An Oak Tree by Michael Craig-Martin is one of the most telling art works of our modern (and postmodern) times. Comprising a glass of tap water on a glass shelf, it could not be more transparently what it is, surely, but then there is an accompanying text that asserts it as an oak tree. In the form of an interview it poses reasonable questions that are answered by the artist, as summarised by the following extract:

Q: Do you mean that the glass of water is a symbol of an oak tree?
A: No. It’s not a symbol. I’ve changed the physical substance of the glass of water into that of an oak tree.
Q: It looks like a glass of water....
A: Of course it does. I didn’t change its appearance. But it’s not a glass of water. It’s an oak tree.

This exchange is smart, not only because of the radical questions it raises around the use of readymades in art, but also the correspondence it clearly suggests between artistic experience and religious faith. The obvious artistic precedent is Duchamp’s upturned urinal, but instead of being a receptacle and drain for fluid released by the human body, Craig-Martin’s found object takes us back to the start of the biological process, a receptacle for drinking - the cause of the effect - and the drink on this occasion is pure unadulterated water.

Duchamp refers to his urinal, paradoxically, as a fountain. Craig-Martin is especially insistent on his glass of water being an oak tree. It is not simply or just called an oak tree, and it not a symbol of an oak tree. It isanoaktree.“Isn’tthisacaseoftheemperor’snewclothes?”isa question in the interview. The answer? “No. With the emperor’s new clothes people claimed to see something which wasn’t there because they felt they should. I would be very surprised if anyone told me they saw an oak tree”. Duchamp was daring his audience to see a work of art in an object made to cater for base animal behaviour. Craig-Martin on the other hand is talking about some kind of transubstantiation. 1

Transubstantiation is the transformation of wine into the blood of Christ, and the bread into his body during the Roman Catholic service of the Eucharist. Nothing changes its appearance. It doesn’t taste different. Our senses tell us that there is absolute continuity between what has gone before and what is happening now – any difference is unseen - but we know that the wine and bread have become blood and body of the Son of God, and that by their consumption we are absolved of sin and thus made acceptable for heaven.

An Oak Tree has biographical interest, reflecting as it does the artist’s particular Christian background, but beyond this are its implications for artistic experience in general, the necessary (if not sufficient) factor of faith whereby not only is art identified as art, but also deemed good for us, better than non- art, and somehow transcendental. Duchamp’s Fountain – and the readymade in general - was a profound undermining of the myth of art at the outset of modernism but still the romance persists. Craig-Martin’s gesture, fifty years later, was telling us this and more; that the romance is essentially religious.

Like religion, the art world capitalises on mystery. This is possible especially due to the indefinable nature of its commodity. For a long time now we’ve acknowledged that art does not have a distinct look or material quality – art objects do not have an intrinsic artiness – or even need to have an artist’s touch. They can comprise the most ordinary mass produced glasses and shelves. An art object doesn’t have to be well made or a “good” thing. Art can lie in absence. Art doesn’t have to be an object, and visual art doesn’t even have to be visual.

There is nothing inherent in art that makes it different to anything else. It is interesting to speculate on the kind of observations that an extraterrestrial alien would make on arrival in our world, encountering for the first time the multifarious products of the visual culture in which we are now steeped
and which we usually take for granted. Any discrimination we might make between high art and popular culture, including signage, advertising and so on, would elude the alien. In an art world that accommodates Jeff Koons, through museum retrospectives and acquisitions, he or she would have no understanding of the hierarchy that builds up from kitsch to those revered products of human ingenuity we call masterpieces. What exactly is the problem with fakes? Why does a painting lose millions of pounds of value when it is discovered not to be by Rembrandt but one of his honest followers? The alien would want to know why human beings were spinning this “art” story around something so fugitive, and deduce that it called for anthropological research rather than a study of aesthetics.

This is the conclusion reached by Alfred Gell in his brilliant essay ‘Vogel’s Net: Traps as Artworks and Artworks as Traps’, first published in 19962. It centres on an exhibition some years previously in New York that featured, amongst other things, a traditional hunting net from central Africa, an object not made with any intention, let alone any understanding of art. Now bound up and translated into a dedicated art space, in one of the major art cities of the world, it could be easily mistaken for a work of art in the style of artists such as Eva Hesse and so, Gell asked, what exactly was the difference and what could this encounter with the hunting net tell us about our definitions of art?

Gell was relentlessly logical in his pursuit of certain facts – like Renaissance philosophers against the weight of the Church - and here he considers
three options; firstly that a work of art “can be defined as any object that is aesthetically superior, having certain qualities of visual appealingness [sic.]
or beauty”. Next up is the “interpretative” theory; that is to say that a work of art can only be interpreted as such “in the light of a system of ideas that is founded within an art historical tradition”. This gives way through an argument that insists essentially on a mental trip to a place beyond western culture to what he refers to as the “institutional” theory whereby a “work may be in origin unconnected with the mainstream of art history, but if the art world co-opts the work, and circulates it as art, then it is art”. In short, our art world is as tribal as the African community that produced the hunting net.

To paraphrase, with Michael Craig-Martin in mind, if we co-opt the glass of water, and it circulates as an oak tree, then it is an oak tree. And again, if we co-opt An Oak Tree, and it circulates as art, then it is art.

Readymades are objects - in origin unconnected with the mainstream of
art history - co-opted as art, and that was the basic point being made by Duchamp. This is fairly uncontroversial, but then unless we accept Alfred Gell’s institutional theory, not only does Duchamp’s urinal slip back into
its previously less elevated non-art status, but so too do countless other things written into art history, such as French and Spanish cave paintings, Australian aboriginal sand sculpture, Chinese scrolls, early nineteenth century photographs and Japanese woodblock prints, made without any thought of art as we understand it.

Gell’s understanding of art is as persuasive as the world view of Richard Dawkins, the arch-atheist who regards any form of superstition and any idea of transcendental reality as sloppy thinking. Like Gell, Dawkins wants to strip things down to what make sense in terms of science. Whatever can’t

be observed or proved remains in a vast realm of future discoveries, not to be accounted for through leaps of faith. He sees nothing virtuous in faith, and encourages us to not only accept that we live in the midst of known and unknown unknowns, but also to appreciate what we encounter here and now, rather than defer our happiness until some imaginary afterlife. Dawkins is positivist and positive, asserting that what we do know is easily wonderful enough and that we should have no need to invent a god or gods in order to enhance the quality of human existence.

The conventions of the art world, like those of religion, grew up around the nothingness that art is - a void we seem to need – and could not have be more at odds with the freedom that art actually has to offer, precisely because of its nothingness. The tendency to treat art objects like holy relics, valuable because they somehow embody the presence of an artist (saint-like) is at the heart of the problem, and so museums have the attraction of churches and temples, and curators function like priests. Art works are sold to collectors, like indulgences, with the promise of a brighter future because art is good, better than non-art and somehow transcending normal life.

In the clear light of day we see art as the placebo it is, something that makes a beneficial difference to us because we believe it will. We know that a lot of art is not good, but cling to the idea that it is good that it is art. On the other hand, there are a lot of good things, things that make a beneficial difference to us – things that are aesthetically attractive, inspiring, deeply philosophical and so on – that have nothing to do with art.

This is a liberating (obvious, undeniable) realisation, and the most important fact is that it arises out of the art world itself. It is as if we have gone through a dreamy adolescent phase to realise that, well, it was just a dream and that artists and those in orbit around them are just ordinary human beings after all, not saints, not priests. There is no need to make up stories, shot through with irrationality, to insulate us from a reality which is as wonderful as it is existentialist in its absurd yet no-nonsense this-is-this-ness. Assorted natural phenomena, objects of sentimental value, the beauty of youth intensified by our own children, and all manner of other such wholesome things as well as miscellaneous personal weirdnesses that we fetishise in order to enhance our lives beyond what is run of the mill. In short, art does not have a monopoly on beauty or truth or wonder, and most of the time it is very ordinary.

How can one “believe” in art? Why do people “believe” in art? Corresponding to Gell’s anthropology there is Dawkins’ theory of memes, whereby art and other kinds of cultural information, beneficial to the species, are handed down from one generation to another in a non-genetic kind of natural selection as "self-replicating tokens of religious ideas." And beyond this is psychology, a closer study of the “grey matter” that Duchamp insisted on as the vital factor in any artistic equation. Such a line of enquiry may one day reveal the mental equivalent of the God Particle, but for now it exists in the realm of known unknowns and we are left dealing with this thing called art, as Dawkins is dealing with religion.

The difference between religion and art is the degree to which the latter interrogates itself, and this essay is a case in point. Art as an institution is auto-analytical to an extraordinary degree, perhaps more so than any other, and Michael Craig-Martin and Duchamp are two artists amongst many whose work reflects on the artistic nature of itself. Modernism was notoriously self- conscious, but what characterises much of the best art today is a thorough- going scepticism with respect to any idea of art being anything other than a phantom conjured up out of faith. It has a no-nonsense attitude, refreshing

in the face of an outdated romanticism that was not repudiated but rather reincarnated through modernism.

Preeminent in this respect is Russian artist Vladimir Arkhipov. For many years he has been developing his Post-Folk Archive, a vast collection of functional objects hand-crafted from unwanted stuff by people in response to everyday needs. Often made in poor circumstances, where manufactured products required are either not available or too expensive, results bear out the maxim that “necessity is the mother of invention” and so a plank of wood with bottle tops nailed into it becomes a doormat, an empty paint tub with its bottom removed enjoys new life as a basketball hoop and a bent piece of cutlery serves perfectly well as a radio aerial. The makers are usually as far from the art world as those in Africa who knotted the hunting net, and yet the art world – crucially through the agency of a recognised artist – embraces the objects in the Post-Folk Archive. Arkhipov, who is as unironic as he is knowing, exemplifies Gell’s institutional theory by concentrating our attention within dedicated art space in order to transform our perception of experiences in everyday life. He is encouraging us to look beyond the white cube for our epiphanies.

With this in mind we consider Sofia Hultén’s recent videos in series, Immovable Object/Unstoppable Force, depicting her encounters with large objects in everyday locations. We see the artist transfixed, for example, by

rubbish skips on the street with an idea that an act of looking - with sufficient intent, the right kind of sensibility? – might magically take them to a place where natural laws no longer apply. They might defy gravity and float in front of her eyes.

There is a nice hint of madness in Hultén’s behaviour as she is clearly apprehending something, at least a possibility, that eludes the rest of us.
Like Arkhipov she asserts unwanted material as worthy of attention and it becomes the subject for her work of art, if not the work of art itself. An earlier series by her is especially interesting in this context, as it depicts her, time and time again, staring at large single rocks. She is reminding us of the Chinese tradition of “scholars’ rocks”, ostensibly found objects –readymade by natural forces - that are appreciated like rare masterpieces, thus calling into question any perceptible difference between art and non-art. Hultén is suggesting, like John Berger, that art boils down to a way of seeing.

It is salutary to reflect on the fact that in China, elsewhere in Asia and in fact anywhere else in the world before European imperialism, art as we know it was simply unheard of. Beautiful, meaningful things like African hunting nets were being made – likewise woodblock prints, sand sculptures, cave paintings and so on – but not with any idea of the museums and galleries that we cherish as an ultimate destination. Any argument for art for art’s sake, for transcendent beauty, that might have been used to justify their accommodation in dedicated art space, lost all relevance with Duchamp’s introduction of the readymade,

to the point that now there is no certainty with respect to what might or might not be admitted into the hallowed halls of the art world. Art doesn’t look like art, and artistic intention has nothing to do with it. Institutional co-option, with its attendant consensual leap of faith, on the other hand is vital.

In this vein, it’s too easy to dismiss Nicolas Bourriaud’s Relational Aesthetics as just another fashion. At its heart is an understanding that is not so easy to shrug off, that the “whole of human relations and their social context” determined not only the meaning but also the identity of art. It chimes in well with the ideas of Alfred Gell, although unlike him Bourriaud looked too close to home, restricting his field of enquiry to a group of artists based more or less in western Europe. He could instead have spent more time in China and other parts of Asia, for example, where arguably there was much more being done by artists in the spirit of relational aesthetics, not simply as a reaction to a redundant (modernist) art paradigm, whereby artistic experience is characterised as being somehow self-contained, but simply because they sprang from cultural traditions, pre-art, that were never repudiated.

Bourriaud’s gang of artists included Dominique Gonzalez-Foerster, Liam Gillick, Carsten Hӧller, Philippe Parreno, Pierre Huyghe and Rirkrit Tiravanija. Of these, for the purposes of this discussion, Tiravanija is the most interesting, making work that is at once extremely savvy with respect to western contemporary

art and guileless in its derivation from the cultural traditions of his Thai family. Cooking pad thai, as learnt at his grandmother’s knee and shared with visitors to his exhibitions, became his trade mark early on. Subsequent work has been consistently easy-going and smart in its relationship to this thing that we call art and thus a breakthrough, to the extent that he should be acknowledged as one of the most important artists, internationally, of his generation.

Tiravanija was by no means the first – his predecessors include Li Yuan Chia, David Medalla and Tadashi Kawamata – but art historical circumstances were such that his practice also has provided a bridge over which many other Asian artists have crossed over onto the other side which is the mainstream western art world, and vice versa. Hence we have been enjoying more the “relational” work of other Thai artists such as Surasi Kusolwong, Navin Rawanchaikul and Soi Project. From China, Song Dong and Ai Wei Wei. From Japan, Shimabuku, Tadasu Takamine, Shinobu Yoshida and Makoto Nomura amongst many others.

These artists have enormously enriched our artistic experience, but at the same time tended to undermine the foundations that support the edifice of
art in a western sense – and art only really is in a western sense – so that
now we find ourselves remarkably free, free to go anywhere with it. As well as sharing a meal, we can take a taxi ride or a boat trip, join an amateur band, sit around and talk, or visit a street market, and our art world embraces all such activity, co-opts it as art. We could celebrate the fact that art is as absorbent as capitalism, morphing itself to incorporate anything that might be deemed a challenge, or we might return to An Oak Tree and see the co-option of these unremarkable things as essentially the result of religious impulse, unnecessary if not now a little desperate.

The Asian artists referred to are not playing some exoticist game that seduces the western sensibility with zen-like calm, or some post-modern archness, but rather they are attempting to wake us up, or rather reawaken us to the compelling nature of everyday life as it goes on without feeling the need to turbo-charge it with some contrived (artistic) fiction or melodrama. Alerting

us to what is wonderfully pragmatic, their practices, on the whole, encourage exploration beyond clever self-reference and the sophism of contemporary art about art, to the point where we should be asking ourselves whether or not art is desirable. There was, without question, great cultural achievement in Asia and other parts of the non-western world, long before art came along and so why, why, should it be now be, like Jesus, with us always? Perhaps one day there will be a return to the good old times when there wasn’t any art.

Still, we are where we are. An Oak Tree is both a major work in the art collection of Tate and central to this art exhibition. It is a disquieting presence, speaking to us at once of essential sustenance – water is required for life as we know it - and a strange shift that makes it a milestone in our art history. It raises questions of faith. It doesn’t resemble or represent art. It is art. It is an oak tree, if you like, reminding us that our grey matter is a black box, and what happens inside is absolutely unseen.