In a philosophical sense, a metaphysical outlook can be taken as one’s view on the nature of reality. From this outlook then flows philosophical views on things like ethics, epistemology, or the human mind. In my view, certain modes of artistic creation flow from metaphysical constructs as well. Yet unlike a philosopher directly trying to define an unseen metaphysic, the artist is more apt to use feelings or intuition as guides to create things that bring metaphysical formulations to life. The causal nature of this process can fall anywhere between total determinism, or (seemingly) conscious, freely decided action. That is to say, one artist might be moved overwhelmingly by an uncanny feeling to paint a certain way. While another artist might examine the same uncanny feeling in a more rational or intellectual manner first; then proceed towards a creative undertaking.
This then begs the question, is art ‘of its time’ a product simply deriving from the metaphysics of the day; or is it an active interrogation of the metaphysical water the artist is swimming in? It would seem, at least initially, that the feelings that emerge in the consciousness of the artist are determined by the nature of the world around them. That is to say, like all humans, the artist doesn’t control the initial thoughts and feelings that pop into consciousness. This mental process was touched upon in Robert Wright’s recent book, ‘Why Buddhism is True: The Science and Philosophy of Meditation and Enlightenment’. In his book, Wright goes into detail about the interaction between our emergent feelings, our ‘modular’ minds, and how evolution has shaped the process of our decision making.
Wright maps out the human predicament of our actions being largely determined by an external causal network and our internal evolutionary programming. His discourse centers on how Buddhist philosophy, and more importantly, meditation can be seen as remedies to our modern situation. Yet in terms of this writing, it is Wright's basic description of how we as humans must 'detach' from our feelings in order to better understand them which seems relevant. This mode of 'feeling observation' is the basic action of mindfulness meditation. This action of acknowledging our feelings, yet maintaining a certain distance in order to better judge them, seems to mirror the tension or oscillation that many artists experience.
The causal chain outside, and inside the mind of the artist seems to flow something like this: the metaphysics of the day lead to feeling, which then leads to acknowledgement, which finally leads to action. The greatest variable in the process would be the mental space concerning ‘acknowledgement’. Some artists might be keen to let their emergent feelings move directly into action. While other artists might ponder the origin and nature of their feelings before moving forward. There is no right way to go about this process of course. And there are certainly more shades of gray involved than black and white determinations. Yet I do think this is the basic framework in which art ‘of its time’ is created. If one were to look for artists whose creativity seemed to embody this process, there would be no shortage of candidates. Yet there are two that remain close to my heart for differing reasons. One is Andy Warhol, whose mastery captured the metaphysics of his time like few have before or since. The other is the late Vito Acconci, who was a contemporary of Warhol, and my professor at Brooklyn College.
During pretty much all of my conversations with Vito, we would discuss the metaphysics of the day. Although I’m pretty sure Vito would hate the word ‘metaphysics’, so I’ll just say that we tried to make sense of what the fuck was actually happening in the convoluted world around us. I didn’t realize it at the time, but I was percolating with thoughts that I would eventually decipher as metamodern. Vito would often say of his own work decades ago that he just ‘wanted to be of his time’. This sentiment is why I think I gravitated towards his thinking. Though we were very different in our creative output; we both sought to acknowledge and inspect the feelings the outside world had spurred within us. It was not enough to simply ride metaphysical waves to a destination. We needed to examine where the wave was coming from and where it was taking us.
Some of the first lectures Vito gave our class were survey’s of his life’s work. Around 73 years old at the time, yet still vibrant and inquisitive; Vito would click through slides of his art while ruminating on his thoughts and inspirations. I recorded the audio of a portion of this, and still have it today. Like many in his generation, Vito was raised in the shadow of religion, but quickly saw no use for it by the time he came of age in the 1960’s. The age of modernist metaphysics (that had seen its apogee in the years after the end of World War II) was quickly coming apart as a new generation looked to deconstruct what was outdated and unjust. Authority wasn’t to be blindly followed anymore, it was to be questioned. Traditions weren’t to be heeded simply because they existed. Instead they were to be examined and discarded like expired milk. Society was going to be torn down and remade; the only question was how.
By the end of the 1960’s and the beginning of the 1970’s; political assassinations, civil unrest, and the Vietnam War had left their imprint on American society. The metaphysics of the day influencing the mind of Vito were those of deconstruction, feelings of cynicism, and finding new pathways to meaning. In 1969 Vito created a work called, ‘Following Piece’. The work entailed Vito finding a random person on the streets of New York City, and following them everywhere he could until they entered a private space. During his lecture, when speaking about the inspiration for the piece, Vito would say he was thinking, ‘how do I connect, how do I connect with the world around me, with people around me’. This seems like an apt metaphor for a time in which the old ‘rules and ways’ about how, and who you could connect with were discarded. Which then raises the existential question: how does one connect with the world if nothing in the world tells them how anymore?
Vito would go on to talk about an exhibition in 1970 he was invited to participate in at the Museum of Modern Art in New York. The show was titled, ‘Information’, and Vito described it as the first show in New York (and maybe the United States) that was trying to ‘come to grips’ with what was coming to be known as ‘so called conceptual art’. Upon being invited to participate, Vito described thinking he thought museums were ‘totally opposite’ to what he wanted to do. He would say he wanted his work to be in ‘everyday space’, and that ‘museums seemed to be the enemy; (and that) museums seemed to be a specialized place’. Again, this shows how Vito was internalizing the metaphysics of the day. By 1970, institutions, whether they were the federal government, the church, or the military; they had all lost their veneer of virtue. All concentrated institutional power, including museums, were to be treated with suspicion.
Vito’s piece in the exhibition was a work called ‘Surface Area’. The installation consisted of a table with a plastic, open top container. For the duration of the show, Vito arranged that his mail be delivered to the Museum of Modern Art. This meant that instead of simply fetching his mail from his Manhattan building lobby, he would have to ride the subway to the museum; and ‘perform’ some action with the mail at the installed table. Vito called this an important work for his thinking because it made him realize that maybe instead of thinking about exhibitions, maybe he should be thinking about ‘doing an activity that would result in something he needed’ (or wanted). For Vito the act had become ‘the art’. He had transported a mundane, everyday task to a place that was reserved for ‘special’ things and people. The metaphysics of the day were spurring feelings of subversion and a search for personal meaning. Vito’s acknowledgment of these feelings led him to take physical actions in response. Actions that will forever be known as vanguards of conceptual and performance art.
While the feelings that emerge in the consciousness of the artist can spur physical action. They can also spur formal innovation. A little less than ten years before Vito Acconci began to crystalize the metaphysics of the day through action; Andy Warhol began to capture the metaphysics of the day through silkscreen and photography. The early 1960’s were a time when the ‘mass media’ society we know today began to come into formation. The television was becoming a media force despite its black and white visual limitations. National news began to change from modernist, idealistic narratives to realistic, unvarnished communication. And celebrities were reaching their full status as idols showered with dehumanizing love and ridicule. Warhol was able to fully detach and observe his feelings about the changing times. Yet despite his view from a position of nowhere, he still felt attached to the metaphysics of the day. Around 1963 Warhol would tell a newspaper reporter, ‘I feel very much a part of my times, of my culture - as much a part of it as rockets or television’.
Warhol’s early use of the silkscreen technique captured the effect that the television medium was having on the minds of individuals. Warhol brought to life Marshall McLuhan’s famous phrase, ‘the medium is the message’. McLuhan’s phrase articulated that the effect a medium has on society matters more than its content. Warhol’s silkscreens captured the unseen metaphysical effect of television and revealed its existence. The medium was the message in Warhol’s silkscreens. Yet it was his chosen content depicted through the silkscreen medium that fully cemented his work as ‘of its time’.
On August 4th, 1962 the famed actress and star Marilyn Monroe overdosed on barbiturates and died in Los Angeles. Her death was reported by the media as a suicide. Warhol, acting on the suggestion of a friend, immediately decided to make Monroe the subject of his next silkscreen paintings. The natural imperfections in the silkscreen process mirrored the dark side of fame and American ‘star culture’ that Monroe’s death represented. The blocks of color layered with the black and white photo mirrored the mental image the average citizen had of Monroe. After all, they had never met her, but they ‘knew’ her through print and film images. The overall feeling the Marilyn works evoked was one of ‘metaphysical storytelling’. Almost as if they were telling the viewer; ‘you loved her, you made her, yet you didn’t really know (or care for) her; and we all probably contributed to her death’.
A little over a year after Marilyn Monroe’s death, the assassination of President John F. Kennedy in November of 1963 would mark the unofficial end of American modernist innocence. As a seismic historical and cultural event, the assassination of President Kennedy was also one of the first instances of collective mass media fueled mourning. Every newspaper, radio, and television news program was devoted to covering the murder of the young President. This would seem appropriate given the enormity of the event. Yet for Warhol, from his detached position of metaphysical observation, he saw something different. He observed the feelings that were being stoked within himself, and in the masses at large. In the aftermath of the assassination, Warhol would say, ‘he (Kennedy) was handsome, young, smart, but it didn’t bother me that much that he was dead - what bothered me was the way television and radio were programming everybody to feel so sad. It seemed like no matter how hard you tried, you couldn’t get away from the thing.’
From a humanistic standpoint, Warhol’s detachment could be seen as cold. Yet it did allow him to see the aftermath of the assassination as it was happening from the outside looking in; rather than simply being swept away by the feelings of the day. This led him to create a series of paintings depicting Kennedy’s widow, Jacqueline Kennedy. The works captured some of the same fleeting notions of fame and illusion that his Marilyn Monroe works captured. Yet it was their window into the voyeuristic grief the country was experiencing that might have been their greatest power. Jacqueline Kennedy was an avatar for the ‘glamor fantasy’ of the Kennedy presidency; and she became an avatar for the country’s mourning after her husband’s killing. In his piece, ‘Nine Jackies’ Warhol captured the essence of her transition while again mirroring the television medium that was engrossing the minds of the masses. His use of distinct, yet low resolution, black and white imagery mimicked the mental images retained in the public consciousness. If Warhol did indeed believe the minds of the masses were being ‘programmed’ by mass media, this was his way of revealing the source code.
It seems hard to argue that both Warhol and Vito Acconci were not just products of their time, but projectors of it. They each were able to maintain a certain distance from their feelings and examine their origin. The question for our current times is how does our atomized, de-centralized reality correspond to this process of feeling detachment? During Warhol’s and Acconci’s time, there was really only ‘one reality’. That is to say, as I have discussed before, the metaphysical nature of their time was condensed; while the metaphysics of today are scattered and nonlinear. This then raises the question, when an artist of today detaches and examines the root cause of their feelings; are they drilling down into the nature of reality as whole, or just their portion of it? Maybe there are two sets of feelings to be examined now. One set deriving from the atomized nature of overall reality itself. And one set deriving from our own digitally backed reality within the overall structure. In any case, it would seem that the causal chain of an external metaphysical reality spurring feelings; that are then acknowledged by the artist, is a bit more complicated in this time of metamodernism. Our feelings often lead us astray in terms of the nature of the world around us. If we are indeed dealing with two sets of feelings now, the modern artist needs to be wary of the illusions or falsehoods that can come by mistaking one set for the other.