Below is the first draft of an essay written for (but then ultimately cut) from our book Navigating the Art World: Professional Practice for the Early Career Artist. As it is only a first draft, Transhistoricality is in a pretty rough state, but we thought it could be of some interest as it is.

The book is still available, and can be found HERE

Transhistoricality

AGE OF MANIFESTOS

In his seminal 1996 work of aesthetic philosophy After the End of Art, Arthur C. Danto discusses the idea that art, as suggested in the title, is over. This is not something to be railed against however, as it is not quite as literal and as frightening as it at once appears. 

What Danto is actually suggesting, is that we have now moved into a period of art that is free of the constraints with which it was once shackled, and into something new, as-yet-untitled, and more liberated than before.

Before the Renaissance, it could be argued (and indeed is, by Hans Belting in his book The Image Before the Era of Art) that art – in its current meaning, didn’t exist. Paintings were created by craftsman, and were not appreciated for their aesthetic beauty or for the skill with which they were created, but for the ideas they represented. These icons were often religious in content, and did not require the myth of the artist to validate their significance. It was only with the dawn of Modernism, and the Impressionists in particular, that a real philosophy of art was necessitated, or even possible.

Artists became as important as their work, and the philosophy of why something was made, what it meant, and why that was significant, became salient things to consider when critiquing a work of art.
It was no longer enough to appraise a painting based on its aesthetic qualities alone, and in a very real sense, the early Modernists weren’t creating ‘art’ as it had been understood previously.

Arthur C. Danto describes the period of ‘art’ as being between AD 1400, and up to (but not including) Andy Warhol’s Brillo Boxes of AD 1964. His reason for this is that the period in question was, in his mind, the ‘Age of Manifestos’. This period was characterized by successive movements that either built upon, or rejected, the idioms and style of the previous movements. Each movement claimed to have discovered the essence of true art, and as such, decried that any other movement was irrelevant. Their art was ‘true’, whereas all others work was not. These movements were limited to a specific time period, and often to a specific place, and anything outside of that was irrelevant. The movements fell into and out of fashion, and these fashions dictated what succeeded at the time.

All artwork that was made during the Age of Maifestos was identified as being of a certain movement (often to the artists’ chagrin), and nothing sat outside of at least one particular movement. 

What Danto argues, is that this all ended with Andy Warhol’s Brillo Box sculptures, because up until that point, all art could be characterized to being of a certain movement based upon it’s aesthetic alone, and it could be judged as being successful as an artwork (or otherwise), based on this criteria. What happened with the Brillo Boxes (Danto argues) is that now, one could not simply enter a gallery with one’s one critical faculties alone and review an artwork, but rather one now needed a contextual framework, including the artist’s intent, biography, and philosophy, before one could really understand the work.
This is what brought about the real need for a philosophy of art. Not the aesthetic philosophy that dealt with such abstract questions as ‘What is beauty?’, but rather, the much harder to answer questions such as ’What is art?’. 

What is art is a question that until the dawn of Modernism, was simply not asked. Art after the dawn of Modernism was constantly in flux, with each movement stating that only they were to be called the true artists. After the Age of Manfestos, no one movement or group of artists could deny any other’s validity as artists, as anything, and everything, could be art.

More than this, as artists now need not be restricted to a certain stylistic paradigm dictated by the dominant movement at the time, and their influences and inspirations can come from anywhere.

Pre-Modernism, artworks were historical or Religious; during the ‘Age of Manifestos’, artists strove create the new; after the end of ‘art’, artists were free to paint anything and everything, free from the temporal and stylistic constrains of the past.

Another thing that the end of art, and Pop Art in particular orchestrated was the blurring of the line between ‘highbrow’ and ‘lowbrow’, allowing for the first time the twee, the kitsch, and the cute, to be considered as worthy subjects for art. Artists are now freer than ever to reference everything and anything, and nothing is off-limits.

ATEMPORALITY

In her catalogue essay for the Forever Now exhibition of contemporary abstracts at the Moma, Laura Hoptman calls this ‘Atemporality’ – which means that now artists need not feel confined to any particular style, movement, or genre. Rather, they are free to take their inspiration from all and any point on the art-historical timeline that they wish, as now more than ever before, our connection to the past is strengthened by our ‘post-historical cultural condition”.

Art history exists in a straightforward line from the cave paintings of our ancestors, to some point during the Age of Manifestos (in Danto’s mind it is until Andy Warhol’s Brillo Boxes) at which point it explodes like a firework and shoots off in an infinite number of directions. History is no-longer linear, and from this point there are no dominant movements that discount, or attempt to discount, all artists who decide not to conform to their ideals. 

Today we live in a time of limitless knowledge, easily accessible and at our fingertips. Our inspirations have always been multifarious and difficult to discern in origin, but now more than ever we are able to digest and distill information from countless disconnected and even contradictory sources, with the aim of using these to generate something new. 

WHAT THIS MEANS

For artist’s today, this can be incredibly liberating. No longer do they have to ascribe to a particular movement, and they can make whatever crazy idea comes into their heads, without the worry that anyone is able to deny its position as art. The debate now becomes whether a work of art is good or bad, successful or unsuccessful, original or derivative, but no more is it whether something is or isn’t art. An artist’s intent is now all that can be questioned, but if something is created as an artwork sincerely, then it unquestionably is.

Delphian Gallery presents ‘Antisocial Isolation’, a group exhibition at Saatchi Gallery, which brings together a collection of some of the most exciting early-career artists working today. Closed during the start of the lockdown, is now due to reopen on the 9th of December!

Artworks as records of history mediate the transitory space between what we experience and our shifting perceptions of those experiences. All of the works included have either been made during the current Covid19 pandemic, been made in response to it, or have developed new potential contexts when viewed from within it.

This exhibition is presented in a new liminal space which is neither isolated nor social. Embedded within each work are a myriad of shifting signifiers that are decoded afresh by each viewer, whose subjective lens endows the art with fluid meanings that are entirely unique.

The future will never be the same again. Here is now.

Artists include: Amy Beager, Anne Rothenstein, B.D. Graft, Benjamin Murphy, Danny Romeril, Enam Gbewonyo, Eva Hu, Florence Hutchings, Galina Munroe, George Lloyd-Jones, Igor Moritz, Jeroen Cremers, Jukka Virkkunen, Kadiya Qasem, Lian Zhang, Matt Macken, Minyoung Choi, Miranda Forrester, Moley Talhaoui, Nettle Grellier, Nick JS Thompson, Rhiannon Salisbury, Rosie Gibbens, Rosie McGinn, Sam Harris, Sunyoung Hwang, Valerie Savchits.

^{To book tickets click HERE}

(Tickets are free)

More News From Nowhere is an exhibition encompassing works from some of the most exciting artists working in Finland today.
Curated by artist and gallerist Benjamin Murphy, this show brings together works from artists represented by the biggest galleries in the country. More News From Nowhere is an immersive exhibition that will present works from a plethora of media, including painting, sculpture, and ceramics.

Initiated in-part as a response to the ongoing Covid19 situation, MNFN is intended to provide some much-needed excitement in this unusual time. As galleries and exhibitions move online, MNFN exists in this in-between space, existing both physically, and through documentation and presentation online. The duration of the show exemplifies and echoes this fleeting and uncertain time we find ourselves in.

Artists Exhibiting

Jenni Hiltunen, Jussi Goman, Tuukka Tammissari, Peetu Liesinen, Benjamin Murphy, Dorian Bajramovic, Olli Piipo, Heini Aho, Wilma Väisänen, Timo Vaittinen, Piia Hiltunen, Konsta Ojala, Hermanni Keko, Petri Ala-Maunus, and Ari Pelkonen.

A flag hangs on a wall with a creeping, knobbled finger curling in invitation. Above the finger is written in large black letters, ‘Something Bad Is Going To Happen’. I wonder, had I seen Allen Gardener’s gnarled hand and ominous message in March, would I have taken it so presciently? It is trite, and most certainly over-done, to compare everything along a pre- and post-pandemic line, but in this show where everything speaks of the spectral, the weird and the mantic, I can’t help but see it as prophecy.

As Gardener’s work predicted, something bad did happen. Stalled by the global spread of coronavirus, Collective Ending‘s first show in their new HQ was delayed until the beginning of July. After staging three bacchanalian shows in the Spit & Sawdust pub in Bermondsey, titled in the series ABSINTHE, the group has settled in its HQ in Deptford, a large double-height warehouse with studios nestled in the eves and at the rear. Having a permanent space, and one in which its members can work alongside one another, is fuel for the group’s mission: giving art back to the artists, empowering them through reciprocal relationships. Collaboration, working against the scarcity ethics of the art world, is a central value of the group, hence its invitation to thirteen artists outside of the collective to display their work in its new space.

And they have followed the theme of the weird and the uncanny that began with ABSINTHE. A Land of Incomparable Beauty tells of “the sinister and eldritch underbelly, the skull beneath the skin of the countryside”, as the curators describe. It pries apart our construction of rural utopia that is particular to England, looks in its corners and behind its twitching curtains. The proximity between nature and horror is keenly felt; upon arrival, you are greeted by a spidery, twisted canvas by Luisa Mè, its arms reaching and crawling in terrible technicolour. There is an eeriness, a sense of threat from the phallic, totemic, sculpture of Irvin Pascal, and the Celtic symbolism of Jonathan Kelly’s twin canvases studded with rudraksha seeds.

The philosopher Mark Rowlands has written that “when life is at its most visceral, and therefore also at its most vibrant, it is not possible to separate exultation from terror.” Like this, all the impeccable utopia that we imagine exists in the countryside is underwritten by a second script, a buzzing, uncanny monologue. A Land of Incomparable Beauty alerts us that our view is partial. I grew up in Somerset, a beloved corner of England’s countryside, the ‘hush of nature’ where Samuel Taylor Coleridge and Jane Austen wrote. And yet I saw more of my home turf in this exhibition, with all its darkness and mire and collapse, than in any pastoral landscape.

Yet this show is not simply about stripping away our constructions, but about filling in gaps. It illustrates the longing in the utopic vision of England’s “green and pleasant land”. Our nostalgia for the rural denotes much more than a loss of the natural, but a sense of the loss of the human, of man’s connection to the authentic and divine. Works like Beth Emily Richards’ audio piece, a recording of Cornish residents performing a lost choral practice formerly used to send messages to heavenly friends or loved ones, and Hadas Auerbach’s glass plates, elfin drawings covered in baby’s breath and weeds, are reminders of the magic and mystery still alive underneath the housing estates and care homes, the out-of-town supermarkets and car showrooms.

The works on display are powerful, considered. It takes an adjustment of the eye to connect them to the curatorial theme, but it’s no bad thing for an exhibition to require some interpretative work. Besides, just as the underlying horrors of the countryside, the muck and the sublime, are beneath the surface, so is the impetus of this show; a humming, thrumming line connecting a diversity of artists through a compelling, unexpected theme. Marshall Berman’s description of modernity is one that fits well, that ‘to be modern is to experience personal and social life as a maelstrom, to find one’s world and oneself in perpetual disintegration and renewal… to be part of a universe in which all that is solid melts into air’. Like this, A Land of Incomparable Beauty reminds us that our eyes are gently blinkered, that the ground is not steady beneath our feet, that nature, spirits, the mystical lie always in wait.

Words by Stella Botes

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