Q. What if we took lameness literally, straight from the dictionary: lame art as “weak” art; “inadequate; unsatisfactory; clumsy”: lame art as “out of touch with modern fads or trends”?
A. We would hit a paradox straight off as we realize that a certain weakness, inadequacy, unsatisfactoriness and clumsiness are prized as signs within much recent art: go see Tal R, David Shrigley, Sean Landers, Karen Kilimnik, Gary Rough, Mike Kelley, Paper Rad, Cady Noland (especially as approximated by Triple Candie), Tracey Emin, Jessica Diamond.
But maybe there’s nothing so very new in all of this: the trajectory of modern art’s historical development, we are often told, has largely been driven by the improbable power of ineptitude. In the beginning: The wooden awkwardness of the figures in Courbet’s Burial at Ornans and Bonjour M. Courbet; the sullen aggression of his slab-like paint; the apparent banality of his subject matter (anonymous nobodies from who knows where): all of these characteristics were noted with derision and contempt by the majority of his contemporaries. Courbet’s crime? — He chose to reject all that painting had strived so hard to accomplish. He refused to play by the rules, rules ostensibly established to guarantee the quality and consistency of workmanship, intellectual substance and moral probity of all work produced and exhibited under the auspices of the Academy. Rules, moreover, that replicated within the realm of culture all of those regulatory forces operating throughout the wider social, political and economic spheres. Courbet relativized the agreed and accepted norms, exposing their contingency. And in the charged political atmosphere of post-1848 France, this breach of etiquette was a danger. The gaucheness of his art was borrowed from popular culture (cheap Épinal woodcuts), and was thus aimed at a “philistine” sensibility — at those untouched by the ennobling influence of art, the “wine drinking scum” of the dark back streets, potential revolutionaries. In Courbet’s hands, lameness revealed the contingent and precarious nature of power’s investment in “good form”. The sophisticated urbanite was reminded in no uncertain terms that their taste and hard earned cultural capital did not, in fact, represent a set of unchallenged universal values. Courbet’s uncouth and clumsy paintings triggered uncomfortable reactions in many of those cultural parvenus who first witnessed them in the refined ambience of the Parisian salon: uncomfortable because they served as a reminder of all that they had denied, repressed and discarded in order to gain access to “culture”. Had they themselves, as recent economic migrants from the countryside, not struggled to rid themselves of rustic poor taste in order to add the veneer of “high” cultural respectability to their newly acquired social and economic assets? And it was this very veneer that Courbet’s seeming artlessness — his lameness — had threatened to strip away, exposing the rawness and the lack that always lay beneath.
Failure to meet expectations — a certain weakness, inadequacy, unsatisfactoriness and clumsiness in ‘fine’ art: this, according to art historical orthodoxy, was always modern art’s way to keep culture moving throughout much of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Flatten the image and undermine spatial illusionism (Manet); discard draftsmanship (Impressionism); ditch fixed-point perspective (Cubism); embrace chance (Dada); problematize the creative process (readymades); celebrate the irrational (Surrealism); abandon the recognizable image (abstraction); dispense with the art object (Conceptualism); elevate mass culture (Pop); vacate the gallery (site-specific and land art). To claim, however, that such art failed to meet expectations begs two questions: first, whose expectations were thus thwarted; second, how successful were these attempts to out-manoeuvre the “enemy”? I guess we would have to say that those expectations came from the direction of the putative owners of high culture: the bourgeoisie, the class that had wrested control of symbolic capital and currency from the aristocracy during the eighteenth century. Disdain for the bourgeois — for his lack of “class”, his philistinism, his crass instrumentalism, his vulgar materialism, his usurpation of high culture — may have provided the gas that fuelled the motor of modern art, but this rhetoric of contempt was ultimately both counter-productive and disingenuous.
It was counter-productive because — falling into the trap of all strategies of critique-by-opposition — it served to legitimize that which it wished to counter: locked in a master-slave relation, its very survival demanded the continuing dominance of that which it defined itself in opposition to. And the disingenuity of this stance derived from two principal — if rather mundane — considerations: i) the overwhelming majority of artists were themselves of bourgeois social origin; ii) the despised class was also the means of the artist’s financial survival (in the memorable phrase of Clement Greenberg, artists were attached to the bourgeoisie by “an umbilical chord of gold”). Power thrives on challenge, provided that such challenge is limited and contained: dissent acts upon the social body in much the same way as an inoculation acts upon the biological body, the introduction of a controlled amount of the virus serving to strengthen the body’s resistance.
We have already, then, begun to answer the second question; how successful were these attempts at negative critique through the staging of lameness in art? A full answer would demand serious historical research far beyond my meager resources, but I’m pretty certain that the results of such research would suggest that the effectiveness of this strategy of negative critique would be subject to the law of diminishing returns. Épater la bourgeoisie? What may have worked for Courbet and his successors in nineteenth century France had certainly lost its edge by the time it had reached NYC in the 1960s. Claes Oldenburg summed it up when he lamented the fact that the art audience had now come to demand shock, that outrage was the guarantee of a genuine art experience, and that the appetite for shock far outstripped the artist’s capacity to satiate the hunger: to shock is chic, as we have now learned. (Incidentally, it may be that the vestigial power of the lame to shock was revived in those rare moments when an artist chose to “go lame” after having already established a reputable position: Picasso’s Demoiselles d’Avignon as a recanting of his Blue and Rose periods; Magritte’s inexplicable Période Vache; Philip Guston’s shift to his ‘cartoon’ style after success as an Abstract Expressionist. Such radical shifts — experienced and understood as traumatic losses — not only dismayed the public, but also fellow artists and, not least, the artists’ dealers.)...(extract)

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