In 1849, after his first success in the state sanctioned Salon earlier that year, the painter Gustave Courbet embarked on a new body of work in his rural  hometown of Ornans. [1] He pursued a chef d’oeuvre that would draw upon everything he had learned from his recent paintings of the French countryside and its people,  resulting in something more significant than what his work had accomplished up to that point. This productive era in Courbet’s life would almost immediately change the course of art history.

Courbet exhibited A Burial at Ornans in the Salon of 1850-51, which knowingly looked ahead of unknowing — it was unique in being neither customary nor propagandistic, neither Romantic nor Neoclassical. Instead, its existence would help define what Realism would come to mean in its own time. A Burial at Ornans was uniquely modern in its manifest anxiety, its expectation, and its formal stature. The haphazard style of the painting and its un-idealized subject matter of the townspeople of Ornans, including Courbet’s own family members, local laborers, and even Ornans’ veterans of the French Revolution of 1793, created a vexing, constitutive relationship between audience and artwork as well as between artist and critic. Modern art must have such a vexing, negative effect — if only to inform us about our epoch. 

The deflated grandeur of divinity in relation to the cortège of clergymen and semi-bourgeois townspeople contributes to the Burial’s break from the eternal character in art and culture, as represented by the sphinxes, nymphs, and other unfree ancient allegorical figures hanging high up in the Romantic and Neoclassical paintings that filled the halls of the Salon. Fortunately, and much to the benefit of avant-garde culture, the bad reaction of the academy experts and the immediate public was not enough to stifle the impact of Courbet’s work. His work and that of those he deemed his peers met with recognition from critics and other artists who were considerably tasked by his Realism and their avant-garde spirit, driven to begin the attempt of apprehending their unintelligible intelligibility — to meet art at the intersection of its explicit but wordless truth and the world in which it is relinquished, i.e. the modern world. Indeed, as art critic Michael Fried argued  in a 2019 lecture on Edouard Manet, there’s a lot to be learned from the mid-to-late 19th century moment in art and culture, and not only through its historical actors, but through those non-dismissive critics who were willing to apprehend the potentials of change being put into motion. 

Today, it appears that the original spirit of the avant-garde, the spirit embodied by the Burial, has been relegated to the same place in history that it once sought to overcome, whether consciously or not. The fraught appearance of an (ir-)reconcilable  history has once again been (self-)administered. The problem isn’t exclusive to artists and the artistic imagination; a recursive problem confronts today’s artists as the chrysalis of (art) history, in which not only the past 60 years, but all of antecedent history causes a paralysis which comes into relief. It is confusion about where one stands in the course of world-history. Does anyone teach artists art anymore? I come up against this wall when I’m creating work that may not have an audience in the world, as if it were for a different time or place — maybe another species altogether. What I think I’m doing seems not to be a site of exact reproduction (of the world in which I find myself), but something greater than the sum of its parts or something meant for a time beyond today. 

I arrive at solace when I look back (hence Courbet) and conjure Walter Benjamin when he says, “An [artist] who does not teach other [artists], teaches nobody.” [2] The question for someone like Courbet is not only, “how can one use the knowledge of our current position in history to teach oneself and others, through one’s work?” But also, “how does one go about potentially imposing on the aesthetic of an epoch’s own unfreedom?” Having been afflicted by the avant-garde splinter of Courbet’s Burial, I arrive at a set of questions persistently related to ideas and the quality of ideas as they brush against both the artistic and historical processes, to measure and to judge. These things might actually have a lot more to tell us, especially when they’re channeled into and objectified as autonomous art. Our experiential and aesthetic relation to being members of society renders us complicit in determining world-history. The negative character of  art, at its best, suggests to us new freedoms yet seen. This much must be recognized.

The belief that the first artworks are the highest and purest is warmed-over romanticism; with no less justification it could be claimed that the earliest artistic works are dull and impure in that they are not yet separated from magic, historical documentation, and such pragmatic aims as communicating over great distances by means of calls or hom sounds; the classical conception of art gladly made use of such arguments. In bluntly historical terms, the facts Blur. [3]

The Burial explored the limits of “Alexandrianism” — elaborated by Clement Greenberg as the tendency in culture characterized by its eternal and thereby un-historical kitsch quality — and proposed a new way of relating to the present. It allowed for the portrayal and transcendence into “ugliness” of a particular and fraught position in history, allowing such a space to be aesthetically apprehended for the first time, hence the turmoil it left in its wake. Courbet understood that as a great new work, it was also genre-defeating; he once stated that the Burial was, “in reality the burial of Romanticism.” [4] From this point of view, eternalist-appearing Romanticism needed to die, but only by a creative destruction wherein some new aesthetic imagination would be born to take its formal place — thus tearing down the walls of the Alexandrian library and its ordained shelves. Courbet consciously apprehended the historical and objective limits of the imagination bequeathed by Romanticism and critically determined that Romanticism needed to be buried on its own basis, being already dead and not adequate to reflect the new revolutionary potential of the mid-19th century. According to a young Courbet, whatever we encounter en masse today might just as well need to be considered a (neo-) Romanticism waiting for its own Burial in order to explode the heteronomy of the given and the same in which we constantly entrench ourselves.

I attempt to deal with Burial in response to its forms and method in an electronic artwork where it serves to place the viewer as a subject of the history of art production, using a portion of a reproduction of Courbet’s iconoclastic work. I task myself with being taught by a figure from the original avant-garde because there’s something to be learned there, and not only in the work’s methodology — the historical — but also in aesthetic resonance as it relates. This work serves as a study, a foray into the question of the history of art and how it comes to appear in the present in its enigmatic entirety. It is formally an interactive-responsive work directly implicating the viewer, which, I think, bears a resemblance to the constitutive process of identification present in the painting Burial acting as an open-ended question asked of art’s present condition. The work’s digital and kinetic structuring alternately reveals and hides the bit of Courbet’s picture in relation to the viewer’s proximity, heightening the self-reflexive relationship between Courbet’s manifesto encapsulating  art history hitherto and the viewer. This space presents only more questions and perhaps more confusion, following the 1850 reception of the sui generis genre-turned-history painting, A Burial at Ornans — which necessarily appeared alien.  //

[1] This body of work also included Stonebreakers and Peasants at Flagley, along with the featured,  A Burial at Ornans.

[2] “The Author as Producer.” Understanding Brecht, by Walter Benjamin, Verso, 1998, p. 98. Emphasis added.

[3] Theodor W. Adorno, Aesthetic Theory, Translated by Robert Hullot-Kentor. University of Minnesota Press, 1988, 2.

[4] “Gustave Courbet (1819-1877),” Encyclopedia of Visual Artists.