I have been reading more than painting for the past ten days.  This is immensely important for the practice as we zoom out and recognize it as a multi-decade practice (hopefully half a century) and not “what will I post on Instagram next week?”.

I will endeavor to briefly share a few insights as it pertains to some of the art history reading I’ve been doing these last few days.

It has been said that the only class liberated by the french revolution was the bourgeoisie. Fifty years later in 1848 two rounds of violent protests occurred, one in February and one, more impactfully, in June.  The bourgeoisie sponsored the state in the squashing of these rebellions resulting in a few thousand protestors being slaughtered. This is the political backdrop from which Courbet is and will be exhibiting paintings in the years ‘48, ‘49, ‘50.

In 1849 he won a prize at the salon for his painting “After Dinner at Ornanes”, the state purchased this painting.  Napoleon III, the nephew of The Napoleon, has recently ascended to the throne.  This was not a controversial subtext per se, although the underlying current of the rural peasantry and the oppressed urban classes could be perhaps read into this painting.  These groups, despite sharing class identity, had not unified in any substantive way.

The next year 1850 is when Courbet profoundly displays 3 paintings which are to be the beginning of the Avant-Garde.

• The Stonebreakers – Man as machine, man as tool
• Burian at Ornanes – intensely simple painting (tonally), awkward composition of figures
• Peasants of Flagy – peasants presented ambiguously (perhaps like the social classes of paris)

These pictures are profound in a few simple ways.  Their formal simplicity in lack of gradating values, their deliberate ugliness, their almost black and white tonal simplicity, their awkwardness and emotional flatness evoke the popular mass images accessible to the lower classes of the time.  To reference Greenberg, Courbet evoked the imagery of Kitsch.  Kitsch would be considered the culture of those who are too busy working to have a culture, culture.  This is any sort of cheap, easily produced and distributed form of entertainment.  What Courbet did that was so revolutionary is he evoked these formal qualities mentioned above in these massive historical paintings. 

This could all be summed up by Courbet’s use of a naive style. He makes his work relatable to the oppressed masses in a way that was unprecedented – this is the definition of Avant-Garde.

This is powerful because he makes his salon work more relatable to the lower classes thus empowering them and alienating its typical bourgeoisie public.  In short he turns the spectators into interlocutors (a person who takes part in a dialogue).  Mind you the political backdrop occurring at this time. 

Modernism versus the Avant-Garde

It seems to me that the Zizek writing is about our innate desire for the sacred. In the absence of anything to fill this void, we essentially fill it with trash, but the point is it needs to be filled and even more so we need to assert that this void exists to begin with.  For many centuries art filled this void (the sacred) with many “traditionally” understood beautiful art objects, including many naked and partially naked women.  The great illusion that representational painting implied was not of rendering space but that these beautiful women could be had.  Courbet comes along and with this painting “The origin of the world” gives you, front and center, that.  This is desublimation according to Zizek, in that he takes what has been elevated to the sacred (sublimation) and undermines it, demotes it, to the ordinary, but not just that the abject and the disgusting.  This is what happens Zizek argues when the void is filled with the object such that no space is able to exist and thus the plane is broken.  Zizek asserts that the sublime occurs in the space between the object and the void.  In our contemporary age we elevate all sorts of “stuff” to fill the void thus christening it as sacred.  But the point for me is that something needs to be sacred.  He uses coke, or even Coke Lite as an example. 

The last point to work through here is that the equal and opposite painting made by Malevich was the Black Square.  This is the inversion of Courbet’s painting.  The Black Square reasserts the void, which is what modern art does (or did).  Modern art was able to shock and thus challenge the system. Postmodern art only shocks, that is the system.

For me I can’t help but approach all this and not think about, given all this obtuseness (which actually is quite manageable and concrete), what paintings can (and should) be made in order to perpetuate the inertia of progress.  What paintings can be made that will shock via anti-shock. I have been spending more time reading than painting these last two weeks.  That is okay, but in the meantime I am using the break to assess and assert what it is (deep down under) that I want to paint.  What is the true me expressed via the materiality of paint?