The Future is not Trad

If we want to revitalise culture we have to address the attachment traditionalists have to forms and style

[Alexander Adams, untitled (c. 2001), oil on linen, 16” x 16”]

Since I began publishing statements and articles, I have defended many forms of art. On the basis that I found pleasure in many things and considering that we benefit from plurality (after all, my earliest polemical position was opposing State Art monoculture) I consequently supported Modernism, traditional art, folk art, crafts, abstraction, religious art and even (sparingly) Post-Modernism. Yet I have had reservations about modern-day practitioners of each style, mostly to do with the quality of the art. Doubts have become too pressing to be ignored and they will be the substance of this article.

My doubt is about the viability of certain forms – or more precisely, certain attitudes – for the vital iteration of any physical culture. I have previously written about the natural propensity among creative outliers to take risks. For me, risk-taking is essential for a vanguard. I write here for anyone who judges himself to be part of (or allied to) a new wave of art made by those opposed to the State Art status quo. Those of us sufficiently arrogant, disagreeable, assertive and bold (reckless) must embrace our destinies by accepting our propensity to take risks and compulsion to break new ground. Dissenters need to address the division between the reactionary and the conservative. Both tendencies have weaknesses but this discussion will cover the conservative proclivity to embrace symbols and structures.

The trouble with wishing to revive a Renaissance/Baroque/Pre-Raphaelite era of culture is twofold. The first (and least important) is capacity to emulate; the second is an attachment to tradition-as-form.

Conservatives correctly identify a problem inherent in Modernism, globalism and materialistic culture of our time, namely the way it detaches us from rootedness in soil (place) and blood (kinship). This has a deracinating effect. Severance from pre-Modern culture makes us ignorant of both craft and the tradition whence craft sprang, distancing us from folk knowledge and a sense of faithfulness to our predecessors. Hence conservatives advocate returning to tradition and localism. In the article “Bad Painting, Folk Art and Localism” I pointed out that we are already so immersed in world pop culture that localism is no longer viable, unless we return to a pre-Modern age of technology. When artists advocating Classicism or Romanticism talk of returning to the core of art and rootedness, I look at their art and I cannot (within the formal properties of the art) identify the century or country of production. This has come about because the traditionalist artists are so detached from tradition that they can find it only in the art of other centuries and countries. This makes their art more rootless than Pop Art or Neo Geo, because at least those styles have a definite era.

The already existing separation from the tradition is exacerbated by deliberate obfuscation. You traditionalists select views without modern buildings; in your landscapes you replace motorways with fields, in a conscious repastoralisation. I understand this because I did it too when I was a young artist. Why not do the reverse? If you abhor contemporary eco-politics, do not hide away in Samuel Palmer idylls but paint a landscape including a wind turbine. Have the courage to confront what you oppose, then criticise it. We need artists who are brave; being competent is not enough. Painting safe pictures for a pre-existing set of collectors is no advance. Make art that through the sheer force of your vision and ability brings into existence a new group of collectors, a new genre, a new art movement. Paint as you wish but if you want to be great, heed this warning.

I do not say you cannot or should not paint keeping in mind art of the past but remember the necessity of becoming fully yourselves. Display the ambition of a great man by saying you will go beyond what you have learnt. Leonardo da Vinci wrote, “It is a poor pupil who does not surpass his master.” What would Leonardo have done if he had been content to remain a follower of Verrocchio? Only by swearing “I must surpass Van Eyck, Raphael and Rembrandt” will you have a chance of equalling them.

Why can’t the essential qualities you wish to advance be incorporated into an art style you originate, one that others will wish to imitate? Think of those who will come after you. No one wishes to imitate an imitator. No one aspires to follow a spear-carrier. They wish to follow a leader or (in exceptional cases) to become a leader. If you have qualities which are eternal you find a place by situating them in context that means something and has importance for your time. If you believe that craft and skill are neglected, apply those to subjects of today. I am not asking you to make pictures of portrait subjects holding mobile phones as a gimmick, but be able to be a portraitist who is not afraid of including the modern. Such touches will locate your art in time and place and give it the rootedness you crave.

As Evola advised, be in your time (because you must be) but be not of your time (because you ought not to be). You can observe and commentate your situation but try not to fall into the fallacies of your age. The uplifting can be an image of something you dislike, that makes you uncomfortable, that imprints itself on to your memory through brilliant aggression. Making an adequate pastiche of a Romantic landscape is a display of competent imitation, but it will win over no viewer with a dash of sublime force. No, not every picture can rise to that level but an imitator’s art never does because the highest threshold it can reach is adequacy. There is no space for meaningful originality, let alone genius.

You may find the picture in this article squalid – a poor representation of the type of ennobling art we stand to produce. Perhaps it is squalid. But there is more vitality in this than in any fantasia after Titian or Ruisdael because it has the stuff of life about it. It forces you to consider what is important to you. It asks you if realism (and reality) is compatible with your viewpoint. It asks that you consider this figure which is shown in a pose and situation that is not flattering and to consider why the subject allowed herself to be captured in a such photograph and why she might find this image “her best self” to put out into the world. What expectations does she have of a woman’s attractiveness and appropriacy and why might we consider her to be degraded (or at least not advantageously presented) in this image? You must consider the question, does this image have any redeeming qualities? It presents modern life without celebrating or promoting modernity.

Unless you are as good as the masters you follow, your art will not endure as theirs has. If you think Classicism or Romanticism is the route to immortality then you have learnt the wrong lesson. The brilliance of the Old Masters carried through their art resided not the forms or idioms. It was not the advancement of a formula. To contend otherwise is academicism in a time when the academy accepts political collectivists advocating for Afro futurism. You won’t be granted admission into the Royal Academy and (without constant multi-generational vigilance) your self-founded academies face an identical fate.

So, we come to the second problem of conservative artists, that is their attachment to forms instead of spirit.

The future of art is not traditionalism because tradition, as TS Eliot observed, is something that springs form a linkage of living culture from which serious makers cannot be detached. Here is a paragraph from a previous article of mine: “Yet if the only form of tradition, of handing down, consisted in following the ways of the immediate generation before us in a blind or timid adherence to its successes, “tradition” should positively be discouraged.” So wrote Eliot in 1919, in his seminal essay “Tradition and the Individual Talent”. He argues that even a poet working in new ways is part of a tradition that infuses his work with meaning, in the same way his era does, regardless of whether or not he employs the forms and styles of his antecedents. As the great writer submits himself ever more to his material and works honestly within the idiom of his age, his work is transmuted and absorbed into the tradition. “What happens is a continual surrender of himself as he is at the moment to something which is more valuable. The progress of an artist is a continual self-sacrifice, a continual extinction of personality. There remains to define this process of depersonalisation and its relation to the sense of tradition. It is in this depersonalisation that art may be said to approach the condition of science.” Tradition is a sequence of adjustments and absorptions of innovations. Therefore innovation is necessary and normal within a living tradition.

In other words, actual tradition can survive as tradition-in-spirit but not as tradition-as-form because forms will (more than becoming moribund) be appropriated and repurposed. Consider the British Union flag – once a symbol of imperialism and military might, now an insignia for multicultural acceptance and soft-power liberalism. Consider the aforementioned academies and how they no longer serve art but the interests of those who scorn what was cherished by the founders of the academy. Traditionalism in that respect is open to subversion because it is synonymous (in the most superficial understanding) with loyalty to a symbol. If that symbol is not within your group’s control then it will be appropriated for degradation and repurposing. Put no trust in symbols and institutions unless you trust yourself to repudiate those things when they become perverted.

I want to work with artists of all types. If you disagree with my reservations, exhibit beside me, outpaint me, make art that overcomes my reservations by being too astonishing to reject. Do not seek to be compared to any artist, no matter how great. Simply make pictures or sculpture that stands in and for itself, so alive that it seems more vivid than mere “art”. Make something that could live. When making art, aspire to not art but life.