The theory in art thread has once again ballooned to unacceptable lengths, so I’m going to post Caro’s last comment here in an effort to start again from zero. Also it’s a really interesting comment:
Theory is not about art – it’s about language (Derrida’s primordial writing). Theory is always reading. CLOSE reading. Closer than anybody has ever read before (which is why everybody thinks it’s not reading at all.) You have a tendency to see my desire for a challenge to Theory as an opposition between language and not-language, whereas what I’m hoping for is something that is less oppositional and more nuanced. Language through a different, visual frame. A different way of conceptualizing language, that is less “linguistic”, but still recognizably semiotic. What happens when you make the questions too much about something other than that slippery semiotic frame is you move out of epistemology and into ontology.
You commented that’s exactly what the visual image does — but that’s not Theory. Theory axiomatically denies that there is any ontology that is not always already epistemology first. You can make the dialectic move to elide those binaries — but you can also make the dialectic move to synthesize the binary of visual and verbal rather than collapsing it.
So I don’t want an alternate Theory, informed by Theory, of how art works. I want to know whether a rigorous stipulation of the epistemology of art would change the way Theory conceptualizes the epistem-ontology of language. It probably won’t be a strict semiotics, because of the openness of the visual sign — but it can be a strict epistemology. And art tends to think of itself and be thought of as ontological.
I’m thinking of Sean’s point about his “visual reading protocols” and how different they are from prose reading. So what is the linguistics of visual reading? That’s still a very linguistic question — but one that really explodes the reliance of semiotics on the linguistic sign. But it still needs to be formalist semiotics, or it’s not theory. Theory’s formalist semiotics claims that the sign can be both verbal and visual, but the structure is derived from the workings of the verbal signs, because as Bert said, the syntagm of nature isn’t as ordered. That’s the oversimplification that I think comics challenges so powerfully, and you guys both said that contemporary art assumes it…
This makes things rather clearer. I would point out though, that the Theory you’re talking about is a particular strand of post-structuralism. Derrida would agree that Theory is not about art (maybe?), but I hesitate to agree that Barthes would, for example, or Deleuze…or Zizek. I think there’s really a question as to whether language and art are even separable in that way. I think, for example, Polar Diamond (and much other artwork) challenges the effort to separate them so easily.
You’re asking for a very particular response to a very particular philosophical question, which is fine. But I don’t quite see how the failure to find that response says anything in particular about the ambition of art, or even about the ambition of theorists. It means they don’t share your particular ambition, or, perhaps, your particular understanding of what Theory is or how it should work. Since the list of people who don’t share your particular ambition of how Theory should confront Art appears to include Zizek, Badiou, Barthes, and Derrida, it’s not clear to me that contemporary art, or Theory, or theory, or critics can be said to be particularly at fault.
I mean, as far as I can tell, the project you want to see happen is predicated on the idea that it is an oversimplification to say that nature is less ordered than language. Right?
I don’t really see that comics challenges that idea. It seems to me that in fact that idea is correct; nature is less ordered than language. I think images are less ordered than language too…though I could see someone making an argument otherwise.
Anyway, I’d be hesitant to say anything about what contemporary art as a whole, or art in general, assumes or doesn’t assume. I think that piece of Buddhist art I discussed, for example, makes a very strong parallel between language and images. So does text art, for that matter and Polar Diamond, as I said above. I wouldn’t off the cuff say that text art assumes that the syntagm of language is more or less ordered than the syntagm of images. It seems in part to say that there is not a difference between the two, or that the difference is governed, not by syntax and grammar, but by discourse (do you think that Foucault and Derrida are entirely compatible in the first place?)
I don’t know…probably just to annoy everyone…but thinking about this more, I think that the challenge you’re looking for to theory from art is in part actually at the first part of your comment rather than the last. That is, “Theory is not about art, it’s about language.”
Contemporary art is really, really interested in denying (deconstructing?) that language/art binary you’ve set up…and interested in deconstructing it specifically in the interest of collapsing art and theory, as well as art and language. That’s part of the deal with conceptual art actually being more of a story attached to the art than the art itself; the language and the art can’t come apart. Which turns art into language, but *also* turns language into art.
So…for example, Bert’s argument that theory is poetry in propositional form. That’s an insight that comes out of art’s engagement with theory and language, at least in part. Language/concepts/thought — those are art, from art’s perspective, which is why putting a Zizek essay on a wall makes sense. You say “it still needs to be formalist semiotics, or it’s not theory” — which in a lot of ways is congruent with Franklin’s argument. The form is what makes art, art, or theory, theory. But contemporary art (informed by post-structuralism’s post-structuralism) denies, or pushes against, both those formalisms. Art is theory and theory is art. And people who are committed to art as form or theory as form more or less lose their shit and storm about muttering about lack of technique and lack of rigor and the laziness of all and sundry.
My point is…art over the last decades has *directly* addressed theory, specifically by challenging theory. It’s done what you want it to do. The problem *is not* that it has failed to address theory. The problem is that it has pushed back against theory *so thoroughly that you don’t recognize the result as theory anymore.* As you’ve said, you want art to address very specific, very narrow questions; you want the conversation to be dictated by theory, and to have art fill in the blanks. Instead art (inspired by theory) has grabbed the paper, torn it up, and taped it back together again. And you point at the paper and say, that’s not theory (or it’s bad theory), much like Franklin would point at the paper and say, that’s not art (or it’s bad art.)
Those are oppositional stances which don’t at all make you a worse theorist, or Franklin a worse artist — quite the contrary, I’d guess, in both cases. But I don’t agree with Franklin that art’s failed because it’s abandoned form and I don’t agree with you that art has failed because it hasn’t engaged with theory.
However. One of the side-effects of contemporary art’s particular formal and theoretical concerns is the proliferation of the genre of artist’s statements. Which are, in fact, a hideous blight upon the face of the world, and a steep price to pay for anything else contemporary art has happened to achieve.
Oy, you always make me out to be so much more provocative than I think I’m being when you recast these comments as posts LOL.
I think the key thing you’re misunderstanding is that I don’t actually hate contemporary art, I just hate what contemporary art thinks contemporary art means. For example, I absolutely love the Bruce Nauman “Fifteen Pairs of Hands” that they just installed at the National Gallery. I think the repetition-with-variation is extremely aesthetically pleasing, as is the texture of the skin — and despite everybody saying how humorless he is there’s something about the isolation and repetition of the gestures that ends up being really hysterical, like a mime making funny faces. To me there is something incredibly universal about it — and the fact that the skin is brown makes it a marvelously simple and humor-filled meditation on the fiction of race.
But apparently this is not what I’m supposed to get out of it — apparently I am supposed to find it “a negative demonstration of Gestalt theory, enacting ‘the experience and awareness of fragmentation and duality’ of a mind that cannot integrate its parts into a healthy whole” and so forth (that’s not about that piece, but that’s the closest thing I can find online to the description they were giving at the Gallery.)
And I’m sorry — it’s nonsense. It’s a riff; it has virtually nothing to do with the artwork and is drivel perpetuated by some art theory nerd jerking off at getting to use Gestalt in a sentence. Puke vomit blech.
That kind of “Theoretical” reading is incredibly forced — and the reading itself — well, I could call it some kind of poetry but it’s god awful as poetry, and more importantly it does not add anything new and stunning to Gestalt theory, or theories of interiority/exteriority, etc. So what’s the point?
Theory’s assertion isn’t that there’s a binary between art and language. It’s that everything, including art, including consciousness itself, is language — there’s no binary because there’s only one thing. Because it collapses epistemology and ontology, so that being is knowing, and language is how you know, so language is how you be. Any difference between words and images is you deceiving yourself. So when art tries to assert its self-ness, it isn’t intervening in that assertion, it’s just rejecting it.
That’s why I’m asking for an intervention that challenges the place to which poststructuralism has cast “primordial writing.” The opposition you’re describing from art is just an opposition — it’s not a deconstruction. Deconstruction’s mechanism isn’t to collapse binaries by rejecting them; what deconstruction does is reverse the polarity of binaries — it removes opposition, not distinction. The “logic of the supplement” is along the lines of “you think art and images and the syntagm of nature are primordial and intuitive and more ordered than language, but in fact language is what’s primordial, and art is just one manifestation of the primordial writing, which is not a record of speech or language, but the logic on which speech and language depend — the logic of the sign.” Something along those lines. But the primordial sign is defined — not just in poststructuralism, in semiotics period — by reference to two things, language and math. Not images. It’s a missing third term that needs to be addressed, not reduced to a derivative of language in which the “visual sign” is, at root, equivalent to the “verbal sign.” The problem of “image semiotics” isn’t really that narrow of a question…
Okay; so here’s Judith Butler on Paris is Burning, reworking her ideas about gender and camp in light of the film. It’s in a book about theory in contemporary art since 1985, so apparently the editors feel that the film qualifies as contemporary art (which seems reasonable.)
Here’s an essay talking about Eve Sedgwick’s use of Andy Warhol to discuss queerness and subaltern identities.
Here’s Linda Williams talking about Annie Sprinkle; I guess this is more theory used to talk about art, but Williams is a theorist not a reviewer, and the focus is certainly as much on investigating ideas about pornography and feminism as to interpret Sprinkle.
And just reading that Badiou…he argues explicitly against the idea that theory is less important than art, or that the question of art is or should be secondary.
“And so, today, artistic creation is a part of human emancipation, it’s not an ornament, a decoration and so on. No, the question of art is a central question, and it’s central because we have to create a new sensible relation to the world. In fact, without art, without artistic creation, the triumph of the forced universality of money and power is a real possibility. So the question of art today is a question of political emancipation, there is something political in art itself. There is not only a question of art’s political orientation, like it was the case yesterday, today it is a question in itself. Because art is a real possibility to create something new against the abstract universality that is globalization.”
I don’t even know if I agree with that, really, but I think he’d reject the idea that art has nothing to say to theory, or that, by using theory to think about art, he is not also using art to reexamine theory.
I’d agree that none of these examples is addressing the derridean issues or linguistic issues you in particular want to get at. But it seems clear that contemporary art, broadly defined (which is how contemporary art usually defines itself) is an important inspiration and conversation partner for queer theory informed by Foucault and Lacan.
Badiou talks about the place of the artist in the work as well, in terms of absence and desperation….
Caro: “…apparently I am supposed to find it “a negative demonstration of Gestalt theory, enacting ‘the experience and awareness of fragmentation and duality’ of a mind that cannot integrate its parts into a healthy whole” and so forth…And I’m sorry — it’s nonsense….Puke vomit blech.”
Hilarious!
Wait…now you’re saying I think art and nature are more *ordered* than language? But I think they’re less ordered. Right?
Anyway, I hate a lot (a lot!) of contemporary art. And that thing about gestalt is horrible. I could give a crap about gestalt theory to begin with.
Perhaps you’ll feel the following is just another stupid artist statement. But…
art, or at least a fair bit of contemporary art, asserts its selfness not by claiming that images are more natural, but really by just swallowing language. Language is art because art is language; you can write Zizek on a wall or have a story about a diamond, and those are art. Polar Diamond is following the logic you’re asserting here fairly precisely, I think; the language creates the thing. The thing doesn’t come first; the language about the thing is what constitutes it — I only know what the art is because I’m told, and as a result there is in fact no thing outside of the telling. It’s a simple, elegant illustration of Derrida, actually.
Where it moves away from Derrida and towards Foucault is that the piece is explicitly about power. Language creates truth, which has actual transformative effects on bodies (the polar bear ash turned to diamond) and the world (which we can destroy, precisely because it is not nature but a word.)
And, you know, like you said I’m not super-rigorous…but for me, one of the things I like about the piece is that it juxtaposes Derrida and Foucault in such a way that it raises ethical questions about the view you’re talking about: that is, I think it asks, what are the ethical consequences for human beings if language is primordial, if everything is language, and therefore our technology is essentially the globe?
I know you argue that the debiologicizing and denaturalizing of experience, a la Derrida, is liberatory from a feminist perspective. And I get that. But this piece in subordinating the things (diamond, bear, world) to language, and showing how that is connected to the way the world is subordinated to us, via technology (and language is a kind of technology, even if it’s also everything.) Which, like I said in the review, is what the Fall is about. Language makes the world out of us, so we can move it as if it is us, granting us free will (which is the liberatory part). But free will is also sin — which feminism often rejects for perfectly valid reasons, but which maybe has some resonance still when you’re burning polar bears for pleasure and destroying the world made out of language because you feel like it and language lets you.
Maybe Derrida says all that somewhere. The stuff of his I’ve read has never been explicitly concerned with ethics (unless close reading is an ethic), but you’d know better than me. But I can say that, for me, contemporary art helped me think through these theoretical questions, which are more important theoretical questions to me, personally, than whether I can explain step by step how images turn into language in a way that would make Derrida rigorously happy. Though I’m not *un*interested in that project. It’s just not the thing I personally care about the most, and so the fact that contemporary art is maybe not addressing that doesn’t particularly bother me, because I feel it does address theoretical issues that I care about more. Such as where you’re left if the world is a monism and the monism is you and you like to break things.
I’ve only skimmed — I’ll have to read all this tomorrow — but your artist statement is much better than most of the ones I read, like the gestalt thing. Maybe you should start a side business ghostwriting them.
More…sometime when it’s not 1:30 AM.
I’d like to point out that Judith Butler’s Paris Is Burning bit in Bodies That Matter is infamous in transgender activist circles for accusing all transsexual people of “uncritical miming of the hegemonic [sex/gender system],” and Venus Xtravaganza specifically of mindlessly lusting after a bourgeois lifestyle. Keep in mind that this is a well-off, superstar academic looking down her nose at an impoverished young trans prostitute who was *murdered* and dumped in a river for wanting a comfortable lifestyle. The “uncritical miming” line is no less heinous. Butler falls into a common transphobic trap: trans people are held up to scrutiny in a way that cisgender people would never have to deal with, and any trans person deemed to fall short of the particular cis judge’s ideas of how gender *ought* to be formed is roundly condemned.
The trans people I know and have met in various capacities are no more involved in “uncritical miming” than cisgender people. The extent to which earlier, pioneering generations of transsexuals *were* invested in that miming project, and to which some minority still are, is a product of doctors who policed (and some still police) gender ruthlessly, and forced (force) transsexuals to jump through all sorts of hoops regarding behavior, dress, voice, and many details of appearance, etc. It’s those old-school, Harry Benjamin Syndrome-diagnosing doctors who deserve whatever blame is to be apportioned. Beyond that, of course the gender politics of most people can be scrutinized and found lacking; to single trans people out for criticism, when we have suffered so much more for our gendering than most, is callous at the very least.
Some thoughts on Butler’s essay, including a positive not on her more recent thoughts re: trans people, by Quinnae Moongazer:
http://quinnae.wordpress.com/tag/judith-butler/
Hey Anja. I wasn’t endorsing it (only skimmed it!) Just pointing out that it existed.
This is the one thing I’ve written on transgender issues, working off of Antony and the Johnsons (a band certainly not uninspired by performance art) and Julia Serano. Sort of nervous about what you’ll think of it, but here it is.
“but your artist statement is much better than most of the ones I read”
High praise indeed.
The Julia Serano thing I talk about in that essay is actually from the gay utopia project I did; it’s here.
I think it was originally delivered in what was essentially a performance art context, so it’s another example of theory as art, art as theory.
Caro I’d be interested to see your take on Pierre Huyghe’s works, particularly ‘No Ghost Just A Shell’ and ‘The Third Memory’ or Sophie Calle and Paul Auster’s ‘Double Game’. I think you might find them quite interesting if you haven’t seen them.
I don’t see any visual art making an ontological statement beyond the banality of ‘secondary creation’. Even the densest Abstract Expressionist or Frazetta disciple knows he/she isn’t creating an alternate reality.
I’m pretty sure Grant Morrison has made statements to the effect that the DC Universe is an alternate reality.
“The advocates of method oppose the nonmethod of chance to that of proceeding by reason. But what they want to prove is given in advance. They suppose that a little animal, bumping into things, explores a world that he isn’t yet able to see and will only be able to discern when they teach him to do so. But the human child is first of all a speaking being. The child who repeats the words he hears and the Flemish student lost in hos Telemaque, are not proceeding hit or miss. All their effort, all their exploration, is strained toward this: someone has addressed words to them that they want to recognize and respond to: not as students or learned men, but as people; in the same way that you respond to someone speaking to you and not to someone examining you: under the sign of equality.” Jacques Ranciere, from The Ignorant Schoolmaster.
The left-theory world has its populists, like Ranciere, Bordieu, Zizek, and Gramsci, and its formalists, like Althusser, Deleuze, Derrida, and Greenberg. And it’s split up in numerous other ways too. And it’s like that in the art world as well, and in various areas of culture. But hierarchies of excellence are always conservative (even in a university), and totalizing universality is always radical (even when it’s just capitalism).
Barthes might indeed agree that image qua image needs to be recognized in some Platonic trinity of language qua language and math qua math, and freedom is the void that distinguishes and defines incommensurable multiplicities. I realize that that is a properly structuralist outlook.
But if the only true philosophy is epistemology, there immediately becomes no truth to epistemologically discern. Which I recognize as a conservative outlook– which, ironically for the feminists working with idealism, leaves them with nothing but nature and embodiment and the return to ancestral lore, the general revival of “witchcraft.”
And I have a great deal of sympathy for that, for blood and earth and haptic reflexive spasm within egoless harmonious chaos. And yet, there’s nothing about that that stands for an ethics that is itself ontological, rooted in the cosmos. I merely hope, without systematically promising, that image, the simulacrum of death, resurrected through the discursive language of art, can perhaps offer, as Caro says (echoing Hegel?), an ‘intervention that challenges the place to which poststructuralism has cast “primordial writing.”’
That so kicks ass, Bert.
In terms of your point about feminism…I think that gets at why Irigary, for example, who so radically resists the notion of biological determinism in some ways, in other ways seems so obsessed with embodiment, to the extent of seeing mathematics as gendered. Gender differences are metaphors, but there is no ontological truth beyond metaphors, so the women are not one because female lips are two, and the metaphor is the only truth there is. Bodies get erased by language and then immediately reconstituted in language. Logic is constantly swallowing bloody hunks of meat and then voiding them in a geyser of fluids, the pure grid eternally defiling itself, like Descartes pausing in his syllogisms to cut open a cow carcass, or Frankenstein birthing a shit baby. Derrida’s close reading is not an academic exercise; it’s a shamanic plunging of his orifice into sopping entrails; a violent and bloody ritual sacrifice to the hungering void.
Barthes has a book about Sade, Fourier, and Loyola (called Sade Fourier Loyola), in which he describes them all as “logothetes,” inventors of languages; “It makes little difference how their style is judged, good, bad, or indifferent… all that is left in each of them is a scenographer; he who disperses himself across the framework he sets up and arranges ad infinitum. Thus if Sade, Fourier, and Loyola are founders of a language, and only that, it is precisely in order to say nothing, to observe a vacancy… Nothing is more depressing than to imagine the text as an intellectual object… The text is an object of pleasure… It is a matter of bringing into our everyday life the fragments of the unintelligible that emanate from a text we admire(.)”
This to me seems like a possibility in any discourse, to constantly defer Being through the proceas of Becoming, with the techniques of writing and erasing (sacrificing and consuming) functioning to constantly paper over the abyss on which we tread.
But the abyss itself persists only if we emerge ex nihilo, without reference to the gap that exiles us from nature. This lack that is the Real, perceived only in its effects, opposes the void, through trauma that makes necessity necessary and possibility possible. Language’s connection to pleasure is symbolic desire, which means anxiety and frustration for the phallus, but boundless freedom in lack.