Halim Badawi about Avelina Lésper

Against Avelina Lesper

Frequently, the greatest political correctness guises itself of “politically incorrect.” The most conservative and authoritarian opinions can be seductively presented to the public as “innovative” or “avant-garde”, using artifices of language and media (and high-sounding) spokesmen or spokeswomen who act, allegedly, like that innocent child capable of pointing out “the farce”, or like that unsuspecting character who points out the nudity of the emperor.

This misleading exercise of putting an innovative mask on a reactionary position has been one of the recurrent mechanisms used to disqualify artistic avant-gardes throughout the history of art. This strategy typically uses all sorts of argumentative fallacies (hasty generalizations and ad hominem fallacies), always easy, to point out that our time is “a charade”, that “everything is a deception”, that we must return to placid, safe territories. and acritical times of the past, not to reinvent the present but to remain in the past, like Heidi picking flowers in the forest.

This strategy calls for a return to “technical perfection”, “veracity”, “skill”, “genius”, “easel painting” (always in its “most classic”, “most beautiful” or “pleasant” version), “rigor” and “some objective criteria to assess art”, understanding art as a martial competition, not as a laboratory for open experimentation. Thus, in a magical exercise of nostalgic idealization of the past, of a perfect past, of wonders and “geniuses”, in opposition to a “decadent” present, it is easy to disqualify the actors of the cultural movement of our time.

This is the way in which the Mexican polemicist Avelina Lésper proceeds in her articles, interventions before the media and especially in her book The fraud of contemporary art: four critical essays (Malpensante, 2015). Lésper’s criticisms of contemporary art, which some dislocated people describe as “direct”, “radical” and “brave”, follow the path of the texts that we have already read during the last two hundred years, coming from the pen of the most reactionaries figures of the culture, the most resistant to change. Nothing new under the sun.

Lésper’s text constitutes one more link in a long chain of episodes. In 1874, the critic Louis Leroy, in an act of incomprehension of the social and artistic phenomena of his time, erroneously pointed the Impressionist painters as “frauds”. Keeping the proportions, both in the case of Leroy and Lésper, the repetition of the “fraud” or “farce” stratagem is evident, which conveniently reappears in the title of the Mexican woman’s book.

For his part, in 1937, the conservative journalist Laureano Gómez, in line with the National Socialist idea of ​​“degenerate art”, described Colombian expressionism as a “lazy” and “unskillful” art. It is worth noting that Gómez, an accomplished Francoist and later president of Colombia, also defended a “genuine art” (according to Gómez, “imitation of the living model and of nature”), in the same way that Lésper does when referring to a “true art”, defined by her according to a very personal criterion with less intellectual substratum than the Laureanist discourse.

Gómez pointed to the art of the 1930s as “a slope of decadence towards a tragic abyss of inability and ordinariness”, similar to when Lésper begins his book by emphasizing, in an apocalyptic tone (nearly ninety years later): “we are in a culminating moment of the history of art. Today, what we used to call by that word, has become an ideology […] This lack of rigor has allowed the slightest effort, the occurrence, the lack of intelligence, to be values ​​of this false art and that anything can be exhibited in the museums”. A sentence not very far from the Laureano-Goebbelian formula.

To the repetition of an outdated discourse (which in editorial terms already seemed outdated in Colombia since the 1940s), and to the nostalgia for an unequivocal and perfect past, is added Lésper’s radical authoritarianism in defense of a “true art”. Although Lésper compares contemporary art to an “unquestionable dogma” (so she calls the first chapter of her book, full of multiple religious allusions), she builds her own dogma through an act of faith in herself, when she defines what for her is the “true art” and, in opposition, the “anti-art”, a polarity which is very similar to “true” and “false religions”, normally promoted by egotistical and messianic personalities who polarize public opinion.

Although the definitions and categories of what we currently understand as “contemporary art” have been gradually formed through consensus and disputes between the various agents in the cultural field, Lésper prefers to blurt out her rather personal opinion, demand its compliance and make it see how the only contemporary conception worthy of attention and respect, in the manner of the old critics from the end of the 19th century, high-sounding, radical and outmoded, who acted through summary judgments as arbiters of taste, morality and good customs.

Without going into the theoretical and historical intricacies of the publication (which would give an in extenso refutation) and without stopping to question numerous naive, personalistic and reckless assertions, it seems to me necessary to point out five aspects: the first, the hasty generalizations, a form of persistent fallacy throughout the book, such as when Lésper uses an artist or a work of contemporary art to invalidate the entire system of contemporary art as a whole: a specific work as an instrument to disqualify universal contemporary creation. In other words, she assumes that, since a certain artist produces a light work, all artists produce with the same lightness, and therefore contemporary art has no value.

Second, Lésper’s radical ignorance of the ways in which artistic creation is related to the art market, two matters that she confuses into a single mess, as if the commercial valuation of a work depended exclusively on factors intrinsic to their own materiality, and not to the pressures generated by supply and demand, pressures that are part of an economic system that exceeds the artist himself. If there is any criticism in this regard, it is not encompassing contemporary art as a fraud and pointing to the market as a blind entity that stupidly buys anything. On the contrary, the criticism would have to be directed towards pointing out the areas of conflict: speculation with art, the trafficking of interests, media inflation, express curatorship, the insubstantial discourse of certain curators or the legitimization of productions and trajectories to through the market and not by critical consensus.

Third, to assume that only contemporary art needs explanation and not, for example, ancient art. Lésper presumes that the entire content of a work lives (or should live) only within it, as an intrinsic spirit, ignoring the historiography of art and the relationship of works with the viewer and with other agents in the cultural field. Even ancient art needs explanation, sometimes more than contemporary art: Flemish mythological painting or Italian religious painting requires iconographic, stylistic and historical reflection to be fully understood and enjoyed. There are no works in which all the content is immanent and is revealed to us without the mediation of analysis and text. Furthermore, all art has layers of reading that are added over time.

Fourth, imagine that art is a static entity that does not change, as other disciplines such as medicine, law or cinematography do. Lésper imagines art as an entity that must remain unchanged, obstructed, pure and based on a series of anachronistic values ​​that do not correspond to the interests of the society of his time. This is as stupid as demanding that the cinema continue to produce silent movies, or in black and white, to respect a supposed original purity; or require medicine to operate according to the surgical techniques of the twelfth century. Although it seems platitude, it is worth repeating that art responds and transforms according to the interests of a time and a place.

And fifth, assuming that there is no value scale in contemporary productions, that everything produced by current artists is measured according to the same standard and that everyone can enter and exhibit in museums and galleries without selection processes. To state this goes against the personal experience of a large number of artists who have failed to break through in the highly competitive contemporary art system.

It is necessary to transcend that rusty vision of art as a “rest chair”, display of Renaissance skills, demonstration of “creative genius” or Olympic competition of manual skills. Perhaps it is more effective to imagine art as a free territory, a laboratory, therapy or the possibility of healing, as a device to imagine new orders and ways of feeling, as a starting point, a network of affects, a spearhead, a formulator of questions, a producer of knowledge, or taste trigger: art as Trojan Horse. And there might lie the function of the critic: rather than acting as a nineteenth-century arbiter of taste, perhaps it is better to point out the areas of conflict in which art reproduces the old power structures that inhabit us, or to challenge works that resemble to a currency of exchange and not to the promise of a new world.

Article originally published in Arcadia magazine (Bogotá, April 16, 2016). On this occasion, a version prior to the one originally published and edited by the author was used.