Art vs Books

Why don’t people heap scorn on the books shortlisted for literatary prizes in the same way they deride the shortlisted works in art prizes? So asked Guardian critic and Turner Prize judge Jonathan Jones in early December, and yet nobody was rubbishing the 2009 Turner Prize winner Richard Wright. Why?
 
People are naturally conservative, and perhaps novels appeal more to our notions of formal tradition than conceptual art. In 1959 the artist and writer Brion Gysin said that writing was 50 years behind art, but novelists have never had to deal with a machine that could tell stories better than they could.

When the camera was invented the representational purpose of art was subverted, and artists had to adapt and find new forms of visual expression with which to challenged themselves and engage an audience. This has not been an easy evolution.

Most noticably, as artists moved further and further away from art’s representational roots, they needed to explain themselves more and more. Today the visual arts, the idea image, depends more than ever on its own literature for recognition. It’s difficult to see the artistic greatness in a box of dirty underpants until someone explains, in language, why it is great. Thomas Wolfe complained about art’s growing reliance on its own texts more than 30 years ago

‘All these years, in short, I had assumed that in art, if nowhere else, seeing is believing. Well – how very shortsighted! Now, at last, on April 28, 1974, I could see. I had gotten it backward all along. Not “seeing is believing”, you ninny, but “believing is seeing”, for Modern Art has become completely literary: the paintings and other works exist only to illustrate the text.’

Novels have never been dependent on theory in this way. You don’t need to be told why a novel is great, you either enjoy it or you don’t, and you’re not as inclined to ask, why? The experience of reading the novel is generally enough in itself. But the experience of standing inside an empty room (Martin Creed’s Turner Prize winning work of 2001) can leave an audience bemused and uncertain. Why is this great? They might ask, and without some well written theory to inform them, they flounder.

Fourty years before Creed’s empty room, French Artist Yves Klein created an empty room, too, called The Void. The only difference between it and Creed’s empty room was that Creed added a light that went on and off. This story illustrates just how difficult it is to compare art and novels. Could a novelist copy another author’s ‘non-work’, wordless page after wordless page, dress it up with a different book cover and title, and win a literary prize 40 years after the original non-work was created?

Human beings are generally opposed to change, and so contemporary novels tend to enjoy a more positive critical reception from the public than contemporary art could ever hope for. Perhaps, too, this is why Richard Wright was such a popular and uncontroversial Turner Prize winner last year. His work harks back to our traditional notions of art: beautiful paintings with an emotional power that require no theory for us to appreciate.

Evan Maloney’s novel Tofu Landing is released by Quartet Books in February, 2010