Two giants of art, two great Modernists, Richard Serra and Frank Stella passed within a few weeks of each other in the Spring of 2024. There were many parallels in their careers but in this most hectic, political year, these passings give pause. Can art, considering the current climate, ever be apolitical again? Triumphantly apolitical? Relieved of all issues to be art and art alone.
Maybe now, when we are all of us in the crossfire, walking on eggshells, afraid of the knock on the door as much as the next social media post, maybe we can now understand the genesis of art for art’s sake. This is what artists were up against in 1915, 1929, 1933, 1939, 1941, 1949. There aren’t headlines from back then screaming that art had triumphed. There were only warnings that suffering under dogma was inevitable; everything old is new again. When the only option is Both Sides Murder can we now see the art of peace was not the preachy dove illustrations but the glorious oblivion of the specific object, the illusion-free stroke of paint, the picture as the unique experience.
We aren’t even through the beginning of these political times, this daily turmoil of aggravation and stances, certainty and lies. And now we are short two more guides, guides toward the solution of annihilating context as a ruse of commerce and forging away from the cajolers and missionaries. What does it mean to create a new truth, free of any connection to anything besides itself? Will any living artist ever have that freedom, that chance to ignore their times and create an eternally new paradigm?
If there is to be freedom in the visual arts in our lifetimes it won’t be a slogan or a pamphleteer delivering it. It will be the righteous path of artists like these recently departed Modern giants pointing a few lucky visionaries away from the traps of convention and conformity disguised as community, but steeped in complicity and/or commodity. Tomorrow may manifest what today has castrated: creativity serving no person, no group, no cause, nobody’s propaganda arm. Like Richard Serra and Frank Stella, we can at least dream of the possibilities and hope those dreams manifest in a studio somewhere to deliver us a new world.
Published on what would have been Frank Stella’s 88th birthday
All images via Creative Commons.