Anat Vovnoboy
Writing



Modern Art vs. Western Civilization

 During thousands of years prior to the modern era, art seemed to advance in a straight path, each new step directly following the one that preceded it. Artists knew and cherished the artistic traditions of past, and were pleased when they succeeded to improve or extend it. It would be very hard, almost impossible to detect the path on which art is moving in the modern period, but it very clear that it is not the same straight path on which it used to advance.    
This whole paper is a foot note to a comment made by Ortega in his famous assay Dehumanization of Art. Ortega states that modern art rejected the artistic traditions of the West as part of a much bigger rejection of Western civilization as a whole. At first such a statement could sound absurd. how could art from of a certain civilization reject the very core of its own cultural foundation?! if art is a product of a civilization, how is it possible for  an art to exist without its very foundation? yet,  after so many artists have so clearly stated they anti cultural and anti western positions, such a rejection can no longer be denied.
  It started with a wealthy business man with successful business and a loving family that started to show interest in art. the more he painted the more he became isolated from the kind of life that he was living, until he took the final decision to dedicated him self to art and have moved away from the western world to the most foreign and exotic place he could have find. Gauguin painted his new serounding with a vigor and affection never before seen in his work.  as if to glorify his "new world" as apouse to the old one.    
 In the late 19th century different artifacts from unfamiliar civilizations became available for viewing in the West. It is a matter of historical and artistic debate whether modern artists were actually influenced by the new artifacts that were now suddenly available to view; they may, on the other hand, have just been looking for a new style that would counterpoise the elaborate and decorative style of the classical Western tradition and have started to create in a style that was plain and almost grotesque, resembling the style of the primitive tribal cultures.
Exotic cultures were not the only source of outside inspiration for the artist.  In 1922  Hans Prinzhorn, a psychiatrist, published his famous book “ The Artistry on the Mentally Ill” for the first time analyzing art made by mentally ill patients from an aesthetic perspective and not just as a treatment tool, hence legitimizing it as art. Prinzhorn emphasized the many likeness between the art created by the mentally ill and the art created by children or “primitive” societies, suggesting that there are paths of expression common to all humans that are part of the human nature. Elementary thoughts, rather than intellectual concepts spread by transmission. During the development of Western civilization this natural instinct was cultivated and ultimately  altered and so people who are embodied in the civilized art world  are no longer sensitive to their most natural instinct.
 Prinzhorn claims that both the artist and the mentally ill are isolated and alienated from society, the only difference is that the artist choices to alienate him self while the mentally ill person is forced in to it.


Prinzhorn’s book had a great influence on the art world. Many museums, galleries, art dealers and consumers began to show a serious interest in art created by the mentally ill. 
One of the artists was deeply interested in the art of the “insane” was the French artist Jean Dubuffet. Dubuffet started a collection of "art brut" or "raw art" an art created outside the mainstream of the art world such as art created by the mentally ill or people who had never received artistic education.  He was trying to look for works created with out any contamination by social values, by people who never came under the distractive influence of Western culture.
 In his 1952 lecture in Chicago, titled  "Anti-cultural Positions”, Dubuffet claimed  that culture by its nature was restrictive. The Canon we call culture and is supposedly a representation of the sum of human development is actually a very small collection of select works, carefully assembled by a small group of elite arbiters and the academics and critics that serve them. Dubuffet’s solution was to destroy the notion of value and with it the “notion of notion itself”. Art is a production of a "whimsical mind" and hence cannot grow out of restriction and limits. Culture with its heavy borders and limitations will always suffocate any attempt at creativity

The rebellion against the Western civilization was not merely by accepting the influence from outside. All during the progress of art through the Western civilization, artists always tried to disguise the material that their artwork was made out off. In general in the civilized society, man was trying to submit nature to his own will, turn wild nature into inhabited cities or villages, divert the rivers and cultivate the fields. In the same manner the classical artists of the western civilization were trying to submit the material to their own vision. Modern artists rebeled against this tendency by submitting their will and vision to the natural material.        
Owing to the abandonment of figurative models, the modern artist has no will or shape to impose any more and he now lets the material itself to take the roll and lead the creation of the art work. The material turns to be not only what the artwork is made from but also sometime the subject of the artwork.
Art is bringing man back to the very beginning of his development where he once again stands in front of nature with an astonished and innocent admiration, but this time he is unwilling, rather than unable, to change it.   
It would be false to say that all of modern art turned completely away from the developments and accomplishments of the West. Some artist were rebelling against the West in a completely different way. Instead of turning to look for inspiration in other cultures or ignoring Western development, artists set to explore the Western achievements, exposing all of its many flaws.        
One of the first most innovative of such attempts was the ready- mades, created by Marcel Duchamp. In the an exhibition, Duchamp presented the public with ordinary industrial products such as a stool with a bicycle wheel, a shovel and most notably his famous “fountain”. The ready-mades have provoked many interpretations about the nature of art and the industrial society. Only few of them were complimentary.
Later, pop-artists like Andy Warhol, Roy Lichtenstein, Richard Hamilton, Derek Boshier and others explored the ridiculous and absurd in Western contemporary popular culture. With elaborate techniques and concepts pop artists displayed products of the culture with just slight changes or  exaggeration presenting them in a critical light.

What happened? What made the artists turn so sharply against their own cultural heritage, to abandon thousand of years of aesthetic tradition just in a moment when this tradition seemed to have reached it highest peacks and received technical and technological possibilities that now allowed it to reach higher than ever before?
The art world was not alone in this rebellion; scholars from many different disciplines were starting to question the traditions and the very foundations of their professions. The exposure to new culture opened the question of relativism. Michel Foucault, one of the most distinguished intellectuals of the time, began to examine the role of discourse and to criticize different social institutions like the psychiatric clinics, prisons, education systems exposing the relationship of power and knowledge and the way it was used in the establishment of Western thought.
Paradoxically, all those art works that tried so hard to reject the Western culture eventually became the Western culture it self. All those artist how rebelled against the art institutions with such vigor,  had presented their work in the most respectable museums.