I recently read an essay that made me question everything I’d ever been taught about Modernism. The author, Miles Mathis, contends that Modernism as it is construed by art historians and critics doesn’t really exists, and that Modernism really began and peaked with one seminal work, the 1917 controversy, Fountain, by Marcel Duchamp. Mathis argues that Fountain is the first work that completely relies on critical theory: “Fountain has no aesthetic qualities, and its novelty is not an outcome of any aesthetic theory. It is an outcome of critical theory. Which is to say that it is all analysis and no synthesis.” He says. So what about what comes after…and before? Of course a few synapses misfired when I tried to reconcile the fact that the great masters of Modernism, Picasso, Rodin, Monet, Cezanne, Van Gough were in fact not at all Modern. Mathis has been attacked (and quite ferociously I gather) on this very score. But it actually makes sense. If you take a moment to sift through what historians and critics have said these artists did and said, and look at what they actually did and said, it becomes clear they were not much interested in theory, at least it wasn’t the mainstay of their artistic practice, and especially the earlier artists lumped into Modernism, were in no way trying to destroy artistic traditions. “Van Gogh was not interested in novelty for its own sake; he was not a precursor to the main line of 20th century art. Redon was not interested mainly in theory. Nor Matisse nor Whistler nor Rodin nor Monet nor any of the rest. All would be horrified by the direction art history has taken,” he says. Mathis talks about the “wasteland” created by Modernism, whereby a hierarchy of money has stunted cultural development, breeding greed, laziness, deception; where art is stuck in a perpetual groundhog day that never really moves beyond 1917. At this point I thought that maybe Mathis was an old-school scholar who had never made it past the ‘70s, but a quick Google search told me he is still walking the globe, and the article I was reading was in fact written in 2005. So in his saying “Currently we have an absolute dumbing-down of content and form in the name of political anti-elitism, so that artifacts are now intentionally indistinguishable from garbage. But we still create an elite simply by paying certain artists exorbitant sums for garbage,” he is in fact talking about now. This struck a chord with me, because for a long time I turned away from art precisely for this reason. I mean we all pay lip service to the breaking down of boundaries, of challenging the system, but do we really call human blood, urine and feces – some smeared on canvases, some jarred or bottled up for display – art? And the truth is we do, and this is Mathis’ point – where can we go from here if we’ve already sunk so low? To a very great extent this true. Art has hit rock bottom. It may not be popular to say it, but I think that art has for the most part, lost its way, stuck in the stasis of the times we live in. But, I think unlike Mathis, I have a certain optimism for art, because I’ve seen pockets of resistance to the ‘garbage’ and from the most unlikely places. Here in Pakistan, a country at the center of decades of different conflicts, soulful art is being produced, drawing on the rich artistic traditions of the subcontinent but not being hampered by it at the same time. It was Pakistani artist Sana Arjumand who helped me believe in art again. Art from Asia in general has inspired me more than anything coming from the ‘great’ contemporaries like Emin or Christo or sorry to say it, even Hirst. I see more promise in the future of art from artists like Riusuke Fukahori, Ah Xian and Arjumand than Emin or Christo show me. And that’s why, at the end of reading Mathis’ essay I’m actually more excited than ever about art, because he and I can’t be the only ones ‘over’ Modernism. Check out some of my paintings http://www.artorca.com/painting