Art, the expression of society, manifests, in its highest soaring, the most advanced social tendencies: it is the forerunner and the revealer. Therefore, to know whether art truly fulfills its proper mission as initiator, whether the artist is truly of the avant-garde, one must know where Humanity is going, know what the destiny of the human race is . . . . Along with their hymn to happiness, the dolorous and despairing ode . . . . To lay bare with a brutal brush all the brutalities, all the filth, which are at the base of our society.
Gabriel-Désiré Laverdant 1
So, for art and culture, the discussion of the end of the ideology of progress boils down to a single question-is artistic activity able to maintain a critical function if it is cut off from an emancipation project?
Thierry de Duve 2
Bonnie Young's paintings present a world of animal metaphors. Like the animals in Aesop's Fables and Orwell's Animal Farm, Young's animals are at once themselves and ourselves, actors in a political drama. 3 One may urge that all art is political, and none more so than that which denies its political character with the rhetoric of a formalist, or of an expressionist, theory of art. That is not to say that formalist or expressionist theories of art are without utility: their utility consists in what they enable to appear in one's engagement with the artwork. It is to say that a fallacy of synecdoche-an illicit substitution of a part for the whole-obtains when an implicit or explicit claim of hermeneutic exclusivity is part of a formalist or an expressionist-or of any-approach to regarding artworks. However that may be, that situation does not obtain with respect to Bonnie Young's works: the political character of Young's work remains overt, direct, trenchant when the formal and expressive aspects of the works are fully regarded. Apart from their immediate rhetoric, Young's works are significant for raising the question of the possibility of political artworks as such, now, after the collapse of the avant-garde has seemingly obviated that possibility for many. 4 Indeed, historically the possibility of political artworks is in itself the possibility of an avant-garde.
Underlying the historical confluence of aesthetic and political avant-gardes is the presupposition of a transitive linkage of the aesthetic and the ethical domains. This linkage of aesthetic and political domains is readily enough defined by ostension, for it constitutes much of the practice of modernism from the Enlightenment on, notwithstanding the Kantian instauration of modernism as entailing "the separation of the spheres, the becoming autonomous of truth, beauty and goodness from one another, and their developing into self-sufficient forms of practice." 5 Examples of the linkage of aesthetic and political avant-gardes are plentiful: David's Death of Marat and the French Revolution, Goya's Third of May 1808 at Madrid, Delacroix's Greece Expiring on the Ruins of Missolonghi, Géricault in 1830, Courbet and the Paris Commune of 1848, the Picasso of Guernica and World War II, the role of the Situationiste Internationale artists in the events of May 1968 in Paris, James Rosenquist's F-111 and the war in Vietnam. These exemplify an explicit linkage of manifest political content with events in the social formation. Less obvious, though no less germane to the historical confluence of the political and aesthetic avant-gardes, are the relations of works without such manifest political content, but which in the linkage of artistic practice-however practiced, whatever form that practice may take-with aspirations of human progress, however that was to be defined. But again, while the case of works without explicit political content is germane to an overarching history of the confluence of aesthetic and political avant-gardes, it is the case of explicit linkage of aesthetic and political domains that is most directly apt in regarding Bonnie Young's works. The political domain has a substantial extension; nevertheless, whatever the particular manifestation it may be succinctly adumbrated as entailing an emancipation project. 6 Emancipation, in turn, entails the granting of ethical-particularly, political, civic, legal-status in advance of the conditions otherwise necessary to its attainment. The transitive linkage of aesthetic and political domains, of the practices of artists and the situation of the social formation, obtains as a critical function, a vigilance in which: "Artistic or aesthetic activity would function as judge, guardian, guarantor of the achievement of an ethical or political project of emancipation." 7
Young's works divide into an upper and a lower register through the use of a horizon line. Dividing the visual field into upper and lower registers is an obvious correlative for tropes of lower and upper, and all the referents such a division may have. It is a trope grounded in the lived experience of embodied consciousness: all directions are equally accessible except the vertical; gravity imposes its tax on the expenditure of energy required for vertical movement. Along with the placing of different aspects above and below is the placing of different aspects in distal and proximal space. The placement of the horizon line high within all of Young's works except RLP distances the city, positioning it, positing it, as a utopian topos, an unattainable no-place. There is more in this distal positioning of the city than the venerable trope of a dichotomy of urban and rural, usually vitiating the city while valorizing the pastoral. In RLP, the low horizon line emphasizes the horse and riser galloping over the figures in the lower register, while making space above for the polo player. Yet the representations of the city in Young's works is not entire that of a utopia; it is also a stark-black and white-reference to a reality of impersonal skyscrapers and industry. This aporia in the representation of the city and its industrial base, at once utopia and dystopia, evocation of the gap between the promise of the rhetoric of progress and its imperfection in actuality, the gap between the ought and the is, recalls Auden's The Shield of Achilles:
She looked over his shoulder
For vines and olive trees,
Marble well-governed cities
And ships upon untamed seas,
But there on the shining metal
His hands had put instead
An artificial wilderness
And a sky like lead.
8
Looking over the shoulder of Hephaistos, looking over a horizon, is to regard a scene within the scene, a representation within a representation. The contrast between the subsuming and the embedded representation is heightened by the shift from the grisaille representation of the city and its supporting industrial infrastructure through collaged photocopies, to the remainder of the field of Young's works consisting largely in passages of intense color. Young's use of intense color is not that of Rodchenko's triptych, or of Kandinsky: pure color in the formalist strain of the modernist avant-garde adumbration of utopia. 9 Rather, Young's use of intense color performs several functions: the structural function of a shifter 10 between levels of representation as document and as invention of contextual narrative, the directing of the viewer's regard through emphasis, and the engagement of the viewer's attention. Thus the intense color and painterly surface in the foreground lower register of Dystopian Dream contrasts with the syntax of the collage photocopy elements comprising the urban landscape beyond the horizon line in the upper register. So also the strong perspective in Untitled and the preliminary Study reference Aesop's fable of the frogs requesting of Jupiter a king. Young represents the culmination of the fable, with the heron about to eat the frogs. 11 During modernism, from Lessing to Greenberg, the literary and the painterly were regarded as domains to be kept separate. 12 Young's works undoes the modernist turn, returning to the premodern model of ut pictura poesis. 13 If modernism in painting entailed thematization of the problematic of the relationship between the world outside the painting, the illusion of the things of the world in the painting, and the reconciliation of this illusion on the flat picture plane, the postmodern in painting may be regarded as entailing thematization of the relationship between the world outside the painting, the manner in which this world is signified in painting, and the reconciliation of this manner of signification with the flatness of the supporting surface. 14 The difference is more than semantic, and more than a belated postmodern assimilation of semiotics: it includes a view of art not as an enterprise obtaining within a specific medium, but a generic activity 15 consisting in "the logical operations on a set of cultural terms." 16 If this view of the postmodern turn seems too abstract, too remote from lived experience in the lifeworld and thus precludes politically engaged painting, it is because it is a formulation within the beholding that is theory. Painting as a practice-generically, art making as a practice-is carried on precisely within one's situation of being-in-the-world and as such can entail doing:
what works of art have always done-externalizing a way of viewing the world, expressing the interior of a cultural period, offering itself as a mirror to catch the conscience of our kings. 17
Bonnie Young received the Master of Fine Arts from Southern Methodist University and the Bachelor of Fine Arts from The School of the Art Institute of Chicago. She is Adjunct Professor of Art at Southeastern Michigan.
| 1 | Study for Untitled | watercolor, ink, collage on paper | 26 x 20 |
| 2 | Study | watercolor, ink on paper | 20 x 20 |
| 3 | Purple Deer | oil on canvas | 96 x 74 |
| 4 | RLP | oil on panel | 84 x 48 |
| 5 | Dystopian Dream | oil on panel | 48 x 48 |
| 6 | I'm Keeping the Title to Myself | oil on panel | 48 x 48 |
| 7 | Trickle Down | oil on panel | 72 x 48 |
| 8 | Untitled | oil on panel | 48 x 36 |
Animals, brand logos, and the red, white and blue now inhabit a symbolic place in my paintings. Animals stand in as actors in a global drama, a modern day Aesop's fable. I find they offer many more possibilities than the figure. Their diverse range of species personifies pluralism. They caricaturize today's popular culture. Animal metaphors can possess multiple levels of meaning within the animal world and the human world. They speak for themselves and the natural environment that our urban development crowds out. Animals represent us as antagonists-corporate mongers and consumers of branded shit. They can be our protagonists. We too suffer their plight as the product of the processes of mass production like workers turned into cattle.
I foresee an endless source of signs, symbols, myths, and dialogues deriving from our furry neighbors with whom we share this place. We need them around. As we continue to live and work on this planet, animals will indicate to us what the next changes in our environment might be.
The Frogs Asking for a KingOnline at http://casweb.cas.ou.edu/lgibbs/aesop/texts/townsend/1.htm and at http://classics.mit.edu/Aesop/fab.1.1.html
The Frogs, grieved at having no established Ruler, sent ambassadors to Jupiter entreating for a King. Perceiving their simplicity, he cast down a huge log into the lake. The Frogs were terrified at the splash occasioned by its fall and hid themselves in the depths of the pool. But as soon as they realized that the huge log was motionless, they swam again to the top of the water, dismissed their fears, climbed up, and began squatting on it in contempt. After some time they began to think themselves ill-treated in the appointment of so inert a Ruler, and sent a second deputation to Jupiter to pray that he would set over them another sovereign. He then gave them an Eel to govern them. When the Frogs discovered his easy good nature, they sent yet a third time to Jupiter to beg him to choose for them still another King. Jupiter, displeased with all their complaints, sent a Heron, who preyed upon the Frogs day by day till there were none left to croak upon the lake.