Dear Johanna,
Many thanks for your post which astutely articulates and reflects a
number of conversations with friends and colleagues that I’ve had
during the past few months. Specifically, I so appreciate your candor
and courage and do hope that your post will open up a space for this
productive conversation.... for Sweet Dreams are made of these ....
( apologies for the pun which seems somehow appropriate gesture of
nostalgia within the haze of New Years'!)
Kevin Hamilton initiated an earlier attempt in mid-late November. The
resonance of the last sentence in his post stayed with me – “Any
thoughts? Maybe a public listserv isn't the safest place to have this
conversation? Kevin Hamilton." I felt a chill as I read his sentence
as it fully evidenced the dynamics to which your email alludes.
So … now ... thanks to the continuum of Empyre and Nicholas we have
the introduction of this topic for January – one which is wholly
welcome and necessary.
I will respond more fully in the days to come –
Chris
On Jan 2, 2010, at 6:59 AM, Johanna Drucker wrote:
All,
This is meant as an independent start, not a response to John's
post, which I shall take a look at later today. I just wanted to
make an initial statement here before engaging in discussion.
JD
Complicity
I believe in art and I believe that aesthetic objects and
expressions do something that other things do not. What is the work
that aesthetic objects do and what are the grounds for critical
apprehension of that activity? My answers to these basic questions
does not fall far from the formulations of earlier aestheticians—
refinement of discriminatory sensibility, appreciation of purposive
purposelessness, shock effect that wakes us to experience, and the
opening of the space for experience itself. Works of art and the
work of art objects are remarkable, unique, and provocative because
they give form to thought in material expressions that make it
available to a shared perception. From that, all kinds of cultural
effects follow.
When I titled Sweet Dreams, I was well aware that the
term “complicity” was provocative, suggesting as it does that the
critical stance of moral superiority to “common” or “mass” culture
taken by many critics and artists was being called into question.
But at the same time, I was not suggesting that the acknowledgment
that we are – all of us – part of systems of consumption, careerism,
professionalism, promotion etc. that are the inevitable apparatus of
our conditions of work and existence–meant that we are necessarily
aligned with values of oppression and exploitation. But I was trying
to point out what feels like blindness (even bad faith at its
extreme) in two worlds I know well – that of radical, innovative art
practice and that of academic work focused on cultural production
across the arts and media. I simply wanted to point out that we are
all operating inside the same system that becomes reified as the
object of critical study. None of us are outside its machinations,
nor, if we are honest, outside the drives and desires it instills in
us or to which we subscribe.
I was originally motivated to write Sweet Dreams because
of the enthusiasm I had for contemporary artists whose work had a
playful relation to mass culture that did not begin with the
assumption of negativity that was characteristic of some early 20th
century avant-garde practices. If we revisit Italian Futurism, we
find Marinetti, for instance, fully engaged in mass media as a
thematic inspiration (‘wireless imagination’) and as instrument and
means of realization (the language of publicity, typography of
advertising, use of radio, pamphlets, newspapers as sites and
instruments of the work). Dada and Cubist collage work is not
antithetical to mass culture, but toying with its materials and
their potential as elements of aesthetic expression. Surrealism has
a long career of absorption into fashion, film, popular culture.
While the useful critical tenets of Russian Formalism, particularly
those of Viktor Shklovsky, stress defamiliarization as a way to
recover aesthetic experience from the numbing mechanical effects of
daily life, they are not more focused on mass culture as the enemy
than on other routines and habits. Mass media becomes an object of
critical disdain and denigration with the fearful recognition of the
power of propaganda to create a “mass” whose hysterias are both
destructive and self-destructive. Media studies arises from the
terrors wrought by the first world war, and takes the form we know
best through the writings of the Frankfurt School, particularly
Theodor Adorno, in response to the rise of fascism and the
contemporary free-market demon, the culture industries. But the
legacy of Adorno’s aesthetics is problematic for us because it has
become academic, and because it is premised on a description of the
world and of art that have become formulaic.
I was at an end of patience with watching my university
colleagues self-promote their critical insights through cultural
studies approaches that are intellectually bankrupt and morally
suspect. These are highly educated, well-paid, privileged
individuals with mortgages, retirement accounts, good cars, kids in
private schools, who are brand-conscious style mavens who constantly
produce the same jargon-ridden pablum that promotes the “critique of
mass culture” while living entirely as a dependent upon it. The
hypocrisy of cultural studies as currently practiced in the academy
is repulsive—if you live a bourgeois lifestyle, at least have the
decency to admit that it is a desirable and pleasant mode of
existence, and that the goal of a sane society might be to guarantee
the same level of stability and security for all human beings. This
is not a platform to promote consumerism! But to pretend that “we”
critically enlightened academics, by pointing out the ideological
operations of mass culture, are outside it is patently ridiculous!
Likewise, I was done with the postures and rhetorics
of “political” artists – whose careerist strategies were all cloaked
in a language of self-justification, martyrdom to their didactic
sense of superiority to the world around them—as if they were not
themselves keen to be promoted as the new celebrities of an art
culture whose hierarchies of fame and rewards are modeled to conform
to other celebrity industries. Didactic art is the bane of
contemporary thought. It is always subsumed to its agenda, always
illustrative, always circumscribed by its assumptions. Activist art
is a different matter, though it walks a thin line between
patronizing benevolence and community empowerment, it can be an
agent of actual change, creating cultural capital and symbolic
force. But whether they are involved in didactic, activist,
escapist, purist, or any other work, artists can’t conceive of
themselves or their work as outside of or superior to the conditions
of their own production. That is all I meant by complicity. We are
all part of the current system of corruption, destruction,
exploitation with all that that means in local, environmental,
global, social, economic terms. You can’t get outside that. We all
work from within.
_______________________________________________
empyre forum
empyre@lists.cofa.unsw.edu.au
http://www.subtle.net/empyre
C h r i s t i a n e R o b b i n s
- J E T Z T Z E I T S T U D I O S -
... the space between zero and one ...
Walter Benjamin
LOS ANGELES I SAN FRANCISCO
" The present age prefers the sign to the thing signified, the copy to
the original, fancy to reality,
the appearance to the essence
for in these days
illusion only is sacred, truth profane."
Ludwig Feuerbach, 1804-1872
_______________________________________________
empyre forum
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