. 4, Autumn 1980): 305-321. 8. T. E. Diffey, in a personal letter dated 9 August 1979. 9. B. Smith, ‘Concerning Donald Brook’s “New Theory of Art”.’ Meanjin 47 (No. 1, 1988): 5-10.
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...and a bit of string
It goes without saying that that my reflections on the question about what art is, as they are presented in this essay (and, more specifically, the insight that the inscription ‘art’ is homonymic) did not occur to me on the beach at Bridlington in 1929. In those days I often stayed with my grandmother at 40 Leicester Place, Leeds. I only seemed to have one grandmother who was the sister of two kindly great aunts with a spare room in Bridlington. Her own house in Leeds was where I stayed, sometimes for two or three weeks at a time because my parents who lived just up the street (at 8 Leicester Place, where I was born) were frequently away. They must have believed in the child-rearing advice never apologise, never explain, because I have no idea where they went, or why. It is easy to see why Leicester Place has been demolished. It was one of those back-to-back slum terraces built for the growing industrial proletariat in the nineteenth century. The dunny was outside, just beside the only entrance door at basement level. It stood adjacent to a flight of worn stone steps by which one ascended to the cobbled street. The toilet bowl was an inverted circular cone of coarse yellow ceramic with a cracked glaze, like a narrow funnel. A pine seat that was too high and too deep for the comfort of a child had been scrubbed until the grain stood out like corduroy. In the very small circular hole at the bottom of the bowl there was often blood. I averted my gaze, withholding speculation. Yellowing squares of The Yorkshire Post hung on a string from a bent nail in the brick wall. My grandfather had once been a journalist and was still a secret drinker. He sucked a lot of peppermints because my grandmother was a Rechabite and a Jehovah’s Witness. I loved my grandfather. In the mornings when I stayed with them, long after my grandmother was up and about, telling the good news about The Lord’s Work around the slum streets with a portable gramophone, I would creep into their soft four-poster bed with a sour smell and prop myself up among huge grey pillows where he taught me to spell.
Row housing, Leeds 10
‘Spell onomatopoeia, Donald lad.’ Those were the easy ones. The ones I expected to get. The hard ones were the ones with (or without) the double ell, the double cc or the double mm, some of which still elude me. ‘Spell accommodation, Donald.’ He had odd friends. I would toddle along hand in hand with him sometimes in the wintry afternoons to a small black park called Woodhouse Moor, just behind the Leeds University not far from where we lived. There were black iron benches and black angular trees with occasional black leaves. There was black grass that will not turn green in my mind’s eye by any force of reason. We could see some of the black roofs of the University above a line of black trees, and my grandfather promised me that one day I would study there. It did not strike me then as an attractive prospect, but he turned out to be right. His friends trundled into the park in an unnaturally animated way, like freshly released prisoners. They were from the nearby Deaf and Dumb Institute, and he talked to them in hand signing. Some of them made useless sounds and all of them, unlike ordinary Yorkshire folk, laughed and nodded cheerfully. To extend the morning discipline of spelling my grandfather taught me the deaf and dumb hand alphabet, and I can still do it. On the way home from Woodhouse Moor in the late afternoon we would stop at the barber’s shop. I would sit high up on a ruptured leather bench with horsehair poking out, irritating my legs under the knees as I swung my feet clear of the ground. I would watch in the mirror while his round pink face was whitened with soap like a clown’s and then scraped with the rasping sound of a cutthroat razor. There was a musty smell that may have been ground nutmeg. I do not know where my grandfather went in the evenings to escape from his fearsome wife and the Lord’s Work, freshly shaved and smelling of exotic spice. All this came back to me when the ABC asked me to write a blog in 2008 for their new website, that was then called Unleashed.
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