[Nietzsche Circle][Hyperion]

The Rise of the Good-Enough

A Meditation on the Drawing as a Work of Art

Page III

Vincent van Gogh’s chalk drawing is titled The Carrot Puller, 1885. This faceless drawing depicts a peasant woman in the act of prying a carrot from the ground with a long-handled spade. Her posterior takes up the bulk of the drawing, turned politely toward us non-carrot pullers while the woman does her work. Our eye-level is at her mid-thigh, her child’s eye, perhaps. The dress of the woman is shaded carelessly, for the artist is shaping a mass, rather than clothing it. The hatch-lines are primarily 45° parallel lines with variation in their individual widths rather than along their length. Where a cross-hatch is used, it forms a corner. The extreme vertical hatching down from behind the right buttock rings the first bell of complaint. It creates a shade which does not lie across the fabric of the dress, for even though the parallel hatches on the rest of the dress are unpleasant, their consistency shows their strength of purpose, and we understand them and are unoffended. The vertical curved hatches across the upper left buttock likewise fit the form in the sense that the upper part of the dress is composed of a different material or another weave from the lower part. The hatch-work on the end of the handle of the spade seems to be as much an afterthought as the vertical hatches that so offended earlier.

Regarding the form of the woman, it goes without saying that Van Gogh was studying the pose, weight and point of view of the woman, not her anatomy. There is no regard for muscle or bone; there are no details. The flesh is consistent, as is the headgear and the blouse. The footwear belongs to the dress stage of the drawing, and seems ridiculous in its treatment. The ground is shadowed nicely. One can rarely go wrong with a ground like that; one can also rarely go right.

The Carrot Puller is obviously an observational sketch, accomplished for the artist’s personal needs as a painter, and as such should not offend the eye regardless of what seems mean and unaccomplished in it. Should a sketch be held accountable for a little inconsistency in the hatching, when the spirit of the artist infuses it so fully? Well, in the summer of 2006, The Art Institute of Chicago mounted it in a public place, gave it a catalog number, hung a description by its side, and gave us all the opportunity to muse about a little hatching sitting artlessly on a woman’s cornered rump.

The catalog tells the curious ones that the provenance of this drawing began when it was sold by Ambroise Vollard in 1906 to Adrien Hebrard. Prior to that, it is likely he obtained the drawing in the usual fashion, via the widow of Theo van Gogh, Johanna van Gogh-Bonger. “May I have this?” he asks the holder of the estate. “Of course, take it, it is only a drawing. Here are thirteen more.” Vincent van Gogh’s attitude toward the drawing, while personal and beyond our knowledge, most likely would have been expressed with even more bluntness, for the attitude is not unfamiliar. For him, the drawing was the means to an end that was possibly realized, possibly not. Of course the drawing is imperfect, it was never intended to be a paragon of perfection. In fact, it is likely that he did not think of himself in terms of the masters (viz. Renaissance), so perfection would not have been a concern (Truth, perhaps, but not perfection). Ambroise Vollard, using the techniques of the critic and the salesman, sold the drawing, and the purchaser now had a relic of the great crazy artist, and to the collector it was beyond reproach. The drawing is the fingernail of the saint, salving the soul that needs something. The entrance of the drawing into the public arena gives birth to the potential of an engagement with art. It is interesting to note that the companion drawing in the exhibition is Edgar Degas’ After the Bath, 1900 (cat. 80). It, too, is a study of a woman bent at the waist with her hand at her toes. Instinctively, I loathe the drawing, and find none of the same charm that was in The Carrot Puller. Degas’ drawings should rarely be exhibited.

Enter today the young artist with no name or style to call his own, who walks into the house of a man who has hanging on his wall, mattted with care, this drawing scratched out by good old what’s-his-name. The young artist looks at it and snorts and thinks to himself, I can draw that, and I can draw it better. Then, being savvy, he says to himself, Actually, I can draw that just as well, and clearly I needn’t draw any better. Van Gogh’s technique obviously wasn’t the reason this drawing was purchased. I must take advantage of this situation. It is the secret dialogue one artist has with another’s work. A sickness enters his mind in that instant: the lure of the good-enough.

I am speaking of secret things here; such talk is dangerous. The individual artist may not care where his drawing ends up—but he should, especially if he wants to avoid needless criticism such as I bestowed upon the little Van Gogh. The criticism is needless precisely because the artist who is constantly working already knows that his work is not perfect. This is why he is always drawing another picture, always painting another scene. It is needless criticism because the criticism serves others, not himself. However, that is not the only unfortunate possibility that arises when his drawings are in the public. The artist should be wary of releasing his “imperfect drafts” into the world because of how they always influence the young and the stupid, who know countless ways to thrill the old, and will employ the easiest means to do so.

Vincent van Gogh likely drew hundreds of drawings after drawing the relic under observation. He was not thinking about this particular sheet when he cut off his ear. But the artist who saw it hasn’t forgotten it (I haven’t forgotten it) and now he has the master’s permission to make a mediocre drawing and seek out the wall upon which it must hang. Barely given a chance to flourish, the Subject-Self became the new readymade.

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THE APOCALYPSE OF THE READYMADE

Most of Van Gogh’s oeuvre was created out of the Subject-Self. He was one of the first great artists of whom it might be said that all their works were directly about the Subject-Self. I don’t think it’s an exaggeration to claim that he might be the apotheosis of the Subject-Self. However, it is crucial to understand that even as the “apotheosis of the Subject-Self,” this is no indication of value or worth. Before Van Gogh, the Subject-Self was already becoming readymade, leveling all subject matter to this basic state. Artists had quickly consumed the human brain, which even at its most complex is shared by all. Madness is merely the newest nativity scene.

The works collected in the exhibition under the title “Modernism” have an interconnectedness that goes beyond the “dialogues” to which they are subject. Prior to 1913, we saw the readymade as the springboard for artistic creation, the vehicle for artistic vision and style. The Subject-Self allowed the idea as a subject to become critically acceptable, manifested primarily as the depiction of thought or mental state. At the beginning of the 20th century, schools and styles began to flourish and spawn, until the miasma of art revolted and coughed up Marcel Duchamp. When Duchamp exhibited Bicycle Wheel and other readymades, the entire history of art was gathered up in his mischievous apocalypse. He did not usher in the modern age. He was the prophet who closed out the previous one.

When the readymade was officially recognized, art was left primarily with the idea as the object of fascination, and the notion that anything could be art. While the schools of painting during the first World War were concerned with the interactions of the artistic medium with itself, those which followed had at their core Idea and rhetoric, and occasionally pure mathematics or science. The exhibition pairs two drawings together which mark the modern post-apocalyptic state: Fernand Léger’s Study for The Ball Bearing, 1926 (cat. 111) and Francis Picabia’s sublime Spirit of a Young Girl, 1918 (cat. 112). Still life and portraiture collapsed into one, or the abstraction of the living as the non-living, or form and dimension vitalized by the menial nature of human consciousness: any penned description will do, for the drawings defy description in the old manner.

When there is no readymade subject, the artist must work with his ideas and emotions. The only problem with drawings about ideas is that regardless of the technique and skill, ideas are inherently uninteresting in their early states. The drawing itself is admirable, if without value. The drawing records the thrill of the creative act: executed in private (the face of the page turned to the eye of the draughtsman only), the practiced hand quickly formulates the initial idea with the strokes of his pen. Drawings are the first-fruits of thought, the first formulations of a visual idea on paper. There is a delightful frailty to a drawing that is lacking in canvas or board: the paper is disposable, but never disposed of (without reason)—the paper is cheap, the ink or graphite cheaper—the drawing can be made anywhere. Facility with the tools came at great cost. As a record, the drawing is like no other piece of art. It is the rare embalming of potentiality: it says, “This is my early grapple with the Idea. I have lost, but not without increase. There will be another fight.”

Good scholarship demands that the romance be taken out of the technical description of art and be replaced with dry humor. Thus, in the case of drawings, we now discuss the doodle. One should never forget the vital relationship between the doodle and the idea. Pencil in hand, the artist begins to draw fancies and unimportant things. He doodles until the lines begin to collide in an interesting way with the thoughts that have been concerning him of late. Fascination takes hold of him (some might call this inspiration, others might call it the decisive perception of gestalt, it does not matter) and the doodles become sketches and the sketches mature into drawings and eventually they may become the seeds of finished works of art (painting, sculpture, whatever) or else languish in a folder collecting age.

But does the doodle have value or does the doodler? When we have no readymade subject, we have to admit that it is the doodler and not the doodle that will first be examined. While not covered by the exhibition, a study of post-modern drawing reveals that the latter half of the 20th century is filled with doodles and doodlers. The drawings of the first half of the 20th century, with the absence of the readymade and the predominance of the idea, gave rise to a new school of drawing: the Good-Enough. The idea begins to come to life as the artist works, but it is not wrestled into strength. It is not fought with until it is stronger than the artist. When drawings have exchange value and subjects do not, artists are free to stop developing ideas as early as they like.

When the end of art was the exploration of the idea, the artist turned inward and found that all of his major and minor internal machinations had an external exchange value. Advancements in painting in the 19th and early 20th centuries (Impressionism, Expressionism, Abstract Expressionism, etc) coincided with advancements in cataloguing introspection, which accidentally coincided with looser standards in the marketplace. The late 20th century result is that the artist is content to produce what the market is content to buy: the Good-Enough.

It is clear from the exhibition that in the past the public was eager to see how an artist transformed the nail-filled reality of life into a thing of beauty or horror. They appreciated the interpretations of the readymade into an insubstantial yet visible reality. Through the works of artists upon society’s most precious subjects, an internal engagement could take place, and a person could find themselves disoriented in such a way that they might now grow. Interest in drawings is natural: the display of secret, hidden labors is tantamount to deconstructing a reliquary. Even so, people generally had little energy to know intimately the occult workings themselves. On display was the fruit of passion, the Masterpiece or the Failure or worse the Mediocrity—but for the most part it wasn’t just another idea that everyone shared. The subject was pulled from tradition and chance, but it was recognizable and powerful.

Today, after a long decay, we are more interested in the artist’s rhetorical abilities. Until ideas lose all value in themselves, art will continue its descent from the apocalypse ushered in by the man who gave up painting to prove that the readymade was depleted and encompassed all. Now we are mildly interested in the ideas of the artist, who interprets that interest as having Value: the idea has value, therefore the Idea is the commodity, therefore it is the end of my labor. Unfortunately, all ideas are common unless they pass through strenuous refinement. And what is wrong with the common? Nothing is wrong with the common. But the common is as exciting here on earth as streets of gold would be in heaven. Now that there is no subject, we have only our common untransfigured ideas.

“Drawings in Dialogue” closes with a dialogue between two portraits. A drawing of Marcel Duchamp sits directly across from a drawing of the French Surrealist poet René Char. Duchamp is drawn in a sketchy, black cubist style by his brother Jacques Villon in 1953 (cat. 165). Char is drawn by Giacometti in a well-formed classically refined sketch in 1964 (cat. 166). Their right legs are crossed over their left knees. Duchamp looks vaguely impatient. Char has a bored expression on his face. Their lips are tightly sealed.

(published in Hyperion: On the Future of Aesthetics, a web publication of The Nietzsche Circle: www.nietzschecircle.com, June 2007)

To download the entire essay, Open PDF: | “The Rise of the Good-Enough”

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