For a few years now, a new interest in the art of the past has been growing in the contemporary art scene. The main reason for this change may certainly be extra-artistic, as is made obvious by the fact that the most interesting artists involved belong to those “groups” which for the last fifty years have been burdened with the responsibility for human emancipation. Yet the prohibition of historical narratives once exhausted has given artists and critics, malnourished and hungry for new experiences, a green light to fall over their forgotten prey. With renewed curiosity, some have concerned themselves with how the “past” really was, embracing their hate and diluting their hopes in the accumulation of images whose goal is ultimately to “instruct.” Others, less committed to creating new historical laws, have given unrestrained freedom to their feelings; they chew and spit out what lays at hand, concerned only with the creation of something new. Barbarous and savage, fully dressed in their historical costumes, the new lovers of history do not hunt, however, without a certain feeling of disgust.

Titus Kaphar is an 18th century portrait painter with a 21st century historical consciousness. His dix-huitièmisme shows prominently in his attention to details of dress, custom, and character, which older painters focused on in their efforts to ennoble the poor physiognomies of their clients. But what would it mean today to “ennoble” a client in a portrait? Kaphar is ambivalent to the aesthetic, and thus he attempts to suppress his artistic impulses under the barbarity of the “idea,” which usually returns with a vengeance. In some of his newest canvases from the Seeing Through Time series, the enlarged black women in the background look at us suspiciously. They are of course meant to stand for the “ground” on which the wealthy and nonchalant silhouettes have built their social status and acquired their right of representation. But they have already been used for millennia and, tired, refuse to comply. Their features, carrying the pain of a humanity that may never outgrow its oppressive infancy, do not wish to be remembered. Their patron-like rendering makes them shy. Children of the present, they bring to mind so vividly the wretched who refused to carry the guilt of being merely what they are supposed to be, expected to be (not because they are “black”, “white”, “woman”, “man”, but simply for the suffering nature of humanity) in our self-satisfied times. Kaphar’s paintings are barbarous in that they embody the truth of a world in which the formality of law, the possibility and ultimate banality of representation, can be imagined without justice. 

But that is certainly not the reason for Kaphar’s public attraction. It is a piece of mere schoolboy knowledge that Kaphar’s ideas about what stands behind his paintings are more appealing to the public than the works themselves. The great amount of irrelevant criticism of his work, which simply repeats what the artist says verbatim, makes looking at his pictures very difficult. And of course, the problem to some extent is the new burden taken up by academic artists, who, bound by the anxiety of knowing what they can serve before the market, can no longer afford to let the objects say more than they presently know. Portraiture, whose origin lies in the pleasure which the imagination derives from the idealization of the human figure in light of its potential for self-transformation (freedom), is in this way reduced to a semiotic bag of power indices. But the idea which makes the art of the past the ideological tool of individual interests raises the suspicion of present art as a form of manipulation. Utility fosters distrust in those who wish to use the aesthetic for their own purposes. 

Kara Walker’s work from 2017 has been beautifully described by Allison Hewitt Ward for what it was: the flowering of the artist as a historical painter. The ancient tales of antiquity, whose moral images represented the significant moments of history to be remembered and passed down from generation to generation, were transformed into disquieting and messy explosions of violence. The fact that Walker’s pictures present “History... [as] a stinking swamp—a mess of body fluids and parts and organs and cruelty and failure” is not merely a question of the present. The force of the new does not merely transform but also distances the experience of the past, so that it can stare back at us with its Medusa’s face. If Walker’s U.S.A. Idioms (2017) remind us of nothing more than some of Goya’s Desastres (1810-20), doesn’t the latter’s exuberant reflection of violence strike us now as suave? Elevated to the heights of history, the tortured imagination today submerges the fragments of strife on a fantasy of violent extinction and cynical sniggering that would have terrified Goya’s most extravagant nightmares.

Only short-sighted academics would find pleasure in the “meanings” of historical and contemporary art, and ignore the ways each object resonates with, and ultimately tasks, our present feelings. Artists have the right to pillage the past for a lineage, or rather for an elevated ground upon which to look ahead while at their feet the validity and necessity of art (and thus the meaning of their own life) remains a contested battleground. They must carry on and cannot afford to be distracted by antiquarian recollections. In the past, they have discovered the sufferings, illusions, dreams, and fantasies of others who, like them, have pursued their own aesthetic experience and have refused to give in. If the melancholy sensibility of the artist finds nothing in the past but the reflection of their own despair, only those whose thirst for life does not shy away from the tasks of the past may survive through the present’s ghastly existence. //