The Known Unknowns

Andy Warhol Cy Twombly Robert Motherwell Sigmar Polke Joseph Beuys Keith Coventry Piero della Francesca Michelangelo

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The challenge of meaning
I’m touring Europe at the moment with a BBC film crew making a documentary about beauty in art. Meaning keeps coming up. Why bother with meaning in art? It has it or it doesn’t. You register what it is, and you like it or not. You tend to think about it according to what you’re told it is in a particular object, and what you’ve just seen, what’s in your head at that moment. It’s not something that necessarily needs to be philosophized. In life you can’t nail everything down. You just have to accept that there are some unknowns. What does the floor mean? Will it still be hard when I tread on it after I get out of bed? If I can’t be sure, should I just stay under the covers? Obviously this would be a negative way to start each morning. Why should we approach meaning in art the same way? Just get on with it is the best policy.

One day I’m filming art by Cro-Magnons, the next it’s Piero della Francesca. Today I was in a cathedral in Sicily with a supersonic bit of equipment that allows for movielike, magnificent sweeping shots. The screen fills with giant gold mosaics gliding by, picturing mystical scenes. One of the sequences ends up with a full-screen Jesus. This particular mosaic is so big, in fact, that one finger alone of his hand gesture, symbolizing the unity of the human and the divine, is a meter long. The film is called This Is Beauty. The final edited product won’t be chronological, but it so happens that the last filming stop is the new Brandhorst contemporary art museum in Munich. The shots here will emphasize the gallery spaces in general more than individual works (the opening show is the museum’s Cy Twombly holdings, but there is also a selection of other works from the collection). The idea for this section (which will come after cave art and before Michelangelo) is that the design of the Brandhorst is the beautiful thing. Maybe with contemporary art it is not the art objects themselves that are required to be beautiful but the surroundings.

Is beauty a meaning? It would be odd to say Twombly or Andy Warhol or any of the other Brandhorst blue-chip, upper-echelon objects, by Joseph Beuys or Sigmar Polke or whoever, is about beauty. Some stains in Polke can be very beautiful. But he seems to be about the impossibility of taking anything seriously rather than beauty as such. Irony forever, reflections reflecting reflections, is a meaning, while beauty is more a quality. But in art it’s not talked about enough to count seriously as a meaning. For years it was taken for granted that it was a negative. Between Picasso and Abstract Expressionism, it’s definitely a bad thing. Meaning is the thing. Pop, Minimalism, Conceptual Art — the same. Then when it was possible for beauty to be a positive, because of a new spirit of curatorial mischievousness (or cleverness that doesn’t necessarily mean anything), beauty seemed part of irony, so there was something reassuring about the negative-positive switch, as well as something challenging.

The greatest meaning
Michelangelo’s Sistine Chapel ceiling is about the fall of man and the promise of future redemption. That’s a pretty heavy meaning, with a big historical consensus saying yes to Michelangelo’s seriousness — that artist really means it. Even though no one knows what he actually meant. Two shows on at the same time in London — "Robert Motherwell: Open," at Bernard Jacobson, and "Keith Coventry: Painting & Sculpture Part II: Works 2002-2009," at Haunch of Venison — challenge a contemporary audience to think about meaning. The Motherwells are about a sort of visually charged nothingness. The Coventrys are about the history of art plus social issues.

Many meanings and none
Out of the Motherwell and Coventry shows, which one means the most? Motherwell’s means the least. It’s only lines and planes. But this show means a lot in terms of waking one up to the power and impact of abstract values, the power of the sheerly visual. Surely those were the values behind medieval mosaics that told people about the meaning of existence? They had to look good. But how useful is that kind of thought to an audience that is totally blasé about such values?