File Note 93: Ruth Ewan

Everything that you see in contemporary art galleries started with the French Revolution. The things that most people have come to recognise as art today have their origins in the heady days of 1789 and its consequences for France and the world that Europeans had already begun colonising. Boris Groys, one of the world’s smartest art historians said it very clearly recently: “…before the French Revolution there was no art, only design”.¹ The art he is referring to, of course, is a particular kind of object production. Before the Revolution, the term ‘art’ referred to the task of beautifying spaces and objects as well as pleasing the gods and keeping mortal patrons happy. It was largely a skill, a craft. Afterwards, art gradually became something else as well; a critical thinking tool dedicated to changing perceptions and comprehending human nature in new ways. This new definition, which came to be known as autonomous art because it wrote its own rules, started to dominate the common social understanding of art over time, so that by the early modernist period (the Impressionists etc.) the character and role of the artist – genius, troublemaker, romantic – and the purpose of his or her art – to provoke, break rules, show the as-yet-unseen and incomprehensible – were aims to which almost all serious art and artists would aspire. Perhaps it is then no coincidence that a publicly supported art gallery like Camden Arts Centre chose to invite an artist who has been concerned with the living legacy of the French Revolution in her earlier work. At a time when the social democratic arguments for public cultural funds are less persuasive than ever, art institutions might, even subconsciously, want to discover other historical justifications for their existence; and the idea of revolution is one of them.

If this short history maps out some of the background to Ewan’s work here, it fails to explain why we are looking at a manifestation of the revolutionary calendar in this gallery today. If the artist had wanted to, she could have updated the names with relative ease – a financial product here, an iPhone there and it would have been done. Instead, she chooses to take us back to the source of the idea of social change and distanced from current day-to-day concerns. She also reminds us that the poetry of the naming stems from a revolutionary poet and marks an aggressive act of political imposition through which cultural traditions were hoped to be eliminated. In contrast to any contemporary version, which would be merely an artistic gesture without any force of law, we are asked to contemplate the beauty in an act of political violence. 

The work might also be read as a labyrinthine, colourful critique of the role of art in 21^st century society. To begin with, such an alliance between an artist and state politics is very hard to imagine today. Perhaps, Back to the Fields, with its hint of a later Cultural Revolution, might suggest something quite troubling for those invested in an oppositional art practice – that the capacity for revolution on the scale of 1789 is no longer possible, whether in art or politics. If that is even partially true, then the autonomous forms of critical art created by revolutionary potential might also no longer be so appropriate. Looking at the plants and animals, what we see is a way of thinking and a level of political ambition that feels out of reach today. By the 21^st century, humanity’s experience of revolution may not have been so positive but the sense that the world could be turned upside down is still a ghostly presence that haunts what remains of the avant-garde in contemporary art. Indeed, potential revolution of some kind is almost a requirement to maintain any idea of art as transformative or revelatory, but the problem is that such a belief is hard to sustain in the face of art’s actual role in contemporary society today.