The Romantic period of the arts, from roughly the second half of the 18th Century into the early 19th, was a reaction against the Classicist philosophical model put forward by the Enlightenment. Romanticism prized individualism and emotion in the artist, over the rational and logical artist of the neo-classical period. It is from the Romantics that we get the notion of the struggling artist, working in his garret on his masterpiece, ignored by the world, he is probably syphilitic and drunk on red wine. The Romantics (Wordsworth, Keats, Coleridge and Geothe in poetry, Mozart in music, Delacroix, Goya and Turner in painting), are primarily men of the industrial revolution, they are the interpreters for civilization of a world freed from the constrictions of serfdom. This manifests itself in the idea of individualism; the French and American Revolutions are Romantic in their nature, America is still unnaturally in thrall to the individualist notion summed up in its constitution, as too, unfortunately, are the arts.

Let us look at Homer, and the problems that biography pose for us when we do, there are many suppositions about who Homer was, but they must all remain suppositions barring some fantastical archeological discovery. What we deal with, in our discussion of the idea of biography in art, is fact, and fact is troublesome, especially in the area of historical fact. E.H Carr, is his work What Is History? asks us to reexamine our conception of the historical fact. Our image of the past is clouded, not just by the bias of the person recording, but also because of the reason for something being recorded. What we know of ancient Greece, comes from a select few people, mainly in Athens, we know very little of what it was like to be a Spartan, or a Theban, so even beyond examining an historical supposition with a eye trained to look for personal bias, we must also look for the huge gaps in our knowledge of history. The biography of Homer is recorded, but not truthfully, we have records from Lucian, but he is a satirist, not an historian, we know how certain groups perceived Homer, but we have no historical facts relating directly to Homer, we only have historical interpretations of Homer. Our own ideas about Homer are no more than suppositions, and for future scholars they will be little more than historical interpretations, our contemporary classical scholars can only make judgments on and conflations of previous historical interpretations, but, and here is the rub, these investigations can add nothing to the texts of the Iliad and Odyssey, the true areas of importance in our study of Homer. Like Shakespeare, it doesn’t matter who Homer was, it only matters what was written, and if they were written by someone else or through conflation of different sources, it doesn’t really make much difference. Would Hamlet somehow become a different text if Shakespeare were actually a woman? No. It is interesting that we know little to nothing about who wrote some of the best literary texts, but we will argue amongst ourselves about why Van Gogh cut his ear off. It should be enough to admire the work.

The reason for further eliminating the biographical reading of art works, whether that is in poetry, novels, paintings, etc, is expounded again by E.H. Carr. His example comes from Gustav Stresemann, Foreign Minister for the Weimar Republic; upon Stresemann’s death in 1929 he left behind a pile of papers, which have come to the English reader in the form of Gustav Streseman, His Diaries, Letters and Papers. What we must consider in our discussion of the fallacy of biography is how these mass of documents that Stresemann left behind, became the book that we must use to judge his time in office. Working backwards then, the book the English-speaking world has is different from the original in German, it is a selection of the papers and memos most pertinent to English readers. This original book is itself a selection of Stresemann’s full papers, it mainly focuses on the areas of foreign policy in which Stresemann was particularly successful; his dealings with Western Europe, his negotiation of Germany’s entrance into the League of Nations etc, it glosses over his relative failings in his policies with the USSR. So, with each step backwards that we take we move nearer to a complete picture of Stresemann. Except when we get to the actual papers themselves (which were salvaged in 1945 by the English Army), what we see is not a number of historical facts, but merely autobiography. Each of us writes himself, and all biography is first and foremost based upon autobiography, we create our own images for future consumption. In Stresemann’s personal memos, papers, files and diaries he is engaged in the creation of a mirrored self for future posterity, it is impossible to read Stresemann as a man because our interpretations of him are clouded by his own historical bias towards himself. E.H. Carr tells us as much,The documents do not tell us what happened, but only what Stresemann thought had happened, or what he wanted others to think, or perhaps what he wanted himself to think, had happened.
To make an autobiographical reading of a text we are engaged in reading into hearsay to illuminate the fact of a work. To read Stresemann’s documents to form a picture of him, as historical fact, is impossible. If we read On The Road by Jack Kerouac as a semi-autobiographical account of his own years spent on the road we are forced, by Kerouac himself, to accept not just the merits of the text, but what he went through to write it. We cloud our judgment of a novel through childish admiration of what the author’s biography can represent. Kerouac engages himself in the creation of autobiography in his text, this enables the novel to gain a veneer of reality that for large portions lacks much verve, suspense or insight.

Kerouac relies on substandard strands of our schooling that teaches us to see the artist as a grand struggling individualist creating his grand work of art, like Freidrich’s painting Wanderer Above the Sea of Fog; part of any discussion about a work in class focuses on the person who wrote it. The work must stand alone to be truly democratic. Contemporary art criticism places much emphasis on the work being propped up by the artist; the artist must somehow become a figure of great magnitude for his work to also be of great magnitude. The reality is that we are not in an age of figures of great magnitude. Ezra Pound implored us to ‘make it new’, this was Modernism, more or less, but isn’t it funny how the art world has taken it to mean, ‘find us someone new’. The Art Industry relies on money to survive, true novelty is unsellable because the industry doesn’t know how to sell it, a creative industry does not really rely on creativity, what it relies on is more of the same. Let’s take Four Weddings and a Funeral as an example, this film does well, Hugh Grant gets good audience reactions as a bumbling English stereotype, then we get to see more of Hugh Grant in new films, which are generally the same, because the Industry knows how to sell them. Look at film posters, they have set signs for what kind of film they are, the red lettering on white background with enlarged faces and a smattering of out of context ‘praise’. Or for another example let us take Grunge, when Nirvana went stratospheric in 1991 we have hordes of A&R men moving to Seattle like locusts to get another Nirvana on their hands, so they can make money. It is because the Industry knows how to sell this, they can sell Nirvana as music for disenfranchised teens suffering rebellion because they can create this idea of Kurt Cobain as biographically apt for them, they can sell Hugh Grant to middle-aged housewives because he plays the part of the charming stereotypical Englishman. Biography is parasitically attached to an artwork in order for it to become sellable. The art industry relies on the same premise, what we have is not ‘new’ art, but new artists who make old art, the YBAs were not ‘new’, merely successfully sold as ‘new’, and their work over the past fifteen years atones to the fact that Damien Hirst is nothing more than a coffee shop existentialist ripping off ideas that have been floating around for about a hundred years. The newness we may really speak of in contemporary art is not in the art itself but in the Industry, so to truly make something new we would have to get rid of the idea of artistic industry, as it exists now, and so it follows that the next new development in art must be to create a new kind of art industry, not a new kind of art.

Hypothetically, if there were to be a new type of art industry, one that wasn’t so much an ‘industry’, a word carrying connotation of pure economics and the processing of raw materials, via labour, into goods. A Marxist interpretation of the flaws of the art industry in very easy to concoct (although it is not the subject of this essay), but what we should be concerned with is a new way of presenting the reality of art, on a democratic level, whereby figures and money are unimportant. The word hobby isn’t palatable to the art industry, the true hobbyist is the person who does something for the love of it, it presupposes a love that is beyond profitability. A new art industry would place the hobbyist as its king. Once money becomes involved in matters of artistic creation it takes the onus off of creativity and places it on sellability, and one way that the art industry has of ensuring sellability of its product is by creating a fallacy of biography around its product. If you can convince people that the person creating a work has the biographical prerequisites necessary for them to be great you can ensure that work will sell regardless of its merits.

Modern man likes to pretend that his thinking is wide-awake. But this wide-awake thinking has led us into the mazes of a nightmare in which the torture chambers are endlessly repeated in the mirrors of reason.

Octavio Paz.

I.

On the 15^th of November in 1992, at half past ten at night, a large, white van pulled up at One Canada Square filled with 1000lbs of home-made explosives. Security guards discovered the van before its load could be detonated and a controlled explosion was undertaken to safely get rid of the vans contents. No one was hurt. The editor of the paper was allowed back into the building to set the front page by hand.

In 1867 the first terrorist attack in London was carried out by the Fenian Brotherhood, a group who sought Irish Independence; they set off a bomb outside Clerkenwell Prison killing three people.

So began 130 years of bombings in vague degrees of co-ordination across London; firstly to free Ireland from British rule, then to free Northern Ireland from British Rule, a period described by that most incredible of Euphemisms, ‘The Troubles’.

II.

History is full of events like this, vague suppositions which we read as a sequence of events; name and then file away. The idea of cause and effect allows us to shape large chunks of unintelligible and only hazily related material into the neat narrative of the school textbook. To move forward in our study of history it is essential we move onto the comparison of the unrelated events that took place in disparate places and at different times; a new arbitrary historical discourse.

III.

When the Russian tanks rolled westward into Poland in the year of nineteen-thirty-nine there was little the army could do to halt the innumerable gently sloping divisions. The defence was a not a success, stranded, a blood-clot in the heart of Europe. If they were lucky those who remained were taken off to Siberia to collect the sap from trees for the next six years. In parallel the German tanks rolled eastward and Poland really collapsed, buckling under the weight of two tectonic plates of ideological imperialism. It has been well documented what happened to ninety percent of the Jewish population who couldn’t escape, collecting sap from trees isn’t so bad is it? People conveniently forget that Britain and France merely declared war on Nazi Germany and did nothing to try and save the lives of the six million Jews living there.

IV.

These are two examples of the enacting of ideology, but it is in comparison between the poetics of the periods that we can construct some kind of correlation. Both periods produced winners of the Nobel Prize in Literature, Seamus Heaney and Czesław Miłosz, from Ireland and Poland respectively.

Heaney’s collection North, from 1971, explored the difficulty of forming a Northern Irish/Catholc identity at the time through the historical conceit of comparing an ancient Ireland in relation to the modern one, suffering from its ‘troubles’. Heaney, as poet-witness to these acts of political violence shy’s away from overt statement of support or protest, instead he bows down, whatever you say, say nothing, is his only ironic advice. Through his misguided idea that using poetry one can change something, that maybe by exploring old barbarism he can shed some light on new barbarism he accepts the idea of cause and effect, that human history is a rational discourse; as if poetry could hope to change anything, as if it could change a giant and anonymous cultural system of violence.

In post-war Poland Czesław Miłosz was writing poems, saying anything, saying it by samizdat and multiplying it by photocopier. In one place the only system of censorship was the self-enforced censorship of poetic voice, in the other you had a real fear, there wasn’t even the opportunity for anything as luxuriously decadent as just having a system of poetic self-censorship, still the poets found a way to comment upon their political situation, the whole impetus is not on what is being said but on the act of just saying something. Whatever you say, say something, was Miłosz’s reminder to us.

V.

Can we now proclaim that the age of ideology is over? Can we file it away in the museums under ‘Atrocity Exhibit F: fig. 1b’, a little reminder of the stupidity and megalomania of humanity?

We proclaim we are in the age of nothingness; we have seen everything that history had to show us and were unimpressed, naturally, only unfeeling, throwing glasses in brick houses.

We are a generation that connects to life via ultrareal violent computer games, iconophilia and late night television insomnias. If our parents generation thought they could change the world, and their grandparents reinvented it, we are too tired to believe in change or revolution; we just want to squeeze out the last drops of fun and then discard it.

They tried to discredit our generation because we could only connect to life via ultrareal violent computer games. But we are impossible to stop because our unfeelingness is an avalanche and everything else is a tiny Swish chateau in comparison. The snow is rolling down the mountainside, a beautiful wave of white powder that sweeps up unique and delicate snowflakes and whips them into the crescendo of an landslide.

The history of modern humanity is based upon repeated and beaten attempts to create something interesting. If a single feat of daring can change the whole conception of what is possible then equally a single defeat of daring will reinforce the whole conception of what will always remain impossible; but it is important (and this is a handy epithet for the Off Modern movement), whatever you do, do something.