Secret Agents
Thursday, December 11, 2008
"I honestly do wonder, without wishing to be morbid, how I reached this present pass. So far as I can remember of my youth, I chose the secret road because it seemed to lead straightest and furthest towards my country’s goal. The enemy in those days was we could point at and read about in the papers. Today, all I know is that I have learned to interpret the whole of life in terms of conspiracy. This is the sword I have lived by, and as I look around me now I see it is the sword I shall die by as well. These people terrify me but I am one of them. If they stab me in the back, then at least that is the judgment of my peers.”
George Smiley in a letter to his estranged wife Anne
from John Le Carré, The Honourable Schoolboy (1978)
George Smiley, the most famous creation of spy writer John le Carré, is an espiocrat, a desk man working for MI6. His interpretation of life as conspiracy might seem a quaint fragment from a genre novel, reflecting the paranoia of an age obsessed with the Bomb and locked in a Cold War of misty grey areas. However, with the looming fear of terrorism and ecological disaster new surrogates for the Bomb, a Berlin mist spreading and settling in for the long haul, the conspiratorial mind doesn’t seem so far off the mark in contemporary life. When interpreting art, this mindset seems well in place and the fear of betrayal, while melodramatic, seems appropriate. The practise of art, right down to its language and culture, is filled with daily betrayals.
The history of art, too, is a treachery both vast and petty. In terms of personalities it is filled with perfidy and vindictiveness. Imagine the moment when Duchamp’s urinal was rejected from the Society of Independent Artists, or when Guy Debord expelled Constant from the Situationist International, or when Clement Greenberg turned his back on Abstract Expressionism in favour of Post-painterly Abstraction. Art History, as a meta-narrative, has betrayed us. In Le Carré’s Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy (1974), the double agent Bill Haydon is described as being “recruited before Empire became a dirty word” and the last spy still working on the Great Game – a reference to Rudyard Kipling’s Kim (1901), in which the Great Game referred to the culture of espionage in India at the turn of the last century in the face of panic about Russian expansion into central Asia. Haydon’s unfaithfulness is more about hurting that which has lost faith in him than any conviction for the other side.
Art history is like that, uneasy with post-modernism, with post-colonialism, still obsessing with its movements and geniuses, especially in the popular imagination, still playing the Great Game. As we start to suspect that it is no longer telling the truth, it lashes out at us. We have to keep prodding and poking it.
Extract from a piece by me published in Art South Africa 7.2. Read the rest in the magazine.
George Smiley in a letter to his estranged wife Anne
from John Le Carré, The Honourable Schoolboy (1978)
George Smiley, the most famous creation of spy writer John le Carré, is an espiocrat, a desk man working for MI6. His interpretation of life as conspiracy might seem a quaint fragment from a genre novel, reflecting the paranoia of an age obsessed with the Bomb and locked in a Cold War of misty grey areas. However, with the looming fear of terrorism and ecological disaster new surrogates for the Bomb, a Berlin mist spreading and settling in for the long haul, the conspiratorial mind doesn’t seem so far off the mark in contemporary life. When interpreting art, this mindset seems well in place and the fear of betrayal, while melodramatic, seems appropriate. The practise of art, right down to its language and culture, is filled with daily betrayals.
The history of art, too, is a treachery both vast and petty. In terms of personalities it is filled with perfidy and vindictiveness. Imagine the moment when Duchamp’s urinal was rejected from the Society of Independent Artists, or when Guy Debord expelled Constant from the Situationist International, or when Clement Greenberg turned his back on Abstract Expressionism in favour of Post-painterly Abstraction. Art History, as a meta-narrative, has betrayed us. In Le Carré’s Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy (1974), the double agent Bill Haydon is described as being “recruited before Empire became a dirty word” and the last spy still working on the Great Game – a reference to Rudyard Kipling’s Kim (1901), in which the Great Game referred to the culture of espionage in India at the turn of the last century in the face of panic about Russian expansion into central Asia. Haydon’s unfaithfulness is more about hurting that which has lost faith in him than any conviction for the other side.
Art history is like that, uneasy with post-modernism, with post-colonialism, still obsessing with its movements and geniuses, especially in the popular imagination, still playing the Great Game. As we start to suspect that it is no longer telling the truth, it lashes out at us. We have to keep prodding and poking it.
Extract from a piece by me published in Art South Africa 7.2. Read the rest in the magazine.
posted by Robert Sloon at 1:29 PM
2 Comments:
great read, Sloonie
Seriously now, in the art world we like to think of ourselves as contributing to, who is actually into the Great Game? Nobody. The academic main stream is about pretending that it has stumbled upon the end of the game, and it keeps pretending that this is news, cos the entire subject is too fucking thin to diversify to anywhere more interesting.
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