Gimmicks of Future Past

It’s telling that one of the more enduring art-world coinages of the last decade refers not to a groundbreaking aesthetic movement or formal innovation but to a market posture. “Zombie formalism,” as the critic Walter Robinson wrote in 2014, described a glut of undemanding works designed, above all else, to adorn the gallery-white walls of the superrich: “These pictures all have certain qualities—a chic strangeness, a mysterious drama, a meditative calm—that function well in the realm of high-end, hyper-contemporary interior design.” Robinson pointed to Jacob Kassay’s electroplated monochromes and Lucien Smith’s gimmicky use of a fire extinguisher as a replacement for a paintbrush as emblematic of how zombie formalism presented “a series of artificial milestones” but was ultimately only “a simulacrum of originality” masking a deep creative stasis. As a short-lived market trend, zombie formalism was a relatively insignificant blip, but the term has stuck around as a way to identify knee-jerk, market-savvy gestures toward novelty.

These market-oriented simulations of “the new” are not driven by self-conscious cynicism, however; they constitute an escapism in denial of itself. There are two dominant currents of this fantasy, which we could call neo-modernism and neo-premodernism. Adherents of the former insist, credulously, that the rapid advancements of the twentieth century are matched, if not surpassed, by the innovations of the present, with artificial intelligence, the “singularity,” and so on representing profound transformations that will usher in a new and improved future for art and the world. The latter, meanwhile, represented by droves of conspicuously historicist figurative painters and social media-addled “culture critics,” waxes nostalgic for the not-yet-disenchanted world of the past as the antidote for our estranged lives.

Thus we get social media accounts that post sculptures by Bernini with the caption, “What’s your excuse?” as though equaling one of the greatest virtuosos of all time were merely a matter of seeing The Rape of Proserpina online, ordering a block of marble, and getting down to business. Being nurtured from childhood in a robust craft workshop tradition, explosive developments in Italian sculpture since Donatello, and once-in-a-generation individual talent are, clearly, irrelevant. In the art world, such an egregious misunderstanding of history is rare, but prevailing strains of classicism can be just as facile, as in Ewa Juszkiewicz’s woefully generic imitations of European portraiture offset by generic imitations of Magritte’s obscured faces. Learning from history is vital to a well-rounded aesthetic education and an ability to comprehend art in general, just as adopting new technologies can make new ways of making art possible, but neither “progress” nor history are inherently good. Both are simply forms of information that need to be put to good use.

Consider Refik Anadol’s Unsupervised, for which he trained a machine-learning model to “interpret the publicly available data of MoMA’s collection.” From 2022 to 2023, the resulting work was projected on a prominent wall in the museum’s lobby. Fawning critics lobbed him questions like, “What can we learn about the invisible activities of a machine from its hallucinations—from charting latent space?” to which he replied that the artwork is “a whole new world,” before quickly moving on to thanking his team and plugging the tech company NVIDIA. Anadol calls his work “data painting” and consistently gushes about teaching machine learning algorithms to dream, and in the process to expand our conceptions of reality and consciousness. That all sounds impressive, but the problem is that these lofty assertions fall flat when the art itself looks a whole lot like a fancy screensaver. Artificial intelligence may automate some of the process, but the difference between Anadol’s artworks and the iTunes visualizer I had on my computer in 2006 is merely one of degree, not of kind.

The only thing AI seems to have unlocked for art so far is a means of delegating production to a program instead of an assistant, but much noise has been made about the groundbreaking ramifications of these glorious new tools. A thesis exhibition for this artistic outlook took place at New York’s Nahmad Contemporary in 2022 titled, appropriately enough, The Painter’s New Tools. The show’s press release, in an impressive feat of begging the question, observes the way smartphones have abstracted our experience of media before blithely asserting that “this has changed the way to think about painting: How can you make a distinct image in the face of this glut of images, this constant distraction, and is that even important? What are the painter’s new tools, and what can be done with them?” There’s no suggestion that technology, being the source of the problem, should not necessarily be the solution.

The exhibition’s lineup comes very close to a who’s who of tech-focused contemporary artists, including Seth Price, Jacqueline Humphries, Alex Carver, and Harm van den Dorpel, among others. In spite of the insistence on newness, their preoccupation with technology results in a strangely homogenous body of work: amorphous digital blobs, flatly digital CMYK/RGB color palettes, sleek digital shapes with rounded corners, etc. It all looks like the kind of art that computer programs can make. Critics, however, were dazzled: in Madeline Cash’s review she states as fact that “anyone can use an AI to paint like Rembrandt,” which strains credulity. Far from liberating creativity from the strictures of conventional mediums, technology like AI is only serving to constrain the artist’s vision. There are exceptions—like Albert Oehlen and Richard Prince, both of whom subvert tech optimism by prankishly misusing their computer programs to create scrappy, consciously juvenile collages—but in general, neo-modernist painters are indeed not using their new tools; the new tools are using them.

The neo-modernist faith in the future assumes the potentiality of the not-yet as an ideal; it credulously takes the bait of hype, assuming that technological innovation will continue to produce new aesthetic paradigms, and ideally market value. These cycles of hype go from boom to bust with predictable regularity—see, for instance, the spectacular death of NFTs—but to the believers, individual fads matter less than the stubborn insistence on the importance of each of them, which is unsurprising when you consider that every one of the faithful might also be a profiteer.

The future’s diminishment to vacuous hype coincided with the internet reaching its cultural saturation point around the end of the first decade of the millennium. Whereas the “net art” of the 1990s and early 2000s was driven by the perceived utopian possibilities of the internet when it was a nascent technology, the optimism soured and the “post-internet art” that emerged by the end of the aughts looked with skepticism toward tech’s increasing dominance over society and the psyche. In the early 2010s the films of Ryan Trecartin, for instance, were a visionary augury of our present consciousness: shot more like cheap reality TV than anything “arty,” his impenetrable non-narratives consisted of little more than people in unhinged outfits hanging out on vaguely futuristic sets and babbling psychedelically, but the effect was hypnotic, intense, and bewildering. That feeling of dissociative chaos has been normalized in our present of doomscrolling and meme-addled nihilism, but those films still resonate because all that frenetic energy feels palpably fresh, even fecund.

They’re also still funny. Otherwise, most post-internet art simply recycles the aesthetics of Tumblr for a gallery setting. Even if artists offer a critique of their subject, the underlying ethos rarely goes beyond an affirmation of the vertigo you get from frying your brain by spending too much time online. Thus we get the filmmaker and artist Jon Rafman quipping, “We live in a world of pure Baudrillardian hyperreality, and we cannot distinguish reality from a simulation of reality. The Internet and virtual worlds are entirely divorced from any sense of historical context. Wario and Waluigi, as characters, are the epitome of that. Maybe Wario and Waluigi are the heroes of our times, the true representatives of the modern individual.” In spite of his invocations of Baudrillard and Benjamin, Rafman takes evident pleasure in all of this artifice, conflating their militant critiques with his own nihilistic indifference to the disorientations he documents in his videos, which survey the debasements of 4chan and other dark corners of the internet.

This intellectual veneer pretends to offer insight into the contemporary, but it only serves as a name-drop to rationalize his adolescent shock jock impulses: instead of creating an effect reminiscent of digital psychosis, he simply appropriates images of depravity found online. A real critique wouldn’t take smug satisfaction in the clever diagnosis that “we are all Wario” but suggest that there is more to reality than that. To affirm hyperreality is little more than doom-mongering. Is projecting our numb disassociation back at us really the best art can do? (This is a flippant rhetorical question, but it is a serious one.)

The delusions of neo-premodernism are subtler, if only by comparison. History and the past cannot be discounted as readily as the future because the past informs everything, but the necessity of learning and the influence of the past flirts with the trap of empty imitation. Using traditional techniques and drawing from the aesthetic repositories of the past are merely two means by which to make art, but the decisive question is what it is an artist does with them. Consider John Currin, who, with all the technical refinement of the rococo style, paints disturbingly hyper-mannerist caricatures of contemporary femininity that at their best evoke a simultaneous pleasure and revulsion so bitingly satirical and so deathly serious that it could only come out of our disenchanted present. Or consider Kai Althoff’s overtly exoticist paintings, which manage to avoid crass nostalgia because he draws from such a broad and obscure range of sources that it’s impossible to accuse him of being simply derivative. One painting exhibited in 2018 depicts two scenes bisected horizontally; at the top a warrior presiding over a pile of naked corpses, on the bottom two people under the covers of a futon. Both are spiritually derived from traditional Japanese art, but the warrior’s elaborately decorative armor and the couple’s outlandish wigs, along with the abrupt juxtaposition of images, conjures a dream logic not at all beholden to any initial inspiration.

Compare these painters to Anna Weyant and Julien Nguyen, prominent purveyors of zombie realism who rely on their showy but modest technical skills to obscure the vacuity of their subjects. Weyant’s cherub-faced blondes—no matter the influences of Francisco de Zurbarán, Georges de La Tour, or indeed, an imitation of a mollified Currin—serve only to articulate the emptiness of an art market that has returned to figuration simply because virtuosity looks expensive and can justify a high price to even the least cultivated collector. Nguyen, meanwhile, wears his Italian Old Master pretensions so openly that all one can see in his images is the dull narcissism of an artist whose relationship with his influences has gone well beyond mere reverence and inspiration. What separates these two pairs is their divergent relationship to the present. Currin and Althoff engage with history as a means to generate work that evokes a contemporaneity beyond the purview of their references, whereas Weyant and Nguyen seem to assume that their hollow surfaces of traditional mastery inherently entitle them to relevance. More than anything this sense of entitlement characterizes the contagion at the root of neo-modernism and neo-premodernism, namely relativism.

Both modes obscure the problems of contemporary art by arguing that we either need to return to the traditions of the Old Masters or else embrace the latest, greatest technology. Neither demand is insightful or useful. Bluntly, a doctrinaire insistence that art must concern itself with the past or the future is beside the point, because neither is any guarantee of artistic quality. Art is a continuum, and what is possible for one artist is as much determined by their own subjective limitations and proclivities as it is by the particularities of their socioeconomic context, and the norms and beliefs of their age, which is to say that artists are intrinsically never quite “free” to do as they please. Lest that sound pessimistic, this difficulty of navigating the weight of the past, present, and future in defiance of normative pressures all while attempting to find a mode of working that is contemporary and non-derivative is what motivates artists to perpetually reinvent art, and it’s precisely the pervasive denial of this fact that has so throttled art’s productive force.

An artist’s subjectivity is built, not granted, and that discrete process of development doesn’t need to be groundbreaking or anachronistic; it only has to find articulation within its own context. I think of Susan Rothenberg, who came into her own as an artist during the New York City post-minimalism scene of the mid-seventies by painting, of all things, horses. At the time, artists were immersed in exploring dematerialized qualities like space, attention, time, and light: Bruce Nauman was walking in a line, land art was in full swing, Joan Jonas was orchestrating dance performances closer to Allan Kaprow’s happenings than ballet, and every sculptor from Robert Morris to Eva Hesse seemed hellbent on finding and staking out the most obscure industrial byproduct to use as the basis for their “spatially oriented practice.” The notion of something so crass and, my god, saleable, as a figurative painting was almost unthinkable, at least among Rothenberg’s peers. What’s fascinating in her horses is that, unlike Philip Guston’s divisive return to figuration a few years earlier, she discovered a way back into figurative painting without severing a connection to the present.

Rothenberg had no personal connection to horses; she just absentmindedly sketched one out and it caught her attention. Her subject emerged almost against her will, taking in all of these bodily, anti-imagistic concerns of the art around her until this iterative, ambiguous symbol emerged. The first horses, sketchily daubed in black, white, or terra cotta brown, are always in full profile and facing to the left, the canvases divided by lines or X-shapes. Some are barely distinguished from a background of the same color; sometimes there’s a second horse alongside, they stand, gallop, or are frozen mid stride. With a few exceptions, everything she painted between 1974 and 1977 adhered to this formula.

As an innovation it’s a minor, even conservative move, really a lateral step, and yet these paintings are inscrutable and unique even now, at a time where almost every artist can be effortlessly categorized. That distinctiveness is unrelated to ideas of progress in painting and even, in a strange way, to traditional painting. When Rothenberg likens her horses to cave painting that isn’t because she was inspired by the mystic power of Lascaux but because her own paintings have a similarly primal effect, as though she had rediscovered figurative painting by tapping into the original human urge to create images. Crucially, her later paintings never clarified or systematized this obscurity but leaned into it with other figural elements like body parts, attempts to convey movement, other animals painted from life, and portraits of Mondrian. Their cumulative effect is a body of work that suggests painting on an alternate timeline, recognizable images but grounded in a perception of reality that stands apart from our own.

In the end this is to say something simple: what matters in an artwork is its singularity, one that is achieved qualitatively, not through categorical affirmations of novelty or tradition. Quality lies in the specificity of the artwork and its acuity of effect, whatever that effect may be. Neo-modernism and neo-premodernism are not solutions to art’s contemporary impasse; they’re fixations on how art operates temporally to the neglect of what art does, which is to facilitate experience. In listening to a four-hundred-year-old Mass by William Byrd we make it contemporary and alive by the feeling it produces in us. His melodies are not beautiful because they adhere to a tradition or because they were innovative but because he used the conditions of composition of his time to write melodies that are beautiful to hear. Human experience is infinitely rich, but its categories are finite, and art makes those qualities of experience happen anew. An artwork only needs to be new so that it doesn’t repeat the old.