I admit to feeling a bit overwhelmed by the complexities and
theoretical commingling coming to light during this past week of this
welcome discussion Clearly, there are a number of issues whose
relevancy is unquestionable – yet whose challenge may deserve a thesis
or two to appropriately address ( although Sean has offered us a
terrificly astute articulations!) I only wish that I had the time
necessary to do justice to the unpacking of the complexities bearing
on this discussion including, i.e. the inevitable forces of class
structure and bearings, shifting definitions of modernism, the
domestication of post-modernism, the institutionalization of
structuralism, the infusion of post-secondary visual art education
funded into the public sphere during the late 20thc thus resulting in
studio art ( and media) practices which occasionally collided and
ruptured the conventions of working and middle class. Consequently
the market was presented with an imbrication - a hybrid aesthetic
practice - which embedded popular culture signifiers and mores within
the intellectual legacies of “fine art.” This is not to forget to
mention the fluid and tailored minor-cord definitions and
codifications of “art” being bandied around on this list itself, as
well as attendant historical, situational and geo-cultural contexts.
So … in the spirit of participation, I’m going to bring up a wholly
untheoretical premise, which rather indirectly addresses the notion of
complicity ( as defined as deriving benefit thru one’s willing and
knowing participation in a particular endeavor) specifically in
relation to contemporary visual art practices + the 4th/5th paragraphs
in Johanna's introductory post. It strikes me that using the
strategies of relocation and historical reference (primarily from the
USA, as that is the context with which I am most familiar) may shed
some minor ray of light. Somewhat problematically, cultural
production from the States is being discussed (unquestionably) as the
global imperative that underscores the logic and capital based
dynamics of the market. If my reading is accurate, this is what many
on this list may be referring to as the art market – + all of its
attendant tendrils of institutionalization, including the academy.
I find myself infinitely curious as to where such underlying
assumptions derive – that is, what lies beyond the obvious ( and
seductive ) drip stream of Art Forum chatter, stylin’ art world
comings and goings, as well as the inevitable plethora of incisive
hip syllabi, bibliographies and theoretical citations. I question as
to whether the complicity to which Johanna and others illustrate is a
new arrival … or is it more simply a much needed throwing back of the
curtain and exposing OZ – again.
Heretofore, have we ( the representative, collective “we “who populate
this list) simply fooled ourselves into thinking that we are something
other than what socio-economic studies and database characterizations
reveal? Does this nascent awareness of “complicity” reside more
within ourselves? Have the myths embedded in art practices - which
have donned various cloaks of invisibility for the last 50 + years -
simply led us into a path of self-deception through a conceit of
disassociation ? Have we only now realized that, perhaps, we have
been wading through the murky realms of cultural constructs and
production where Baudelaire’s quip speaks to an uncanny resonance:
“self-delusion is the key to happiness.”
Due to one of my current projects, I have been dragged by my thumbs
into reading “Bobos in Paradise …”, 2000, by the neo-conservative
American pundit David Brooks ( http://books.google.com/books?id=5R6Bx3LRBuEC&pg=PA70&dq=david+brook+%2B+bohemian&cd=1#v
=onepage&q=&f=false ). Admittedly, this is an abrupt right turn and
intellectual ramping down of Adorno + friends…. but one which provided
a surprising perspective that may be worth our consideration.
Brook’s book offers an explication of his views of today’s “cultural
elites” – whom he labels “Bourgeois Bohemians” or “Bobos” – and whom
he defines as a synthesis of bohemians and middle class conformist
consumers. His chapters on Transcendentalists and The Culture War
(pg. 73 – 85 ) have some analogous bearing on this discussion and the
contested site(s) of the bourgeoisie and the bohemian - who share a
remarkable resemblance to what has been posited as today’s complicit
academic artist. Brook’s references the 1960’s book, Growing up
Absurd by Paul Goodman who rhapsodizes about the mythological Beats –
“ Their main topic is the system with which they refuse to
cooperate…..” “ Goodman was savvy enough to notice something else
about the beats. Though they were dissidents and though they rejected
affluence and all that, the beats actually lived pretty well. It was
their spirit of pleasure that made them so attractive. In a passage
that brilliantly anticipates the BOBO consumerism of today, Goodman
observed, The Beat subculture is not merely a reaction to the middle
class or to the organized system. It is natural. “
And then Brooks continues on ….discussing the evolution of the
Bohemian subculture as it turned into a “mass movement” – suitable for
the covers of LIFE and LOOK magazine. He locates a binary mirroring of
these disparate BOBO elements which eventually lead to their ironic
fusion that seems to characterize the complicit artist/academic framed
in our discussion this week.
That’s it for tonite - once again, thanks to you all for such an
engaging discussion –
Chris
Begin forwarded message:
From: Christiane Robbins <c...@mindspring.com>
Date: January 2, 2010 10:21:08 AM PST
To: soft_skinned_space <empyre@lists.cofa.unsw.edu.au>
Cc: emp...@gamera.cofa.unsw.edu.au
Subject: Re: [-empyre-] complicit post
Reply-To: soft_skinned_space <empyre@lists.cofa.unsw.edu.au>
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
empyre@lists.cofa.unsw.edu.au
http://www.subtle.net/empyre
_______________________________________________
empyre forum
empyre@lists.cofa.unsw.edu.au
http://www.subtle.net/empyre