One-Idea Art

When I first became enthralled by rather than interested in art (history) and specifically painting as a teenager, I remember how, in the modernist chapter of the textbook my parents gave me, I first saw a reproduction of a Francis Bacon painting, one of the Pope Innocent X ones, and being totally mind-blown that an oil painting could be angsty and horrific in that outward way. So because of that, Bacon was my default favorite painter for the rest of highschool and maybe the first 2/3rds of college, and while it would be exaggerating to say that I regret my fandom, that’s because I think it’s better than loving on some of the other usual objects of affection among students enrolled in nowhere state school painting programs (at least at the time that I was part of one of those), like for instance (Bacon’s contemporary) Lucian Freud, or Caravaggio, or Jenny Saville, or Alyssa Monks, or Bo Bartlett, or Odd Nerdrum, or Cecily Brown (who I also was guilty of art-crushing on in the second half of college), or Nicole Eisenman or other painters that have kinds of the tricks of definitional style like that. And for the most part, I don’t hate or actively dislike these kinds of artists individually (to be doubly clear, I do hate some of them), but my view of them is forever tied up in my own burgeoning artist ideals and those of the other students I was around during that time. It’s more the “what was I thinking” feeling you would get from reflecting on how you went to see Inception multiple times in the theatre, but only watched Interstellar once. Or having significant playtime in a Bethesda game. Whether or not their specific styles and voices as painters are thoughtful and well-developed, the recognition of such stylistic coherence as the mark of success has to be kind of stifling as far as asking people to be open and progress themselves as artists.

As a class,  these artists drill deep into the immature artist’s mind as achievable visions of direct-to-approval painting. These are the gratified-ambition painters, who seem to wield a distinctive mastery and reproducible style that doesn’t fundamentally challenge or reconfigure the reason and work that most people are interested in being painters for. By the way, the last part is not a wholesale denigration of the Common Artistic Impulse since of course people should want to create things for the sake of doing so and should be really intimately involved with the things they do make, but what I’m trying to suggest is that all the artists I’m talking about don’t do anything to push their medium and are basically defintional easel painters, which I would be a major hypocrite to say is a bad thing. And most importantly, after you’ve seen two of any of these painters’ paintings, you can pretty well guess what the third one is going to look like, and that’s what I mean by achievable and reproducible. This is importantly different from just having a recognizable style as an artist. Because like for example Charline Von Heyl has a cohesive/coherent style as an artist, but that style emerges from a sustained curiosity in and exploration of painting’s possibilities, not an attempt to standardize and master and corner the medium. Her style is specifically not reproducible because it cultivates specificity in individual works and allows for the participation of the painting in realizing itself.

But anyway, the famous-in-art-school types’ message to students is that you just need One Idea (i.e. style, approach) that gets recognized as such in order to make it work, and this is really just compounded by the converging, thesis-show structure of art school. There’s for sure a range among these precedent-setting artists for which exact stylistic premises you want to depart from. To choose two clear poles among them, you have someone like Caravaggio, whose main innovation was using a projector and only rendering about 3/5ths of his paintings, and then there’s Cecily Brown, whose work is just an ur-modernism slop that demonstrates there’s some kind of relevance if you just couch your paintings historically enough and hold far back on your brushes and use a lot of turpentine (I still really like her paintings and I thought her show at the Met a couple years ago was super cool).

The schools and students aren’t wrong that you only need one of your own (idea, painting, whatever) in a lot of ways, and Anna Weyant and Jordan Casteel, among others, are demonstrating that the standard for what constitutes “your own” is changing, so it’s really not even that dire. But then again, if this is something you needed to learn, and if you were going to the same kind of school that I did, you’re already basically fucked as far as that kind of success is concerned. So I guess, then, there are questions about what truthfully serves that milieu as far as healthy goalposts, whether that’s instruction as to the apparent standards of gallery+museum style artistic success for which they are already too far behind for more than like a fraction of a percent to participate in, or whether it’s the teachers’ mega-subjective standards for self-actualization. But also this cynicism is maybe a misunderstanding of art school.

To view most art schools in the Stafford Beer way, the purpose is to provide an environment where self-identified creative young adults are able to lean into those ambitions and learn what Serious art making looks like for a few years, which they will then pay for retroactively when they join normal wage society and maybe get to continue the habits of creation that they cultivated in school, but almost definitely separate from any amount of context and community like what they had in school. From here, the One Idea philosophy of instruction is appealing because it recognizes that students, in most of the times, won’t ever get an opportunity like the school one, where they get to really think hard and be challenged and questioned about what they are doing and why. So if you just get one good thought that has been properly tempered in the schooling process, you can come out and iterate on it indefinitely if you want to. And on the off-chance that one of these students has the circumstances to break into the professional, formal art world, they are primed and set on the most efficient path to do so, theoretically making good on the school’s greatest implicit promise and contributing to the profile of the institution.

The system described this way, it’s perfectly sensical and perhaps wise that artists like those I’ve noted are fed too and adopted hungrily by the students. Because if you were having to write a middlest-common-denominator playbook for the United States’s undergraduate art students, you’d also recommend attacking the injurious and back-ups on the art world’s defense for every play.

This explanation amounts, I guess, to a halfway endorsement of the system too, and so the purpose I am trying to serve here is more to offer some Why for this style of artmaking being so pervasive within art schools and students tending to draw on and adore those artists who have followed closely the same rules they are studying. To me, this is obviously a bad way of creating profound and investigative art because it is so eager to reach a conclusion of some sort. There are non-art reasons why the One Idea process is practical, though. Because I think the dissonance and disappointment and sometimes anger and regret that echoes in the thwarted art student body is made up in this invisible reason for why art education looks this way. Basically, remaining implicit because of the discomfort those schools understandably have with the idea of professionalizing their students. The tradition of the American art program is so entrenched in the notions of modern art purity and authenticity that the Why for directing students in this way (for their own benefit in some ways, yes, but not for an idealistic art benefit) cannot be squarely and earnestly dealt with. But upsetting and compromising maneuvers are going to be essential in the artist’s bag, so maybe best that the otherwise is never pretended. Transcendence from the reality that the art is made inside of is make-believe, and we are already acting like that is true, basically all the time, and even in the institutions that could (not that they definitely should) shield from such lines of thinking.

And if I sound scared of committing to any particular stance on the art Academy, that’s because I am. This is really another way of saying that I have plenty of annoying criticisms beyond as far as I’ve already said, but these institutions are already too hollowed and beleaguered for that to serve any purpose since like a lot of that would maybe be fixed if art schools were in possession of the means to fix it at all. Harping on them at this point really only serves the harper, who are almost, to a them, the people with the good enough fortune to have had going to stupid art school be a possibility. An exercise in reverse engineering the generalized failure of the art school’s let-down is the most helpful way to interpret any of this, probably. Because then, by extension, it can somewhat inform how you proceed, from the far-down bottom of art’s being-looked-at pyramid, as like permission to let go of your One Idea(s) and, even more significantly, to stop thinking that this is what the model of success has to or should look like for anyone except the deep-aspirational artists, who seek to make gallery-and-museum-operated marionettes of themselves.