What happened? From a particular, arts-based perspective, nothing did in the 2000s. Yes, sure, there was the cataclysm of 9/11, and the proliferation of social media and digital culture. But were there any major shifts in the nature of contemporary visual art? In literature? In theatre and in dance? Granted, one tends to register change and (excuse the usage) zeitgeist easiest in the most vital, i.e., most mass-consumed, of media: both music and film were unquestionably altered this decade, due especially to new channels of dissemination that had been found for them. But will we remember this decade for the plays, novels, poems, choreography and artworks that emerged from it? For those of us who care about such things, we will, certainly; but we won’t, I don’t think, look at them and see, aside from some inescapable temporal and topical markers, much that makes them distinctive or characteristic.
What does differentiate these practices from their ’90s precedents, however, is the lack of anxiety under which they operate. Fiction, for instance, has evolved this decade in its incipient acknowledgment of a different forum for reading (fittingly, 2009 concluded with the firm introduction of the Kindle into the market), but it has not largely — Christian Bök’s forthcoming genetic-code poetry aside — felt a pressing need to reinvent itself formally, at least not radically. Remember hypertext? Remember, for that matter, digital painting? Such gauche, tetchy attempts of old, hallowed modes to embrace the present did not shape the best work that emerged from the ’00s (or, while we're at it, the ’90s). And this is because, in most senses concerning the traditional arts, the decade has proven Camille Paglia’s contention that the avant-garde is dead.
First, to clarify: “avant-garde” means, literally, “advance guard,” and is a phrase used as shorthand by critics to denote a kind of art that intends to push beyond mainstream art and its values. The 20th century saw the effective invention of the avant-garde, with movements from cubism to dadaism to abstract expressionism to pop art making fundamental advances to mass aesthetics after first seeming abhorrent and anarchistic to them. The impasse I speak of now is obvious: there is just no way anymore for a successful creative gesture to be primarily subversive and, moreover, up-to-date. We have all seen too much; too much has already been attempted and claimed as brand new; too much is changing now, technologically, for an over-300-year-old mode like the novel to compete. A more effective way to resonate is as a craftsperson, to succeed based on a rigorously cultivated knowledge of what works and what doesn’t within the given limitations of a medium. To wit, for many of the best artists of the early 21st century, the new way to “make it new,” as Ezra Pound once urged, is the simplest yet hardest way: that is, to make it good.
I have seen the idea confirmed with stunning regularity this year. Ask any avid Toronto theatregoer what the two premiere events of 2009 were and they’ll inevitably say Tracy Letts’ 2008 Pulitzer Prize-winner August: Osage County, imported here by Mirvish with an impeccable ensemble initiated by Chicago’s Steppenwolf theatre, and the magnificent Robert Lepage–directed The Nightingale and Other Short Fables at the Canadian Opera Company.
Neither production was particularly of its time, and yet both positively transformed (sold-out) audiences. Indeed, after a solid decade-or-so of seeing plays in Toronto (having moved here in 2001), I have rarely seen anything that has had such a tangible impact. Exiting both was like exiting an aesthete’s version of a tent revival.
Curiously, the only thing that makes Letts’ play remarkable is how brilliantly it achieves a kind of mathematical mean of good theatre. Indeed, going into it, one is apt to dread its apparent predictability: it is set in Oklahoma and is an unabashed piece of American Gothic; it is about a dysfunctional family, the mother of which is a pill-popping harridan; it unfolds over several days, when the family gathers after the disappearance of the patriarch. The canon has given us this before: from Chekhov to Williams, from O’Neill to Albee, there’s no titan on whom Letts doesn’t set his sights. And, for the most part — surely in all aspects that truly matter — he succeeds; and the play is, in turn, a talented actor’s feast; it is, finally and ingeniously, about what all great plays are about, truth and deception, concepts upon which the very apparatus of theatre has always depended.
Lepage’s, in complement, was a kind of classical avant-gardism: a celebration of surrealism and expressionism not as disturbingly new, but as eternal characteristics of art. (Compare this with his critically panned Lipsynch at Luminato, a concertedly contemporary nine-hour epic that tried on novelty for novelty’s sake and failed repeatedly.) Never has Stravinsky seemed, to me, so perfectly and simultaneously abstract and traditional. Here his jarring, precocious arrangements encourage an audience not merely to abandon staid views of what music might do, but also to accept that the experimental has always defined the folkloric: that the subconscious, specifically the stories buried within it, is inherently bizarre, angular, abstract. The lavish Orientalism of the opera’s second half was a lovely counterpoint, an all-too-rare concession to an audience’s craving for the dreamily spectacular, done with a light, affecting intelligence that recalled a Vincente Minnelli MGM musical.
As a theatre artist and brand, Lepage has — and has had for a long time — a network of people to realize his worlds for him; many of the decade’s freshest, most influential artists, however, did it all themselves. There was a resurgence of painting and drawing in the art world, for instance — the last time, I believe, these things will resurge; our renewed context of disciplinary plurality suggests they are, as they always have been, here to stay — with Winnipeg’s Royal Art Lodge–member Marcel Dzama achieving international renown, and once-Ontarian Peter Doig coming to prominence as one of the West’s most expensive living artists. A painter of extraordinary, haunting, colour-saturated landscapes, Doig — a fantasist and romantic — chose Port of Spain, Trinidad as his home base, a move echoing Gauguin’s to Tahiti. Doig’s is at once a private, pared-down practice and a richly social one: he runs a repertory cinema, Studio Film Club, with Trinidadian Che Lovelace in Laventille, one of the island’s most notoriously crime-ridden wards.
Conversely, much of what conceptual art gave us this decade we could find articulated more coherently and forcefully in digital culture: the post-structuralist and deconstructionist minefields of Facebook and Twitter; the video- and performance-art trove that is YouTube. (Former C Magazine editor Rosemary Heather has written an excellent essay about this, which is required decade-in-review reading.) Amid all the relational-art pretension of the ’00s, Toronto had a rare gift in the Mammalian Diving Reflex and Darren O’Donnell, who parlayed his inspired theatre work into a series of awkward, genuine social encounters and disruptions, most of them realized outside of a confining, commercial-gallery infrastructure.
A few weeks ago at CineCycle, O’Donnell participated in Sheila Heti and Margaux Williamson’s game show with former New Yorker critic Lawrence Weschler called “What’s the New Line?”: a weird, dubiously successful event that nonetheless helped me to solidify my take on the fate of the arts this decade. The evening began with Heti explaining that the aesthetic binary of fiction/non-fiction had recently been confused, and that we needed to arrive at a new binary, or “line.” This was then literalized, with various local artists positioning themselves along a rope representing a continuum between new binaries shouted out by the audience. Much of it seemed disingenuous, given what we know about the organizers’ own work, which tends to rest wilfully outside binaries, and about the history of art, which, as one audience member shouted out, has never had a stable relationship with veracity.
I was impressed, however, when someone else suggested the new binary of selfishness/generosity: what better way to describe the creative turning point of our era than, first, through an artist’s motivation; second, through their idea of who their audience might be; and, last, through how an actual audience might achieve gratification from the work?
To be sure, both selfish and generous art can be great, but this decade will prove, I think, that a lasting impression is, as we always suspected, the most hard-won. As New Yorker art critic Peter Schjeldahl said of a show by Philadelphia figurative painter Karen Kilimnik in 2006, “She represents a lately neglected common-sense rule for making art: mean it.”
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